Walter Benjamin wrote his prophetic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” almost a century ago, yet it is still pertinent today. Benjamin warned that as art becomes devoid of aura through reproduction, less attention is needed to engage with it. What role does aura play in AI-generated work? Despite recent advances in AI it produces “artwork” that for the most part operates as entertainment. It can’t produce work that has grown out of reckoning with culture (...) the way artists do in their efforts to provide space for grappling with deep questions that ultimately inform culture. Nevertheless, AI is potentially more disruptive to Art than to any other field. If AI becomes the dominant producer of art, this could lead to a sort of consensus trance with a generation of people consuming “art” that does not inspire questioning and new understandings of the world we live in. For centuries, the term “computer” referred to living, breathing humans. Today, no person can claim the title. Is this the fate of “artist”? By problematizing the ways we use AI, artists can help address the problem of how we as a culture should engage with it. (shrink)

New technologies can upset scientific workplaces’ established practices and social order. Scientists may therefore prefer preserving skilled manual work and the social status quo to revolutionary technological change. For example, digital imaging of rock-encased fossils is a valuable way for scientists to “see” a specimen without traditional rock removal. However, interviews in vertebrate paleontology laboratories reveal workers’ skepticism toward computed tomography imaging. Scientists criticize replacing physical fossils with digital images because, they say, images are more subjective than the “real thing.” (...) I argue that these scientists are also implicitly supporting rock-removal technicians, who are skilled and trusted experts whose work would be made obsolete by widespread implementation of CT scanning. Scientists’ view of CT as a sometimes useful tool rather than a universal new approach to accessing fossils preserves the laboratory community’s social structure. Specifically, by privileging “real” specimens and trusted specimen-processing technicians over images and imaging experts, scientists preserve the lab community’s division of labor and skill, hierarchy between scientists and technicians, and these groups’ identity and mutual trust. (shrink)

A major challenge in neuroscience is to understand what happens to a brain as it ages. Such insights could make it possible to distinguish between individuals who will undergo typical aging and those at risk for neurodegenerative disease. Over the last quarter century, thousands of human brain imaging studies have probed the neural basis of age-related cognitive decline. “Aging” studies generally enroll adults over the age of 65, a historical precedent rooted in the average retirement age of U.S. wage-earners. A (...) consequence of this research tradition is that it overlooks one of the most significant neuroendocrine changes in a woman’s life: the transition to menopause. The menopausal transition is marked by an overall decline in ovarian sex steroid production – up to 90% in the case of estradiol – a dramatic endocrine change that impacts multiple biological systems, including the brain. Despite sex differences in the risk for dementia, the influence that biological sex and sex hormones have on the aging brain is historically understudied, leaving a critical gap in our understanding of the aging process. In this Perspective, we highlight the influence that endocrine factors have on the aging brain. We devote particular attention to the neural and cognitive changes that unfold in the middle decade of life, as a function of reproductive aging. Next, we consider emerging evidence from animal and human studies that other endocrine factors occurring earlier in life (e.g. pregnancy, hormonal birth control use) also shape the aging process. Applying a women’s health lens to. (shrink)

Human development takes place in a social context. Two pervasive sources of social information are faces and hands. Here, we provide the first report of the visual frequency of faces and hands in the everyday scenes available to infants. These scenes were collected by having infants wear head cameras during unconstrained everyday activities. Our corpus of 143 hours of infant-perspective scenes, collected from 34 infants aged 1 month to 2 years, was sampled for analysis at 1/5 Hz. The major finding (...) from this corpus is that the faces and hands of social partners are not equally available throughout the first two years of life. Instead, there is an earlier period of dense face input and a later period of dense hand input. At all ages, hands in these scenes were primarily in contact with objects and the spatio-temporal co-occurrence of hands and faces was greater than expected by chance. The orderliness of the shift from faces to hands suggests a principled transition in the contents of visual experiences and is discussed in terms of the role of developmental gates on the timing and statistics of visual experiences. (shrink)

In this new book, Foley defends an epistemology that takes seriously the perspectives of individual thinkers. He argues that having rational opinions is a matter of meeting our own internal standards rather than standards that are somehow imposed upon us from the outside. It is a matter of making ourselves invulnerable to intellectual self-criticism. Foley also shows how the theory of rational belief is part of a general theory of rationality. He thus avoids treating the rationality of belief (...) as a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon from the rationality of decision or action. His approach generates promising suggestions about a wide range of issues--e.g., the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic reasons for belief; the question of what aspects of the Cartesian project are still worth doing; the significance of simplicity and other theoretical virtues; the relevance of skeptical hypotheses; the difference between a theory of rational belief and a theory of knowledge; the difference between a theory of rational belief and a theory of rational degrees of belief; and the limits of idealization in epistemology. (shrink)

What propositions are rational for one to believe? With what confidence is it rational for one to believe these propositions? Answering the first of these questions requires an epistemology of beliefs, answering the second an epistemology of degrees of belief.

The “headscarf affair,” Muslim girls wearing veils to school, has generated a storm of controversy in France. This study uses the headscarf affair to explore Muslim immigrant women's views of their place in French society and reveals that even those who disagree with French public opinion often invoke arguments that are more French than North African. Interviews with 41 North African women show that younger, well-educated women defend the headscarf as a matter of personal liberty and cultural expression. Older, poorly (...) educated women either defend or reject the veil but never discuss the issue of secularism. In dismissing the veil, they rely on a different understanding of Muslim womanhood. A third group opposes the veil, arguing that the goal of school is integration. Respondents' answers are interpreted according to structural factors and cultural repertoires, both North African and French. (shrink)

A research community must share assumptions, such as about accepted knowledge, appropriate research practices, and good evidence. However, community members also hold some divergent assumptions, which they—and we, as analysts of science—tend to overlook. Communities with different assumed values, knowledge, and goals must negotiate to achieve compromises that make their conflicting goals complementary. This negotiation guards against the extremes of each group’s desired outcomes, which, if achieved, would make other groups’ goals impossible. I argue that this diversity, as a form (...) of value pluralism, regularly influences scientific practice and can make scientific evidence and knowledge more useful and more reliable. As an example, I examine vertebrate paleontology laboratories, which house a variety of workers with different training and priorities, particularly about the meaning of time. Specifically, scientists want to study fully prepared fossils immediately, conservators want to preserve fossils for future use, and preparators mediate between the other groups’ conflicting goals. After all, one cannot study a fossil encased in rock, and one cannot remove that rock without removing information from that specimen. In response, these coworkers articulate their assumptions in everyday deliberations about how scientific evidence should be made and used. I argue that this exchange of assumptions is crucial for a research community to achieve mutually beneficial compromises that benefit current and future knowledge construction. (shrink)

To what degree should we rely on our own resources and methods to form opinions about important matters? To what degree should we depend on various authorities, such as a recognized expert or a social tradition? In this provocative account of intellectual trust and authority, Richard Foley argues that it can be reasonable to have intellectual trust in oneself even though it is not possible to provide a defence of the reliability of one's faculties, methods and opinions that does (...) not beg the question. Moreover, he shows how this account of intellectual self-trust can be used to understand the degree to which it is reasonable to rely on alternative authorities. This book will be of interest to advanced students and professionals working in the fields of philosophy and the social sciences as well as anyone looking for a unified account of the issues at the centre of intellectual trust. (shrink)

Background Over the last decade, the return of results (ROR) in precision medicine research (PMR) has become increasingly routine. Calls for individual rights to research results have extended the “duty to report” from clinically useful genetic information to traits and ancestry results. ROR has thus been reframed as inherently beneficial to research participants, without a needed focus on who benefits and how. This paper addresses this gap, particularly in the context of PMR aimed at increasing participant diversity, by providing investigator (...) and researcher perspectives on and questions about the assumed value of ROR in PMR.Methods Semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of investigators and researchers across federally funded PMR studies in three national consortia, as well as observations of study activities, focused on how PM researchers conceptualize diversity and implement inclusive practices across research stages, including navigating ROR.Results Interviewees (1) validated the value of ROR as a benefit of PMR, while others (2) questioned the benefit of clinically actionable results to individuals in the absence of sufficient resources for translating findings into health care for diverse and disadvantaged populations; (3) expressed uncertainties in applying the presumed value of ROR as a benefit for non-clinical results; and (4) and debated when the promise of the value of ROR may undermine trust in PMR, and divert efforts to return value beyond ROR.Conclusions Conceptualizations of diversity and inclusion among PM researchers and investigators raise unique ethical questions where unexamined assumptions of the value of ROR inform study recruitment efforts to enroll minoritized and under-represented populations. A lack of consideration for resources and infrastructure necessary to translate ROR into actionable information may hinder trustworthy community-research relationships. Thus, we argue for a more intentional interrogation of ROR practices as an offer of benefit and for whom. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: An Unfortunate Assumption Sosa on Knowledge and Justification The Distinctness of Justification and Knowledge.

Detailed and in-depth investigation of the important but often unappreciated work done by science technicians, in this case in the context of paleontology.

The desire to maintain current beliefs can lead individuals to evaluate contrary evidence more critically than consistent evidence. We test whether priming individuals’ scientific reasoning...

The articles in this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy explore emerging technologies, medical innovations, and shifting moral norms, expanding present discussions around topics in bioethics both old and new. Some question whether novel definitions of death and harm change the moral permissibility of killing, particularly at the hands of a physician. Others question how increased or decreased abilities affect responsibility and achievement. Another illustrates how rhetorical appeals to character have been used to justify otherwise morally illicit actions (...) within the clinic. Together, these articles shed new light on topics in the field of bioethics. (shrink)

Over the past decade, Canadian media coverage of street sex work has steadily increased. The majority of this interest pertains to graphic violence against street sex workers, most notably from Vancouver, British Columbia. In this article, the authors analyze newspaper coverage that appeared in western Canadian publications between 2006 and 2009. In theorizing the violence both depicted and perpetrated by newspapers, the authors propose an analytic framework capable of attending to the process of othering in all of its complexity. To (...) this end, the authors supplement a Foucauldian analysis of abjection by considering the work of Judith Butler along with Julia Kristeva's conceptualization of abjection. Using excerpts from western Canadian newspapers, the authors illustrate how the media's discursive practices function as triggers for the process of cultural abjection by inscribing street sex workers with images of defilement. The authors argue that newspaper coverage of street sex workers reinforces the inviolability of normalized life by constantly reiterating the horror reserved for abjected bodies. (shrink)

My mother died within the first few months of the pandemic. Her sudden and rapid decline from Alzheimer's disease is difficult to separate from the COVID-19 restrictions put in place by her nursing home just two months prior. We went from visiting her daily to not at all, then to a strictly enforced twenty-minute hospice visit to say goodbye. After her passing, and still amidst the pandemic, I could not write. The conventional methods and outputs of bioethics inquiry felt impossible.Making (...) art is the only thing that felt possible then. Perhaps that's the function of art, to make things feel more possible. I began by collecting materials from work—package inserts, empty prescription bottles and gelatin capsules—to... (shrink)

Henri Bergson was a French professor and philosopher. Born in Paris in 1859 to a Polish composer and Yorkshire woman of Irish descent, his revelatory ideas of life as ceaseless transformation and the importance of attention, learning, humor and joy brought him incredible fame and media celebrity.Here you will find insights from his greatest works.The Life Lessons series from The School of Life takes a great thinker and highlights those ideas most relevant to ordinary everyday dilemmas. These books emphasize ways (...) in which wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us. (shrink)

There is a longstanding belief that research should be a calling more than a job. How does this expectation shape the selection of future researchers? Specifically, undergraduate research experience is credited with increasing students’ success in science and engineering majors and their likelihood to choose careers in science and engineering; thus, how researchers select student laboratory workers has implications for the future population of researchers. After all, because research communities construct knowledge collectively, researchers’ identities and experiences crucially shape knowledge. This (...) paper analyzes qualitative interviews with engineering professors and students about what they believe are the characteristics of a good researcher. Both groups describe the importance of a researcher feeling interested in and enthusiastic about research to be able to do good work. They also imply that good researchers must be assertive, such as by requesting jobs in laboratories. I suggest that these... (shrink)

BackgroundReturning neuroimaging incidental findings may create a challenge to research participants’ health literacy skills as they must interpret and make appropriate healthcare decisions based on complex radiology jargon. Disclosing IF can therefore present difficulties for participants, research institutions and the healthcare system. The purpose of this study was to identify the extent of the health literacy challenges encountered when returning neuroimaging IF. We report on findings from a retrospective survey and focus group sessions with major stakeholders involved in disclosing IF.MethodsWe (...) surveyed participants who had received a radiology report from a research study and conducted focus groups with participants, parents of child participants, Institutional Review Board members, investigators and physicians. Qualitative thematic analyses were conducted using standard group-coding procedures and descriptive summaries of health literacy scores and radiology report outcomes are examined.ResultsAlthough participants reported high health literacy skills, 67 % did not seek medical care when recommended to do so; and many participants in the focus groups disclosed they could not understand the findings described in their report. Despite their lack of understanding, participants desire to have information about their radiology results, and the investigators feel ethically inclined to return findings.ConclusionsThe language in clinically useful radiology reports can create a challenge for participants’ health literacy skills and has the potential to negatively impact the healthcare system and investigators conducting imaging research. Radiology reports need accompanying resources that explain findings in lay language, which can help reduce the challenge caused by the need to communicate incidental findings. (shrink)

In the United States, social media organizations are not legally liable for what users do or say on their platforms and are free to regulate expression in any way they see fit. As a result, dark co...

In this paper, Caitlin Murphy Brust and Rebecca Taylor examine the responsibilities of college educators to resist conditions of epistemic injustice within their institutions. Pedagogy alone cannot bring about epistemic justice in higher education, for no individual epistemic agent can single-handedly transform their epistemic environment. The roots of such injustices are structural and thus require structural interventions. However, college educators do retain some agency to engage in epistemic resistance. Brust and Taylor argue that they can and should take steps (...) to foster just relations within the epistemic communities of their classrooms — calling for pedagogy that both recognizes the unjust features of the broader epistemic environment and responds to the unique forms of epistemic injustice that manifest in the classroom, with particular attention to seminar-style courses. (shrink)

How do children acquire beliefs from testimony? In this chapter, we discuss children's trust in testimony, their sensitivity to and use of defeaters, and their appeals to positive reasons for trusting what other people tell them. Empirical evidence shows that, from an early age, children have a tendency to trust testimony. However, this tendency to trust is accompanied by sensitivity to cues that suggest unreliability, including inaccuracy of the message and characteristics of the speaker. Not only are children sensitive to (...) evidence of unreliability, but they are also sensitive to the positive reasons a speaker may have for the reliability of their testimony. This evidence is discussed in relation to reductivist and non-reductivist viewpoints. (shrink)

Philosophers of science are well aware that theories are underdetermined by data. But what about the data? Scientific data are selected and processed representations or pieces of nature. What is useless context and what is valuable specimen, as well as how specimens are processed for study, are not obvious or predetermined givens. Instead, they are decisions made by scientists and other research workers, such as technicians, that produce different outcomes for the data. Vertebrate fossils provide a revealing case of this (...) data-processing, because they are embedded in rock that often matches the fossils’ color and texture, requiring an expert eye to judge where the fossil/context interface is. Fossil preparators then permanently define this interface by chiseling away the material they identify as rock. As a result, fossil specimens can emerge in multiple possible forms depending on the preparator’s judgment, skill, and chosen tools. A prepared fossil then is not yet data but potential data, following Leonelli’s relational framework in which data are defined as evidence that scientists have used to support a proposed theory. This paper draws on ethnographic evidence to assess how scientists overcome this underdetermination of specimens, as potential data, in addition to the underdetermination of theories and of data, to successfully construct specimen-based knowledge. Among other strategies, paleontology maintains a division of labor between data-makers and theory-makers. This distinction serves to justify the omission of preparators’ nonstandard, individualized techniques from scientific publications. This separation has benefits for both scientists and technicians; however, it restricts knowledge production by preventing scientists from understanding how the pieces of nature they study were processed into researchable specimens. (shrink)

Across the globe, our work and social lives are increasingly integrated with Information and Communication Technologies, yet massive disparities in the values, uses and benefits of ICT exist. New methods are needed to shed light on unique and integrative concepts of ICT across cultures. This paper explores the use of visual methods to facilitate critical engagement with ICT—defined as situational awareness, reflexive ICT practice and power and control over ICT. This definition of critical ICT engagement is informed by a cultural (...) identity lens, and intends to improve participatory methods in ICT for Development and community technology design and application. Our notion of critical ICT engagement is developed through an analysis of three case studies, each employing visual methods to shed light on concepts and practices of ICT cross-culturally. This paper makes three contributions to the ICT4D literature. First, it establishes a cultural identity lens to chart out cultural differences between researchers and participants, and to develop situational awareness of ICT in context. Second, it defines the conceptual domain of reflexive ICT practice and establishes the key role of researchers in facilitating it. Third, it argues for the need to support participants to develop capacity to engage critically with ICT as a means to influence social and organizational structures. This paper offers a way for researchers and practitioners to engage with cultural issues in community-based research and design using visual methodologies. (shrink)

An increasing number of epistmeologists claim that having beliefs which are reliable is a prerequisite of having epistemically rational beliefs. Alvin Goldman, for instance, defends a view he calls “historical reliabilism.” According to Goldman, a person S rationally believes a proposition p only if his belief is caused by a reliable cognitive process. Goldman adds that a proposition p is epistemically rational for 5, whether or not it is believed by him, only if there is available to S a reliable (...) cognitive process which if used would result in S’s believing p. Likewise, Marshall Swain, Ernest Sosa, and William Alston all claim that reliability is a prerequisite of epistemic rationality. Swain claims that S rationally believes p only if he has reasons for p which are reliable indicators that p is true. Sosa says S rationally believes p only if the belief is the product of an intellectual virtue, where intellectual virtues are stable dispositions to acquire truths. And, Alston says that S rationally believes p only if the belief is acquired or held in such a way that beliefs held in that way are reliable, i.e., mostly true. (shrink)

The disciplines of ethics, science, and the law often conflict when it comes to determining the limits and boundaries of embryo research. Under current Australian law and regulations, and in various other jurisdictions, research conducted on the embryo in vitro is permitted up until day fourteen, after which, the embryo must be destroyed. Reproductive technology and associated research is rapidly advancing at a rate that contests current societal and ethical limits surrounding the treatment of the embryo. This has brought about (...) the question of the adequacy of the fourteen-day rule and whether it is necessary for it be reconsidered and reformed. This paper will highlight some of the tensions that exist in ethics, science, and the law in relation to the extension of the rule. It will be concluded that any move to extend the rule must be accompanied by close consultation with the public as the ultimate stakeholders in how the future of reproductive technology is created, constructed, and contested. (shrink)