In developing nations, the implementation of Foundational Identity Systems (FIDS) has optimised service delivery and inclusive economic growth. Cross-border e-government will gain traction as developing countries increasingly look to identity federation and trustworthy interoperability through FIDS for the identification and authentication of identity holders. Despite this potential, the interoperability of FIDS in the African identity ecosystem has not been well-studied. Among the difficulties in this situation are the intricate internal political dynamics that have led to weak institutions, suggesting that FIDS (...) could be used for political purposes; additionally, citizens’ or identity holders’ habitual low trust in the government raises concerns about data security and privacy protection. Similarly, vendor lock-in, cross-system compatibility, and ambiguous legislative rules for data exchange are other concerns. Interoperability is fundamentally necessary as a precondition for e-government services and serves as the foundation for the best possible service delivery in the areas of social security, education, and finance, as well as gender equality as demonstrated by the European Union (EU). Moreover, the integration of cross-border FIDS and an ecosystem of effective data governance will be created by unified data sharing via an interoperable identity system. Thus, in this study, we point to the challenges, opportunities, and requirements for cross-border interoperability in an African setting. Furthermore, we investigated current interoperability solutions such as the EU’s eIDAS and Estonian X-Road and proposed an approach for scoping requirements to achieve a fully functional interoperable identity ecosystem in the African setting. Our findings show that interoperability in the African identity ecosystem is essential for expanding the scope of e-government throughout the continent and for bolstering the smooth authentication and verification of identity holders for inclusive economic growth. (shrink)

When experimental philosophers carry out studies on thought experiments, some participants are excluded based on certain exclusion criteria, mirroring standard social science vignette methodology. This involves excluding people that do not pay attention or who miscomprehend the scenario presented in thought experiments. However, experimental philosophy studies sometimes exclude an alarmingly high number of participants. We argue that this threatens the external and internal validity of the conclusions being drawn and we show how a simple visualization of thought experiments can reduce (...) exclusion rates significantly. Furthermore, we argue that focus should not merely be on how many are excluded, but also why they are excluded, and we highlight the role of comprehension questions in this regard. Philosophical thought experiments often rely on the acceptance of certain key premises that may be regarded contestable, and asking comprehension questions involving such key assumptions could be problematic as that may result in some participants being inadvertently excluded from the study, potentially creating a selection bias. (shrink)

While early optimists have seen online discussions as potential spaces for deliberation, the reality of many online spaces is characterized by incivility and irrationality. Increasingly, AI tools are considered as a solution to foster deliberative discourse. Against the backdrop of previous research, we show that AI tools for online discussions heavily focus on the deliberative norms of rationality and civility. In the operationalization of those norms for AI tools, the complex deliberative dimensions are simplified, and the focus lies on the (...) detection of argumentative structures in argument mining or verbal markers of supposedly uncivil comments. If the fairness of such tools is considered, the focus lies on data bias and an input–output frame of the problem. We argue that looking beyond bias and analyzing such applications through a sociotechnical frame reveals how they interact with social hierarchies and inequalities, reproducing patterns of exclusion. The current focus on verbal markers of incivility and argument mining risks excluding minority voices and privileges those who have more access to education. Finally, we present a normative argument why examining AI tools for online discourses through a sociotechnical frame is ethically preferable, as ignoring the predicable negative effects we describe would present a form of objectionable indifference. (shrink)

The authors of the articles in this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy address a wide variety of topics, from definitions of disease to bioenhancement. Each author, however, draws out the importance of careful use of language. Over the years, philosophers of medicine and bioethicists have debated questions such as what qualifies something as a disease, whether disease language is evaluative, whether the term “person” encompasses more than just human beings, and what language ought to be used to (...) best convey complex information to patients. Among a great deal of disagreement on these topics, one thing emerges distinctly: that clarity and careful attention to language is paramount in medicine. The articles in this issue contribute to that conversation, presenting complex arguments and illustrative examples of why it is so important to use clear and well-defined terms in medicine, and of the reality-altering power that our language carries. (shrink)

Self-fulfillment of theories is argued to be a threat to social science in at least two ways. First, a realist might worry that self-fulfillment constitutes a threat to the idea that social science is a proper science consistent with a realist approach that develops true and successful statements about the world. Second, one might argue that the potential self-fulfilling nature of social science theories potentially undermines the ethical integrity of social scientists. We argue that if one accepts that social science (...) theories are not based on laws akin to those that govern natural reality or acknowledges that if one can predict self-fulfillment via a meta-theory that explains the underlying regularities of the self-fulfilling change, the threat to realism is dismantled. Furthermore, on the basis of these arguments, we show that if one is unable to predict the consequences of a theory, it is difficult to ascribe moral responsibility at the individual level. It is, therefore, not the potential self-fulfillment of theories per se that poses an ethical challenge, in contrast to claims in the literature. (shrink)

In this paper we study the logic , which is first-order logic extended by quantification over functions (but not over relations). We give the syntax of the logic as well as the semantics in Heyting categories with exponentials. Embedding the generic model of a theory into a Grothendieck topos yields completeness of with respect to models in Grothendieck toposes, which can be sharpened to completeness with respect to Heyting-valued models. The logic is the strongest for which Heyting-valued completeness is known. (...) Finally, we relate the logic to locally connected geometric morphisms between toposes. (shrink)

Hans Reichenbach's so-called geometrical conventionalism is often taken as an example of a positivistic philosophy of science, based on a verificationist theory of meaning. By contrast, we shall argue that this view rests on a misinterpretation of Reichenbach's major work in this area, the Philosophy of Space and Time (1928). The conception of equivalent descriptions, which lies at the heart of Reichenbach's conventionalism, should be seen as an attempt to refute Poincaré's geometrical relativism. Based upon an examination of the reasons (...) Reichenbach gives for the cognitive equivalence of geometrical descriptions, the paper argues that his conventionalism is a specific form of scientific realism. At the same time we shall argue against those interpretations which lead to a trivialization of Reichenbach's conventionalism or deny it entirely. (shrink)

Research methods and their developers play a crucial role in bringing together scientific fields. Scientists, who wish to have their methods acknowledged and used in another discipline have to bridge the gaps between different practices and worldviews, and they often experience hostility, incredulity, and in general feelings of ‘otherness’, while changing the established practice in a scientific field. Researchers representing newly emerging fields such as materials science have to overcome obstacles that are caused more by feelings of threat and fear (...) than by arguments rooted in epistemic or social considerations. In using the habitus concept of Pierre Bourdieu, I analyze in this article statements and observations of the scientists who in the 1950s and 1960s have introduced physical methods into chemistry and in so doing merged characteristic features of research communities into a new unit. The habitus of physicists, chemists and method-oriented researchers are shaped by hierarchical relationships inside the disciplines, and between them. Studying emotional expressions in interviews and self-descriptions gives access to hitherto neglected parts of the historical processes leading to new disciplines and fields. The brief case studies presented are seen as exemplars, and the analysis offered is intended more to provide a possible model for further research than as giving conclusive answers. (shrink)

The linkages and interactions of scientific disciplines with industry, politics, and society have long been a staple in the history of science, the history of technology, and science studies. However, it is arguable that the impact of this intertwining on the epistemic and social core of scientific disciplines has not yet been sufficiently explored. Chemistry is an ideal case in point, given that it has emerged as one of the largest scientific disciplines while at the same time becoming one of (...) the world’s most powerful technologies. Specifically, chemistry’s power lies in its ability to gain knowledge of the natural world by transforming it, along with the society in which it is embedded. The four contributions to this Focus section all address chemistry’s border permeability, based on its transformative powers; they focus on the feedback mechanisms that transformed chemistry and thereby altered the very concept of a scientific discipline. So successful has this “nonclassical approach” become that, in the opinion of the contributors to this Focus section, it is now both necessary and advisable to study the history of chemistry’s embeddedness and power in science and technology. (shrink)

By bringing feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway’s A manifesto for cyborgs (1985) and Situated knowledges (1988) in line with contemporary critical new materialist thought (see Colman & Van der Tuin, 2024; Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012; Geerts, 2022), this critical pedagogical and philosophical think piece tackles the problematic of Anthropocenic disruptions of the planetary biosphere for critical pedagogies and higher education (also see Carstens, 2016). It additionally encourages its readers to think through their own pedagogical conceptions and (...) praxes by means of irruptive (Geerts & Carstens, 2024; Koro-Ljungberg, 2015) selfreflection- stimulating questions. Our situated – and thus limited and open-ended – response to this all-encompassing Anthropocenic crisis is rooted in a rethinking of Harawayan cyborgian and situated knowledges and the critical pedagogical lessons drawn from the latter. Rereading Haraway’s work through contemporary critical new materialist and related scholarship reveals that it already contained an ecofeminist onto-epistemological shift toward more-than-human agency and relationality. This shift has major consequences for all things critical pedagogical and educational, as our pedagogical thinking-doings are deeply embedded in today’s crisis-ridden lifeworld. This rereading exercise furthermore underlines the necessity of an updated critical new materialist pedagogical praxis for learning and teaching, inspired by Harawayan ecofeminism, that takes the entanglements between human, dehumanised, and more-than-human actors seriously. (shrink)

Flickering light induces visual hallucinations in human observers. Despite a long history of the phenomenon, little is known about the dependence of flicker-induced subjective impressions on the flicker frequency. We investigate this question using Ganzfeld stimulation and an experimental paradigm combining a continuous frequency scan with a focus on re-occurring, whole percepts. On the single-subject level, we find a high degree of frequency stability of percepts. To generalize across subjects, we apply two rating systems, a set of complex percept classes (...) derived from subjects’ reports and an enumeration of elementary percept features, and determine distributions of occurrences over flicker frequency. We observe a stronger frequency specificity for complex percept classes than elementary percept features. Comparing the similarity relations among percept categories to those among frequency profiles, we observe that though percepts are preferentially induced by particular frequencies, the frequency does not unambiguously determine the experienced percept. (shrink)

These reflections on faith, reason and certainty have the purpose of engaging again, if not anew, the fundamental intellectual elements of western civilization.

In keiner geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplin hat Gadamers Hermeneutik tiefere Spuren hinterlassen als in der Literaturwissenschaft. Bezugnahmen auf 'Wahrheit und Methode' bilden langst eine Art 'Koine' der Selbstverstandigung des Fachs. Der aus einem Kolloquium im Deutschen Literaturarchiv Marbach hervorgegangene Band bilanziert diesen Bestand: Im ersten Teil diskutieren Jean Grondin, Dieter Teichert, Norbert Groeben, Tilmann Koppe u.a. Gadamers Theorievorschlage und deren Rezeption durch so wirkungsmachtige Literaturwissenschaftler wie Hans-Robert Jauss, E.D. Hirsch und Frank Kermode. Dabei geht es nicht nur um wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Befunde, sondern um (...) eine aktuelle Kritik der Leistungen Gadamers. Im zweiten Teil des Bandes befassen sich David Wellbery, Rudiger Gorner, Sandra Kluwe, Gerhard Buhr u.a. mit Gadamers Interpretationen zu Goethe, Holderlin, George, Rilke und Paul Celan. Neben vergleichenden Perspektiven, so auf die Interpretationsmanier Heideggers, werden auch hier die Pramissen der Gadamerschen Auslegungspraxis herausgearbeitet und auf ihre hermeneutische Produktivitat hin befragt. Eine Podiumsdiskussion, in der Dieter Henrich, Glenn Most, Karlheinz Stierle und Rainer Warning Gadamers interpretationstheoretische Zentralmetapher des Text-Leser-Gesprachs erortern, rundet den Band ab. (shrink)

SummaryAt the end of 1910, when the Qing dynasty was on the verge of collapse and the whole Chinese empire in a process of transformation, North Manchuria was devastated by a large pneumonic plague epidemic. The Russian and Japanese governments wanted to use the outbreak of the disease as a pretext to invade north-east China, making plague an issue of international politics. At this dramatic moment the empire relied on the skills of the young Chinese doctor Wu Lien-teh, the first (...) Chinese medical graduate from Cambridge. Wu investigated the disease on the spot, chaired an international plague conference in Shenyang (Manchuria) in April 1911, and, later on, became the figurehead of fundamental public health reforms in Republican China. Highly ambitious, striving for personal fame and international renown for China, supported by an excellent network of personal connections, and equipped with a medical training considered the best in the world at the time, he launched on a startling career as one of China's key medical reformers and international representatives. His history is an example of the inseparable links between personal fate and historical events, and between the interests of scientists, medical men, politicians, and businessmen on the national and international stages. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 2, Page 153-154, February 2022.

The different versions of the Kochen-Specker Theorem show that quantum mechanics cannot be supplemented by hidden variables given two constraints. These results are generally interpreted as showing that QM is complete in the following way. A QM system S has only those values of observables for which the state yields probability 1. For all other probabilities S adopts a value during the measurement interaction. But this interpretation is fundamentally problematic. In fact it cannot yield a general and coherent interpretation of (...) the trace formula. I present an argument to this effect, discuss a possible objection and sketch implications. (shrink)

Review of ELSE MARIE BUKDAHL, JOHANNES WIEDEWELT – TRADITION OG NYBRUD [JOHANNES WIEDEWELT – TRADITION AND BREAKTHROUGH] COPENHAGEN: U PRESS, 2021. 148 PAGES ISBN: 9788793890121.

Objectives To investigate risk perception relating to living kidney donation, to compare the risk donors would accept with current practice and identify influential factors. Design An observational study consisting of questionnaires completed by previous living donors and the general public. Participants selected the risk they would accept from a list of options, in various scenarios. Risk communication was investigated by randomly dividing the sample and presenting risk differently. Setting Primary care (two centres) and secondary care (one centre), London. Participants 175 (...) questionnaires were sent to patients who had previously undergone living-donor nephrectomy and to members of the public consulting a general practitioner. The living-donor sample comprised 77 consecutive donors at Guy's Hospital from May 2003 to January 2005. The general-public sample was recruited from two London healthcare centres. Of the eventual 151 participants, 61 were living donors and 90 were from the general public. Main outcome measure The amount of risk a participant would accept to donate a kidney. Results 74% of participants were willing to accept a risk of death higher than 1/3000. The most commonly accepted risk was 1/2 (29%). Those presented with a ‘chance of survival’ accepted higher risks than those presented with a ‘risk of death’ (p<0.01). Greater risks were accepted when the recipient was closely related and, for some, when the recipient's prognosis was worse. No difference was observed between the living-donor and general-public groups. Conclusions Kidney donors will accept a higher risk of death than is currently quoted, especially if risks are presented in terms of chance of survival. (shrink)

The public generally regards the media with suspicion and distrust. Therefore, the media's primary concern is to regain that trust through the production of sincerity. Advancing the field of media studies in a truly innovative way, Boris Groys focuses on the media's affect of sincerity and its manufacture of trust to appease skeptics. Groys identifies forms of media sincerity and its effect on politics, culture, society, and conceptions of the self. He relies on different philosophical writings thematizing the gaze of (...) the other, from the theories of Heidegger, Sartre, Mauss, and Bataille to the poststructuralist formulations of Lacan and Derrida. He also considers media "states of exception" and their creation of effects of sincerity -- a strategy that feeds the media's predilection for the extraordinary and the sensational, further fueling the public's suspicions. Emphasizing the media's production of emotion over the presentation of "facts," Groys launches a timely study boldly challenging the presumed authenticity of the media's worldview. (shrink)

The Song of Songs, a lyric cycle of love scenes without a narrative plot, has often been considered as the Bible’s most beautiful and enigmatic book. The present study questions the still dominant exegetical convention that merges all of the Song’s voices into the dialogue of a single couple, its composite heroine Shulamit being a projection screen for norms of womanhood. An alternative socio-spatial reading, starting with the Hebrew text’s strophic patterns and its references to historical realia, explores the poem’s (...) artful alternation between courtly, urban, rural, and pastoral scenes with their distinct characters. The literary construction of social difference juxtaposes class-specific patterns of consumption, mobility, emotion, power structures, and gender relations. This new image of the cycle as a detailed poetic frieze of ancient society eventually leads to a precise hypothesis concerning its literary and religious context in the Hellenistic age, as well as its geographical origins in the multiethnic borderland east of the Jordan. In a Jewish echo of anthropological skepticism, the poem emphasizes the plurality and relativity of the human condition while praising the communicative powers of pleasure, fantasy, and multifarious Eros. (shrink)

A monist theory of explanation is one that seeks a common definition for all speech acts answering why-questions. One recent example is the counterfactual theory of explanation, which assumes that an ideal explanation can be characterized by the familiar Hempelian criteria for a scientific explanation plus a certain counterfactual that is supported by the laws mentioned in the explanans. I show that the CTE fails. My discussion leads to a critique of the CTE’s key concept of counterfactual dependence and to (...) the suggestion of an alternative: For an argument to be a scientific explanation, a certain necessary-condition claim must be true. For an answer to a why-question to be an explanation, it must express a certain necessary condition. (shrink)

Proceeding on a limited number of general, widely accepted equity criteria, we develop a proposal for distributing common resources. In particular, the proposed fair division mechanism is individually rational, envy-free, Pareto-efficient and satisfies the stand alone test, which follows as a minimum requirement from the resource and population monotonicity criteria. Applied to international climate policy, the thrust of this proposal is that the South should initially be fully compensated for the greenhouse gas abatement measures it is to undertake as a (...) result of efficiency considerations. (shrink)

We use the language of categorical logic to construct generic saturated models of intuitionistic theories. Our main technique is the thorough study of the filter construction on categories with finite limits, which is the completion of subobject lattices under filtered meets. When restricted to coherent or Heyting categories, classifying categories of intuitionistic first-order theories, the resulting categories are filtered meet coherent categories, coherent categories with complete subobject lattices such that both finite disjunctions and existential quantification distribute over filtered meets. Such (...) categories naturally embed into Grothendieck toposes which then contain saturated models of the theory we started with. (shrink)

The size of animal exhibits has important effects on their lives and welfare. However, most references to exhibit size only consider floor space and height dimensions, without considering the space afforded by usable features within the exhibit. In this paper, we develop two possible methods for measuring the usable space of zoo exhibits and apply these to a sample exhibit. Having a metric for usable space in place will provide a better reflection of the quality of different exhibits, and enhance (...) comparisons between exhibits. (shrink)

1. The Search Engine operators inform the users about the way in which the Search Engine works; particularly the basic criteria of ranking are explained. Also, the Search Engine operators describe which ways of manipulating websites lead to exclusion from the result lists in case of doubt.2. The Search Engine operators design their sites in the most transparent way. Contents whose position on the result list is due to a commercial arrangement are clearly marked.3. It is the intention of the (...) Search Engine opera-tors to protect children and youths from morally damaging contents. To this purpose, the opera-tors provide family filters and point out to the fact that filters do not guarantee absolute pro-tection for youths and that children should not use the internet without their parents´ supervision.4. Those sites which are regarded illegal according to national legislation will be excluded from the result lists as soon as the operators know about them and have access to the illegal sites on the index.5. For handling the users´ data there is the princi-ple of data-thriftiness.This “Code of Conduct” was developed by Carsten Welp. It was first published in: Marcel Machill and Carsten Welp : Wegweiser im Netz. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung 2003. Republished and trans-lated by kind permission of Marcel Machill. (shrink)

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)

We argue that Recanati burdens his otherwise salutary “Mental File” account of singular thought with an “Actualist” assumption that he has inherited from the discussion of singular thought since at least Evans, according to which singular thoughts can only be about actual objects: apparent singular thoughts involving “empty” terms lack truth-valuable content. This assumption flies in the face of manifestly singular thoughts involving not only fictional and mistakenly postulated entities, such as Zeus and the planet Vulcan, but also “perceptual inexistents,” (...) e.g., Kanizsa figures, rainbows, words and phonemes, as well as hosts of at best metaphysically problematic “objects,” such as properties, numbers, ceremonies, contracts, symphonies, “the sky,” “the rain.” Indeed, reflection on what seems to be the boundless diversity of “things” about which we seem to be able to have singular thoughts strongly suggests that there may be no general metaphysics of objects, much less “acquaintance” and “epistemically rewarding” relations that would distinguish singular from non-singular thought. We recommend that Recanati and other mental file theorists confine the theory to a metaphysically neutral account of singular thought as specific kind of internally “focused” computational state, and not seek any general account of the relation of thought to reality. (shrink)

Seit geraumer Zeit versteht die Wissenschaftssoziologie die Erzeugung und Verbreitung von Wissen als ein Kontinuum, an dem Experten und Laien gleichermaßen teilhaben, wobei sich die Erforschung dieses Kontinuums vorrangig auf die "Wissenschaftspopularisierung" des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts konzentriert. Indem der Sammelband die Popularisierung auch des nicht-naturwissenschaftlichen Wissens thematisiert, treten Phänomene in den Blick, die mehr sind als eine bloße Vorgeschichte moderner Wissenschaftspopularisierung. Die Beiträge, die unterschiedlichen Disziplinen entstammen, fragen nach Strukturen, Motiven und Bedingungen von Popularisierungsprozessen in spezifischen historischen Konstellationen - (...) von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, wobei erstmals konsequent die Vormoderne berücksichtigt und bewusst die Popularisierung kulturgeschichtlichern, religiösen und identitätsstiftenden Wissens einbezogen wird. Die besondere Aufmerksamkeit aller Beiträge gilt dabei immer wieder dem grundlegenden Zusammenhang von gesellschaftlichen Krisen und der Nachfrage nach popularisiertem Wissen. (shrink)

Kants Anliegen, Erfahrung zu begr nden als eine Verbindung von Anschauung und Begriff, erweist sich als ein komplexes Unterfangen, insofern hierzu viele Synthesisleistungen des Verstandes und der Einbildungskraft strukturell notwendig sind. Die Arbeit setzt sich zum Ziel, diese isoliert und in ihrer Bezogenheit aufeinander zu untersuchen. Ausgehend von einer Betrachtung der Anschauungsformen Raum und Zeit und einer Analyse der urspr nglich-synthetischen Einheit der Apperzeption, wird der Bogen geschlagen zu den einzelnen Synthesen der Einbildungskraft und der synthetischen Reflexion durch den Verstand. (...) Dabei hat insbesondere das Kapitel zum Schematismus der reinen Verstandesbegriffe eine tragende Bedeutung; hier soll ein neues Licht auf die Schemata als Schnittstelle zwischen Begriff und Anschauung geworfen werden. Trotz der mittlerweile schwer zu berschauenden Zahl an Forschungsliteratur finden sich nur wenige Untersuchungen speziell zur Synthesis, weshalb die Arbeit als ein Desiderat der Kant-Forschung gelten kann. Ein Desiderat ist sie auch deshalb, weil Kants Theorie seit Strawson immer wieder Angriffen speziell sprachanalytischer Interpretationen ausgesetzt ist, die "Synthesis" f r obsolet erkl ren wollen. (shrink)