‘Flash houses’, a distinctive type of public house associated with criminal activity, are a shadowy and little-studied aspect of early 19th-century London. This article situates flash houses within a wide perspective, arguing that the discourses on flash houses were part of concerns about the threat of the urban environment to the moral character of its inhabitants. The article draws on an original synthesis of a range of sources that refer to flash houses, including contemporary literature, newspapers, court documents, and government (...) papers. It demonstrates that flash houses were part of both popular intrigue about the perceived ‘criminal underworld’ and official concerns about the collusion between police officers and suspected offenders, since police officers allegedly frequented flash houses to gather criminal information. A detailed examination of this term reveals anxieties about the state of the metropolis, poverty, and criminality that were central to the early 19th-century consciousness. However, the discussion of flash houses in this context also demonstrates a powerful connection in contemporary minds between the physical spaces of the city and the risks that they posed to inhabitants' morals. While associations between the physical environment and morality have been drawn throughout history, flash houses represent a paradigmatic moment in this dialogue. This is because different moral concerns coalesced around the discourse on flash houses: anxieties about the criminal underworld, the potential for moral degradation of young people who frequented these spaces, and the corruption of police officers through contact with known or suspected offenders. (shrink)

Vice essentialism is the view that epistemic vices have robustly negative effects on our epistemic projects. Essentialists believe that the manifestation of epistemic vices can explain many of our epistemic failures, but few, if any, of our epistemic successes. The purpose of this paper is to argue that vice essentialism is false. In §1, I review the case that some epistemic vices, such as closed-mindedness and extreme epistemic deference, have considerably beneficial effects when manifested in collectivist contexts. In §2, I (...) add that there are putative epistemic vices whose repeated manifestation leads to significant epistemic achievements over time. Epistemic recklessness is one such unstable vice. Though Sosa argues that epistemically reckless judgements cannot constitute knowing full well, the repeated manifestation of epistemic recklessness is essential to our becoming fully well knowledgeable in the long run. Without making incompetent judgements in environments that offer unambiguous, actionable feedback, we could not develop the intuitive and reflective competences and meta-competences required for knowing full well. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s influential concept of epistemic injustice has recently seen application to many areas of interest, with an increasing body of healthcare research using the concept of epistemic injustice in order to develop both general frameworks and accounts of specific medical conditions and patient groups. This paper illuminates tensions that arise between taking steps to protect against committing epistemic injustice in healthcare, and taking steps to understand the complexity of one’s predicament and treat it accordingly. Work on epistemic injustice is (...) therefore at risk of obfuscating legitimate and potentially fruitful inquiry. This paper uses Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis as a case study, but I suggest that the key problems identified could apply to other cases within healthcare, such as those classed as Medically Unexplained Illnesses, Functional Neurological Disorders and Psychiatric Disorders. Future work on epistemic injustice in healthcare must recognise and attend to this tension to protect against unsatisfactory attempts to correct epistemic injustice. (shrink)

This book confronts the threats of epistemic relativism and Pyrrhonian scepticism to analytic philosophy. Epistemic relativists reject absolute notions of knowledge and justification, while sceptics claim that knowledge and justification of any kind are unattainable. If either of these views is correct, then there can be no objective basis for thinking that one set of methods does a better job of delivering accurate information than any other set of methods. Philosophers have generally sought to resist these threats by responding to (...) the argument that seems to motivate both positions: the Agrippan trilemma. Steven Bland argues that this is a mistaken strategy. He surveys the most influential responses to the Agrippan trilemma, and shows that none of them succeeds in undermining epistemic relativism. Bland also offers a new, dialectical strategy of challenging epistemic relativism by uncovering how epistemic methods depend on one another for their applications. By means of this novel analysis, the book concludes that there are principled reasons to prefer naturalistic to non-naturalistic methods, even if these reasons do little to ease the threat of scepticism. (shrink)

Using as a framework the logical treatment of causality in the Buddhist Madhyamika, a theory of the psychology of event coherence and causal connectedness is developed, and suggestive experimental evidence is offered. The basic claim is that events are perceived as coherent and causally bound to the extent that the outcome is seen to be already contained in the ground of the event in some form and the connecting link between them is seen as the appropriate means for changing the (...) outcome-in-the-ground to the outcome-as-perceived. There are four types of such connections: the identity of the object in the ground and outcome is seen as the same ; a property is seen to be transferred from ground to outcome ; for animate beings, a cognitive representation and a state of the world are seen to match - either the representation-as-outcome coming to match the world-as-ground or the world-as-outcome coming to match the representation-as-ground ; the `essence' of a category is seen to manifest itself . The standard critique of such coherence explanations is that they are tautological. We demonstrate that `nontautological' scientific accounts become convincing coherent explanations only to he extent that the outcome is re-introduced into the ground. Explanations which are noncausal altogether, such as probability or chance, are shown to be psychologically unstable. This critique suggests some new perspectives on causal thinking both in the cognitive sciences and the folk theories of daily life. (shrink)

Dans ce volume collectif, J. Albisetti, J. Goodman et Rebecca Rogers nous emmènent dans un tour européen du développement de l’enseignement secondaire pour les filles. Les contributeurs proposent deux pistes principales : une vue d’ensemble des histoires nationales de l’enseignement des filles ; et une présentation des pistes de recherche à suivre. Bien que Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western World soit organisé par pays, les directeurs et les auteurs soulignent les multiples connexions...

This paper argues that solicitors are required to lawyer relationally when delivering independent legal advice (ILA) to (predominantly) women set to provide suretyship for their intimate partner’s debts. Case law tells us that women providing suretyship may be entering the transaction under the coercion of their partner. Coerced debt is a form of economic abuse, which in turn is a form of domestic abuse. ILA in this context therefore provides an important intervention to potentially assist victims of abuse before entering (...) (potentially more) debt at the hands of their abuser. To make ILA purposeful, solicitors must prioritise relational values/dynamics such as consultation, care, judgement, and empowerment; the anti-thesis of market-exchange lawyering which is characterised by the values such as objectivity and detachment. Market-exchange lawyering is also associated with ethical apathy as lawyers prioritise their client’s means-ends above all else, therefore failing to consider the broader implications of those ends (in terms of their client’s best interests and/or the public interest). Drawing on interview data with 22 solicitors, it is demonstrated that most interviewees provide tick-box ILA prioritising completion. That is, most interviewees prioritised values of commerce over values of care when acting for women who may be experiencing economic abuse. (shrink)

Background People who are at elevated risk of suicide stand to benefit from internet-based interventions; however, research in this area is likely impacted by a range of ethical and practical challenges. The aim of this study was to examine the ethical issues and practical barriers associated with clinical studies of internet-based interventions for suicide prevention. Method This was a mixed-methods study involving two phases. First, a systematic search was conducted to identify studies evaluating internet-based interventions for people at risk of (...) suicide, and information pertaining to safety protocols and exclusion criteria was extracted. Second, investigators on the included studies were invited to complete an online survey comprising open-ended and forced-choice responses. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the data. Results The literature search identified 18 eligible studies, of which three excluded participants based on severity of suicide risk. Half of the 15 suicide researchers who participated in the survey had experienced problems obtaining ethics approval, and none had encountered adverse events attributed to their intervention. Survey respondents noted the difficulty of managing risk in online environments and the limitations associated with implementing safety protocols, although some also reported increased confidence resulting from the ethical review process. Respondents recommended researchers pursue a collaborative relationship with their research ethics committees. Conclusion There is a balance to be achieved between the need to minimise the risk of adverse events whilst also ensuring interventions are being validated on populations who may be most likely to use and benefit from them. Further research is required to obtain the views of research ethics committees and research participants on these issues. Dialogue between researchers and ethics committees is necessary to address the need to ensure safety while also advancing the timely development of effective interventions in this critical area. (shrink)

This paper examines three programmatic responses to the problem of cognitive bias: virtue epistemology, epistemic paternalism, and epistemic collectivism. Each of these programmes focuses on asinglelevel of epistemic analysis: virtue theorists on individuals, paternalists on environments, and collectivists on groups. I argue that this is a mistake in light of the fact that cognitive biases arise frominteractionsbetween these three domains. Consequently, epistemologists should spend less time defending these programmes, and more timecoordinatingthem. This paper offers empirically based arguments for the interactionist (...) approach, and contends that its adoption is an essential step for minimizing bias in empirical science. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds that Judaism is indifferent or even suspiciously hostile to the visual arts due to the Second Commandment's prohibition on creating "graven images," the dictates of monotheism, and historical happenstance. This intellectual history of medieval and modern Jewish attitudes toward art and representation overturns the modern assumption of Jewish iconophobia that denies to Jewish culture a visual dimension. Kalman Bland synthesizes evidence from medieval Jewish philosophy, mysticism, poetry, biblical commentaries, travelogues, and law, concluding that premodern Jewish intellectuals (...) held a positive, liberal understanding of the Second Commandment and did, in fact, articulate a certain Jewish aesthetic. He draws on this insight to consider modern ideas of Jewish art, revealing how they are inextricably linked to diverse notions about modern Jewish identity that are themselves entwined with arguments over Zionism, integration, and anti-Semitism. Through its use of the past to illuminate the present and its analysis of how the present informs our readings of the past, this book establishes a new assessment of Jewish aesthetic theory rooted in historical analysis. Authoritative and original in its identification of authentic Jewish traditions of painting, sculpture, and architecture, this volume will ripple the waters of several disciplines, including Jewish studies, art history, medieval and modern history, and philosophy. (shrink)

I argue that the need to understand spacetime structure as emergent in quantum gravity is less radical and surprising it might appear. A clear understanding of the link between general relativity's geometrical structures and empirical geometry reveals that this empirical geometry is exactly the kind of thing that could be an effective and emergent matter. Furthermore, any theory with torsion will involve an effective geometry, even though these theories look, at first glance, like theories with straightforward spacetime geometry. As it's (...) highly likely that there will be a role for torsion in quantum gravity, it's also highly likely that any theory of quantum gravity will require us to get to grips with emergent spacetime structure. (shrink)

This paper looks at the relationship between spacetime functionalism and Harvey Brown’s dynamical relativity. One popular way of reading and extending Brown’s programme in the literature rests on viewing his position as a version of relationism. But a kind of spacetime functionalism extends the project in a different way, by focussing on the account Brown gives of the role of spacetime in relativistic theories. It is then possible to see this as giving a functional account of the concept of spacetime (...) which may be applied to theories that go beyond relativity. This paper explores the way in which both the relationist project and the functionalist project relate to Brown’s work, despite being incompatible. Ultimately, these should not be seen as two conflicting readings of Brown, but two different directions in which to take his project. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MARCHING AND RISING: THE RITUALS OF SMALL DIFFERENCES AND GREAT VIOLENCE Byron Bland Center ofInternational Strategic Arms Control What is really needed is the decommissioning of mind-sets in Northern Ireland. (Report of the International Body on Arms Decommissioning: The Mitchell Report, January 24, 1996) The 1996 Orange Marching season brought a major setback to peace process in Northern Ireland. On the Garvaghy Road in the Drumcree community of (...) Portadown, Protestants and Catholics displayed the mutual intolerance and intransigence for which they are notorious. Within each camp, a contagion of ill-will took hold, metamorphosing ancient malice into modern hatred. A volatile fog, toxic with recriminations and threats, descended upon the countryside. The battlelines drawn at Drumcree energized other historical points ofconfrontation across the province. Just as the plucked string of a musical instrument sets the all the others vibrating harmoniously, so the cord struck in Portadown sounded the key to a counterpoint that seemed almost primordial. As the tragic notes of the final measures faded, a numbing silence enveloped a society once again stunned by the violence unleashed within its soul. It was as if the North of Ireland looked at the prospect of peace and announced that it was not going to take it lying down. A strangely 102Byron Bland irrational logic seemed to drive events. Viewed from afar, it never should have happened. Neither Protestants nor Catholics stood to gain anything of tangible value. Only in retrospect—from the finale once the standoff had energized every potential division backwards—do substantive political issues emerge. However, this collapsing of events obscures the interactive process from which this mishap arose and leaves the central and confounding mystery unsolved: how did a dispute about nothing so quickly become a conflict about everything? The answer to this enigma lies in the mimetic theory of René Girard. Sinn Fèin Party Chairman Mitchel McLaughlin parsed correctly, but not insightfully, the social dynamics of this explosive situation. Shortly before the July marching season, he affirmed the right of Protestants to march. Nevertheless, he maintained, Catholics would tolerate no triumphalism. The problem is, of course, that Protestants don't march in the abstract. They march down specific streets, passing through particular communities, toward specified locations. Their Lambeg drums boom out a terrifying cadence. Their Bowler hats, black-thorn canes, and orange sashes shout a silent message for all to hear. Without triumphalism, an Orange march is simply a pointless stroll. It is nothing—a non-event, a momentous occasion that did not happen. Orange triumphalism needs serious nationalist resistance to be more than ludicrous display ofparanoid-driven pomposity. Orange "marching" must provoke a Catholic "rising." It has to find a contumacious partner before the mimetic choreography of "not any inch" can proceed. Only then can the thundering beat of the Lambeg drum transform the contestants into violent doubles, each captivated by a spellbinding obsession with the other. From the pounding rhythms spring forth entranced rivals who are much more than mere competitors. Caught in a tragedy replayed thousands of times, Catholics and Protestants stare across the bloody boundary of small differences that separates them. Their opposition defines the mirrored sameness of their common Irishness as utterly alien. With melodramatic anticipation, both await the moment when violence seals off the expelled other and circumscribes the sacred realm of our metaphysical identity. Fully enshrined, the Protestants and Catholics of Ulster feel the fullness of their humanity. They are now complete, but sadly they are no longer whole. MarchingandRising103 History is a weapon, a poker you keep in your pocket to beat the present senseless and so reorder its alignment to the past andjustify present murder. (Kevin Toolis, Rebel Hearts) Marching and drumming make an Orange parade. The practice first entered Ireland with the arrival of "King Billy"—William of Orange in 1690. His troops—the vanguard of Protestantism—marched to the cadence ofkettle drums strapped to the backs ofhorses. When they routed the Catholic army of James II at the Battle of the Boyne, marching and drumming entered the lexicon of Protestant dominance. When the Orangemen hit the streets, they take on the identity of King Billy's Protestant troops. They triumph over the Catholics in... (shrink)

Prelinguistic infants must find a way to isolate meaningful chunks from the continuous streams of speech that they hear. BootLex, a new model which uses distributional cues to build a lexicon, demonstrates how much can be accomplished using this single source of information. This conceptually simple probabilistic algorithm achieves significant segmentation results on various kinds of language corpora - English, Japanese, and Spanish; child- and adult-directed speech, and written texts; and several variations in coding structure - and reveals which statistical (...) characteristics of the input have an influence on segmentation performance. BootLex is then compared, quantitatively and qualitatively, with three other groups of computational models of the same infant segmentation process, paying particular attention to functional characteristics of the models and their similarity to human cognition. Commonalities and contrasts among the models are discussed, as well as their implications both for theories of the cognitive problem of segmentation itself, and for the general enterprise of computational cognitive modeling. (shrink)

Recent work on distributed cognition and self-narrative has emphasised how autobiographical memories and their narration are, rather than being stored and created by an individual, distributed across embodied organisms and their environment. This paper postulates a stronger form of distributed narration than has been accommodated in the literature so far, which I call narrative deference. This describes the phenomena whereby a person is significantly dependent upon another person for the narration of some significant aspect of their own autobiographical self-narrative. I (...) suggest that a person is more likely to narratively defer where they suffer a mnemonic impairment regarding some significant adverse life experience like trauma, illness or injury. Following a recent turn in the literature towards investigating the harmful aspects of distributed cognition as well as its many advantageous features, this paper explores how the benefits of autobiographical self-narrative deference within close personal relationships are complexly related to its harms. (shrink)

Sandra Harding is working on the reconstruction of scientific objectivity. Lorraine Daston argues that objectivity is a concept that has historically evolved. Her account of the development of "aperspectival objectivity" provides an opportunity to see Harding's "strong objectivity" project as a stage in this evolution, to locate it in the history of migration of ideals from moral philosophy to natural science, and to support Harding's desire to retain something of the ontological significance of objectivity.

There have always been medical standards of care in the American health-care sector. However, never before have they been so deeply incorporated in the delivery of health care as they are today. With the increased delivery of care through integrated delivery systems, as well as the development of the computerized patient record, medical standards of care are now used in innovative ways by providers and health plans in delivering health care to individual patients. There is great potential for even more (...) innovative uses of medical standards of care in the future.This article first presents a taxonomy of the medical standards of care that are involved in health-care delivery today Next, the article traces the historical evolution of medical standards of care since the early 1980s. Included in this discussion are the origins of the standard-setting movement as well as the developments that led to the way standards of care are currently used by large institutional providers and managed care plans to improve the quality of their health-care services. The article concludes with a brief analysis of the key legal issues that affect how standards of care can be used to improve the health care of patients. (shrink)

Does telling a story imply a fictional world in which that story takes place? In contemporary philosophy, “fictional worlds” are one solution to the problem of how there can be true and false judgments about fictional characters. Fictional-world accounts generally disregard whether facts are explicitly stated in the story or not; it is enough for them to be logically implied. And yet, as Ruth Lorand has observed, whether a fact is stated or merely implied changes the meaning of a story. (...) “Imagine that the original text contains the following sentence: ‘Daisy Miller is human and as such she was born to human parents.’ Wouldn’t.. (shrink)

There is an influential, ongoing debate between traditionalists and experimentalists about how to carry out conceptual analysis by means of the method of possible cases. The debate concerns whose intuitions are evidentially relevant to philosophical theories, and which methods are most appropriate for collecting such evidence. The aim of this paper is not to take sides in this debate, but to question the monopoly that the method of possible cases has in contemporary discussions of philosophical methodology. Since early analytic philosophy (...) is replete with methods of conceptual analysis that make no essential use of intuitions, these discussions are inevitably myopic. In particular, it will be argued that Frege’s logical analysis of arithmetic, Hilbert’s axiomatic analysis of geometry, and Poincaré’s transcendental analysis of physics are non-psychologistic methods that yield profound philosophical conclusions. None of these methods are carried out from the philosopher’s armchair or the scientist’s laboratory; instead they properly belong to mathematics and physics. Thus, by ignoring these methods, both traditionalists and experimentalists have neglected the significant role that the exact sciences can play in conceptual analysis. (shrink)

The past 30 years has seen a theoretical and clinical renaissance in psychoanalysis, as well as a flourishing of Christian engagement in the fields of psychology and anthropology. This volume of essays stages a new conversation between Christianity and psychoanalysis that opens up new ways of thinking about the rich mosaic of human experience.

This paper aims to understand how recent discussion of novel and robust behaviour in physics might be applied in biology and other special sciences. In particular, it looks at the prospects for extending an account of novel explanation to biological examples. Despite the differences in the disciplines, the prospects look good, at least when we look at a biological example in which a certain kind of reduction is possible.

Biofunctionalism appears to be a pioneering effort to formulate a portrait of the body&endash;mind which acknowledges intuitions we have about human functioning that go beyond the analytic approach of the cognitive sciences but that can yet remain within the worldview and methods of the analytic portrait. The intuitions are : wholeness, interdependent causality, present temporality, effortless action, realness, panoramic knowing, and value. Such themes are most fully developed in the meditative and contemplative traditions of the world. Biofunctionalism is evaluated both (...) in terms of how well it instantiates those themes and in terms of its ability to generate explanations and predictions within the scientific context. (shrink)

This article examines the rise of meta-commentary in US media, and considers the consequences it has for the social construction and the performance of intellectual expertise. Media meta-commentary is defined as critical reflection about media practices and performances, in which the primary basis for criticism is the comparison of different media formats. Meta-commentary began to emerge with the differentiation of the aesthetic sphere and the development of a new kind of expert, the cultural critic. Cultural criticism led to a proliferation (...) of expert performance styles, including a type of counter-performance that rejects the somber and serious nature of traditional intellectual practices. By the 1980s, these new styles of intellectual performance were being reinforced by important institutional and regulatory changes within the media industry, and ultimately by the proliferation of new digital technologies and DIY culture. By the twenty-first century, media meta-commentary had become a distinctive and peculiar form of expert discourse, which legitimates the act of criticism while also relativizing it. The current environment suggests two possible outcomes: a hopeful one that encourages greater reflexivity, and a more ominous one that points toward populism. (shrink)

This book takes a new look at the history of individual rights, focusing on how philosophers have written that history. Eleanor Curran argues that the turn to jurisprudence, after the philosophical rejection of natural rights, has resulted in an impoverished notion of rights as no more than claims and entitlements.

While there are many competing accounts and scales of intellectual humility, philosophers and psychologists are generally united in treating it as an epistemically _beneficial_ disposition of _individual_ agents. I call the research guided by this supposition the _traditional approach_ to studying intellectual humility. The traditional approach is entirely understandable in light of recent findings that individual differences in intellectual humility are associated with various deleterious epistemic tendencies. Nonetheless, I argue that its near monopoly has resulted in an underestimation of important (...) limitations of human cognition. In particular, it neglects the fact that intellectual arrogance can be both deeply recalcitrant and significantly beneficial for bounded cognitive agents whose reliance on one another is profound. I propose to integrate these insights into the study of intellectual humility by treating it as a _collective virtue_ that gets manifested in the structure of epistemic environments. More specifically, it is an interactive virtue that harnesses and constrains intellectual arrogance to yield benefits for both individuals and collectives. I claim that this can happen only within _humbling environments_, such as forecasting tournaments and open institutional science. (shrink)