Relational quantum mechanics (RQM) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics based on the idea that quantum states do not describe an absolute property of a system but rather a relationship between systems. There have recently been some criticisms of RQM pertaining to issues around intersubjectivity. In this article, we show how RQM can address these criticisms by adding a new postulate which requires that all of the information possessed by a certain observer is stored in physical variables of that observer (...) and thus is accessible by measurement to other observers. This makes it possible for observers to reach intersubjective agreement about quantum events that have occurred in the past. We suggest a possible ontology for a version of RQM employing this postulate; this ontology upholds the principle that quantum states are always relational, but it also postulates a set of quantum events that are not strictly relational. We show that the new postulate helps address the preferred basis problem in RQM. (shrink)

What kinds of issues does the global crisis of climate change present to aesthetics, and how will they challenge the field to respond? This paper argues that a new research agenda is needed for aesthetics with respect to global climate change (GCC) and outlines a set of foundational issues which are especially pressing: (1) attention to environments that have been neglected by philosophers, for example, the cryosphere and aerosphere; (2) negative aesthetics of environment, in order to grasp aesthetic experiences, meanings, (...) and dis/values in light of the catastrophic effects of GCC; (3) bringing intergenerational thinking into aesthetics through concepts of temporality and ‘future aesthetics’ (4) understanding the relationship between aesthetic and ethical values as they arise in regard to GCC. (shrink)

Experiments are commonly thought to have epistemic privilege over simulations. Two ideas underpin this belief: first, experiments generate greater inferential power than simulations, and second, simulations cannot surprise us the way experiments can. In this article I argue that neither of these claims is true of experiments versus simulations in general. We should give up the common practice of resting in-principle judgments about the epistemic value of cases of scientific inquiry on whether we classify those cases as experiments or simulations, (...) per se. To the extent that either methodology puts researchers in a privileged epistemic position, this is context sensitive. (shrink)

Demystifying Legal Reasoning defends the proposition that there are no special forms of reasoning peculiar to law. Legal decision makers engage in the same modes of reasoning that all actors use in deciding what to do: open-ended moral reasoning, empirical reasoning, and deduction from authoritative rules. This book addresses common law reasoning when prior judicial decisions determine the law, and interpretation of texts. In both areas, the popular view that legal decision makers practise special forms of reasoning is false.

Recently there have emerged an assortment of theorems relating to the ‘absoluteness of emerged events,’ and these results have sometimes been used to argue that quantum mechanics may involve some kind of metaphysically radical non-absoluteness, such as relationalism or perspectivalism. However, in our view a close examination of these theorems fails to convincingly support such possibilities. In this paper we argue that the Wigner’s friend paradox, the theorem of Bong et al and the theorem of Lawrence et al are all (...) best understood as demonstrating that if quantum mechanics is universal, and if certain auxiliary assumptions hold, then the world inevitably includes various forms of ‘disaccord,’ but this need not be interpreted in a metaphysically radical way; meanwhile, the theorem of Ormrod and Barrett is best understood either as an argument for an interpretation allowing multiple outcomes per observer, such as the Everett approach, or as a proof that quantum mechanics cannot be universal in the sense relevant for this theorem. We also argue that these theorems taken together suggest interesting possibilities for a different kind of relational approach in which _interaction_ states are relativized whilst observed events are absolute, and we show that although something like ‘retrocausality’ might be needed to make such an approach work, this would be a very special kind of retrocausality which would evade a number of common objections against retrocausality. We conclude that the non-absoluteness theorems may have a significant role to play in helping converge towards an acceptable solution to the measurement problem. (shrink)

With the normative demand to attend to social difference and an absence of universal evaluative terms with which to do so, recent theory has increasingly turned to the study of the affective rather than epistemological conditions of ethical encounter. This I call a “dispositional ethics” that construes responsibility as responsiveness. Recent articulations of such an ethics, notably in the most current work of Judith Butler, James Tully, Jade Larissa Schiff, and Ella Myers, highlight its connection to situated practices of concrete (...) bodies-in-relation, but often stop short of developing an account of what such embodied practices might be. Based on interviews with thirteen experts who take the body as their primary vocational and intellectual field and characterize their practice as an art of listening, I distinguish three dimensions of a dispositional ethics in practice and some of the specific strategies available to cultivate the conditions for responsiveness in political life. (shrink)

Exploring key topics in contemporary aesthetics, this work analyzes the issues that arise from the unique works of Frank Sibley (1923-1996), who developed a distinctive aesthetic theory through a number of papers published between 1955 and 1995. Here, thirteen philosophical aestheticians bring Sibley's insight into a contemporary framework, exploring the ways his ideas foster important new discussion about issues in aesthetics. This collection will interest anyone interested in philosophy, art theory, and art criticism.

Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics. It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a social group—apparent in paradigmatic approaches to engaging social difference in settler communities—is at the heart of the particularity (...) of settler group identity and also stands at the heart of countless failures to meet in settler-Indigenous politics. This essay thus seeks to mark the particular ground of this unmarkedness of settler identity in Western philosophies that set being unmarked as both ontology and ideal; the dominance of settler communities in places of settlement; and the willful forgetting of the colonial histories brought about by such dominance. (shrink)

Neuroscientists are increasingly put into situations which demand critical reflection about the ethical and appropriate use of research tools and scientific knowledge. Students or trainees also have to know how to navigate the ethical domains of this context. At a time when neuroscience is expected to advance policy and practice outcomes, in the face of academic pressures and complex environments, the importance of scientific integrity comes into focus and with it the need for training at the graduate level in the (...) responsible conduct of research . I describe my experience teaching RCR in a graduate neuroscience program and identify three personal reflections where further dialogue could be warranted: mobilizing a common set of competencies and virtues standing for professionalism in the neurosciences; tailoring RCR for the neurosciences and empowering students through the active engagement of mentors; soliciting shared responsibility for RCR training between disciplines, institutions and governmental or funding agencies. (shrink)

Emerging demonstrations of the malleability of distance perception in affective situations require an organizing structure. These effects can be predicted by approach and avoidance orientation. Approach reduces perceptions of distance; avoidance exaggerates perceptions of distance. Moreover, hedonic valence, motivational intensity, and perceiver arousal cannot alone serve as organizing principles. Organizing the literature based on approach and avoidance can reconcile seeming inconsistent effects in the literature, and offers these motives as psychological mechanisms by which affective situations predict perceptions of distance. Moreover, (...) this perspective complements functional models of perception claiming perceptions of distance serve adaptive responding, and in so doing suggests why perceptions of distance respond to affective situations. This review contributes to the building of a broader theory of motivated distance perception. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on care homes in the United Kingdom, particularly for those residents living with dementia. The impetus for this article comes from a recent review conducted by the authors. That review, a qualitative media analysis of news and academic articles published during the first few months of the outbreak, identified ethical care as a key theme warranting further investigation within the context of the crisis. To explore ethical care further, a set of salient (...) ethical values for delivering care to care home residents living with dementia during the pandemic was derived from a synthesis of relevant ethical standards, codes and philosophical approaches. The ethical values identified were caring, non-maleficence, beneficence, procedural justice, dignity in death and dying, well-being, safety, and personhood. Using these ethical values as a framework, alongside examples from contemporaneous media and academic sources, this article discusses the delivery of ethical care to care home residents with dementia within the context of COVID-19. The analysis identifies positive examples of ethical values displayed by care home staff, care sector organisations, healthcare professionals and third sector advocacy organisations. However, concerns relating to the death rates, dignity, safety, well-being and personhood – of residents and staff – are also evident. These shortcomings are attributable to negligent government strategy, which resulted in delayed guidance, lack of resources and Personal Protective Equipment, unclear data, and inconsistent testing. Consequently, this review demonstrates the ways in which care homes are underfunded, under resourced and undervalued. (shrink)

Listening appears as elusive as it is crucial to democratic life, particularly in conditions of structural injustice. Dominant groups benefit from histories and habits of inattention and, when enlisted, common responses of denial, defensiveness, and resentment. What lies behind this pervasive and persistent failure to listen to claims of structural injustice by more advantaged groups, and what does this mean for democratic engagement? This paper addresses this question via three interventions: first, it develops a novel account of listening that reveals (...) why listening to claims of structural injustice often proves difficult. Second, it examines how inhabiting positions of relative advantage shapes whether and how people listen to such claims. Finally, it explores the implications these challenges have for the design of democratic processes that seek to engage advantaged groups regarding structural injustice. To develop this account, I draw together current scholarship regarding listening and structural injustice with original fieldwork of recent and current efforts to engage more advantaged communities regarding a specific form of structural injustice: specifically, interviews and observation of the ten organizations across Aotearoa New Zealand most active in efforts to engage communities regarding socio-economic inequality in the country. (shrink)

In this chapter, we address the roles that exemplars might play in a comprehensive response to epistemic injustice. Fricker defines epistemic injustices as harms people suffer specifically in their capacity as (potential) knowers. We focus on testimonial epistemic injustice, which occurs when someone’s assertoric speech acts are systematically met with either too little or too much credence by a biased audience. Fricker recommends a virtue­theoretic response: people who do not suffer from biases should try to maintain their disposition towards naive (...) testimonial justice, and those who find themselves already biased should cultivate corrective testimonial justice by systematically adjusting their credence in testimony up or down depending on whether they are hearing from someone whom they may be biased against or in favor of. We doubt that the prominent admiration-­emulation model of exemplarism will be much use in this connection, so we propose two ways of learning from negative exemplars to better conduct one’s epistemic affairs. In the admiration-­emulation model, both the identification of what a virtue is and the cultivation of virtues identified thusly proceed through the admiration of virtuous exemplars. We show that this model has serious flaws and argue for two alternatives: the envy-­agonism model and the ambivalence-avoidance model. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 28-30.

Caesar's description of the Germans' social organization andmoresin the sixth book of hisBellum Gallicum(BG6.21–8) has long been the subject of multiple scholarly controversies. Its focus on various seemingly random ethnographical details – above all the description of the Hercynian forest and its fantastical beasts – has so surprised readers that the very authenticity of the passage has been questioned. It has been convincingly argued that interpolation is not likely. However, the internal excursus describing the Hercynian forest, and the final section (...) concerning its fauna in particular, remains a subject of intrigue, as a result of the extraordinary, semi-mythical nature of its contents. It is the latter portion of the excursus, concerning the beasts of the Hercynian forest, and the place and role of their portrayal within the ethnography as a whole, that I wish to elucidate in the present article. While it undeniably possesses great entertainment value, its presence cannot be justified merely on such grounds. (shrink)

This paper explores the significance of Adam Smith's ideas for defending non-cognitivist theories of aesthetic appreciation of nature. Objections to non-cognitivism argue that the exercise of emotion and imagination in aesthetic judgement potentially sentimentalizes and trivializes nature. I argue that although directed at moral judgement, Smith's views also find a place in addressing this problem. First, sympathetic imagination may afford a deeper and more sensitive type of aesthetic engagement. Second, in taking up the position of the impartial spectator, aesthetic judgements (...) may originate in a type of self-regulated response where we stand outside ourselves to check those overly humanizing tendencies which might lead to a failure in appreciating nature as nature. (shrink)

Sylvia Wynter, novelist, dramatist, cultural critic, and philosopher, has called for a new poetics that “will have to take as its referent subject, that of the concrete individual human subject”. By “referent subject” Wynter means a shared sense, poetic in nature, that can nevertheless exclude many who are also expected to live it. Man, Wynter argues, as a referent subject first appeared in the Italian Renaissance. As Walter Mignolo has argued, this way of representing an individual is made visual in (...) Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a man of perfect... (shrink)

The omen of the door and the eagle at Iliad 24.314–21 appears to have sparked scant scholarly interest, but deserves careful attention. The omen itself forms part of an analogy, for the eagle is likened in the size of its wingspan to a large, barred door. This simile might seem unremarkable, merely a convenient means of depicting great size, a casual juxtaposition of two ordinary nouns. The omen, on the whole, might be dismissed as nothing more than a conventional expression (...) of divine favor. But closer scrutiny will reveal that there is, in fact, nothing arbitrary or haphazard in the selection of the terms of the analogy. Appreciation of the elegance and subtlety of the simile in turn reveals the full import of the omen. (shrink)

Prior research has shown that various types of conventional multiword chunks are processed faster than matched novel strings, but it is unclear whether this processing advantage extends to variant multiword chunks that are less formulaic. To determine whether the processing advantage of multiword chunks accommodates variations in the canonical phrasal template, we examined the robustness of the processing advantage (i.e., predictability) of binomial phrases with non‐canonical conjunctions (e.g.,salt and also pepper; salt as well as pepper). Results from the cloze study (...) (Experiment 1) showed that there was a high tendency of producing the canonical conjunct (pepper), even in the binomials that contained non‐formulaic conjunctions. Consistent with these findings, results from two eye tracking studies (Experiments 2a and 2b) showed that canonical conjuncts were read faster than novel conjuncts that were matched on word length (e.g.,paprika), even in the binomials with variant conjunctions. This robust online processing advantage was replicated in a self‐paced reading study that compared all three conjunction types (Experiment 3). Taken together, these findings show that binomials with variant function words also receive facilitated processing relative to matched novel strings, even though both types of strings are neither conventional nor relatively frequent. Exploratory analyses revealed that this processing speed advantage was driven by the lexical–semantic association between the canonical conjuncts (salt–pepper), rather than lexical and phrasal frequency. Overall, these results highlight flexibility in the processing of multiword chunks that current models of multiword storage and processing must take into account. (shrink)

In the 1930s, the Bengali philosopher K. C. Bhattacharyya proposed a new theory of rasa, or aesthetic emotion, according to which aesthetic emotions are feelings that have other feelings as their intentional objects. This paper articulates how Bhattacharyya’s theory offers a novel solution to the puzzle of how it is both possible and rational to enjoy the kind of negative emotions that are inspired by tragic and sorrowful tales. The new solution is distinct from the conversion and compensation views that (...) dominate the existing literature, and it derives its significance from how it ties aesthetic experience to self-awareness. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the recent discovery of alleged arsenic bacteria in Mono Lake, California, and the ensuing debate in the scientific community about the validity and significance of these results. By situating this case in the broader context of projects that search for anomalous life forms, I examine the methodology and upshots of challenging biochemical constraints on living things. I distinguish between a narrower and a broader sense in which we might challenge or change our knowledge of life (...) as the result of such a project, and discuss two different kinds of projects that differ in their potential to overhaul our knowledge of life. I argue that the arsenic bacteria case, while potentially illuminating, is the kind of constraint-challenging project that could not—in spite of what was said when it was presented to the public—change our knowledge of life in the deeper sense. (shrink)

This article briefly considers current positions about whether the inclusion of the perspectives and interests of marginalised groups in the construction of knowledge is of epistemic value. It is then argued that applied social epistemology is the proper epistemic stance to take in evaluating this question. Theorists who have held that diversity makes an epistemic contribution are interpreted as attempting to reform social pathways to knowledge in ways that make true belief more likely. Thus, the demand for diversity challenges the (...) individualistic and a priori nature of traditional epistemology. This stance has consequences for education. It supports greater attention to helping students examine the testimonial bases for their beliefs. And it prepares students for their role as citizens in supporting policies that maintain credible inclusive institutions of public knowledge. (shrink)

People sometimes use speech to interfere with other people’s speech, as in the case of a heckler sabotaging a lecture with constant interjections. Some people claim that such interference infringes upon free speech. Against this view, we argue that where competing speakers in a public forum both have an interest in speaking, free speech principles should not automatically give priority to the ‘official’ speaker. Given the ideals underlying free speech, heckling speech sometimes deserves priority. But what can we say, then, (...) about situations in which heckling clearly seems to infringe upon people’s civil liberties, in a way that intuitively justifies intervention? In such cases, we argue, heckling infringes upon people’s associative freedom. We present and defend an ethical framework for the institutional management of ‘Speech Fights’, geared around this insight. (shrink)

Aesthetic value is a kind of value that emerges out of a variety of relations with the world. My interest here is not in developing a theory of relational aesth.

In the woods of Spring City, Pennsylvania, lies Pennhurst, a school for people with developmental and physical disabilities from 1908 to 1987. Like many institutions, Pennhurst eventually became a place of abuse and neglect. Pennhurst was finally shut down, and the residents were relocated into group homes. Two years ago, a group well educated about Pennhurst's past formed the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to making Pennhurst into a national museum. Standing in the way of PM&PA's vision (...) was a businessman named Richard Chakejian, who purchased Pennhurst from the state for $2 million and has now converted it to a haunted house. The result is a bizarre hybrid of history and legend, and of criminality and commercialism, that simultaneously evokes and erases Pennhurst's troubled past. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of emotion focuses on challenging dualistic conceptualizations. Three of the most obvious dualisms are the following: 1. emotion opposes reason; 2. emotion is subjective, while reason is objective; 3. emotion lies internal to the subject, while reason is external. With challenges to these dualisms, one of the more interesting questions that has surfaced is the idea of emotional appropriateness in a particular context. Here, consider a widely held belief in the United States associates racialized groups (...) with specific emotions—most notably African American women with anger. Clearly these emotional attributions are essentialistic--and hence racist. But this response is too easy. The acknowledgement that emotion lies both internally in the subject and externally in the world opens the possibility of attributing an emotional temperament to a population group. Yet if an identity group has an emotional temperament, can they be accountable for emotionally appropriate behavior? (shrink)