Negotiation is not only used to settle differences of interest but also to settle differences of opinion. Discussants who are unable to resolve their difference about the objective worth of a policy or action proposal may be willing to abandon their attempts to convince the other and search instead for a compromise that would, for each of them, though only a second choice yet be preferable to a lasting conflict. Our questions are: First, when is it sensible to enter into (...) negotiations and when would this be unwarranted or even fallacious? Second, what is the nature of a compromise? What does it mean to settle instead of resolve a difference of opinion, and what might be the dialectical consequences of mistaking a compromise for a substantial resolution? Our main aim is to contribute to the theory of argumentation within the context of negotiation and compromise formation and to show how arguing disputants can shift to negotiation in a dialectically virtuous way. (shrink)

Casuistry, which involves analogical reasoning, is a popular methodological approach in bioethics. The method has its advantages and challenges, which are widely acknowledged. Meta-philosophical reflection on exactly how bioethical casuistry works and how the challenges can be addressed is limited. In this paper we propose a framework for structuring casuistry and analogical reasoning in bioethics. The framework is developed by incorporating theories and insights from the philosophy of science: Mary Hesse’s ideas on horizontal and vertical relations in analogical reasoning in (...) the sciences, Paul Bartha’s articulation model of analogical reasoning and Daniel Steel’s insights on mechanism-based extrapolation in biomedical research. Adopting our framework results in two practical benefits: it sets methodological standards for analogical reasoning and enables us to compare and evaluate diverging lines of analogical reasoning in a systematic way. Adopting the framework also has theoretical benefits: it helps to understand how analogical reasoning can have moral normativity; it pinpoints exactly where moral principles or theories enter analogical reasoning; and it helps to understand why casuistry is an attractive method in bioethics and in applied ethics more generally. (shrink)

This article examines the legitimacy attached to different types of multi-stakeholder data partnerships occurring in the context of sustainable development. We develop a framework to assess the democratic legitimacy of two types of data partnerships: open data partnerships and closed data partnerships. Our framework specifies criteria for assessing the legitimacy of relevant partnerships with regard to their input legitimacy as well as their output legitimacy. We demonstrate which particular characteristics of open and closed partnerships can be expected to influence an (...) analysis of their input and output legitimacy. (shrink)

In a seminal book, Alvin I. Goldman outlines a theory for how to evaluate social practices with respect to their “veritistic value”, i.e., their tendency to promote the acquisition of true beliefs in society. In the same work, Goldman raises a number of serious worries for his account. Two of them concern the possibility of determining the veritistic value of a practice in a concrete case because we often don't know what beliefs are actually true, and even if we did, (...) the task of determining the veritistic value would be computationally extremely difficult. Neither problem is specific to Goldman's theory and both can be expected to arise for just about any account of veritistic value. It is argued here that the first problem does not pose a serious threat to large classes of interesting practices. The bulk of the paper is devoted to the computational problem, which, it is submitted, can be addressed in promising terms by means of computer simulation. In an attempt to add vividness to this proposal, an up-and-running simulation environment is presented and put to some preliminary tests. (shrink)

We describe a prototype ontology-driven information system (ODIS) that exploits what we call Portion of Reality (POR) representations. The system takes both sensor data and natural language text as inputs and composes on this basis logically structured POR assertions. The goal of our prototype is to represent both natural language and sensor data within a single framework that is able to support both axiomatic reasoning and computation. In addition, the framework should be capable of discovering and representing new kinds of (...) situations and thematic roles, (e.g., roles such as agent, patient and instrument), based on new compositions of existing representations. We applied our prototype in an intelligence analysis use case to test the hypothesis that a framework of this sort can produce usefully structured information from combined natural language and sensor data inputs. We further tested our hypothesis by adding an enhanced US Air Force ontology framework to our ODIS in order to (1) process a collection of sensor data, intel reports, and mission plans; (2) build composite POR representations from these data; and (3) machine analyze the fused results to infer mission threats. (shrink)

I challenge a cornerstone of the Gettier debate: that a proposed analysis of the concept of knowledge is inadequate unless it entails that people don’t know in Gettier cases. I do so from the perspective of Carnap’s methodology of explication. It turns out that the Gettier problem per se is not a fatal problem for any account of knowledge, thus understood. It all depends on how the account fares regarding other putative counter examples and the further Carnapian desiderata of exactness, (...) fruitfulness and simplicity. Carnap proposed his methodology more than a decade before Gettier’s seminal paper appeared, making the present solution to the problem a candidate for being the least ad hoc proposal on the market, one whose independent standing cannot be questioned, among solutions that depart from the usual method of revising a theory of knowledge in the light of counterexamples. As an illustration of the method at work, I reconstruct reliabilism as an attempt to provide an explication of the concept of knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter considers the present account to be a sufficient response to the generality problem as an objection that specifically targets reliabilism. It identifies the main challenge for reliabilism in relation to the typing of belief‐forming processes. The chapter focuses on insights in cognitive science in a way that should make this response attractive to practitioners of naturalized epistemology, including Goldman himself. The most stimulating part of Conee and Feldman's attack can charitably be viewed as targeting the notion that the (...) reliabilist concepts of knowledge and justification are sufficiently similar to their folk counterparts. The chapter focuses for simplicity on the reliabilist theory of justification (RJ) and on Conee and Feldman's criticism as targeting the faithfulness of RJ with regard to everyday concept of justification. For the purposes of neutralizing Conee and Feldman's central challenge it was sufficient to give a purely descriptive account of how people type belief‐forming processes. (shrink)

This paper argues in favor of a hybrid conception of identity. A common conception of identity in datafied society is a split between a digital self and a real self, which has resulted in concepts such as the data double, algorithmic identity, and data shadows. These data-identity metaphors have played a significant role in the conception of informational privacy as control over information—the control of or restricted access to your digital identity. Through analyses of various data-identity metaphors as well as (...) philosophical accounts of identity, we argue in favor of a hybrid conception of identity that emphasizes the relations between the ‘real’ and the ‘digital’. A hybrid conception of identity—where the digital is an aspect on par with social relations, self-understanding, and values—ultimately calls for an understanding of privacy as the right to influence one’s own identity. (shrink)

Proponents of permitting living kidney sales often argue as follows. Many jobs involve significant risks; people are and should be free to take these risks in exchange for money; the risks involved in giving up a kidney are no greater than the risks involved in acceptable hazardous jobs; so people should be free to give up a kidney for money, too. This paper examines this frequently invoked but rarely analysed analogy. Two objections are raised. First, it is far from clear (...) that kidney sales and dangerous jobs involve comparable risks on an appropriately broad comparison. Second, and more importantly, even if they do involve comparable risks it does not follow that kidney sales must be permitted because dangerous jobs are. The analogy assumes that kidney sales are banned for paternalistic reasons. But there may be other, non-paternalistic reasons for the ban. And paternalists, too, can consistently defend the ban even if kidney sales are no riskier than occupations that they find acceptable. Soft paternalists may want to protect would-be vendors from harms that they have not voluntarily chosen. Egalitarian hard paternalists may want to protect already badly off vendors from further worsening their situation. For neither species of paternalist is the size of the risk prevented decisive. I conclude that the analogy with dangerous jobs, while rhetorically powerful, pulls little real argumentative weight. Future debates on living kidney sales should therefore proceed without it. (shrink)

This paper starts from qualitative research on volunteering and citizenship, with a special focus on volunteering within a setting of restorative justice and mediation. In a first stage, the author reconstructs two models of meaningfulness as hermeneutical lenses to better understand how volunteers see their engagement and experiences as a source of meaningfulness. The paper argues that a biographical model of meaningfulness is in need of a complementary approach to meaningfulness, which focuses on transformational experiences with a strong existential depth. (...) In a second stage, the paper dialogues with the experiences and narratives of the volunteers, and shows how their understanding of citizenship informs, and transforms their ideas of meaningfulness. Both the biographical and the existential approach to meaningfulness appear to be deeply influenced by the volunteers’ civic imaginaries. (shrink)

We develop a constructive version of nonstandard analysis, extending Bishop's constructive analysis with infinitesimal methods. A full transfer principle and a strong idealisation principle are obtained by using a sheaf-theoretic construction due to I. Moerdijk. The construction is, in a precise sense, a reduced power with variable filter structure. We avoid the nonconstructive standard part map by the use of nonstandard hulls. This leads to an infinitesimal analysis which includes nonconstructive theorems such as the Heine-Borel theorem, the Cauchy-Peano existence theorem (...) for ordinary differential equations and the exact intermediate-value theorem, while it at the same time provides constructive results for concrete statements. A nonstandard measure theory which is considerably simpler than that of Bishop and Cheng is developed within this context. (shrink)

A much-discussed objection to skeptical theism is that skeptical theism implies that divine testimony cannot provide us with knowledge. Here I argue that it is not skeptical theism that raises doubts about the trustworthiness of divine testimony; rather, the vast amount of inscrutable evil in our world together with God’s track record of deception is the source of the trouble. I draw on that insight to develop further my divine deception argument (Wielenberg 2014). The argument I will defend goes roughly (...) like this: There is a lot of inscrutable evil in the world and the Christian God has a track record of being deceptive about future events. Therefore, divine testimony regarding future events is not a source of knowledge that such events will occur. (shrink)

William Bateson has long occupied a controversial role in the history of biology at the turn of the twentieth century. For the most part, Bateson has been situated as the British translator of Mendel or as the outspoken antagonist of W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson's biometrics program. Less has been made of Bateson's transition from embryologist to advocate for discontinuous variation, and the precise role of British and American influences in that transition, in the years leading up to (...) the publication of his massive Materials for the Study of Variation. In this paper, I first attempt to trace Bateson's development in his early career before turning to search for the development of the moniker "anti-Darwinist" that has been attached to Bateson in well-known histories of the neo-Darwinian Synthesis. (shrink)

Sheaf semantics is developed within a constructive and predicative framework, Martin‐Löf's type theory. We prove strong completeness of many sorted, first order intuitionistic logic with respect to this semantics, by using sites of provably functional relations.

We introduce the _character lens_ perspective to account for stable patterns in the way that individuals make sense of and construct the ethical choices and situations they face. We propose that the way that individuals make sense of their present experience is an enduring feature of their broader moral character, and that differences between people in ethical decision-making are traceable to upstream differences in the way that people disambiguate and give meaning to their present context. In three studies, we found (...) that individuals with higher standing on moral character (operationalized as a combination of Honesty-Humility, Guilt Proneness, and Moral Identity Centrality) tended to construe their present context in more moral or ethical terms, and this difference in moral recognition accounted for differences in the ethical choices they made. Moreover, individuals with higher levels of moral character maintained high levels of moral recognition even as pressure to ignore moral considerations increased. Accordingly, this work unifies research on moral character, moral recognition, sensemaking, and judgment and decision-making into a person-centered account of ethical decision-making, highlighting the way decision-makers actively and directly shape the choice contexts to which they must respond. (shrink)

The class of points in a set-presented formal topology is a set, if all points are maximal. To prove this constructively a strengthening of the dependent choice principle to infinite well-founded trees is used.

A worldview has six components. We concentrate on the first two: the descriptive world model and the explanatory world model. In the first half of the paper we make some general remarks on the methodology of world construction. In the second part, we discuss inconsistencies in world models. Adding new fragments to our world model can lead to inconsistencies. Three strategies are distinguished: (i) a partial return to instrumentalism, (ii) paraconsistency, and (iii) the adaptive option. The latter option is elaborated (...) by means of several historical examples and by means of the EPR paradox. (shrink)

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that just about everyone agrees that the highest good is eudaimonia while disagreeing with one another about what eudaimonia is. A similar situation exists among many contemporary philosophers: they agree that naturalism is true while disagreeing with one another about what naturalism is. By their lights, the claim that a given entity exists is worth taking seriously only if the entity in question is compatible with naturalism ; otherwise, the entity is queer or spooky (...) and the claim that it exists should be rejected outright.In God, Value, and Nature, Fiona Ellis considers five increasingly expansive version of naturalism, ranging from a view according to which the only entities that qualify as natural rather than spookily supernatural are those that can be studied by the hard sciences to a view about that classifies the Christian God as natural. Part of Ellis’s project is to consider the extent to wh .. (shrink)

The author makes the case for sortition from a Marxist perspective, explaining how sortition could become part of an anticapitalist political strategy.

Research on motivation has mainly concentrated on the role of goal orientation and self?evaluation in conducting learning activities. In this paper, we examine the relative importance of teachers? teaching and their efficacy beliefs to explain variation in student motivation. Questionnaires were used to measure the well?being, academic self?efficacy, mastery goal orientation, performance avoidance, intrinsic motivation and school investment of students (n = 3462) and the teaching practices and teachers? sense of self?efficacy (n = 194) in primary schools. Results of the (...) multi?level analyses show that connection to the students? world and cooperative learning methods had a positive effect on students? motivation, while process?oriented instruction by the teacher had a negative effect on motivational behaviour and motivational factors of students. Finally, the results lend credence to the argument that teachers? sense of self?efficacy has an impact on both teachers? teaching and students? motivation to learn. (shrink)

This paper examines some connections between Hume’s epistemology in his Treatise of Human Nature and his political economy. I make three claims: First, I argue that it is the development of Hume’s account of the faculty of reason in Book I of the Treatise that leads him to emphasize social science—including political economy—and the humanities over more abstract modes of intellectual inquiry. Second, I argue that Hume’s conception of reason has implications for his methodology in political economy. His perception of (...) human reason leads him to deploy a method of qualified generalization that emphasizes the by-and-large nature of theoretical statements. Third, when it comes to policy matters, the method of qualified generalization in theory cashes out in terms of practical maxims. I suggest that two central maxims in Hume’s political economy derive from his views of the usefulness of economic liberty and the coordinating nature of the status quo. (shrink)

Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage can be seen as a collection of chapters designed to provoke thought and discussion, or it can be seen and used as separate chapters that may help class debate in courses dealing with the digital humanities, game studies (especially in the areas of serious games and game-based learning) or aspects of virtual heritage. While there are very few books in this intersecting area, the range of topics that could be investigated and debated is (...) huge. So instead I have concentrated on questions in areas that appear to be central to the intersection of these three areas, have not currently been debated to any great extent or are topics that would suit either individual reflection or classroom discussion and debate. (shrink)

Early educators are in a bind. Teacher education programs are calling on them more and more to help students practice critical thinking and develop intellectual character ; yet school funding depends on meeting Common Core standards, which do not explicitly assess critical thinking until the high-school level. Add to that an over-engineered content curriculum, and thinking becomes a luxury that is quickly lost amid more immediate concerns. As a result, we are raising a generation of “excellent sheep” who flourish amid (...) standardized tests but are increasingly unable to think for themselves. The problem, we suggest, is that today’s teachers are in such a rush to give students the answers that they are not allowing them time to ask the questions. As a result, students cannot find the “deep structure” of issues. Bodies of knowledge thus strike them as disconnected facts, quickly forgotten. The solution, as suggested by recent work in cognitive science, is to teach critical thinking through teaching content. In what follows, we propose a way of organically integrating content and thinking through games, story books and art. With this, we put children into the driver’s seat, encouraging them to ask their own questions, to propose their own answers and to join their peers in joint inquiry through dialogue. In a word, we propose teaching children philosophy as early as possible. Tom Wartenberg has made considerable progress with his picture-book philosophy curriculum designed for elementary schools. But what of younger children? Combining the resources of Rollins College’s Philosophy Department and Child Development and Student Research Center, we set out to find “how low can we go?” Over four terms’ of trial and error, we have adapted and distilled Wartenberg’s methods into a model that works for the Center’s 4-year-olds, and we have tested this model on a larger scale through a one-term collaboration with the Winter Park Day Nursery. (shrink)