The world contains objective causal relations and universals, both of which are intimately connected. If these claims are true, they must have far-reaching consequences, breathing new life into the theory of empirical knowledge and reinforcing epistemological realism. Without causes and universals, Professor Fales argues, realism is defeated, and idealism or scepticism wins. Fales begins with a detailed analysis of David Hume's argument that we have no direct experience of necessary connections between events, concluding that Hume was mistaken on this fundamental (...) point. Then, adopting the view of Armstrong and others that causation is grounded in a second-order relation between universals, he explores a range of topics for which the resulting analysis of causation has systematic implications. In particular, causal identity conditions for physical universals are proposed, which generate a new argument for Platonism. The nature of space and time is discussed, with arguments against backward causation and for the view that space and time can exist independently of matter or causal process. Many of Professor Fales's conclusions seem to run counter to received opinion among contemporary empiricists. Yet his method is classically empiricist in spirit, and a chief motive for these metaphysical explorations is epistemological. The final chapters investigate the perennial question of whether an empiricist, internalist and foundational epistemology can support scientific realism. (shrink)

It has been nearly a decade and a half since Fred Dretske, David Armstrong and Michael Tooley, having each rejected the Regularity theory, independently proposed that natural laws are grounded in a second-order relation that somehow binds together universals.' (l shall call this the ‘DTA theory’). In this way they sought to overcome the major - and notorious — shortcomings of every version of the Regularity theory: how to provide truth conditions for laws that lack instances; how to distinguish laws (...) from accidental generalizations; how to provide truth conditions for the counterfactuals and disposition statements that laws apparently ‘support’; how to justify inductive inferences from past events to laws and future events. For each of these puzzles, an apparently key element in the solution seems to be missing from Regularity theories. That missing element is a genuine connection, a relation with more than merely spatial and/or temporal content, linking the antecedent of a law to its consequent. Once such an additional objective element - however understood — is admitted to be essential to the analysis of laws, one is forced to give up the idea that the logical form of laws can be given in terms of quantifiers ranging over events or states of alfairs, and truth-functions. (shrink)

This article gives two arguments for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing. First is an inductive argument: most other societies, in history and in the world today, have been unknowingly guilty of serious wrongdoing, so ours probably is too. Second is a disjunctive argument: there are a large number of distinct ways in which our practices could turn out to be horribly wrong, so even if no particular hypothesized moral mistake strikes us as very likely, (...) the disjunction of all such mistakes should receive significant credence. The article then discusses what our society should do in light of the likelihood that we are doing something seriously wrong: we should regard intellectual progress, of the sort that will allow us to find and correct our moral mistakes as soon as possible, as an urgent moral priority rather than as a mere luxury; and we should also consider it important to save resources and cultivate flexibility, so that when the time comes to change our policies we will be able to do so quickly and smoothly. (shrink)

Traditionally, theories of mindreading have focused on the representation of beliefs and desires. However, decades of social psychology and social neuroscience have shown that, in addition to reasoning about beliefs and desires, human beings also use representations of character traits to predict and interpret behavior. While a few recent accounts have attempted to accommodate these findings, they have not succeeded in explaining the relation between trait attribution and belief-desire reasoning. On my account, character-trait attribution is part of a hierarchical system (...) for action prediction, and serves to inform hypotheses about agents’ beliefs and desires, which are in turn used to predict and interpret behavior. (shrink)

This paper explores some of the differences between the enactive approach in cognitive science and the extended mind thesis. We review the key enactive concepts of autonomy and sense-making . We then focus on the following issues: (1) the debate between internalism and externalism about cognitive processes; (2) the relation between cognition and emotion; (3) the status of the body; and (4) the difference between ‘incorporation’ and mere ‘extension’ in the body-mind-environment relation.

We argue that human rights are best conceived as norms arising from a fiduciary relationship that exists between states and the citizens and noncitizens subject to their power. These norms draw on a Kantian conception of moral personhood, protecting agents from instrumentalization and domination. They do not, however, exist in the abstract as timeless natural rights. Instead, they are correlates of the state's fiduciary duty to provide equal security under the rule of law, a duty that flows from the state's (...) institutional assumption of irresistible sovereign powers. (shrink)

As the field of clinical bioethics has moved from its pioneers, who turned their attention to ethics problems in clinical medicine and clinical and animal research, to today’s ubiquity of university degrees and fellowships in bioethics, there has been a steady drumbeat to professionalize the field. The problem has been that the necessary next steps—to specify the skills, knowledge, and personal and professional attributes of a clinical bioethicist, and to have a method to train and evaluate mastery of these standards—are (...) lacking.Ordinarily, the path to professionalism in medicine starts with the intellectual pioneers. Then come those who develop early experience in clinical settings. Then comes the specification of the skills, knowledge, and personal and professional attributes needed to perform the activities of the new specialty or subspecialty. And only then, after a method to train and evaluate levels of mastery from novice to advanced practitioner has been developed, comes credible credentialing and certification/licensing.Unfortunately, the field of clinical bioethics has skipped these steps. Rather, a credential, that is, the Healthcare Ethics Consultant (HEC) certification, was created by a small group within the bioethics professional association, the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), without community agreement or necessary input. Further, the testing of processes to train HECs and to evaluate their levels of mastery of competencies was prematurely forwarded as sufficient evidence of competence in clinical ethics. That is, the credential, offered by the ASBH for a fee, upon passing an exam based on how many hours one has been involved in clinical consultation, about which there is no field agreement on how such consultations ought to be conducted and for which only controversial standards have been set, is being touted as evidence of competence in clinical bioethics. In their article, “Competencies and Milestones for Bioethics Trainees,” Sawyer and colleagues identify the central weakness of these claims to professionalization and provide the field the first substantive assessment tool and method to train and evaluate competencies. The tool these authors present is the real next step forward for true professionalization of the field of clinical bioethics. (shrink)

Birch sketches out an ingenious account of how the psychology of social norms emerged from individual-level norms of skill. We suggest that these individual-level norms of skill are likely to be much more widespread than Birch suggests, extending deeper into the hominid lineage, across modern great ape species, all the way to distantly related creatures like honeybees. This suggests that there would have been multiple opportunities for social norms to emerge from skill norms in human prehistory.

Theodicies can be distinguished as “hard-nosed” or “good-hearted.” Typical features of each are given. I reject the former; they set the bar too low for God. Considerable discussion is devoted to Eleonore Stump's recent Wandering in Darkness, which sets the standard for good-hearted theodicies. I then develop the notion of a “perfect creature”, a possible being indistinguishable from God except lacking aseity, and argue that God should have created only perfect creatures. Since He did not, He is not. Theodicies, therefore, (...) are in trouble if there is a best possible world and it is a perfect creature world. (shrink)

We argue that the minimal biological requirements for consciousness include a living body, not just neuronal processes in the skull. Our argument proceeds by reconsidering the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Careful examination of this thought experiment indicates that the null hypothesis is that any adequately functional “vat” would be a surrogate body, that is, that the so-called vat would be no vat at all, but rather an embodied agent in the world. Thus, what the thought experiment actually shows is that the (...) brain and body are so deeply entangled, structurally and dynamically, that they are explanatorily inseparable. Such entanglement implies that we cannot understand consciousness by considering only the activity of neurons apart from the body, and hence we have good explanatory grounds for supposing that the minimal realizing system for consciousness includes the body and not just the brain. In this way, we put the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment to a new use, one that supports the “enactive” view that consciousness is a life-regulation process of the whole organism interacting with its environment. (shrink)

Theoretical simplicity is difficult to characterize, and evidently can depend upon a number of distinct factors. One such desirable characteristic is that the laws of a theory have relatively few "counterinstances" whose accommodation requires the invocation of a ceteris paribus condition and ancillary explanation. It is argued that, when one theory is reduced to another, such that the laws of the second govern the behavior of the parts of the entities in the domain of the first, there is a characteristic (...) gain in simplicity of the sort mentioned: while I see no way of quantitatively measuring the "amount" of defeasibility of the laws of a theory, microreduction can be shown to decrease that "amount.". (shrink)

The Doctrine of the Given The Myth of the Given A Methodological Problem To a convinced foundationalist, the project of establishing the existence of the ...

This article makes five main points. Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. The concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy, under- stood as a unique and irreducible kind of intentionality. Empathy is the precondi- tion of the science of consciousness. Human empathy.

In this book, Christopher Evan Franklin develops and defends a novel version of event-causal libertarianism. This view is a combination of libertarianism--the view that humans sometimes act freely and that those actions are the causal upshots of nondeterministic processes--and agency reductionism--the view that the causal role of the agent in exercises of free will is exhausted by the causal role of mental states and events (e.g., desires and beliefs) involving the agent. Franklin boldly counteracts a dominant theory that has (...) similar aims, put forth by well-known philosopher Robert Kane. -/- Many philosophers contend that event-causal libertarians have no advantage over compatibilists when it comes to securing a distinctively valuable kind of freedom and responsibility. To Franklin, this position is mistaken. Assuming agency reductionism is true, event-causal libertarians need only adopt the most plausible compatibilist theory and add indeterminism at the proper juncture in the genesis of human action. The result is minimal event-causal libertarianism: a model of free will with the metaphysical simplicity of compatibilism and the intuitive power of libertarianism. And yet a worry remains: toward the end of the book, Franklin reconsiders his assumption of agency reductionism, arguing that this picture faces a hitherto unsolved problem. This problem, however, has nothing to do with indeterminism or determinism, or even libertarianism or compatibilism, but with how to understand the nature of the self and its role in the genesis of action. Crucially, if this problem proves unsolvable, then not only is event-causal libertarianism untenable, so also is event-causal compatibilism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15.2 (2005) 199-210 [Access article in PDF] Conflict-of-Interest Policy at the National Institutes of Health: The Pendulum Swings Wildly* Evan G. DeRenzo **This article addresses the National Institutes of Health (NIH) employee conflict-of-interest (COI) policy that went into effect February 2005. It is not, however, merely an account of another poorly crafted government policy that cries out for revision. Instead, it is also (...) a story about one of our nation's most important and prestigious institutions and its struggles to navigate the crosscurrents of scientific aspirations, power politics, public ambivalence toward capitalist economics in the biosciences, and the media's inclination to exaggerate problems and under report complicated facts. It is also a tale of greed, politics, purgatory, and redemption. The dramatic and abrupt change in the NIH COI policy demonstrates the difficulty of balancing the production of cutting-edge science with the demands for transparency resulting from work performed in the public interest on the public tab. It is an unhappy chapter in the life of a government agency that is also a national treasure. And, one hopes, it will be an example of how harmful and ill-conceived law can be revised and amended to advance national health and well-being. What is the New NIH COI Policy? The new NIH COI employee policy, more accurately referred to as the Interim Final Rule (Federal Register 2005), is a sweeping set of prohibitions on activities and holdings to reduce the possibility that NIH employees will have any actual [End Page 199] or apparent conflicts of interest. For the most part, the prohibitions are applied across-the-board—i.e., without distinction to employee category or function. The new policy includes prohibitions on outside activities, stock holdings, and awards. It prohibits all NIH employees from engaging in any compensated or uncompensated employment, including consulting, serving on advisory or other such boards, and compensated teaching, speaking, writing, or editing with certain kinds of entities. The first class of such entities is referred to as substantially affected organizations, defined as biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical device companies, and others with similar interests. But these are not the only entities included in the prohibitions. Other organizations from which NIH employees now are cut off are hospitals, clinics, and other health care institutions; health, science, or health research-related professional associations and consumer and advocacy groups. Included also are educational institutions and not-for-profit independent research institutes that are, or were, recent NIH funding applicants, grantees, contractors, or cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) partners. The only exemptions appear to be for health care institutions at which NIH employees provide clinical care and some forms of writing—e.g., an NIH physician who moonlights at her/his local hospital's emergency room or submits a manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal that receives only unrestricted funding from a prohibited entity. Prohibited and/or restricted holdings include stock in biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies and others in research, development, or manufacture of medical devices, equipment, preparations, treatments, or products. The prohibitions apply to senior NIH employees; restrictions in the amount of such holdings apply to all remaining employees. Both apply to the spouses and minor children of NIH employees. If an NIH employee wins an award, the monetary allowance in most cases is limited to $200. In sum, the scope of this policy is vast, too vast to be reasonable. Too many employees are restricted in too many ways. Where appropriate restrictions have been placed on senior NIH employees, even these constructive aspects of the policy are overshadowed by the unfairness and destructiveness of other aspects. This policy far exceeds anything that could be considered sound. Fortunately, the policy has a built-in assessment process to begin at the end of the policy's first year of implementation. One can only hope that a fair and open evaluation will be conducted, the results of which surely must result in major revisions to what is now bad regulation. Why the Policy... (shrink)

Let me express my deep thanks to the contributors for taking the time to read my book, Mind in Life, and for writing their thoughtful commentaries, from which I have learned a great deal. Special thanks are due to Tobias Schlicht, whose hard work and dedication made this volume possible. In what follows, I will respond singly to each con-tributor and do my best to address their main points. My replies to the commentators will be longer or shorter depending on (...) the points they raised. (shrink)

The science of genetics is undergoing a paradigm shift. Recent discoveries, including the activity of retrotransposons, the extent of copy number variations, somatic and chromosomal mosaicism, and the nature of the epigenome as a regulator of DNA expressivity, are challenging a series of dogmas concerning the nature of the genome and the relationship between genotype and phenotype. According to three widely held dogmas, DNA is the unchanging template of heredity, is identical in all the cells and tissues of the body, (...) and is the sole agent of inheritance. Rather than being an unchanging template, DNA appears subject to a good deal of environmentally induced change. Instead of identical DNA in all the cells of the body, somatic mosaicism appears to be the normal human condition. And DNA can no longer be considered the sole agent of inheritance. We now know that the epigenome, which regulates gene expressivity, can be inherited via the germline. These developments are particularly significant for behavior genetics for at least three reasons: First, epigenetic regulation, DNA variability, and somatic mosaicism appear to be particularly prevalent in the human brain and probably are involved in much of human behavior; second, they have important implications for the validity of heritability and gene association studies, the methodologies that largely define the discipline of behavior genetics; and third, they appear to play a critical role in development during the perinatal period and, in particular, in enabling phenotypic plasticity in offspring. I examine one of the central claims to emerge from the use of heritability studies in the behavioral sciences, the principle of minimal shared maternal effects, in light of the growing awareness that the maternal perinatal environment is a critical venue for the exercise of adaptive phenotypic plasticity. This consideration has important implications for both developmental and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

This talk, delivered at De l''autopoièse à la neurophénoménologie: un hommage à Francisco Varela; from autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: a tribute to Francisco Varela, June 18–20, at the Sorbonne in Paris, explicates several links between Varela''s neurophenomenology and his biological concept of autopoiesis.

This book puts that right, and goes further by also including decriptions of animal "person-to-person" interactions.

This chapter examines arguments for the view that any science of the supernatural must be a pseudoscience. It shows that many of these arguments are not good arguments. It also argues that, contrary to recent philosophical discussions, the appeal to the supernatural should not be ruled out as science for methodological reasons, but rather because the notion of supernatural intervention probably suffers from fatal flaws.

The depletion effect, a decreased capacity for self-control following previous acts of self-control, is thought to result from a lack of necessary psychological/physical resources (i.e., “ego depletion”). Kurzban et al. present an alternative explanation for depletion; but based on statistical techniques that evaluate and adjust for publication bias, we question whether depletion is a real phenomenon in need of explanation.

The attraction between religion and politics is perennial. Sometimes, in its long and checkered history, it has led to an adulterous affair. I want to ask what lies at the heart of this attraction, and whether that can shed any light on the current religious/political scene. But the romance metaphor is at bottom not a good one. I shall argue that, in their originary condition, religion and politics are "closer," both ontologically and in their motivation, than woman and man, closer (...) than siblings. Perhaps the image of siamese identical twins would serve best as a figure for the union which binds together these domains, in spite of the peculiar political history which has, in the West and especially in this country, attempted to sunder them. Let me emphasize right here that my project is a descriptive one: I am seeking a deeper understanding of the phenomena, not attempting to develop a prescriptive or normative position concerning what is to be done. Indeed, I shall only be able to sketch the outlines of the descriptive position I shall propose. (shrink)

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

Excellence in the care of hospital patients, particularly those in an intensive care unit, reflects esprit de corps among the care team. Esprit de corps depends on a delicate balance; each clinician must preserve a sense of personal responsibility for “my” patient and yet participate in the collaborative work essential to the care of “our” patient. A harmful imbalance occurs when a physician demands total control of the decision-making process, especially concerning end-of-life treatment options. Although emotional factors may push a (...) physician to claim decision-making exclusivity, compounded by a legal framework that overemphasizes individual responsibility, esprit de corps can be preserved through timely communication among clinicians and a recognition that optimal care for “my” patient requires effective team practice. (shrink)

Ethics rounds in clinical ethics have already taken hold in multiple venues. There are “sit-down rounds,” which usually consist of a bioethicist setting a specific, prescheduled time aside for residents and/or others to bring a case or two for discussion with the bioethicist. Another kind of rounds that occurs on an ad hoc or infrequent basis is to have either a staff or outside bioethicist give hospital-wide and/or departmental “grand rounds.” Grand rounds is a traditional educational format in medicine and (...) adding bioethics to the topics covered in grand rounds is an important means of elevating ethical awareness within a department or throughout a healthcare organization. Newer is the rounding practice of adding a bioethicist to other established rounding processes, such as case management and utilization review rounds. All of these kinds of ethics rounds are important opportunities to elevate the level of moral discourse within a healthcare setting and are becoming part and parcel of any full-service hospital bioethics program. (shrink)

How should we act when uncertain about the moral truth, or when trying to remain neutral between competing moral theories? This dissertation argues that some types of actions and policies are relatively likely to be approved by a very wide range of moral theories—even theories which have never yet been formulated, or which appear to cancel out one another's advice. For example, I argue that actions and policies which increase a moral agent's access to primary goods also tend to increase (...) that agent's likelihood of bringing about good consequences, even under varying and mutually incompatible hypotheses about what consequences count as "good". We therefore have a subjective, pro tanto moral reason to perform such actions and enact such policies—one whose justification does not require treating any particular theory as especially probable, but instead merely requires treating at least one at-least-partly consequentialist moral theory as an open hypothesis, and is therefore applicable even under conditions of moral uncertainty or moral neutrality. My discussion begins abstractly, but as it progresses it gradually applies its framework to increasingly concrete issues. I find that the justification of some liberal policies—in the classical sense of "liberal"—can be accomplished with significantly fewer moral assumptions than have traditionally been relied upon. (shrink)

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called (...) Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that the central problem of Aristotle’s Metaphysics H (VIII) 6 is the unity of forms and that he solves this problem in just the way he solves the problem of the unity of composites – by hylomorphism. I also discuss the matter– form relationship in H 6, arguing that they have a correlative nature as the matter of the form and the form of the matter.

This paper examines a specific appeal to philosophical anthropology—Andy Clark's—and the role it plays in shaping his account of our fundamental cyborg humanity." By focusing on the theme of embodiment, we also inquire into how phenomenology might benefit from Clark's account as well as how Clark's account might benefit from further engagement with phenomenology. Throughout, we explore inter- and intra-disciplinary questions that highlight the contribution the philosophy of technology can make to our understanding of embodiment and philosophical anthropology.

The phenomenon of perceptual persistence after the motion stops in shape-from-motion displays was used to study the influence of prior knowledge on the maintenance of a percept in awareness. In SFM displays an object composed of discontinuous line segments are embedded in a background of randomly oriented lines. The object only becomes perceptible when the line segments that compose the object and the lines that compose the background move in counterphase. Critically, once the movement of the line segments stops, the (...) percept of the object persists for a short period of time. In the present study, perceptual persistence for digits exceeded that reported for nonsense shapes composed of the same line segments. This result is taken as evidence that the processes involved in the persistence of SFM, and therefore sustained perception, are sensitive to top-down influences. (shrink)