This paper sets out to accomplish two goals. First, drawing on the Irish perspective, it reconceptualises one of the enduring legacy-based harms of epistemic colonisation, in this case, ‘linguicism’, in terms of ‘hermeneutical injustice’. Second, it argues that otherwise well-meaning attempts to combat epistemic colonisation through the inclusion of marginalised testimony can, in certain circumstances, lead to cases of ‘epistemic exploitation’, which, in turn, can result in ‘ontic burnout’. Both linguicism and epistemic exploitation, this paper theorizes, have the potential to (...) bring about ontic burnout. Here is the plan: to set the scene, section I briefly surveys some key arguments supporting the call for higher education institutions (HEIs) to engage in epistemic decolonising, focusing on the importance of striking a balance between two extremes: (i) abandoning all forms of Eurocentric/colonial knowledge through the elimination of inherited thinking and conceptual schemes which result from colonization, in particular, those which remain in our thinking “owing to inertia rather than to our own reflective choices” (Wiredu 2002, p.56); (ii) the other—pursuing a more positive project where we seek to, “exploit as much as is judicious the resources of indigenous conceptual schemes” (Wiredu 1996: p.136). From here, it moves to consider harms associated with a subset of ‘epistemicide’, that is, ‘linguicism’—a phenomenon where the language and culture of the colonizer become part of the ‘civilising project’ and, in more extreme cases of linguicide, forcibly replaces indigenous languages. Section II then explores the subtleties of harmful by-products deriving from ‘inclusion’, namely that which scholars refer to as ‘epistemic exploitation’. Situations where marginalised scholars are finally ‘at the table but still on the menu’ arise when privileged persons, compel marginalised knowers to educate them [and others] about the nature of their oppression (Berenstain, 2016). Habitual requests to turn themselves inside out for emancipatory principles give rise to a phenomenon known as ontic burnout (Dunne and Kotsonis, 2022, p.9)—“a form of dissociative explanatory fatigue culminating in oppressed persons engaging in a conscious or unconscious decoupling from their socially constructed identity, from the burdens and injustices associated with being a member of a certain social kind”. This harm is, I argue, rarely discussed in the literature and worthy of further analysis. (shrink)

This third volume of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science contains papers which are based upon Colloquia from 1964 to 1966. In most cases, they have been substantially modified subsequent to presentation and discussion. Once again we publish work which goes beyond technical analysis of scientific theories and explanations in order to include philo sophical reflections upon the history of science and also upon the still problematic interactions between metaphysics and science. The philo sophical history of scientific ideas has (...) increasingly been recognized as part of the philosophy of science, and likewise the cultural context of the genesis of such ideas. There is no school or attitude to be taken as de fining the scope or criteria of our Colloquium, and so we seek to under stand both analytic and historical aspects of science. This volume, as the previous two, constitutes a substantial part of our final report to the U. S. National Science Foundation, which has continued its support of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science by a grant to Boston University. That report will be concluded by a subse quent volume of these Studies. It is a pleasure to record our thanks to the Foundation for its confidence and funds. We dedicate this book to the memory of Norwood Russell Hanson. During this academic year of 1966-67, this beloved and distinguished American philosopher participated in our Colloquium, and he did so before. (shrink)

In this 1958 book, Professor Hanson turns to an equally important but comparatively neglected subject, the philosophical aspects of research and discovery.

This paper proposes a novel educational approach to epistemic vice rehabilitation. Its authors Gerry Dunne and Alkis Kotsonis note that, like Quassim Cassam, they remain optimistic about the possibility of improvement with regard to epistemic vice. However, unlike Cassam, who places the burden of minimizing or overcoming epistemic vices and their consequences on the individual, Dunne and Kotsonis argue that vice rehabilitation is best tackled via the exemplarist animated community of inquiry zetetic principles and defeasible-reasons-regulated deliberative processes. The vice-reduction (...) method they propose is made up of four distinct yet complementary components: (1) positive exemplarism of epistemic virtue (saints), (2) negative exemplarism of epistemic vice (sinners), (3) direct teaching/instruction, and (4) cognitive apprenticeship. Dunne and Kotsonis argue that this pedagogical intervention appropriately considers learnings deriving from forensic scrutiny of both ideal and non-ideal interpersonally calibrated zetetic features integral to knowledge acquisition as well as wider societal influences impacting the development of agents' epistemic character. It bridges research on vice epistemology (Cassam's obstructivist theory), social epistemology (corrupted social processes mitigating against vice rehabilitation), virtue epistemology, and moral exemplarism. (shrink)

Arthur Diamond comments that "it is not clear how a donor distributes money through Hanson's market". Let me try again to be clear. Imagine David Levy were to seek funding for the regression he suggests in his comments, on the relative impact of sports versus science spending on aggregate productivity. Consider what might happen under three different funding institutions.

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm's, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different (...) sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways. In this methodologically diverse and unusually personal account, Gerry Simpson brings to the surface international law's hidden literary prose and offers a critical and redemptive account of the field. He does so in a series of chapters on international law's bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners. Finally, the book closes with a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this is put forward as a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times. (shrink)

[Anne:] “I can't, I'm in the depths of despair. Can you eat when you are in the depths of despair?”“I've never been in the depths of despair, so I can't say,” said Marilla.“Weren't you? Well did you ever try to imagine you were in the depths of despair?”” No, I didn't.”“Then I don't think you can understand what it's like. It's a very uncomfortable feeling indeed. When you try to eat a lump comes right up in your throat and you (...) can't swallow anything, not even if it was a chocolate caramel.”—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables.Emotion, as a “suprarational” property, transcends rationality in that it can be thought of as a group, contextual rather than as a solely individual trait, and thus is a higher order property, as the above quote suggests. This proposal arises from a metatheoretical analysis of models available to broach questions of emotion. I use metatheoretical in the sense of both the context of theory production and the theory of theory. From the first arose the idea that emotion, through the use of irrationality, has surfaced as a working equivalent to inexplicability or rational relativity, and can be modelled more adequately as suprarational, with a unique nature in its own right. The latter led me to propose that the concept of emotion as contextual, a higher order group level property, is possible and tentatively profitable. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1 Introduction 1 -- 2 Central themes and critical issues 10 -- Introduction 10 -- Core themes 11 -- Differences which have surfaced in the move from -- margins to mainstream 15 -- The claims of restorative justice: a brief examination 21 -- Some limitations of restorative justice 25 -- Some dangers of restorative justice 29 -- Debunking restorative justice 32 -- 3 Reviving restorative justice traditions 36 -- The rebirth of an ancient practice 36 -- (...) Pre-modem criminal justice 37 -- The renaissance of native justice traditions 43 -- Navajo peacemaking 44 -- Can one characterise ancient and indigenous -- justice as restorative? 47 -- Can one revive restorative justice traditions? 49 -- Conclusion: did restorative justice ever die? 59 -- 4 Healing the victim 62 -- Introduction 62 -- The experiences and needs of victims 64 -- The inadequacy of punitive justice for the victim 67 -- Victim reforms 70 -- Restitution from the offender 74 -- Beyond restitution: restoring victims 76 -- Restorative justice or 'clubbing together'? 78 -- Using victims to rehabilitate offenders 81 -- Paternalism towards victims 83 -- Balancing the needs of the victim with those of society 84 -- 5 A restorative approach to offenders 87 -- Introduction 87 -- Restorative justice as an alternative to retributive justice 88 -- Restorative justice as an alternative to treatment 94 -- The goals and methods of restorative justice in relation -- to offenders 95 -- An alternative to punishment or an alternative form of -- punishment? 106 -- An alternative to treatment? 111 -- 6 Shame, apology and forgiveness 114 -- Introduction 114 -- Restorative cautioning 115 -- The psychological routes of restorative conferencing 116 -- The idea of reintegrative shaming 118 -- Some questions about shaming 123 -- Apology and forgiveness 132 -- 7 Mediation, participation and the role of community 136 -- Introduction: handling criminal conflicts 136 -- The rationale for the restorative justice process 140 -- Achieving restorative goals 141 -- Moral development and the strengthening of community 144 -- The role of community 151 -- 8 The future of restorative justice 161 -- Introduction 161 -- Implementing restorative justice: the paths less likely 163 -- The implementation of restorative techniques 166 -- Restorative justice and the pattern of penal control 169 -- The future of restorative justice research 170 -- Appendix to chapter 3: the theological roots of judicial -- punishment 172. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the view that, in so far as they involve the deliberate targeting of innocent people, neither terrorism nor area bombing is ever morally permissible. Four attempts to justify this view are considered, all of which are based on the intuition that deliberately killing innocent people is wrong. By means of a detailed examination of the introduction of area bombing by Britain in 1940–41, it is argued that in certain circumstances there are other equally powerful (...) and accessible intuitions which support the opposite view. It is further argued that only moral theories which provide for the weighing of competing moral intuitions are capable of avoiding this kind of impasse and the biased selection of intuitions that this form of absolutism involves. (shrink)

Our article attempts to provide some clarity to the debate about the proper relationship between science and public policy by drawing on the philosophical field of logic. We argue that based on an analysis of the most fundamental ways that empirical and evaluative truth claims can be used together in arguments, the tendency to conceive of this relationship either in dual terms of “pure” vs. “applied” or complex “multi-disciplinary” or “multi-cultural” systems of categorization should be rejected in favor a basic (...) four-part division. A significantly improved understanding of the connection between science and public policy can be based on an examination of the four most basic kinds of logical connection between empirical and evaluative statements. One such improvement is a better understanding of how funding should be divided between state and private interests. (shrink)

Richard Rorty, a world-renowned American pragmatist, died on 8 June 2007. He left an enduring impact on Western philosophy. Like his predecessors Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, Rorty attempted the gargantuan task of redescribing the nature of philosophy in the late twentieth century. This article is a modest personal tribute to a great philosopher who shaped the author’s views about self-creation, metaphysics, and politics. The major themes in Rorty’s philosophy are discussed briefly. It is the author’s hope that this article (...) will serve as a short introduction to Rorty’s neopragmatism. The author likewise hopes that it will stimulate the readers to pursue the philosophical issues that Rorty raised. (shrink)

The present discussion of dialectic thought is an extension of Van's original discussion of “realism” as the dialectic synthesis of conservatism (theism) and liberalism (empiricism) as approaches to thought.

Bioethics and Global Bioethics are currently among the most visible programs in ethics in the global academic community. It was my good fortune to have met Dr. Van Rensselaer Potter in 1963, long before he coined the term “Bioethics” and emerged as America's first Bioethicist, maintaining “The Wisconsin Tradition” established by John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Van believed that all ethics are properly based on a pan-cultural scientific knowledge base. How it is that ethics are related to knowledge, and to (...) values and morals, is the subject of this discussion. (shrink)

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real‐world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how the real‐world event would unfold if it were being experienced directly; (c) concurrent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, and the prior internal states (...) of the system, each drive the predictive process; (d) the representation of prior internal states across a representational substrate common to the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains enables the predictive process to operate over variable time frames and variable levels of representational abstraction. We review empirical data exemplifying the operation of these principles and discuss the relationship between prediction, event structure, thematic role assignment, and incrementality. (shrink)

Many thinkers believe that the next transformational change in human organisation will be the onset of human-level artificial intelligence, and that the most likely method of achieving this will come through brain emulations or "ems": the ability to scan human brains and program their connections into ever faster computers. Taking this as his starting point, Hanson describes what a world dominated by these ems will be like.

What it means to be a knower together with the social practices through which we come to know are irreducibly complex ethical concepts (Congdon, 2018). Extant analyses of epistemic injustice typica...

This paper examines the relatively underexplored relationship between epistemic wrongs and epistemic harms in the context of epistemic injustice. Does the presence of one always imply the presence of the other? Or, is it possible to have one without the other? Here we aim to establish a prima facie case that epistemic wrongs do not always produce epistemic harms. We argue that the epistemic wrongness of an action should never be evaluated solely based on the action's consequences, viz. the epistemic (...) and practical harms suffered by the wronged party. Instead – as we shall show – epistemic harms necessarily follow from epistemic wrongs. To conclude, we suggest ways in which extant accounts of epistemic wrongs and epistemic harms as they cash out in epistemic injustice contexts might be refined in light of our argument. (shrink)

We have been discussing some of the fundamental features of the classical calculus of probability. The equiprobability of rival events was seen to be a major assumption of the calculus. Moreover, it is an assumption which the pure mathematician need not bother to justify. He need only present his formal system as follows.

ABSTRACT This paper scrutinizes the nature and scope of deleterious consequences arising from the pursuit of unattainable pedagogical exemplars on social media. We cash out this phenomenon using exemplarist theory to emphasize the fact that social media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) are platforms in which the vast majority of users present idealized and curated versions of themselves. We focus specifically on educational practitioners and show that attempting to emulate unattainable pedagogical exemplars has negative impacts on agents’ emotional well-being: It can (...) cause burnout and self-conflict, decrease motivation, and also inflict detrimental outcomes on agents’ self-esteem. We conclude that attainable, relevant, relatable, and authentic exemplars are key to a successful exemplarist approach and that safeguarding against unattainable pedagogical exemplars is of paramount importance for the wellbeing of pedagogues, and by extension, the success of educational systems. (shrink)

The field of neuroimaging has reached a watershed. Brain imaging research has been the source of many advances in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science over the last decade, but recent critiques and emerging trends are raising foundational issues of methodology, measurement, and theory. Indeed, concerns over interpretation of brain maps have created serious controversies in social neuroscience, and, more important, point to a larger set of issues that lie at the heart of the entire brain mapping enterprise. In this volume, (...) leading scholars -- neuroimagers and philosophers of mind -- reexamine these central issues and explore current controversies that have arisen in cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, and signal processing. The contributors address both statistical and dynamical analysis and modeling of neuroimaging data and interpretation, discussing localization, modularity, and neuroimagers' tacit assumptions about how these two phenomena are related; controversies over correlation of fMRI data and social attributions ; and the standard inferential design approach in neuroimaging. Finally, the contributors take a more philosophical perspective, considering the nature of measurement in brain imaging, and offer a framework for novel neuroimaging data structures. Contributors: William Bechtel, Bharat Biswal, Matthew Brett, Martin Bunzl, Max Coltheart, Karl J. Friston, Joy J. Geng, Clark Glymour, Kalanit Grill-Spector, Stephen José Hanson, Trevor Harley, Gilbert Harman, James V. Haxby, Rik N. Henson, Nancy Kanwisher, Colin Klein, Richard Loosemore, Sébastien Meriaux, Chris Mole, Jeanette A. Mumford, Russell A. Poldrack, Jean-Baptiste Poline, Richard C. Richardson, Alexis Roche, Adina L. Roskies, Pia Rotshtein, Rebecca Saxe, Philipp Sterzer, Bertrand Thirion, Edward Vul The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

Can artworks be morally good or bad? Many philosophers have thought so. Does this moral goodness or badness bear on how good or bad a work isas art?This is very much a live debate.Autonomistsargue that moral value is not relevant to artistic value;interactionistsargue that it is. In this paper, I argue that the debate between interactionists and autonomists has been conducted unfairly: all parties to the debate have tacitly accepted a set of constraints which prejudices the issue against the interactionist. (...) I identify two demands which are routinely placed on arguments seeking to establish interaction and argue that they are, in fact, mutually conflicting.There are two upshots. First, in light of this, it is unsurprising that arguments for interaction have failed to meet with everybody’s satisfaction. The constraints are such that no argument can meet them. Second, recognizing this helps us uncover a new, promising, but hitherto overlooked strategy for establishing artistic-ethical interaction. (shrink)

Originally published in 1963, The Concept of the Positron forms a detailed analysis of quantum theory. Whilst it is not as well known as Professor Hanson's previous book, Patterns of Discovery, the text has many interesting aspects. In many ways it goes further than Hanson's earlier work in approaching the problems of theory competition and the rationality of science, topics that have since become central to the philosophy of science. It is also notable for a rigorous and forthright (...) defence of the Copenhagen Interpretation. Taken together, the ideas presented in this book constitute a first-rate achievement in the history and philosophy of science. This paperback reissue comes with a new preface from Matthew Lund, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Rowan University. (shrink)

Pleckstrin homology (PH) domains are a family of compact protein modules defined by sequences of roughly 100 amino acids. These domains are common in vertebrate, Drosophila, C. elegans and yeast proteins, suggesting an early origin and fundamental importance to eukaryotic biology. Many enzymes which have important regulatory functions contain PH domains, and mutant forms of several such proteins are implicated in oncogenesis and developmental disorders. Numerous recent studies show that PH domains bind various proteins and inositolphosphates. Here I discuss PH (...) domains in detail and conclude that they form a versatile family of membrane binding and protein localization modules. (shrink)

Is there a public good? A prevalent view in political science is that democracy is unavoidably chaotic, arbitrary, meaningless, and impossible. Such scepticism began with Condorcet in the eighteenth century, and continued most notably with Arrow and Riker in the twentieth century. In this powerful book, Gerry Mackie confronts and subdues these long-standing doubts about democratic governance. Problems of cycling, agenda control, strategic voting, and dimensional manipulation are not sufficiently harmful, frequent, or irremediable, he argues, to be of normative (...) concern. Mackie also examines every serious empirical illustration of cycling and instability, including Riker's famous argument that the US Civil War was due to arbitrary dimensional manipulation. Almost every empirical claim is erroneous, and none is normatively troubling, Mackie says. This spirited defence of democratic institutions should prove both provocative and influential. (shrink)

Creativity is something that everyone talks about but how did this concept originate? With roots in nineteenth century philosophy, our current idea of creativity has emerged largely from psychological theories since the early twentieth century. Michael Hanchett Hanson has woven together the history of the development of the psychological theories of creativity with social constructivist views of power dynamics and pragmatic insights into the use of this powerful concept. Worldmaking: Psychology and the Ideology of Creativity provides an engaging and (...) thought-provoking analysis of interest to anyone who uses the idea of creativity, from psychologists and philosophers to artists, educators and business leaders. (shrink)

Gerry Gaden; Rehabilitating Responsibility, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 27–38, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-975.