Industry is a major source of funding for scientific research. There is also a growing concern for how it corrupts researchers faced with conflicts of interest. As such, the debate has focused on whether researchers have maintained their integrity. In this article we draw on both the history of medicine and formal modeling to argue that given methodological diversity and a merit-based system, industry funding can bias a community without corrupting any particular individual. We close by considering a policy solution (...) that may seem to promote unbiased inquiry but that actually exacerbates the problem without additional restrictions. (shrink)

In recent years the social nature of scientific inquiry has generated considerable interest. We examine the effect of an epistemically impure agent on a community of honest truth seekers. Extending a formal model of network epistemology pioneered by Zollman, we conclude that an intransigently biased agent prevents the community from ever converging to the truth. We explore two solutions to this problem, including a novel procedure for endogenous network formation in which agents choose whom to trust. We contend that our (...) model nicely captures aspects of current problems in medical research and gesture at some morals for medical epistemology more generally. (shrink)

Private companies provide by far the most funding for scientific research and development. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been paid to the dynamics of industry‐funded research by philosophers of science. This paper addresses this gap by providing an overview of the major strengths and weaknesses of industry research funding, together with the existing recommendations for addressing the weaknesses. It is designed to provide a starting point for future philosophical work that explores the features of industry‐funded research, avenues for addressing concerns, (...) and strategies for making research funded by the private sector as fruitful as possible. (shrink)

Private companies provide by far the most funding for scientific research and development. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been paid to the dynamics of industry‐funded research by philosophers of science. This paper addresses this gap by providing an overview of the major strengths and weaknesses of industry research funding, together with the existing recommendations for addressing the weaknesses. It is designed to provide a starting point for future philosophical work that explores the features of industry‐funded research, avenues for addressing concerns, (...) and strategies for making research funded by the private sector as fruitful as possible. (shrink)

A critical interrogation of elements of Hobbes's political and natural philosophy and its capacity to enrich our understanding of the natural of democratic life.

A popular defense of physicalist theories of consciousness against anti-physicalist arguments invokes the existence of ‘phenomenal concepts’. These are concepts that designate conscious experiences from a first person perspective, and hence differ from physicalistic concepts; but not in a way that precludes co-referentiality with them. On one version of this strategy phenomenal concepts are seen as (1) type demonstratives that have (2) no mode of presentation. However, 2 is possible without 1-call this the ‘bare recognitional concept’ view-and I will argue (...) that this avoids certain recent criticisms while retaining the virtue of finessing the ‘mode of presentation’ problem for phenomenal concepts. But construing phenomenal concepts this way seems to not do justice to the phenomenology of conscious experience. In this paper I examine whether or not this impression can be borne out by a good argument. As it turns out, it is harder to do so than one might think. It can be done, but it involves somewhat more convoluted reasoning than one might have supposed necessary. Having shown that, I will end with a few brief remarks on what my argument means for attempts to preserve a physicalist account of consciousness. (shrink)

Arguments that medical decision making should rely on a variety of evidence often begin from the claim that meta-analysis has been shown to be problematic. In this paper, I first examine Stegenga’s argument that meta-analysis requires multiple decisions and thus fails to provide an objective ground for medical decision making. Next, I examine three arguments from social epistemologists that contend that meta-analyses are systematically biased in ways not appreciated by standard epistemology. In most cases I show that critiques of meta-analysis (...) fail to account for the full range of meta-analytic procedures. In the remainder of cases, I argue that the critiques identify problems that do not uniquely cut against meta-analysis. I close by suggesting one reason why it may be pragmatically rational to violate the principle of total evidence and by outlining the criteria for a successful argument against meta-analysis. A set of criteria I contend remain unmet. (shrink)

As some see it, an impasse has been reached on the mind- body problem between mainstream physicalism and mainstream dualism. So lately another view has been gaining popularity, a view that might be called the 'Russellian theory of mind' (RTM) since it is inspired by some ideas once put forth by Bertrand Russell. Most versions of RTM are panpsychist, but there is at least one version that rejects panpsychism and styles itself as physicalism, and neutral monism is also a possibility. (...) In this paper I will attempt to sort out these different versions with a view to determining which, if any, have a chance of breaking the perceived impasse. The unsurprising conclusion will be that there are a lot of challenges ahead for the RTM theorist. The surprising conclusion will be that it's not clear that pan- psychist RTM holds an advantage over the other versions in this regard. (shrink)

The standard philosophical definition of placebos offered by Grünbaum is incompatible with Cartwright’s conception of randomized clinical trials. I offer a modified account of placebos that respects this role and clarifies why many current medical trials fail to warrant the conclusions they are typically seen as yielding. I then consider recent changes to guidelines for reporting medical trials and show that pessimism over parsing out the cause of “unblinding” is premature. Specifically, using a trial of antidepressants, I show how more (...) sophisticated statistical analyses can parse out the source of such effects and serve as an alternative to placebo control. (shrink)

There is now a general consensus amongst philosophers in the values in science literature that values necessarily play a role in core areas of scientific inquiry. We argue that attention should now be turned from debating the value-free ideal to delineating legitimate from illegitimate influences of values in science, a project we dub “The New Demarcation Problem.” First, we review past attempts to demarcate the uses of values and propose a categorization of the strategies by where they seek to draw (...) legitimacy from. Next, we propose a set of desiderata for what we take to be a satisfactory solution and present a case study where conflicting sets of values clearly impinge on science, but where the legitimacy of their influence is ambiguous. We use these desiderata and the case study to illustrate what we take to be the strengths and weaknesses of current strategies. To be clear, our goal is not to answer the question we pose, but to articulate a framework within which a solution can be judged. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has demonstrated the extent to which the latter's republicanism is of a populist type, and a potentially important resource for contemporary democratic theory. Although work has been produced on the constitutional form of the Machiavellian republic, less effort has been made to articulate the theoretical assumptions upon which the advocacy of such a republic is ethically grounded. Here, I attempt to locate the democratic ethical imperative in the affirmation of a fundamental (...) human difference. Influenced by the Epicurean tradition, Machiavelli's natural philosophy considers material entities as absolute singularities lacking internal teleological direction, their movement the productive result of contingent encounters. One cannot assume a natural or pre-social identity of desire between persons. Democracy is the ethically preferred regime because it is the one that is capable of facilitating the expression of this human uniqueness. (shrink)

It has been argued that naturalizing the mind will result in the elimination of the ontology of folk psychology (e.g. beliefs and desires). This paper draws from a wide range of empirical literature, including from developmental and cross-cultural psychology, in building an argument for a position dubbed restrictive materialism . The position holds that while the ontology of folk psychology is overextended, there is a restricted domain in which the application of the folk ontology remains secure. From the evidence of (...) developmental uniformity and cross-cultural ubiquity of beliefs and desires, it is argued that the ontology (but not the principles) of folk psychology may be incorrigible. Thus, even if radically false as a description of first-order brain processes, beliefs and desires might be an unavoidable second-order brain process. Given that the domain of psychology is how humans think, if the above argument is correct, then beliefs and desires will continue to earn their rightful place in the ontology of any future psychology, in just the same way as any other scientific entity. (shrink)

This book critically reevaluates the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, demonstrating the extent to which he can be seen to formulate a unique ethical foundation for democratic practice that is grounded in the creative orientation of all individuals.

Stephen John has recently suggested that the ethics of communication yields important insights as to how values should be incorporated into science. In particular, he examines cases of “wishful speaking” in which a scientific actor endorses unreliable conclusions in order to obtain the consequences of the listener treating the results as credible. He concludes that what is wrong in these cases is that the speaker surreptitiously relies on values not accepted by the hearer, violating what he terms “the value-apt ideal”. (...) I expand on this view by integrating into it Miranda Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice. I find testimonial injustice can arise in a manner unanticipated by Fricker, specifically that a credibility excess given to a speaker typically reduces the ability of others in the epistemic community to transmit knowledge, a phenomenon I term “collateral epistemic injustice”. I argue that this possibility entails that receivers have an ethical obligation to assign credibility judiciously. A further consequence of this view is that the value-apt ideal is insufficient. Because audience members have an obligation to assign credibility judiciously, a speaker cannot merely rely on shared values, they must also be open about the extent to which their conclusions depend on those values. Thus, both wishful speaking and obscuring the value-dependent nature of a conclusion makes one an unreliable source of information. Accordingly, other community members have an ethical obligation to ignore a speaker that frequently engages in either. (shrink)

This article suggests that the philosophical contributions of the French democratic theorist Miguel Abensour offer a unique model for the practice of the history of political thought. Under the influence of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, Abensour can be seen as applying a method of thinking in constellations to the study of historical texts, the critical rearrangement of conceptual elements drawn from the latter generating new dialectical images that reveal something previously obscured about the object of investigation. (...) The history of political thought on this model is less about the recuperation of a definite textual intelligibility than the revelation of social and political alterity. (shrink)

Modern observations based on general relativity indicate that the spatial geometry of the expanding, large-scale Universe is very nearly Euclidean. This basic empirical fact is at the core of the so-called “flatness problem”, which is widely perceived to be a major outstanding problem of modern cosmology and as such forms one of the prime motivations behind inflationary models. An inspection of the literature and some further critical reflection however quickly reveals that the typical formulation of this putative problem is fraught (...) with questionable arguments and misconceptions and that it is moreover imperative to distinguish between different varieties of problem. It is shown that the observational fact that the large-scale Universe is so nearly flat is ultimately no more puzzling than similar “anthropic coincidences”, such as the specific values of the gravitational and electromagnetic coupling constants. In particular, there is no fine-tuning problem in connection to flatness of the kind usually argued for. The arguments regarding flatness and particle horizons typically found in cosmological discourses in fact address a mere single issue underlying the standard FLRW cosmologies, namely the extreme improbability of these models with respect to any “reasonable measure” on the “space of all spacetimes”. This issue may be expressed in different ways and a phase space formulation, due to Penrose, is presented here. A horizon problem only arises when additional assumptions—which are usually kept implicit and at any rate seem rather speculative—are made. (shrink)

The work of Herbert Marcuse, unlike that of certain of his colleagues at the Institut für Sozialforschung, is most often maligned as being excessively positive and identitarian. His work on Freud, for example, is criticized for being grounded in a crude biological determinism which points towards an ultimate reconciliation of both psychic and social conflict. This essay will attempt to counter such readings by critically juxtaposing Marcuse’s concept of non-repressive sublimation with Cornelius Castoriadis’s understanding of psychic socialization. It will be (...) suggested that the affinities between Marcuse and Castoriadis’s appropriations of Freudian metapsychology reveals the degree to which the former can be read as a radical democratic thinker affirming the values of autonomy and creativity. This reading demonstrates that Marcuse has much to contribute to contemporary debates on the role of the aesthetic and the sensuous in democratic theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Philosophy of Belonging: Persons, Politics, Cosmos by James GreenawayThomas W. HolmanGREENAWAY, James. A Philosophy of Belonging: Persons, Politics, Cosmos. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023. xii + 326 pp. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $50.00“Belonging” is a common theme in contemporary political discourse, but it has not yet garnered much sustained attention in terms of its philosophical significance. James Greenaway’s new book aims to address this (...) issue by offering an original and penetrating exploration into the philosophical meaning of this difficult and laden term. At the heart of his approach lies the concept of the metaxy. As explained in Plato’s Symposium and expanded by Eric Voegelin, it is a state of being-in-tension between two static states or “poles,” which can represent wisdom and ignorance, need and plenty, transcendence and immanence, eternity and time, and so forth. This becomes the foundation for Greenaway’s “hermeneutic of belonging,” which consists of two forces: “existence-from” and “existence-toward.” Existence-toward is a sort of intentionality, a consciousness of “someone or something with whom I am experiencing some kind of an affinity.” It is the “where” or “with whom” I desire to be. Existence-from is an awareness [End Page 717] of the other that a person carries within him- or herself: persons, communities, places, times that are “so significant that I cannot be who I am without them.” Greenaway argues that belonging in the abstract hinges on the metaxic tension between these two poles, variously conceived depending on the context.The second section of the book examines the different contexts in which existence-from and existence-toward play out within each person: between oneself, other persons, and the cosmos. These constitute the various aspects of what Greenaway calls “presence.” Belonging on this level means each person participates “in the grand, continual emergence of reality in all of its variety.” Presence to myself, to others, and to the cosmos as a whole reflects the metaxic tension of the hermeneutic of belonging.In the final section, Greenaway turns to explaining how belonging works in community. He begins by differentiating between the communion, or “bond and order” of a community, and communitas, the “shoulder-to-shoulder stance” that permeates political existence. Communion is a manifestation of the aforementioned hermeneutic of belonging within and among persons and the cosmos. It is the more fundamental principle of community that reflects the primordial intersubjectivity of Buber’s I–Thou: In some sense, each person is or must be involved in or available (in the sense of Gabriel Marcel’s disponibilité) to the other. Without some sort of grounding in communion, communitas becomes impossible. By contrast, communitas is the jostling, back-and-forth movement associated with the practical discernment and attainment of common political goods that Greenaway conceives, with St. Augustine, as objects of common love. These are sought out, argued about, and even fought over in everyday political life, which is marked by a shared commitment to achieving the goals associated with common political goods. The communitas is centered in the tension of belonging between the more fundamental recognition of each person as a bearer of meaning in the cosmos and the everyday business of collectively discerning and implementing the common good.But communion carries a further meaning. In addition to the more fundamental respect for myself and all others in the community as bearers of presence, it is also an awareness of all possible transcendent perfections of the community as a whole. Greenaway calls this second sense “sacramentality.” Yet this mysterious perfection is not necessarily for the here-and-now. It is, rather, another example of the hermeneutic of belonging where transcendent principles intersect with temporal reality. Thus, every community is sealed with seeming contradictions that, far from being irresolvable paradoxes, illustrate its belonging-in-tension alongside mystery. An example of one such paradox is the ideal of universal humanity: we are aware of the claims placed on us by our shared universal humanity, but we are also necessarily situated within a particular place or country or community. The idea of a universal brotherhood of man reflects one way in which transcendent perfection [End Page... (shrink)

Our life in this broken world requires tools to own and express our grief in ways that are connected to our faith in God. We find that the biblical genre of lament is appropriate to the task. However, we do not come to lament without baggage, and we sometimes require additional help in the form of symbolic capital borrowed from stories and songs. In this case, The Chronicles of Narnia provide such capital. As we reflect on these stories, we can (...) see lament in a new way that helps us bring our pain to God. As we engage in the discipline of lament, we are spiritually formed into the image of Jesus. (shrink)

This paper will provide an immanent critique of the political theory of Herbert Marcuse. I argue that Marcuse’s politics are often inadequate when considered from the standpoint of his theory of socialism, the latter being understood as the realization of the negative human capacity for creation in all those fields within which the human being is active. Although Marcuse’s politics often reveals itself as instrumental and managerialist in orientation, I will argue that there nevertheless remains a certain countertendency in his (...) philosophy, one which can be seen as affirming a negative and nonidentitarian politics of overcoming that looks always toward creation. (shrink)

“Female sexual dysfunction” is the type of contested disease that has sparked concern about the role of the pharmaceutical industry in medical science. Many policies have been proposed to manage industry influence without carefully evaluating whether the proposed policies would be successful. We consider a proposal for incorporating citizen stakeholders into scientific research and show, via a detailed case study of the pharmaceutical regulation of flibanserin, that such programs can be co-opted. In closing, we use Holman’s asymmetric arms race (...) framework as a tool for evaluating policies in industry-funded science. (shrink)

There are some philosophical questions that can be answered without attention to the social context in which evidence is produced and distributed.ing away from social context is an excellent way to ignore messy details and lay bare the underlying structure of the limits of inference. Idealization is entirely appropriate when one is essentially asking: In the best of all possible worlds, what am I entitled to infer? Yet, philosophers’ concerns often go beyond this domain. As an example I examine the (...) debate on mechanistic evidence and then reevaluate a canonical case study in this debate. I show that for the assessment of actual evidence, produced in a world that is far from ideal, omission of the social aspects of medical epistemology leads philosophers to draw the wrong lessons from cases they take as paradigmatic cases for their views. I close by arguing that social epistemology provides an avenue to incorporate these complications and provides the necessary framework to understand medical evidence. (shrink)

In a recent article, Grover Maxwell presents a case for a kind of mind-brain identity theory which he claims precludes materialism. His case is based on some views about meaning which I find plausible. However, I will argue that, by adopting certain assumptions about the nature of sensory experience, and extending some of Maxwell's views about meaning in a plausible way, the issue of a materialistic identity theory is reopened. Ultimately, I will agree that such a theory is not true, (...) but more is needed to show this than Maxwell gives us. But the question of materialism is not thereby closed, because it has become axiomatic these days that materialism does not require an identity theory. So I will go on to consider if all forms of materialism have been ruled out by Maxwell's theory, as extended by me. I will end with a tentative affirmative answer but also with a proposal which, if it can be worked out, would reverse the decision. (shrink)

In early 2020, as the first of many COVID lockdowns began across Australia, a collective of feminist and queer performance scholars and artists embarked on the research project Staging Australian Women’s Lives: Theatre, Feminism and Socially Engaged Art. Our aim was to document contributions of womxn theatre makers, while conducting a feminist analysis of strategies used to deal with gender inequality and oppression, on stage and off. While pivoting to the digital and the virtual, we recognised a need to support (...) womxn theatre makers whose lives and livelihoods are thrown into further precarity by the pandemic. This paper speaks to our commitment to bringing together critical theory, arts practices and everyday life in ethical forms and encounters that make visible, recognise and express care for one another and for the work. (shrink)

Agent-based models have played a prominent role in recent debates about the merits of democracy. In particular, the formal model of Lu Hong and Scott Page and the associated “diversity trumps ability” result has typically been seen to support the epistemic virtues of democracy over epistocracy (i.e., governance by experts). In this paper we first identify the modeling choices embodied in the original formal model and then critique the application of the Hong-Page results to philosophical debates on the relative merits (...) of democracy. In particular we argue that the “best-performing agents” in Hong-Page model should not be interpreted as experts. We next explore a closely related model in which best-performing agents are more plausibly seen as experts and show that the diversity trumps ability result fails to hold. However, with changes in other parameters (such as the deliberation dynamic) the diversity trumps ability result is restored. The sensitivity of this result to parameter choices illustrates the complexity of the link between formal modeling and more general philosophical claims; we use this debate as a platform for a more general discussion of when and how agent-based models can contribute to philosophical discussions. (shrink)

Perhaps the most often criticized element of Hannah Arendt's political theory is her insistence on the necessity of constructing and maintaining rigid boundaries between various activities of the human condition. Less often, however, is the attempt undertaken to determine the philosophical motivation stimulating this project of distinction. This article will attempt to demonstrate the extent to which Arendt's imperative is rooted in a certain misreading of the Marxian dialectic. The first part of the article will outline the contours of Arendt's (...) erroneous interpretation of Marx's understanding of labour, demonstrating the degree to which the latter breaks down the tripartite structure of the vita activa. The second part of the article will read Arendt's affirmation of distinction as being a response to what Arendt will take to be the problems of the dialectic, specifically the dialectic's allegedly necessary positing of conceptual contingency and logical necessity. Finally, the third part of the article will demonstrate, through an examination of two key passages in the work of Marx, the extent to which Marx himself was just as concerned with overcoming the type of homogeneous and abstract universalism rejected by Arendt. The ground will thus be provided for the overcoming of the necessity of Arendtian distinction, and perhaps also for a more fruitful engagement between the Marxian and Arendtian theoretical problematics. (shrink)

This paper states two sets of axioms sufficient for extensive measurement. The first set, like previously published axioms, requires that each of the objects measured must be classifiable as either greater than, or less than, or indifferent to each other object. The second set, however, requires only that any two objects be classifiable as either indifferent or different, and does not need any information about which object is greater. Each set of axioms produces an extensive scale with the usual properties (...) of additivity and uniqueness except for unit. Moreover, the axioms imply Weber's Law: whether two objects are indifferent depends only upon the ratio of their scale values. (shrink)

(1981). Intension, identity, and the Colourless Physical World: A revision and further discussion. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 59, No. 2, pp. 203-205.

This article seeks to address a tension in contemporary scholarship regarding Machiavelli’s view of human nature. While it is common for readers to identify Machiavelli’s rejection of any foundational law that determines the structure of the world, it is just as common for them to abstract human nature from this world and thereby to posit a fixed human essence. Machiavelli is thus seen as an anti-essentialist when it comes to external nature and as an essentialist when it comes to internal (...) human nature. I will attempt to demonstrate, however, that for Machiavelli these two interpretations are integrated into an overall ontology of being that rejects all forms of essentialist thinking, including all positive models of human nature. Machiavelli’s rejection of a fixed or positive human essence will be demonstrated by analyzing his account of the openness of human being to change and alteration by socialization, and his account of the multiplicity of forms of human doing and being. I argue that Machia... (shrink)