People who defend “pragmatic encroachment” about knowledge generally advocate two ideas: you can rationally act according to what you know; knowledge is harder to achieve when more is at stake. In their chapter in this volume, Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne argue that these two ideas may not fit together so well. This chapter extends Anderson and Hawthorne’s argument. By applying some standard decision theory, we can calculate a precise quantity of “how much is at stake” that does fit (...) together with knowledge and action. While this calculated quantity matches intuitions about how much is at stake in certain standard cases, in others it does not.Keywords. (shrink)

Wright, Ken Review of: How much is Enough?: Money and the good life, by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, Other Press, New York, 2012, x + 241 pp., $20.07.

Despite devoting their time to another person’s needs, many carers paradoxically experience guilt during their caregiving tenure concerning whether they are providing enough care. When discussing the “enough” of anything, what is at stake is that thing’s quantification. Given that there are seemingly no quantifiable units of care by which to measure the role, concerns regarding whether enough care is being provided often focus on what constitutes enough time as a carer. In exploring this aspect of the carer’s experience, two (...) key parameters emerge; guilt, and, quantified time. The guilt that carers report regarding whether they devote “enough time” to their caring responsibilities can be examined through Henri Bergson’s philosophical conception of quantification. By integrating contemporary analyses of carers’ guilt from the social sciences, most significantly via the sociology of Rebecca Olson, the relationship between quantified time and guilt becomes apparent. A quantified conception of time frames the assumption that spending more time on caregiving will reduce the amount of guilt felt by a carer. However, whilst care is structured according to quantified, clocked and calendared time, there are not comparable, quantifiable parameters for guilt. This means that suppositions of an inverse relationship between how much time one spends giving care, and how much guilt they will feel in terms of their caregiving, are problematic. These insights become relevant to health care policies via a coherence with calls to make the role of unpaid, caregiving, labour time more visible, and by explaining how understanding quantified time can help policies guide how caregivers negotiate guilt. (shrink)

How much information from experience does a normal adult remember? The “functional information content” of human memory was estimated in several ways. The methods depend on measured rates of input and loss from very long‐ term memory and on analyses of the informational demands of human memory‐based performance. Estimates ranged around 109 bits. It is speculated that the flexible and creative retrieval of facts by humans is a function of a large ratio of “hardware” capacity to functional storage requirements.

Wang (_Philosophy & Technology_ 35, 2022) introduces a Foucauldian power account of algorithmic transparency. This short commentary explores when this power account is appropriate. It is first observed that the power account is a constructionist one, and that such accounts often come with both factual and evaluative claims. In an instance of Hume’s law, the evaluative claims do not follow from the factual claims, leaving open the question of how much constructionist commitment (Hacking, 1999) one should have. The concept (...) of acts in equilibrium (Nozick, 1981) is then used to explain how different individuals reading Wang can end up with different evaluative attitudes towards algorithmic transparency, despite factual agreement. The commentary concludes by situating constructionist commitment inside a larger question of how much to think of our actions, identifying conflicting arguments. (shrink)

We should be suspicious of the idea that experiencing pain could enable animals to trade off different motivations in a common currency. It is not even clear that humans have a common motivational currency reflected in evaluative experience. Instead, pain may capture attention, inhibiting attention to competing motivations and needs, thereby making genuine trade-offs harder. Our criteria for pain in invertebrates should be part of a more subtle theory of the relationship between pain and decision-making.

It is widely assumed that we can meaningfully talk about emotional reactions as being appropriate or inappropriate. Much of the discussion has focused on one kind of appropriateness, that of fittingness. An emotional response is appropriate only if it fits its object. For instance, fear only fits dangerous things. There is another dimension of appropriateness that has been relatively ignored — proportionality. For an emotional reaction to be appropriate not only must the object fit, the reaction should be of (...) the appropriate intensity. It should be proportional. The problem for any attempt to develop norms of appropriateness is that proportionality is a factor of how much the person cares about the focus. But, as I argue, it is not clear how we should normatively assess care. I present problems for a few ways to assess the normativity of care and argue that the difficulties are compounded when it comes to fiction. (shrink)

An excellent critical analysis and scientific assessment of the nature and actual level of risk leading environmental health hazards pose to the public. Issues such as radiation from nuclear testing, radon in the home, and the connection between electromagnetic fields and cancer, environmental factors and asthma, pesticides and breast cancer and leukemia clusters around nuclear plants are discussed and how scientists assess these risks is illuminated.

In this paper we will examine a number of G.E.M. Anscombe’s claims about the human person after death in light of the practices of praying to and for the pre-resurrected dead. In particular, we will look at whether these practices commit one to weighty ontological beliefs. In order to evaluate the costs and benefits of Anscombe’s claims, we will weigh them against competing claims from other theories. In section 1, we will describe a number of views about the human person, (...) noting whether they face difficulties, either in general or in relation to certain practices of prayer. In section 2, we turn to Anscombe’s theory itself, describing both her claims about the disembodied soul and the relation of these claims to the practices of prayer. In section 3, we will discuss the costs and benefits of this approach. In particular, we will note that Anscombe’s view has the benefit of avoiding the theoretical difficulties that plague each of the other views we discuss. We will argue, however, that there is also a great cost to her theory for Catholics: Her view would undermine the practices of praying to and for the dead for many of their participants. (shrink)

High-quality art pedagogical work requires continuous further training for teachers and the observation of art practice and art exhibitions. As art changes, so does society and therefore schools. If the teacher wants to refresh the content and bring it closer to the students, he or she must follow the changes. In this article, we present part of a broader study in which we were interested in teachers' personal interest in monitoring art practice. The research was conducted on a sample of (...) 84 upper elementary school art teachers from all over Slovenia (N = 84). We analyzed teachers' interest in terms of age and length of service. We were interested in whether age and length of service are factors that influence the personal interest of art teachers and the continuation of their professional development. The results show that teachers, regardless of age and professional experience, show a similar interest in artistic practices. (shrink)

In this compelling new book, the philosopher Rudiger Safranski grapples with the pressing problems of the global age: 'Big Brother' states, terrorism, ...

Philosophizing, according to E. Martens, can be seen as an elemental cultural technology, like arithmetic or writing, which both can and should be acquired in childhood. Martens is proposing here an understanding of philosophy that attributes value not only to the content canon, but also to the process itself, as Wittgenstein, for one, also did when he stated in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Philosophy is not a doctrine, but an activity.” For Socrates, this activity consisted in “giving an account of ourselves, (...) our knowledge, our way of life.” In Nietzsche’s view, the precondition for this kind of accounting is the personal capacity for self-distancing, which allows us to grasp our quite individual primal experiences of emotion, perception, sudden illuminations of insight, and so on, as general concepts and logical structures. (shrink)

"In this book, the effects of our own decisions and actions on the human environment are examined from several different perspectives, all informed Buddhist thought.

We consider the problem of measurement using the Lindblad equation, which allows the introduction of time in the interaction between the measured system and the measurement apparatus. We use analytic results, valid for weak system-environment coupling, obtained for a two-level system in contact with a measurer (Markovian interaction) and a thermal bath (non-Markovian interaction), where the measured observable may or may not commute with the system-environment interaction. Analysing the behavior of the coherence, which tends to a value asymptotically close to (...) zero, we obtain an expression for the time of measurement which depends only on the system-measurer coupling, and which does not depend on whether the observable commutes with the system-bath interaction. The behavior of the coherences in the case of strong system-environment coupling, found numerically, indicates that an increase in this coupling decreases the measurement time, thus allowing our expression to be considered the upper limit for the duration of the process. (shrink)

We continue investigations of forcing notions with strong ccc properties introducing new methods of building sweet forcing notions. We also show that quotients of topologically sweet forcing notions over Cohen reals are topologically sweet while the quotients over random reals do not have to be such.

Christopher Gill ABSTRACT: How much theory is enough for a complete account of ancient Stoic ethics and for modern life-guidance? Stoic ethics was presented either purely in its own terms or combined with the idea of human or universal nature. Although the combination of ethical theory with human and universal nature provides the ….

In this paper we argue that one-way quantum computation can be seen as a form of phase transition with the available information about the solution of the computation being the order parameter. We draw a number of striking analogies between standard thermodynamical quantities such as energy, temperature, work, and corresponding computational quantities such as the amount of entanglement, time, potential capacity for computation, respectively. Aside from being intuitively pleasing, this picture allows us to make novel conjectures, such as an estimate (...) of the necessary critical time to finish a computation and a proposal of suitable architectures for universal one-way computation in 1D. (shrink)

Sexual depictions were analyzed in 139 episodes of seven drama serials on British mainstream television over a four-week period in November–December 2006. Scenes that depicted sexual behavior and talk about sexual matters were counted separately. Further distinctions were made on the basis of the levels of intimacy and the graphic nature of portrayals. A total of 506 sexual scenes were found that occurred at the rate of 6.5 per hour across the seven soaps, but this figure was inflated by one (...) late-night serial that averaged 16.0 scenes per hourly episode. Nearly two-thirds of these scenes were restricted to talk about sexual matters, while the others contained overt depictions of sexual behavior. Sexual intercourse was relatively rare and restricted in terms of overt depictions to the late-night serial. Passionate kissing was far more prevalent throughout these programs regardless of the time of day the program was transmitted. When sexual intercourse was featured, this was generally in the context of loss of virginity or of infidelity. (shrink)

This article analyses the cost of motherhood borne by Polish women. The cost of motherhood is defined as a drop in earnings caused by the presence of children. The findings show that motherhood in Poland is associated with a drop in women’s net monthly earnings of around 13–19%. The results also show that the cost of motherhood varies with the number of children and the drop in wages is particularly high for mothers of three or more children. The investigation of (...) mother’s self-selection into employment suggests that the estimated cost would be higher if the choice could be accounted for. (shrink)

Mr. Bork discusses concern over press power and irresponsibility, particularly the attitude of the press that the public's "right to know" gives them the right to publish anything. He expresses concern that the public backlash could lead to excessive restrictions on the press.

Some believe that it is immoral to harm animals, but it is not immoral to kill humanely raised domesticated animals. Implicit in this is the assumption that it is possible to raise and slaughter animals without harming them significantly. In recent years, a number of philosophers – DeGrazia, Harman, Bradley, and others – have claimed that slaughter harms an animal in proportion to the amount of valuable future life that an animal loses in dying, which seems to challenge this assumption. (...) But a question remains: how much are domesticated animals, particularly humanely raised ones, harmed by their slaughter? Here, I take up this question. My answer may be surprising: in ordinary circumstances, slaughter hardly deprives humanely raised animals of any good life, and so is not very harmful to them. This result may strengthen the case for humane slaughter – or it may give us reason to revise our understanding of the harmfulness of death. (shrink)

How much understanding should be required of a person with respect to her actions and their implications for her to be autonomous with respect to her decisions to perform them? I defend a thin approach to the question of how much understanding of her acts a person should possess for her possibly to be autonomous with respect to her decisions to perform them: That a person could be autonomous with respect to her decision to perform a certain action (...) if she understood both the nature of the act and its expected implications under the intensional description under which she intentionally performed it. This paper is divided into three sections. First, I argue that a concern for the moral value of autonomy does not undergird the ethical requirement to secure a person’s informed consent to her medical treatment. Second, I respond to several objections that have been leveled against this argument that focus on its implicit premise that only a thin understanding of one’s actions is required for one to be autonomous with respect to one’s decisions to perform them. I conclude by indicating why this minimalist account of autonomy that I defend is preferable to its more robust competitors. (shrink)

How much by way of economic reward is due to health care providers?Although this problem usually presents itself as a practical matter of policy, it has buried within it a number of philosophical issues, for it can be regarded as a question in the theory of economic justice. The formal principle of justice is that we should render persons what is due to them. But on what consideration in the case of health care providers can we make an assessment (...) of what is due?The answer we give to this question has significant implications for the ethical appraisal of the allocation of resources in the health care system. Some of the most difficult issues of ethical appraisal emerge when we consider the problems of allocating potentially life-saving resources between different groups of patients. Many of the most significant current issues in medical ethics—the role of QALYs, the meaning of equality and the economic evaluation of life—find their point of reference in the ‘tragic choices’ that are created when there are insufficient resources to meet apparently legitimate medical need. Yet, as Robert Evans has pointed out, it is a simple matter of accounting identity that health care expenditures must equal health providers' incomes. So, in asking how we limit or allocate costly health care resources, we are implicitly offering an answer to the question of how much we should pay providers. I hope by seeking an answer explicitly to that question to throw light on the problems that are raised when considering ethically the allocation of health care resources. (shrink)

Consciousness often seems to be utterly mysterious. I suspect that the principle cause of this bafflement is a sort of accounting error that is engendered by a familiar series of challenges and responses. A simplified version of one such path to mysteryland runs as follows:

Phil: What is consciousness?

Sy: Well, some things.