Evidence-based medicine (EBM), the dominant approach to assessing the effectiveness of clinical and public health interventions, focuses on the results of association studies. EBM+ is a development of EBM that systematically considers mechanistic studies alongside association studies. In this paper we provide several examples of the importance of mechanistic evidence to coronavirus research. (i) Assessment of combination therapy for MERS highlights the need for systematic assessment of mechanistic evidence. (ii) That hypertension is a risk factor for severe disease in the (...) case of SARS-CoV-2 suggests that altering hypertension treatment might alleviate disease, but the mechanisms are complex, and it is essential to consider and evaluate multiple mechanistic hypotheses. (iii) To be confident that public health interventions will be effective requires a detailed assessment of social and psychological components of the mechanisms of their action, in addition to mechanisms of disease. (iv) In particular, if vaccination programmes are to be effective, they must be carefully tailored to the social context; again, mechanistic evidence is crucial. We conclude that coronavirus research is best situated within the EBM+ evaluation framework. (shrink)

The first of John Henry Newman’s Oxford University Sermons is often neglected as an integral part of this collection. Yet Newman considered these individual sermons as a unit. There is an important theme that runs unchanged from the first to the last of these Sermons: the primacy of faith over human reason. The main burden of his first Sermon is the need for its hearers to return to their “early, religious training.” Although the worth of human reason is much amplified (...) in his last Sermon, even there faith remains paramount. Newman depicted faith in his fifteenth Sermon as the chief form of human knowledge, as the bedrock and the guarantor of every other form of human knowledge: the one thing necessary is the childlike “obedience of Faith.”. (shrink)

A moral-pragmatic argument for a proposition is an argument intended to establish that believing the proposition would be morally beneficial. Since such arguments do not adduce epistemic reasons, i.e., reasons that support the truth of a proposition, they can seem at best to be irrelevant epistemically. At worst, believing on the basis of such reasoning can seem to involve wishful thinking and intellectual dishonesty of a sort that that precludes such beliefs from being epistemically unjustified. Inspired by an argument from (...) William James’ classic, “The Will to Believe”, I argue that there is a way of making sense of moral-pragmatic arguments such that they are epistemically relevant. I develop and argue for a theory of epistemic justification that I dub the “moral encroachment theory” (emphasizing its connection to recent pragmatic encroachment views). According to the theory, moral considerations can raise or lower epistemic standards from where they would be in morally neutral settings. The moral encroachment theory, I contend, denotes a normative property that is at once distinctively epistemic and valuable. The theory also allows a legitimate role for moral-pragmatic reasoning under certain conditions. The upshot is that moral-pragmatic reasoning can be epistemically as well as morally appropriate. (shrink)

According to some philosophers of technology, technology embodies moral values in virtue of its functional properties and the intentions of its designers. But this paper shows that such an account makes the values supposedly embedded in technology epistemically opaque and that it does not allow for values to change. Therefore, to overcome these shortcomings, the paper introduces the novel Affordance Account of Value Embedding as a superior alternative. Accordingly, artefacts bear affordances, that is, artefacts make certain actions likelier given the (...) circumstances. Based on an interdisciplinary perspective that invokes recent moral anthropology, I conceptualize affordances as response-dependent properties. That is, they depend on intrinsic as well as extrinsic properties of the artefact. We have reason to value these properties. Therefore, artefacts embody values and are not value-neutral, which has practical implications for the design of new technologies. (shrink)

This essay is a discussion of the philosophical and foundational issues that arise in non-relativistic quantum theory. After introducing the formalism of the theory, I consider: characterizations of the quantum formalism, empirical content, uncertainty, the measurement problem, and non-locality. In each case, the main point is to give the reader some introductory understanding of some of the major issues and recent ideas.

Agent-centered epistemic norms direct thinkers to attach different significance to their own epistemically relevant states than they attach to the similar states of others. Thus, if S and T both know, for certain, that S has the intuition that P, this might justify S in believing that P, yet fail to justify T in believing that P. I defend agent-centeredness and explain how an agent-centered theory can accommodate intuitions that seem to favor agent-neutrality.

Hammersley asserts that “radical” strands of ethnomethodology and constructionism in science and technology studies (STS) take an anti-representationalist approach which denies that “science produces representations referring to objects or processes that exist independently of it.” In this ‘Comment,’ I argue that ethnomethodology is distinct from both constructionist and post-constructionist research programs in STS, and that Hammersley presents a binary choice between being for or against the general proposition that scientific representations correspond to independent realities. He suggests that STS studies should (...) “suspend” the philosophical question of whether scientific representations correspond to their worldly referents. Perhaps this is good advice for proponents of STS who promote a “turn to ontology” or propose to do “empirical philosophy,” but ethnomethodologists take a deflationary approach to the topics of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

In recent years, scientists have increasingly taken to investigate the predictive nature of cognition. We argue that prediction relies on abstraction, and thus theories of predictive cognition need an explicit theory of abstract representation. We propose such a theory of the abstract representational capacities that allow humans to transcend the “here-and-now.” Consistent with the predictive cognition literature, we suggest that the representational substrates of the mind are built as ahierarchy, ranging from the concrete to the abstract; however, we argue that (...) there are qualitative differences between elements along this hierarchy, generating meaningful, often unacknowledged,diversity.Echoing views from philosophy, we suggest that the representational hierarchy can be parsed into:modality-specificrepresentations, instantiated on perceptual similarity;multimodalrepresentations, instantiated primarily on the discovery of spatiotemporal contiguity; andcategoricalrepresentations, instantiated primarily on social interaction. These elements serve as the building blocks ofcomplex structures discussed in cognitive psychology (e.g., episodes, scripts) and are the inputs for mental representations that behave like functions, typically discussed in linguistics (i.e.,predicators). We support our argument for representational diversity by explaining how the elements in our ontology are all required to account for humans’ predictive cognition (e.g., in subserving logic-based prediction; in optimizing the trade-off between accurate and detailed predictions) and by examining how the neuroscientific evidence coheres with our account. In doing so, we provide a testable model of the neural bases of conceptual cognition and highlight several important implications to research on self-projection, reinforcement learning, and predictive-processing models of psychopathology. (shrink)

Humeans are often accused of positing laws which fail to explain or are involved in explanatory circularity. Here, I will argue that these arguments are confused, but not because of anything to do with Humeanism: rather, they rest on false assumptions about causal explanation. I’ll show how these arguments can be neatly sidestepped if one takes on two plausible commitments which are motivated independently of Humeanism: first, that laws don’t directly feature in scientific explanation and second, the view that explanation (...) is contrastive. After outlining and motivating these views, I show how they bear on explanation-based arguments against Humeanism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXIV, Number 1, April 1998, pp. 71-94 Hume on the Very Idea of a Relation MICHAEL COSTA I think it is a productive strategy in interpreting Hume's philosophy to examine very carefully exactly what constitutes for Hume the cognitive state of having a certain idea or belief. More often than not, interpretive pressures arise almost immediately when one comes to address the details in such (...) cases. Attempting to relieve these interpretive pressures can have substantial payoffs in understanding and evaluating Hume's philosophy, even when the attempts are not entirely successful.1 In this paper, I am going to raise the question, "What is the very idea of a relation for Hume?" which I will understand to mean, "What exactly constitutes the cognitive state of having an idea of a relation for Hume?" First I will argue for a particular account of what an idea of a relation must consist in for Hume. The account that I describe is essentially the same as one that has already been introduced by some recent work of Don Garrett,2 but I will offer here a new way of arriving at it. Also, I will examine in detail the capacity of the account to deal with each of Hume's categories of relation. Hume has extensive discussions of some of these (the "matters of fact" relations of space, time, identity, and causation), but almost nothing to say about some of the others (the "relations of ideas" of resemblance, contrariety, degree of quality, and quantity and number). All of them raise interpretive problems, and attempting to resolve them will suggest new ways of understanding a number of important issues in Hume's philosophy including: the nature of the cognitive process of comparing ideas and Michael Costa is at the Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208 USA. email: [email protected] 72 Michael Costa deriving a general idea from the comparison, the distinction between having a belief and making an assertion or explicit judgment on the basis of one's beliefs, the nature of a fiction or fictitious idea, how Hume thinks that language and symbols enhance cognitive processing, and how we should understand Hume's empiricist criterion of meaning. The obvious place to start in addressing the question of what ideas of relation consist in for Hume is the section "Of relations" that appears early in the Treatise? Just prior to this section Hume indicates that he thinks of relations as complex ideas. He says, "complex ideas may be divided into Relations, Modes, and Substances" (T 13). He goes on in the section to draw a distinction between natural and philosophical relations as a distinction between those relations that are connected to associations in thought (the natural relations) and all relations whatsoever that can be conceived (the philosophical relations) (T 13-14). But that distinction does not in itself shed any light on the nature of our ideas of the latter as complex ideas. Nor, initially, do Hume's brief remarks on each of the seven categories of relations (T 14-15), although we will find some interesting issues to mine here after getting a better understanding of Hume's account of relations as complex ideas. We can get some help by recalling the way in which Hume draws the distinction between simple and complex ideas. This division is into Simple and Complex. Simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation. The complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts. Tho' a particular colour, taste, and smell are qualities all united together in this apple, 'tis easy to perceive they are not the same, but are at least distinguishable from each other. (T 2) A complex idea is one that can be distinguished into parts. Hume's illustration of the apple can easily mislead. He seems to be talking about an apple (physical object) as a collection of qualities. But for this to serve as an illustration of the distinction under discussion we must read him as talking about an impression or idea of an apple being a collection of impressions... (shrink)

In a rich and thought-provoking paper, Lambros Malafouris argues that taking material culture seriously means to be ‘systematically concerned with figuring out the causal efficacy of materiality in the enactment and constitution of a cognitive system or operation’ (Malafouris 2004, 55). As I understand this view, there are really two intertwined claims to be established. The first is that the things beyond the skin that make up material culture (in other words, the physical objects and artefacts in which cultural networks (...) and systems of human social relations are realized) may be essential to the enactment of, and be partly constitutive of, certain cognitive systems or operations. The consequence of establishing this claim is supposed to be that we have a mandate to recast the boundaries of the mind so as to include, as proper parts of the mind, things located beyond the skin. Thus, in talking about the contribution of the world to cognition, Malafouris (2004, 58) concludes that ‘what we have traditionally construed as an active or passive but always clearly separated external stimulus for setting a cognitive mechanism into motion, may be after all a continuous part of the machinery itself; at least ex hypothesi’. This is the position that, in philosophical circles, is known increasingly as the extended mind hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers 1998; Menary forthcoming). Henceforth I shall refer to this hypothesis as EM. A stock example will help bring the idea into view. Rumelhart et al. (1986) note that most of us solve difficult multiplication problems by using ‘pen and paper’ as an external resource. This environmental prop enables us to transform a difficult cognitive problem into a set of simpler ones, and to temporarily store the results of certain intermediate calculations. For the fan of EM, the distributed combination of this external resource and certain inner psychological processes constitutes a cognitive system in its own right. (shrink)

An extension of intuitionism to empirical discourse, a project most seriously taken up by Dummett and Tennant, requires an empirical negation whose strength lies somewhere between classical negation (‘It is unwarranted that. . . ’) and intuitionistic negation (‘It is refutable that. . . ’). I put forward one plausible candidate that compares favorably to some others that have been propounded in the literature. A tableau calculus is presented and shown to be strongly complete.

The role of mechanistic evidence tends to be under-appreciated in current evidencebased medicine (EBM), which focusses on clinical studies, tending to restrict attention to randomized controlled studies (RCTs) when they are available. The EBM+ programme seeks to redress this imbalance, by suggesting methods for evaluating mechanistic studies alongside clinical studies. Drug approval is a problematic case for the view that mechanistic evidence should be taken into account, because RCTs are almost always available. Nevertheless, we argue that mechanistic evidence is central (...) to all the key tasks in the drug approval process: in drug discovery and development; assessing pharmaceutical quality; devising dosage regimens; assessing efficacy, harms, external validity, and cost-effectiveness; evaluating adherence; and extending product licences. We recommend that, when preparing for meetings in which any aspect of drug approval is to be discussed, mechanistic evidence should be systematically analysed and presented to the committee members alongside analyses of clinical studies. (shrink)

This chapter offers an account of Crusius’ conception of freedom. In the first part of the chapter I sketch Crusius’ understanding of ‘Thelematology’ or ‘science of the will’ and his conception of the will itself. In the second part of the paper I provide an account of Crusius’ conception of freedom of the will and I focus on two topics: his understanding of freedom as self-determination and his conception of free choice. Contrary to how some of the secondary literature portrays (...) his view, I argue that freedom of the will, for Crusius, is not best described as the freedom to choose otherwise or liberty of indifference. On the contrary, Crusius argues that free choice is rarely indifferent to its choices and is most often strongly inclined towards certain ends that free choice must overcome and choose against. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus upon two aspects of Adolf Grünbaum's discussion of space and time. First, I consider Grünbaum's rejection of intrinsic metrics in favor of extrinsic metrics, both in the case of space, and also in the case of time. Here I argue for the following three claims: (1) The idea of an extrinsic metric is open to very strong objections, both in the case of space, and in the case of time; (2) By contrast, there is no (...) serious objection to the idea of an intrinsic metric, either in the case of space, or in the case of time; (3) There are good reasons for postulating an intrinsic metric, both in the case of space, and in the case of time. Secondly, I also consider Grünbaum's account of the nature of time, and here I argue for the following theses: (1) The argument that Grünbaum offers against accounts of the nature of time that postulate mind-independent tensed facts does not show that such accounts are unsound; (2) Grünbaum's claim that all tensed facts are mind-dependent is open to a serious objection; (3) Grünbaum's proposal that conceptualized awareness is an essential constituent of mind-dependent tensed facts is also very problematic. (shrink)

Until recently, little attention has been paid in the school classroom to creationism and almost none to intelligent design. However, creationism and possibly intelligent design appear to be on the increase and there are indications that there are more countries in which schools are becoming battle-grounds over them. I begin by examining whether creationism and intelligent design are controversial issues, drawing on Robert Dearden's epistemic criterion of the controversial and more recent responses to and defences of this. I then examine (...) whether the notion of ‘worldviews’ in the context of creationism is a useful one by considering the film March of the Penguins. I conclude that the ‘worldviews’ perspective on creationism is useful for two reasons: first it indicates the difficulty of using the criterion of reason to decide whether an issue is controversial or not; secondly, it suggests that standard ways of addressing the diversity of student views in a science classroom may be inadequate. I close by examining the implications of this view for teaching in science lessons and elsewhere, for example in religious education lessons and citizenship lessons and at primary level where subject divisions cannot be made in so clear-cut a manner. (shrink)

Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World is an account of modeling in contemporary science. Modeling is a form of surrogate reasoning where target systems in the natural world are studied using models, which are similar to these targets. My book develops an account of the nature of models, the practice of modeling, and the similarity relation that holds between models and their targets. I also analyze the conceptual tools that allow theorists to identify the trustworthy aspects of (...) models. Taken as a whole, I try to account for the ways that modeling is actually practiced by theorists, while abstracting sufficiently to understand the similarities and differences among examples of concrete, mathematical, and computational modeling.I am grateful to Wendy Parker, Jay Odenbaugh, and Bill Wimsatt for their careful and interesting reading of my book, as well as their constructive criticisms. Although I naturally disagree with some of their critiques, I have learned much .. (shrink)

The problem of perception is the problem of explaining how perceptual knowledge is possible. The skeptic has a simple solution: it is not possible. I analyze the weaknesses of one type of skeptical reasoning by making explicit a dynamic epistemic principle from dynamic epistemic logic that is implicitly used in debating the problem, with the aim of offering a novel diagnosis to this skeptical argument. I argue that prominent modest foundationalist responses to perceptual skepticism can be understood as rejecting the (...) dynamic assumption made by the skeptic, that there are independent reasons to doubt the truth of such a principle in the context of skeptical reasoning, and that making the dynamic principle explicit allows for a better understanding of at least one objection to modest foundationalism. (shrink)

Toleration is typically defined as follows: an agent (A), for some reason, objects to certain actions or practices of someone else (B), but has outweighing other reasons to accept these actions or practices nonetheless and, thus, refrains from interfering with or preventing B from acting accordingly, although A has the power to interfere. So understood, (mutual) toleration is taken to allow for peaceful coexistence and ideally even cooperation amongst people who disagree with each other on crucial questions on how to (...) live and what to value, which is why it has traditionally been regarded as an important part of political liberalism. An explicitly value-neutral liberal state then avoids taking sides when it comes to different and competing ways of life. However, following this idea of liberal neutrality, it has been questioned whether a value-neutral liberal state still needs toleration or is even compatible with it, for apparently neutrality leaves no more room for the objection component of toleration to take hold. In this paper, I take up this question and argue that there is, indeed, conceptual and practical room left for a value-neutral liberal state to be tolerant. Drawing on the interplay between four kinds of reasons (pragmatic, ethical, moral, and political), pragmatic and political reasons may still provide the needed evaluative and normative ground upon which the combination of objection and outweighing acceptance can be made sense of. However, the possible scope of toleration for a value-neutral liberal state is considerably limited. (shrink)

Roman Frigg and Adam Toon, both, defend a fictionalist view of scientific modeling. One fundamental thesis of their view is that scientists are participating in games of make-believe when they study models in order to learn about the models themselves and about target systems represented by the models. In this paper, the epistemology of these two fictionalist views is critically discussed. I will argue that both views can give an explanation of how scientists learn about models they are studying. However, (...) how the use of models can foster an understanding of target systems is not sufficiently accounted for by Frigg and Toon. (shrink)

Is there a prima facie obligation to produce additional individuals whose lives would be worth living? In his paper ‘Is it Good to Make Happy People?’, Stuart Rachels argues not only that there is, but, also, that precisely as much weight should be assigned to the quality of life that would be enjoyed by such potential persons, if they were to be actualized, as to the quality of life enjoyed by actually existing persons. In response, I shall argue, first, that (...) Rachels’ view is exposed to very serious objections, and secondly, that his arguments in support of his position involve a crucial assumption, which cannot be sustained, concerning the relation between, on the one hand, propositions about good‐making and bad‐making properties, and, on the other, propositions about right‐making and wrong‐making ones. I shall then argue that there is a very plausible position concerning the conditions under which an action can be morally wrong which entails the following asymmetry: there is a prima facie obligation not to bring into existence individuals whose lives are not worth living, but there is no corresponding obligation to create additional individuals whose lives would be worth living. (shrink)

In the 1960s molecular population geneticists used Monte Carlo experiments to evaluate particular diffusion equation models. In this paper I examine the nature of this comparative evaluation and argue for three claims: first, Monte Carlo experiments are genuine experiments: second, Monte Carlo experiments can provide an important meansfor evaluating the adequacy of highly idealized theoretical models; and, third, the evaluation of the computational adequacy of a diffusion model with Monte Carlo experiments is significantlydifferent from the evaluation of the emperical adequacy (...) of the same diffusion model. (shrink)

Largely due to the popular allegation that contemporary science has uncovered indeterminism in the deepest known levels of physical reality, the debate as to whether humans have moral freedom, the sort of freedom on which moral responsibility depends, has put aside to some extent the traditional worry over whether determinism is true. As I argue in this paper, however, there are powerful proofs for both chronological determinism and necessitarianism, forms of determinism that pose the most penetrative threat to human moral (...) freedom. My ultimate hope is to show that, despite the robust case against human moral freedom that can be made without even relying on them, chronological determinism and necessitarianism should be regarded with renewed urgency. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article examines the presuppositions and theoretical frameworks of the “new-wave” “Post-Westphalian” approach to international business ethics and compares it to the more philosophically oriented moral theory approach that has predominated in the field. I contrast one author’s Post-Westphalian political approach to the human rights responsibilities of transnational corporations (TNCs) with my own “Fair Share” theory of moral responsibility for human rights. I suggest how the debate about the meaning of corporate human rights “complicity” might be informed by the fair (...) share theory. While I point out that Post-Westphalians and moral philosophers may have fundamental disagreements about basic concepts such as legitimacy, justice, and democratic deliberation, I conclude that the Post-Westphalians have made a major contribution to the expansion of the field by presenting business ethicists with an opportunity to inform and guide debates about the potential future course of transnational governance. (shrink)

Nuno Venturinha holds that the contextualist epistemology adumbrated in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty--the most powerful response to philosophical skepticism yet developed-- falls short of providing a complete answer to Cartesian radical skepticism about knowledge of the external world. I argue that Venturinha underestimates the range and complexity of Wittgenstein’s epistemological. He does so because he reads Wittgenstein along the lines of so-called ‘hinge epistemology’. Hinge epistemology indeed fails as a diagnosis of skepticism. But it also fails as a reading of Wittgenstein. (...) A more adequate understanding of Wittgenstein suggests that Venturinha’s pessimistic conclusion can be avoided. (shrink)

This paper reviews the claim that certain predicates, including what are called predicates of personal taste, have a sometimes-hidden element for a judge or experiencer. This claim was advanced in my own earlier work, as well as a number of other papers. My main goal here is to review some of the arguments in favor of this claim, and along the way, to present some of my earlier unpublished work on the matter. In much of the earlier literature, this claim (...) was part of a debate between relativists, contextualists, and others about the semantics of ‘subjective’ or ‘perspectival’ predicates. I shall argue here that these issues are independent. Whether we opt for experiencer or judge parameters is independent of whether we prefer relativist semantics to any other kind. (shrink)

In “Subordinating Speech,” Ishani Maitra defends the claim that ordinary instances of hate speech can sometimes constitute subordination. While she accepts that subordinating speech requires authority, she argues that ordinary speakers can acquire this authority via a process of “licensing.” I believe this account is interestingly mistaken, and in this paper I develop an alternative account. In particular, I take issue with what I see as the highly localized character of Maitra’s account, which effectively divorces the subordinating authority of ordinary (...) hate speech from the broader normative context, including social and pragmatic features that I claim play essential roles in subordination. (shrink)

PDP networks that use nonmonotonic activation functions often produce hidden unit regularities that permit the internal structure of these networks to be interpreted (Berkeley et al., 1995; McCaughan, 1997; Dawson, 1998). In particular, when the responses of hidden units to a set of patterns are graphed using jittered density plots, these plots organize themselves into a set of discrete stripes or bands. In some cases, each band is associated with a local interpretation. On the basis of these observations, Berkeley (2000) (...) has suggested that these bands are both subsymbolic and symbolic in nature, and has used the analysis of one network to support the claim that there are fewer differences between symbols and subsymbols than one might expect. We suggest below that this conclusion is premature. First, in many cases the local interpretation of each band is difficult to relate to the interpretation of a network's response; a more appropriate relationship only emerges when a band associated with one hidden unit is considered in the context of other bands associated with other hidden units (i.e., interpretations of distributed representations are more useful than interpretations of local representations). Second, the content that a band designates to an external observer (i.e., the interpretation assigned to a band by the researcher) can be quite different from the content that a band designates to the output units of the network itself.. We use two different network simulations – including the one described by Berkeley (2000) – to illustrate these points. We conclude that current evidence involving interpretations of nonmonotonic PDP networks actually illustrates the differences between symbolic and subsymbolic processing. (shrink)

Stainton points out that speakers “can make assertions while speaking sub-sententially”. He argues for a “pragmatics-oriented approach” to these phenomena and against a “semantics-oriented approach”. In contrast, I argue for a largely semantics-oriented approach: typically, sub-sentential utterances assert a truth-conditional proposition in virtue of exploiting a semantic convention. Thus, there is an “implicit-demonstrative convention” in English of expressing a thought that a particular object in mind is F by saying simply ‘F’. I note also that some sub-sentential assertions include demonstrations (...) and argue that these exploit another semantic convention for expressing a thought with a particular object in mind. I consider four objections that Stainton has to a semantics- oriented approach. The most interesting is the “syntactic ellipsis” objection, which rests on two planks: the assumption that this approach must claim that what appears on the surface to be a sub-sentential is, at some deeper level of syntactic analysis, really a sentence; the claim that there is no such syntactic ellipsis in these sub-sentential utterances. I argue that is wrong and that may well be. I also reject the other three objections: “too much ambiguity”; “no explanatory work”; and “fails a Kripkean test”. Nonetheless, occasionally, sub-sentential utterances semantically assert only a fragment of a truth-conditional proposition. This fragment needs to be pragmatically enriched to yield a propositional message. To this extent a pragmatics-oriented approach is correct. (shrink)

In this paper, I approach epistemic norms from an ontogenetic point of view. I argue and present evidence that to understand epistemic norms – e.g., scientific norms of methodology and the evaluation of evidence – children must first develop through their social interactions with others three key concepts. First is the concept of belief, which provides the most basic distinction on which scientific investigations rest: the distinction between individual subjective perspectives and an objective reality. Second is the concept of reason, (...) which in the context of science obligates practitioners to justify their claims to others with reasons by grounding them in beliefs that are universally shared within the community. Third is the concept of social norm, which is not primarily epistemic, but provides children with an understanding of norms as collective agreements. The theoretical argument is that all three of these concepts emerge not from just any kind of social interaction, but specifically from social interactions structured by the human species’ unique capacities for shared intentionality. (shrink)

Adjectival and Generic Pragmatism: Problems and Possibilities While honoring the suggestion that one should always use an adjective with "pragmatism," I explore the possibility of a generic use of the term, contending that an orientation to habit or revisable practice is a useful indicator.

What I have just said strikes me as not only paradoxical but true. In what follows I shall try to show that it is not all that paradoxical and that it is true. In order to show this, and in order to discuss some important and neglected features of act and duty individuation, I shall contrast the concepts of perfect duty and imperfect duty.

Professional chaplains have the unique opportunity to provide spiritual care within institutional settings where other types of pastoral care may not exist. Serving within these institutions presents special challenges, including tension between multiple identities and responsibilities. This tension can create conflict within the Christian chaplain, and confusion as to whom they are ultimately beholden. The first section of the article discusses what I see as the five identity-related tensions a professional chaplain may experience serving in an institution. The second section (...) of the article outlines a Christian theology of calling built on the framework of Covenant Theology and God’s reconciling work of grace. This theology of calling orients the professional identity of the Christian chaplains, rooting them in a clear sense of their responsibilities within their institutional setting. Christian chaplains are beholden first to God and to the calling God places on their life. Proper orientation to that calling equips chaplains to reconcile any cognitive dissonance caused by identity-related tensions, thus opening up a richer spiritual dialogue with God as they live out their kingdom-advancing mission. (shrink)

In this paper, I make two points about Richard’s truth relativism. First, I argue his truth relativism is at odds with his account of truth-aptness. Second, I argue that his truth relativism commits him to a form of pluralism about truth.

Ned Block says ‘yes’ (, ). His position is based on the phenomenon of identity-crowding. According to Block, in cases of identity-crowding, something is consciously seen even though one cannot attend to it. In taking this view, Block is opposing a position I have taken in recent work (Tye 2009a, 2009b, 2010). He is also contributing to a vigorous recent debate in the philosophy of mind over the relation, if any, between consciousness and attention. Who is right? Not surprisingly, I (...) think I am. (shrink)

Religious Education (RE) currently enjoys the status of a compulsory curriculum subject in state schools in England and Wales. Though it is not part of the National Curriculum, and therefore not subject to a nationally prescribed syllabus, it is part of the basic curriculum to which all children are entitled. The question I raise in this chapter is whether RE merits this status. Is the study of religion sufficiently central to the task of preparing children for adult life to justify (...) the existence of a separate and compulsory curriculum subject? (shrink)

I argue that supererogation poses a serious problem for theories of moral reasoning and that this problem results, at least in part, from our taking too narrow a view of the reasons that can influence an act’s deontic status. We tend to focus primarily on those reasons that count directly for and against an act’s performance. To adequately account for supererogation, we need to consider also a different class of moral reasons. Aside from those reasons that contribute, for instance, to (...) an act’s being morally better or worse than its alternatives, there are moral reasons that govern the ways in which we respond to the performance or non-performance of those acts. These reasons govern the attitudes we express in response to moral acts as well as our practices of issuing demands and of seeking justification in the case of an omission. These sorts of moral reasons are, I argue, integral to an account of supererogation. Attending to them will allow us to accept that the supererogatory omission does actually involve a moral failure of sorts while denying that it is a failure of obligation. And this will allow us to account for our intuitions regarding supererogation while avoiding what I call the problem of supererogation. I begin with a discussion of what we might mean by ‘supererogation’, and I outline the problem that it raises. I then provide an account of supererogation that avoids this problem. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Peter Klein's "Human Knowledge and the Infinite Progress of Reasoning". After briefly discussing what Klein says about the requirement, for doxastic justification, that a belief be formed in the right way, I'll make the following three points: Klein's solution to the regress problem isn't an infinitist solution, Klein's position on doxastic justification faces a troubling dilemma, and Klein's objection to foundationalism fails.

In this paper, I provide an introduction for biostatisticians and others to some recent work in the philosophy of medicine. Firstly, I give an overview of some philosophical arguments that are thought to create problems for a prominent approach towards establishing causal claims in medicine, namely, the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) approach. Secondly, I provide an overview of further recent work in the philosophy of medicine, which argues that mechanistic studies can help to address these problems. Lastly, I describe a novel (...) approach for establishing causal claims in medicine that has been informed by this recent work in the philosophy of medicine, namely, the EBM+ approach. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explicates Shaftesbury’s idea that we ought to live our lives as though they are works of art. I show that this idea is central to many of Shaftesbury’s most important claims, and that an understanding of this idea enables us to answer some of the most contested questions in the scholarship on Characteristics.

Evidence from biology and psychology suggests that our moral views depend on our evolutionary history. For example, if we humans would have evolved to live like hive bees, we would probably think very differently about moral questions such as whether we have a duty to care for our children. The findings from biology and psychology threaten to ‘debunk’ the justification of judgements about objective moral truths. Objective moral truths are always the same and they do not vary with our contingent (...) evolutionary history, whereas our moral judgements do. It has been argued that we, therefore, cannot tell right from wrong. In my thesis, I investigate the epistemology behind the evolutionary debunking of morality. Evolutionary explanations of morality, I argue, do not imply that our moral judgements are false. This leaves the possibility that evolution undercuts our (alleged) evidence for our moral judgements. Our evolutionarily influenced moral judgements might turn out to be unreliable guides to the moral truth, just like sight is a lousy guide to the external world in bad lighting conditions. However, I show that as long as we have reason to initially trust our moral beliefs, evolution does not provide us with reason to give up our moral beliefs. If evolution undercuts our moral beliefs, evolutionary considerations must show that true moral judgements do not qualify as knowledge because moral judgements are not cognitive achievements but comparable to lucky guesses. The thesis thus answers how empirical investigations of morality might have justificatory implications and the findings are relevant for deciding whether new factual information can alter how we think about right and wrong. (shrink)

Ever since I abandoned the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, I have sought solutions of philosophical problems by means of analysis, and I remain firmly persuaded, in spite of some modern tendencies to the contrary, that only by analysing is progress possible. (Russell, My Philosophical Development, ch. 1).

This important book includes a compelling selection of original essays on euthanasia and associated legislative and health care issues, together with important background material for understanding and assessing the arguments of these essays. The book explores a central strand in the debate over medically assisted death, the so called "slippery slope" argument. The focus of the book is on one particularly important aspect of the downward slope of this argument: hastening the death of those individuals who appear to be suffering (...) greatly from their medical condition but are unable to request that we do anything about that suffering because of their diminished mental capacities. Slippery slope concerns have been raised in many countries, including Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States. This book concentrates most of its attention on the latter two countries. Stingl divides the book into four parts. Part I lays out the relevant public policies in the form of legal judgments, making them the philosophical point of departure for readers. Part II discusses the ever-present slippery slope objection to assisted suicide and other forms of euthanasia. Parts III and IV examine the role of social factors and political structures in determining the morality and legalization of voluntary and non-voluntary euthanasia. These sections are especially valuable. The inclusion of a selection of papers on the relationship between the morality and legality of euthanasia and systems of health care delivery is of particular interest, especially to those who want to make statistical, legal and moral comparisons between the USA and Canada. (shrink)

Normalization and Totalization By the early 1980s, after more than two decades of producing provocative studies on topics ranging from madness to biopower, Michel Foucault came to the conclusion that modernity is marked by an increasingly efficient integration of normalized individuals into totalizing networks. “Never, I think, in the history of human societies—even in the old Chinese society—has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques, and of totalization processes.”3 There no longer seemed to (...) be a substantial “exterior” to modernity, and traditional political critique was already caught within and could only further the. (shrink)

This article distinguishes historical ills and historical injustices. It conceives of the latter as legalised natural crimes; committed by morally competent agents. A natural crime consists in the deliberate violation of a natural right. 'Legalised' means that the natural crime must be prescribed; permitted or tolerated by the legal system. I advocate an approach which assesses moral competence on the basis of an exposedness criterion; that is: a historical agent must not be blamed for failing to see the right moral (...) reasons if his epoch and social world is utterly unacquainted with these reasons. However; an appropriate application of the exposedness criterion should take social factors and psychological mechanisms into account that obstruct access to the right reasons. I state a number of factors that seem to be auspicious for the development of moral competence. (shrink)

A historically persistent way of reading Leibniz regards him as some kind of conceptualist. According to this interpretation, Leibniz was either an ontological conceptualist or an epistemological conceptualist. As an ontological conceptualist, Leibniz is taken to hold the view that there exist only concepts. As an epistemological conceptualist, he is seen as believing that we think only with concepts. I argue against both conceptualist renditions. I confront the ontological conceptualist view with Leibniz’s metaphysics of creation. If the ontological conceptualist interpretation (...) were right, then Leibniz could not invoke compossibility as a criterion of creation. But since he does invoke compossibility as a criterion of creation, the ontological conceptualist approach cannot be right. I confront the epistemological conceptualist interpretation with Leibniz’s assertion of non-conceptual content. Since Leibniz acknowledges non-conceptual content at least when it comes to metaphysical knowledge, Leibniz could not have been an epistemological conceptualist either. So, Leibniz could not have been a conceptualist at all. (shrink)

In this essay I share some of the lessons I have learned over the last 25 years studying how the vascular endothelium via nitric oxide contributes to the regulation of the cardiovascular system in humans. My motivation for this effort is that in an era of molecular reductionism in biomedical research I believe that the lessons from the vascular endothelium and NO are instructive in a larger sense. These discoveries might also be among the "last" big biomedical discoveries made by (...) traditional physiology and pharmacology using primarily organ baths, pharmacological blockers, and in... (shrink)