We have two aims. The main one is to expound the idea of renormalization in quantum field theory, with no technical prerequisites. Our motivation is that renormalization is undoubtedly one of the great ideas—and great successes--of twentieth-century physics. Also it has strongly influenced in diverse ways, how physicists conceive of physical theories. So it is of considerable philosophical interest. Second, we will briefly relate renormalization to Ernest Nagel's account of inter-theoretic relations, especially reduction. One theme will be a contrast between (...) two approaches to renormalization. The old approach, which prevailed from ca. 1945 to 1970, treated renormalizability as a necessary condition for being an acceptable quantum field theory. On this approach, it is a piece of great good fortune that high energy physicists can formulate renormalizable quantum field theories that are so empirically successful. But the new approach to renormalization explains why the phenomena we see, at the energies we can access in our particle accelerators, are described by a renormalizable quantum field theory. For whatever non-renormalizable interactions may occur at yet higher energies, they are insignificant at accessible energies. Thus the new approach explains why our best fundamental theories have a feature, viz. renormalizability, which the old approach treated as a selection principle for theories. That is worth saying since philosophers tend to think of scientific explanation as only explaining an individual event, or perhaps a single law, or at most deducing one theory as a special case of another. Here we see a framework in which there is a space of theories. And this framework is powerful enough to deduce that what seemed “manna from heaven” is to be expected: the good fortune is generic. We also maintain that universality, a concept stressed in renormalization theory, is essentially the familiar philosophical idea of multiple realizability; and that it causes no problems for reductions of a Nagelian kind. (shrink)

This article argues that two new definitions are needed for what constitutes a truth commission. The first new definition that is needed is a different backward-looking definition that is used reflectively to contrast, compare and research past and present truth commissions. It is argued that the variety of definitions that exist about what constitutes a Truth Commission have a number of problems, and that a better definition is needed to categorise past mechanisms, make comparisons and improve comparative research. The second (...) goal of the article is to investigate why it is necessary to create a non-prescriptive explanatory forward-looking definition focusing on the compositional elements of a TC. This is because definitions are also useful to assist those who wish to establish TC on what the compositional elements need to be, to ensure that these institutions are less likely to fail in their endeavours. This is important, as TCs have been extensively criticised for not achieving the goals that they are meant to. To determine why a new backward-looking definition is needed, which is broader and more inclusive than existing definitions, some of the current TC definitions are deconstructed. The various elements are re-examined and reconstituted to ensure a more holistic and relevant definition for what a TC is. As far as a forward-looking definition is concerned, the article examines what the compositional elements ought to be to make them more likely to be contextually applicable, to have more of a positive effect and have more of a constructive role in the places where they are created. Issues focused on that need greater delineation include the idea that TCs—besides focusing on the past—also, in some cases, investigate on-going human rights abuse. It is contended that TCs must be created with the support of the people in the country and be reflective of their needs. It is maintained that a TC should be a temporary body and that independence, legitimacy and sufficient resources are crucial factors in determining whether a TC will be successful. Also, considered is why having an independent process to choose commissioners, who are diverse and representative of that society is critical to the outcome of the process. (shrink)

In The Metaphysics of Truth, Doug Edwards offers a sustained case against deflationism about truth and in favour of his preferred pluralist theory of truth. Here, I take up three of the main components of that case. The first is Edwards' account of the distinctive metaphysical commitments of deflationism. His views about this issue have changed over the past few years, and I detail these changes as well as a concern for the views that he develops in the book. Second, (...) I take up the argument that Edwards offers for thinking that deflationism is, in a certain sense, internally unstable. I explain why this argument is inconclusive, outlining three responses to it on behalf of the deflationist. Third, I consider Edwards' novel argument for truth pluralism, which acts as an indirect argument against deflationism. After sorting out some interpretive nuances related to the use of definite descriptions in this argument, I show how the deflationist can resist it. Having responded to Edwards' critique of deflationism, I close by briefly explaining why I take the methodology of deflationism to be especially promising, insofar as it underscores the significance of empirically-informed inquiry about truth. (shrink)

The evidence for a positive, direct link between the representation of women on boards of directors and financial performance is tenuous. Given the importance of the gender diversity–financial performance debate, researchers are left to examine how, if at all, the two are linked. The present study takes the position that the link is indirect. Specifically, following stakeholder theory, an argument is made that women on boards’ attunement to stakeholder interests leads them to influence firms’ prosocial actions, which results in higher (...) levels of corporate social responsibility. In turn, following the extant literature, CSR is expected to be positively linked to financial performance. Relying on a sample of Australia’s largest publicly traded firms, the results demonstrate that women on boards are linked to CSR and that CSR is linked to financial performance. However, in the mediation test, CSR appears to fully mediate the link between women on boards and financial performance. The results are discussed along with limitations and future research directions. (shrink)

The long-standing overarching policy governing research with human subjects conducted and supported by most federal agencies and departments in the United States, known as the Common Rule, has recently been revised, with most requirements slated to become effective in 2018. Although there are multiple alterations to the current regulations, some of the most significant changes aim to enhance consent for research. While some of the particular provisions in this regard will be easy to apply and promise to help meet this (...) goal, others may be more challenging to implement despite their intuitive appeal. In this article, I examine some of the provisions in the revised Common Rule that relate to consent: new required consent elements; the goal of comprehension in the consent process; consent forms; and broad consent. By raising issues about these provisions now and suggesting possible ways to overcome their potential shortfalls, the hope is that future efforts can be taken to help clarify and appropriately implement them. (shrink)

In _Nonsense upon Stilts¸_ first published in 1987, Waldron includes and discusses extracts from three classic critiques of the idea of natural rights embodied in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Each text is prefaced by an historical introduction and an analysis of its main themes. The collection as a whole in introduced with an essay tracing the philosophical background to the three critiques as well as the eighteenth-century idea of natural rights which they attacked. (...) But the point of reproducing these works is not merely historical. Modern attacks on ‘rights-based’ political philosophy mirror the concerns of Bentham, Burke and Marx. Jeremy Waldron has therefore added an extensive concluding essay which relates these classic texts to the modern discussion of rights and re-examines the idea of rights in the light of contemporary critiques. This text provides an invaluable teaching tool for courses in politics and philosophy. (shrink)

Understanding Torture surveys the massive literature surrounding torture, arguing that, once properly understood, there can be no defence of torture in any circumstances.

“Terrorism”' is sometimes defined as a “form ofcoercion.” But there are important differences between ordinary coercion and terrorist intimidation. This paper explores some of those differences, particularly the relation between coercion, on the one hand, and terror and terrorization, on the other hand. The paper argues that while terrorism is not necessarily associated with terror in the literal sense, it does often seek to instill a mental state like terror in the populations that it targets. However, the point of instilling (...) this mental state is not necessarily coercive or intimidatory: one can try to instill terror as an act of punishment, or as an expressive or therapeutic act, or because one values the political consequences that might follow, or because one thinks terror is preferable, from an ethical point of view, to the inauthentic complacency that characterizes the targeted population at present. Though this paper asks questions about the definition of “terrorism,” these questions are not asked for their own sake. The quest for a canonical definition of “terrorism” is probably a waste of time. But asking questions which sound like questions of definition is sometimes a fruitful way of focusing our reflections on terrorism and organizing our response. (shrink)

Shearmur draws on his years as Popper's assistant, on unpublished material in the Hoover archive, and on wider themes within Popper's philosophy to offer striking critical re-interpretations of his ethical and social theory. This title available in eBook format. Click here for more information . Visit our eBookstore at: www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.

By what right do sovereign states prohibit migrants from entering their territories? It cannot be assumed that they do, certainly not as a matter of the way we define “sovereignty.” Can the sovereign right to exclude immigrants be derived from the sovereign’s status as owner of the territory it controls? This Article shows that the idea of the sovereign as owner is too problematic to be the basis of any argument for the right to exclude. It also argues against the (...) proposition that communities, considered as informal sovereigns, have a right to exclude based on their communal property in the land they inhabit. In both cases, an “ownership conception” is distinguished from a more attractive “responsibility conception” of sovereignty. The former remains unclear, while the latter leaves open the question of who the sovereign is responsible for. (shrink)

Biomedical and behavioral research may affect strongly held social values and thereby create significant controversy over whether such research should be permitted in the first place. Institutional review boards responsible for protecting the rights and welfare of participants in research are sometimes faced with review of protocols that have significant implications for social policy and the potential for negative social consequences. Although IRB members often raise concerns about potential long-term social implications in protocol review, federal regulations strongly discourage IRBs from (...) considering them in their decisions. Yet IRBs often do consider the social implications of research protocols and sometimes create significant delays in initiating or even prevent such research. The social implications of research are important topics for public scrutiny and professional discussion. This article examines the reasons that the federal regulations preclude IRBs from assessing the social risks of research, and examines alternative approaches that have been used with varying success by national advisory groups to provide such guidance. The article concludes with recommendations for characteristics of a national advisory group that could successfully fulfill this need, including sustainability, independence, diverse and relevant expertise, and public transparency. (shrink)

Depending on our mode of reasoning—moral, prudential, instrumental, empirical, dialectical, and so on—we may come to vastly different conclusions on the nature of death and the appropriate orientation toward matters such as euthanasia or procuring organs from brain-dead patients. These differing orientations have resulted in some of the most enduring conflicts in biomedical decision-making with roots in the earliest strands of philosophical discourse. Through continually grappling with questions over matters of death, we continually step closer to clarity, even if certainty (...) on these matters remains necessarily as elusive as death itself. (shrink)

Hypnosis is considered a unique tool capable of modulating cognitive processes. The extent to which hypnotic suggestions intervenes is still under debate. This study was designed to provide a new insight into this issue, by focusing on an unintentional emotional process: attentional bias. In Experiment 1, highly suggestible participants performed three sessions of an emotional Stroop task where hypnotic suggestions aiming to increase and decrease emotional reactivity towards emotional stimuli were administered within an intra-individual design. Compared to a baseline condition (...) (without hypnotic suggestion), a significant increase in attentional bias was found when a hypnotic suggestion to increase emotional reactivity was administered. In contrast, the bias was eliminated when a suggestion to decrease emotional reactivity was administered. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of session repetition on attentional bias across three successive experimental sessions without hypnosis, and showed that the emotional Stroop effect did not vary across sessions. Hence, session repetition could not account for part of the modulation of attentional bias in Experiment 1. Taken together, the results suggest that specific hypnotic suggestions can influence elicitation of unintentional emotional processing. The implications are discussed regarding the locus of intervention of hypnotic suggestion in cognitive and emotional processes. (shrink)

The building of the transcontinental railroad in the US Central West in the late 1860s greatly improved access to this region and led to the expansion of scientific field work. The relationships between science and the railroad spanned a diverse spectrum, ranging from its practical advantages to more complex interactions such as the transformation of nature along railway corridors and the reciprocal exchange of favours between scientists and railway companies. The dominance of science along the railroad in the second half (...) of the nineteenth century continued into the early twentieth century, with a gradual shift to automobile travel beginning in the 1910s. By stimulating and shaping field research both on and off the railway corridor, the laying of iron tracks across the continent helped guide US science, just as it influenced so many other aspects of US life. (shrink)

An alethic holding is any speech act that functions to hold another person to acting for reasons that they already had prior to the performance of a speech act with this function. Although it is tempting to think of such acts as either informing another person of extant reasons for acting or as creating new reasons for that person to so act, a central goal of this paper is to suggest that this temptation should be resisted. First, alethic speech acts (...) are situated within the broader terrain of performances that strive to hold others responsible. Second, the precise sense of ‘holding’ to reason that characterizes an alethic speech act is explicated, in a manner that distinguishes such acts from either those designed to inform one of extant norms or to add new norms. Third, an account that attempts to explain how a speech act can achieve this holding function is offered, one based on the idea of a self-conscious interpersonal, transaction. Finally, it is suggested that the terrain of holding other’s responsible sketched at the outset looks different once this account of alethic holdings is in view. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron’s essay centres around Martha Nussbaum’s ideas on cosmopolitan education: Nussbaum argues that we should make ‘world citizenship, rather than democratic or national citizenship, the focus for civic education’. The essay provides just a few examples to illustrate the concrete particularity of the world community for which we are urged by Nussbaum to take responsibility, with the aim of refuting the view of those who condemn cosmopolitanism as an abstraction. The arguments for and against Nussbaum’s idea are presented, (...) and one of the opposing views highlighted: that cosmopolitan moral education is not just an education in moral ideas; it is an education in the particular ways in which people have inhabited the world. The different sections of the chapter look at how a society becomes multicultural, the infrastructure of cultural interaction, the identification of citizenship, the language of citizenship, and its concrete reality and its cosmopolitan dimensions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough item-memory for emotional information is enhanced, memory for associations between items is often impaired for negative, emotionally arousing compared to neutral information. We te...

Jeremy Waldron; XV*—Participation: The Right of Rights, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 98, Issue 1, 1 June 1998, Pages 307–338, https://doi.org.

No longer viewed by scientists as the cell’s fixed master molecule, DNA is a dynamic script that is ad-libbed at each stage of development. What our parents hand down to us is just the beginning. Genetic Explanations urges us to replace our faith in genetic determinism with scientific knowledge about genetic plasticity and epigenetic inheritance.

In this paper I direct attention to one feature of Hacking’s recent work on styles of reasoning and argue that this feature is of far greater philosophical significance than Hacking’s limited discussion of this suggests. The feature in question is his use of ‘legendary beginnings’ in setting out a given style, viz. the method of introducing a style of reasoning by recounting a popular and quasi-mythical narrative that ties the crystallisation of that style to a particular person in a particular (...) place and at a particular time. Whilst Hacking both deploys and discusses this method, his comments suggest that this is primarily a stylistic device employed for reasons of expedience. In contrast, it is argued here that recounting the legendary origins of a style of reasoning affords a distinctive way of vindicating that style, a vindication from within the style itself. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore our common-sense thinking about the relation between moral value, moral merit, and well-being. Starting from Ross’s observation that welfarist axiologies ignore our intuitions about desert, I focus on axiologies that take moral merit and well-being to be independent determinants of value. I distinguish three ways in which these axiologies can be formulated, and I then consider their application to the issue of punishment. The objection that they recommend penalties in circumstances in which intuitively we would (...) judge them to be unjustified is examined, and I suggest that it can be met by incorporating temporal information into the way in which value, well-being and moral merit are linked. (shrink)

Despite a significant amount of literature debating the efficiency of high-risk pools in health insurance, dramatically less has been written about their normative implications. The present article takes the route less traveled by setting aside the question of efficiency to argue that the use of high-risk pools creates some serious normative concerns. The article explores these concerns by dividing them on two fronts. First, as regards the social-recognitional status of those who are forced into the high-risk pool. Second, as regards (...) a general concern of distributive justice, namely fairness in access to resources. The author argues that regardless of the veracity of arguments which laud the efficiency of high-risk pools, their use in health insurance is unjust because of the herein explained implications for social recognition and distributive justice. (shrink)

Pragmatic factors encroach on epistemic predicates not solely because the threshold for actionable belief may shift with an epistemic agent’s context, as an evidential Bayesian might insist, but also because what our inductive policy should be may shift with that context. I argue for this thesis in the context of imprecise probabilities, maintaining that the choice of the defining hyperparameter for an Imprecise Dirichlet Model for nonparametric predictive inference may correspond to the choice of an eager versus reticent inductive policy (...) in a way that can be sensitive to stakes and other practical circumstances. (shrink)

Discussions about biotechnology tend to assume that it is something to do with genetics or manipulating biological processes in some way. However, the field of biometrics––the measurement of physical characteristics––is also biotechnology and is likely to affect the lives of more people more quickly than any other form. The possibility of social exclusion resulting from the use of biometrics data for such uses as identity cards has not yet been fully explored. Social exclusion is unethical, as it unfairly discriminates against (...) individuals or classes of people. Social exclusion is unethical, as it unfairly discriminates against individuals or classes of people. This article looks at some of the ways in which social exclusion might arise from the use of biometric data, and introduces a model of balancing individual interests with which to analyse whether it is justified to run the risk of excluding some members of society for the benefit of others. (shrink)

Working in homotopy type theory, we provide a systematic study of homotopy limits of diagrams over graphs, formalized in the Coq proof assistant. We discuss some of the challenges posed by this approach to the formalizing homotopy-theoretic material. We also compare our constructions with the more classical approach to homotopy limits via fibration categories.

Jamin Asay has recently argued that deflationists about the concept of truth cannot satisfactorily account for our alethic desires, i.e., those of our desires that pertain to the truth of our beliefs. In this brief reply, I show how deflationists can draw on well‐established psychological findings on framing effects to explain how the concept of truth behaves within the scope of our alethic desires.

Spatial Big Data—be this natively geocoded content, geographical metadata, or data that itself refers to spaces and places—has become a pervasive presence in the spaces and practices of everyday life. Beyond preoccupations with “the geotag” and with mapping geocoded social media content, this special theme explores what it means to encounter and experience spatial Big Data as a quotidian phenomenon that is both spatial, characterized by and enacting of material spatialities, and spatializing, configuring relations between subjects, objects, and spaces in (...) new and unprecedented ways. (shrink)

In place of Tomasello's explanation for the source of moral obligation, we suggest that it develops from the concern for others already implicit in the human developmental system. Mutual affection and caring make the development of communication and thinking possible. Humans develop as persons within such relationships and this develops into respect and moral obligation.

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Amulya Mandava, Joseph Millum, and Benjamin E. Berkman revisit an old conundrum—whether to disclose incidental findings of misattributed parentage—in light of new developments in genomic sequencing that will make that conundrum both more complex and more common. While the authors’ defense of nondisclosure as the appropriate default action in genomic research aligns with prior thinking and practice, their exploration of philosophical foundations is refreshingly rigorous and developed. The final product of their analysis—an (...) applied taxonomy of the types of harms and benefits that can result from disclosure of misattributed parentage—is an important contribution to the literature on this subject and worthy of serious consideration by genomic researchers and bioethicists alike. Despite these virtues, I am struck by the authors’ deference to the traditional assumption that disclosure ethics can be adequately understood and appreciated within a purely consequentialist framework. (shrink)