The Plant Ontology (PO) is a community resource consisting of standardized terms, definitions, and logical relations describing plant structures and development stages, augmented by a large database of annotations from genomic and phenomic studies. This paper describes the structure of the ontology and the design principles we used in constructing PO terms for plant development stages. It also provides details of the methodology and rationale behind our revision and expansion of the PO to cover development stages for all plants, particularly (...) the land plants (bryophytes through angiosperms). As a case study to illustrate the general approach, we examine variation in gene expression across embryo development stages in Arabidopsis and maize, demonstrating how the PO can be used to compare patterns of expression across stages and in developmentally different species. Although many genes appear to be active throughout embryo development, we identified a small set of uniquely expressed genes for each stage of embryo development and also between the two species. Evaluating the different sets of genes expressed during embryo development in Arabidopsis or maize may inform future studies of the divergent developmental pathways observed in monocotyledonous versus dicotyledonous species. The PO and its annotation databasemake plant data for any species more discoverable and accessible through common formats, thus providing support for applications in plant pathology, image analysis, and comparative development and evolution. (shrink)

Focusing on the production of lists of evaluative criteria has oversimplified our judgments of qualitative research. On the one hand, aspirations for global criteria applicable to “qualitative” or “interpretive” research have glossed over crucial analytic differences among specific types of inquiry. On the other hand, the methodological concern with appropriate ways of acquiring trustworthy data has led to an overly narrow proceduralism. I suggest that rational evaluations of analytic worth require the delineation of species of analytic tasks and the exercise (...) of genre-appropriate judgments, to determine what constitutes explanatory, interpretive, or explicatory adequacy. I focus on the parameters of judgment for interpretations and explications because their analytic differences have not yet been made distinct in qualitative research. (shrink)

In cognitive science, there is a tacit norm that phenomena such as cultural variation or synaesthesia are worthy examples of cognitive diversity that contribute to a better understanding of cognition, but that other forms of cognitive diversity (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder/ADHD, and dyslexia) are primarily interesting only as examples of deficit, dysfunction, or impairment. This status quo is dehumanizing and holds back much-needed research. In contrast, the neurodiversity paradigm argues that such experiences are not necessarily deficits but rather (...) are natural reflections of biodiversity. Here, we propose that neurodiversity is an important topic for future research in cognitive science. We discuss why cognitive science has thus far failed to engage with neurodiversity, why this gap presents both ethical and scientific challenges for the field, and, crucially, why cognitive science will produce better theories of human cognition if the field engages with neurodiversity in the same way that it values other forms of cognitive diversity. Doing so will not only empower marginalized researchers but will also present an opportunity for cognitive science to benefit from the unique contributions of neurodivergent researchers and communities. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Lee Kerckhove and Sara Waller (hereafter K & W) argue that the concept of personhood is irrelevant for the abortion debate.1 Surprisingly, this irrelevance is due merely to the fact that the predicate ‘being a person’ — hereafter ‘personhood’ — is inherently vague. This vagueness, they argue, reduces ‘personhood’ to incoherency and disqualifies the notion from being a useful moral concept. In other words, if ‘personhood’ isn’t a precise notion with well-defined boundaries, then it cannot be (...) of any use in the debate over the permissibility of abortion. This argument is mistaken. While it may be true that ‘personhood’ is irrelevant for the debate over abortion (a substantive issue not dealt with in this paper), it is not true that ‘personhood’ should be disqualified merely because it is vague. Section 2 of the paper is a quick survey in which I briefly review the importance of ‘personhood’ in some of the more recent literature concerning the moral status of abortion. Section 3 is a reconstruction of K & W’s argument against the relevancy of ‘personhood’ and a criticism showing why their argument fails. Section 4 approaches the use of a vague predicate in moral debate and explores the application of ‘personhood’ given three contemporary solutions to vagueness: degree theory, epistemicism and supervaluationism. (shrink)

Review of What Every Science Student Should Know by J. L. Bauer, Y. J. Kim, A. H. Zureick and D. K. Lee, U of Chicago Press, 2016.

Value claims about ecological entities, their functionality, and properties take center stage in so-called “ecological” ethical and aesthetic theories. For example, the claim that the biodiversity in an old-growth forest imbues it with “value in and for itself” is an explicit value claim about an ecological property. And the claim that one can study “the aesthetics of nature, including natural objects...such as ecosystems” presupposes that natural instances of a type of ecological entity exist and can be regarded as more or (...) less aesthetically valuable. My discussion below will bear wide implications for how claims like... (shrink)

There is ample evidence that violations of injunctive norms impact ordinary causal attributions. This has struck some as deeply surprising, taking the ordinary concept of causation to be purely descriptive. Our explanation of the findings—the responsibility view—rejects this: we contend that the concept is in fact partly normative, being akin to concepts like responsibility and accountability. Based on this account, we predicted a very different pattern of results for causal attributions when an agent violates a statistical norm. And this pattern (...) has been borne out by the data. These predictions were based on the responsibility attributions that we would make. In this paper, I extend these previous findings, testing responsibility attributions. The results confirm the basis of our predictions, showing the same pattern of effects previously found for causal attributions for both injunctive norms and statistical norms. In fact, the results for responsibility attributions are not statistically significantly different from those previously found for causal attributions. I argue that this close correspondence lends further credence to the responsibility view over competing explanations of the impact of norms on causal attributions. (shrink)

This essay extends my “invisible disagreement” argument for Color Realism (2017) to formulate an argument for Direct Realism. It uses a variation of an “inverted qualia” thought experiment to show that successes in intersubjectively validating empirical claims about colors is proof that a nuanced version of Direct Realism is correct.

I suggest that we can read Marx in the light of recent analytic, neo-Hegelian thought. I summarize the Pittsburgh School philosophers’ claims about the myth of the given, the claim that human experience is conceptual all the way out, and that we live in a space of reasons. I show how Hegel has been read in those terms, and then apply that reading of Hegel to Marx’s argument that capital is akin to what Hegel called Geist, or spirit. We can (...) understand capitalism as a space of reasons that is contradictory: while the space of reasons is supposed to make human freedom possible, our space of reasons makes freedom impossible. Reading Marx in this way is helpful, because it avoids the flaws of analytical Marxism, existentialism and structuralism. However, it raises a large problem of its own: Can the theory of the space of reasons be applied to a society that is not free of alienation? I argue that it can, but only in ways that would not satisfy the analytic neo-Hegelians themselves. (shrink)

No exact definition of an “organic” substance has been agreed upon by the chemical community and textbook definitions vary substantially. The question of what exactly constitutes an “organic” substance is explored in this paper. Various carbon-containing substances that have been by some considered to be “inorganic” are examined in an attempt to ascertain whether carbon in these compounds display different chemical behavior than what is expected of carbon in an “organic” substance. Types of substances considered are carbon allotropes, carbides, carbonates (...) and bicarbonates, cyanide and cyanate ions, carbido clusters, carbon oxides, and compounds without hydrogen.Graphic abstract. (shrink)

Environmental advisory institutions around the world operate under the assumption that theoretical ecological models (TEMs) can guide decision-making about environmental policy and natural resource management. At the same time, leading ecologists and philosophers continue to point out that it is unclear exactly how such models can usefully inform such decision-making. Much critical debate about whether and how ecology can inform practical decisions centers on confusions that are due to the fact that the workings of TEM-based research is poorly understood outside (...) ecology. This essay addresses this issue by clarifying: what TEMs are; what limitations ecologists admit such models have; and in what general ways TEM-based analyses can inform and enable decision-making in environmental policy and resource management in spite of those limitations. (shrink)

Political character, the dynamic intersection of personality and public performance within a cultural and historical context, is appropriately the subject of news reports. The article provides journalists with an ethical rationale for covering political character while acknowledging the human need for privacy and then outlines a set of characterrelated issues that journalists should explore. It concludes with the suggestion that journalists should once again begin to cover the public record of political figures in-depth and that this public record be linked (...) with deeper, psychologically based explorations of character. (shrink)

In most general terms, my paper is about the mixture of agendas in the recording industry, where documentation, with its apparently educational implications, becomes difficult to distinguish from a range of distinct, even opposed, goals—which I group under the heading "fabrication." After a few historical remarks, I develop the concept of what I call works of phonography —that is, sound-constructs created by the use of recording machinery. I detail their ontological characteristics, as contrasted the features of ordinary musical works. WPs (...) are—I claim—replete. They are autographic. And they are phono-accessible—that is, accessible only through playbacks of authentic instances of their record artifacts, e.g., cassette tapes, CDs, etc. I then turn to Theodore Gracyk's recent study of rock music, arguing that his account is formally similar to my account of WPs. This raises the question of whether there be counter-examples to Gracyk's account—particularly of the sort that show his view to be too broad. I bring this to a focus finally by a comparison of rock recordings with jazz recordings—two classes that Gracyk tries to keep ontologically distinct. I argue that many classic jazz recordings are artifacts of the recording studio, no less than those Gracyk identifies as pure cases of rock music. In the same vein, I argue that, once recorded, the improvisational music of jazz is deformed—indeed, that it acquires features of WPs. This has the further implication that Gracyk cannot preserve his sharp distinction between rock and jazz records that he want's to maintain. (shrink)

Scientists collect evidence in order to confirm or falsify scientific theories. Unfortunately, scientific evidence may sometimes be false or deceiving and as a consequence lead individuals to believe in a false theory. By interaction between scientists, such false beliefs may spread through the entire community. There is currently a debate about the effect of various network configurations on the epistemic reliability of scientific communities. To contribute to this debate from a logical perspective, this paper introduces an epistemic logical framework of (...) observation, interaction and belief revision in scientific communities. The presented sound and complete system provides the formal tools for qualitative analysis of the social dynamics of scientific inquiry. Furthermore, this paper includes detailed suggestions for future applications of the framework. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Doxxing is a form of online abuse where doxxers deliberately seek and publish their targets’ personal information without consent, often with malicious intent such as ruining their reputation. Despite its prevalence, doxxing has received little scholarly attention compared to other forms of online aggression, and almost no study has approached doxxing from a language and discourse perspective. This exploratory study analyzes 464 online forum posts and comments related to doxxing during the on-going pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, addressing the (...) overarching question: In what ways is doxxing a discursive action? More specifically, how is doxxing realized intertextually? What are the discourse strategies that forum participants employ to legitimize doxxing? Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis, the analysis begins by illustrating doxxing as an intertextual and recontextualized social practice, focusing on a forum thread that discloses a police officer’s personal information. The core part of the paper discusses four key legitimation strategies of doxxing identified in the data, rationalization, definition, construction of negative-Other, and victimizing ‘Us’. The paper concludes by considering the role of doxxing in the Hong Kong social movement, and outlining some directions for future research. (shrink)

Sagoff (2016) criticizes widely used “theoretical” methods in ecology; arguing that those methods employ models that rely on problematic metaphysical assumptions and are therefore uninformative and useless for practical decision-making. In this paper, I show that Sagoff misconstrues how such model-based methods work in practice, that the main threads of his argument are problematic, and that his substantive conclusions are consequently unfounded. Along the way, I illuminate several ways the model-based inferential methods he criticizes can be, and have been, usefully (...) informative. (shrink)

Environmental scientists and engineers have been exploring research and monitoring applications of robotics, as well as exploring ways of integrating robotics into ecosystems to aid in responses to accelerating environmental, climatic, and biodiversity changes. These emerging applications of robots and other autonomous technologies present novel ethical and practical challenges. Yet, the critical applications of robots for environmental research, engineering, protection and remediation have received next to no attention in the ethics of robotics literature to date. This paper seeks to fill (...) that void, and promote the study of environmental robotics. It provides key resources for further critical examination of the issues environmental robots present by explaining and differentiating the sorts of environmental robotics that exist to date and identifying unique conceptual, ethical, and practical issues they present. (shrink)

New robotics technologies are being used for environmental research, and engineers and ecologists are exploring ways of integrating an array of different sorts of robots into ecosystems as a means of responding to the unprecedented environmental changes that mark the onset of the Anthropocene. These efforts introduce new roles that robots may play in our environments, potentially crucial new forms of human dependence on such robots, and new ways that robots can enhance life quality and environmental health. These efforts at (...) once introduce a variety of new and unprecedented ethical concerns. This work uses a previously developed functional taxonomy of kinds of environmental robots to develop a list of key ethical questions to push forward the sub-field and study of Environmental Robot Ethics. By identifying unique concerns raised by the different sorts of existing environmental robotics technologies, this paper aims to provide resources for further critical analysis of the ethical issues and tradeoffs environmental robots present. (shrink)

In a recent set of publications Ballantyne :485–503, 2011, Synthese 185:319–334, 2012, Synthese 91:1391–1407, 2013) argues that luck does not have a significant role in understanding the concept of knowledge. The problem, Ballantyne argues, lies in what is commonly thought to be a necessary condition for luck—a significance or value condition :385–398, 2007; Lackey, in Austral J Philos 86:255–267, 2008, Ballantyne, in Can J Philos 41:485–503, 2011). For an event, like forming a true belief, to be lucky then it must (...) be of some significance or value to an agent. Yet, if significance, as it has also been commonly thought, plays a role in determining the degree of luck :485–503, 2011), then this leads to a result similar to an absurd form of pragmatic encroachment. If this problem cannot be avoided, then anti-luck epistemology should be abandoned. However, this paper will argue that with proper considerations about the nature of luck according to at least one theory, no such problem arises. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s texts suggest countervailing construals of the respective roles of divine and human agency in an individual’s pursuit of blessedness. Kierkegaard paradoxically suggests that the individual must depend entirely on grace for the birth and development of faith, and at the same time actively cultivate faithful dispositions and passions. But Kierkegaard did not espouse Calvinistic divine determinism, or Pelagian autonomous human agency, or the Arminian cooperation of the two. For Kierkegaard, the ostensible paradox of grace and free will is not (...) a cognitive conundrum but is rather a challenge to integrate faith as a gift and faith as a task. (shrink)

Lynch, Parke, and O’Malley highlight the need for better evaluative criteria for causal explanations in microbiome research. They propose new interventionist criteria, show that paradigmatic examples of microbiome explanations are flawed using those criteria, and suggest numerous ways microbiome explanations can be improved. While we endorse their primary criticisms and suggestions for improvements in microbiome research, we make several observations regarding the use of mooted causal models in microbiome research that have significant implications for their overall argument. In sum, we (...) contend that their critique is too modest and that even flawed causal inferences like those they criticize can be valuable for generating better causal models and evaluating explanatory outcomes in individual cases. (shrink)

The growing demand for uterus transplantation (UTx) invites continued philosophical evaluation of the function of UTx (and what constitutes its ‘success’), as well as the recipient eligibility for UTx. Currently, UTx caters to partnered, cisgender women of childbearing age looking to get pregnant and give birth to a biogenetically related child. The medical justification for this—the treatment of uterine infertility—explains the primacy of this practice. However, this dominant conceptualization of UTx does not necessarily capture the diverse needs for which both (...) cis- and transgender women might take interest in UTx that are not strictly procreative, such as bodily integrity and gender identity reasons. In this paper, I argue that non-procreative motivations for uterus acquisition ought to be taken seriously as a matter of non-discrimination and consistency. (shrink)

The claim of this work is that philosophy is a kind of autobiographical practice. To investigate and defend this claim I look to three notable occasions in the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson in which the philosophical is, I argue, a translation of the autobiographical. ;There are three parts of this work, each of which aims to illuminate the autobiographical nature of philosophical tasks and problems. For special consideration, I investigate Emerson's experience of the death of others, the (...) anxiety of inheritance, and the loss of vision. In the first part, I look at the way in which the corpse is related to the corpus , and the manner in which performances have propositional content. In the second part, I concern myself with paradoxes involved in Emerson's version of exemplarity. In the third part, I focus on how Emerson's persistent use of ocular metaphor signals a way of understanding subjectivity, namely as something that is constituted visually, and how this use is indicative of Emerson's view that perception is fatal. I consider the implications of a selfhood that is regarded to be metaphorically as fragile and limited as the human eye. ;I point out some of the significant ways in which human bodily constitution impacts moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical life. I may enjoy the experiences that attend thinking, but alas the conditions of embodiment announce themselves, and there is no amount of cognitive negotiation that can save me from having to cope with the necessities of mortality and inheritance, and with the limitations of perception. I cannot overcome my status as a body---that is, as a text---and so I cannot undo the necessity that my life is an incarnation of my philosophy, and that my philosophy is a surrogate instance of my life. No matter how distant my philosophical projects seem to be from my life, they are wholly constituted as autobiographical exercises. (shrink)

Adorno's philosophical writings on music are notably focused on the new, invested in positioning the challenging avant‐garde works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern as the modernist mainstream. Nevertheless, Adorno's relationship with this “Second Viennese School” of composers was characterized by ongoing complexities, contradictions, and dissonances. His conflicted position is theorized here on multiple levels, considering not only Adorno's mature philosophy of the New Music, but his own musical‐creative output, and his relationships with the members of the Second Viennese School; a (...) group he was intimately connected to and distinct from at once. As his composition teacher, Berg was particularly influential in shaping Adorno's compositional activity and stance as simultaneously a champion and critic of Schoenberg. Adorno attempted to apply Schoenberg's twelve‐tone technique within his own compositions, recognizing its promise, yet from early on he had growing critical and compositional reservations concerning the method's restrictions. Though Adorno's writings from the 1930s defend Schoenberg and the twelve‐tone technique, by the end of the following decade, his Philosophy of New Music (2006 [1949]) expounds his critique of the method for its eschewal of the freedom of Expressionism. The impact of the Philosophy of New Music in the wake of the Second World War was both greater than and different from what Adorno could have expected. His message that the twelve‐tone method came at the cost of expressivity was largely missed by the subsequent generation of avant‐garde composers, the “Darmstadt School,” who understood the book as philosophical and theoretical basis for their extended exploration of music's serial systematization. (shrink)

Scientific realists argue that a good track record of multi-agent, and multiple method, validation of empirical claims is itself evidence that those claims, at least partially and approximately, reflect ways nature actually is independent of the ways we conceptualize it. Constructivists contend that successes in validating empirical claims only suffice to establish that our ways of modelling the world, our “constructions,” are useful and adequate for beings like us. This essay presents a thought experiment in which beings like us intersubjectively (...) validate claims about properties of particular things in nature under conditions in which those beings have profoundly different personal phenomenological experiences of those properties. I submit that the thought experiment scenario parallels our actual situation, and argue that this shows that successes in intersubjectively validating empirical claims are indeed enough to claim victory for the realist. More specifically, I champion a variation of realism that marries Ronald Giere’s brand of ‘perspectival realism’ with Philip Kitcher’s ‘real realism,’ and posits that causal relations between ourselves and properties instantiated in nature ground our references to the relevant properties even though our conceptions of them are perspective relative. (shrink)