After nearly three decades of scientific research, digital mental health (DMH) is having its moment. Millions of dollars of venture capital funding are entering this space (Shah and Berry 2021; Wan...

In ‘Are biological traits explained by their “selected effect” functions?’, Christie, Brusse, Bourrat, Takacs, and Griffiths argue that selected effect functions only explain the presence of a trait (or the frequency of a trait in a population) in cases in which the selective environment has been uniform, illustrating their point with cases of coevolution, frequency-dependent selection, and bet-hedging. This commentary suggests that selected effect functions are explanatory even in those cases, and that Christie, Brusse, et al. are mistaken about the (...) explanatory aims of the selected effects theory, criticizing it for failing to do something it never set out to do. (shrink)

Adults and children spontaneously produce gestures while they speak, and such gestures appear to support and expand on the information communicated by the verbal channel. Little research, however, has been carried out to examine the role played by gesture in the listener's representation of accumulating information. Do listeners attend to the gestures that accompany narrative speech? In what kinds of relationships between gesture and speech do listeners attend to the gestural channel? If listeners do attend to information received in gesture, (...) how is this information represented— is it 'tagged' as originating in the gestural channel? In this article research is described that addresses these questions. Results show that listeners do attend to information conveyed in gesture, when that information supplements or even contradicts the information conveyed by speech. And information received via gesture is available for retelling in speech. These results are taken to demonstrate that gesture is not taken by the listener to be epiphenomenal to the act of speaking, or a simple manual translation of speech. But they also suggest that the information conveyed in a discourse may be represented in a manner that is neither gesture nor language, although accessible to both channels. (shrink)

Are learning processes selection processes? This paper takes a slightly modified version of the account of selection presented in Hull et al. (Behav Brain Sci 24:511–527, 2001) and asks whether it applies to learning processes. The answer is that although some learning processes are selectional, many are not. This has consequences for teleological theories of mental content. According to these theories, mental states have content in virtue of having proper functions, and they have proper functions in virtue of being the (...) products of selection processes. For some mental states, it is plausible that the relevant selection process is natural selection, but there are many for which it is not plausible. One response to this (due to David Papineau) is to suggest that the learning processes by which we acquire non-innate mental states are selection processes and can therefore confer proper functions on mental states. This paper considers two ways in which this response could be elaborated, and argues that neither of them succeed: the teleosemanticist cannot rely on the claim that learning processes are selection processes in order to justify the attribution of proper functions to beliefs. (shrink)

Ruth Millikan’s teleological theory of mental content is complex and often misunderstood. This paper motivates and clarifies some of the complexities of the theory, and shows that paying careful attention to its details yields answers to a number of common objections to teleological theories, in particular, the problem of novel mental states, the problem of functionally false beliefs, and problems about indeterminacy or multiplicity of function.

The purpose of the patent system is to provide incentives for the development of new and useful products and processes. Such products and processes are generally referred to as ‘inventions’. Whilst patents have historically been sought and granted for mechanical and chemical inventions only, the biotechnology revolution of the last 30 years has radically changed this by precipitating a mass of patent applications in respect of living and biological matter. Applications of this nature have forced a re-examination by courts and (...) policy makers of traditional understandings of what can be patented. In particular, they have forced consideration of the extent (if any) to which life and nature can be viewed as ‘inventions’ so as to be capable of supporting a patent. In considering this question the central guiding principle has been the distinction, on which all of patent law is said to rest, between man-made inventions on the one hand and discoveries of nature on the other. (shrink)

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a process for managing construction project information in such a way as to provide a basis for enhanced decision-making and for collaboration in a construction supply chain. One impediment to the uptake of BIM is the limited interoperability of different BIM systems. To overcome this problem, a set of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) has been proposed as a standard for the construction industry. Building on IFC, the ifcOWL ontology was developed in order to facilitate representation (...) of building data in a consistent fashion across the Web by using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This study presents a critical analysis of the ifcOWL ontology and of the associated interoperability issues. It shows how these issues can be resolved by using Basic Formal Ontology (ISO/IEC 21838-2) as top-level architecture. A set of competency questions is used as the basis for comparison of the original ifcOWL with the enhanced ontology, and the latter is used to align with a second ontology – the ontology for building intelligent environments (DOGONT) – in order to demonstrate the added value derived from BFO by showing how querying the enhanced ifcOWL yields useful additional information. (shrink)

Taniwha are powerful water creatures in te ao Māori (the Māori world/worldview). Taniwha sometimes affect public works in Aotearoa New Zealand: for example, consultation between government agencies and tangata whenua (the people of the land) about proposed roading developments sometimes results in the route being moved to avoid the dwelling place of a taniwha. Mainstream media responses have tended to be hostile or mocking, as you might expect, since on the face of it the dominant western scientific worldview has no (...) place for beings like taniwha. However, in the 2020s, there appears to be an increased willingness to engage with te ao Māori. In this spirit, this paper proposes a way for non-Māori to begin to take taniwha more seriously, taking as its starting point the work of Dan Hikuroa on the practical usefulness of taniwha pūrākau (traditional narratives) in encoding information about natural hazards. The focus of this paper is narrow, but aspects of the strategy it proposes may be generalisable both to other aspects of te ao Māori and to other bicultural and multicultural contexts. (shrink)

The authors focus on the European Union both as a regional organization with distinctive norms and practices, and as a grouping of states that reflect specific individual traditions and views. The chapter describes two core paradigms: the national and the post‐national. The national paradigm is recognizably realist and state‐centric in approach. It suggests that the focus of external behaviour should be the promotion of order via traditional power‐political means and for traditional state‐based normative ends. The post‐national paradigm, however, reflects a (...) more cosmopolitan understanding of global society in which Europe's institutional and substantive understanding of justice questions can be reflected in its policies beyond EU borders. These propositions are tested in three issue areas. The authors conclude that while the EU may have the capacity to shape an order/justice agenda beyond its borders, its members have not yet agreed what that agenda should be. (shrink)

Ratio Juris, Volume 34, Issue 2, Page 106-120, June 2021.

Finding a naturalistic account of biological function is important both for making sense of the way functions are talked about in biology and medicine and for the project in the philosophy of mind of naturalising mental content via teleosemantics. The selected effects theory accounts for the proper functions of traits in terms of their selectional history, and is widely considered to be the most promising approach to naturalising biological functions. However, new challenges to the selected effects account have recently emerged. (...) Matthewson ( 2020 ) argues that natural selection comes in degrees and that on the face of it biological function does not, suggesting that analysing the latter in terms of the former is therefore problematic. Christie et al. (forthcoming) argue that the selected effects account of function does not fit with biologically detailed accounts of actual selection processes, in that it focuses on the functions of traits of individuals rather than the frequency of traits in populations and does not generate accurate selectional explanations in cases in which there is not a uniform selective environment. This paper defends the selected effects account against these challenges, arguing that a viable response to Matthewson is that _any_ degree of selection suffices to confer proper functions, and that Christie et al. mischaracterise the aims and assumptions of the selected effects account. (shrink)

, Derek Matravers defends a new version of the arousal theory of musical expressiveness. In this paper it is argued that for various reasons, including especially what the theory implies about the inappropriateness of certain kinds of response to music, we should reject Matravers's theory in favour of some form of cognitivism.

À la fin du xe siècle, en Germanie ottonienne, dans des circonstances politiques particulières, se développe une nouvelle forme de pouvoir au féminin, qui ne se restreint plus aux seules souveraines. Les filles et sœurs d’empereurs, en particulier Mathilde, abbesse de Quedlinburg, puis Sophie, moniale à Gandersheim, et Adélaïde, moniale à Quedlinburg, participent activement au gouvernement et à la représentation impériale du pouvoir. Elles peuvent exercer la régence et reçoivent de nouveaux titres, comme celui de dominae imperiales, qui leur est (...) accordé par l’autrice des Annales de Quedlinburg, formidable miroir du pouvoir de ces femmes à l’aube du xie siècle. Cette nouvelle configuration témoigne de l’intégration pleine et entière des femmes à la dynastie ottonienne, qui se pense dans son ensemble comme dynastie souveraine. (shrink)

The completion of the human genome project in 2000 dramatically emphasized the imminent success of the genetic revolution. The ethical and social consequences of this scientific development are immense. From human reproduction to life-extending therapies, from the impact on gender and race to public health and public safety, there is scarcely a part of our lives left unaffected by the impact of the new genetics. A Companion to Genethics is the first substantial study of the multifaceted dimensions of the genetic (...) revolution and its philosophical, ethical, social, and political significance. It brings together the best and most influential contemporary writing about genethics. Newly commissioned essays from prominent figures in the current debate provide a wide-ranging and fascinating scholarly analysis of all the issues that arise from this explosive science. (shrink)

The concept of `the granny' is not uncommon in British media texts, in a range of stereotyped representations of older women and in (sometimes playful, sometimes serious) invocations of the grandmother role. `Granny parties' are one genre of recreational social event where young people dress up as grannies. In this paper I bring together data from the media and from an ethnographic study of granny parties in order to assess the age-political and ideological significance of `granny' in these very different (...) contexts. In both cases, representations and performances prove to be fashioned dialectically, in relation to normative assumptions about grannies as conservative, passive and out-dated characters. Despite the ludic frames of many representations, it isargued that the granny concept recycles restrictive ideological values for gendered ageing. (shrink)

The introduction of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Quebec and Canada raises the question of extending this service to minors. The constant presence of nurses at the patient’s bedside leads them to receive requests related to MAID. The aim of this study is to explore the perceptions of nurses working in paediatric oncology services concerning the possibility for adolescents over 14 years of age requesting MAID. Six nurses working in paediatric oncology or palliative care or in direct contact with (...) adolescents at the end of their lives as part of their nursing work took part in an individual semi-directed interview. The results of this research highlight that: 1) nurses recognise their supportive role in the care of patients at the end of life; 2) most have a professional opinion in favour of the MAID for adults and distinguish this from their personal opinion; 3) they value the discussions around the MAID and are concerned about the establishment of criteria for it; and 4) long experience as a nurse leads to more concerns about the expansion of the MAID, but at the same time makes nurses more comfortable providing information about this subject. In light of these findings, academic and paediatric health care institutions need to recognise and evaluate the need for training nurses on MAID to better equip them to deal with such situations and thus better meet the needs of their patients. (shrink)

A patent agent is a person with recognised expertise in the field of intellectual property generally and patents specifically. In the UK patent agents form an elite professional community, membership of which is denoted by inclusion on the Register of Patent Agents. The Register exists under statute and is maintained by The Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA), a body empowered by royal charter of which most patent agents are also members.

The South China Sea territorial dispute has been a contentious issue in the international community. In the course of 3 years, China and the Philippines had undergone arbitral proceedings over the maritime rights and entitlements in the South China Sea. As the Permanent Court of Arbitration reached its decision, this paper aims to examine the interpretation process of the Arbitral Tribunal in the judgment of the South China Sea conflict between China and the Philippines. The primary objective of the study (...) is to reconstruct or explain how the Tribunal came up with its interpretation of the written arguments presented by the parties involved and to distinguish whether such reconstruction the Tribunal has successfully interpreted or made sense of the said arguments and submissions. Doing so would necessitate a pragmatic analysis– the relevance-theoretic account of human communication and cognition. Data analyzed include written submissions and arguments as well as the legal documents used during the arbitral process. Using content analysis, the data were evaluated through applying the tool of interpretation based on the criteria set by the three conditions of the relevance theory: logical condition, pragmatic condition, and condition of optimal relevance. This paper argues that in order for the addressee of an utterance, in this case the Arbitral Tribunal, to attain a successful interpretation, it should meet these three conditions. This study found that the reconstruction of the interpretation based on the three conditions showed that the Tribunal had attained a valid and correct interpretation of the Philippines’ and China’s arguments. Furthermore, the paper asserts that implied conclusion and the contextual assumptions can be a guiding principle for the cognitive comprehension or interpretation of legal texts. (shrink)

Law exists among other things to facilitate social interaction by creating the conditions necessary to enable people to trust each other sufficiently to interact. To that end it is part of a complex web of social mechanisms, variations in any part of which produce ripple effects in all others.

L’exercice artistique suppose un rapport au temps spécifique : l’homme s’exerçant à son art répète, reprend, corrige ses gestes. Mais en va-t-il de même concernant la réception des œuvres : la perception du spectateur s’exerce-t-elle par répétition et variation des expériences esthétiques? L’objet de cet article est de montrer qu’il existe un type d’exercice dont le mécanisme repose plutôt sur la déstabilisation des habitudes de perception. À partir des réflexions valéryennes sur l’informe dans l’_Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de (...) Vinci_ et _Degas, Danse, Dessin_, nous proposons de penser un exercice de la perception qui passe par la décomposition de ses mécanismes. Cette idée trouve sa réalisation dans des dispositifs artistiques labyrinthiques tels que l’exposition _Contact_ d’Olafur Eliasson qui, en perturbant les échelles d’espace et de temps, oblige le récepteur à produire consciemment le travail de cohérence de la synthèse perceptive. (shrink)

To have the burden of proof is to be rationally required to argue for or provide evidence for your position. To have a heavier burden than an opponent is to be rationally required to provide better evidence or better arguments than they are required to provide. Many commentators suggest that differential or uneven distribution of the burden of proof is ubiquitous. In reasoned discourse, the idea goes, it is almost always the case that one party must prove the claim at (...) issue to prevent the opposing view winning by default. The following passage is typical of the sort of thing one finds in critical thinking textbooks. (shrink)

Causal and predictive learning research often employs intuitive and familiar hypothetical scenarios to facilitate learning novel relationships. The allergist task, in which participants are asked to diagnose the allergies of a fictitious patient, is one example of this. In such studies, it is common practice to ask participants to ignore their existing knowledge of the scenario and make judgments based only on the relationships presented within the experiment. Causal judgments appear to be sensitive to instructions that modify assumptions about the (...) scenario. However, the extent to which prior knowledge continues to affect competition for associative learning, even after participants are instructed to disregard it, is unknown. To answer this, we created a cue competition design that capitalized on prevailing beliefs about the allergenic properties of various foods. High and low allergenic foods were paired with foods moderately associated with allergy to create two compounds; high + moderate and low + moderate. We expected high allergenic foods to produce greater competition for associative memory than low allergenic foods. High allergenic foods may affect learning either because they generate a strong memory of allergy or because they are more salient in the context of the task. We therefore also manipulated the consistency of the high allergenic cue-outcome relationship with prior beliefs about the nature of the allergies. A high allergenic food that is paired with an inconsistent allergenic outcome should generate more prediction error and thus more competition for learning, than one that is consistent with prior beliefs. Participants were instructed to either use or ignore their knowledge of food allergies to complete the task. We found that while participants were able to set aside their prior knowledge when making causal judgments about the foods in question, associative memory was weaker for the cues paired with highly allergenic foods than cues paired with low allergenic foods regardless of instructions. The consistency manipulation had little effect on this result, suggesting that the effects in associative memory are most likely driven by selective attention to highly allergenic cues. This has implications for theories of causal learning as well as the way causal learning tasks are designed. (shrink)

Fragmented social relations, the twin demise of authority and tradition, the breakdown of behavioural norms and constraints: all these are the outcome, according to their critics, of the uses and abuses of human rights in contemporary democratic societies. We are, they say, seeing the perverse effects of a 'religion of human rights' to which Europe has rashly devoted its heart and mind; and the supposed burgeoning of rights, which goes hand in hand with an unchecked rise of expectations, is catapulting (...) Western democracies into an age of never-ending demands. This emerged clearly in France in Spring 2013 during the demonstrations against equal marriage ('mariage pour tous') whose opponents deplored the excesses of a movement-driven left striving for an unbounded extension of rights - from the right to same-sex marriage to the enfranchisement of non-nationals or the right of same-sex couples to adopt. (shrink)

This paper presents a case study of Gardens and Green Spaces (GGS), a resident-driven, grant-funded project in Cleveland, Ohio working toward community change. Through both placemaking and entrepreneurial strategies, the main grant objectives are to effect change at the intersection of food (and agriculture), arts, and culture in Kinsman, a 96% Black Neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side. While community development (CD) projects are often designed by outside ‘experts’ who inform the scope and focus of grant-funded projects, this project is rooted (...) in the hypothesis that a resident-driven approach to CD will lead to increased community buy-in and participation, resulting in more lasting and substantive community change. GGS works across sectors, integrating arts, culture, and food to promote placemaking and community-based entrepreneurial engagement as a path towards greater health, equity, and economic resilience. This paper argues that community-based and resident-driven development—although not without its own challenges—can result in more holistic community transformation across sectors, with the potential for greater resident participation, sustainability, and equity. The case study presented in this paper, including in-depth interviews and neighborhood surveys, is an examination of the pilot phase of GGS, and argues that both placemaking and entrepreneurialism represent a negotiation between market driven community development and a solely philanthropic model. It provides insight into more equitable and sustainable change that has the potential to shift the traditional paradigm of expert driven, or “outside-in” community development. (shrink)

With an upsurge of interest and investment in new legal technologies comes consideration of who is making them and whether these individuals or entities should be subject to regulation. This article looks at how such regulation might function in light of the existing regulatory regimes governing lawyers and the capacities of legal regulators. It considers the ramifications both of maintaining the existing system, or in extending some form of regulation to these new entrants to the legal services market.

Achieving genuine engagement and understanding between communities with radically divergent worldviews is challenging. If there is no common ground on which to stand and have a discussion, the likely outcomes of an apparent intercultural disagreement are a stalemate, or the (sometimes colonialist) imposition of a single worldview, or a kind of relativistic tolerance that falls short of genuine engagement. In this paper, we suggest a way forward that takes as its starting point the philosophical discussion of deep disagreement, using the (...) example of taniwha (powerful water beings that must be treated with respect) to outline a strategy for building intercultural understanding and enabling constructive intercultural dialogue. (shrink)

Developing and implementing a meaningful code of conduct by managers or consultants may require a change in orientation that modifies the way these precepts are determined. The position advocated herein is for a different approach to understanding and organizing the guiding parameters of the firm that requires individual reflection and empowerment of the entire organization to advance their shared values. The processes involved are discussed using four discrete stages that move from the personal to the work team and to the (...) unit to the full company, followed by the board of directors’ evaluation. The hoped-for end product is dynamic, employee-driven, codes of conduct that recognize the systemic and far-reaching impact of organizational activities across internal and external stakeholders. Operational details for and some issues associated with its implementation are also provided. (shrink)

The popular notion of bullshit and the term that expresses it has received little philosophical attention despite the fact that it pervades much of human discourse. Frankfurt recovered bullshit analysis in the eighties and opened the way to studies on its nature and function. Our interest in bullshit is philosophically analytical, but also practical, as bullshit particularly affects the field of science policy. In order to understand that double character, we first present Grice’s model of meaning of expressions and then (...) summarize the controversy between the tobacco industry and the US Administration, which allows us to state our basic hypothesis: tobacco companies have developed and implemented a discursive tactic of bullshit in order to delay or avoid governmental regulations and decisions. Before eventually applying the Gricean model to various cases of bullshit, we locate our approach against the background of the comparison between sound and junk science. Keywords: Grice, intention, meaning, tobacco industry, bullshit, junk science, uncertainty. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the prospects for an account of good argument that takes the character of the arguer into consideration. We conclude that although there is much to be gained by identifying the virtues of the good arguer and by considering the ways in which these virtues can be developed in ourselves and in others, virtue argumentation theory does not offer a plausible alternative definition of good argument.