Fear generalisation is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when fear that is elicited in response to a frightening stimulus spreads to similar or related stimuli. The practical harms of pathological fear generalisation related to trauma are well-documented, but little or no attention has been given so far to its epistemic harms. This paper fills this gap in the literature. It shows how the psychological phenomenon, when it becomes pathological, substantially curbs the epistemic agency of those who experience the fear that (...) generalizes, limiting their ability to respond to evidence, and substantially limiting their epistemic horizons. It is argued that when these epistemic harms are caused by wrongful actions and decisions of individuals or institutions, because the fear is elicited in response to a traumatic experience inflicted by them, the harms should be considered epistemic wrongs. The epistemic wrongs are closely akin to agential epistemic injustice, a variety of distributive epistemic injustice, and sometimes also involve epistemic exclusion. The paper thereby identifies a previously underexplored psychological mechanism that can be a vehicle through which both individuals and institutions can epistemically wrong others. The argument has implications for how both epistemic wrongs and epistemic injustice should be conceived, suggesting that both can occur without being caused by primarily epistemic flaws or errors, or a bad epistemic character. Finally, it highlights the advantage of taking a victim-centred approach to understanding epistemic harm. (shrink)

The ideal of objectivity is in crisis in science and the law, and yet it continues to do important work in both practices. This article describes that crisis and develops a shared rescue strategy for objectivity in both domains. In a recent article, Inkeri Koskinen attempts to bring unity to the fragmented discourse on objectivity in the philosophy of science with a risk account of objectivity. To put it simply, she argues that we call practitioners, processes, and products of science (...) objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic risks. We endorse this view and attempt to tailor Koskinen's strategy to the problem of objectivity in the legal context. To do so, we develop a novel notion of phronetic risk, and argue that we call practitioners, processes, and products of law objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic and/or phronetic risks. Our attempt to rescue objectivity is especially important for work at the intersection of law and psychiatry. For that intersection represents a place where skeptical worries about objectivity in science and law work in tandem to pose serious critical challenges to contemporary practice; and our rescue strategy represents a promising way to negotiate those challenges. (shrink)

How should we respond to extremist views that we know are false? This paper proposes that we should be intellectually humble, but not open-minded. We should own our intellectual limitations, but be unwilling to revise our beliefs in the falsity of the extremist views. The opening section makes a case for distinguishing the concept of intellectual humility from the concept of open-mindedness, arguing that open-mindedness requires both a willingness to revise extant beliefs and other-oriented engagement, whereas intellectual humility requires neither. (...) Building on virtue-consequentialism, the second section makes a start on arguing that intellectually virtuous people of a particular sort—people with ‘effects-virtues’—would be intellectually humble, but not open-minded, in responding to extremist views they knew were false. We suggest that while intellectual humility and open-mindedness often travel together, this is a place where they come apart. (shrink)

Epistemic analyses of stereotyping describe how they lead to misperceptions and misunderstandings of social actors and events. The analyses have tended so far to focus on how people acquire stereotypes and/or how the stereotypes lead to distorted perceptions of the evidence that is available about individuals. In this chapter, I focus instead on how the stereotypes can generate misleading evidence by influencing the policy preferences of people who harbour the biases. My case study is stereotypes that relate to people living (...) in poverty. I show how these stereotypes influence policy choices in ways that generate misleading evidence about people living in poverty. I argue that the stereotypes generate the misleading evidence by supporting policies that restrict the agency of the people in poverty. In generating this misleading evidence, the stereotypes place additional constraints on the epistemic agency of everyone, making it harder for anyone, including those who do and those who do not endorse the stereotypes, to gain true beliefs about people living in poverty. Going forward, I conclude, adequate epistemic analyses of stereotyping ought to be more expansive, acknowledging both the way that stereotypes generate misleading evidence by constraining the agency of those stereotyped, and how we can all thereby be epistemically constrained by the stereotypes harboured by others. (shrink)

I argue that faith is a type of trust. It is also part of a relationship in which both parties are called on to be faithful, where faithfulness is a type of trustworthiness. What distinguishes faith relationships from trust relationships is that both parties value the faith relationship intrinsically. I discuss how faith on this account can, and cannot, be rational when it goes beyond a person’s evidence. It turns out that faith has the same rationality conditions as trust, differing (...) from it only in the cases that fix our intuitions. (shrink)

This volume advances the contemporary debate on five central issues in the philosophy of film. These issues concern the relation between the art and technology of film, the nature of film realism, how narrative fiction films narrate, how we engage emotionally with films, and whether films can philosophize. Two new essays by leading figures in the field present different views on each issue. The paired essays contain significant points of both agreement and disagreement; new theories and frameworks are proposed at (...) the same time as authors review the current state of debate. Given their combination of richness and clarity, the essays in this volume can effectively engage both students, undergraduate or graduate, and academic researchers. (shrink)

Those who have views about the relation between aesthetic and ethical value often also have views about the nature of art criticism. Yet no one has paid much attention to the compatibility of views in one debate with views in the other. This is worrying in light of a tension between two popular kinds of view: namely, between critical pluralism and any view in the art and ethics debate that presupposes an invariant relation between aesthetic value and ethical value. Specifically, (...) the tension with invariance arises insofar as critical pluralism accommodates the aesthetic value of interpretive richness, including the aesthetic value of ethically conflicted interpretive richness. Given this tension, a shift of focus is needed in the art and ethics debate; from specifying the criteria for the aesthetic relevance of a work's ethical qualities to defending the fundamental nature of the aesthetic-ethical value relation. (shrink)

Wexler and Specker Sullivan (2023) reflect on the field of neuroethics by highlighting criticisms from both scholars within and outside the field. Among these criticisms, are claims that neuroethic...

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare systemic inequities shaped by social determinants of health (SDoH). Public health agencies, legislators, health systems, and community organizations took notice, and there is currently unprecedented interest in identifying and implementing programs to address SDoH. This special issue focuses on the role of medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) in addressing SDoH and racial and social inequities, as well as the need to support these efforts with evidence-based research, data, and meaningful partnerships and funding.

Gatekeeping, or determining membership of your group, is crucial to science: the moniker ‘scientific’ is a stamp of epistemic quality or even authority. But gatekeeping in science is fraught with dangers. Gatekeepers must exclude bad science, science fraud and pseudoscience, while including the disagreeing viewpoints on which science thrives. This is a difficult tightrope, not least because gatekeeping is a human matter and can be influenced by biases such as groupthink. After spelling out these general tensions around gatekeeping in science, (...) we shed light on them with a case study from psychology. This concerns whether academic psychologists rightly or wrongly classify the applied-psychology framework of NLP (‘neuro-linguistic programming’) as unscientific and even pseudoscientific. This example of gatekeeping is particularly instructive because both the NLP community and the psychology community, we argue, make legitimate but also illegitimate moves. This case gives rise to several general insights about gatekeeping in science more generally. (shrink)

Recent discussions of structuralist approaches to scientific theories have stemmed primarily from Worrall's, in which he defends a position whose historical roots he attributes to Poincare. In the renewed debate inspired by Worrall, it is thus not uncommon to find Poincare's name associated with various structuralist positions. However, Poincare's structuralism is deeply entwined with both his conventionalism and his idealism, and in this paper we explore the nature of these dependencies. What comes out in the end is not only a (...) clearer picture of Poincare's position regarding structuralism, but also two arguments for versions of epistemic structuralism different in kind from that given by Worrall. (shrink)

An important technique in large cardinal set theory is that of extending an elementary embedding j: M → N between inner models to an elementary embedding j*: M[G] → N[G*] between generic extensions of them. This technique is crucial both in the study of large cardinal preservation and of internal consistency. In easy cases, such as when forcing to make the GCH hold while preserving a measurable cardinal (via a reverse Easton iteration of α-Cohen forcing for successor cardinals α), the (...) generic G* is simply generated by the image of G. But in difficult cases, such as in Woodin's proof that a hypermeasurable is sufficient to obtain a failure of the GCH at a measurable, a preliminary version of G* must be constructed (possibly in a further generic extension of M[G]) and then modified to provide the required G*. In this article we use perfect trees to reduce some difficult cases to easy ones, using fusion as a substitute for distributivity. We apply our technique to provide a new proof of Woodin's theorem as well as the new result that global domination at inaccessibles (the statement that d (κ) is less than 2κ for inaccessible κ, where d (κ) is the dominating number at κ) is internally consistent, given the existence of 0#. (shrink)

This paper focuses on how experiences of trauma can lead to generalized fear of people, objects and places that are similar or contextually or conceptually related to those that produced the initial fear, causing epistemic, affective, and practical harms to those who are unduly feared and those who are intimates of the victim of trauma. We argue that cases of fear generalization that bring harm to other people constitute examples of injustice closely akin to testimonial injustice, specifically, mnemonic injustice. Mnemonic (...) injustice is a label that has been introduced to capture how injustice can occur via the operation of human memory systems when stereotypes shape what is remembered. Here we argue that injustices can also occur via memory systems when trauma leads to a generalized fear. We also argue that this calls for a reformulation of the notion of mnemonic injustice. (shrink)

J. H. Lambert proved important results of what we now think of as non-Euclidean geometries, and gave examples of surfaces satisfying their theorems. I use his philosophical views to explain why he did not think the certainty of Euclidean geometry was threatened by the development of what we regard as alternatives to it. Lambert holds that theories other than Euclid's fall prey to skeptical doubt. So despite their satisfiability, for him these theories are not equal to Euclid's in justification. Contrary (...) to recent interpretations, then, Lambert does not conceive of mathematical justification as semantic. According to Lambert, Euclid overcomes doubt by means of postulates. Euclid's theory thus owes its justification not to the existence of the surfaces that satisfy it, but to the postulates according to which these "models" are constructed. To understand Lambert's view of postulates and the doubt they answer, I examine his criticism of Christian Wolff's views. I argue that Lambert's view reflects insight into traditional mathematical practice and has value as a foil for contemporary, model-theoretic, views of justification. (shrink)

Several prominent debates in biology, such as those surrounding adaptationism, group selection, and punctuated equilibrium, have focused on disagreements about the relative importance of a cause in producing a phenomenon of interest. Some philosophers, such as John Beatty have expressed scepticism about the scientific value of engaging in these controversies, and Karen Kovaka has suggested that their value might be limited. In this paper, I challenge that scepticism by giving a novel analysis of relative significance controversies, showing that there are (...) three forms they can take. I argue that these controversies can have significant epistemic upshots, in that they help scientists form predictions about new instances of the phenomenon of interest. Finally, using two historical examples, I show how engaging in these controversies can improve our understanding of causal relationships. (shrink)

Consideration of social cognition—how an individual’s decision-making is influenced by her/his social environment—is key to understanding the behaviour of socially living nonhuman primates. In this chapter we discuss primate social cognition by focusing on primates’ behavioural responses to the presence and actions of others, how they adjust their behaviour to maximize their own gains, and possibly also the rewards received by a partner. Individuals can observe and replicate the actions of others, or the outcomes of their actions, to accelerate behavioural (...) acquisition of techniques to obtain rewards. Beyond passively observing others, primates can also work with group mates to obtain rewards more easily or to get rewards that would otherwise be unattainable by a single individual. Although not universally seen among primates, one individual may also help another to acquire resources. Prosocial and collaborative interactions may result in an imbalance of benefits received, and certain primate species respond negatively when receiving less than a social partner, a response which may protect individuals against cheating. Such behaviours demonstrate how the interplay between an individual’s desires and those of others can modify behavioural outcomes and the importance of considering cognition from a social perspective in order to understand the decision-making of individuals. However, there is variation both within and between species in their sensitivity to the actions of others and their responses to them. Thus, a comparative framework is needed when studying what is meant by ‘primate social cognition’. (shrink)

The article discusses leadership enactment in medical emergencies. We draw on video recordings of simulated obstetric emergencies and investigate how senior clinicians ‘do being’ the leader discursively in the spatiomaterial context of the emergency room. We take an interactional analysis approach, combining conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics and look specifically into the ways in which professional roles do interactional control using directives and questions in the material space of the obstetric room. We discuss this interactional performance in relation to the (...) clinical performance of the teams. Our analysis shows that leadership in medical emergencies is multimodally achieved; professionals draw on discursive strategies, the affordances of material space, body and gaze orientation, which build on each other and converge in indexing leadership. Our findings highlight the situated nature of negotiating responsibility, illustrating that leadership in our context is claimed, projected and resisted discursively. We provide a typology of the functions of questions in the emergency encounter, and close the article by foregrounding the implications of our study and providing directions for further research. (shrink)

Für ökonomische Evaluationen medizinischer Leistungen steht ein etabliertes Methodenspektrum zur Verfügung. Ziel der Arbeit ist, anhand ausgewählter Aspekte herauszuarbeiten, inwieweit diese Methoden für den derzeit viel diskutierten Bereich der Personalisierten Medizin anwendbar sind bzw. welche Besonderheiten dabei auftreten und wie diese adressiert werden können. Für die vorliegende Arbeit wurde eine explorative Literaturrecherche durchgeführt. In Abgrenzung zur herkömmlichen Medizin kann je nach Blickwinkel die Personalisierte Medizin entweder hinsichtlich der physiologischen Unterschiede oder hinsichtlich der individuellen Präferenzen der Beteiligten betrachtet werden. Je nach (...) Betrachtungsweise ergeben sich unterschiedliche methodische Herausforderungen an gesundheitsökonomische Evaluationen. Verbesserte Ausrichtung der Versorgung an physiologischen Unterschieden stellt die Evaluation beispielsweise vor das Problem, dass aufgrund des oftmals kleinen Stichprobenumfangs häufig Evidenz zur Parametrisierung von Entscheidungsmodellen fehlt. Informationswertanalysen können Hinweise über den potenziellen Nutzen weiterer Forschung geben. Das Konzept des „Expected Value of Individualized Care“ bietet einen den Informationswertanalysen sehr ähnlichen Ansatz, um den potenziellen Wert eines Einbezugs individueller Präferenzen in die Versorgung zu quantifizieren. Welfarismus und Extra-Welfarismus bieten unterschiedliche Lösungsansätze, wie Nutzen Biomarker-basierter Information im Sinne von „Empowerment“ in Evaluationen einbezogen werden können. Generell sind die Methoden der gesundheitsökonomischen Evaluation auch auf den Bereich der Personalisierten Medizin anwendbar. Es stellen sich jedoch eine Reihe spezifischer Herausforderungen, zu deren Lösung weiterer Forschungsbedarf besteht. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years there has been increasing interest in the work of Michel Foucault in the social sciences and in particular with relation to education. This, the first book to draw on his work to consider lifelong learning, explores the significance of policies and practices of lifelong learning to the wider societies of which they are a part. With a breadth of international contributors and sites of analysis, this book offers insights into such questions as: What are the (...) effects of lifelong learning policies within socio-political systems of governance? What does lifelong learning do to our understanding of ourselves as citizens? How does lifelong learning act in the regulation and re-ordering of what people do? The book suggests that understanding of lifelong learning as contributory to the knowledge economy, globalisation or the new work order may need to be revised if we are to understand its impact more fully. It therefore makes a significant contribution to the study of lifelong learning. (shrink)

Spirituality has been a part of nursing for many centuries and represents an essential value for people, including nurses and patients. Cumulative evidence points to the positive contribution of spiritually on health and wellbeing. However, there is little clarity about what spirituality means. The literature reveals that nurses have ascribed a diversity of interpretations to spirituality. However, no studies have investigated how registered nurses construct their understanding of spirituality using a critical discourse analysis approach. Therefore, the aim of this study (...) was to uncover how registered nurses construct their understanding of spirituality using a critical discourse analysis approach. Twenty registered nurses from a non‐denominational public hospital and a faith‐based private hospital were interviewed about their understanding of spirituality and practice of spiritual care. A critical discourse analysis approach was used in the examination of the interview texts to uncover underlying social and power features. Links were made between the linguistic features the registered nurses used in their interviews and the broader social context of the study. Three discourses emerged from the interview texts. These include constructing spirituality through personal religious beliefs discourse, holistic discourse and empathetic care discourse. The findings of this study have implications for nurse education and policy makers. (shrink)

The COVID-19 Law Lab platform enables quantitative representation of epidemic law and policies in a given country for multiple years, enabling governments and researchers to compare countries, and learn about the impacts and drivers of policy choices. The Law Lab initiative is designed to address the urgent need for quality legal information to support the study of how law and policy can be used to effectively manage this, and future, pandemic(s).

Media, politicians, and the courts portray college campuses as divided over diversity and affirmative action. But what do students and faculty really think? This book uses a novel technique to elicit honest opinions from students and faculty and measure preferences for diversity in undergraduate admissions and faculty recruitment at seven major universities, breaking out attitudes by participants' race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, and political partisanship. Scholarly excellence is a top priority everywhere, but the authors show that when students consider individual (...) candidates, they favor members of all traditionally underrepresented groups - by race, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic background. Moreover, there is little evidence of polarization in the attitudes of different student groups. The book reveals that campus communities are less deeply divided than they are often portrayed to be; although affirmative action remains controversial in the abstract, there is broad support for prioritizing diversity in practice. (shrink)

A recent article in this journal by Katrina Hutchison exposes and addresses the cumulative effects of implicit bias on women in surgery. We doubt that there is a single woman in any surgical field who has not experienced both implicit and explicit bias. Many of the issues facing women in surgery seem to be mirrored in both the developed and developing countries. There is little literature describing the exact situation in Africa. South African government institutions have made a concerted effort (...) to improve the representation of minorities in business, education and the health sector. In the hospital setting, hiring is done by means of a quota system based on demographics within that particular sector. This has also resulted in a number of unforeseen epistemic biases. This policy-driven ‘forced’ hiring of female candidates also led to feelings of doubt in the candidates themselves about their merits and competence and capabilities. This epistemic bias can then filter down, feeding the already prevalent imposter syndrome and confidence issues felt by many female surgical trainees. Not only do we need to aim to change the culture in surgical departments by changing the image of the ‘stereotypical surgeon’, we need to extend this message out into our training institutions, communities and peoples’ homes. We believe that this is the only way to change a culture steeped in implicit bias, to be more inclusive of women and other minority groups and shed the assumption that they are lesser. (shrink)

Research has consistently revealed gender differences in attitudes toward science and technology. One explanation is that women are more personally affected by particular technologies, so they consider them differently. However, not all women universally experience biomedical technologies. We use the concept of technological salience to address how differences in subjective implications of a technology might explain differences in women’s attitudes toward biotechnology. In a sample of U.S. women from the National Survey of Fertility Barriers, we examine how women with and (...) without a biomedical barrier to fertility evaluate biotechnology for infertility, which, we argue, reflects differences in technological salience. For women with a biomedical barrier, various experiences, beliefs, and values impacted their attitudes; yet, most of these did not affect attitudes if women had not experienced a fertility barrier. Results suggest that technological salience contextualizes women’s attitudes toward these biotechnologies and may also have broader implications for other biotechnologies. (shrink)

This article focuses on a potentially perplexing aspect of our interactions with pictorial representations : in some cases, it seems that visual representations can play tricks on our cognitive faculties. We may either come to believe that objects represented in pictures are real or perhaps perceive them as such. The possibility of widespread pictorial illusions has been oft discussed, and discarded, in the aesthetics literature. I support this stance. However, the nature of the illusion is more complicated than is usually (...) considered. I argue that there are five different types of potential illusions and present reasons for rejecting each. I also explore in detail the most persistent illusion: the “object recognition perceptual illusion thesis,” which states that we undergo a perceptual illusion while viewing pictorial representations simply in virtue of seeing objects in the representation. I contend that a rejection of this thesis depends on the nature of perceptual content, an issue with far-reaching consequences in aesthetics. (shrink)

Previous philosophical work on distrust in science has argued that understanding public distrust in science and scientific interventions requires that we pay careful attention not only to epistemic considerations (that is, beliefs about science), but also to values, and the emotional contexts in which assessments of scientific credibility are made. This is likely to be a truncated list of relevant factors for understanding trust/distrust, but these are certainly key areas of concern. The aim of this paper is not to further (...) innumerate the list of relevant factors. Rather, it is to map the ways that these key areas (beliefs, values, and emotions) are related to each other. These are not distinct categories, but rather they interact, making our picture of distrust more complicated than we might otherwise imagine. This discussion will take place in the context of resistance to medical interventions. Notably, Ebola interventions in West Africa, HIV/AIDS testing in South Africa, and vaccines across the world. (shrink)

The Laws x argument that the gods attend to humans has a surprising structure: the Athenian offers an argument that ‘forces’ the interlocutor to agree that he was wrong, then says he needs a myth in addition. I argue that the myth responds to the interlocutor’s motivation for thinking that the gods ignore human beings, and that although it is not an argument, it is a vehicle for rational persuasion.

The Global Forum on Bioethics in Research (GFBR) served as a global platform for debate on ethical issues in international health research between 1999 and 2008, bringing together research ethics experts, researchers, policy makers and community members from developing and developed countries. In total, nine GFBR meetings were held on six continents. Work is currently underway to revive the GFBR. This paper describes the purpose and history of the GFBR and presents key elements for its reinstatement, future functioning and sustainability. (...) Potential participants and sponsors are encouraged to contribute actively to the future of this unique international research ethics event. (shrink)

Employer studies indicate recent college graduates are underprepared for workplace communication. Philosophy instructors should offer alternative writing assignments to improve career readiness. I propose philosophy instructors offer white paper assignments in lieu of, or in addition to, traditional academic writing assignments like argumentative papers. White papers provide students familiarity with business writing and inclusive and empowering learning opportunities. I present my argument as a white paper and provide sample white paper topics, scaffolding suggestions, and assessment examples.

Kant’s Mathematical World (KMW) is a strikingly original, richly detailed account of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics as a reckoning with the long-held understa.

Background Since the UK Abortion Act (1967), women have travelled from Ireland to the UK for legal abortion. In 2011 >4000 women did so. Knowledge and attitudes of medical students towards abortion have been published, however, this is the first such report from Ireland. Objective To investigate medical students’ attitudes towards abortion in Ireland. Methods All medical students at the University of Limerick, and physicians who graduated from the university within the previous 12 months, were invited via email to complete (...) an anonymous online survey. The questionnaire comprised 17 questions. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed. Results Response rate was 45% (n=169; 55% women; 88.2% <30 years of age; 66.7% Irish; 29.2% North American). Outcomes were: abortion should not be legally available (7.1%), abortion should be allowed in limited circumstances only (35.5%), abortion should be legally available upon request (55%). 72.8% of respondents were moderately/strongly prochoice (74% of women/71% of men/72% and 76% of Irish and North American respondents, respectively). Students aged >30 years were less likely to be prochoice (55%). While 95.2% believed that education on abortion should be offered within medical school curricula, 28.8% stated that they would decline to terminate pregnancies even if legally permitted. While 58.8% indicated that they might perform legal abortions once qualified, 25.7% would do so under limited circumstances only. Conclusions The majority of participants wanted education regarding abortion. Despite being predominantly prochoice, considerably fewer students, irrespective of nationality, indicated that they would perform abortions. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The ‘Essence’ of a Philosophical Prejudice One Philosophical Task or Two? Techniques for Ridding People of Philosophical Prejudices.