This commentary responds to Moti Gorin's article “What Is the Aim of Pediatric ‘Gender‐Affirming’ Care?” We argue that Gorin's case against pediatric gender‐affirming care rests upon numerous false conceptual binaries: female/male, public/private, objective/subjective, and medically necessary/elective. Drawing on feminist bioethics, we show how such dichotomous thinking is both inaccurate and marginalizing of gender minorities.

Emmanuel Levinas compares ethical responsibility to a maternal body who bears the Other in the same without assimilation. In explicating this trope, he refers to a biblical passage in which Moses is like a “wet nurse” bearing Others whom he has “neither conceived nor given birth to”. A close reading of this passage raises questions about ethics, maternity, and sexual difference, for both the concept of ethical substitution and the material practice of mothering.

This volume honors Lisa Cahill's 45 years of teaching Christian ethics at Boston College. With contributions from most of the doctoral students she directed during her career, it provides an interpretive overview of Cahill's specific contributions to Christian ethics.

Motivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most important ethical and political problems of our time, the contributors to this volume come together from a diverse range of backgrounds to analyze, critique, and envision alternatives to the injustices of the U.S. prison system, with recourse to deconstruction, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. They engage with the hyper-incarceration of people of color, the incomplete abolition of slavery, the exploitation of prisoners (...) as workers and as "raw material" for the prison industrial complex, the intensive confinement of prisoners in supermax units, and the complexities of capital punishment in an age of abolition. -/- Contents -/- Introduction: Death and Other Penalties Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman -/- Part I. Legacies of Slavery -/- Excavating the Sedimentations of Slavery: The Unfinished Project of American Abolition Brady Heiner -/- From Commodity Fetishism to Prison Fetishism: Slavery, Convict-leasing, and the Ideological Productions of Incarceration James Manos -/- Maroon Philosophy: An Interview with Russell Maroon Shoatz Russell Maroon Shoatz -/- Part II. Death Penalties -/- In Reality-from the Row Derrick Quintero -/- Inheritances of the Death Penalty: American Racism and Derrida's Theologico-Political Sovereignty Geoffrey Adelsberg -/- Making Death a Penalty: Or, Making "Good" Death a "Good" Penalty Kelly Oliver -/- Death Penalty Abolition in Neoliberal Times: The SAFE California Act and the Nexus of Savings and Security Andrew Dilts -/- On the Inviolability of Human Life Julia Kristeva (translated by Lisa Walsh) -/- Part III. Rethinking Power and Responsibility -/- Punishment, Desert, and Equality: A Levinasian Analysis Benjamin S. Yost -/- Prisons and Palliative Politics Ami Harbin -/- Sovereignty, Community, and the Incarceration of Immigrants Matt S. Whitt -/- Without the Right to Exist: Mass Incarceration and National Security Andrea Smith -/- Prison Abolition and a Culture of Sexual Difference Sarah Tyson -/- Part IV. Isolation and Resistance -/- Statement on Solitary Confinement Abu Ali Abdur'Rahman -/- The Violence of the Supermax: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics of Prison Space Adrian Switzer -/- Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry Shokoufeh Sakhi -/- Critical Theory, Queer Resistance, and the Ends of Capture Liat Ben-Moshe, Che Gossett, Nick Mitchell, and Eric A. Stanley. (shrink)

The grounds for global solidarity have been theorized and conceptualized in recent years, and many have argued that we need a global concept of solidarity. But the question remains: what can motivate efforts of the international community and nation-states? Our focus is the grounding of solidarity with respect to global inequities in health. We explore what considerations could motivate acts of global solidarity in the specific context of health migration, and sketch briefly what form this kind of solidarity could take. (...) First, we argue that the only plausible conceptualization of persons highlights their interdependence. We draw upon a conception of persons as ‘ecological subjects’ and from there illustrate what such a conception implies with the example of nurses migrating from low and middle-income countries to more affluent ones. Next, we address potential critics who might counter any such understanding of current international politics with a reference to real-politik and the insights of realist international political theory. We argue that national governments – while not always or even often motivated by moral reasons alone – may nevertheless be motivated to acts of global solidarity by prudential arguments. Solidarity then need not be, as many argue, a function of charitable inclination, or emergent from an acknowledgment of injustice suffered, but may in fact serve national and transnational interests. We conclude on a positive note: global solidarity may be conceptualized to helpfully address global health inequity, to the extent that personal and transnational interdependence are enough to motivate national governments into action. (shrink)

This volume presents cutting-edge theory and research on emotions as constructed events rather than fixed, essential entities. It provides a thorough introduction to the assumptions, hypotheses, and scientific methods that embody psychological constructionist approaches. Leading scholars examine the neurobiological, cognitive/perceptual, and social processes that give rise to the experiences Western cultures call sadness, anger, fear, and so on. The book explores such compelling questions as how the brain creates emotional experiences, whether the "ingredients" of emotions also give rise to other (...) mental states, and how to define what is or is not an emotion. Introductory and concluding chapters by the editors identify key themes and controversies and compare psychological construction to other theories of emotion. (shrink)

I argue that a particular epistemological approach, “ecological thinking,” helps to demonstrate that long-term care work is organized transnationally—through health, economic, labor, and immigration policies established primarily by governments, transnational corporations, other for-profit entities, and international lending bodies—to create and sustain injustice against the dependent elderly and those who care for them, and to weaken the care capacities of countries and their health systems, especially those of source countries. An ecological approach also helps to reveal the grounding of global responsibilities (...) and an alternative conception of justice for long-term care and global health equity more generally. (shrink)

The present study provides evidence that valence focus and arousal focus are important processes in determining whether a dimensional or a discrete emotion model best captures how people label their affective states. Individuals high in valence focus and low in arousal focus fit a dimensional model better in that they reported more co-occurrences among like-valenced affective states, whereas those lower in valence focus and higher in arousal focus fit a discrete model better in that they reported fewer co-occurrences between like-valenced (...) affective states. Taken together, these findings suggest that one static, nomothetic theory may not accurately describe the subjective affective experience of all individuals. (shrink)

Conflict adaptation reflects the increase in cognitive control after previous conflict between task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. Tonic arousal elicited by emotional words e...

Does conscious reflection lead to good decision-making? Whereas engaging in reflection is traditionally thought to be the best way to make wise choices, recent psychological evidence undermines the role of reflection in lay and expert judgement. The literature suggests that thinking about reasons does not improve the choices people make, and that experts do not engage in reflection, but base their judgements on intuition, often shaped by extensive previous experience. Can we square the traditional accounts of wisdom with the results (...) of these empirical studies? Should we even attempt to? I shall defend the view that philosophy and cognitive sciences genuinely interact in tackling questions such as whether reflection leads to making wise choices. (shrink)

For the first time, the revised Common Rule specifies that public health surveillance activities are not research. This article reviews the historical development of the public health surveillance exclusion and implications for other foundational public health practices.

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a turn (...) to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences. (shrink)

The work of Michel Foucault is much read, widely cited, and occasionally misunderstood. In response to this state of affairs, this collection aims to clarify, to contextualize, and to contribute to Foucauldian scholarship in a very specific way. Rather than offering either a conceptual introduction to Foucault's work, or a series of interventions aimed specifically at experts, After Foucault explores his critical afterlives, situates his work in current debates, and explains his intellectual legacy. As well as offering up-to-date assessments of (...) Foucault's ongoing use in fields such as literary studies, sexuality studies, and history, chapters explore his relevance for urgent and emerging disciplines and debates, including ecology, animal studies, and the analysis of neoliberalism. Written in an accessible style, by leading experts, After Foucault demonstrates a commitment to taking seriously the work of a key twentieth-century thinker for contemporary academic disciplines, political phenomena, and cultural life. (shrink)

In Australia, along with many other countries, limited guidance or other support strategies are currently available to researchers, institutional research ethics committees, and others responsible for making decisions about whether to return genomic findings with potential value to participants or their blood relatives. This lack of guidance results in onerous decision-making burdens—traversing technical, interpretative, and ethical dimensions—as well as uncertainty and inconsistencies for research participants. This article draws on a recent targeted consultation conducted by the Australian National Health and Medical (...) Research Council to put forward strategies for supporting return of finding decision-making. In particular, we propose a pyramid of decision-making support: decision-making guidelines, technical and interpretative assistance, and ethical assistance for intractable “tough” cases. Each step of the pyramid involves an increasing level of regulatory involvement and applies to a smaller subsection of genomic research findings. Implementation of such strategies would facilitate a growing evidence base for return of finding decisions, thereby easing the financial, time, and moral burdens currently placed on researchers and other relevant decision-makers while also improving the quality of such decisions and, consequently, participant outcomes. (shrink)

McCullough et al. suggest that revenge and forgiveness rest upon risk computation. Risk computation is implemented by emotions that evolved for additional functions, giving rise to phenomena such as betrayal aversion and taboo-tradeoffs, and specific patterns of forgiveness we have documented. A complete account of revenge and reconciliation should incorporate broader constructs from social psychology, including emotions and values hierarchies.

In this paper we construct an extension, ℒ, of Anderson and Belnap's relevance logic R that is classical in the sense that it contains p&p → q as a theorem, and we prove that ℒ is pretabular in the sense that while it does not have a finite characteristic matrix, every proper normal extension of it does. We end the paper by commenting on the possibility of finding other classical relevance logics that are also pretabular.

This commentary was submitted to the World Medical Association on behalf of the International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Our submission included a description of feminist research ethics, suggestions for specific revisions to the Declaration, and elements found in other international research ethics codes that are important from a feminist perspective. Our goals were to encourage the WMA to craft a declaration that: conceptualizes issues of vulnerability in richer and more nuanced ways, resists the influence of profit motives, and (...) extends the scope of responsibility for ethical research more broadly. (shrink)

Chipman, Meagher, and Barwise (2024) develop a public health ethics framework to understand and address health disparities for those with limited English proficiency (LEP). People with LEP face hea...

Section I examines historical philosophical understandings of expertise in order to situate the current institution of bioethics. Section II focuses on philosophical analyses of the concept of expertise, asking, among other things, how it should be understood, how it can be acquired, and what such expertise warrants. Finally, section III addresses topics in bioethics and how ethics expertise should or should not be brought to bear in these areas, including expertise in the court room, in the hospital room, in the (...) media, and in making policy. 2. A GUIDED HISTORICAL TOUR As Scott LaBarge points out, Plato’s dialogues can be viewed as an extended treatment of the concept of moral expertise, so it is fitting to begin the volume with an examination of “Socrates and Moral Expertise”. Given Socrates’ protestations that he knows nothing, LaBarge observes that it would be interesting to determine both what a Socratic theory of moral expertise might be and whether Socrates qualified as such an expert. Plato’s model of moral expertise is what LaBarge calls “demonstrable expertise”, which is concerned mainly with the ability to attain a goal and to explain how one did it. The problem with this account is that when one tries to solve the various problems in the model – for example, allowing that moral expertise is not an all-or-nothing skill – then one is immediately faced with the “credentials problem”. As LaBarge puts it, “... (shrink)

In this paper, we consider the relationships among corporate accountability, reputation, and tax behavior as a corporate social responsibility issue. As part of our investigation, we provide empirical examples of corporate reputation and corporate tax behaviors using a sample of large, U.S.-based multinational companies. In addition, we utilize corporate tax controversies to illustrate possibilities for aggressive corporate tax behaviors of high-profile multinationals to become a reputation threat. Finally, we consider whether reputation serves as an accountability mechanism for corporate tax behaviors (...) among other mechanisms for holding firms accountable for corporate tax behaviors. Our conceptual work points to a complicated relationship among shareholder, stakeholder, and civic responsibilities in the development and execution of firm’s corporate tax strategies. Building on those insights, our empirical illustration considers corporate reputation data alongside data which reflects corporate tax behavior. Based on this work, we find no clear trend or pattern indicating that reputation is associated with or affected by certain types of corporate tax behaviors. That is, our exploratory empirical illustration suggests that corporate tax behavior does not produce broad reputational consequences that would motivate a change in firm behavior. Drawing from celebrity and strategic silence research, we then suggest that reputation may not be a well-functioning mechanism for holding corporations to account for contributing their fair share of the resources used by government for the benefit of society and offer-related theoretical insights. (shrink)

This article analyses the two main rhetorical techniques of “argumentation” and “persuasion” employed in politico-philosophical debates recorded in early Chinese argumentative texts of the Warring States period. Through the analysis of pertinent case studies drawn from the received literature, the contribution explores the formal, structural, and grammatical features of these techniques, with attention paid to the wide selection of rhetorical and literary devices they make use of. It also further provides an overview of the historical and socio-cultural background against which (...) such techniques developed among so called “wandering persuaders”, who were travelling from court to court to offer their services as political advisors and diplomats to the local rulers of the time. (shrink)

With Spirits and Clocks, Dennis Des Chene completes a two-part project begun with Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul. In both volumes, Des Chene is concerned with the question of what makes living things living. For the Jesuit Aristotelians, the answer requires a complex analysis of the ontology of soul and power. For Descartes, of course, the answer is completely different; arguably, there is a sense in which his answer is: nothing. Indeed Des Chene does argue this, concluding (...) that for Descartes there are no living things in the Aristotelian sense: the body machine does not live, because it has no powers; the soul does not live because it has no role in nutrition, growth, and generation. Descartes’s physiology thus represents the most radical aspect of his natural philosophy, for he must eliminate souls from living things as part of the general project of eliminating Aristotelian forms from nature. As such, the importance of Descartes’s physiology is manifest; Des Chene’s study is a very welcome and original addition to the still-modest philosophical literature engaged with Descartes’sL’Homme and La description du corps humain. (shrink)

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich's recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues (...) that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice. (shrink)

Setting out to understand the effects of positive moral emotions in leadership, this research examines the consequences of leaders’ expressions of gratitude and pride for their followers. In two experimental vignette studies and a field study, leaders’ gratitude expressions showed a positive effect and leaders’ pride expressions showed a negative effect on followers’ ascriptions of leader selfishness. Thereby, leaders’ gratitude expression indirectly led to higher follower satisfaction with and OCB towards the leader, while leaders’ pride expressions indirectly reduced satisfaction with (...) and OCB towards the leader. Furthermore, leaders’ expressions of gratitude indirectly reduced followers’ intentions to leave the leader, while leaders’ expressions of pride indirectly fuelled them. Although ascriptions of selfishness consistently influenced these leader outcomes more strongly than comparable organizational outcomes, results on organizational outcomes were mixed. While leaders’ expressions of gratitude led, as expected, to higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intentions, leaders’ expressions of pride showed positive relations with both OCB towards the organization and intentions to leave the organization. We discuss the theoretical implications of leaders’ expressions of positive moral emotions as signals of outcome attributions, as well as leaders’ selfishness and practical implications that help leaders build followers’ satisfaction and positive leader–follower relationships. (shrink)

Advancements in the field of biotechnology have accelerated the development of drugs that are manufactured from cultures of living cells, commonly referred to as “biologics.” Due to the complexity of the production process, generic biologics are unlikely to be chemically identical to the reference product, and accordingly are referred to as “biosimilars.”Encouraging the development of biosimilars has been presented as the key solution to decrease prices and increase access to biologics, but the development and use of biosimilars continues to raise (...) problems, none of which can easily be addressed. Developing a biosimilar requires considerable time and financial resources, and legitimate safety concerns necessitate elaborate clinical testing of biosimilars. As a consequence, the introduction of biosimilars onto the market has not resulted in significant price reductions, and concerns regarding the substitution and interchangeability of original biologics with biosimilars persist.This article will explain how the biologics production process distorts the trade-offs that traditionally guided both patent protection and regulatory exclusivities: disclosure as a key condition for benefiting from the corresponding monopoly position. Hence, we propose establishing a mechanism of mandatory deposit of the original biologic's cell line at the stage of the regulatory approval as the most effective remedy. (shrink)

This paper considers just how memory works throughout the Meditations to adduce Descartes’s conception of memory. Examining the meditator’s memory at work raises some questions about the nature of Cartesian memory and its epistemic role. What is the distinction between remembering and repeating a thought? If remembering is not simply repeating a thought, then what is involved in properly remembering? Can we remember properly while adding or shifting content, say, in virtue of articulating relations between ideas? If so, what is (...) the relation between remembering and reasoning, since both would then involve relations of ideas? These questions become salient in considering the meditator’s creative recollections in the Third and especially the Sixth Meditations. After briefly considering what Descartes does say about memory, I consider two other strategies for addressing those questions: an analogy with innate ideas, and attending to the role that other thinkers play in one’s own recollections. (shrink)

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 19, Issue 5, Page 781-786, December 2011.

Various debates in bioethics have been focused on whether non-persons, such as marginal humans or non-human animals, deserve respectful treatment. It has been argued that, where we cannot agree on whether these individuals have moral status, we might agree that they have symbolic value and ascribe to them moral value in virtue of their symbolic significance. In the paper I resist the suggestion that symbolic value is relevant to ethical disputes in which the respect for individuals with no intrinsic moral (...) value is in conflict with the interests of individuals with intrinsic moral value. I then turn to moral status and discuss the suitability of personhood as a criterion. There some desiderata for a criterion for moral status: it should be applicable on the basis of our current scientific knowledge; it should have a solid ethical justification; and it should be in line with some of our moral intuitions and social practices. Although it highlights an important connection between the possession of some psychological properties and eligibility for moral status, the criterion of personhood does not meet the desiderata above. I suggest that all intentional systems should be credited with moral status in virtue of having preferences and interests that are relevant to their well-being. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between knowledge, politics, and education in the context of the global crisis of democracy and the growing prevalence of political polarization. Focusing on the issue of vaccine hesitancy, I explore how citizens’ reference to knowledge and values shapes their political judgements and argue for the importance of education in facilitating informed and reasoned decision-making. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s dialectical account of politics and knowledge, I highlight the limitations of reducing political debates to a quest for (...) ‘right knowledge’, arguing that it neglects the coordination of diverse values and interpretations that is essential to democratic processes. To do so, I discuss ‘educationalization’ of the political during the COVID-19 pandemic, wherein the dissemination of empirically grounded information became a strategy to generate public consent. However, my article cautions against the hegemony of empirical knowledge, which can lead to despotic politics and the proliferation of misinformation. To ensure differentiated and reasonable judgements in uncertain situations and conflicts, I turn to Arendt’s concept of reflective and political judgement, emphasizing the ability to imagine others’ perspectives and construct general principles. The educational task, therefore, encompasses not only conveying factual knowledge but also nurturing reflective judgement that strikes a balance between factual truth and divergent interpretations, values, and interests. (shrink)

Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) warn that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey, did more than eliminate a nationwide right to...

Although much has been written about the property of rationality, its requirements, and whether it is normative, rationality attributions themselves have not received much attention. The main aim of this paper is to address this oversight by focussing directly on rationality attributions and their complexities. After offering a diagnosis for why attributions have been largely overlooked, the paper introduces three problems that have plagued the rationality debate as a result: implausible symmetry, conflicts within rationality, and with reasons. Brunero’s (2012) answer (...) to the symmetry problem provides the beginnings of a solution but makes it harder to compare the rationality of agents. The remainder of the paper is dedicated to spelling out the new approach: to understand rationality attributions as relative to specific sets of attitudes. This approach circumvents the previous problems and meets a number of desiderata, resulting in a more nuanced and complete understanding of rationality that can enhance our practices of praising or criticising agents based on their rational performance. (shrink)

Nach einer allgemeinen Hinführung zu den Themen „Markt“ und „Wettbewerb“ und deren normativen Dimension wird eine Reihe von wirtschaftsethischen Fragestellungen diskutiert: die deutschsprachige Debatte über den „Ort“ der Moral im Markt sowie verschiedene angelsächsische Debatten, die eine differenzierte Sicht auf die Problematik von Moral unter Bedingungen des Wettbewerbs erlauben. Abschließend wird argumentiert, dass sich in Situationen, in denen Wettbewerb die Erfüllung moralischer Pflichten erschwert, die Pflichten der Marktteilnehmer*innen hin zu kollektiven Pflichten verschieben, diese Umstände gemeinsam zu ändern.

This paper starts from an observation of our practices: when people are ascribed delusional beliefs or conspiracy beliefs, they tend to be excluded from shared epistemic projects relevant to the content of their beliefs. What might motivate this exclusion? One possibility is that delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs are considered as evidence of irrationality and pathology, and thus endorsing them suggests that one’s epistemic agency is compromised, at least in some contexts. One common argument for the irrational and pathological nature (...) of delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs lies in their being the outputs of faulty cognition. There are some areas of overlap in the cognitive antecedents of delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs as identified in the empirical literature. For instance, some biases and thinking styles have been correlated either with the adoption of delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs, or with the strength of conviction in such beliefs. The paper challenges the claim that, if delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs are the outputs of biased cognition, then it is justified to exclude people endorsing delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs from epistemic projects relevant to the content of their beliefs. The relevant biases and thinking styles are widespread in the non-clinical population, do not need to be part of a dysfunctional cognitive process, and can be adaptive in some contexts. (shrink)

In this paper I critique two popular, non-scientific attitudes toward genetically engineered foods. In doing so, I will be employing the concepts of ambiguity, purity/impurity, control/resistance, and unity/diversity as developed by Latina feminist metaphysicians. I begin by casting a critical eye toward a specific anti-biotech account of transgenic food crops, an account that I will argue relies on an anti-feminist metaphysics. I then cast that same critical eye toward a specific pro-biotech account, arguing that it also relies on such an (...) anti-feminist metaphysics. I will argue further that this metaphysics yields a less accurate account of genetics. I end by arguing that if we adopt a Latina feminist metaphysics we can more accurately understand plants, genetics, and genetic engineering. (shrink)

In this paper, I articulate the thesis that most delusional beliefs are continuous with other irrational beliefs. Any interpreter with some knowledge about the cognitive and affective life of subjects with delusions can at least partially understand their reports, and explain and predict their behavior in intentional terms. I identify similarities and differences between this approach to the nature of delusions and the approach adopted by Rhodes and Gipps, who have recently defended the view that people with delusions do not (...) share the same bedrock beliefs as people without (the Background Theory of Delusions). (shrink)