AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Social Theory After Cognitive Science1. Throwing Out the Tacit Rule Book: Learning and Practices2. Searle's Social Reality3. Imitation or the Internalization of Norms: Is Twentieth-Century Social Theory Based on the Wrong Choice?4. Relativism as Explanation5. The Limits of Social Constructionism6. Making Normative Soup Out of Nonnormative Bones7. Teaching Subtlety of Thought: The Lessons of "Contextualism"8. Practice in Real Time9. The Significance of ShilsReferences Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

An introduction to the various logics of truth and modality as part of a foundation for the construction of theories of knowledge representation. The book reviews various semantic theories and employs them as the basis for the development of logics of truth and modality.

Augmented reality (AR) technologies function to ‘augment’ normal perception by superimposing virtual objects onto an agent’s visual field. The philosophy of augmented reality is a small but growing subfield within the philosophy of technology. Existing work in this subfield includes research on the phenomenology of augmented experiences, the metaphysics of virtual objects, and different ethical issues associated with AR systems, including (but not limited to) issues of privacy, property rights, ownership, trust, and informed consent. This paper addresses some epistemological issues (...) posed by AR systems. I focus on a near-future version of AR technology called the Real-World Web, which promises to radically transform the nature of our relationship to digital information by mixing the virtual with the physical. I argue that the Real-World Web (RWW) threatens to exacerbate three existing epistemic problems in the digital age: the problem of digital distraction, the problem of digital deception, and the problem of digital divergence. The RWW is poised to present new versions of these problems in the form of what I call the augmented attention economy, augmented skepticism, and the problem of other augmented minds. The paper draws on a range of empirical research on AR and offers a phenomenological analysis of virtual objects as perceptual affordances to help ground and guide the speculative nature of the discussion. It also considers a few policy-based and designed-based proposals to mitigate the epistemic threats posed by AR technology. (shrink)

This article addresses the long-standing problem of how to understand Mill’s famous harm principle in light of his failure to specify what counts as “harm” in On Liberty. I argue that standard accounts restricting “harm” to only certain negative consequences fail to do justice to the text, and that this fact forces us to rethink Mill’s defense of individual liberty. I then offer a new account of that defense in which “harm” is understood in an expansive sense, despite apparent problems (...) for such a view. (shrink)

In the wake of the paleobiological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, paleontologists continue to investigate far-reaching questions about how evolution works. Many of those questions have a philosophical dimension. How is macroevolution related to evolutionary changes within populations? Is evolutionary history contingent? How much can we know about the causes of evolutionary trends? How do paleontologists read the patterns in the fossil record to learn about the underlying evolutionary processes? Derek Turner explores these and other questions, introducing the (...) reader to exciting recent work in the philosophy of paleontology and to theoretical issues including punctuated equilibria and species selection. He also critically examines some of the major accomplishments and arguments of paleontologists of the last 40 years. (shrink)

Classic and canon -- Description -- Categories -- Metaphors -- Diagrams -- Cynicism and scepticism : two intellectual styles -- Sociological theory and the art of living.

John Stuart Mill’s defense of free discussion in On Liberty includes the claim that silencing discussion implies an “assumption of infallibility.” This claim is often dismissed as absurd on the ground that a censor might attempt to silence an opinion he believes to be true but pernicious, or because rational assurance short of infallibility is obviously sufficient to justify censorship. This paper argues that Mill is concerned about the epistemic position one assumes with regard to future persons and circumstances as (...) a result of attempting to settle some matter irremediably. The irrationality of this "assumption" sets an important authority-limiting constraint on both social authority and individuals in matters that otherwise would fall under their rightful control. For individuals, in particular, it explains Mill's restriction on selling oneself into irrevocable slavery. (shrink)

Eric Katz’s insight about the relationship between causal history and value only generates a principled critique of de-extinction when conjoined with the diminishment claim, or the claim that human involvement in something’s causal history diminishes its value. The diminishment claim is a form of negative anthropocentrism. In addition to thinking about de-extinction as a form of ecological restoration, we could think of it as a form of environmental artwork. This reframing highlights the implausibility of the diminishment claim.

Entrenched biases in favour of large, charismatic mammals, towards predators, towards terrestrial animals and towards species that have cultural importance can influence the selection of candidate species for de-extinction research. Often, the species with the highest existence value will also be the ones that raise the most serious animal welfare concerns.

Argument-giving reasons for a view-is our model of rational dispute resolution. Fogelin suggests that certain "deep" disagreements cannot be resolved in this way because features of their context "undercut the conditions essential to arguing" . In this paper we add some detail to Fogelin's treatment of intractable disagreements. In doing so we distinguish between his relatively modest claim that some disputes cannot be resolved through argument and his more radical claim that such disputes are beyond rational resolution. This distinction, along (...) with some ofthe detail we add to Fogelin's treatment, sheds some useful light on the project of informal logic. (shrink)

The problem of the nature of values and the relation between values and rationality is one of the defining issues of twentieth-century thought and Max Weber was one of the defining figures in the debate. In this book, Turner and Factor consider the development of the dispute over Max Weber's contribution to this discourse, by showing how Weber's views have been used, revised and adapted in new contexts. The story of the dispute is itself fascinating, for it cuts across (...) the major political and intellectual currents of the twentieth century, from positivism, pragmatism and value-free social science, through the philosophy of Jaspers and Heidegger, to Critical Theory and the revival of Natural Right and Natural Law. As Weber's ideas were imported to Britain and America, they found new formulations and new adherents and critics and became absorbed into different traditions and new issues. This book was first published in 1984. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper identifies some of the ethical problems encountered when Western-led military forces conduct operations designed to improve the condition of women in modern conflict zones. We rely on examples from recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, where commanders were required to direct some of their capabilities toward female-based initiatives. Critics have charged that such initiatives were not adequately linked to doctrine-based training, and also that the methods used to build relationships with women were unsuccessful because they were not properly (...) integrated into the broader mission. We go further, and reveal how female-based initiatives essentially contributed to instability because they created multiple ethical pitfalls faced by the primary agents of change; military commanders, male leaders in conflict zones, and the women intended to be beneficiaries of those initiatives. Arguably, if Western-led military forces can address the ethical concerns we identify, then they will be in an im... (shrink)

Argument is a critical component in policy deliberations. In this study, negotiation is viewed as a type of policy deliberation, one characterized by attack and defense of proposals, interdependence between disputants, and mixed motives of cooperation and competition. Argument in negotiation, then, functions as a reason-giving activity to enact policy. Employing a category system based on rhetorical stasis, the researchers examine whether bargainers specialize in their use of argument types and whether this specialization remains consistent throughout a teacher-school board negotiation (...) and whether it differs for the type of settlement of agenda items. Results of the study suggest that bargainers specialize in argument types at different times during the bargaining. In the early stages of negotiation, teachers center on harm and workability arguments to prepare their case and justify the merits of their proposals, but in the latter phases of bargaining they switch to arguments on implementation to reaffirm their demands and to prioritize issues. Board members, in the early stages, rely on disadvantage, workability, and implementation arguments to establish resistance points and to refute appeals for change, but in the latter stages of negotiation they employ harm-inherency and disadvantage arguments to weigh the costs of concessions and to rationalize the settlement. This study, then, supports the existence of phase variation in bargaining and argues for a developmental approach in deciphering how negotiators who hold antithetical positions reach mutually satisfactory settlements. (shrink)

Bioethicists disagree over methods, theories, decision-making guides, case analyses and public policies. Thirty years ago, the thinking of many scholars coalesced around a principlist approach to bioethics. That mid-level mode of moral reasoning is now one of many approaches to moral deliberation. Significant variation in contemporary approaches to the study of ethical issues related to medicine, biotechnology and health care raises the question of whether bioethics exists as widely shared method, theory, normative framework or mode of moral reasoning.

The standard issues with experts are about the nature of scientifi c expertise; problems of legitimacy and problems having to do with the limits of expertise; problems having to do with the place of experts in democratic politics and bureaucracies; as well as more general problems about the knowledge that experts possess: what the role of tacit knowledge and knowledge embodied in things and routines is, and to what extent expertise can be replaced or augmented by expert systems and technical (...) means. The chapters collected in this volume will be concerned with all of these issues, with the exception of tacit knowledge and technological “expert systems,” which will be the subject of a separate volume, Understanding the Tacit. The chapters in the present volume, however, go beyond the problem of scientifi c expertise, which will be treated as one type among many forms of expertise. (shrink)

Open any standard bioethics textbook, and therein can be found a host of subjects ranging from the abortion rights controversy to the morality of xenographic tissue transplantation. Just as there is a wide scope to the subject matter of bioethics, its practitioners come from a multitude of disciplines, including law, medicine, nursing, theology, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. And yet, despite a rich variety of investigators and methods, bioethicists overlook numerous subjects that deserve to be addressed. In particular, they neglect issues (...) of public health, preventive medicine, and social medicine. Although topics such as physician-assisted suicide, prenatal genetic testing, and the ethics of new reproductive technologies constitute the contemporary canon of bioethics and deserve sustained analysis, these subjects are not so significant that they should eclipse other issues. For example, gun control policies, the regulation of food additives. immunization programs, prenatal care, leave programs enabling employees to care for dying relatives, the provision of nutrition and medical care to the homeless, and the use of emergency rooms by the most impoverished citizens are all topics neglected by bioethicists. (shrink)

Can history serve to uphold democracy as an ethical standard of governance? The author suggests that the basic and cross-temporal cornerstones of morality, the family and religion, serve as "intermediate" social structures in attaining the central virtues of a moral democracy.

This article first summarizes research regarding the relationship between sports that intentionally structure multiple types of brain trauma into their practice, such as rugby and boxing, and the range of negative health outcomes that flow from participation in such sports. The resultant brain injuries are described as ‘now’ and ‘later’ diseases, being those that affect the child immediately and then across their lifetime. After highlighting how these sports can permanently injure children, it examines this harm in relation to existing British (...) laws and policies concerning child abuse. The conclusion drawn is that neither children nor adults on their behalf are legally able to give informed consent for participation, and that impact sport organisations effectively groom children into sustaining and accepting brain trauma. Adults providing brain-traumatizing versions of these sports are thus described as being complicit in a form of child abuse that we term brain abuse. The contradictions in existing sports policy are highlighted, where policy describes that children are to be protected from harm, and yet the very practice of such sports creates harm by design. Implications of the argument are that children should be prohibited from partaking in impact sports. (shrink)

Conventional accounts of liberal democracy tend to obscure a basic fact: the phenomenon of administration. The American reception of the administrative state was self-consciously imitative of Continental models of state bureaucracy, as a remedy for the ills of democratic politics, but construed as a means of saving democracy from itself, and from lawyers and legalism, in the name of efficiency. The means was discretionary power, unaccountable to the courts and to voters. Reconciling this to democracy proved a challenge, and continues (...) to be one. (shrink)

The subject of this chapter is the complex and confusing course of the discussion of cause and teleology before and during the period of Mill and Comte, and its aftermath up to the early years of the twentieth century in the thinking of several of the major founding figures of disciplinary social science. The discussion focused on the problem of the sufficiency of causal explanations, and particularly the question of whether some particular fact could be explained without appeal to purpose. (...) In response to such questions, the defenders of the new conception attempted to replace older terminology with new (“function” for “purpose,” for example), sometimes muddling the issues, sometimes turning them into terminological disputes, and sometimes making the different positions difficult to distinguish. The problem of methodological unity in the social sciences is rooted in the discussions of the time. (shrink)

can be adapted and adopted by developing countries. IFC sees this as being an area where we may be able to benchmark and promote positive change. ● The force of global trade initiatives also influences animal welfare.

The split in our thinking between "masculine" and "feminine" is probably as old as language itself. Human beings seem to have a natural tendency to divide things into pairs: good/bad, light/dark, subject/object and so on. It is not surprising, then, that the male/female or masculine/feminine dichotomy is used to classify things other than men and women. Many languages actually classify all nouns as "masculine" or "feminine" (although not very consistently: for example, the Spanish masculine noun pollo means "hen", while the (...) feminine polla is slang for "penis"). This is perfectly natural; it is part of the way categorisation works in language. This does not, however, mean that it is right. It is probably unimportant whether a table or a chair is thought of as masculine or feminine. It may not even be very important these days whether we think of the sun as male and the moon as female (like the ancient Greeks) or vice versa (like most of the German tribes). However, when we start associating abstract concepts like Reason or Nature with men and women, we run into serious difficulties. (shrink)

The question of ‘who owns genetic information‘ is increasingly a focus of ethical inquiry. Applied to predictive testing, several recent critiques suggest that persons with a genetic disorder have a moral duty to disclose that information to other family members. The justification for this obligation is that genetic information belongs to and may benefit not only a single individual, but also members of a biological kinship. This paper considers this issue from a different vantage point: How does gender intersect with (...) the moral duty to disclose genetic information? Scholars have argued that gender is partly comprised of distinct assignments and assumptions of responsibility. Thus, there is a danger that gendered patterns of socialization will make women feel that they should take primary responsibility for disclosing genetic information to others. This article explores issues of responsibility and disclosure of risk information by drawing on an empirical study of women and men who have undergone genetic testing for hereditary breast/ovarian cancer. The research study suggests that disclosure of genetic information is a gendered activity, with both the benefits and burdens of this task falling primarily on women. It also illustrates that when disclosure is understood contextually, it is a far more complicated matter than when viewed through a theoretical lens. The article considers the relevance of these findings on ethical debate and genetic counselling practices. (shrink)