In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in the use of autologous stem cell-based interventions to treat a wide range of medical conditions, including those for which there is limited evidence of safety and efficacy. One justification for this growth in the use of unproven interventions is that clinicians should be free to innovate, as long as consumers are adequately informed about risks and benefits. In this essay, we systematically refute the strong claim that consumer and clinician autonomy (...) provide sufficient justification for clinical innovation with autologous stem cells. While we do not deny the importance of consumer and clinician autonomy, we argue that equal consideration needs to be given... (shrink)

This article provides a rationale for adopting the critical realism instead of pragmatism paradigm when researching skilled migrants' workplace integration in Australia. While the extant...

This deliverable covers the various steps that have been undertaken to develop the path to creating and developing a European Citizen Science Academy (ECS Academy). It is an aggregation of documents and reports that have been elaborated throughout the first year of the ECS project, with a community of practice of citizen science educators and trainers, the European Citizen Science Association and the ECS consortium. They set the stage to the co-creation of the ECS Academy. The ECS Academy is a (...) work package within the European Citizen Science (ECS) project. It seeks to promote citizen science within various stakeholder spheres, countries, by being a point of reference for training material and by regrouping a community of practice around citizen science training and education to develop training needs. (shrink)

The development of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant scientific events of the twentieth century. This revised and updated 3rd edition explores the challenges that faced the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project. It gives a clear introduction to fission weapons at the level of an upper-year undergraduate physics student by examining the details of nuclear reactions, their energy release, analytic and numerical models of the fission process, how critical masses can be estimated, (...) how fissile materials are produced, and what factors complicate bomb design. An extensive list of references and a number of exercises for self-study are included. Links are given to several freely-available spreadsheets which users can use to run many of the calculations for themselves. (shrink)

Cognitive biases can lead to misinterpretations of human and non-human biology and behavior. The concept of the Umwelt describes phylogenetic contrasts in the sensory realms of different species and has important implications for evolutionary studies of cognition (including biases) and social behavior. It has recently been suggested that the microbiome (the diverse network of microorganisms in a given environment, including those within a host organism such as humans) has an influential role in host behavior and health. In this paper, we (...) discuss the host’s microbiome in relation to cognitive biases and the concept of the Umwelt. Failing to consider the role of host–microbiome (collectively termed a “holobiont”) interactions in a given behavior, may underpin a potentially important cognitive bias – which we refer to as the Holobiont Blindspot. We also suggest that microbially mediated behavioral responses could augment our understanding of the Umwelt. For example, the potential role of the microbiome in perception and action could be an important component of the system that gives rise to the Umwelt. We also discuss whether microbial symbionts could be considered in System 1 thinking – that is, decisions driven by perception, intuition and associative memory. Recognizing Holobiont Blindspots and considering the microbiome as a key factor in the Umwelt and System 1 thinking has the potential to advance studies of cognition. Furthermore, investigating Holobiont Blindspots could have important implications for our understanding of social behaviors and mental health. Indeed, the way we think about how we think may need to be revisited. (shrink)

The argument that cumulative technological culture originates in technical-reasoning skills is not the only alternative to social accounts; another possibility is that accumulation ofbothtechnical-reasoning skillsandenhanced social skills stemmed from the onset of a more basic cognitive ability such as recursive representational redescription. The paper confuses individual learning of pre-existing information with creative generation of new information.

Landmarks play a crucial role in bootstrapping both spatial and temporal cognition. Given the similarity in the underlying demands of representing spatial and temporal relations, we ask here whether animals can be trained to reason about temporal relations by providing them with temporal landmark cues, proposing a line of future research complementary to those suggested by the authors.

Perceptual learning is an enduring change in the perceptual system – and our resulting perceptions – due to practice or repeated exposure to a perceptual stimulus. It is involved in the acquisition of perceptual expertise: the ability to make rapid and reliable high-level categorizations of objects unavailable to novices. Attentional weighting is one process by which perceptual learning occurs. Advancing our understanding of this process is of particular importance for understanding what is learned in perceptual learning. Attentional weighting seems to (...) favour the hypothesis that what experts learn is simply to better direct their attention to elements of the stimulus relevant to making post-perceptual categorizations. Here I argue against this hypothesis. Attentional weighting is an integral component of the process that allows experts to come to represent high-level properties in perceptual experience. (shrink)

This article examines motifs of falling, recoiling, and turning across Chester Himes’ oeuvre as figurations of Black susceptibility to racial violence. These images reference and reconstruct an event from Himes’ early adulthood: his catastrophic fall down an elevator shaft. Taking a psychoanalytically oriented approach, I analyze the metonymic connections between these motifs, rather than reading them in their chronological order, using Jean Laplanche’s theory of après-coup. I argue that the recursive quality of these images in Himes’ work is not merely (...) an unconscious repetition or conscious working through of a traumatic biographical event but part of an endeavor to imagine different ways to inhabit and survive the structural trauma of Jim Crow America. (shrink)

'Chains of Being' argues that there can be infinite chains of dependence or grounding. Cameron also defends the view that there can be circular relations of ontological dependence or grounding, and uses these claims to explore issues in logic and ontology.

Kendall Walton’s project in ‘Categories of Art’ (1970) is to answer two questions. First, does the history of an artwork’s production determine its aesthetic properties? Second, how – if at all – should knowledge of the history of a work’s production influence our aesthetic judgments of its properties? While his answer to the first has been clearly understood, his answer to the second less so. Contrary to how many have interpreted Walton, such knowledge is not necessary for making aesthetic judgments; (...) perceiving an artwork as belonging to a (correct) category of art requires no art-historical knowledge whatsoever. Moreover, contextualist attempts to incorporate art-historical knowledge via the mechanism of cognitive penetration are incompatible with Walton’s claim that categories of art must be perceptually distinguishable. Here I propose a way of elaborating Walton’s view that avoids this difficulty and reconciles contextualism with aesthetic perception, the view that we perceive aesthetic properties. (shrink)

As Jonathan Dancy points out, if we are tempted to think morality is a rational enterprise, we would expect moral judgments to be constrained by requirements of consistency. If our judgments and choices use general moral principles as guides or standards -- like the laws that feature in the explicit calculations of Immanuel Kant’s moral agent – we can be somewhat confident we respond to moral salience with consistency and, perhaps, rationally. For Kant, explicit reason ensures consistency because the explicit (...) application of maxims is autonomous from volatile external factors. Contemporary empirical studies in moral psychology show that when we respond morally we seemingly do so from emotion or intuition, not reason. For Kant, emotions and intuitions fluctuate with respect to volatile external factors. They are not the sort of things upon which we ought to base judgment and decision. If we hold the Kantian model true, we must assume that we fail to participate rationally in the moral enterprise. I argue against the Kantian model of moral cognition and turn to Aristotle to develop an account of moral cognition that allows us to retain our standing as rational moral agents. First, I argue for a particularist conception of moral reasons: I deny that the consistency required of a picture of morality as a rational enterprise requires our thought utilizes general moral rules. Next, I develop a particularist account of moral knowledge – a demand from their generalist opponents – by providing an account of moral perception. I subsequently argue that the deliverances of moral perception can constitute knowledge by providing a McDowellian account of perceptual justification. Lastly, I return to examine how the empirical work motivating the idea that we don’t participate in morality rationally. I show how none of these studies threatens the Aristotelian model as a viable alternative to the Kantian model. (shrink)

The acquaintance debate in aesthetics has been traditionally divided between pessimists, who argue that testimony does not provide others with aesthetic knowledge of artworks, and optimists, who hold that acquaintance with an artwork is not a necessary precondition for acquiring aesthetic knowledge. In this paper I propose a reconciliationist solution to the acquaintance debate: while aesthetic knowledge can be had via testimony, aesthetic judgment requires acquaintance with the artwork. I develop this solution by situating it within a virtue aesthetics framework (...) based on Ernest Sosa's virtue epistemology. I go on to apply the solution to the debates on moral testimony and expert testimony. An interesting variant on Gettier cases emerges: cases in which subjects have knowledge, but it has been formed by the wrong competence. (shrink)

This article explores the often-disparate commitments the chaplain has made to both the institutional church as well as the hospital system through the lens of the baptismal rite. As baptism is primarily a religious act meant to initiate new members into the Christian faith and a specific community, the chaplain must grapple with the meaning of baptism in the hospital system, a place of crisis and transient community. It is the numinous presence that binds the chaplain’s disparate commitments together in (...) the liminal space between the clinical and ecclesial within which the chaplain exists. The numinous expands the boundaries of institutions often at odds. The chaplain finds meaning and purpose by bearing witness and remaining committed to this numinous presence that binds. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between farmland investment and environmental uncertainty. It examines how farmland investors seek to “render land investible” in spite of drought, groundwater depletion, and changing regulations. To do so, we analyze a single case study: the purchase of 8000 acres of dry rangeland in California’s Cuyama Valley by the Harvard University endowment for use in creating an irrigated vineyard. Drawing from interviews with Cuyama Valley farmers and community members, participant observation at community meetings, and public document (...) analysis, we make two primary contributions to understandings of uncertain resource materiality in farmland investment. First, this case reveals that investors can turn environmental uncertainty into an advantage, exploiting both the temporal uncertainties associated with resource management under climate change and the spatial uncertainties inherent to all subsurface resources. We argue that the material and legal uncertainties of groundwater access provide investors with a potentially lucrative opening to assert their preferred land imaginaries and improve their property values. In the Cuyama Valley they did so through both participation in groundwater governance and the establishment of water-related infrastructure on their property. Second, this case highlights that the asset-making processes involved in farmland investment may be as much vertical as they are horizontal. The need to map and measure the uncertain vertical dimension of land creates an outsized role for scientific expertise in farmland assetization. (shrink)

Carruthers argues that an integrated faculty of metarepresentation evolved for mindreading and was later exapted for metacognition. A more consistent application of his approach would regard metarepresentation in mindreading with the same skeptical rigor, concluding that the “faculty” may have been entirely exapted. Given this result, the usefulness of Carruthers’ line-drawing exercise is called into question.

Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scientific and methodological expertise, but also expertise gained through the experience of participating in research and/or being a recipient of research outcomes. Engagement is, by its nature, reciprocal and relational: the process of engaging research participants, patients, citizens and others brings them closer to the research but also brings the research closer (...) to them. When translating research into practice, engaging the public and other stakeholders is explicitly intended to make the outcomes of translation relevant to its constituency of users. In practice, engagement faces numerous challenges and is often time-consuming, expensive and ‘thorny’ work. We explore the epistemic and ontological considerations and implications of four common critiques of engagement methodologies that contest: representativeness, communication and articulation, impacts and outcome, and democracy. The ECOUTER methodology addresses problems of representation and epistemic foundationalism using a methodology that asks, “How could it be otherwise?” ECOUTER affords the possibility of engagement where spatial and temporal constraints are present, relying on saturation as a method of ‘keeping open’ the possible considerations that might emerge and including reflexive use of qualitative analytic methods. This paper describes the ECOUTER process, focusing on one worked example and detailing lessons learned from four other pilots. ECOUTER uses mind-mapping techniques to ‘open up’ engagement, iteratively and organically. ECOUTER aims to balance the breadth, accessibility and user-determination of the scope of engagement. An ECOUTER exercise comprises four stages: engagement and knowledge exchange; analysis of mindmap contributions; development of a conceptual schema ; and feedback, refinement and development of recommendations. ECOUTER refuses fixed truths but also refuses a fixed nature. Its promise lies in its flexibility, adaptability and openness. ECOUTER will be formed and re-formed by the needs and creativity of those who use it. (shrink)

It has recently become popular to suggest that cognition can be explained as a process of Bayesian prediction error minimization. Some advocates of this view propose that attention should be understood as the optimization of expected precisions in the prediction-error signal (Clark, 2013, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2012, 2013). This proposal successfully accounts for several attention-related phenomena. We claim that it cannot account for all of them, since there are certain forms of voluntary attention that it cannot accommodate. (...) We therefore suggest that, although the theory of Bayesian prediction error minimization introduces some powerful tools for the explanation of mental phenomena, its advocates have been wrong to claim that Bayesian prediction error minimization is ‘all the brain ever does’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Deliberative democratic theory, commonly used to explore questions of “political” corporate social responsibility, has become prominent in the literature. This theory has been challenged previously for being overly sanguine about firm profit imperatives, but left unexamined is whether corporate contexts are appropriate contexts for deliberative theory in the first place. We explore this question using the case of Starbucks’ “Race Together” campaign to show that significant challenges exist to corporate deliberation, even in cases featuring genuinely committed firms. We return to (...) the underlying social theory to show that this is not an isolated case: for-profit firms are predictably hostile contexts for deliberation, and significant normative and strategic problems can be expected should deliberative theory be imported uncritically to corporate contexts. We close with recent advances in deliberative democratic theory that might help update the PCSR project, and accommodate the application of deliberation to the corporate context, albeit with significant alterations. (shrink)

I begin by contrasting three approaches one can take to the distinction between the essential and accidental properties: an ontological, a deflationary, and a mind‐dependent approach. I then go on to apply that distinction to the necessary a posteriori, and defend the deflationist view. Finally I apply the distinction to modal truth in general and argue that the deflationist position lets us avoid an otherwise pressing problem for the actualist: the problem of accounting for the source of modal truth.

In this project, I develop the concept of a sexualized violence figleaf, a speech mechanism often used in sexualized violence discourse to dismiss or characterize assault as some other kind of thing: a misunderstanding, a change of heart by the victim, a mischaracterization of the perpetrator, or any other number of things which are not rape, or violence. Sexualized violence figleaves are an extension of Jennifer Saul's work on racial and gender figleaves, as the underlying mechanics of the utterance track (...) those of Saul's figleaves. In other words, I am developing a figleaf variant, showing that this conceptual tool is useful for analysing utterances beyond racist, sexist, and conspiracist speech, upon which Saul focuses. Rather, bringing figleaves into the realm of sexualized violence discourse illuminates features of the discourse which are often obscured by the prevalence of strong social intuitions about rapists and their corresponding character. (shrink)

Systems thinking has emerged as a means of conceptualizing and addressing complex public health problems, thereby challenging more commonplace understanding of problems and corresponding solutions as straightforward explanations of cause and effect. Systems thinking tries to address the complexity of problems through qualitative and quantitative modeling based on a variety of systems theories, each with their own assumptions and, more importantly, implicit and unexamined values. To date, however, there has been little engagement between systems scientists and those working in bioethics (...) and public health ethics. The goal of this paper is to begin to consider what it might mean to combine systems thinking with public health ethics to solve public health challenges. We argue that there is a role for ethics in systems thinking in public health as a means of elucidating implicit assumptions and facilitating ethics debate and dialogue with key stakeholders. (shrink)

A multiple analogy is a structured comparison in which several sources are likened to a target. In "Multiple analogies in science and philosophy," Shelley provides a thorough account of the cognitive representations and processes that participate in multiple analogy formation. Through analysis of real examples taken from the fields of evolutionary biology, archaeology, and Plato's "Republic," Shelley argues that multiple analogies are not simply concatenated single analogies but are instead the general form of analogical inference, of which single analogies are (...) a special case. The result is a truly general cognitive model of analogical inference.Shelley also shows how a cognitive account of multiple analogies addresses important philosophical issues such as the confidence that one may have in an analogical explanation, and the role of analogy in science and philosophy.This book lucidly demonstrates that important questions regarding analogical inference cannot be answered adequately by consideration of single analogies alone. (shrink)

This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total (...) benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change. (shrink)

While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...) second strand of the puzzle arises when we widen the scope of aesthetic experience. The very same aesthetic properties that seem to require training for their perception in artworks do not appear to require training to perceive in objects of everyday aesthetic appreciation and natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that a prominent extant attempt to explain how training is compatible with aesthetic perception—cognitive permeation—is an inadequate solution. I also develop a positive view of aesthetic perception that provides a unified solution to both strands of the puzzle. (shrink)

Paul Sheehy has argued that the modal realist cannot satisfactorily allow for the necessity of God's existence. In this short paper I show that she can, and that Sheehy only sees a problem because he has failed to appreciate all the resources available to the modal realist. God may be an abstract existent outside spacetime or He may not be: but either way, there is no problem for the modal realist to admit that He exists at every concrete possible world.

DIALETICS AT A STANDSTILL: BENJAMIN'S "DENKBILDER":0Benjamin's Thougt-Images in Einbahnstraße - Gustan Asselbergs; 0Sichtlich sich verbergend: Die Autor-Figur des Passagen-Werks - Wolfram Malte Fues; 0LIMINAL FIGURES: CHILD AND FLANEUR:0The Child at the Threshold: Walter Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit um 1900 - Corina Stan; 0The Flâneur and the Socio-Economic Critique - Nassima Sahraoui; 0UNSIGHTLY FIGURES: 0Walter Benjamin's Figures of De-Figuration: The Barbarian, the Destructive Character, and the Monster - Sami R. Khatib; 0ANGELS AND HISTORIANS: 0Closing Time: Benjamin, Temporality, and the Problem of Political (...) Organization - Bennett Carpenter; 0Of Fish and Men: Benjamin's Allegorist and the Meaning of Life - Madeleine Kasten; 0Walter Benjamin on Charlie Chaplin: The Rehabilitation of the Allegorical in Modernity - Daniel Mourenza; 0THE NARRATOR AND THE POLITICS OF SENSES: 0"Drawing o an Unlikely Source": The "Erzähler", the Islamic Revival, and Benjamin's Philosophy of Language - Ton Groeneweg; 0TRANSLATION BETWEEN FOREIGNNESS AND KINSHIP: 0Bleakness in the Age of Google: Walter Benjamin and the Possibility of Redemptive Translation - Orr Scharf; 0Walter Benjamin's Translator/Critic as a Model for Transcultural Thought and Practice - Gisela Brinker-Gabler.; 0THE TASK OF CRITIC: 0Lektüre als Opfer: Der Kritiker in "Wider ein Meisterwerk" und dem Trauerspielbuch - Anna Wotkowicz; 0THE RIGHTEOUS AS MEDIATOR OF LINGUISTIC EXPERIENCE: 0"Im Anfang war das Wort": Von Adam, zwei Bäumen und dem Gerechten - Gerard Visser. (shrink)