The method of reflective equilibrium (MRE) is a method of justification popularized by John Rawls and further developed by Norman Daniels, Michael DePaul, Folke Tersman, and Catherine Z. Elgin, among others. The basic idea is that epistemic agents have justified beliefs if they have succeeded in forming their beliefs into a harmonious system of beliefs which they reflectively judge to be the most plausible. Despite the common reference to MRE as a method, its mechanisms or rules are typically expressed (...) in a metaphorical or simplified manner and are therefore criticized as too vague. Recent efforts to counter this criticism have been directed towards the attempt to provide formal explications of MRE. This paper aims to supplement these efforts by providing an informal working definition of MRE. This approach challenges the view that MRE can adequately be characterized only in the negative as a set of anti-essentialisms. I argue that epistemic agents follow MRE iff they follow four interconnected rules, which are concerned with a minimalistic form of foundationalism, a minimalistic form of fallibilism, a moderate form of holism, and a minimalistic form of rationality. In the critical spirit of MRE, the corresponding working definition is, of course, provisional and revisable. In general, the aim is to contribute to a reflective equilibrium (RE) concerning MRE. If it is successful, this working definition provides a better grasp of the most basic elements of the method and thereby enhances our understanding of it. (shrink)

This short and highly accessible volume opens up the subject of the philosophy of biology to professionals and to students in both disciplines. The text covers briefly and clearly all of the pertinent topics in the subject, dealing with both human and non-human issues, and quite uniquely surveying not only scholars in the English-speaking world but others elsewhere, including the Eastern block. As molecular biologists peer ever more deeply into life’s mysteries, there are those who fear that such ‘reductionism’ conceals (...) more than it reveals, and there are those who complain that the new techniques threaten the physical safety of us all. As students of evolution apply their new-found understanding to our own species, some people think that this is merely an excuse for racist and sexist propaganda, and others worry that the whole exercise blatantly violates the religious beliefs many of us hold dear. These controversies are the joint concern of biologists and philosophers—of those whose task it is to study the theoretical and moral foundations of knowledge. The comprehensive and fully up-to-date bibliography makes this an invaluable and indispensable guide. (shrink)

According to the most popular versions of the flicker defense, Frankfurt-style cases fail to undermine the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) because agents in these cases are (directly) morally responsible not for making the decisions they make but for making these decisions on their own, which is something they could have avoided doing. Frankfurt defenders have primarily focused on trying to show that the alternative possibility of refraining from making the relevant decisions on their own is not a robust alternative, (...) while generally granting that this alternative cannot easily be eliminated from successful cases of this sort. In a recent issue of this journal, Stockdale (2022) attempts to sidestep the debate concerning robustness and develops a novel kind of Frankfurt-style case in which agents are unable to avoid making the relevant decisions on their own. The fundamental problem with Stockdale’s argument is that it hinges on an implausible conception of acting on one’s own. I help clarify the pertinent sense of what it means to do a thing on one’s own in this context and show that these new cases are unable to overcome the targeted versions of the flicker defense of PAP. (shrink)

Integrating large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 into medical ethics is a novel concept, and understanding the effectiveness of these models in aiding ethicists with decision-making can have significant implications for the healthcare sector. Thus, the objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of GPT-4 in responding to complex medical ethical vignettes and to gauge its utility and limitations for aiding medical ethicists. Using a mixed-methods, cross-sectional survey approach, a panel of six ethicists assessed LLM-generated responses to eight (...) ethical vignettes.The main outcomes measured were relevance, reasoning, depth, technical and non-technical clarity, as well as acceptability of GPT-4’s responses. The readability of the responses was also assessed. Of the six metrics evaluating the effectiveness of GPT-4’s responses, the overall mean score was 4.1/5. GPT-4 was rated highest in providing technical (4.7/5) and non-technical clarity (4.4/5), whereas the lowest rated metrics were depth (3.8/5) and acceptability (3.8/5). There was poor-to-moderate inter-rater reliability characterised by an intraclass coefficient of 0.54 (95% CI: 0.30 to 0.71). Based on panellist feedback, GPT-4 was able to identify and articulate key ethical issues but struggled to appreciate the nuanced aspects of ethical dilemmas and misapplied certain moral principles.This study reveals limitations in the ability of GPT-4 to appreciate the depth and nuanced acceptability of real-world ethical dilemmas, particularly those that require a thorough understanding of relational complexities and context-specific values. Ongoing evaluation of LLM capabilities within medical ethics remains paramount, and further refinement is needed before it can be used effectively in clinical settings. (shrink)

An assumption central to some forms of retributivism is that it is noninstrumentally good that a culpable wrongdoer suffers in receiving a deserved punishment. A justification for this can be built from a conversational theory of moral responsibility, and in particular deserved blame. On such a theory, deserved blame is fitting as a response to a wrongdoer insofar as it is conversationally meaningful as a reply to a wrong done. Punishment, it might be argued, has this feature too. The conversational (...) aim in both deserved blame and punishment is for the guilty to grasp the meaning conveyed by those who blame or punish and then respond meaningfully by, for example, apologizing or expressing remorse. Ideally, a culpable agent would experience a form and degree of guilt suitable for a wrong done. So, a conversational theory of punishment can then be justified in terms of providing conditions conducive for a culpable wrongdoer to respond to punishment by manifesting an appropriately pained response of guilt. (shrink)

Against arealist background, the paper starts by demonstrating the horror of the very popular doctrine, “Worldmaking”, according to which a known world is partly constructed by our imposition of concepts. The rest of the paper aims to make worldmaking hard. (i) It rejects the usual episternological and semantic paths to Worldmaking arguing that they use the wrong methodology and proceed in the wrong direction. (ii) It considers the relation between Worldmaking and the response-dependency theory of concepts. Philip Pettit has proposed (...) a global version of that theory: all our concepts are response-dependent. The paper argues that this theory provides an example of the semantic path to Worldmaking and for that reason alone should be rejected. (shrink)

In Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, Michael Zuckert proposes a new view of the political philosophy that lay behind the founding of the United States.

What does the growing tide of displaced persons today teach us about the ongoing paradoxes of human rights regimes, which rely on the particular sovereignty of nation-states for their constitution and application but are framed and normatively justified as universal? Working with Arendt’s defense of ‘the right to have rights’ in response to the problem of statelessness which is the practical lynchpin of these historical and theoretical tensions, I specify that and why any person on earth, regardless of their legal (...) status as a national or resident or non-resident alien, can legitimately expect two things from the political community in which they reside: hospitality and membership. (shrink)

Rickert, value philosophy, and the primacy of practical reason -- Husserl, phenomenology, and lived-experience -- Heideggerian reflections on Paul Natorp -- Dilthey on life, lived-experience, and worldview philosophy -- Toward a fundamental ontology -- Philosophy as praxix.

Can we draw substantive conclusions about the reasons for action agents have from premisses about the desires of their idealized counterparts? The answer is that we can. The argument for this conclusion is Rawlsian in spirit, focusing on the choices that our idealized counterparts must make simply in virtue of being ideal, and inferring from these choices the contents of the desires that they must have. It turns out that our idealized counterparts must have desires in which we ourselves figure (...) as both agents and patients, and in which others must figure too, though only as patients. (shrink)

As the capacity to generate, store, aggregate and combine ever greater volumes and types of data about individuals, behaviours and interactions continues to expand apace, so too does the challenge of ensuring suitable and appropriate governance of that data. In broad terms, the challenge is simple; how to ensure the (public) benefits of data, such as improvements in service delivery or individual and collective well-being, while avoiding harms such as discrimination, injustice or placing undue burdens on individuals and groups. The (...) difficulty, as ever, lies in the details. As Nicol et al 1 observe, informed consent is important but does not replace the need for an appropriate governance framework that covers the wider ecosystem of data generation, use and reuse. Moreover, there is no one universal oversight mechanism for data sharing, but what counts as ‘appropriate’ must take into account the context and purpose of data use. In this regard, the study by Ford et al is an important and valuable contribution to our understanding of the …. (shrink)

Contemporary psycholinguistic models place significant emphasis on the cognitive processes involved in the acquisition, recognition, and production of language but neglect many issues related to the representation of language-related information in the mental lexicon. In contrast, a central tenet of network science is that the structure of a network influences the processes that operate in that system, making process and representation inextricably connected. Here, we consider how the structure found across phonological networks of several languages from different language families may (...) influence language processing as we age and experience diseases that affect cognition during the typical and atypical acquisition of new words, during typical perception and production of speech in adults, and during language change over time. We conclude that the network science approach may not only provide insights into specific language processes but also provide a way to connect the work from these domains, which are becoming increasingly balkanized. (shrink)

This paper further develops the non-restrictive dialectical perspective. Many philosophers hold that truthfulness is somehow constitutive of assertion. I argue against this view while simultaneously attempting to ground truthfulness in assertion’s essential features. I argue that truthfulness is the prima facie best way to avoid decisive counter-arguments against what one says. Moreover, avoiding decisive counter-arguments is a constitutive goal of rational dialectic. Thus, while truthfulness is not constitutive of assertion, it is the rational default strategy for achieving a goal that (...) is constitutive of assertion. (shrink)

In a series of essays David Gauthier develops a two-tier pragmatic theory of practical rationality and argues, within that theory, for a distinctive account of the rationality of following through with prior assurances or threats. His discussion suggests that certain kinds of temporally extended agency play a special role in one’s temporally extended life going well. I argue that a related idea about diachronic self-governance puts us in a position to explain a sense in which an accepted deliberative standard can (...) be self-reinforcing. And this gives us resources to adjust Gauthier’s theory in response to a basic challenge. (shrink)

Since the early 1990s, the extractive industries have increasingly valued corporate social responsibility in the communities where they operate. More recently, these industries have begun to recognize the importance of adapting CSR efforts to unique local contexts rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model. However, firms understand local context to mean culture and treat the physical properties of the host region—topography, geology, hydrology, and climate—as the exclusive purview of mineral geologists and engineers. In this article, we examine the organization of CSR (...) at two industrial-scale gold mines in Guatemala, owned by the same firm, which yielded starkly distinct levels of support among host community residents. We develop the idea of social terrain to convey the way in which the biophysical environment informs local social relations and imbues phenomena with particular social meanings. We argue that firms must account for social terrain in organizing for CSR. The literature struggles to provide guidelines for identifying and understanding stakeholders. Social terrain, we argue, can begin to bridge this gap between theory and practice. (shrink)

Contemporary biologists generally agree with E. O. Wilson’s claim that “reduction is the traditional instrument of scientific analysis.” This is certainly true of Michael Ruse, who has attempted to provide a Darwinian account of human scientific knowledge in terms of epigenetic rules. Such an account depends on the characterization of natural objects as the chance concatenations of material elements, making natural form an effect rather than a cause of the object. This characterization, however, can be shown to be false (...) in that it is self-refuting in its exclusion of formal cause. The retorsive argument for formal cause dialectically shows that any attempt to explain a natural object depends on the identification of form as the cause of the intelligibility of the object. It follows that Darwinian explanations of the products of human culture, such as science, cannot consistently treat form as an effect rather than a cause. (shrink)

The deepest moral justification for a capitalist system is not solely that, poor system that it is, it serves liberty better than any other known system; not even that is raises up the living standards of the poor higher than any other system has; nor that it better improves the state of human health and the balance between humans and the environment that either real existing socialism or the traditional Third World society has. All these things, however difficult for one (...) to admit, are empirically true. The true moral strength of capitalism, however, lies in its promotion of human creativity.New wealth can be created. Human beings themselves are the primary cause of the wealth of nations. Human creativity is nature''s primary resource. Removing the institutional repression that now stifles that creativity is the large task ahead of us. (shrink)

The last decade has experienced a vivid enthusiasm to unravel the mystery of consciousness believed to be one of the major puzzles of human kind. We share this enthusiasm. Still, we feel that current models are incomplete suffering from a problem that we call the “small network argument”.

This paper takes issue with the widespread view that Kant rejects epistemic phenomenalism. According to epistemic phenomenalism, only cognition of states of one’s own mind can be certain, while cognition of outer objects is necessarily uncertain. I argue that Kant does not reject this view, but accepts a modified version of it. For, in contrast to traditional skeptics, he distinguishes between two kinds of outer objects and holds that we have direct access to outer appearances in our mind; but he (...) still considers objects outside our mind unknowable. This sheds new light on Kant’s refutation of idealism. (shrink)

When we say that a subject has attitudes that she is rationally required to have, does that entail that she has those attitudes for reasons? In other words, is there a deep nexus between being rational and responding to reasons? Many have argued that there is. For example, Derek Parfit tells us that 'to be rational is to respond to reasons '. But I am not so sure. I begin by considering this question in the domain of theoretical rationality. The (...) question in this domain is whether, when a subject has the beliefs that she is required to have by the norms of theoretical rationality, she is responding to reasons that there are for having those beliefs. Armed with a moderately clear answer to this question in the theoretical domain, I consider their relationship in the practical domain. When a subject has the desires that she is required to have by the norms of practical rationality, is she responding to reasons that there are for having those desires? Part of the interest of these questions lies in improving our understanding of reasons for action. I will say a little about this towards the end. (shrink)

This paper evaluates four different qualitative (probabilistic) accounts to coherence with a focus on structural properties (symmetries, asymmetries, and transitivity). It is shown that while coherence is not transitive on any of these accounts, there are screening-off conditions that render coherence transitive. In a second step, an array of quantitative (probabilistic) accounts to coherence is considered. The upshot is that extant measures differ considerably with respect to a number of symmetry constraints.

Epistemic and moral certainities like ' This is a hand' or 'Killing people is evil' will be interpreted as constitutive rules of language games, such that they are unjustifiable, undeniable and serving as obliging standards of truth, goodness and rationality for members of a community engaging in the respective practices.

Astronomers of the first half of the nineteenth century viewed our solar system entirely differently from the way twentieth-century astronomers viewed it. In the earlier period the dominant image was of a set of planets and moons, both of which kinds of bodies were inhabited by intelligent beings comparable to humans. By the early twentieth century, science had driven these beings from every planet in our system except the Earth, leaving our solar system as more or less desolate regions for (...) the most part bereft of intelligent life. This essay traces this extinction and its relation to religious thought, noting the role played in it by Sir John Herschel and especially by William Whewell. The inverse square laws for gravitation, heat radiation, and light receive special attention, as does the question of the relevance of the Christian notions of a divine incarnation and redemption. (shrink)

The doctrine of double effect has a firm, respected position within Roman Catholic medical ethics. Neil M. Gorsuch, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, believes that this doctrine also enjoys a central place within U.S. law. This essay examines and assesses Gorsuch’s thesis. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.1 (Spring 2011): 31–40.

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys and chimpanzees and the processes which guided the evolution LCA-m → LCA-c → protohumans → H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis of (...) the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language. (shrink)