Michela Massimi is a Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh and was the keynote speaker for Philosophy as a Way of Life. She is currently the PI for an ERC-funded project ʽPerspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge, and Truth from a Human Vantage Point.ʼ Massimi has extensive experience working on interdisciplinary projects and has frequently engaged in public philosophy. In this interview, she discusses the future of research in the UK post-Brexit, the challenges and rewards of interdisciplinary (...) research, shares some thoughts on the history of philosophy and science and our relationship with it, and emphasises the importance of bringing philosophy into the public sphere. She also offers advice for early career researchers and graduate students in philosophy. (shrink)

English, French, German, and Italian, with summaries in the same languages.

Within the evidence-based medicine construct, clinical expertise is acknowledged to be both derived from primary experience and necessary for optimal medical practice. Primary experience in medical practice, however, remains undervalued. Clinicians’ primary experience tends to be dismissed by EBM as unsystematic or anecdotal, a source of bias rather than knowledge, never serving as the “best” evidence to support a clinical decision. The position that clinical expertise is necessary but that primary experience is untrustworthy in clinical decision-making is epistemically incoherent. Here (...) we argue for the value and utility of knowledge gained from primary experience for the practice of medicine. Primary experience provides knowledge necessary to diagnose, treat, and assess response in individual patients. Hierarchies of evidence, when advanced as guides for clinical decisions, mistake the relationship between propositional and experiential knowledge. We argue that primary experience represents a kind of medical knowledge distinct from the propositional knowledge produced by clinical research, both of which are crucial to determining the best diagnosis and course of action for particular patients. (shrink)

While the importance of mechanisms in determining causality in medicine is currently the subject of active debate, the role of mechanistic reasoning in clinical practice has received far less attention. In this paper we look at this question in the context of the treatment of a particular individual, and argue that evidence of mechanisms is indeed key to various aspects of clinical practice, including assessing population-level research reports, diagnostic as well as therapeutic decision making, and the assessment of treatment effects. (...) We use the pulmonary condition bronchiectasis as a source of examples of the importance of mechanistic reasoning to clinical practice. (shrink)

This paper develops an analysis of the relation between fiction and make-believe based on the achievements of imagination. The argument aims at a “reciprocal supplementation” between two approaches to fiction. According to one approach, pretense or make-believe structures play a crucial role in our experience of fiction. Discussing Husserl’s view on bound imagining and Walton’s account of fiction as make-believe, I show why pretense and make-believe cannot thereby be reduced to the mere reproduction of something we would experience as original. (...) According to the other approach, which is presented in Ricoeur’s work on imagination, fiction exemplifies a productive or creative power of imagination that is not active in pretense or make-believe activities. The reciprocal supplementation between these two approaches concerns the following aspects: on the one hand, I wish show why Husserl and Walton allow us to rectify Ricoeur’s claim that make-believe is only reproductive. On the other hand, taking up some of Ricoeur’s insights, I wish to clarify why such an impact should be understood in terms of transformation. (shrink)

Cf. Jardine 1974a, p. 29; chapter 6 is 'an elegant account of developments in late scholastic debating exercises' (Jardine 1974b, 33). Cited Van den Burgh, 126 n. 95 re Grotius's method. cit. Mancosu 1996, 232 n. 39.

What does it mean to be a realist about science if one takes seriously the view that scientific knowledge is always perspectival, namely historically and culturally situated? In this book, Michela Massimi articulates an original answer to this question. The book begins with an exploration of how scientific communities often resort to several models and a plurality of practices in some areas of inquiry, drawing on examples from nuclear physics, climate science, and developmental psychology. Taking this plurality in science (...) as a starting point, Massimi explains the perspectival nature of scientific representation, the role of scientific models as inferential blueprints, and the variety of scientific realism that naturally accompanies such a view. Perspectival realism is realism about phenomena (rather than about theories or unobservable entities). The book defends this novel realist view, which places epistemic communities and their situated knowledge center stage. The result is a portrait of scientific knowledge as a collaborative inquiry, where the reliability of science is made possible by a plurality of historically and culturally situated scientific perspectives. Along the way, Massimi offers insights into the nature of scientific modelling, scientific knowledge qua modal knowledge, data-to-phenomena inferences, and natural kinds as sortal concepts. Perspectival realism is ultimately realism that takes the multicultural nature of science seriously and couples it with cosmopolitan duties about how one ought to think about scientific knowledge and the distribution of the benefits resulting from scientific advancements. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has thus far failed to adequately account for the appropriate incorporation of other potential warrants for medical decision making into clinical practice. In particular, EBM has struggled with the value and integration of other kinds of medical knowledge, such as those derived from clinical experience or based on pathophysiologic rationale. The general priority given to empirical evidence derived from clinical research in all EBM approaches is not epistemically tenable. A casuistic alternative to EBM approaches recognizes that five (...) distinct topics, 1) empirical evidence, 2) experiential evidence, 3) pathophysiologic rationale, 4) patient goals and values, and 5) system features are potentially relevant to any clinical decision. No single topic has a general priority over any other and the relative importance of a topic will depend upon the circumstances of the particular case. The skilled clinician must weigh these potentially conflicting evidentiary and non-evidentiary warrants for action, employing both practical and theoretical reasoning, in order to arrive at the best choice for an individual patient. (shrink)

Experimental realism aims at striking a middle ground between scientific realism and anti-realism, between the success of experimental physics it would explain and the realism about scientific theories it would supplant. This middle ground reinstates the engineering idea that belief in scientific entities is justified on purely experimental grounds, without any commitment to scientific theories and laws. This paper argues that there is no defensible middle ground to be staked out when it comes to justifying physicists' belief in colored quarks, (...) and that experimental realism shifts, under analysis, into scientific realism. (shrink)

One of the difficulties nurses experience in clinical practice in relation to ethical issues in connection with young oncology patients is moral distress. In this descriptive correlational study, the Moral Distress Scale-Paediatric Version (MDS-PV) was translated from the original language and tested on a conventional sample of nurses working in paediatric oncology and haematology wards, in six north paediatric hospitals of Italy. 13.7% of the total respondents claimed that they had changed unit or hospital due to moral distress. The items (...) with the highest mean intensity in the sample were almost all connected with medical and nursing competence and have considerably higher values than frequency. The instrument was found to be reliable. The results confirmed the validity of the MDS-PV (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.959). This study represents the first small-scale attempt to validate MDS-PV for use in paediatric oncology-ematology nurses in Italy. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess recent claims in philosophy of science about scientific perspectivism being compatible with realism. I clarify the rationale for scientific perspectivism and the problems and challenges that perspectivism faces in delivering a form of realism. In particular, I concentrate my attention on truth, and on ways in which truth can be understood in perspectival terms. I offer a cost-benefit analysis of each of them and defend a version that in my view is most promising in living (...) up to realist expectations. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a semantic account of temporally mismatched past subjunctive counterfactuals. The proposal consists of the following parts. First, I show that in cases of temporal mismatch, [past] cannot be interpreted inside the proposition where it occurs at surface structure. Instead, it must be interpreted as constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation. This has the effect of shifting the time of the evaluation of the conditional to some contextually salient past time. Second, I will propose (...) specific felicity conditions (presuppositions) for subjunctive conditionals and I will argue that there is a strict correspondence between the time of evaluation in the truth conditions of a conditional and the time relevant for the felicity conditions. In other words, if the time relevant for the accessibility relation has been shifted to the past, then the conditional's presupposition will make reference to a past context. On the other hand, if no past is constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation, the conditional's felicity will make reference to the current (main) context. Third, I will argue that the intuition that the antecedent of mismatched counterfactuals is not true is a scalar implicature arising from a competition not between assertions but between presuppositions. Finally, I will investigate the repercussions of my proposal for the general theory of modality. (shrink)

In this chapter, I evaluate the thorny issue as to whether Thomas Kuhn’s view supports a form of realism or relativism. I consider two prominent realist readings of Kuhn, offered respectively by Hoyningen-Huene and Giere, and some of the challenges each of them faces. I offer then a reading of Kuhn’s contentious claim about “working in a new world” in terms of what I call naturalized Kantian kinds. I show how this reading can escape some of the challenges and deliver (...) a mild form of realism. (shrink)

I analyze the exploratory function of two main modeling practices: targetless fictional models and hypothetical perspectival models. In both cases, I argue, modelers invite us to imagine or conceive something about the target system, which is known to be either nonexistent or just hypothetical. I clarify the kind of imagining or conceiving involved in each modeling practice, and I show how each—in its own right—delivers important modal knowledge. I illustrate these two kinds of exploratory models with Maxwell’s ether model and (...) supersymmetric particle models at the Large Hadron Collider. (shrink)

Structural realism was born in the attempt to reach a compromise between a realist argument and an antirealist one, namely the ‘no miracle’ ­argument and the ‘pessimistic meta-induction’, respectively. According to the ‘no miracle’ argument, scientific realism is the only philosophy that does not make the success of science a miracle. The only way of explaining why science is so ­successful in making predictions that most of the time turn out to be verified, is to believe that theoretical terms refer, (...) that theories in mature science are true or at least approximately true, and that the same term refers to the same thing even if it occurs in different theories. It is the referential nature of scientific theories that explains the success of science. (shrink)

This edited collection is the first of its kind to explore the view called perspectivism in philosophy of science. The book brings together an array of essays that reflect on the methodological promises and scientific challenges of perspectivism in a variety of fields such as physics, biology, cognitive neuroscience, and cancer research, just as a few examples. What are the advantages of using a plurality of perspectives in a given scientific field and for interdisciplinary research? Can different perspectives be integrated? (...) What is the relation between perspectivism, pluralism, and pragmatism? These ten new essays by top scholars in the field offer a polyphonic journey towards understanding the view called ‘perspectivism’ and its relevance to science. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to address the problem of inconsistent models and the challenge it poses for perspectivism. I analyze the argument, draw attention to some hidden premises behind it, and deflate them. Then I introduce the notion of perspectival models as a distinctive class of modeling practices whose primary function is exploratory. I illustrate perspectival modeling with two examples taken from contemporary high-energy physics at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which are (...) designed to show how a plurality of seemingly incompatible models is methodologically crucial to advance the realist quest in cutting-edge areas of scientific inquiry. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the production of a vast amount of COVID-19-themed brand commercials, in an attempt to exploit the salience of the topic to reach more effectively the consumers. However, the literature has produced conflicting findings of the effectiveness of negative emotional contents in advertisings. The present study aims at exploring the effect of COVID-19-related contents on the hemodynamic brain correlates of the consumer approach or avoidance motivation. Twenty Italian participants were randomly assigned to two different groups that (...) watched COVID-19-related or non-COVID-19-related commercials. The hemodynamic response [oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin modulations] within the left and right prefrontal cortices was monitored with Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy while brand commercials were presented, as the prefrontal lateralization was shown to be indicative of the attitude toward the brand and of the approach-avoidance motivation. First, the findings showed that the COVID-19-related contents were able to prompt emotional processing within the PFC to a higher extent compared to contents non-related to COVID-19. Moreover, the single-channel analysis revealed increased O2Hb activity of the left dorsolateral PFC compared to the left pars triangularis Broca’s area in the group of participants that watched the COVID-19-related commercials, suggesting that the commercials may have driven participants to dedicate more attention toward the processing of the emotional components compared to the semantic meaning conveyed by the ad. To conclude, despite expressing unpleasant emotions, commercials referring to the highly emotional pandemic experience may benefit the advertising efficacy, increasing the capability to reach customers. (shrink)

Moving from pragmatism and drawing on a fascinating and accurate interpretation of Richard Rorty’s work, Rosa Calcaterra’s Contingency and Normativity. The Challenges of Richard Rorty (Brill-Rodopi, 2019) proposes a philosophical investigation of the relationship between normativity and contingency. Calcaterra’s longstanding familiarity with pragmatist philosophy strongly marks her attitude towards these topics and their related issues. The author takes up some of the pragmatists’ constructiv...

The solidarity economy has been interpreted as being characterised by a political dimension: however, empirical and theoretical analysis supporting this statement is still embryonic. Drawing on a qualitative study in the city of Barcelona, this article analyses the political dimension of the solidarity economy and its transformative character with respect to neoliberalism by engaging with critical approaches related to the social movement studies. The main objectives were to investigate factors enabling the upsurge of solidarity economy organisations and how the opposition (...) of social movement participants to neoliberal rationalities impacts on the way the solidarity economy is conceived and implemented in practice. The results highlight three main dimensions in which the political dimension is reflected, and some general as well as context‐specific factors enabling the upsurge of solidarity economy organisations. Findings show how the compensative rationale that distinguishes most approaches in the field of social entrepreneurship studies is contested by the solidarity economy: its transformative character is reflected in discourses and practices that define the solidarity economy as a prefigurative socio‐economic project. (shrink)

The results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS 2001) were published in 2003. In addition to data about the reading achievements of 10?year?olds in 35 countries, PIRLS 2001 also collected questionnaire information from children, their teachers, headteachers and parents. The results showed not just how well students can perform in various reading tasks, but also the relationship between reading abilities and other characteristics, including the characteristics of their homes and schools, the students' attitudes to reading, reading enjoyment, (...) self?confidence, engagement and perceptions of their reading abilities. Surprisingly enough, children in England were reported as having poor attitudes to reading, compared to children in many other countries, despite high achievement on the reading tests. This paper raises some concerns about the interpretation of results from the study, suggesting a more complex picture than that presented in the summary index published in 2003. Our secondary analysis of the attitude and achievement data from PIRLS shows that pupils with low ability levels have misunderstood the questions which tested their attitudes towards reading. The authors point out that caution is needed when making cross?country comparisons to avoid naïve approaches to interpretation. (shrink)

Background:Personal values influence nursing students’ development of professional values, which affect professional outcomes, and how nursing students react to different situations. Personal values can be shaped by different factors, including culture, gender, and age.Aims:To explore personal values held by nursing students, and to verify if and how gender and year of study affect nursing students’ personal values.Research design:A multicenter, cross-sectional study was used.Participants and research context:The whole population of nursing undergraduate students available at the time was recruited from eight centers (...) of two Universities, composing a sample of 947 students. Demographic data were collected and it was administered the Portrait Values Questionnaire.Ethical considerations:Ethical approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Boards of the University of the participating centers.Findings:The study sample was mainly composed of young (92.6%, n = 877), female (77.3%, n = 732), Italian (95.8%, n = 907), and unmarried (98.6%, n = 934) nursing students. The most important value for nursing students, consistently through the years of nursing school, was Self-transcendence, which has the motivational emphasis on helping others and selflessness. Then, we found that male students had higher levels of Power (p < 0.001) and Achievement (p = 0.031), while female students outscored male students in Benevolence (p = 0.005) and Security (p = 0.006). Year of study showed no statistically significant difference.Discussion:Nursing students express high levels in hetero-directed values. Male nursing students, although they choose a stereotypically feminine profession, outscored females in stereotypical masculine values such as dominance and success. This is the first study that describes the personal value profile of undergraduate nursing students, according to the Theory of Basic Human Values, and it is a starting point for future research.Conclusion:Nursing educators might want to consider the findings from this study while guiding students in developing awareness for their personal values. (shrink)

Tenth-century Islamic alchemy attributed different roles to the figure of Hermes, all of which were retained in later alchemy. The playful changing of perspectives, in which Harmis al-Harāmisa perpetually changed his connotation, allowed for a complex game played at the border between science and literature. In the process, he turned from representing the venerable author of the early alchemical texts - master over ancient wisdom and scientific 'subject' - into an 'object' of research, into an allegory of the nucleus of (...) the Great Work, and into a mysterious image of the secret that he himself had handed over to men. (shrink)

English summary: In philosophy, examples are usually employed as illustrations of already determined abstract or general thoughts. In contrast to this view, the contributions of this volume focus on the exemplary and normative function of examples, as guides in order to find a not yet given universal or generality. German description: Der Band diskutiert die theoretische und praktische Bedeutung des Exemplarischen als ein Individuelles, das selbst als Manifestation eines Allgemeinen verstanden wird. Gegenuber der gewohnlichen Auffassung, derzufolge Beispiele lediglich zur nachtraglichen (...) Illustration bereits bestimmter abstrakter Gedanken verwendet werden, beschaftigen sich die Beitrage des Bandes mit dem Beispiel in seiner exemplarischen Bedeutung, bei der das Individuelle selbst als Manifestation des Allgemeinen verstanden wird. Die klassischen Bereiche, in denen diese Rolle und Funktion des Exemplarischen explizit thematisiert werden, sind die Rhetorik, die Kunsttheorie sowie die Didaktik. Demgegenuber spielt das Exemplarische in der allgemeinen Reflexion der theoretischen und praktischen Philosophie keine oder allenfalls eine sehr untergeordnete Rolle. Diese theoretische Vernachlassigung steht in einem auffallenden Gegensatz zur operativen Bedeutung des Exemplarischen im Kontext unseres theoretischen und praktischen Wissens. (shrink)

What good is Kant's philosophy for current philosophy of science? There has been an increasing interest in Kant and philosophy of science in the past twenty years. Through the reconstruction of a variety of Kantian legacies in the development of nineteenth and twentieth century physics and mathematics, this edited volume explores the relevance that Kant's philosophy still has for current debates in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of physics.

The goal of this paper is to offer a compositional semantics for subjunctive and indicative will conditionals, and to derive the projection properties of the types of conditionals we consider and in particular those of counterfactual conditionals. It is argued that subjunctive conditionals are "bare" conditional embedded under temporal and aspectural operators, which constrain the interpretation of the modal operators in the embedded conditional. Furthermore, it is argued that a theory of presupposition projection à la Heim together with the present (...) proposal about their logical form explains the projection facts. (shrink)

In this paper, I address a prominent realist challenge recently raised by Anjan Chakravartty (2010) against scientific perspectivism. I offer a response to the challenge, by rethinking scientific perspectivism as a view on how we form scientific knowledge, as opposed to a view about what sort of objects we have scientific knowledge of. My response follows Ernest Sosa’s perspectivism in epistemology by drawing a distinction between truth and justification for our knowledge claims. With this distinction in place, I pledge to (...) defend scientific perspectivism as a promising alternative to both objectivist realism and relativism. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the aspectual, marginality, and concessive uses of the grading particles still and already can be reduced to the fol lowing three classes of focus sensitive-grading particles: additive particles like too, scalar particles like even, and exclusive particles like only. The meaning differences among the occurrences of still (and already) are mostly reduced to the differences among these three classes of grading particles. In turn, these differences are shown to correlate with what type of object (...) is denoted by the phrase in the scope of the particle. The proposal has repercussions also for the focus-sensitive particle again. I investigate the latter too, and I propose a parallel between the temporal and nominal domains where the contrast between still and again is analyzed along the lines of the contrast between definite and indefinite noun phrases. (shrink)

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What did you know about Pragmatism when you started? Where did you start as a student? Charlene Haddock Seigfried – I came to pragmatism by way of existentialism. During the late sixties, I took my first graduate class at the University of Southern California – an introduction to empiricism – which I didn’t like at all, and I also attended a lecture on existentialism, which intrigued me. But I was always interested in social (...) and political issues and I was m... (shrink)

In this paper I argue that demonstrative induction can deal with the problem ofthe underdetermination of theory by evidence. I present the historical case studyof spectroscopy in the early 1920s, where the choice among different theorieswas apparently underdetermined by spectroscopic evidence concerning the alkalidoublets and their anomalous Zeeman effect. By casting this historical episodewithin the methodological framework of demonstrative induction, the localunderdetermination among Bohr's, Heisenberg's, and Pauli's rival theories isresolved in favour of Pauli's theory of the electron's spin.