Recent algorithmic technologies have challenged law’s anthropocentric assumptions. In this article, we develop a set of theoretical tools drawn from new materialisms and the philosophy of information to unravel the complex intra-actions between law and computer code. Accordingly, we first propose a framework for understanding the enmeshing of law and code based on a diffractive reading of Barad’s agential realism and Simondon’s theory of information. We argue that once law and code are understood as material entities that intra-act through in-formation, (...) the concept of transduction allows us to trace how they push each other towards change. After developing the theoretical tools, we deploy them to make sense of how law and code have changed in response to increasing automation of decision-making and the appearance of unexplainable artificial intelligence (AI) code. Thus, we employ a case study to trace transformations of the right to explanation under the European data protection regulations. This provides the backdrop for our account of how law transduces into code (and vice versa) and a proving ground for our framework. (shrink)

We debate whether permissivism is true. We start off by assuming an accuracy-oriented framework, and then discuss metaepistemological questions about how our epistemic evaluations promote accuracy.

The contribution of this research lies in its dual approach to the question of physical activity (PA) among adolescents, combining objective measurement of PA by teenagers and a comparison of psychological satisfaction through physical activities involving differing degrees of autonomy (i.e., organized or unstructured). Using the conceptual framework of Self-Determination Theory, the analysis also examines the relationship between levels of PA among adolescents and physical self-concept and satisfaction of basic psychological needs during exercise. The study surveyed 129 first-year higher secondary (...) education students from schools in the city of A Coruña. Satisfaction of basic psychological needs during organized and unstructured physical activities was measured using the Basic Psychological Needs in Exercise Scale. PA levels were assessed based on step count per day for a week as measured by an accelerometer. The results show that the daily step average recorded by students (7,400) is below the minimum recommended levels of PA for this age group, that students are more active on weekdays than at the weekend, and that there is no significant difference in PA levels between male and female subjects ( T = 0.23, p d = 0.04). Findings from the comparative analysis of the three basic psychological needs show greater satisfaction of the need for autonomy during unstructured activities ( T = 6.15, p d = 0.68), and greater satisfaction of the need for competence during organized activities ( T = −2.50, p d = 0.27). No variation in terms of sex was found in relation to satisfaction of the need for autonomy or relatedness from unstructured activities; however, girls showed notably lower satisfaction than boys in relation to the need for competence ( T = −2.62, p d = 0.49). Self-esteem was found to play an important mediating role and observed to be strongly related to sex ( T = −5.16, p d = 0.90). Organized PA was found to provide greater need satisfaction among boys than girls across all categories. The study showed no relationship between psychological variables and objectively measured PA (Pillai’s trace: F = 0.86, p > 0.05, η 2 = 0.08, observed power = 0.66). Basic psychological needs show significant positive interrelation between them and a significant positive relationship between them and physical self-concept, as expected based on previous literature. (shrink)

Building from an interactionist view of ethics, this study sought to integrate individual and contextual factors for understanding ethical perceptions in teams. Given the proximal nature of team members, this study specifically explored how individuals comparatively evaluate their own ethical behaviors and team members’ ethical behaviors to arrive at a perception of ethical person–group fit within a team. Grounding our theoretical arguments in relational schemas theory, we demonstrate that interpersonal ethical perceptions can have distal impacts on perceptions of team functioning. (...) The results support the hypotheses that a perceived ethical incongruence between the self and other team members negatively influenced perceptions of relationship conflict and ultimately information sharing. By exploring individual and team level aspects of ethics concurrently, we contribute to a deeper understanding of contextual forces in ethics through an interactionist approach. (shrink)

How is medical knowledge made? There have been radical changes in recent decades, through new methods such as consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine. Miriam Solomon explores their origins, aims, and epistemic strengths and weaknesses; and she offers a pluralistic approach for the future.

Non-financial interests, and the conflicts of interest that may result from them, are frequently overlooked in biomedicine. This is partly due to the complex and varied nature of these interests, and the limited evidence available regarding their prevalence and impact on biomedical research and clinical practice. We suggest that there are no meaningful conceptual distinctions, and few practical differences, between financial and non-financial conflicts of interest, and accordingly, that both require careful consideration. Further, a better understanding of the complexities of (...) non-financial conflicts of interest, and their entanglement with financial conflicts of interest, may assist in the development of a more sophisticated approach to all forms of conflicts of interest. (shrink)

In this paper, I begin by defending permissivism: the claim that, sometimes, there is more than one way to rationally respond to a given body of evidence. Then I argue that, if we accept permissivism, certain worries that arise as a result of learning that our beliefs were caused by the communities we grew up in, the schools we went to, or other irrelevant influences dissipate. The basic strategy is as follows: First, I try to pinpoint what makes irrelevant influences (...) worrying and I come up with two candidate principles. I then argue that one principle should be rejected because it is inconsistent with permissivism. The principle we should accept implies that it is sometimes rational to maintain our beliefs, even upon learning that they were caused by irrelevant influences. (shrink)

I argue that there is a unity between Hume’s philosophical reflection and his political views and that many interesting connections can be found that illuminate both aspects of his thought. This paper highlights two of these connections. First, I argue that the conclusions Hume comes to in his political writings are natural outgrowths of his skepticism, a skepticism that recommends limitation of inquiry, modesty, moderation and openness. Most scholars who view Hume’s skepticism as informing his political views see it as (...) supporting a conservative politics, one which is concerned above all to preserve the status quo. I reject the idea that the kind of philosophical skepticism embraced by Hume leads to such conservatism. The second main aspect of the unity of Hume’s thought I discuss concerns that way in which he addresses normative questions in the epistemological and political realms. The question of what resources Hume has to evaluate some beliefs or philosophical systems as better than others, given his skeptical conclusions, is one that has been of central concern for Hume scholars. His evaluations of political systems and governments can be understood in a similar way; the principles we use to evaluate personal beliefs can also be applied in the evaluation of political systems. (shrink)

For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the (...) traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science. After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to describe a problem for calibrationism: a view about higher order evidence according to which one's credences should be calibrated to one's expected degree of reliability. Calibrationism is attractive, in part, because it explains our intuitive judgments, and provides a strong motivation for certain theories about higher order evidence and peer disagreement. However, I will argue that calibrationism faces a dilemma: There are two versions of the view one might adopt. The first version, I (...) argue, has the implausible consequence that, in a wide range of cases, calibrationism is the only constraint on rational belief. The second version, in addition to having some puzzling consequences, is unmotivated. At the end of the paper I sketch a possible solution. (shrink)

The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st (...) and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper defends a constraint that any satisfactory decision theory must satisfy. I show how this constraint is violated by all of the decision theories that have been endorsed in the literature that are designed to deal with cases in which opinions or values are represented by a set of functions rather than a single one. Such a decision theory is necessary to account for the existence of what Ruth Chang has called “parity” (as well as for cases in (...) which agents have incomplete preferences or imprecise credences). The problem with the all of the decision theories that have been defended to account for parity is that they are committed to a claim I call unanimity: when all of the functions in the set agree that an agent ought to do A, then an agent ought to do A. A decision theory committed to unanimity violates the constraint I defend in this paper. Thus, if parity exists, a new approach to decision theory is necessary. (shrink)

The American regulatory model of corporate governance rests on the theory of self-regulation as␣the most effective and efficient means to achieve corporate self-restraint in the marketplace. However, that model fails to achieve regular compliance with baseline ethical and legal behaviors as evidenced by a century of repeated corporate debacles, the most recent being Enron, WorldCom, and Refco. Seemingly impervious to its domestic failure, Congress imprinted the same self-regulation paradigm on legislation restraining global business behavior, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This (...) anti-bribery initiative prohibits unethical and illegal payments made to foreign public officials in an effort to eradicate bribery as a rational-choice global market entry strategy. However, this paper illustrates, using newly complied statistics from 1977 to 2008, that the FCPA has not had a dramatic impact on U.S. global corporate behavior despite its recent high profile coverage and the tough regulatory rhetoric about corporate compliance. The paper also extends the prior Cragg and Woof FCPA efficiency study and provides current empirical evidence to resolve several unanswered questions raised by that earlier study. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper describes the way in which a simple device, the pregnancy wheel, has been used by the medical profession to impose a new way of measuring and experiencing pregnancy.The change involves counting in weeks instead of counting in months and it is gradually replacing a commonsensical method that had deep physiological and cultural roots. In contrast, the medical methodology of counting forty weeks is more complicated and lacks direct connections to the events of pregnancyIn the encounter between the (...) doctor and the pregnant woman the pregnancy wheel has a variety of uses, among them determinations of the age and estimated size of the fetus.It plays an additional role, however, in the medicalization of pregnancy by providing the doctor with privileged information. It also influences modes of thinking through the way in which it deals with the question of the beginning of pregnancy, a question that has clear moral implications. (shrink)

A new, social epistemology of science that addresses practical as well as theoretical concerns.

Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would novel verbs) in non-prototypical constructions. We provide support for this hypothesis investigating German children using a forced-choice pointing paradigm with reversed agent-patient roles. We tested active transitive verbs in study 1. The 2-year olds were better with familiar than novel verbs, while the (...) 2½-year olds pointed correctly for both. In study 2, we tested passives: 2½-year olds were significantly below chance for familiar verbs and at chance for novel verbs, supporting the hypothesis that the entrenchment of the familiar verbs in the active transitive voice was interfering with interpreting them in the passive voice construction. The 3½-year olds were also at chance for novel verbs but above chance with familiar verbs. We interpret this as reflecting a lessening of the verb-in-construction entrenchment as the child develops knowledge that particular verbs can occur in a range of constructions. The 4½-year olds were above chance for both familiar and novel verbs. We discuss our findings in terms of the relative entrenchment of lexical and syntactic information and to interference between them. (shrink)

The continuing ramifications of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 have forced social scientists to raise fundamental questions about the relationship between capitalism, democracy and inequality. In particular, Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Wolfgang Streeck’s Buying Time focus on, respectively, the economic and the political contradictions of capitalistic societies. Piketty argues that capitalism naturally tends towards the exacerbation of rent-based wealth inequality, whereas Streeck suggests that capitalism and democracy are ultimately incompatible. A striking feature of these two contributions is that their authors (...) are social democrats, not Marxists or radical anti-capitalist thinkers. In this review article, I illustrate how the combination of social democratic convictions and the acknowledgment that capitalism cannot be tamed generates interesting tensions between the diagnosis offered by the two monographs and the solutions that are proposed. I end the piece by raising two remarks on the implications that this tension might have for normative political theory. On the one hand, it is time for theory to do more work on political action and agency. On the other, liberal egalitarian theorists might have to acknowledge that they are in the same predicament as Piketty and Streeck: social democracy is their ideal, yet it is perhaps unattainable. If this is the case, liberal egalitarians might be committed to adopt a more confrontational attitude towards capitalism: they might have to become reluctant radicals. (shrink)

In their target article, Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland (2023) address a longstanding debate within the bioethics and organ transplantation community regarding whether controlled donation after circula...

Quine claims to be "working from within" our conceptual scheme and proceeding scientifically. This description makes his views of interest to those who are skeptical of traditional metaphysical projects and to those with confidence in science. This study examines whether Quine is in fact starting within ordinary language and proceeding scientifically and, if not, how his views are to be best understood. I proceed by exploring some central doctrines in Quine's writing, most notably indeterminacy of translation, but also his views (...) on underdetermination of scientific theory, truth, reality and the dispensability of theory, and the nature of scientific method. In examining Quine's arguments for these doctrines, I find that they do not all issue from what we would ordinarily or scientifically say on the topics concerned. Instead, I find that most arise from an underlying view of the nature of language and knowledge, which I call natural empiricism. I argue that natural empiricism involves assumptions and dynamics of reasoning characteristic of metaphysical points of view, rather than of an ordinary or scientific stance. This is a result with consequences for a critical evaluation of Quine's views. ;I show that natural empiricism leads not only to the central doctrines in Quine's writing that I examine, but also to his general claim to be "working from within" our conceptual scheme and proceeding scientifically. I argue that there is a tension between natural empiricism and "working from within" that is the major tension in Quine's views, leading him to reach different conclusions on the same topic. Quine's views are unusual in that this tension is internal to natural empiricism; most metaphysical views, while they may conflict with the ordinary, do not also endorse it. Natural empiricism is also an unusual point of view in its thoroughgoing empiricism: I claim that it is an empiricist overreaction to the vestiges of rationalism in twentieth century logical empiricism. It shares with the views to which it reacts the need to ground language and knowledge, in a metaphysical sense. Thus Quine's position is particularly valuable for showing up the differences and common motivations in the analytic tradition. (shrink)

David Hunter’s On Believing is an ambitious, extremely carefully argued, discussion of what it means to believe. He urges readers to re-think the way to categorize beliefs (or more precisely believ...

Conflicts of interest in health and medicine have been the source of considerable public and professional debate. Much of this debate has focused on financial, rather than non-financial COI, which is a significant lacuna because non-financial COI can be just as influential as financial COI. In an effort to explore the nature and effects of non-financial, as well as financial COI, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eleven Australian medical professionals regarding their experiences of, and attitudes towards, COI. We found that (...) this group of medical professionals saw non-financial interests—most notably the pursuit of status and respect and the avoidance of stigma—as potentially conflicting with other important interests. (shrink)

The article deals with larger stretches of talk-in-interaction and argues in favor of a descriptive approach, which integrates the structural requirements of global organization, the special type of sequential orderliness within larger units as well as the genre-orientation of these units. Drawing on previous work in conversation analysis, discourse analysis and the sociological genre analysis, the article introduces GLOBE as an analytical tool which functionally links discourse units to conventionalized communicative purposes. GLOBE reconstructs the interactive achievement of genre-oriented discourse units (...) in a three-branch analysis of jobs, devices and forms. The analytical potential of GLOBE is demonstrated in the exemplary genre-contrastive analysis of a narrative, an explanative and an argumentative excerpt. On the basis of the analyses of the three genres, the overarching constitution of genre-oriented global units is then explicated. (shrink)

Greaves and Wallace argue that conditionalization maximizes expected accuracy. In this paper I show that their result only applies to a restricted range of cases. I then show that the update procedure that maximizes expected accuracy in general is one in which, upon learning P, we conditionalize, not on P, but on the proposition that we learned P. After proving this result, I provide further generalizations and show that much of the accuracy-first epistemology program is committed to KK-like iteration principles (...) and to the existence of a class of propositions that rational agents will be certain of if and only if they are true. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche and Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer had strong personalities and freely expressed unconventional opinions. In particular, they dared to challenge the traditional view that considered Aristotelian logic as being absolute and intrinsic to man. Although they formed this opinion in different ways and in different contexts, they both based it on a view of life that considered it as a struggle for power in which logic was a weapon. Therefore, it is interesting to carry out an in-depth analysis on (...) the origins, the core of their opinions concerning logic and the consequences. As a matter of fact, a detailed analysis and a comparison of their contributions to the philosophy of logic have not yet been carried out. In this paper, I intend to present the results of my research.. (shrink)

El presente artículo aborda tres aportes de la deconstrucción de Jacques Derrida a la crítica al nacionalismo en distintos momentos de su obra: a) la deconstrucción del mito de los orígenes como ideal de pureza que expone con la lógica del suplemento; b) la crítica a la noción de un idioma nacional pensado como el idioma de un “nosotros” a partir de una comunidad de espíritu y c) la deconstrucción de un nacionalismo a la vez cosmopolita y humanista, inclusive en (...) filosofías críticas del humanismo y contrarias a cualquier determinación racial o natural. (shrink)

Riassunto: Il presente studio indaga il modo in cui gli scienziati percepiscono la dimensione estetica nella propria attività e nei propri oggetti di studio, al punto da essere un criterio che orienta il loro lavoro; si cercherà pertanto di enucleare le proprietà che caratterizzano il tipo di bellezza da loro riscontrato, facendo riferimento agli scritti di Michael Polanyi. L’autore offre importanti spunti per chiarire il problema della validità di tale uso della bellezza scientifica. La questione è ancor più interessante perché, (...) se la bellezza è legittimamente un criterio scientifico, ne risulta un legame tra scienza e persona (infatti il senso estetico è proprio della persona). Tale bellezza ha caratteristiche specifiche: è intellettuale, strettamente dipendente dall’ordine, dall’intero e dalle relazioni. Inoltre, essa è il termine di una delle cosiddette passioni scientifiche o intellettuali degli scienziati: il ricercatore desidera la bellezza intellettuale e ne è (momentaneamente) appagato. Per Polanyi, la bellezza intellettuale è essenziale alla verità scientifica e ha il potere di rivelare la verità sul mondo naturale. Allo stesso tempo, però, tale standard di bellezza è sempre posto da noi e per noi stessi. Emergono così le tensioni polanyiane a riguardo del realismo. L’articolo propone una soluzione, a favore del criterio di bellezza, che può risultare utile anche per il progresso della ricerca scientifica. (shrink)