In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Inappropriate RegretClaire Pouncey (bio)Keywordsanxiety, inappropriate guilt, moral sentiments, supererogation, regretThis delightful and provocative vignette has many interesting clinical facets, and I thank Dr. Bailey for his candid introspection. For me, this essay calls attention to an asymmetry in our culture, in which women tend to feel more comfortable than men in expressing anxieties about our unpredictable and often dangerous world. Women's fears, however, often are dismissed or minimized, (...) revealing an overall social discomfort with expressed anxiety, and a sense that anxiety itself is, somehow, feminine. When I read Dr. Bailey's essay, I am struck that two self-aware men need the metaphors of war and heroism to address their own anxieties.The vignette builds around a soldier, Colin, who presents with guilt about having been deployed to Iraq, but not engaging in combat. Guilt is a moral sentiment, a feeling that one ought to have acted otherwise in a given situation. It is a self-imposed sanction for a moral failure. In mental health care, we use the term ‘inappropriate guilt’ to describe a clinical symptom commonly associated with depression. Clinicians understand inappropriate guilt as a manifestation of the self-criticism and low self-esteem often associated with depressive disorders. In Colin's case, it did fit with a constellation of symptoms that suggested depression. Dr. Bailey's essay explores the psychodynamics of Colin's guilt, and possible responses to it.As I understand the situation, Colin sees himself as having a moral obligation to exceed his contractual obligation to the military. In the terminology of ethics, he imposes upon himself a duty to be supererogatory, that is, a duty to go beyond the call of duty, which some moral philosophers have considered oxymoronic. For Colin to feel guilty about not engaging in combat, he must have understood a moral obligation to participate in combat that goes beyond his obligation to follow orders. It seems to me that soldiers have a nonmoral, contractual obligation to train, deploy, follow orders, and if circumstances so dictate, fight. But if the circumstances do not lead to combat (Nagel might call this good moral luck), it does not seem to me that a soldier has failed either a contractual or a moral obligation by not being sent into battle. Supererogation aside, to my mind, Colin's guilt is inappropriate: he is holding himself to an unreasonable moral standard, according to which he is required not only to do what the military demands, but also to sacrifice or suffer from the experience in some meaningful way.Although the notion of inappropriate guilt fits with the description of Colin's depression, it occurs to me that the word ‘guilt’ may be too strong here. Perhaps what Dr. Bailey is seeing is better characterized as ‘inappropriate regret’ that Colin missed “his last, best chance to be a hero.” ‘Regret’ is the sentiment that one could have (rather than should have) acted otherwise, perhaps to a better eventual end. Dr. Bailey agrees that Colin's guilt is inappropriate, that no one is ever required [End Page 233] to be a hero. But he seems to share, and even encourage, what I am calling Colin's ‘inappropriate regret,’ which suggests that if Colin had engaged in combat, he would not experience feelings of helplessness or insecurity in our uncertain world. What fascinates me is that Dr. Bailey accepts this premise, and even reflects on his own fears about self-protection in his own urban setting.Rather than challenging it, Dr. Bailey clearly shares Colin's concern that he may not be able to respond adequately should a real threat arise. Both therapist and patient seem to want reassurance that they can keep themselves and their families safe when danger strikes. But this is not a matter of achieving or going beyond the call of duty. Rather, it is an expression of familiar and diffuse anxiety that is unrelated to wartime. In the essay, heroism seems to serve as a metaphor, a filter that makes the expression of anxiety more palatable to both the patient and the therapist. I am fascinated that these two sensitive and introspective interlocutors need to filter their anxieties through... (shrink)

Before we respond to Tamara Browne's proposal for an external ethics advisory review panel to oversee content in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, we wish to introduce ourselves. One of us is a professor of bioethics, a lawyer, and a doctor of public policy, and one of us is a philosopher of psychiatry who studies psychiatric nosology, and who has done bioethics work for two congressional advisory agencies. Based on our backgrounds, we flatter ourselves that we might (...) be considered as members of the DSM ethical review panel Browne proposes. However, we realize that one of us would likely be ineligible because of a lack of experience in psychiatry, and the other would... (shrink)

In "On the Concept of 'Psychiatric Disorder,'" Miriam Solomon strives to resolve the tension between thinking of bereavement as a normal reaction to loss, and recognizing that its most extreme forms look very much like major depressive episodes and benefit from psychiatric treatment. To do this, she introduces the idea that a condition can be both normal and a mental disorder, or in other words, that some mental disorders are normal. Although I very much like the idea that some mental (...) are predictable responses to stressors, I have trouble making sense of the argument Solomon provides. I am going to focus on two reasons why.First, the concept of psychological injury is not new and does not do the work Solomon needs... (shrink)

I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Freedman’s paper on “Akratic Believing.” Often, philosophy of psychiatry offers insights to clarify psychological and psychiatric concepts. Less frequently, it involves a real dialogue between philosophy and psychological science. Dr. Freedman’s account of what is bothersome, rather than just philosophically wrong-headed, about the concept of epistemic akrasia demonstrates that, at least where anxiety is concerned, the a posteriori world may have a great deal to offer theoretical philosophy. Freedman argues that understanding somatic responses to trauma, or (...) more broadly construed, to anxiety, dissolves the problem of why there seems to be more to the problem of epistemic... (shrink)

During the last three decades, reflections on the growth of scientific knowledge have inspired historians, sociologists, and some philosophers to contend that scientific objectivity is a myth. In this book, Kitcher attempts to resurrect the notions of objectivity and progress in science by identifying both the limitations of idealized treatments of growth of knowledge and the overreactions to philosophical idealizations. Recognizing that science is done not by logically omniscient subjects working in isolation, but by people with a variety of personal (...) and social interests, who cooperate and compete with one another, he argues that, nonetheless, we may conceive the growth of science as a process in which both our vision of nature and our ways of learning more about nature improve. Offering a detailed picture of the advancement of science, he sets a new agenda for the philosophy of science and for other "science studies" disciplines. (shrink)

This is the first full-length presentation of a republican alternative to the liberal and communitarian theories that have dominated political philosophy in recent years. The latest addition to the acclaimed Oxford Political Theory series, Pettit's eloquent and compelling account opens with an examination of the traditional republican conception of freedom as non-domination, contrasting this with established negative and positive views of liberty. The first part of the book traces the rise and decline of this conception, displays its many attractions, and (...) makes a case for why it should still be regarded as a central political ideal. The second part of the book looks at what the implementation of the ideal would imply for substantive policy-making, constitutional and democratic design, regulatory control and the relation between state and civil society. Prominent in this account is a novel concept of democracy, under which government is exposed to systematic contestation, and a vision of relations between state and society founded upon civility and trust. Pettit's powerful and insightful new work offers not only a unified, theoretical overview of the many strands of republican ideas, but also a new and sophisticated perspective on studies in related fields including the history of ideas, jurisprudence, and criminology. (shrink)

This book argues against the view that mathematical knowledge is a priori,contending that mathematics is an empirical science and develops historically,just as ...

This innovative approach to freedom starts from an account of what we mean by describing someone, in a psychological vein, as a free subject. Pettit develops an argument as to what it is that makes someone free in that basic sense; and then goes on to derive the implications of the approach for issues of freedom in political theory. Freedom in the subject is equated with the person's being fit to be held responsible and to be authorized as a partner (...) in interaction. This book is unique among contemporary approaches - although it is true to the spirit of classical writers like Hobbes and Kant - in seeking a theory that applies to psychological issues of free agency and free will as well as to political issues in the theory of the free state and the free constitution. The driving thesis is that it is only by connecting up the different issues of freedom, psychological and political, that we can fully appreciate the nature of the questions involved, and the requirements for their resolution. The book does not not seek a comprehensive reach just for its own sake, but rather for the sake of the illumination it provides._ _ _A Theory of Freedom_ is a ground-breaking volume which will be of wide interest to scholars and students in political philosophy and political science. (shrink)

The mental health recovery movement promotes patient self-determination and opposes coercive psychiatric treatment. While it has made great strides towards these ends, its rhetoric impairs its political efficacy. We illustrate how psychiatry can share recovery values and yet appear to violate them. In certain criminal proceedings, for example, forensic psychiatrists routinely argue that persons with mental illness who have committed crimes are not full moral agents. Such arguments align with the recovery movement’s aim of providing appropriate treatment and services for (...) people with severe mental illness, but contradict its fundamental principle of self-determination. We suggest that this contradiction should be addressed with some urgency, and we recommend a multidisciplinary collaborative effort involving ethics, law, psychiatry, and social policy to address this and other ethical questions that arise as the United States strives to implement recovery-oriented programs. (shrink)

Studdert-Kennedy, Gerald, Evidence and Explanation in Social Science. ... Kauffman, Stuart, "Articulation of Parts Explanation in Biology and the Rational ...

This paper sets out an account of trust in AI as a relationship between clinicians, AI applications, and AI practitioners in which AI is given discretionary authority over medical questions by clinicians. Compared to other accounts in recent literature, this account more adequately explains the normative commitments created by practitioners when inviting clinicians’ trust in AI. To avoid committing to an account of trust in AI applications themselves, I sketch a reductive view on which discretionary authority is exercised by AI (...) practitioners through the vehicle of an AI application. I conclude with four critical questions based on the discretionary account to determine if trust in particular AI applications is sound, and a brief discussion of the possibility that the main roles of the physician could be replaced by AI. (shrink)

How Galileo created the problem of consciousness -- Is there a ghost in the machine? -- Can physical science explain consciousness? -- How to solve the problem of consciousness -- Consciousness and the meaning of life.

While there have been forty years of active debate among philosophers of psychiatry about how to define mental disorder, there has been relatively little discussion of mental health. This is starting to change. A new literature is emerging about what it means to have mental health. While some define mental health as simply as the absence of mental disorder, others argue to the contrary that mental health is distinct from, and not reducible to, the presence or absence of mental illness. (...) In this paper we review competing accounts and develop our own account. We characterize a diverse set of dispositions, skills, habits, and capacities, associated with aspects of personality structure. These are some of the same capacities developed across many psychotherapies. Attention to the literature on personality, and clinical psychotherapy, can, in our view, illuminate one (of several) dimensions of positive mental health. (shrink)

This book presents views of the concept of intention and its relationship to communication from three perspectives: philosphy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The book is a record of a workshop held in 1987.

Cognitive science is shamelessly materialistic. It maintains that human beings are nothing more than complex physical systems, ultimately and completely explicable in mechanistic terms. But this conception of humanity does not ?t well with common sense. To think of the creatures we spend much of our day loving, hating, admiring, resenting, comparing ourselves to, trying to understand, blaming, and thanking -- to think of them as mere mechanisms seems at best counterintuitive and unhelpful. More often it may strike us as (...) ludicrous, or even abhorrent. We are. (shrink)

This paper explores the truism that people think about what they say. It proposes that, to satisfy their own goals, people often plan their speech acts to affect their listeners' beliefs, goals, and emotional states. Such language use can be modelled by viewing speech acts as operators in a planning system, thus allowing both physical and speech acts to be integrated into plans. Methodological issues of how speech acts should be defined in a planbased theory are illustrated by defining operators (...) for requesting and informing. Plans containing those operators are presented and comparisons are drawn with Searle's formulation. The operators are shown to be inadequate since they cannot be composed to form questions (requests to inform) and multiparty requests (requests to request). By refining the operator definitions and by identifying some of the side effects of requesting, compositional adequacy is achieved.The solution leads to a metatheoretical principle for modelling speech acts as planning operators. (shrink)

This paper develops a philosophical account of moral disruption. According to Robert Baker (2013), moral disruption is a process in which technological innovations undermine established moral norms without clearly leading to a new set of norms. Here I analyze this process in terms of moral uncertainty, formulating a philosophical account with two variants. On the Harm Account, such uncertainty is always harmful because it blocks our knowledge of our own and others’ moral obligations. On the Qualified Harm Account, there is (...) no harm in cases where moral uncertainty is related to innovation that is “for the best” in historical perspective, or where uncertainty is the expression of a deliberative virtue. The two accounts are compared by applying them to Baker’s historical case of the introduction of mechanical ventilation and organ transplantation technologies, as well as the present-day case of mass data practices in the health domain. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that trust is a moral attitude, by putting forward the Obligation-Ascription Thesis: If E trusts F to do X, this implies that E ascribes an obligation to F to do X. I explicate the idea of obligation-ascription in terms of requirement and the appropriateness of blame. Then, drawing a distinction between attitude and ground, I argue that this account of the attitude of trust is compatible with the possibility of amoral trust, that is, trust held (...) among amoral persons on the basis of amoral grounds. It is also compatible with trust adopted on purely predictive grounds. Then, defending the thesis against a challenge of motivational inefficacy, I argue that obligation-ascription can motivate people to act even in the absence of definite, mutually-known agreements. I end by explaining, briefly, the advantages of this sort of moral account of trust over a view based on reactive attitudes such as resentment. (shrink)

Cognitive neuropsychiatry (CN) is the explanation of psychiatric disorder by the methods of cognitive neuropsychology. Within CN there are, broadly speaking, two approaches to delusion. The first uses a one-stage model, in which delusions are explained as rationalizations of anomalous experiences via reasoning strategies that are not, in themselves, abnormal. Two-stage models invoke additional hypotheses about abnormalities of reasoning. In this paper, I examine what appears to be a very strong argument, developed within CN, in favor of a two-stage explanation (...) of the difference in content between the Capgras and Cotard delusions. That explanation treats them as alternative rationalizations of essentially the same phenomenology. I show, however, that once we distinguish the phenomenology (and the neuroetiology), a one-stage model is adequate. In the final section I make some more general remarks on the one- and two-stage models. (shrink)

A point of contention in recent discussions of the epistemic condition of moral responsibility is whether culpable ignorance must trace to akratic belief mismanagement. Neil Levy has recently defended an akrasia requirement by arguing that only an akratic agent has the capacity rationally to comply with epistemic expectations the violation of which contributes to her ignorance. In this paper I show that Levy’s argument is unsound. It is possible to have the relevant rational capacity in the absence of akrasia. I (...) also argue that the internalist account of rationality that does much of the work in his argument is problematic. (shrink)

In this essay, a new approach to the ethics of emerging information technology will be presented, called anticipatory technology ethics (ATE). The ethics of emerging technology is the study of ethical issues at the R&D and introduction stage of technology development through anticipation of possible future devices, applications, and social consequences. In the essay, I will first locate emerging technology in the technology development cycle, after which I will consider ethical approaches to emerging technologies, as well as obstacles in developing (...) such approaches. I will argue that any sound approach must centrally include futures studies of technology. I then present ATE and some applications of it to emerging information technologies. In ATE, ethical analysis is performed at three levels, the technology, artifact and application levels, and at each levels distinct types of ethical questions are asked. ATE analyses result in the identification and evaluation of a broad range of ethical issues that can be anticipated in relation to an emerging information technology. This ethical analysis can then be used for ethical recommendations for design or governance. (shrink)

As an alternative to establishing awareness thresholds, stimulus contexts in which there were either greater conscious or greater unconscious influences were defined on the basis of performance on an exclusion task. Target words were presented for brief durations and each target word was followed immediately by its three-letter stem. Subjects were instructed to complete each stem with any word other than the target word. With this task, failures to exclude target words indicate greater unconscious influences, whereas successful exclusion indicates greater (...) conscious influences. Conscious influences were dominant at long durations , but unconscious influences were dominant at short durations . Performance on the exclusion task successfully predicated both qualitative differences in Stroop priming and qualitative differences in recognition memory previously associated with the different effects of conscious and unconscious influences. Taken together, these results demonstrate that an exclusion task allows both unconscious and conscious influences to be defined in terms of significant deviations from baseline performance. As such, exclusion tasks provide a method for distinguishing conscious from unconscious influences that does not require establishing thresholds for null awareness. (shrink)

The property theory of musical works says that each musical work is a property that is instantiated by its occurrences, that is, the work's performances and playings. The property theory provides ontological explanations very similar to those given by its popular cousin, the type/token theory of musical works, but it is both simpler and stronger. However, type/token theorists often dismiss the property theory. In this essay, I formulate a version of the property theory that identifies each type (thus, each musical (...) work) with a unique property. I then scrutinize the arguments offered for thinking that types, including musical works, are distinct from properties. I respond that no such argument is forceful and conclude that the property theory of musical works is superior to the type/token theory. (shrink)

It is a priori on many accounts of colour concepts that something is red if and only if it is such that it would look red to normal observers in normal circumstances: it is such that it would look red, as we can say, under normal conditions of observation. And as this sort of formula is widely applied to colour concepts, so similar schemas are commonly defended in relation to a variety of other concepts too. Not only are colour concepts (...) connected in such a fashion with human responses, so by many accounts are secondary quality concepts in general; aesthetic concepts, moral concepts and evaluative concepts of all kinds; modal concepts that serve to pick out the possible and the necessary; and so on. The fashion for resorting to such formulas should not be surprising. Most of us suppose that whether a given, ostensively introduced term has a certain semantic value – whether, for example, it designates a certain property – ought to show up in people’s tending to use it of things, and only of things, that apparently have that property. The obvious way of expressing this expectation is to require that the use of the ostensive term covary with the presence of the property in conditions that are normal in some sense for detecting that property. Thus there is prima facie reason to hold, and hold as an a priori matter, that for any ostensively introduced term, ‘P’, something is P if and only if it is such that it would seem P – people would be disposed to use ‘P’ to ascribe the corresponding property to it – under normal conditions of observation. The schemas invoked under this motivation may vary in many different ways, of course. First, they may not connect the bare or simple reality of being P with a normalised human response, as Philosophical Studies 96: 21–44, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 22. (shrink)

Fodor & Pylyshyn (1981) criticize J. J. Gibson's ecological account of perception for failing to address what I call the 'correlation problem' in visual perception. That is, they charge that Gibson cannot explain how perceivers learn to correlate detectable properties of the light with perceptible properties of the environment. Furthermore, they identify the correlation problem as a crucial issue for any theory of visual perception, what I call a 'primary problem'—i.e. a problem which plays a definitive role in establishing the (...) concerns of a particular scientific research program. If they are correct, Gibson's failure to resolve this problem would cast considerable doubt upon his ecological approach to perception. In response, I argue that both Fodor & Pylyshyn's problem itself and their proposed inferential solution embody a significant mistake which needs to be eliminated from our thinking about visual perception. As part of my response, I also suggest a Gibsonian alternative to Fodor & Pylyshyn's primary problem formulation. (shrink)

Imagine a human society, perhaps in pre-history, in which people were generally of a psychological kind with us, had the use of natural language to communicate with one another, but did not have any properly moral concepts in which to exhort one another to meet certain standards and to lodge related claims and complaints. According to The Birth of Ethics, the members of that society would have faced a set of pressures, and made a series of adjustments in response, sufficient (...) to put them within reach of ethical concepts. Without any planning, they would have more or less inevitably evolved a way of using such concepts to articulate desirable patterns of behavior and to hold themselves and one another responsible to those standards. Sooner or later, they would have entered ethical space. While this central claim is developed as a thesis in conjectural history or genealogy, the aim of the exercise is philosophical. Assuming that it explains the emergence of concepts and practices that are more or less equivalent to ours, the story offers us an account of the nature and role of morality. It directs us to the function that ethics plays in human life and alerts us to the character in virtue of which it can serve that function. The emerging view of morality has implications for the standard range of questions in meta-ethics and moral psychology, and enables us to understand why there are divisions in normative ethics like that between consequentialist and Kantian approaches. (shrink)

This paper reviews the history of psychological investigations of unconscious perception and summarizes the current status of experimental research in this area of investigation. The research findings described in the paper illustrate how it is possible to distinguish experimentally between conscious and unconscious perception. The most successful experimental strategy has been to show that a stimulus can have qualitatively different consequences on cognitive and affective reactions depending on whether it was consciously or unconsciously perceived. In addition, recent studies of patients (...) undergoing general anaesthesia have shown that the effects of stimuli perceived unconsciously during surgery can last for approximately 24 hours. Taken together, the results of these recent psychological investigations provide empirical support for the importance of unconsciously perceived information in determining cognitive and affective reactions. (shrink)

Technological advances in veterinary medicine have produced considerable progress in the diagnosis and treatment of numerous diseases in animals. At the same time, veterinarians, veterinary technicians, and owners of animals face increasingly complex situations that raise questions about goals of care and correct or reasonable courses of action. These dilemmas are frequently controversial and can generate conflicts between clients and health care providers. In many ways they resemble the ethical challenges confronted by human medicine and that spawned the creation of (...) clinical ethics committees as a mechanism to analyze, discuss, and resolve disagreements. The staff of the North Carolina State University Veterinary Hospital, a specialty academic teaching institution, wanted to investigate whether similar success could be achieved in the tertiary care veterinary setting. We discuss the background and rationale for this method, as well as the approach that was taken to create a clinical ethics committee. (shrink)

Research on personality psychology is making important contributions to psychological science and applied psychology. This second edition of The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology offers a one-stop resource for scientific personality psychology. It summarizes cutting-edge personality research in all its forms, including genetics, psychometrics, social-cognitive psychology, and real-world expressions, with informative and lively chapters that also highlight some areas of controversy. The team of renowned international authors, led by two esteemed editors, ensures a wide range of theoretical perspectives. Each research (...) area is discussed in terms of scientific foundations, main theories and findings, and future directions for research. The handbook also features advances in technology, such as molecular genetics and functional neuroimaging, as well as contemporary statistical approaches. An invaluable aid to understanding the central role played by personality in psychology, it will appeal to students, researchers, and practitioners in psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and the social sciences. (shrink)