Pain management has improved in the past few decades. Opioid analgesics have become the mainstay in the treatment of cancer pain whilst inter-disciplinary pain management programmes are the generally accepted approach to chronic pain of non-malignant origin. Recently some pain specialists have advocated the use of opioids in the long-term management of non-cancer pain. This has raised some fundamental questions about the purpose of pain management. Is it best to opt for maximum pain relief and comfort, or should one emphasise (...) function and activity as higher priorities? Will the use of opioids create more autonomy for pain sufferers or will this add handicaps to lives which are already limited? Until more clinical outcome data are available we advocate caution in the use of opioid analgesia. Such caution can, and does, raise questions about the rights of the patient and the rights of the prescriber in a context where the facts do not point to a clear course of action. (shrink)

Research within the H2020 PROGRESSIVE project has identified good practices in user co-production strategies and methodologies. Early findings from research in the PROGRESSIVE project were shared with relevant stakeholders outside the consortium for consultation and review. The outcomes of that initial investigation highlighted the need to focus on the objectives, processes, and methods used in user and older people co-production. This guide adapts these insights and makes them relevant specifically for standardisation in ICT for active and healthy ageing. This guide (...) was approved by representatives of the PROGRESSIVE project on 22 February 2018. The consortium has requested comments from interested stakeholders in an enquiry from 1 March to 30 April 2018. The PROGRESSIVE guide was approved on 5 June 2018. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the question of how to resolve disagreement and uses the Lehrer-Wagner model as a formal tool for investigating consensual decision-making. The main result consists in a general definition of when agents treat each other as epistemic peers (Kelly 2005; Elga 2007), and a theorem vindicating the “equal weight view” to resolve disagreement among epistemic peers. We apply our findings to an analysis of the impact of social network structures on group deliberation processes, and we demonstrate their (...) stability with the help of numerical simulations. (shrink)

The elucidations and regimentations of grounding offered in the literature standardly take it to be a necessary connection. In particular, authors often assert, or at least assume, that if some facts ground another fact, then the obtaining of the former necessitates the latter; and moreover, that grounding is an internal relation, in the sense of being necessitated by the existence of the relata. In this article, I challenge the necessitarian orthodoxy about grounding by offering two prima facie counterexamples. First, some (...) physical facts may ground a certain phenomenal fact without necessitating it; and they may co-exist with the latter without grounding it. Second, some instantiations of categorical properties may ground the instantiation of a dispositional one without necessitating it; and they may co-exist without grounding it. After arguing that these may be genuine counterexamples, I ask whether there are modal constraints on grounding that are not threatened by them. I propose two: that grounding supervenes on what facts there are, and that every grounded fact supervenes on what grounds there are. Finally, I attempt to provide a rigorous formulation of the latter supervenience claim and discuss some technical questions that arise if we allow descending grounding chains of transfinite length. (shrink)

Fabian Wendt proposes combining libertarian foundations with a proviso that requires a just system of private property to ensure that everyone has a sufficient amount of resources to pursue projects. He calls this proviso a sufficiency proviso. This proviso is said to have advantages over all rival provisos “because it better coheres with the […] The post “The Tenuous Foundations of the Sufficiency Proviso” appeared first on Libertarian Papers.

Bayesian epistemology addresses epistemological problems with the help of the mathematical theory of probability. It turns out that the probability calculus is especially suited to represent degrees of belief (credences) and to deal with questions of belief change, confirmation, evidence, justification, and coherence. Compared to the informal discussions in traditional epistemology, Bayesian epis- temology allows for a more precise and fine-grained analysis which takes the gradual aspects of these central epistemological notions into account. Bayesian epistemology therefore complements traditional epistemology; it (...) does not re- place it or aim at replacing it. (shrink)

The concept of supervenience and a regimented concept of grounding are often taken to provide rival explications of pre-theoretical concepts of dependence and determination. Friends of grounding typically point out that supervenience claims do not entail corresponding grounding claims. Every fact supervenes on itself, but is not grounded in itself, and the fact that a thing exists supervenes on the fact that its singleton exists, but is not grounded in it. Common lore has it, though, that grounding claims do entail (...) corresponding supervenience claims. In this article, I show that this assumption is problematic. On one way of understanding it, the corresponding supervenience claim is just an entailment claim under a different name. On another way of understanding it, the corresponding claim is a distinctive supervenience claim, but its specification gives rise to what I call the "reference type problem": to associate the classes of facts that are the relata of grounding with the types of facts that are the relata of supervenience. However it is understood, supervenience rules out prima facie possibilities: alien realizers, blockers, heterogeneous realizers, floaters, and heterogeneous blockers. Instead of being rival explications of one and the same pre-theoretical concept, grounding and supervenience may be complementary concepts capturing different aspects of determination and dependence. (shrink)

Effective field theories have been a very popular tool in quantum physics for almost two decades. And there are good reasons for this. I will argue that effective field theories share many of the advantages of both fundamental theories and phenomenological models, while avoiding their respective shortcomings. They are, for example, flexible enough to cover a wide range of phenomena, and concrete enough to provide a detailed story of the specific mechanisms at work at a given energy scale. So will (...) all of physics eventually converge on effective field theories? This paper argues that good scientific research can be characterised by a fruitful interaction between fundamental theories, phenomenological models and effective field theories. All of them have their appropriate functions in the research process, and all of them are indispensable. They complement each other and hang together in a coherent way which I shall characterise in some detail. To illustrate all this I will present a case study from nuclear and particle physics. The resulting view about scientific theorising is inherently pluralistic, and has implications for the debates about reductionism and scientific explanation. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This paper explores various functions of idealizations in quantum field theory. To this end it is important to first distinguish between different kinds of theories and models of or inspired by quantum field theory. Idealizations have pragmatic and cognitive functions. Analyzing a case-study from hadron physics, I demonstrate the virtues of studying highly idealized models for exploring the features of theories with an extremely rich structure such as quantum field theory and for gaining some understanding of the physical processes in (...) the system under consideration. (shrink)

Angesichts der gegenwärtigen ökonomischen, ökologischen und sozialen Krisen zeichnet sich ab, dass die Wachstumsdynamik moderner Gesellschaften nicht mehr stabilisierend wirkt, sondern selbst zum Krisentreiber geworden ist. In diesem Band diskutieren die Philosophin Nancy Fraser und die Soziologen Klaus Dörre, Stephan Lessenich und Hartmut Rosa, was dies für die Gegenwart und die Zukunft der Demokratie bedeutet und welche Konzeptionen und Wege hin zu einer demokratischen Transformation vorstellbar sind. Aus ihrer demokratietheoretischen Perspektive intervenieren Viviana Asara, Banu Bargu, Ingolfur Blühdorn, Robin Celikates, (...) Lisa Herzog, Brian Milstein, Michelle Williams und Christos Zografos. (shrink)

Science strives for coherence. For example, the findings from climate science form a highly coherent body of knowledge that is supported by many independent lines of evidence: greenhouse gas emissions from human economic activities are causing the global climate to warm and unless GHG emissions are drastically reduced in the near future, the risks from climate change will continue to grow and major adverse consequences will become unavoidable. People who oppose this scientific body of knowledge because the implications of cutting (...) GHG emissions—such as regulation or increased taxation—threaten their worldview or livelihood cannot provide an alternative view that is coherent by the standards of conventional scientific thinking. Instead, we suggest that people who reject the fact that the Earth’s climate is changing due to greenhouse gas emissions oppose whatever inconvenient finding they are confronting in piece-meal fashion, rather than systematically, and without considering the implications of this rejection to the rest of the relevant scientific theory and findings. Hence, claims that the globe “is cooling” can coexist with claims that the “observed warming is natural” and that “the human influence does not matter because warming is good for us.” Coherence between these mutually contradictory opinions can only be achieved at a highly abstract level, namely that “something must be wrong” with the scientific evidence in order to justify a political position against climate change mitigation. This high-level coherence accompanied by contradictory subordinate propositions is a known attribute of conspiracist ideation, and conspiracism may be implicated when people reject well-established scientific propositions. (shrink)

The frame model was developed in cognitive psychology and imported into the philosophy of science in order to provide representations of scientific concepts and conceptual taxonomies. The aim of this article is to show that beside the representation of scientific concepts the frame model is an efficient instrument to represent and analyze scientific theories. That is, we aim to establish the frame model as a representation tool for the structure of theories within the philosophy of science. For this, we will (...) develop the notion of a theory frame and distinguish between theory frames for qualitative theories in which scientific measurement is based on nominal scales and theory frames for quantitative theories in which measurement is based on ratio scales. In three case studies, we will apply frames to a psychological, a linguistic, and a physical theory, thereby showing that the frame model is a powerful and intuitively accessible instrument to analyze the laws of scientific theories, the determination of theoretical concepts, the explanatory role of theoretical concepts, the abductive introduction of a new theoretical concept, the distinction between the core and the periphery of a theory, the diachronic development of a theory, and the distinction between qualitative and quantitative scientific concepts. Finally, we will provide a comparison to the structuralist view of theories, one of the most elaborated and applied models of theory representation. (shrink)

The aggregation of consistent individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective judgment on the same propositions has recently drawn much attention. Seemingly reasonable aggregation procedures, such as propositionwise majority voting, cannot ensure an equally consistent collective conclusion. The literature on judgment aggregation refers to such a problem as the \textit{discursive dilemma}. In this paper we assume that the decision which the group is trying to reach is factually right or wrong. Hence, we address the question of how good (...) the various approaches are at selecting the right conclusion. We focus on two approaches: distance-based procedures and a Bayesian analysis. They correspond to group-internal and group-external decision-making, respectively. We compare those methods in a probabilistic model, demonstrate the robustness of our results over various generalizations and discuss their applicability in different situations. The findings vindicate (i) that in judgment aggregation problems, reasons should carry higher weight than conclusions and (ii) that considering members of an advisory board to be highly competent is a better strategy than to underestimate their advice.". (shrink)

Determining the knowledge that guides human judgments is fundamental to understanding how people reason, make decisions, and form predictions. We use an experimental procedure called ‘‘iterated learning,’’ in which the responses that people give on one trial are used to generate the data they see on the next, to pinpoint the knowledge that informs people's predictions about everyday events (e.g., predicting the total box office gross of a movie from its current take). In particular, we use this method to discriminate (...) between two models of human judgments: a simple Bayesian model (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2006) and a recently proposed alternative model that assumes people store only a few instances of each type of event in memory (MinK; Mozer, Pashler, & Homaei, 2008). Although testing these models using standard experimental procedures is difficult due to differences in the number of free parameters and the need to make assumptions about the knowledge of individual learners, we show that the two models make very different predictions about the outcome of iterated learning. The results of an experiment using this methodology provide a rich picture of how much people know about the distributions of everyday quantities, and they are inconsistent with the predictions of the MinK model. The results suggest that accurate predictions about everyday events reflect relatively sophisticated knowledge on the part of individuals. (shrink)

There has been much concern with the abundance of misinformation in public discourse. Although misinformation has always played a role in political debate, its character has shifted from support fo...

Theoretical models are an important tool for many aspects of scientific activity. They are used, i.a., to structure data, to apply theories or even to construct new theories. But what exactly is a model? It turns out that there is no proper definition of the term "model" that covers all these aspects. Thus, I restrict myself here to evaluate the function of models in the research process while using "model" in the loose way physicists do. To this end, I distinguish (...) four kinds of models. These are (1) models as special theories, (2) models as a substitute for a theory, (3) toy models and (4) developmental models. I argue that models of the types (3) and (4) are considerably useful in the process of theory construction. This will be demonstrated in an extended case-study from High-Energy Physics. (shrink)

We propose an action-oriented understanding of emotion. Emotions are modifications of a basic form of goal-oriented striving characteristic of human life. They are appetitive orientations: pursuits of the good, avoidances of the bad. Thus, emotions are not truly distinct from, let alone opposed to, actions -- as erroneously suggested by the classical understanding of emotions as 'passions'. In the present paper, we will outline and defend this broadly enactive approach and motivate its main claims. Our proposal gains plausibility from a (...) literature- and interview-based investigation of emotional changes characteristic of clinical depression. Much narrative evidence from patient reports points towards the conclusion that many of those changes might result from a catastrophic alteration of the basic form of goal-pursuit at the root of human emotionality. The experience of profound depression could in this respect be a kind of inverted image of non-pathological emotionality--a highly unnatural passivity, giving rise to a profound -- and quite horrifying -- sense of incapacity. (shrink)

Several theories of emergence will be distinguished. In particular, these are synchronic, diachronic, and weak versions of emergence. While the weaker theories are compatible with property reductionism, synchronic emergentism and strong versions of diachronic emergentism are not. Synchronice mergentism is of particular interest for the discussion of downward causation. For such a theory, a system's property is taken to be emergent if it is irreducible, i.e., if it is not reductively explainable. Furthermore, we have to distinguish two different types of (...) irreducibility with quite different consequences: If, on the one hand, a system's property is irreducible because of the irreducibility of the system's parts' behavior on which the property supervenes, we seem to have a case of "downward causation". This kind of downward causation does not violate the principle of the causal closure of the physical domain. If, on the other hand, a systemic property is irreducible because it is not exhaustively analyzable in terms of its causal role, downward causation is not implied. Rather, it is dubitable how unanalyzable properties might play any causal role at all. Thus, epiphenomenalism seems to be implied. The failure to keep apart the two kinds of irreducibility has muddled recent debate about the emergence of properties considerably. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

The formalism of quantum mechanics provides us with the probabilities for certain events to occur—this much is uncontroversial. But how are we to understand these probabilities? The essays in this special issue approach this question from different angles. The first three contributions take as their point of departure the philosophy of probability and discuss what the two main outlooks—objective and subjective interpretations of probability—have to offer in the context of quantum mechanics. The following five papers explore the question of how (...) probabilities in particular interpretations of quantum mechanics—modal interpretations, relative state interpretations, Bohmian mechanics, and GRW theory—can be interpreted. The last three essays address specific issues: non-standard probability and algebraic quantum field theory, quantum propensities, and the relation between decoherence and the interpretation of probability. (shrink)

The Problem of Old Evidence has troubled Bayesians ever since Clark Glymour first presented it in 1980. Several solutions have been proposed, but all of them have drawbacks and none of them is considered to be the definite solution. In this article, I propose a new solution which combines several old ideas with a new one. It circumvents the crucial omniscience problem in an elegant way and leads to a considerable confirmation of the hypothesis in question.

This entry sketches the theory of personal identity that has come to be known as animalism. Animalism’s hallmark claim is that each of us is identical with a human animal. Moreover, animalists typically claim that we could not exist except as animals, and that the (biological) conditions of our persistence derive from our status as animals. Prominent advocates of this view include Michael Ayers, Eric Olson, Paul Snowdon, Peter van Inwagen, and David Wiggins.

Alongside science and law, argumentation is also of central importance in everyday life. But what characterizes a good argument? This question has occupied philosophers and psychologists for centuries. The theory of Bayesian argumentation is particularly suitable for clarifying it, because it allows us to take into account in a natural way the role of uncertainty, which is central to much argumentation. Moreover, it offers the possibility of measuring the strength of an argument in probabilistic terms. One way to do this, (...) implicit in much work, is to identify the strength of an argument with the degree to which the premises of the argument confirm the conclusion. We criticize this prima facie plausible proposal and suggest instead that the strength of an argument has something to do with how much the premises and the conclusion of the argument cohere with each other. This leads to a new probabilistic measure whose properties we examine in more detail. (shrink)

This chapter provides a critical overview of various influential accounts of de se attitudes including those proposed by Frege, Lewis and Perry. It also addresses the charge that there is nothing distinctive about de se attitudes. The second half outlines a widely accepted and influential model of communication and various complications that arise in applying this model to the communication of de se thoughts. The final section provides an overview of the papers in this volume.

Coherence considerations play an important role in science and in everyday reasoning. However, it is unclear what exactly is meant by coherence of information and why we prefer more coherent information over less coherent information. To answer these questions, we first explore how to explicate the dazzling notion of ``coherence'' and how to measure the coherence of an information set. To do so, we critique prima facie plausible proposals that incorporate normative principles such as ``Agreement'' or ``Dependence'' and then argue (...) that the coherence of an information set is best understood as an indicator of the truth of the set under certain conditions. Using computer simulations, we then show that a new probabilistic measure of coherence that combines aspects of the two principles above, but without strictly satisfying either principle, performs particularly well in this regard. (shrink)

A lot of research has recently been done on the topic of ground, and in particular on the logic of ground. According to a broad consensus in that debate, ground is hyperintensional in the sense that even logically equivalent truths may differ with respect to what grounds them, and what they ground. This renders pressing the question of what we may take to be the ground-theoretic content of a true statement, i.e. that aspect of the statement’s overall content to which (...) ground is sensitive. I propose a novel answer to this question, namely that ground tracks how, rather than just by what, a statement is made true. I develop that answer in the form of a formal theory of ground-theoretic content and show how the resulting framework may be used to articulate plausible theories of ground, including in particular a popular account of the grounds of truth-functionally complex truths that has proved difficult to accommodate on alternative views of content. (shrink)

A large body of work has demonstrated the utility of the Bayesian framework for capturing inference in both specialist and everyday contexts. However, the central tool of the framework, conditionalization via Bayes’ rule, does not apply directly to a common type of learning: the acquisition of conditional information. How should an agent change her beliefs on learning that “If A, then C”? This issue, which is central to both reasoning and argumentation, has recently prompted considerable research interest. In this paper, (...) we critique a prominent proposal and provide a new, alternative, answer. -/- . (shrink)

The 11 articles in this issue explore how people respond to climate change and other global challenges. The articles pursue three broad strands of enquiry that relate to the effects and causes of “skepticism” about climate change, the purely cognitive challenges that are posed by a complex scientific issue, and the ways in which climate change can be communicated to a wider audience. Cognitive science can contribute to understanding people's responses to global challenges in many ways, and it may also (...) contribute to implementing solutions to those problems. (shrink)

How does a predecessor theory relate to its successor? According to Heinz Post’s General Correspondence Principle, the successor theory has to account for the em- pirical success of its predecessor. After a critical discussion of this principle, I outline and discuss various kinds of correspondence relations that hold between successive scientific theories. I then look in some detail at a case study from contemporary physics: the various proposals for a theory of high-temperature superconductivity. The aim of this case study is (...) to understand better the prospects and the place of a methodological principle such as the Generalized Correspondence Principle. Generalizing from the case study, I will then argue that some such principle has to be considered, at best, as one tool that might guide scientists in their theoriz- ing. Finally I present a tentative account of why principles such as the Generalized Correspondence Principle work so often and why there is so much continuity in scientific theorizing. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of narrative influence on knowledge acquisition in science education. Special characteristics of narratives and of narrative processing are compared to characteristics and processing of traditional expository educational materials. This paper goes beyond the existing literature on processing of media presentations that combine narrative and educational contents. Effects of four distinctive narrative features – dramatization, emotionalization, personalization, and fictionalization – are discussed with regard to their influence on single steps in knowledge acquisition to explain the superiority (...) of narratives over expository material found in some studies. The need for a model describing the complex relationships between the effects of the single narrative characteristics on knowledge acquisition is proposed. (shrink)

Under the standard modal explication of consequence, a conclusion is a consequence of some premises just in case necessarily, if the latter are true, so is the former. Notoriously, this explication yields some results that at first glance are counter-intuitive. In particular, a necessary truth is a consequence of arbitrary premises, and premises that cannot all be true together entail arbitrary conclusions. In his paper ‘On Ground and Consequence’ (Synthese, 2021), Benjamin Schnieder introduces a novel notion of web consequence, defined (...) on the basis of the concept of ground, which, he argues, fits our intuitive conception better. Building on his idea, the present paper examines the concept of web consequence in more detail. In particular, I provide three alternative, and simpler semantic characterizations of Schnieder’s propositional logic of web consequence, two within a form of truthmaker semantics, one within a many-valued setting. I then consider some natural variations on that logic and establish their connections to well-known subclassical logics such as FDE, $$\hbox {K}_3$$ K 3, and LP. Finally, I provide sound and complete tableaux-based proof systems for each of the logics of web consequence so obtained. (shrink)

Conditionals pervade every aspect of our thinking, from the mundane and everyday such as ‘if you eat too much cheese, you will have nightmares’ to the most fundamental concerns as in ‘if global warming isn’t halted, sea levels will rise dramatically’. Many decades of research have focussed on the semantics of conditionals and how people reason from conditionals in everyday life. Here it has been rather overlooked how we come to such conditionals in the first place. In many cases, they (...) are learned through testimony: someone warns us about the ill-effects of cheese. Any full account of the conditional must consequently incorporate such learning. Here, we provide a new formal account of belief change in response to a testimonial conditional. (shrink)

The article sets out from an understanding of design as an aesthetic form of practical world access. This is specified to the effect that design gives the world an expression in the first place: design is a way through which the world comes to view. This assumption is to be explained in more detail by means of a phenomenologically shaped concept of topology. At the center of a phenomenological topology lies the concept of place. According to Edward Casey, the nature (...) of place should be determined on the basis of the connection between things and the livedbody, whose topological meaning will first be explained in more detail. In the second step, it is then shown that design is topological design. Design as aesthetic workmakes the world appear by referring to the two constitutive moments of place, the gathering of things and the entangled corporeality, and thus brings the world to view in a topological fashion. (shrink)