In face of the multiple controversies surrounding the DSM process in general and the development of DSM-5 in particular, we have organized a discussion around what we consider six essential questions in further work on the DSM. The six questions involve: 1) the nature of a mental disorder; 2) the definition of mental disorder; 3) the issue of whether, in the current state of psychiatric science, DSM-5 should assume a cautious, conservative posture or an assertive, transformative posture; 4) the role (...) of pragmatic considerations in the construction of DSM-5; 5) the issue of utility of the DSM – whether DSM-III and IV have been designed more for clinicians or researchers, and how this conflict should be dealt with in the new manual; and 6) the possibility and advisability, given all the problems with DSM-III and IV, of designing a different diagnostic system. Part 1 of this article took up the first two questions. Part 2 took up the second two questions. Part 3 now deals with Questions 5 & 6. Question 5 confronts the issue of utility, whether the manual design of DSM-III and IV favors clinicians or researchers, and what that means for DSM-5. Our final question, Question 6, takes up a concluding issue, whether the acknowledged problems with the earlier DSMs warrants a significant overhaul of DSM-5 and future manuals. As in Parts 1 & 2 of this article, the general introduction, as well as the introductions and conclusions for the specific questions, are written by James Phillips, and the responses to commentaries are written by Allen Frances. (shrink)

In the conclusion to this multi-part article I first review the discussions carried out around the six essential questions in psychiatric diagnosis – the position taken by Allen Frances on each question, the commentaries on the respective question along with Frances’ responses to the commentaries, and my own view of the multiple discussions. In this review I emphasize that the core question is the first – what is the nature of psychiatric illness – and that in some manner all further (...) questions follow from the first. Following this review I attempt to move the discussion forward, addressing the first question from the perspectives of natural kind analysis and complexity analysis. This reflection leads toward a view of psychiatric disorders – and future nosologies – as far more complex and uncertain than we have imagined. (shrink)

In face of the multiple controversies surrounding the DSM process in general and the development of DSM-5 in particular, we have organized a discussion around what we consider six essential questions in further work on the DSM. The six questions involve: 1) the nature of a mental disorder; 2) the definition of mental disorder; 3) the issue of whether, in the current state of psychiatric science, DSM-5 should assume a cautious, conservative posture or an assertive, transformative posture; 4) the role (...) of pragmatic considerations in the construction of DSM-5; 5) the issue of utility of the DSM - whether DSM-III and IV have been designed more for clinicians or researchers, and how this conflict should be dealt with in the new manual; and 6) the possibility and advisability, given all the problems with DSM-III and IV, of designing a different diagnostic system. Part I of this article will take up the first two questions. With the first question, invited commentators express a range of opinion regarding the nature of psychiatric disorders, loosely divided into a realist position that the diagnostic categories represent real diseases that we can accurately name and know with our perceptual abilities, a middle, nominalist position that psychiatric disorders do exist in the real world but that our diagnostic categories are constructs that may or may not accurately represent the disorders out there, and finally a purely constructivist position that the diagnostic categories are simply constructs with no evidence of psychiatric disorders in the real world. The second question again offers a range of opinion as to how we should define a mental or psychiatric disorder, including the possibility that we should not try to formulate a definition. The general introduction, as well as the introductions and conclusions for the specific questions, are written by James Phillips, and the responses to commentaries are written by Allen Frances. (shrink)

In face of the multiple controversies surrounding the DSM process in general and the development of DSM-5 in particular, we have organized a discussion around what we consider six essential questions in further work on the DSM. The six questions involve: 1) the nature of a mental disorder; 2) the definition of mental disorder; 3) the issue of whether, in the current state of psychiatric science, DSM-5 should assume a cautious, conservative posture or an assertive, transformative posture; 4) the role (...) of pragmatic considerations in the construction of DSM-5; 5) the issue of utility of the DSM - whether DSM-III and IV have been designed more for clinicians or researchers, and how this conflict should be dealt with in the new manual; and 6) the possibility and advisability, given all the problems with DSM-III and IV, of designing a different diagnostic system. Part I of this article took up the first two questions. Part II will take up the second two questions. Question 3 deals with the question as to whether DSM-V should assume a conservative or assertive posture in making changes from DSM-IV. That question in turn breaks down into discussion of diagnoses that depend on, and aim toward, empirical, scientific validation, and diagnoses that are more value-laden and less amenable to scientific validation. Question 4 takes up the role of pragmatic consideration in a psychiatric nosology, whether the purely empirical considerations need to be tempered by considerations of practical consequence. As in Part 1 of this article, the general introduction, as well as the introductions and conclusions for the specific questions, are written by James Phillips, and the responses to commentaries are written by Allen Frances. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ABORTION AS A SACRAMENT: MIMETIC DESIRE AND SACRIFICE IN SEXUAL POLITICS Bernadette Waterman Ward SUNY-Oswego "If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." That familiar taunt is mostly aimed at Roman Catholics to humiliate them for their purportedly religious and anti-rational opposition to abortion. It is conventional to sniffthat the "religious assumptions" on which disapproval of abortion is "typically based" are "highly questionable" (Chambers 1). But the (...) cultural theories of René Girard suggest that it is because men don't get pregnant that abortion already is a sacrament. The key elements of sacrificial religion, as Girard defines it, are the presence of intolerable tension that must lead to social disruption; the choice of a victim who cannot strike back to absorb the community's violence; and the concealment ofthe function ofthe sacrifice, which employs actual violence for the purpose of stabilizing institutional violence. Abortion in America is upheld not as medical or even political policy, but as, in fact, a religious sacrifice. Girard's definition ofreligion requires neither a moral code nor a divinity nor a metaphysical grounding. The cult of Dionysus, to name only one example, evidently endorsed nothing we would recognize as a general code of morality; Buddhism, a far more august example, does not focus on a divinity; animism proposes no universal metaphysics. As to sacraments, Bernadette Waterman Ward19 Thomas Aquinas, following St. Augustine, did not scruple to call nonChristian sacrifices sacraments oftheir religions, "Whether true or false."' Scapegoating defines religious sacrifice. It protects the sacrificing community and promotes its unity—so long as all believe that the scapegoat must suffer. Often the victim is called an enemy to some established order; sacrifice is always conservative, even if it upholds an inherently unstable system. Because powerlessness, not real disruptive power, is the criterion for becoming a scapegoat, sacrifice requires a strong shared illusion. Classical religions provide unopposable gods to choose the tragically necessary victims, allowing strong ambivalence to surround the sacrifice itself. Ifthis is not present, the death or banishment takes on a different character—more political than religious, though Girard notes a fundamental unity between those two methods ofcontrolling mimetic violence. Mimetic violence originates in illusion surrounding a rivalry. Often there is an object involved, such as territory or wealth or political rank, but the object, which seems important, is actually irrelevant. The rivalry can continue, seeking new objects, whatever concrete acquisitions either party makes or loses. General, aimless rivalry dominates a social world of fragile, undefined selves in which anyone can be a model for imitation, and therefore anyone can be a threat to one's sense ofself. What an imitator actually seeks is to have whatever is desirable; most desirable ofall, perhaps, is the ability to know what is desirable, a mysterious quality that is constantly attributed to others; Girard calls this quality "being." From the nursery we are each other's disciples, wanting each other's toys not because of their inherent virtue so much as because someone else has seen some virtue in them. As human desire has no real single object, it has no closure; envy and revenge threaten others in a widening net of destruction. In the classic scenario, the model whose "being" has become matter for imitation finds himself in competition for the object, and attacks the rival, who returns in kind. A disciple who can rally aspire to the model's status can become a dangerous, even a deadly rival; in imagination, and sometimes in reality, they turn each other intp monsters. Yet as the desire has no single object, neither has the rage: the violence can be easily transferred to another object than one's rival. Sometimes those who are uneasy about their status in relation to one another can cement a powerful unity by focusing blame on some common target: a scapegoat. The Orwellian scenario is in fact the normal scenario: individuals caught in the maelstrom of social instability 'Summa Theologiae, 3a.61.1 31. 20Abortion as a Sacrament seek to avoid victimization by diverting the violence into blame and destruction directed, first of all, against someone else—and, if possible, against someone who cannot strike back: a sacrifice. Not all sacrificial religious... (shrink)

A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N (...) = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests. (shrink)

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this (...) is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism. (shrink)

Our current understanding of ‘fake news’ is not in good shape. On the one hand, this category seems to be urgently needed for an adequate understanding of the epistemology in the age of the internet. On the other hand, the term has an unstable ordinary meaning and the prevalent accounts which all relate fake news to epistemically bad attitudes of the producer lack theoretical unity, sufficient extensional adequacy, and epistemic fruitfulness. I will therefore suggest an alternative account of fake news (...) that is meant as an explication rather than a traditional conceptual analysis of the term and that understands fake news solely from the consumer’s perspective. I will argue that this new account has the required theoretical unity, that it is epistemically highly fruitful, and that it is still very close to the ordinary usage. I conclude with addressing some of the main objections to this view. (shrink)

In a series of pre-registered studies, we explored (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios, (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neurodeterministic scenarios (that is, scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level), (c) the difference between people’s intuitions about neutral scenarios (e.g., walking a dog in the park) and their intuitions about negatively valenced scenarios (e.g., murdering a stranger), and (d) the difference (...) between people’s intuitions about free will and responsibility in response to first-person scenarios and third-person scenarios. We predicted that once we focused participants’ attention on the two different abilities to do otherwise available to agents in indeterministic and deterministic scenarios, their intuitions would support natural incompatibilism—the view that laypersons judge that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. This prediction was borne out by our findings. (shrink)

Cognitivism about trust says that it requires belief that the trusted is trustworthy; non-cognitivism denies this. At stake is how to make sense of the strong but competing intuitions that trust is an attitude that is evaluable both morally and rationally. In proposing that one's respect for another's agency may ground one's trusting beliefs, second-personal accounts provide a way to endorse both intuitions. They focus attention on the way that, in normal situations, it is the person whom I trust. My (...) task is to develop an account of the latter insight without the controversial theoretical commitments of the former. I propose a functional account for why the second and third-personal ‘systems’ operate not just in parallel, but in tandem, in support of a cognitivist account of trust. (shrink)

Codes of ethics are directly aimed at behavioral control, but they also affect a company’s ethical culture, which in turn concerns compliance and ethical behavior. To positively influence a company’s ethical culture, employees must be familiar with its code of ethics, perceive that top management is committed to the code, and believe that their peers also comply with the code. The evidence on whether a code’s design affects a company’s ethical culture is limited. This study’s factorial survey experiment contributes to (...) this gap in two ways: first, it investigates whether a code’s design affects how easily the code can be learned and, therefore, contributes to code familiarity. Second, it examines how a code can convey expectations regarding top management’s commitment and peers’ behavior, both of which are part of ethical culture. The results indicate that a positive tone increases code familiarity, and a code signed by top managers sends a strong signal of their commitment to the code. Finally, various implications of the results for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Cet essai présente une description de plusieurs travaux inédits de Jacques Derrida au sujet de Marx et d'Althusser datant des années 1960 et 1970. Au-delà du travail philologique, il s'agit aussi d'une étude théorique de notions telles que 'idéologie', 'fétichisme', 'reproduction', 'division du travail', 'différence sexuelle', 'domination', 'économie politique', 'matérialisme dialectique', ou 'production culturelle' — tout autant à travers les textes marxistes que dans les lectures déconstructives qu'en propose alors Derrida. Durant les années 1970, dans le cadre de son séminaire, (...) Derrida s'efforce de penser une autre économie politique, au-delà de l'économie du propre qu'il identifie aussi bien chez les économistes classiques que chez leurs critiques marxistes. Ces lectures détaillées et combattives de textes marxistes restent aujourd'hui inédites. Leur prise en compte contribue à redéfinir l'image de Derrida et de la déconstruction, en témoignant de ses discussions très avancées de Marx, d'Althusser, et de la pensée marxiste — et ce dès la fin des années 1960 et le début des années 1970, plus de 20 ans avant la publication de Spectres de Marx (1993). -/- Une version plus courte de cet article fut traduite en espagnol par Ramiro Parodi, et publiée en 2019 dans le numéro 7 de la revue Demarcaciones — numéro consacré au 25ème anniversaire de la publication de Spectres de Marx. (shrink)

This 1979 text addresses the ways in which the dominant theories in large areas of Western social science have been subject to strong criticisms, particularly ...

Husserl beruft sich immer wieder programmatisch auf Platon als den Gründervater der europäischen Philosophie, arbeitet jedoch die Bezüge der Phänomenologie zum Platonismus nie auf - obwohl er die "historische Rückbesinnung" auf die Urstiftung seines Denkens als wesentlichen Bestandteil der "Selbstbesinnung auf ein Selbstverständnis dessen hin, worauf man eigentlich hinaus will, als der man ist, als historisches Wesen" charakterisiert. Die vorliegende Arbeit will diese Reflexion leisten. Ihr Gegenstand ist mithin die Transformation Platonischer Gedanken in Husserls Phänomenologie. Dabei werden sechs Problemgebiete thematisiert: (...) A) Philosophie als Wissenschaft, B) Philosophie als Ethik, C) Philosophie als Polemik, D) Philosophie und das Ende der Lebenswelt, E) Philosophie und das Eigenrecht des Eidetischen, F) Philosophie und das Absolute. Den Abschnitten folgen jeweils kritische Erwägungen zu den Spannungen, die vor dem Platonischen Hintergrund innerhalb der Phänomenologie sichtbar werden. Die Arbeit zeigt, dass die Phänomenologie tatsächlich als eine eigenwillige Endstiftung des Platonismus betrachtet werden kann, wodurch sich eine neue Perspektive auf ihre programmatische und systematische Grundkonfiguration ergibt. (shrink)

Hanks has defended a novel account of what propositions are. His key argument against Soames' rival view is that predication is not neutral. According to Hanks, predication is essentially committal. I show that Hanks' argument for this conclusion raises problems for his own account of questions and orders.

In this article, I will discuss some differences between empathy with real persons and empathy with fictional characters. Philosophers who have thought about th.

Christopher Cowley1has recently put forward three arguments against the legal accommodation of a general practitioner’s conscientious objection (CO) to abortion referrals.iHe claims that the adoption of these arguments does not undermine a more general right to CO to involvement in abortion. I argue that Cowley is seriously mistaken. His three arguments, especially the second and third, proceed on a path directed towards the outright rejection of a right to CO in healthcare contexts. A common problem with Cowley’s three arguments is (...) that they overlook the peremptory significance for CO analysis of both the internal, deliberating perspective of those with a CO and the good of moral integrity. This paper supports the view that either there are strong prima facie grounds for holding that a right to CO extends in principle to the issue of referrals or the claim of a general right to CO is easily assailable. (shrink)

American philosophy has been dominated by the theme of "Nature."1 From Edwards to Emerson to Dewey to Dennett, American thought has variously invoked Nature. But to articulate a philosophy of Nature is not thereby to espouse a form of "naturalism." In fact, philosophies undertaken in the name of "naturalism" seem to have a different temperament than those that begin with the thought of Nature as such. As a theme, "Nature" invites an expansive mood for reflection, while "naturalism" sounds constrictive and (...) combative. "Nature" disposes the mind to musement, "pondering," theoria, Denken—to becoming Emerson's "transparent eyeball." "Naturalism" has something of a doctrinal, even dogmatic, flavor, since every "-ism".. (shrink)

1.Introduction Despite more than two decades of strategies and policies to promote equal employment opportunities and avoid discrimination against persons with disabilities, major employment and participation gaps still remain. Persons with disabilities have significantly lower employment rates, and higher inactivity and unemployment rates than persons without disabilities. If they do work, they are less likely to be in full-time employment and more likely to be in subsidised or supported emp...

Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page 714-717, September 2021.

This paper explores how work in the philosophy of science can be used when teaching scientific content to science students and when training future science teachers. I examine the debate on the concept of fitness in biology and in the philosophy of biology to show how conceptual pluralism constitutes a problem for the conceptual change model, and how philosophical work on conceptual clarification can be used to address that problem. The case of fitness exemplifies how the philosophy of science offers (...) tools to resolve teaching difficulties and make the teaching of scientific concepts more adequate to the actual state of affairs in science. (shrink)

In this paper, I will to lay down what I call an expressivist account of the pragmatics of jokes, through which I wish to shed light on the function of offensive jokes in particular. I will focus specifically on jokes, not humor more generally. Jokes are particular sorts of speech-acts; and although many may be issued in the form of declarative or interrogative sentences, they are not reducible to them. I suggest here that their analysis must be understood in terms (...) of the unique pragmatic roles that they play. Following this I turn to offensive jokes in particular, describing some of the conditions relevant to their uptake. I will argue that there is a degree of entitlement to certain jokes, and set of commitments that follow from a given joke—both of which are necessary to understand the difference between a context in which a joke is offensive and one in which a similar joke may be merely not funny. I conclude by outlining how on my account we can understand the role of offensive humor as a mode of social criticism. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes is one of the most important figures in the history of European thought. Although interest in his life and work has grown enomrously in recent years, this is the first complete edition of his correspondence. The texts of the letters are richly supplemented with explanatory notes and full biographical and bibliographical information. This landmark publication sheds new light in abundance on the intellectual life of a major thinker.

ABSTRACTThe most publicised rebellion during the so-called ‘Shareholder Spring’ of 2012 was at Barclays PLC. Using multi-modal and critical discourse analysis, this paper examines how three UK television channels with different public service obligations covered this story on 27 April 2012. It finds that broadcasters’ regulatory obligations do not obviously impact content and that, for example, simple reporting routines contain judgemental phrases. Generally, the multi-dimensional nature of executive pay is simplified and the real balance between private and individual shareholders is (...) obscured. Analysis also reveals that editing and the use of images can subtly construct discourses that may not reflect the reality of the dissent. The paper concludes that established criticisms that business journalism is indolent and that corporate discourses are privileged are not supported, but also that the coverage contributes little to promote wider understanding of executive pay debates. (shrink)

In _Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – A Propaedeutic_, Thomas Sören Hoffmann invites the philosophically interested reader to converse with, to work with, and to think with the “master philosopher of German Idealism,” the last great system builder of European philosophy.

Strassburg, 1509. Facsimile. With 53 woodcuts of playing cards in the text. Edition limited to 500 copies. Thomas Murner attempted to teach logic by means of playing cards.

In diesem Aufsatz räume ich mit einigen tiefsitzenden Vorurteilen gegen die methodologische Rolle von Intuitionen in der Philosophie auf. Zunächst wird gezeigt, dass Intuitionen eine zentrale Rolle als epistemische Gründe in Gedankenexperimenten spielen. Aber auch völlig andere Methoden des Philosophierens (wie etwa die Transzendentalpragmatik) kommen ohne Rekurs auf Intuitionen als Gründe letztlich nicht aus. Außerdem kläre ich über die Natur von Intuitionen und deren epistemologischen Status genauer auf. Intuitionen sind fundamentale Gründe, aber sie sind fehlbar, anfechtbar und lassen sich methodisch (...) kontrollieren. Im letzten Teil des Aufsatzes zeige ich, dass Intuitionen auf eine besondere Weise unangreifbar sind: Alle gegen sie gerichteten skeptischen Argumente rekurrieren selbst an irgendeiner Stelle verdeckt auf Intuitionen. Skeptische Generalangriffe auf Intuitionen als valide Gründe untergraben sich also selbst. (shrink)

There is a set of texts in the history of ancient skepticism that have not been widely understood. Michael Frede has done much to set these texts in their proper context, but his work has not gotten the appreciation it deserves. Historians have tended to think that ancient skepticism in the Clitomachian-Pyrrhonian tradition is the suspension of belief on all matters and that Frede’s attempt to show otherwise is confused. This may turn out to be correct, but Frede’s interpretation, as (...) I think it should be understood, is more plausible and interesting than is usually thought. Frede has made it possible to see the skeptics in the Clitomachian-Pyrrhonian tradition as taking some of the first steps in working out the philosophical view that epistemic justification is a matter of whether a belief is the sustained outcome of a correct cognitive process and that correctness here need not and perhaps should not be understood in terms of modal reliability. (shrink)

Late in a career of more than sixty years, Thomas Burch, an internationally known social demographer, undertook a wide-ranging methodological critique of demography. This open access volume contains a selection of resulting papers, some previously unpublished, some published but not readily accessible [from past meetings of The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and its research committees, or from other small conferences and seminars]. Rejecting the idea that demography is simply a branch of applied statistics, his work (...) views it as an autonomous and complete scientific discipline. When viewed from the perspective of modern philosophy of science, specifically the semantic or model-based school, demography is a balanced discipline, with a rich body of techniques and data, but also with more and better theories than generally recognized. As demonstrated in this book, some demographic techniques can also be seen as theoretical models, and some substantive/behavioral models, commonly rejected as theory because of inconsistent observations, are now seen as valuable theoretical models, for example demographic transition theory. This book shows how demography can build a strong theoretical edifice on its broad and deep empirical foundation by adoption of the model-based approach to science. But the full-fruits of this approach will require demographers to make greater use of computer modeling [both macro- and micro-simulation], in the statement and manipulation of theoretical ideas, as well as for numerical computation. This book is open access under a CC BY license. (shrink)

Dieses Buch erhalten Sie als BonD-Ausgabe. Dabei handelt es sich um einen Nachdruck der vergriffenen Originalausgabe von 1999 - hergestellt auf Bestellung, mit einem hochwertigen Digitaldruckverfahren. Das Traktat "De principiis naturae" ist eines der fruhesten Werke des Thomas von Aquin, in dem er das von der Tradition arabischer Aristoteles-Auslegung rezipierte Gedankenmaterial einer originellen Synthese unterzieht, die fur sein gesamtes Denken grundlegend ist. Mit der ihm eigenen denkerischen Stringenz entwirft Thomas hier seinen Seinsbegriff durch eine Analyse der Prinzipien des (...) konkret Seienden: Aus der alles Endliche bestimmenden Differenz zwischen Wirklichkeit und Moglichkeit schliesst er auf die Ursachen des Seins, um dann die fur seine Ontologie zentrale Analogielehre zu entfalten. Aufgrund ihres einfuhrenden Charakters eroffnet diese - hier erstmals in deutscher Ubersetzung edierte - Schrift einen authentischen Zugang zum philosophischen Gedankengebaude des Aquinaten. (shrink)

Much of the literature from political psychology has focused on the negative traits that are positively associated with affective polarization—e.g., animus, arrogance, distrust, hostility, and outrage. Not as much attention has been focused on the positive traits that might be negatively associated with polarization. For instance, given that people who are intellectually humble display greater openness and less hostility towards conflicting viewpoints (Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016; Hopkin et al., 2014; Porter & Schumann, 2018), one might reasonably expect them to be (...) less polarized. -/- We ran two studies designed to explore the relationship between various forms of humility and polarization. Our chief finding is that people who value humility are prone to what we are calling epistemic polarization—that is, judging the epistemic traits of contrapartisans negatively—which in turn plays a role in polarization more generally. Not only are contrapartisans deemed to have the wrong moral and political beliefs, they are also viewed as less humble and more arrogant, close-minded, and irrational. This makes matters even worse when it comes to the growing partisan divide. In light of our findings, we believe that the novel concept of epistemic polarization that we introduce is a promising target for further investigation. (shrink)

There is a rough, long-term tradeoff between rate of innovation and degree of strong realism in scientific practice, a point reflected in historically changing conceptions of method as they retreat from epistemological foundationism to a highly fallibilistic, modeling perspective. The successively more liberal, innovation-stimulating methods open up to investigation deep theoretical domains at the cost, in many cases, of moving away from strong realism as a likely outcome of research. The crowbar model of method highlights this tension, expressed as the (...) crowbar compromise and the crowbar fallacy. The tools-to-theories heuristic, described and evaluated by Gigerenzer and colleagues, can be regarded as an attempt by some scientific realists to overcome this compromise. Instead, it is an instance of it. Nonetheless, in successful applications the crowbar model implies a modest, instrumental (nonrepresentational) realism. (shrink)