Imprisonment is often said to be the ultimate back-up sanction for offenders who do not abide by their non-custodial sentence. From a standard consequentialist perspective this is morally justified, if it is a cost-effective means to crime prevention. In contrast, the use of imprisonment as a back-up is much harder to justify from retributivist perspectives, with their emphasis on just desert or deserved censure. The crux is this: if the reason for a non-custodial sentence is that a prison sentence (...) risks being a disproportionate or inappropriate sanction, retributivists need to explain how a prison term can be warranted as the backup sanction for those who breach the requirements of their non-custodial sentence, even though their original crime wasn’t serious enough to warrant imprisonment in the first place. The aim in this paper is to critically assess the extent to which retributivists can justify the use of imprisonment as the ultimate back-up sanction. In doing so, I first examine two broad strategies that are discussed in the literature, and which retributivists could employ in order to respond to this problem. The first strategy stresses how desert has only a limited role in sentencing such that it demarcates a range of deserved punishment. On this view, associated with limiting retributivism, one could initially opt for a less harsh yet deserved punishment, leaving room for the imposition of back-up sanctions when needed. The second strategy focuses on how the act of breach is a reprehensible act that can allow for a penalty increase, and thereby lead to imprisonment. Although it is argued that both strategies fail, the paper proposes an alternative solution to this problem. (shrink)

Suppose that people in the affluent countries can easily save the lives of the starving needy in poor countries. Then, three points seem to follow. First, it is wrong for these people not to make the easy rescue . Second, it is wrong to stop making the easy rescue even if they have made many rescues already . Third, if we accept the first two points, the demands of morality are super-extreme. That is, people have to keep making trivial sacrifices (...) until there is no more trivial sacrifices to make . Here, predictably, our commonsense will resist the third point. However, I argue in this paper that, since the first two points are harder to refute, we have to accept the third point anyway. (shrink)

Professional workplaces that embody an “ideal worker” image that is implicitly white and male set-up persistent biases against the competence and suitability for authority of those who are not white men, forcing them to work harder to prove their competence and fit in. The added labor of coping with these burdens is largely invisible to dominant actors in the workplace who do not experience them. To facilitate change by making such burdens visible for all, we present data from a (...) survey of 1,349 architects, including white, Asian, Black, Latinx, and mixed race/other underrepresented men and women, about their specific behavioral experiences of prove-it-again bias, tightrope bias, problems of fit, exclusion, emotion work, and interruptions. Across all measures, white men architects report significantly lower levels of these burdens than do women of any race and almost all non-white men. Consistent with status expectations and stereotype prototypicality theories, we find intersectional patterns in the relative burdens experienced by women and men of different racial groups. Gender differences in bias experiences are greatest among white, less among Asian, and least among Black architects. Women of color report the highest levels of bias overall. (shrink)

Can philosophy laugh at itself? Like Houdini I weigh myself down with chains, the harder to test my virtuosity as an escape artist. So I take the heaviest burden on myself: Hegel. If any philosopher was serious, Hegel was. But - to parody Nietzsche - here is the heaviest thought: Hegel had a sense of humor. My reader will think that already I am joking, but please do not laugh. I am deadly serious: Hegel had a sense of humor. (...) I will proceed seriously to substantiate this audacity to the logical concept by looking at the relation of Hegel and Aristophanes. Let me dampen any suspicion of frivolity or outrage to logical respectability. So I slip back into the tone of scholarly sobriety and purr: To my best knowledge, this relation is one of the most overlooked by commentators. It is also one of the most interesting for the following reasons. (shrink)

It is surprising that Plotinus should have been neglected and underestimated, comparatively speaking, until the nineteenth century. It is more surprising still that the first really successful attempt to translate and interpret the Enneads intelligently should have been made by an Irishman who was neither a professional classical scholar nor philosopher, who had no university degree, who had, in fact, never even crossed the threshold of a university. That this translation should now be reissued after the lapse of nearly thirty (...) years, and despite the appearance in the meantime of two authoritative and scholarly translations, Harder’s German and Cilento’s Italian, is a tribute to the all-round excellence of MacKenna’s work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Who Is a Buddhist?James William ColemanAs a sociologist who has done a lot of work on Western Buddhism, the question of exactly who is a Buddhist and who isn't is a big one. The answers to such fundamental sociological issues as how many Buddhists there are, their age, ethnic group, marital status, social background, and place of residence all rest on that fundamental definitional question. There are, moreover, (...) a number of reasons that question may be harder to answer than for the Judeo-Christian religions from which most of the working assumptions of the social sciences about religion are drawn. To take only a single example, almost all the survey research on religion in the West assumes that one can have only a single religious affiliation. Someone is a Mormon or a Muslim or a Jew, not all three. That assumption makes perfectly good sense when working with the Western hegemonic traditions, but of course, as we can see from the articles in this journal someone can identify with more than one religion at the same time. In fact, it may be more common for people in Japan to identify as both Shinto and Buddhist than to identify as either one or the other. If left undiscovered, hidden Eurocentric biases can obviously lead to a very distorted understanding.The usual sociological approach to such questions as who is a Buddhist, or an African American, or a Republican, has its theoretical foundations in labeling theory.1 According to this view, if you define yourself as a Buddhist and other Buddhists accept you as such, then you are a Buddhist, if not, then you aren't. One obvious issue with this approach is how to handle people who define themselves as belonging to a particular group but are not accepted as a member by others in the group. For example, people of mixed racial ancestry may identify with their more privileged ancestors but be excluded by that group because of their physical appearance. But this isn't generally a big problem in the research on Buddhism, and I won't pursue the issue further here. But another more important problem comes up when we apply this approach to Western Buddhism, for there is an interesting reluctance among many people to label themselves as Buddhists, even when they are deeply involved in Buddhist practice.When my book The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition first came out in 2001,2 journalists and scholars asked me one question over and over again: "How many Buddhists are there in the West?" The answer to this question [End Page 33] obviously rests on how we define who is a Buddhist, and an examination of this issue is actually an excellent way to explore the definitional problems we run into in deciding who is a Buddhist and who isn't. At that time, all I had to offer were a few educated guesses from various sources, which surprisingly turned out not to be so very far off the mark. But since then, several good surveys have helped clarify the issue.The best of these was the 2007 Pew Religious Landscape Survey of more than thirty-five thousand Americans.3 It was a phone survey, which isn't much of a methodological problem these days, but there are other reasons for believing that it underestimated the total number of Buddhists. For one thing, it didn't include Hawai'i, which because of its large Japanese American population in all probability contains a much higher percentage of Buddhists than most other states. Further, it was conducted only in English and Spanish, which would therefore exclude immigrants from Asian Buddhist countries who do not speak either of those languages. But whatever its weaknesses, the Pew survey is the broadest, most reliable source of data we have. Of those who were questioned by the Pew survey, 0.7 percent said they were Buddhists. If we multiply that by the adult population of the United States for that year, there were about 1.6 million American Buddhists at that time. If we multiply 0.7 percent by the total American population, thus including children as well... (shrink)

There is a tendency in decision‐making research to treat uncertainty only as a problem to be overcome. But it is also a feature that can be leveraged, particularly in social interaction. Comparing the behavior of profitable and unprofitable poker players, we reveal a strategic use of information processing that keeps decision makers unpredictable. To win at poker, a player must exploit public signals from others. But using public inputs makes it easier for an observer to reconstruct that player's strategy and (...) predict his or her behavior. How should players trade off between exploiting profitable opportunities and remaining unexploitable themselves? Using a recent multivariate approach to information theoretic data analysis and 1.75 million hands of online two‐player No‐Limit Texas Hold'em, we find that the important difference between winning and losing players is not in the amount of information they process, but how they process it. In particular, winning players are better at integrative information processing—creating new information from the interaction between their cards and their opponents’ signals. We argue that integrative information processing does not just produce better decisions, it makes decision‐making harder for others to reverse engineer, as an expert poker player's cards act like the private key in public‐key cryptography. Poker players encrypt their reasoning with the way they process information. The encryption function of integrative information processing makes it possible for players to exploit others while remaining unexploitable. By recognizing the act of information processing as a strategic behavior in its own right, we offer a detailed account of how experts use endemic uncertainty to conceal their intentions in high‐stakes competitive environments, and we highlight new opportunities between cognitive science, information theory, and game theory. (shrink)

The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal in the United States, but that statement does not hold true for words. Some words carry more weight than others--they seem to work harder, get more done, and demand more respect. Political Keywords: Using Language that Uses Us looks at eight dominant words that are crucial to American political discourse, and how they have been employed during the last fifty years. Based on an analysis of eleven separate studies (...) of political language, Political Keywords helps readers to understand what these terms mean and how they are used. For example, the book tracks what politics now means to modern commentators, how schoolteacher impress certain values upon the nation's children by invoking the office of the president, and why an innocent word like government sometimes makes people so upset. It details how the people are referenced in political talk and how the media portray themselves. The book also considers the work done by political parties, political promises, and political consultants because, together, they shed special light on modern elections. Combining social science with subtle forms of cultural interpretation, Political Keywords: Using Language that Uses Us provides a fresh look at both American politics and American language. It is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in political communication, political language, political campaigns, media and politics, political psychology, public opinion, rhetorical criticism, contemporary public address, and presidential rhetoric. (shrink)

Utilitarianism is the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being—that is, that maximises the sum of whatever makes life worth living, with each person’s life equally weighted. The promise of utilitarianism is to reduce morality to one simple principle, easily incorporated into policy analysis, economics and decision theory. However, utilitarianism is not popular amongst moral philosophers today. This is in large part due to the influence of (...) Williams’s ‘Integrity Objection’ (1973). Though the Integrity Objection has been influential in turning philosophers against utilitarianism, it is also difficult to make precise, evidenced by the myriad interpretations in the literature. In this paper I interpret the objection as holding that agents who accept utilitarianism cannot, as a matter of psychology, be committed to their projects. I explore other interpretations, finding some to be inconsistent with Williams’s approach, and others to be relatively easily answerable by the utilitarian. The psychological problem I identify is harder for utilitarians to avoid, though I have begun to offer a response in other work. (shrink)

The use of multiple means of determination to “triangulate” on the existence and character of a common phenomenon, object, or result has had a long tradition in science but has seldom been a matter of primary focus. As with many traditions, it is traceable to Aristotle, who valued having multiple explanations of a phenomenon, and it may also be involved in his distinction between special objects of sense and common sensibles. It is implicit though not emphasized in the distinction between (...) primary and secondary qualities from Galileo onward. It is arguably one of several conceptions involved in Whewell’s method of the “consilience of inductions” (Laudan 1971) and is to be found in several places in Peirce. (From M. Brewer and B. Collins, eds., (1981); Scientific Inquiry in the Social Sciences (a festschrift for Donald T. Campbell), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 123–162.). (shrink)

Willard van Orman Quine once said that he had a preference for a desert ontology. This was in an earlier day when concerns with logical structure and ontological simplicity reigned supreme. Ontological genocide was practiced upon whole classes of upper-level or ‘derivative’ entities in the name of elegance, and we were secure in the belief that one strayed irremediably into the realm of conceptual confusion and possible error the further one got from ontic fundamentalism. In those days, one paid more (...) attention to generic worries about possible errors than to actual errors derived from distancing oneself too far from the nitty-gritty details of actual theory, actual inferences from actual data, the actual conditions under which we posited and detected entities, calibrated and ‘burned in’ instruments, identified and rejected artifacts, debugged programs and procedures, explained the mechanisms behind regularities, judged correlations to be spurious, and in general, to the real complexities and richness of actual scientific practice. (shrink)

Two widely accepted assumptions within cognitive science are that (1) the goal is to understand the mechanisms responsible for cognitive performances and (2) computational modeling is a major tool for understanding these mechanisms. The particular approaches to computational modeling adopted in cognitive science, moreover, have significantly affected the way in which cognitive mechanisms are understood. Unable to employ some of the more common methods for conducting research on mechanisms, cognitive scientists’ guiding ideas about mechanism have developed in conjunction with their (...) styles of modeling. In particular, mental operations often are conceptualized as comparable to the processes employed in classical symbolic AI or neural network models. These models, in turn, have been interpreted by some as themselves intelligent systems since they employ the same type of operations as does the mind. For this paper, what is significant about these approaches to modeling is that they are constructed specifically to account for behavior and are evaluated by how well they do so—not by independent evidence that they describe actual operations in mental mechanisms. (shrink)

This article reports the findings of a survey examining if there are gender and career stage differences between male and female practitioners regarding ethical judgment. The results show that, on average, females adopted a more strict ethical stance than their male counterparts on 7 out of 19 vignettes. Males on the other hand, demonstrated a more ethical stance than their female counterparts on 2 out of 19 vignettes. The results furthermore indicate there is a significant difference in ethical judgment across (...) career stages. Overall, it appears that practitioners in later career stages display higher ethical judgment than practitoners in lower career stages. Implications are provided for both practitioners and academicians. (shrink)

In Between Facts and Norms Jürgen Habermas works out the legal and political implications of his Theory of Communicative Action, bringing to fruition the project announced with his publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. This new work is a major contribution to recent debates on the rule of law and the possibilities of democracy in postindustrial societies, but it is much more.The introduction by William Rehg succinctly captures the special nature of the work, noting (...) that it offers a sweeping, sociologically informed conceptualization of law and basic rights, a normative account of the rule of law and the constitutional state, an attempt to bridge normative and empirical approaches to democracy, and an account of the social context required for democracy. Finally, the work frames and caps these arguments with a bold proposal for a new paradigm of law that goes beyond the dichotomies that have afflicted modern political theory from its inception and that still underlie current controversies between so- called liberals and civic republicans.The book includes a postscript written in 1994, which restates the argument in light of its initial reception, and two appendixes, which cover key developments that preceded the book.Habermas himself was actively involved in the translation, adapting the text as necessary to make it more accessible to English-speaking readers. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen two significant trends emerging within the philosophy of science: the rapid development and focus on the philosophy of the specialised sciences, and a resurgence of Aristotelian metaphysics, much of which is concerned with the possibility of emergence, as well as the ontological status and indispensability of dispositions and powers in science. Despite these recent trends, few Aristotelian metaphysicians have engaged directly with the philosophy of the specialised sciences. Additionally, the relationship between fundamental Aristotelian concepts—such (...) as "hylomorphism", "substance", and "faculties"—and contemporary science has yet to receive a critical and systematic treatment. _Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science _aims to fill this gap in the literature by bringing together essays on the relationship between Aristotelianism and science that cut across interdisciplinary boundaries. The chapters in this volume are divided into two main sections covering the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of the life sciences. Featuring original contributions from distinguished and early-career scholars, this book will be of interest to specialists in analytical metaphysics and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Although philosophy has been only a minor contributor to cognitive science to date, this paper describes two projects in naturalistic philosophy of mind and one in naturalistic philosophy of science that have been pursued during the past 30 years and that can make theoretical and methodological contributions to cognitive science. First, stances on the mind–body problem (identity theory, functionalism, and heuristic identity theory) are relevant to cognitive science as it negotiates its relation to neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. Second, analyses of (...) mental representations address both their vehicles and their contents; new approaches to characterizing how representations have content are particularly relevant to understanding the relation of cognitive agents to their environments. Third, the recently formulated accounts of mechanistic explanation in philosophy of science both provide perspective on the explanatory project of cognitive science and may offer normative guidance to cognitive science (e.g., by providing perspective on how multiple disciplinary perspectives can be integrated in understanding a given mechanism). (shrink)

The final work of the esteemed philosopher William Demopoulos supplants logical empiricism's accounts of physical theories, which fail to satisfactorily engage modern physics. Arguing for a new appreciation of the tightly woven character of theory and evidence, Demopoulos offers novel insights into the distinctive nature of quantum reality.

Two strategies for using a model as “null” are distinguished. Null modeling evaluates whether a process is causally responsible for a pattern by testing it against a null model. Baseline modeling measures the relative significance of various processes responsible for a pattern by detecting deviations from a baseline model. When these strategies are conflated, models are illegitimately privileged as accepted until rejected. I illustrate this using the neutral theory of ecology and draw general lessons from this case. First, scientists cannot (...) draw certain conclusions using null modeling. Second, these conclusions follow using baseline modeling, but doing so requires more evidence. (shrink)

According to deontic justice theory, individuals often feel principled moral obligations to uphold norms of justice. That is, standards of justice can be valued for their own sake, even apart from serving self-interested goals. While a growing body of evidence in business ethics supports the notion of deontic justice, skepticism remains. This hesitation results, at least in part, from the absence of a coherent framework for explaining how individuals produce and experience deontic justice. To address this need, we argue that (...) a compelling, yet still missing, step is to gain further understanding into the underlying neural and psychological mechanisms of deontic justice. Here, we advance a theoretical model that disentangles three key processes of deontic justice: The use of justice rules to assess events, cognitive empathy, and affective empathy. Together with reviewing neural systems supporting these processes, broader implications of our model for business ethics scholarship are discussed. (shrink)

This generous omnium-gatherum brings together all the writings William James published that have not appeared in previous volumes of this definitive edition of ...

_Metaphysics of Consciousness_ opens with a development of the physicalist outlook that denies the need for any explanation of the mental. This "inexplicability" is demonstrated not to be sufficient as refutation of physicalism. However, the inescapable particularity of modes of consciousness appears to overpower this minimal physicalism. This book proposes that such an inference requires either a wholly new conception of how consciousness is physical or a deep and disturbing new kind of physical inexplicability.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A THEORY OF BASIC GOODS: STRUCTURE AND HIERARCHY* I. FTEN, PERHAPS ALWAYS, moral theory emerges from particular problems. Just how is obscure. The logic of discovery is elusive; and it is harder to explain how we have come to see matters rightly than to recognize that we do, in fact, see them rightly. What counts as a theory, moreover, calls for explication as much as does a theory's (...) emergence. When we have in mind a theory that shapes our social vision, there is a progression from a central set of propositions, keyed to a range of paradigm cases and seen as a logical structure, to a " way of thinking " widely enough embraced to have political significance, at least for a given oommunity. In this essay I want to explore some fundamental questions raised by Germain Grisez's theory of natural law ethics.1 These questions are chiefly conceptual. But neither they nor Grisez's theory should be seen in a vacuum. Rather, I would begin by suggesting that the importance of his work, its emergence in some Catholic circles, is linked with two specific moral and political problems. The first is abortion; the second is the superpowers' policy of nuclear deterrence. *I thank David Blake, Robert Gordh, Carroll Kearley, Gary Mar. Martin Woods, and Linda Zagzebski for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. 1 For the theory's fullest presentation, see Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, vol. one, Ohristian Moral Principles, with the help of Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., Basil Cole, O.P., John Finnis, John A. Geinzer, Robert G. Kennedy, Patrick Lee, William E. May, and Russell Shaw (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983). Especially critical are chapters two through twelve. 221 JAMES G. HANINK As a point of chronology, Grisez's early study of rubortion was the context for one of the first formulations of his natural law ethics.2 But why should this have been so? And why should abortion so engage Catholic thinkers, some of whom had felt a distance from explicitly Catholic positions, that Grisez's work should become pivotal? Answers to such questions must be tentative, but they include the following considerations. In a brief period, no more than a decade, legal abortion in the West became entrenched social policy.8 It was a policy, too, supported by dominant intellectual forces. But the new policy, defended in terms of individual freedom and a right to privacy, struck many Catholicsand non-Catholics-as vicious and tragic. It was vicious in that it made expendable the weakest and most vulnerable human beings. Human rights somehow became restricted to the strong and self-sufficient. The policy was tragic in its denial of human community. We are not, however much radical individualism supposes, merely a collection of separate egos. l/Ve are, rather, a community tied to a past and pledged to a future, so pledged, in part, by the children we bear and nurture.4 For in hearing and nurturing children we carry on the love of parents who have done as much for us; and we carry ourselves into a future where we hope our own love will be thus extended. But abortion, and surely unrestricted abortion, betrays this community of trust. Still, a policy so vicious and tragic can make us look for a fresh moral vision. And, of course, to the extent that we have contributed to,a climate in which abortion could become entrenched -either by our failures to support women in need or 2 Germain Grisez, Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments (New York and Cleveland: Corpus Books, 1970). a A milepost, of course, was the United States Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, in 1973. Recent U.S. Government figures indicate that there are now well over a million legal abortions annually in this country. 4 For a provocative discussion of this theme, see Stanley Hauerwas's " The Moral Value of the Family " in his A Commimity of Character (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). A THEORY OF BASIC GOODS: STRUCTURE & HIERARCHY 223 by an acquiescence in our culture's individualism-the call for theoretical reconstruction is all the more urgent... (shrink)

The essays in this volume were written by leading researchers on classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity. They detail central topics in the foundations of physics, including the role of symmetry principles in classical and quantum physics, Einstein's hole argument in general relativity, quantum mechanics and special relativity, quantum correlations, quantum logic, and quantum probability and information.

Toby Handfield has advanced a subtle form of dispositionalism that purports to reconcile the concept of causal powers with broadly Humean convictions by dissolving the requirement for objectively modal relations between powers and their manifestations. He suggests we should identify manifestations with certain types of causal processes, and identify powers with properties that are parts of their structures. The modal features of causal powers can then be explained in terms of internal relations between a power and the property of being (...) a certain type of causal process, but these relations are supervenient and do not add anything to the basic ontology. In this way, causal powers may be ‘connected’ to their manifestations without admitting objectively modal relations. I disagree with this characterisation of causal powers and its identification of manifestations with types of causal processes: I question the assumption that causal processes can be isolated in quantum physics in the way Handfield requires and confront Humean dispositionalism with the problem of individuating powers in an entangled world. (shrink)

The background of these remarks is that in 1967, in ‘’Constructive reasoning” [27], I sketched an argument that finitist arithmetic coincides with primitive recursive arithmetic, P RA; and in 1981, in “Finitism” [28], I expanded on the argument. But some recent discussions and some of the more recent literature on the subject lead me to think that a few further remarks would be useful.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Office of Scientific IntegrityDavid P. Hamilton (bio)For most of the 1980s, the specter of scientific fraud popped into public view every few years, usually only to submerge again. Faced with several well-publicized cases of scientists who blatantly faked their data—among the best-known being Harvard cardiologist John Darsee (whose colleagues watched him forge data) (Broad and Wade 1982, p. 14) and Sloan-Kettering Institute immunologist William Summerlin (who painted (...) black spots on white mice to simulate tissue grafts) (Broad and Wade 1982, p. 155)—the scientific community as a whole tended to dismiss the phenomenon as the work of a few deviants. Called in 1981 to testify before then-Representative Albert Gore Jr.'s subcommittee on investigations and oversight, Philip Handler, then-president of the National Academy of Sciences, told the panel that science was perfectly capable of regulating itself, and that the problem of scientific fraud had been "grossly exaggerated" by the press (Broad and Wade 1982). The message was clear: Congress should stick to its knitting, and science would take care of itself.Now, however, scientists are faced with a very different situation: a permanent federal bureaucracy, known as the Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI), devoted to the investigation of alleged scientific wrongdoing. The transition from the days of laissez-faire, when universities were entrusted with all investigations unless they were handled so badly that the federal government was forced to take notice, has been an uncomfortable one for many researchers. Lately, this discomfort has taken shape as a vocal protest against OSI. Largely as a result of this protest, federal officials recently promoted a plan to restructure OSI and change some of its operating procedures, a move with unpredictable consequences for universities and researchers alike.OSI was born largely because of investigations by two influential congressmen: Representatives John Dingell of Michigan and Ted Weiss of New York. While both claimed they acted mainly to make sure taxpayer dollars were not spent on fraudulent research, both also maintained a strong interest in protecting "whistleblowers," the often vulnerable, and usually junior, scientists who first raise questions about bad research. And Dingell seemed to take special pleasure in pointing up the deficiencies of investigations run by universities and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) itself. (For reasons that are not well understood, [End Page 171] biomedical research seems far more prone to fraud than any other field of science. As a result, NIH, which funds most biomedical research in the United States, has held ultimate responsibility for most prominent cases of fraud.) Plagued as they often were by conflicts of interest, shoddy methodologies, and, in some cases, a willingness to believe any excuse by the accused, no matter how far-fetched, these investigations made easy targets. And the notion that science could "govern itself" grew harder to sustain.In late 1988, Dingell and other congressmen began circulating draft bills that would have created a new office for investigating scientific fraud. Dingell would have placed such an office under the aegis of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, raising the possibility that scientific fraud might be probed by the same criminal investigators who unravel Medicare fraud. Unsettled by this vision of the "science police," NIH officials moved quickly to pre-empt Congress. On March 16, 1989, they published a notice in the Federal Register announcing the creation of OSI, an office with responsibility for ensuring thorough university investigations of misconduct and the authority to conduct its own investigations when necessary.From the beginning, OSI took an unusual approach to its work. For one thing, the office had a broad mandate: Although located within NIH, it was responsible for research funded throughout the entire Public Health Service, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Alcohol, Drug, and Mental Health Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control. Furthermore, it was not restricted to scientific fraud. Departmental lawyers, wishing to avoid the legal connotations of the term "fraud"—in particular, a requirement that fraudulent actions not only mislead others but also cause them noticeable harm—decided instead to adopt the term "scientific misconduct," defined as "fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that deviate... (shrink)

There is currently an important debate about whether philosophical intuitions are intended as evidence for the theories philosophers promote. On one side are those who argue that philosophers do rely on intuitions as evidence; on the other side are those who deny any such role for philosophical intuitions. This paper argues that both sides of this debate are partially right and partially wrong. Intuitive judgments do not, as psychological states, function as evidence in most well-known philosophical thought experiments. Philosophers nevertheless (...) strongly depend upon these intuitive judgments. Where both sides go awry is in assuming that the importance of intuitive judgments rests solely upon their role as evidence. We need to distinguish between evidence, as such, from various nonevidential psychological states that are needed for something else to serve as evidence. The paper calls these latter conditions “evidence facilitators” and argues that intuitive judgments belong in this category. (shrink)

Citing the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, the Leo Frank murder trial, and other cases, author William Simon takes a fresh look at the ethics of lawyering.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The End of Argument: Knowledge and the InternetSimon Barker1. Fermat's last videoModern mathematics is nearly characterized by the use of rigorous proofs. This practice, the result of literally thousands of years of refinement, has brought to mathematics a clarity and reliability unmatched by any other science.(Jaffe and Quinn 1993, 1)The above passage illustrates how mathematicians have come to esteem rigorous argument as the most important feature of their subject. (...) In turn, the example of mathematics has, over a long period, made rigorous argument an ideal in many other areas of inquiry—from the sciences to theology. How interesting it is, then, that some mathematicians have begun to question that ideal. Gian-Carlo Rota, for example, has said that the axiomatic method of presentation in mathematics has now reached "the zenith of fanaticism" and that the identification of mathematics with this method "is having a corrosive effect on the way mathematics is viewed by scientists in other disciplines" (1997, 189). William Thurston has blamed the formality of contemporary mathematics for "the whole system of generally poor communication" within the subject. According to Thurston, ordinary conversation between mathematicians can often convey a new solution in a matter of minutes, whereas a formal proof delivered in a seminar will take an hour, and a written article may take several hours or even days to understand. In Thurston's view, this disparity arises precisely because conversationalists go far beyond formal mathematical language:They use gestures, they draw pictures and diagrams, they make sound effects and use body language. Communication is more likely to be two-way, so that people can concentrate on what needs the most attention. With these channels of communication, they are in a much better position to convey what's going on, not just in their logical and linguistic facilities, but in their other mental facilities as well. [End Page 154](Thurston 1994, 166)Sadly, however, mathematicians can only converse like this in private. To reach the rest of their audience, they have to publish in journals. Journal articles are limited to formal language and so must convey results more slowly. Formality, though less efficient, is more publishable.Yet there is hope. Another mathematician, Andrew Odlyzko, has suggested that the unfortunate limitations of printed journals can now be overcome with computers. Computers can allow mathematicians to distribute something more than the traditional style of printed proof. Odlyzko suggests an electronic scrapbook that would include a video of each author lecturing about their results (Odlyzko 1995, 90-91). Fermat's Last Video? The point is that if these suggestions come to pass, publication of mathematical results will no longer involve stripping away informal features and replacing them with formal language, as if rigorous argument was all that mattered. Instead, the informal features that help mathematicians to understand new results so quickly in ordinary conversation will be given equal air time. The ideal, for publication at least, will be less formal.Is this just a gimmick? Is it something that will go away, if we shut our eyes, leaving the centuries old ideal of formal proof intact? What I wish to discuss here are some of the reasons why mathematics, as well as other branches of knowledge, may adopt greater informality and may cease to idealise rigorous argument.2. From parents to premissesI will start by examining how and why rigorous, formal argument became an ideal in the first place. This is a long story, going back to the origins of Western literature; so I am forced to be brief.1 I will start with the matter of how argument became an ideal. The first thing we should recognise is that even in the West's earliest literary works—the Iliad and the Odyssey—there are plenty of rudimentary arguments, particularly in the speeches put into the mouths of the major characters. Nevertheless, for sustained or rigorous argument, we must look a little harder. Havelock has put forward the following passage as an example of unusual rigour in early literature (Havelock 1966b, 209). The passage is taken from the start of Hesiod's poem, Works and Days, a piece of wisdom literature almost as old as... (shrink)

The purpose of retracting published papers is to maintain the integrity of academic research. Recent work in research ethics has devoted important attention to how to improve the system of paper retraction. In this context, the focus has primarily been on how to handle fraudulent or flawed research papers and how to encourage the retraction of papers based on honest mistakes. Less attention has been paid to whether papers that report unethical research—for example, research performed without appropriate concern for the (...) moral rights and interests of the research participants—should be retracted. The aim of this paper is to examine to what extent retraction policies of academic journals and publishers address retractions of unethical research and to discuss critically various policy options and the reasons for accepting them. The paper starts by reviewing retraction policies of academic publishers. The results show that many journals do not have explicit policies for how to handle unethical research. Against this background, we then discuss four normative arguments for why unethical research should be retracted. In conclusion, we suggest a retraction policy in light of our empirical and normative investigations. (shrink)

William Vitek enlarges our understanding by treating the act of promising as a social practice and complex human experience. Citing engaging examples of promises made in everyday life, in extraordinary circumstances, and in literary works, Vitek grapples with the central paradox of promising: that human beings can intend a future to which they are largely blind. _Promising_ evaluates contemporary approaches to the topic by such philosophers as John Rawls, John Searle, Henry Sidgwick, P.S. Atiyah, and Michael Robbins but transcend (...) their more limited focus on promissory obligation. Vitek's innovative approach moves beyond theories of language, ethics, and law to unveil a complex human activity subject to shifting interpretations and changes in nature. (shrink)

In the nearly half a century since its modern inception (Anscombe (1965), Hintikka (1969)), the Representation theory has faced no more implacable enemy than Ned Block. He has offered objection after objection, usually in the form of apparent counterexamples, and as I write this he shows no sign of flagging.

Scientific models may be more useful for false assumptions they make than true ones when one is interested not in the fit of the model, but in the form of the residuals. Modeling Darwin’s “blending” theory of inheritance shows how it illuminates features of Mendelian theory. Insufficient understanding of it leads to incorrect moves in modeling population structure. But it may prove even more useful for organizing a theory of cultural evolution. Analysis of “blending” inheritance gives new tools for recognizing (...) population structure for culture and for understanding differences between biological and cultural inheritance. (shrink)

Between the opposing claims of reason and religious subjectivity may be a middle ground, William J. Wainwright argues. His book is a philosophical reflection on the role of emotion in guiding reason. There is evidence, he contends, that reason functions properly only when informed by a rightly disposed heart. The idea of passional reason, so rarely discussed today, once dominated religious reflection, and Wainwright pursues it through the writings of three of its past proponents: Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newman, (...) and William James. He focuses on Edwards, whose work typifies the Christian perspective on religious reasoning and the heart. Then, in his discussion of Newman and James, Wainwright shows how the emotions participate in non-religious reasoning. Finally he takes up the challenges most often posed to notions of passional reason: that such views justify irrationality and wishful thinking, that they can't be defended without circularity, and that they lead to relativism. His response to these charges culminates in an eloquent and persuasive defense of the claim that reason functions best when influenced by the appropriate emotions, feelings, and intuitions. (shrink)