In this paper, it is argued that, when properly revised in the face of counter-examples, the source control and actual access views of privacy are extensionally equivalent but different in their underlying rationales. In this sense, the source control view and the actual access view, when properly modified to meet counter-examples, can be metaphorically compared to ‘climbing the same mountain but from different sides’ (as Parfit [1] has argued about normative theories). These two views can equally apply to (...) the privacy debates and, thus, resolve a long-standing debate in the literature. (shrink)

Educational inclusion remains an area of controversy. While there is a strong moral consensus that children ought to experience a meaningful education irrespective of their ability, the application of this inclusive moral commitment to substantive questions of educational policy and teacher practice remains contentious. In this chapter I argue that the debate over educational inclusion is informed by two rival concepts of education and that the analysis of education foregrounded by the philosopher R.S. Peters can be applied in order to (...) develop a more nuanced account of meaningful access for all students. (shrink)

When read as demands for justification, these questions seem absurd. We don’t normally ask people to substantiate assertions like “I think it will rain tomorrow” or “I have a headache”. There is, at the very least, a strong presumption that sincere self-attributions about one’s thoughts and feelings are true. In fact, some philosophers believe that such self-attributions are less susceptible to doubt than any other claims. Even those who reject that extreme view generally acknowledge that there is some salient epistemic (...) difference between (a) one’s belief that she thinks it will rain tomorrow, or that she has a headache, and (b) her belief that it is raining, or that another person has a headache. (shrink)

The proximity of introspection makes it difficult to explain. In what does our knowledge of our own beliefs and desires consist? Do we observe them with an inner eye? Do we infer their existence from premises concerning our actions and feelings? I reject both of these suggestions. Instead, I defend the view that facts about what we believe, and certain facts about what we want, are known by us in a direct or unmediated fashion. When one has genuinely introspective knowledge (...) of a belief one's reason for believing that one believes that p is the very fact that one believes that p . ;According to this account, our knowledge of certain mental states is infallible relative to its grounds: there are no false introspective beliefs that have the same kind of justification as our typical, true introspective beliefs. A significant part of the dissertation is spent defending this claim against those who argue for the possibility of certain forms of self-directed error. I argue that it cannot be the case that a subject falsely believes that she believes that p because she instead either believes some other proposition or bears some other attitude toward p, and that these facts impugn observational and inferentialist accounts of self-knowledge. I also develop accounts of what beliefs and desires are to help explain the relative infallibility of introspection. ;The view of self-knowledge I offer is one according to which we have reasons for believing that we believe certain things and reasons for believing that we want certain things. I argue that any adequate account of self-knowledge must have this feature because justification is necessary for knowledge and we must have reasons to be justified. But I reject the view that only phenomenal or experiential states can endow a subject with reasons. Beliefs and desires are individuated by their causal roles---they are not purely phenomenal in nature---but the fact that one believes that p can nevertheless directly ground one's introspective beliefs. Introspective knowledge is both direct and grounded in reason. (shrink)

Renewed Accountability for Access and Excellence provides a forum for contributing scholars and practitioners to advance the discussion of Tenuto’s democratic professional practice in education by sharing additional insights, perspectives, and implications for both policy and practice. Consistent with the model itself, this collective work is intended to encourage meaningful conversations and critical thinking about inclusionary practices, equitable access, excellence, and renewed accountability for teaching and leading.

In this paper, I argue that the debate on the accessibility of religious reasons, as it exists within the public reason literature, has insufficiently identified what it is that makes a religious reason for political action accessible. I thus explore a new route of analysis, one that takes seriously how religious reasons can be accessed via emotion. Emotions, I claim, are not only a source of justification for believers, but they allow non-religious citizens to feel the force of religious reasons (...) more than they otherwise would. (shrink)

Questions regarding the moral responsibility of Internet accessand service providers relating to information on the Internetcall for a reassessment of the ways in which we think aboutattributing blame, guilt, and duties of reparation andcompensation. They invite us to borrow something similar to theidea of strict liability from the legal sphere and to introduceit in morality and ethical theory. Taking such a category in thedistribution of responsibilities outside the domain of law andintroducing it into ethics, however, is a difficult thing. Doingso (...) seems to conflict with some broadly shared and deeply feltintuitions regarding the individuality of responsibility and therelationship between responsibility and guilt. These convictionscoincide with some basic ideas in Kantian moral theory and theascriptive theory based on these ideas. Nevertheless, theproblems to which the proposed liabilities / responsibilitiesrelate are so serious that they do not seem to leave room foraloofness. At least, they encourage us to reconsider the idea ofstrict liability carefully and to assess its merits. (shrink)

This article deals with the semantics of “double-access” sentences. They are defined as English sentences which have a past tense morpheme in the matrix clause and a present tense morpheme in a subordinate clause in the immediate scope of the matrix past tense. They receive a very peculiar interpretation, which we will refer to as a “double-access interpretation.” The episode described in the embedded clause makes reference to two times: the time referred to by the matrix predicate and (...) the utterance time of the whole sentence. Previous studies on this construction are largely descriptive and do not attempt to analyze it formally, with one important exception. Abusch (1991) addresses the problems connected with the construction and proposes that double-access interpretations involvede re attitudes about intervals. Her proposal contains an important insight and provides one possible account of the double-access construction. My proposal was independently developed at approximately the same time as Abusch's and offers an alternative explanation for the phenomena. I consider a series of hypotheses and conclude that double-access readings involvede re attitude reports about state individuals. This account is couched in an eventuality-based framework and employs the techniques proposed by Cresswell and von Stechow (1982). In order to yield the desired reading, the tense must first adjoin to the complement S, then to the matrix S, leaving two traces in the process. (shrink)

Self-control is that which is enacted to align our behaviour with intentions, motives, or better judgment in the face of conflicting impulses of motives. In this paper, I ask, what explains interpersonal differences in self-control? After defending a functionalist conception of self-control, I argue that differences in self-control are analogous to differences in mobility: they are modulated by inherent traits and environmental supports and constraints in interaction. This joint effect of individual (neuro)biology and environmental factors is best understood in terms (...) of access to self-control behaviours. I sketch an account of access as including the three criteria of means, awareness, and non-excessive effort. I further demonstrate that people with disorders such as ADHD have limited access to self-control behaviours and stand therefore at a disadvantage with regard to self-control. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a wish list of requirements for formal fairness in the specific context of triage in emergency departments (EDs) and maps the empirical and conceptual research questions that need to be addressed in this context in the near future. The pandemic has brought to the fore the necessity for public debate about how to allocate resources fairly in a situation of great shortage. However, issues of fairness arise also outside of pandemics: decisions about how to allocate resources (...) are structurally unavoidable in healthcare systems, as value judgements underlie every allocative decision, although they are not always easily identifiable. In this paper, we set out to bridge this gap in the context of EDs. In the first part, we propose five formal requirements specifically applied for ED triage to be considered fair and legitimate: publicity, accessibility, relevance, standardisability and accountability. In the second part of the paper, we map the conceptual and empirical ethics questions that will need to be investigated to assess whether healthcare systems guarantee a formally just ED triage. In conclusion, we argue that there is a vast research landscape in need of an in-depth conceptual and empirical investigation in the context of ED triage in ordinary times. Addressing both types of questions in this context is vital for promoting a fair and legitimate ED triage and for fostering reflection on formal fairness allocative issues beyond triage. (shrink)

Approximately two billion people lack access to medicines globally. People living with HIV, cancer patients, those suffering from tuberculosis or malaria, and other populations in desperate need of life-saving medicines are increasingly unable to access existing preventative, curative, and life-prolonging treatments. In many cases, treatment may be unavailable or inaccessible for even some of the most common and readily treatable health concerns, such as hypertension. In the developing world, many of the factors that contribute to making the world’s (...) most vulnerable and marginalized populations particularly susceptible to illness also operate to restrict their access to medicines. As a result of dramatic economic inequities and widespread poverty, it is not profitable for most originator pharmaceutical companies to develop new medicines for sale in developing markets or to lower the cost of existing drugs so that they are affordable for the majority of these populations. (shrink)

Modal accounts of normality in non-monotonic reasoning traditionally have an underlying semantics based on a notion of preference amongst worlds. In this paper, we motivate and investigate an alternative semantics, based on ordered accessibility relations in Kripke frames. The underlying intuition is that some world tuples may be seen as more normal, while others may be seen as more exceptional. We show that this delivers an elegant and intuitive semantic construction, which gives a new perspective on defeasible necessity. Technically, the (...) revisited logic does not change the expressive power of our previously defined preferential modalities. This conclusion follows from an analysis of both semantic constructions via a generalisation of bisimulations to the preferential case. Reasoners based on the previous semantics therefore also suffice for reasoning over the new semantics. We complete the picture by investigating different notions of defeasible conditionals in modal logic that can also be captured within our framework. (shrink)

I challenge a claim that seems to be made when nominalists offer reformulations of the content of mathematical beliefs, namely that these reformulations are accessible to everyone. By doing so, I argue that these theories cannot account for the mathematical knowledge that ordinary people have. In the first part of the paper I look at reformulations that employ the concept of proof, such as those of Mary Leng and Ottavio Bueno. I argue that ordinary people don’t have many beliefs (...) about proofs, and that they are not in a position to acquire knowledge about proofs autonomously. The second part of the paper is concerned with other reformulations of content, such as those of Hartry Field and Stephen Yablo. There too, the problem is that people are not able to acquire knowledge of the reformulated propositions autonomously. Ordinary people simply do not have beliefs with the kind of content that the nominalists need, for their theory to account for the mathematical knowledge of ordinary people. All in all then, the conclusion is that a large number of theories that suggest reformulations of mathematical content yield contents that are inaccessible for most people. Thus, these theories are limited, in that they cannot account for the mathematical knowledge of ordinary people. (shrink)

Jordi Fernandez has recently offered an interesting account of introspective justification according to which the very states that (subjectively) justify one's first-order belief that p justify one's second order belief that one believes that p. I provide two objections to Fernandez's account.

The objectives of this article are twofold. First, by denying the dualism inherent in attempts to load metaphysical significance on the inner/outer distinction, it defends the view that scientific investigation can approach consciousness in itself, and is not somehow restricted in scope to the outward manifestations of a private and hidden realm. Second, it provisionally endorses the central tenets of global workspace theory, and recommends them as a possible basis for the sort of scientific understanding of consciousness thus legitimised. However, (...) the article goes on to argue that global workspace theory alone does not constitute a fully worked-out objective account of the conscious subject. This requires additional attention to be paid to the issue of embodiment, and to the possibility of indexicality that arises when an instantiation of the global workspace architecture inhabits a spatially localised body. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to account for privileged access or, more precisely, the special kind of epistemic right that we have to some beliefs about our own mental states. My account will have the following two main virtues. First of all, it will only appeal to those conceptual elements that, arguably, we already use in order to account for perceptual knowledge. Secondly, it will constitute a naturalizing account of privileged access in that (...) it does not posit any mysterious faculty of introspection or "inner perception" mechanism. (shrink)

Preparing words in speech production is normally a fast and accurate process. We generate them two or three per second in fluent conversation; and overtly naming a clear picture of an object can easily be initiated within 600 msec after picture onset. The underlying process, however, is exceedingly complex. The theory reviewed in this target article analyzes this process as staged and feedforward. After a first stage of conceptual preparation, word generation proceeds through lexical selection, morphological and phonological encoding, phonetic (...) encoding, and articulation itself. In addition, the speaker exerts some degree of output control, by monitoring of self-produced internal and overt speech. The core of the theory, ranging from lexical selection to the initiation of phonetic encoding, is captured in a computational model, called WEAVER++. Both the theory and the computational model have been developed in interaction with reaction time experiments, particularly in picture naming or related word production paradigms, with the aim of accounting for the real-time processing in normal word production. A comprehensive review of theory, model, and experiments is presented. The model can handle some of the main observations in the domain of speech errors (the major empirical domain for most other theories of lexical access), and the theory opens new ways of approaching the cerebral organization of speech production by way of high-temporal-resolution imaging. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the so-called Access Problem for Duncan Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism (2012). After reconstructing Pritchard’s own response to the Access Problem, I argue that in order to assess whether Pritchard’s response is a satisfying one, we first need an account of the notion of ‘Reflective Access’ that underpins Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism. I provide three interpretations of the notion of Reflective Access: a metaphysical interpretation, a folk interpretation, and an epistemic interpretation. I argue (...) that none of these three interpretations comes without problems. I conclude that, until we have a clear and unproblematic account of Reflective Access, the Access Problem remains a challenge for Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the Armchair Access Problem for E=K as presented by Nicholas Silins (2005), and I argue, contra Silins, that it does not represent a real threat to E=K. More precisely, I put forward two lines of response, both of which put pressure on the main assumption of the argument, namely, the Armchair Access thesis. The first line of response focuses on its scope, while the second line of response focuses on its nature. The (...) second line of response is the most interesting one, for it represents the framework within which I develop a novel account of second-order knowledge, one that involves evaluation of counterfactual conditionals and the employment of our imaginative capacities, i.e., an imagination-based account of second-order knowledge. The two lines of response are shown to be jointly compatible and mutually supportive. I then conclude that the Armchair Access Problem is not a challenge for E=K, yet it relies on the ambiguity of the notion of armchair knowledge underpinning the Armchair Access thesis. (shrink)

BackgroundSharing de-identified individual-level health research data is widely promoted and has many potential benefits. However there are also some potential harms, such as misuse of data and breach of participant confidentiality. One way to promote the benefits of sharing while ameliorating its potential harms is through the adoption of a managed access approach where data requests are channeled through a Data Access Committee (DAC), rather than making data openly available without restrictions. A DAC, whether a formal or informal (...) group of individuals, has the responsibility of reviewing and assessing data access requests. Many individual groups, consortiums, institutional and independent DACs have been established but there is currently no widely accepted framework for their organization and function.Main textWe propose that DACs, should have the role of both promotion of data sharing and protection of data subjects, their communities, data producers, their institutions and the scientific enterprise. We suggest that data access should be granted by DACs as long as the data reuse has potential social value and provided there is low risk of foreseeable harms. To promote data sharing and to motivate data producers, DACs should encourage secondary uses that are consistent with the interests of data producers and their own institutions. Given the suggested roles of DACs, there should be transparent, simple and clear application procedures for data access. The approach to review of applications should be proportionate to the potential risks involved. DACs should be established within institutional and legal frameworks with clear lines of accountability, terms of reference and membership. We suggest that DACs should not be modelled after research ethics committees (RECs) because their functions and goals of review are different from those of RECs. DAC reviews should be guided by the principles of public health ethics instead of research ethics.ConclusionsIn this paper we have suggested a framework under which DACs should operate, how they should be organised, and how to constitute them. (shrink)

Aaron Zimmerman has recently raised an interesting objection to an account of self-knowledge I have offered. The objection has the form of a dilemma: either it is possible for us to be entitled to beliefs which we do not form, or it is not. If it is, the conditions for introspective justification within the model I advocate are insufficient. If not, they are otiose. I challenge Zimmerman's defence of the first horn of the dilemma.

This is my first publication of the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness, though not using quite those terms. It ends with this: "The upshot is this: If Searle is using the access sense of "consciousness," his argument doesn't get to first base. If, as is more likely, he intends the what-it-is-like sense, his argument depends on assumptions about issues that the cognitivist is bound to regard as deeply unsettled empirical questions." Searle replies: "He refers to what (...) he calls an "access sense of consciousness." On my account there is no such sense.". (shrink)

Defenders of current restrictions on EU immigrants’ access to welfare rights in host member states often invoke a principle of reciprocity among member states to justify these policies. The argument is that membership of a system of social cooperation triggers duties of reciprocity characteristic of welfare rights. Newly arriving EU immigrants who look for work do not meet the relevant criteria of membership, the argument goes, because they have not yet contributed enough to qualify as members on the grounds (...) of reciprocity. Therefore, current restrictions on their access to welfare rights are justified. In this article, I challenge this argument by showing how restrictions on EU immigrants’ access to welfare rights are inconsistent with duties of international reciprocity. There are different variations of this challenge, but my focus here will be on one that uses a veil of ignorance device to support this claim. What matters from a perspective concerned with international reciprocity, I will argue, is what kind of welfare policy EU member states would choose were they not to know whether those receiving EU migrants were net contributors or net beneficiaries to the relevant scheme of international cooperation made possible by the four freedoms, and freedom of movement in particular. I argue that framing the requirement of reciprocity in this way provides a more comprehensive understanding of what should count as an ‘unreasonable burden’ on the welfare systems of host member states. The paper also examines alternative accounts of ‘unreasonable burdens’. It shows when and how the current institutional structure of the EU could take steps to deal with such burdens by preventing member states from gaming a comprehensive system of welfare rights protections across member states and by recognising the achievements of those member states that best serve them. (shrink)

Prior research examining mate expulsion indicates that women are more likely to expel a mate due to deficits in emotional access while men are more likely to expel a mate due to deficits in sexual access. Prior research highlights the importance of accounting for measurement limitations (e.g., the use of incremental vs. forced-choice measures) when assessing attitudes toward sexual and emotional infidelity; Wade & Brown, 2012; Sagarin et al., 2012). The present research uses conjoint analysis, a novel methodology (...) for controlling several limitations of using continuous self-report measures in mate expulsion research. Participants (N = 181; 128 women) recruited from Bucknell University and several psychology recruitment listservs in the US rated 9 profiles that varied in three potential levels of emotional and sexual accessibility. Men were more likely to want to break up with a partner due to sexual accessibility deficits, whereas women were more likely to want to break up due to emotional accessibility deficits. However, regardless of sex, emotional inaccessibility was more likely to produce mate expulsion. These findings are consistent with prior theory and highlight the need to disentangle emotional accessibility into its constituent in-pair benefits. This research also illustrates the utility of conjoint analysis as a statistical tool for studying how humans resolve trade-offs among competing outcomes during romantic decision-making. (shrink)

The paper examines a dichotomy between special access accounts of authoritative self‐knowledge and constitutive accounts that treat such authority as a feature of the ‘grammar’ of self‐ascriptions, and concludes that it is a false one. Firstly, special access theories are shown to include not just Cartesian views but also a number of different kinds of accounts of the nature of mental states and our self‐knowledge of them. One group comprises functionalist accounts—special access theories, which involve non‐Cartesian conceptions (...) of the individuation of conditions of mental states, and need make no play with any form of ‘inner perception’. Secondly, it is argued that there is space for intermediate theories according to which ‘grammar’ and empirical regularities collaborate inextricably to hold our actual mental state concepts together, and play a joint role in explaining the reliability of our basic self‐ascriptions of mental states. Finally, it is shown that all viable concepts of mental states, which can be competently self‐ascribed in a non‐inferential way, must be multi‐criterial concepts and not wholly fixed by ‘grammar’. (shrink)

Privileged Access provides a very valuable survey of contemporary philosophical views and issues on the classical topic of self-knowledge. The book is in part an anthology of previously published papers, but it also contains nine new essays, most of which deal directly with the issue of privileged access to one’s own mental states.

Philosophical discussions of personal identity depend upon thought experiments which describe psychological vicissitudes and question whether the original person survives in the person resulting from the described change. These cases are meant to determine the types of psychological change compatible with personal continuation. Two main accounts of identity try to capture this distinction; psychological continuity theories and narrative theories. I argue that neither fully succeeds since both overlook the importance of a relationship I call “empathic access.” I define empathic (...) access and discuss its role in a complete account of personal identity. (shrink)

"Accessibility" is a crucial concept of possible worlds semantics. The simplest approach to accessibility is the "magical theory" that construes this relation as analogous to spatial or temporal relations. In this paper I give a nonmagical structural account of the accessibility relation that can be used to give a necessitarian account of kinds and laws. Laws are characterized in a structural way as stable invariants of the world's gestalt. Finally, I point out how the structural approach can be (...) embedded in a general representational theory of modality. (shrink)

The access problem for mathematics arises from the supposition that the referents of mathematical terms inhabit a realm separate from us. Quine’s approach in the philosophy of mathematics dissolves the access problem, though his solution sometimes goes unrecognized, even by those who rely on his framework. This paper highlights both Quine’s position and its neglect. I argue that Michael Resnik’s structuralist, for example, has no access problem for the so-called mathematical objects he posits, despite recent criticism, since (...) he relies on an indispensability argument. Still, Resnik’s structuralist does not provide an account of our access to traditional mathematical objects, and this may be seen as a problem. (shrink)

Access can either be first-order or second-order. First order access concerns whether contents achieve representation in phenomenal consciousness at all; second-order access concerns whether phenomenally conscious contents are selected for metacognitive, higher order processing by reflective consciousness. When the optional and flexible nature of second-order access is kept in mind, there remain strong reasons to believe that exclusion failure can indeed isolate phenomenally conscious stimuli that are not so accessed. Irvine’s [Irvine, E. . Signal detection theory, (...) the exclusion failure paradigm and weak consciousness—Evidence for the access/phenomenal distinction? Consciousness and Cognition.] partial access argument fails because exclusion failure is indeed due to lack of second-order access, not insufficient phenomenally conscious information. Further, the enable account conforms with both qualitative differences and subjective report, and is simpler than the endow account. Finally, although first-order access may be a distinct and important process, second-order access arguably reflects the core meaning of access generally. (shrink)

Perceptual beliefs that categorize objects can be justified by demonstrating basic properties (eg shapes) of the objects. In these justifications, perceptual justifiers have different contents to the beliefs they justify. I argue that the justifications are not inferential. Subjects are unlikely to have bodies of beliefs adequate to inferentially justify the beliefs they actually form on the strength of their object recognition abilities, especially when recognition depends on stimulus-dependent retrieval of visual memories. Instead, I argue, the justifications exploit a partial (...) awareness that subjects have of states and processes involved in object recognition. As such, they show that subjects have a degree of internal access to the principles of externalistic perceptual warrant, and to the features of perceptual states that give them justificatory force on externalistic accounts. The justifications themselves are evidential, but in order for them to have any justificatory force, they have to be placed in an externalistic framework for perceptual justification. I conclude that this form of justification shows that subjects have a degree of insight into why their perceptual experiences justify their beliefs. (shrink)

The Mass Density approach to GRW (GRWm for short) has been widely discussed in the quantum foundations literature. A crucial feature of GRWm is the introduction of a Criterion of Accessibility for mass, which allows to explain the determinacy of experimental outcomes thus also addressing the tails problem of GRW. However, the Criterion of Accessibility leaves the ontological meaning of the non-accessible portion of mass utterly unexplained. In this paper I discuss two viable approaches to non-accessible mass, which I call (...) anti-realist and realist, and will defend the latter. First, I show that the anti-realist approach suffers from various objections. Second, I develop an account of non-accessible mass density states as objectively indeterminate states of affairs. (shrink)

In his paper, Young has eloquently put forward a novel account of how and why the phenomenon of thought-insertion seen in patients with schizophrenia does not contradict the immunity principle. He argues that, in TI, the problem lies not in misidentification but in mispredication: the individual with TI does not ascribe the right predicate to the wrong subject, but has misdetected the predicate in the first place. The author points out that an inconsistently formulated immunity principle could risk confusing (...) the two types of errors. The author defines the immunity principle as: Any agent... (shrink)

Silvia Castellazzi shows how companies can implement their corporate responsibility and support employability and access to training in an incentive-compatible manner. The study provides insights into unrealized cooperation and disincentives which prevent companies from investing in a shared pool of employable and skilled people. The research draws on the theoretical framework of the economic ethics and on in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in two European countries. Findings show that incentives for investments in training are selective and might reinforce path-dependencies (...) and exclusion, while not supporting cooperation and productive competition. The study also shows the value of conceptualizing employability as a social rather than a psychological contract to facilitate investments and the implementation of corporate responsibility. Contents Trends and Conflicts in Employability and Provision of Training Incentives Structures and Stakeholders' Strategies A Social Contract for Employability Target Groups Researchers in business ethics, employee relations, further education and training HR and training managers; CSR managers The Author Silvia Castellazzi works as account manager in the corporate education division of MIP Graduate School of Business (Politecnico di Milano). Her research interests and activities are focused on professional and executive education, corporate responsibility and decision-making, the future of work and new forms of work organization. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the challenges and potentialities of a solidarity-based approach to data access and governance. To do that, it offers an infraethical understanding of solidarity that describes it as a structural moral enabler that can sustain collective action and risk taking. The paper ends with a brief discussion of health data access as a possible case study to test this approach.

Based on an ethnographic project in a public high school in a low-income neighborhood in South Los Angeles, this paper argues that access to information and communication technologies cannot be taken as helpful or empowering on its own terms; instead, concerns about justice must be accounted for by the local communities technology is meant to benefit. This paper juxtaposes the concept of technological access with recent work in feminist science and technology studies on infrastructure, maintenance, and ethics. In (...) contrast to popular descriptions of ICTs as emancipatory and transformative, in the setting of an urban school, access produced extensive demands for attention, time, and information. This paper focuses on the labor of a group of student workers, Student Technology Leaders, and how they became responsible for the significant amount of repair and maintenance work involved in keeping hundreds of new computing devices available for use. An expanded process of accounting can more realistically frame issues of justice and its relationship to ICTs. I use a town hall meeting held with these students as an example of a processual vision of justice, one that encourages the beneficiaries of technological access to evaluate costs, benefits, and ethical concerns together. (shrink)

Despite efforts to make virtue-acquisition more accessible, neo-Aristotelian accounts of virtue currently exclude those who occasionally experience depressive episodes from potentially possessing moral virtue. This problem of accessibility is especially relevant given the increased prevalence of depression due to, e.g., the COVID19 pandemic. Through an interdisciplinary analysis, I argue that one’s ability to adequately recognise and respond to virtuous possibilities for action is impoverished during a depressive episode. This is illustrated through the depressed agent’s field of affordances: the collection of (...) possible actions an agent perceives. As moral virtues are conceptualised as stable dispositions, even a temporary yet significant decrease in moral competence excludes the agent from possessing the relevant virtue. To solve this problem of accessibility, I argue that, similar to Aristotle’s discussion of sleep, depressive episodes can be conceptualised as temporary states that cause one’s virtues to be inactive, rather than absent. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce two issues relevantly related to the cognitive phenomenology debate, which, to our minds, have not been yet properly addressed: the relation between access and phenomenal consciousness in cognition and the relation between conscious thought and inner speech. In the first case, we ask for an explanation of how we have access to thought contents, and in the second case, an explanation of why is inner speech so pervasive in our conscious thinking. We discuss (...) the prospects of explanation for both sides of the debate and argue that cognitive phenomenology defenders are in an overall advantageous position. We also propose an account of inner speech that differs from other influential explanations in some interesting respects. (shrink)

Almost everyone agrees, under some interpretation, that a world is nomologically accessible if and only if it obeys the laws of the base world. This surface agreement, however, has led many to attach little importance to different interpretations, thereby conflating two distinct concepts of nomological accessibility. According to the Shared Law Account (hereafter SL), a target world is nomologically accessible from the base world if, and only if, all and only the laws of the base world are laws at (...) the target world. The Compossible Events Account (hereafiter CE) holds that a target world is nomologically accessible from the base world if, and only if, all events of the target world are compossible with the laws of the base world. After demonstrating that these accounts are distinct, I shall show that the distinction matters. Not only is the correct modal system for nomic necessity determined by which characterizes accessibility, but some arguments against Humean supenfenience depend upon SL. In the final section I show that CE is the correct interpretation. (shrink)

We believe that the distinction between procedural and declarative knowledge unnecessarily confounds two issues: action-centeredness and accessibility, and can be made clearer through separating the two aspects. The work presents an integrated model of skill learning that takes into account both implicit and explicit processes and both action-centered and non-action-centered knowledge. We examine and simulate human data in the Letter Counting task. The work shows how the data may be captured using either the action-centered knowledge alone or the combined (...) action-centered and non-action-centered knowledge. The results provide a new perspective on skill learning. (shrink)

Within Western approaches to disability, the expectation for disabled people to ‘prove our disability’ is not only central for receiving access supports, but also for being accepted by those around us. Disabled people must make themselves intelligible to the able-bodied world under the threat of not getting one’s needs met, exclusion, and violence. In this paper I argue that Édouard Glissant is important to bring into conversation with issues in disability studies for two reasons: First, Glissant’s account of (...) compulsory transparency illuminates the underlying colonial values that inform the assumption that we need to understand someone’s disability in order to provide access and respect. Second, Glissant’s argument for the right to opacity creates a potential avenue to rethink an approach to access that is not predicated on being fully understood or rendered fully visible by means of reductive, able-bodied categories: the right to access opacity. (shrink)

In Québec, the Act Respecting Access to Documents Held by Public Bodies and the Protection of Personal Information provides an exception to transparency to most public institutions where public health research is conducted by allowing them to not disclose their uses of personal data. This exceptionalism is ethically problematic due to important concerns and we argue that all those who conduct research should be transparent and accountable for the work they do in the public interest.

The paper examines a dichotomy between special access accounts of authoritative self‐knowledge and constitutive accounts that treat such authority as a feature of the ‘grammar’ of self‐ascriptions, and concludes that it is a false one. Firstly, special access theories are shown to include not just Cartesian views but also a number of different kinds of accounts of the nature of mental states and our self‐knowledge of them. One group comprises functionalist accounts—special access theories, which involve non‐Cartesian conceptions (...) of the individuation of conditions of mental states, and need make no play with any form of ‘inner perception’. Secondly, it is argued that there is space for intermediate theories according to which ‘grammar’ and empirical regularities collaborate inextricably to hold our actual mental state concepts together, and play a joint role in explaining the reliability of our basic self‐ascriptions of mental states. Finally, it is shown that all viable concepts of mental states, which can be competently self‐ascribed in a non‐inferential way, must be multi‐criterial concepts and not wholly fixed by ‘grammar’. (shrink)

Many countries have imposed strict regulations on the genetic information to which insurers have access. Commentators have warned against the emerging body of legislation for different reasons. This paper demonstrates that, when confronted with the argument that genetic information should be available to insurers for health insurance underwriting purposes, one should avoid appeals to rights of genetic privacy and genetic ignorance. The principle of equality of opportunity may nevertheless warrant restrictions. A choice-based account of this principle implies that (...) it is unfair to hold people responsible for the consequences of the genetic lottery, since we have no choice in selecting our genotype or the expression of it. However appealing, this view does not take us all the way to an adequate justification of inaccessibility of genetic information. A contractarian account, suggesting that health is a condition of opportunity and that healthcare is an essential good, seems more promising. I conclude that if or when predictive medical tests (such as genetic tests) are developed with significant actuarial value, individuals have less reason to accept as fair institutions that limit access to healthcare on the grounds of risk status. Given the assumption that a division of risk pools in accordance with a rough estimate of people's level of (genetic) risk will occur, fairness and justice favour universal health insurance based on solidarity. (shrink)

The presented article is devoted to the question of whether extended access therapy can or should be accompanied by research activity. It consists of three parts. The first lists the tasks that can be used for medical information regarding extended access programs, which leads to the conclusion that even taking into account the specific limitations of their cognitive value, this type of data can be meaningfully used. The second part is devoted to the limited regulations in European (...) law concerning the discussed issue, and the Polish Act on the Professions of Physician and Dentist which grants physicians/researchers broader powers. In the last part of the article, two arguments are presented to ethically justify the granting of such broad powers to researchers, and thus limiting the autonomy of patients. (shrink)

Practical Internalism holds that an agent's reasons for acting are entirely determined by his rational desires. This account is thought to be preferable to externalism, on the grounds that internalism alone can guarantee that agents have ‘rational motivational access’ (RMA) to their reasons. Rachel Cohon has recently argued that (i) internalism fails to ensure this, and (ii) an externalist account, akin to relativism, can guarantee RMA. I suggest that both of these claims are mistaken. I argue that (...) relativism is best understood as an internalist theory, and claim that one version of internalism can therefore guarantee RMA. (shrink)

Stoics and Sceptics distinguish belief (doxa) from a representationally and functionally similar but sub-doxastic state: passive yielding to appearance. Belief requires active assent to appearances, that is, affirmation of the appearances as true. I trace the roots of this view to Plato's accounts of doxa in the Republic and Theaetetus. In the Republic, eikasia and pistis (imaging and conviction) are distinguished by their objects, appearances versus ordinary objects; in the Theaetetus, perception and doxa are distinguished by their objects, proper perceptibles (...) versus ‘commons’, including being. But underlying these ontological distinctions is a psychological one: the lower mental states are confined to their lower objects because they are passive; the higher mental states have access to higher objects because they result from questioning appearances and making active affirmations about how things are. This doctrine of doxa anticipates both the Hellenistic one and modern accounts of belief as ‘aiming at truth’; it also shows Plato's views of doxa to have more in their favour philosophically and to cohere better with one another than generally thought. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical phenomenological view of the concept of access intimacy, a term coined by disability justice advocate Mia Mingus. Access intimacy refers to a mode of relation between disabled people or between disabled and non-disabled people that can be born of concerted cultivation or instantly intimated and centrally concerns the feeling of someone genuinely understanding and anticipating another’s access needs. Putting in conversation this notion of intimacy with Kym Maclaren’s critical phenomenological account of (...) intimacy, I show how accessibility is not about what one person or institution can do for another but involves an ongoing, interpersonal process of relating and taking responsibility for our inevitable encroachment on one another in ways that enhance one another’s freedom. (shrink)

Whistleblowing (WB) is the practice of reporting immoral or illegal behavior by members of a legitimate organization with privileged access to information concerning an alleged wrongdoing within that organization. A common critique of WB draws on its supposed consequence of generating a climate of mutual distrust. This wariness is heightened in the case of external WB, which may lead to weakening public trust in an organization by diminishing its credibility. Accordingly, even the defenders of WB have presented it as (...) an individual conscientious extrema ratio; the justification of WB as a dutiful practice has lost plausibility. Contrary to this view, we present WB as a specific instance of institutional and individual moral duties of public accountability in nonideal conditions. WB is thus justified as a dutiful corrective practice within a general normative theory of institutions because it qualifies the individual and institutional moral demands attached to rule-governed institutional roles. (shrink)