Philosophical counseling can be understood as the facilitation of personal narratives in which an individual’s moral frameworks are clarified and re-prioritized. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of narrative, hyper-goods and moral frameworks, and applying them to a case study, this article shows the different roles family can play in the formation of a personal narrative.

The Whole Child is a beautifully written book combining classic philosophical themes such as wonder and happiness with contemporary parenting virtues like courage, compassion, integrity, and discipline.

The paper lays the groundwork for understanding Heidegger's original ethics in the context of embodiment. I draw upon Merleau-Ponty's account of the flesh to develop a new ontology of embodiment as the basis for ethics. This ontology is formulated by integrating three unique accounts of the embodiment, namely, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, Yuasa Yasuo's Eastern-based phenomenology of the body, and the emerging science of Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI). In each of these accounts of embodiment, the flesh is revealed as simultaneously consisting of presence and (...) absence, incarnation and transcendence, being and consciousness. As a result, the Heideggerian approach to ethics, which is based upon the relationship we have with being, can be realized on many levels of embodiment. This makes the cultivation of a holistic ethos more feasible. Such an ethos overcomes the shortcomings in Heidegger's ethics and, in particular, those revealed by Levinas, Levin, Krell, and Caputo. (shrink)

This paper considers a puzzling conflict between two positions that are each compelling: it is irrational for an agent to pay to avoid `free' evidence before making a decision, and rational agents may have imprecise beliefs and/or desires. Indeed, we show that Good's theorem concerning the invariable choice-worthiness of free evidence does not generalise to the imprecise realm, given the plausible existing decision theories for handling imprecision. A key ingredient in the analysis, and a potential source of controversy, is the (...) general approach taken for resolving sequential decision problems { we make explicit what the key alternatives are and defend our own approach. Furthermore, we endorse a resolution of the aforementioned puzzle { we privilege decision theories that merely permit avoiding free evidence over decision theories for which avoiding free evidence is uniquely admissible. Finally, we situate this particular result about free evidence within the broader `dynamic-coherence' literature. (shrink)

There has been much recent interest in imprecise probabilities, models of belief that allow unsharp or fuzzy credence. There have also been some influential criticisms of this position. Here we argue, chiefly against Elga (2010), that subjective probabilities need not be sharp. The key question is whether the imprecise probabilist can make reasonable sequences of decisions. We argue that she can. We outline Elga's argument and clarify the assumptions he makes and the principles of rationality he is implicitly committed to. (...) We argue that these assumptions are too strong and that rational imprecise choice is possible in the absence of these overly strong conditions. (shrink)

This chapter explores the topic of imprecise probabilities as it relates to model validation. IP is a family of formal methods that aim to provide a better representationRepresentation of severe uncertainty than is possible with standard probabilistic methods. Among the methods discussed here are using sets of probabilities to represent uncertainty, and using functions that do not satisfy the additvity property. We discuss the basics of IP, some examples of IP in computer simulation contexts, possible interpretations of the IP framework (...) and some conceptual problems for the approach. We conclude with a discussion of IP in the context of model validation. (shrink)

His attempt to answer that question had been anticipated in the eighteenth century by writers as varied as Swift, Diderot and Hume; and was addressed again, under Burke's influence, in the nineteenth century by some who are often regarded as exemplars of liberalism, such as Tocqueville and Lord Acton, or as enemies to it, such as John Henry Newman."--Jacket.

Does strolling through an art museum, admiring the old masters, improve us morally and spiritually? Would government subsidies of "high art" (such as big-city opera houses) be better spent on local community art projects? In What Good are the Arts? John Carey--one of Britain's most respected literary critics--offers a delightfully skeptical look at the nature of art. In particular, he cuts through the cant surrounding the fine arts, debunking claims that the arts make us better people or that judgements (...) about art are anything more than personal opinion. Indeed, Carey argues that there are no absolute values in the arts and that we cannot call other people's aesthetic choices "mistaken" or "incorrect," however much we dislike them. Along the way, Carey reveals the flaws in the aesthetic theories of everyone from Emanuel Kant to Arthur C. Danto, and he skewers the claims of "high-art advocates" such as Jeannette Winterson. But Carey does argue strongly for the value of art as an activity and for the superiority of one art in particular: literature. Literature, he contends, is the only art capable of reasoning, and the only art that can criticize. Language is the medium that we use to convey ideas, and the usual ingredients of other arts--objects, noises, light effects--cannot replicate this function. Literature has the ability to inspire the mind and the heart towards practical ends far better than any work of conceptual art. Here then is a lively and stimulating invitation to debate the value of art, a provocative book that will pique the interest of anyone who loves painting, music, or literature. (shrink)

This article explores the ethical challenges of providing Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in a paediatric setting. More specifically, we focus on the theoretical questions that came to light when we were asked to develop a policy for responding to MAID requests at our tertiary paediatric institution. We illuminate a central point of conceptual confusion about the nature of MAID that emerges at the level of practice, and explore the various entailments for clinicians and patients that would flow from different (...) understandings. Finally, we consider the ethical challenges of building policy on what is still an extremely controversial social practice. While MAID is currently available to capable patients in Canada who are 18 years or older—a small but important subsection of the population our hospital serves—we write our policy with an eye to the near future when capable young people may gain access to MAID. We propose that an opportunity exists for MAID-providing institutions to reduce social stigma surrounding this practice, but not without potentially serious consequences for practitioners and institutions themselves. Thus, this paper is intended as a road map through the still-emerging legal and ethical landscape of paediatric MAID. We offer a view of the roads taken and considered along the way, and our justifications for travelling the paths we chose. By providing a record of our in-progress thinking, we hope to stimulate wider discussion about the issues and questions encountered in this work. (shrink)

It is well known that the convex hull of the classical truth value functions contains all and only the probability functions. Work by Paris and Williams has shown that this also holds for various kinds of nonclassical logics too. This note summarises the formal details of this topic and extends the results slightly.

Imprecise probabilism—which holds that rational belief/credence is permissibly represented by a set of probability functions—apparently suffers from a problem known as dilation. We explore whether this problem can be avoided or mitigated by one of the following strategies: (a) modifying the rule by which the credal state is updated, (b) restricting the domain of reasonable credal states to those that preclude dilation.

We introduce ‘model migration’ as a species of cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer whereby the representational function of a model is radically changed to allow application to a new disciplinary context. Controversies and confusions that often derive from this phenomenon will be illustrated in the context of econophysics and phylogeographic linguistics. Migration can be usefully contrasted with concept of ‘imperialism’, that has been influentially discussed in the context of geographical economics. In particular, imperialism, unlike migration, relies upon extension of the original model (...) via an expansion of the domain of phenomena it is taken to adequately described. The success of imperialism thus requires expansion of the justificatory sanctioning of the original idealising assumptions to a new disciplinary context. Contrastingly, successful migration involves the radical representational re-interpretation of the original model, rather than its extension. Migration thus requires ‘re-sanctioning’ of new ‘counterpart idealisations’ to allow application to an entirely different class of phenomena. Whereas legitimate scientific imperialism should be based on the pursuit of some form of ontological unification, no such requirement is need to legitimate the practice of model migration. The distinction between migration and imperialism will thus be shown to have significant normative as well as descriptive value. (shrink)

There is currently much discussion about how decision making should proceed when an agent's degrees of belief are imprecise; represented by a set of probability functions. I show that decision rules recently discussed by Sarah Moss, Susanna Rinard and Rohan Sud all suffer from the same defect: they all struggle to rationalize diachronic ambiguity aversion. Since ambiguity aversion is among the motivations for imprecise credence, this suggests that the search for an adequate imprecise decision rule is not yet over.

ABSTRACT In a recent article, Samir Okasha presented an argument that suggests that there is no rational way to choose among scientific theories. This would seriously undermine the view that science is a rational enterprise. In this article, I show how a suitably nuanced view of what scientific rationality requires allows us to sidestep this argument. In doing so, I present a new argument in favour of voluntarism of the type favoured by van Fraassen. I then show how such a (...) view of scientific rationality gives a precise interpretation of what Thomas Kuhn thought. _1_ Introduction _2_ Okasha’s Argument _3_ Rationality Can Be Silent _4_ Arrow Undermined _5_ The Informational-Basis Escape _6_ Theory Choice at the Level of the Individual Scientist _7_ Kuhn Vindicated _8_ Trade-offs and Partial Commensurability _9_ Conclusion. (shrink)

Econophysics is a new and exciting cross-disciplinary research field that applies models and modelling techniques from statistical physics to economic systems. It is not, however, without its critics: prominent figures in more mainstream economic theory have criticized some elements of the methodology of econophysics. One of the main lines of criticism concerns the nature of the modelling assumptions and idealizations involved, and a particular target are ‘kinetic exchange’ approaches used to model the emergence of inequality within the distribution of individual (...) monetary income. This article will consider such models in detail, and assess the warrant of the criticisms drawing upon the philosophical literature on modelling and idealization. Our aim is to provide the first steps towards informed mediation of this important and interesting interdisciplinary debate, and our hope is to offer guidance with regard to both the practice of modelling inequality, and the inequality of modelling practice. _1_ Introduction _1.1_ Econophysics and its discontents _1.2_ Against burglar economics _2_ Modelling Inequality _2.1_ Mainstream economic models for income distribution _2.2_ Econophysics models for income distribution _3_ Idealizations in Kinetic Exchange Models _3.1_ Binary interactions _3.2_ Conservation principles _3.3_ Exchange dynamics _ 4 _ Fat Tails and Savings _ 5 _ Evaluation. (shrink)

We review the question of whether objective chances are compatible with determinism. We first outline what we mean by chance and what we mean by determinism. We then look at the alleged incompatibility between those concepts. Finally, we look at some ways that one might attempt to overcome the incompatibility.

Imprecise probabilities are an increasingly popular way of reasoning about rational credence. However they are subject to an apparent failure to display convincing inductive learning. This paper demonstrates that a small modification to the update rule for IP allows us to overcome this problem, albeit at the cost of satisfying only a weaker concept of coherence.

In their summary and critique, Gamble, Gamble, and Pruski mischaracterise both the central arguments and the primary objectives of our original paper. Our paper does not provide an ethical justification for paediatric Medical Assistance in Dying by comparing it with other end of life care options. In fact, it does not offer arguments about the permissibility of MAID for capable young people at all. Instead, our paper focuses on the ethical questions that emerged as we worked to develop a policy (...) for responding to MAID requests at our tertiary paediatric institution. Following the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decriminalisation of MAID, our hospital needed to answer immediate on-the-ground questions such as: ‘What are we going to do if an 18-year-old patient in our care requested MAID today, as is now their legal right? How should we protect their privacy? What is the best way to ensure patients are informed when making these decisions?’ On these important questions, Gamble, Gamble, and Pruskiare silent. (shrink)

Epistemic Modality Epistemic modality is the kind of necessity and possibility that is determined by epistemic constraints. A modal claim is a claim about how things could be or must be given some constraints, such as the rules of logic, moral obligations, or the laws of nature. A modal … Continue reading Epistemic Modality →.

Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies of syntactic priming of the English dative alternation. Study 1 was a cross-sectional study (N = 140) of children aged 3−9 years, in which we found strong evidence of abstract priming and the lexical boost, but (...) little evidence that either effect was moderated by age. We found weak evidence for a prime surprisal effect; however, exploratory analyses revealed a protracted developmental trajectory for verb-structure biases, providing an explanation as for why prime surprisal effects are more elusive in developmental populations. In a longitudinal study (N = 102) of children in tightly controlled age bands at 42, 48, and 54 months, we found priming effects emerged on trials with verb overlap early but did not observe clear evidence of priming on trials without verb overlap until 54 months. There was no evidence of a prime surprisal effect at any time point and none of the effects were moderated by age. The results relating to the emergence of the abstract priming and lexical boost effects are consistent with prediction-based models, while the absence of age-related effects appears to reflect the structure-specific challenges the dative presents to English-acquiring children. Overall, our complex pattern of findings demonstrates the value of developmental data sets in testing psycholinguistic theory. (shrink)

There is consensus that the adult lexicon exhibits lexical competition. In particular, substantial evidence demonstrates that words with more phonologically similar neighbors are recognized less efficiently than words with fewer neighbors. How and when these effects emerge in the child's lexicon is less clear. In the current paper, we build on previous research by testing whether phonological onset density slows lexical access in a large sample of 100 English‐acquiring 30‐month‐olds. The children participated in a visual world looking‐while‐listening task, in which (...) their attention was directed to one of two objects on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. We found moderate evidence of inhibitory effects of onset neighborhood density on lexical access and clear evidence for an interaction between onset neighborhood density and vocabulary, with larger effects of onset neighborhood density for children with larger vocabularies. Results suggest the lexicons of 30‐month‐olds exhibit lexical‐level competition, with competition increasing with vocabulary size. (shrink)