One of the major adaptations during the evolution of Homo sapiens was an increase in brain size. Here we present evidence that a significant and substantial proportion of variation in brain size may be related to changes in temperature. Based on a sample of 109 fossilized hominid skulls, we found that cranial capacities were highly correlated with paleoclimatic changes in temperature, as indexed by oxygen isotope data and sea-surface temperature. Indeed, as much as 52% of the variance in the cranial (...) capacity of these skulls could be accounted for by temperature variation at 100 ka intervals. As an index of more short-term seasonal fluctuations in temperature, we examined the latitude of the sites from which the crania originated. More than 22% of the variance in cranial capacity of these skulls could be accounted for by variation in equatorial distance. (shrink)

Dr Bawa-Garba, a senior paediatric trainee who had been involved in the care of a child who died shortly after admission to hospital, was convicted of gross negligence manslaughter and subsequently erased from the medical register. We argue that criminalisation of doctors in this way is fraught with ethical tensions at levels of individual blameworthiness, systemic failures, professionalism, patient safety and at the interface of the regulator and doctor. The current response to alleged manslaughter during clinical care is not fit (...) for purpose because of its narrow focus on criminalisation and punishment of individual doctors. The justice system fails to take into account systemic issues in a sufficiently proper and informed way particularly in respect of human factors involved in decision-making. It is easier to convict individual doctors for gross negligence manslaughter than it is to effect legal accountability upon organisations. If educational reflections are used to apportion blame, then this could impact detrimentally on honesty and the duty of candour, with negative implications for patient safety. Regulatory processes should not be deployed without consideration of context. There is an urgent need for a fresh and open evaluation of professional and societal expectations from the regulator that should include positive action as well as those that are proportionately punitive. Justice and patient safety would be served better by more sophisticated contextualisation through an approach that balances accountability in healthcare with failures that can occur within complex systems, and by working to a radical shift towards a just culture. (shrink)

The book examines ethics and employment issues in contemporary Human Resource Management (HRM). Written by an international team of academics from universities in the UK, the US, Australia and New Zealand, it examines the problems and opportunities facing employers and employees. The book subdivides into three sections: Part I assesses the context of HRM; Part II analyses contemporary debates, continuity and change in HRM, and Part III proposes likely developments for the future seeking to identify a more proactive HRM approach (...) towards ethical issues arising in employment. Distinctive features include: -/- -Comprehensive analysis of continuity and change in employment and HRM -In-depth assessment of the ethical contribution and potential of HRM -Timely evaluation of the ethical achievements to-date of HRM in: individualized employment relations, HRM partnerships, HRM and employee performance, and strategic HRM -Detailed recommendations for HR managers and general managers encouraging more ethically aware practice -Guidance on ethical approaches to leadership, knowledge management and collective employment relations -Analysis of alternative futures for HRM as a profession and advice on how to create more rigorous and independent professional practice -A vision of a more innovative, cooperative and ethically sensitive set of HRM practices -Clear proposals for HRM on how to attain more ethical conduct. (shrink)

Increased technological and pharmacological interventions in patient care when patient outcomes are uncertain have been linked to the escalation in moral and ethical dilemmas experienced by health care providers in acute care settings. Health care research has shown that facilities that are able to attract and retain nursing staff in a competitive environment and provide high quality care have the capacity for nurses to process and resolve moral and ethical dilemmas. This article reports on the findings of a systematic review (...) of the empirical literature (1980 — February 2007) on the effects of unresolved moral distress and poor ethical climate on nurse turnover. Articles were sought to answer the review question: Does unresolved moral distress and a poor organizational ethical climate increase nurse turnover? Nine articles met the criteria of the review process. Although the prevailing sentiment was that poor ethical climate and moral distress caused staff turnover, definitive answers to the review question remain elusive because there are limited data that confidently support this statement. (shrink)

Fallibilists claim that one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Jessica Brown offers a compelling defence of this view against infallibilists, who claim that it is contradictory to claim to know and yet to admit the possibility of error.

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s :741–742, 1960; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such a debate has primarily focused on principles—the (...) ‘what’ of AI ethics —rather than on practices, the ‘how.’ Awareness of the potential issues is increasing at a fast rate, but the AI community’s ability to take action to mitigate the associated risks is still at its infancy. Our intention in presenting this research is to contribute to closing the gap between principles and practices by constructing a typology that may help practically-minded developers apply ethics at each stage of the Machine Learning development pipeline, and to signal to researchers where further work is needed. The focus is exclusively on Machine Learning, but it is hoped that the results of this research may be easily applicable to other branches of AI. The article outlines the research method for creating this typology, the initial findings, and provides a summary of future research needs. (shrink)

This volume is about the notion of 'defeat' in philosophy. The idea is that someone who has some knowledge, or a justified belief, can lose this knowledge or justified belief if they acquire a 'defeater' - evidence that undermines it. The contributors examine the role of defeat not just in epistemology but in practical reasoning and ethics.

This book argues that the major traditions in the philosophy of language have mistakenly focused on highly idealized linguistic contexts. Instead, it presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language that contends that the essential function of language is to direct attention for the purpose of achieving diverse social and political goals. Philosophers of language have focused primarily on highly idealized linguistic contexts in which cooperative agents are working toward the shared goal of gaining information about the world. This approach abstracts (...) away from important issues like power, ideology, social position, and diversity of goals which are crucial to explaining linguistic phenomena both at the semantic and pragmatic levels. This book begins by examining the work of some of the pioneers of this tradition--primarily David Lewis, Paul Grice, and Robert Stalnaker. The author shows that various problems have their source in idealizations made at the foundational level of linguistic theory and proposes to rebuild from the ground-up. She presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language which retains the major insights of traditional frameworks while rejecting the social idealizations that guide them. Then, she explores the social and political applications of her account to issues such as dog whistling, propaganda, slurs and racist speech, silencing, and manipulation. Non-Ideal Foundations of Language will appeal to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of language who are interested in the social and political applications of language, as well as traditional metasemantic theory. (shrink)

According to the naïve, pre-theoretic conception, lying seems to be characterized by the intent to deceive. However, certain kinds of bald-faced lies appear to be counterexamples to this view, and many philosophers have abandoned it as a result. I argue that this criticism of the naïve view is misplaced; bald-faced lies are not genuine instances of lying because they are not genuine instances of assertion. I present an additional consideration in favor of the naïve view, which is that abandoning it (...) comes at an extremely high price; alternative accounts which eschew the intent-to-deceive condition on lying have difficulty distinguishing lies from non-literal speech. (shrink)

A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena.The Restless Clock examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals—dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us (...) through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency.The Restless Clock reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Assertion is a fundamental feature of language. This volume will be the place to look for anyone interested in current work on the topic.

The term "fake news" ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more precisely. A common theme in this nascent philosophical (...) discussion is that contemporary fake news is not a new kind of phenomenon, but just the latest iteration of a broader kind of phenomenon that has played out in different ways across the history of human information-dissemination technologies. While we agree with this, we argue that newer sorts of fake news reveal substantial flaws in earlier understandings of this notion. In particular, we argue that no deceptive intentions are necessary for fake news to arise; rather, fake news arises when stories which were not produced via standard journalistic practice are treated as though they had been. Importantly, this revisionary understanding of fake news allows us to accommodate and understand the way that fake news is plausibly generated and spread in a contemporary setting, as much by non-human actors as by ordinary human beings. (shrink)

A persuasive monograph that answers the keyepistemological arguments against anti-individualism in thephilosophy of mind.

A number of examples of studies from the field ‘The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice’ (PMP) are given. To characterise this new field, three different strands are identified: an agent-based, a historical, and an epistemological PMP. These differ in how they understand ‘practice’ and which assumptions lie at the core of their investigations. In the last part a general framework, capturing some overall structure of the field, is proposed.

Jessica Flanigan defends patients' rights of self-medication on the grounds that same moral reasons against medical paternalism in clinical contexts are also reasons against paternalistic pharmaceutical policies, including prohibitive approval processes and prescription requirements.

The purpose of this article was twofold: "firstly" to draw attention to the emerging conceptual turn' in contemporary philosophy; and, "secondly", to serve as a prolegomenon to the author's magnum opus, "Philosophy as Higher Enlightenment", to be published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc. in 1994. The main thesis of the article is: That philosophical inquiry must lead to higher enlightenment (about the big questions)--or it leads to nothing.

The construct of wellbeing has been criticised as a neoliberal construction of western individualism that ignores wider systemic issues such as inequality and anthropogenic climate change. Accordingly, there have been increasing calls for a broader conceptualisation of wellbeing. Here we impose an interpretative framework on previously published literature and theory, and present a theoretical framework that brings into focus the multifaceted determinants of wellbeing and their interactions across multiple domains and levels of scale. We define wellbeing as positive psychological experience, (...) promoted by connections to self, community and environment, supported by healthy vagal function, all of which are impacted by socio-contextual factors that lie beyond the control of the individual. By emphasising the factors within and beyond the control of the individual and highlighting how vagal function both affects and are impacted by key domains, the biopsychosocial underpinnings of wellbeing are explicitly linked to a broader context that is consistent with, yet complementary to, multi-levelled ecological systems theory. Reflecting on the reciprocal relationships between multiple domains, levels of scale and related social contextual factors known to impact on wellbeing, our GENIAL framework may provide a foundation for a transdisciplinary science of wellbeing that has the potential to promote the wellbeing of individuals while also playing a key role in tackling major societal challenges. (shrink)

An essentialist theory of modality claims that the source of possibility and necessity lies in essence, where essence is then not to be defined in terms of necessity. Hence such theories owe us an account of why it is that the essences of things give rise to necessities in the way required. A new approach to understanding essence in terms of the notion of generalized identity promises to answer this challenge by appeal to the necessity of identity. I explore the (...) prospects for this approach, and argue that it fails. If one favours an account of essence in terms of generalized identity, then one will not, I argue, be able to satisfactorily defend an essentialist theory of modality against the challenge; if one wishes to defend an essentialist theory of modality, and thereby to give an explanation of how necessity arises from essence, one should not understand essence in terms of generalized identity. (shrink)

Vaccine refusal harms and risks harming innocent bystanders. People are not entitled to harm innocents or to impose deadly risks on others, so in these cases there is nothing to be said for the right to refuse vaccination. Compulsory vaccination is therefore justified because non-vaccination can rightly be prohibited, just as other kinds of harmful and risky conduct are rightly prohibited. I develop an analogy to random gunfire to illustrate this point. Vaccine refusal, I argue, is morally similar to firing (...) a weapon into the air and endangering innocent bystanders. By re-framing vaccine refusal as harmful and reckless conduct my aim is to shift the focus of the vaccine debate from non-vaccinators’ religious and refusal rights to everyone else’s rights against being infected with contagious illnesses. Religious freedom and rights of informed consent do not entitle non-vaccinators to harm innocent bystanders, and so coercive vaccination requirements are permissible for the sake of the potential victims of the anti-vaccine movement. (shrink)

Contextualists such as Cohen and DeRose claim that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions vary contextually, in particular that the strength of epistemic position required for one to be truly ascribed knowledge depends on features of the attributor's context. Contextualists support their view by appeal to our intuitions about when it's correct (or incorrect) to ascribe knowledge. Someone might argue that some of these intuitions merely reflect when it is conversationally appropriate to ascribe knowledge, not when knowledge is truly ascribed, (...) and so try to accommodate these intuitions even on an invariantist view. DeRose (Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, 1998; Philosophical Review, 2002) argues that any such 'warranted assertibility manoeuvre', or 'WAM', against contextualism is unlikely to succeed. Here, I argue that his objections to a WAM against contextualism are not persuasive and offer a pragmatic account of the data about ascriptions of knowledge. (shrink)

Previous meta-analyses support a female advantage in decoding non-verbal emotion (Hall, 1978, 1984), yet the mechanisms underlying this advantage are not understood. The present study examined whether the female advantage is related to greater female attention to the eyes. Eye-tracking techniques were used to measure attention to the eyes in 19 males and 20 females during a facial expression recognition task. Women were faster and more accurate in their expression recognition compared with men, and women looked more at the eyes (...) than men. Positive relationships were observed between dwell time and number of fixations to the eyes and both accuracy of facial expression recognition and speed of facial expression recognition. These results support the hypothesis that the female advantage in facial expression recognition is related to greater female attention to the eyes. (shrink)

Shadow of the Other is a discussion of how the individual has two sorts of relationships with an "other"--other individuals. The first regards the other as a s work apart is her brilliant utilization of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing tensions: masculinity and femininity, subjectivity and objectivity, passivity and activity, love and aggression, fantasy and reality, modernism and postmodernism, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective. Benjamin s work apart is her brilliant utilization (...) of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing other as a mental repository fo unwanted characteristics cast from the self. Jessica benjamin shows the implications of this dual relationship for male/female hierarchy and offers a possibility for balancing the two. This book continues the author's well-known explorations of the themes of intersubjectivity and gender, taking up issues at the forefront of contemporary debates in feminist theory and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Inadequate diet is the leading risk factor for morbidity and mortality worldwide. However, approaches to identifying inadequate diets in clinical practice remain inconsistent, and dietary interventions frequently focus on facilitating ‘healthy choices’, with limited emphasis on structural constraints. We examine the ethical implications of introducing a routine question in the medical history about ability to access food. Not collecting data on food security means that clinicians are unable to identify people who may benefit from support on an individual level, unable (...) to consider relevant dietary risk factors for disease and disease progression and unable to monitor population trends and inequalities in dietary access in order to design effective policy interventions. We argue that the current lack of routine screening for food insecurity is inconsistent with our approach to other health behaviours, as well as with doctors’ frequent informal role as gatekeepers to the food aid system, and recent calls for governmental action on food insecurity and health inequalities from individual clinicians and professional bodies. Potential ethical barriers to asking patients about food security are addressed, including concerns about stigma, limiting autonomy, fair resource allocation, unclear professional remits and clinicians’ ability to offer effective interventions. We suggest that there is an ethical imperative for doctors to ask patients about their ability to access healthy food. Gathering this data provides a valuable first step in re-framing the social determinants of health as modifiable risks, rather than inevitable inequities. No data are available. (shrink)

Mirroring the set of questions explored in the special report in which this essay appears and through a critical Cree standpoint, this essay poses three provocations intended to upend habits of thought relative to notions of goodness, biocitizenship, and the democratization of scientific pursuit. Styled as foreplay, the essay warms the reader up to the desirable possibility of being a bad biocitizen. I briefly establish the colonial conditions under which the fields of genomic science, biomedical research, and bioethics have been (...) made possible. I then offer Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society as an alternative project aimed at disturbing the territorial, political, and morally inflected claims of nation‐states and their citizens, research institutions and their researchers, and bioeconomies and their consumers to continue to possess Indigenous territories and to study Indigenous bodies while controlling the bioethical principles, protocols, and policies for doing so. The work of Indigenous STS seeks to break down the bounded knowledges of disciplinary reason and map the networked interrelations of problems inhibiting and solutions strengthening the empowerment of Indigenous peoplehoods. (shrink)

Perception of temporal patterns is fundamental to normal hearing, speech, motor control, and music. Certain types of pattern understanding are unique to humans, such as musical rhythm. Although human responses to musical rhythm are universal, there is much we do not understand about how rhythm is processed in the brain. Here, I consider findings from research into basic timing mechanisms and models through to the neuroscience of rhythm and meter. A network of neural areas, including motor regions, is regularly implicated (...) in basic timing as well as processing of musical rhythm. However, fractionating the specific roles of individual areas in this network has remained a challenge. Distinctions in activity patterns appear between "automatic" and "cognitively controlled" timing processes, but the perception of musical rhythm requires features of both automatic and controlled processes. In addition, many experimental manipulations rely on participants directing their attention toward or away from certain stimulus features, and measuring corresponding differences in neural activity. Many temporal features, however, are implicitly processed whether attended to or not, making it difficult to create controlled baseline conditions for experimental comparisons. The variety of stimuli, paradigms, and definitions can further complicate comparisons across domains or methodologies. Despite these challenges, the high level of interest and multitude of methodological approaches from different cognitive domains (including music, language, and motor learning) have yielded new insights and hold promise for future progress. (shrink)

When subjects violate epistemic standards or norms, we sometimes judge them blameworthy rather than blameless. For instance, we might judge a subject blameworthy for dogmatically continuing to believe a claim even after receiving evidence which undermines it. Indeed, the idea that one may be blameworthy for belief is appealed to throughout the contemporary epistemic literature. In some cases, a subject seems blameworthy for believing as she does even though it seems prima facie implausible that she is morally blameworthy or professionally (...) blameworthy. Such cases raise the question of whether one can be blameworthy for a belief in a specifically epistemic sense rather than in some already recognised sense, such as being morally or professionally blameworthy. A number of authors have recently argued that there is a moral or social sense in which one ought to conform one’s beliefs to the evidence. In this paper, I argue that even while accepting that there are moral and social norms governing belief, there are cases in which a subject is blameworthy for a belief but isn’t plausibly morally or socially blameworthy. If this latter view is correct, then we may need to develop a new account of blame which can be applied to beliefs which are not morally or socially blameworthy. (shrink)

The null morpheme POS -- The null morpheme EVAL -- Implicature : a brief review -- Evaluativity as implicature -- Extensions of the evaluativity implicature.

Most people have a clear sense of what they mean by disability, and have little trouble identifying conditions they consider disabling. Yet providing a clear and consistent definition of disability is far from straightforward. Standardly, disability is understood as the restriction in our abilities to perform tasks, as a result of an impairment of normal physical or cognitive human functioning. However, which inabilities matter? We are all restricted by our bodies, and are all incapable of performing some tasks, but most (...) of these inabilities are not considered disabilities. If, then, we are to avoid the category of disability becoming overly broad—and thus politically and practically useless—we need some way of picking out the specific inabilities that are disabling. I argue that our answer should be informed by an account of the opportunities individuals are entitled to be able to perform as a matter of justice. Thus, to be disabled is to have these opportunities restricted, and not to deviate from the species norm or lack any ability that might improve our well-being. (shrink)

Hypocrites invite moral opprobrium, and charges of hypocrisy are a significant and widespread feature of our moral lives. Yet it remains unclear what hypocrites have in common, or what is distinctively bad about them. We propose that hypocrites are persons who have undermined their claim to moral authority. Since this self-undermining can occur in a number of ways, our account construes hypocrisy as multiply realizable. As we explain, a person’s moral authority refers to a kind of standing that they occupy (...) within a particular moral community. This status is both socially important and normatively precarious. Hence, moral agents are right to be vigilant when it comes to hypocrisy, and are often justified in their outrage when they detect it. We further argue that our view can preserve what is attractive in rival accounts, while avoiding their associated problems. (shrink)

Emanuel Viebahn accounts for the distinction between lying and misleading in terms of what the speaker commits to, rather than in terms of what the speaker says, as on traditional accounts. Although this alternative type of account is well motivated, I argue that Viebahn does not adequately explain the commitment involved in lying. He explains the commitment in lying in terms of a responsibility to justify one's knowledge of a proposition one has communicated, which is in turn elaborated in terms (...) of being able to consistently dismiss a challenge to justify that knowledge. But whether one can consistently dismiss such a challenge, as Viebahn defines this, depends on whether one is responsible for justifying one's knowledge. Without further specification of the nature of this justificatory responsibility, it is difficult to assess whether it is one that liars have but misleaders lack. (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions are a central topic of research in both philosophy and science. In this collection of new essays on knowledge ascriptions, world class philosophers offer novel approaches to this long standing topic.

In response to Habgood-Coote (2019) and a growing number of scholars who argue that academics and journalists should stop talking about fake news and abandon the term, we argue that the reasons which have been offered for eschewing the term 'fake news' are not sufficient to justify such abandonment. Prima facie, then, we take ourselves and others to be justified in continuing to talk about fake news.

The rise of mobile communication applications and technologies presents promising therapeutic and accessibility-related interventions for neurodivergent users. However, top-down approaches in human-computer interaction research often prioritize the needs and goals of allistic and neurotypical researchers and secondary stakeholders in media creation. Furthermore, media technologies are created with a one-size-fits-all approach, with the intent of rehabilitating or curing neurodivergent ways of being. This article imagines neuroqueer technoscience as an extension of crip technoscience that amplifies new styles of relationality, self-expression, and communication (...) practices within the development of information and communication technologies. Using an interdisciplinary framework informed by crip technoscience and human-computer interaction research, the author presents three tenets for mediating neuroqueer subjectivities. (shrink)