I consider two attempts to combine realism with pluralism about the units of selection: Sober and Wilson’s combination of “model” and “unit” pluralism, and Sterelny and Griffiths’ “local pluralism”. I argue that both of these attempts fail to show that realism and pluralism are compatible. Sober and Wilson’s pluralism turns out, on closer inspection, to be a kind of monism in disguise, while Sterelny and Griffiths’ local pluralism involves a combination of realism and anti-realism about interactors, and the units of (...) selection, that is fundamentally unstable. My conclusion is that one must choose whether to be a realist or a pluralist in this area: one cannot be both. The question of which we should choose is a further question that I do not take a stand on. (shrink)

In ordinary discourse we often attribute beliefs not just to individuals but also to groups. But can groups really have genuine beliefs? This paper considers but ultimately rejects one of the main arguments in support of the claim that groups can be genuine believers – the Argument From Interpretationism – and concludes that we have good reasons to be sceptical about the existence of group beliefs. According to the Argument From Interpretationism, roughly speaking, groups qualify as genuine believers because we (...) can interpret their behaviour in much the same way that we can interpret the behaviour of individuals. While this argument may seem initially attractive, I argue that it is ultimately unsuccessful. In particular, I argue that the argument is unsuccessful even if one is generally sympathetic towards interpretationism. The reason for this, as we will see, is that a number of problems arise when we try to apply the interpretationist strategy – originally formulated with individual subjects in mind – to plural subjects or groups. In showing why the Argument From Interpretationism fails, the paper also brings into focus some more general constraints on the scope and applicability of interpretationism. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to defend the Lockean View—the view that a belief is epistemically justified iff it is highly probable—against a new family of objections. According to these objections, broadly speaking, the Lockean View ought to be abandoned because it is incompatible with, or difficult to square with, our judgments surrounding certain legal cases. I distinguish and explore three different versions of these objections—The Conviction Argument, the Argument from Assertion and Practical Reasoning, and the Comparative Probabilities (...) Argument—but argue that none of them are successful. I also present some very general reasons for being pessimistic about the overall strategy of using legal considerations to evaluate epistemic theories; as we will see, there are good reasons to think that many of the considerations relevant to legal theorizing are ultimately irrelevant to epistemic theorizing. (shrink)

What do corporations look like when they have integrity, and how can we move more companies in that direction? Corporate Integrity offers a timely, comprehensive framework- and practical business lessons - bringing together questions of organizational design, communication practices, working relationships, and leadership styles to answer this question. Marvin T. Brown explores the five key challenges facing modern businesses as they try to respond ethically to cultural, interpersonal, organizational, civic and environmental challenges. He demonstrates that if corporations are to (...) meet the needs of civil society, they must facilitate inclusive communication patterns based on mutual recognition and civic cooperation. Corporate Integrity is essential reading for professionals in organizational ethics, business leaders, and graduate students looking for practical and reflective insights into doing business with integrity and purpose. (shrink)

An approach to phenomenology, by D. Cairns.--Husserl's critique of psychologism: its historic roots and contemporary relevance, by J. Wild.--The ideal of a presuppositionless philosophy, by M. Farber.--On the intentionality of consciousness, by A. Gurwitsch.--The "reality-phenomenon" and reality, by H. Spiegelberg.--The phenomenological concept of "horizon", by H. Kuhn.--Phenomenology and logical empiricism, by F. Kaufmann.--Phenomenology and the history of science, by J. Klein.--Phenomenology and the social sciences, by A. Schuetz.--Art and phenomenology, by F. Kaufmann.--The relation of science to philosophy in the light (...) of Husserl's thought, by L. O. Kattsoff.--Husserl and the social structure of immediacy, by C. Hartshorne.--A materialist approach to Husserl's philosophy, by V. J. McGill.--Outline-sketch of a system of metaphysics, by W. E. Hocking.--Men and the law, by G. Husserl.--The ghost of modality, by H. Weyl.--Supplement: Grundlegende untersuchungen zum phänomenologischen ursprung der räumlichkeit der natur, by E. Husserl. (shrink)

The primary objective of this paper is to introduce a new epistemic paradox that puts pressure on the claim that justification is closed under multi premise deduction. The first part of the paper will consider two well-known paradoxes—the lottery and the preface paradox—and outline two popular strategies for solving the paradoxes without denying closure. The second part will introduce a new, structurally related, paradox that is immune to these closure-preserving solutions. I will call this paradox, The Paradox of the Pill. (...) Seeing that the prominent closure-preserving solutions do not apply to the new paradox, I will argue that it presents a much stronger case against the claim that justification is closed under deduction than its two predecessors. Besides presenting a more robust counterexample to closure, the new paradox also reveals that the strategies that were previously thought to get closure out of trouble are not sufficiently general to achieve this task as they fail to apply to similar closure-threatening paradoxes in the same vicinity. (shrink)

The concept of cultural safety offers a unique approach to nursing practice, based on recognition of the power differentials inherent in any interaction. It is from within the context of nursing in Aoteaoroa/New Zealand (A/NZ) that the concept developed and was subsequently integrated into nursing education. Cultural safety is based within a framework of biculturalism, and is congruent with the tenets of the nation's founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi. Clarification of the concept is offered, together with a review of (...) the historical shift in nursing attitudes that has led to the emergence of ‘cultural safety’ as a viable and valued component of nursing practice.The argument is made that cultural safety has allowed for a more reflective, critical understanding of the actions of nursing to develop. This includes recognition that nurses’ attitudes and values have inevitably been influenced by social and political forces, and as such are in part reflective of those within the wider community. Comparison between the support given by nurses in the early 1900s to the theory of eugenics and the current acceptance of cultural safety is used to highlight this point. An examination of the literature identifies that ideological and conceptual changes have occurred in the approach of A/NZ nurses to issues with cultural implications for practice. A review of background factors relating to Maori health status and the Treaty of Waitangi is presented as a necessary context to the overall discussion.The discussion concludes with an acknowledgement that while the rhetoric of cultural safety is now part of nursing culture in New Zealand, there is no firm evidence to evaluate its impact in practice. Issues identified as impacting on the ability to assess/research a concept, such as cultural safety, are discussed. For cultural safety to become recognised as a credible (and indispensable) tool, it is necessary to further examine the ‘end-point’ or ‘outcomes’ of the process. (shrink)

In this paper I formulate the thesis of the Division of Epistemic Labor as a thesis of epistemic dependence, illustrate several ways in which individual subjects are epistemically dependent on one or more of the members of their community in the process of knowledge acquisition, and draw conclusions about the cognitively distributed nature of some knowledge acquisition.

On most accounts present in the literature, the complex experience of shame has the injury to self-esteem as its main component. A major objection to this idea is that it fails to differentiate between shame and disappointment in oneself. I argue that previous attempts to respond to the objection are unsatisfactory. I argue further that the distinction should refer to the different ways the subject’s self-esteem is formed. A necessary requirement for shame is that the standards and values by which (...) the subject judges himself are borrowed from a canon of values the subject accepts as a given. The proper focus of shame is the fact of conformity to that canon. Those agents who have a different conception of self-esteem and who freely set and alter their own values are prone to self-disappointment, but not to shame. (shrink)

A comparative method of studying the biological bases of personality compares human trait dimensions with likely animal models in terms of genetic determination and common biological correlates. The approach is applied to the trait of sensation seeking, which is defined on the human level by a questionnaire, reports of experience, and observations of behavior, and on the animal level by general activity, behavior in novel situations, and certain types of naturalistic behavior in animal colonies. Moderately high genetic determination has been (...) found for human sensation seeking, and marked strain differences in rodents have been found in open-field behavior that may be related to basic differences in brain neurochemistry. Agonistic and sociable behaviors in both animals and humans and the trait measure of sensation seeking in humans have been related to certain common biological correlates such as gonadal hormones, monoamine oxidase (MAO), and augmenting of the cortical evoked potential.The monoamine systems in the rodent brain are involved in general activity, exploratory behavior, emotionality, socialization, dominance, sexual and consummately behaviors, and intracranial self-stimulation. Preliminary studies have related norepinephrine and enzymes involved in its production and degradation to human sensation seeking. A model is suggested that relates mood, behavioral activity, sociability, and clinical states to activity of the central catecholamine neurotransmitters and to neuroregulators and other transmitters that act in opposite ways on behavior or stabilize activity in the arousal systems. Stimulation and behavioral activity act on the catecholamine systems in a brain–behavior feedback loop. At optimal levels of catecholamine systems activity (CSA) mood is positive and activity and sociability are adaptive. At very low or very high levels of CSA mood is dysphoric, activity is restricted or stereotyped, and the organism is unsocial or aggressively antisocial. Novelty, in the absence of threat, may be rewarding through activation of noradrenergic neurons. (shrink)

Computing Methodologies -- Artificial Intelligence.

Recent years have seen the rise of a new family of non-probabilistic accounts of epistemic justification. According to these views—we may call them Normalcy Views—a belief in P is justified only if, given the evidence, there exists no normal world in which S falsely beliefs that P. This paper aims to raise some trouble for this new approach to justification by arguing that Normalcy Views, while initially attractive, give rise to problematic accounts of epistemic defeat. As we will see, on (...) Normalcy Views seemingly insignificant pieces of evidence turn out to have considerable defeating powers. This problem—I will call it the Easy-Defeat Problem—gives rise to a two-pronged challenge. First, it shows that the Normalcy View has counterintuitive implications and, second, it opens the door to an uncomfortable skeptical threat. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a novel pluralist theory of epistemic justification that brings together two competing views in the literature—probabilistic and non-probabilistic accounts of justification. The first part of the paper motivates the new theory by arguing that neither probabilistic nor non-probabilistic accounts alone are wholly satisfactory. The second part puts forward what I call the Functional Theory of Justification. The key merit of the new theory is that it combines the most attractive features of both probabilistic and non-probabilistic accounts (...) of justification while avoiding their most serious shortcomings. The paper also provides a blueprint for future pluralist projects in epistemology. (shrink)

Since van Fraassen first put forward the suggestive idea that many philosophical positions should be construed as ‘stances’ rather than factual beliefs, there have been various attempts to spell out precisely what a philosophical stance might be, and on what basis one should be adopted. In this paper I defend a particular account of stances, the view that they are pragmatically justified perspectives or ways of seeing the world, and compare it to some other accounts that have been offered. In (...) Sect. 2 I consider van Fraassen’s argument for construing empiricism as a stance, and look at some responses to it. In Sect. 3 I outline my conception of stances as perspectives or ways of seeing, and explain how stances so understood may be justified. I illustrate this conception by way of a discussion of the model pluralist position with respect to the units of selection debate in biology, and suggest that on the model pluralist view different perspectives on the units of selection, such as the gene’s eye view, are in fact van Fraassian stances. In Sect. 4 I discuss the view put forward by Teller and Chakravartty among others that stances should be understood as epistemic policies, and argue that it is consistent with the conception of stances as perspectives. In the final section I criticise Rowbottom’s attempt to assimilate stances to Kuhnian paradigms. I argue that he has overlooked some important disanalogies between stances and paradigms, so that the comparison obscures more than it reveals. (shrink)

This volume brings together a collection of essays on the history and philosophy of probability and statistics by one of the eminent scholars in these subjects. Written over the last fifteen years, they fall into three broad categories. The first deals with the use of symmetry arguments in inductive probability, in particular, their use in deriving rules of succession. The second group deals with four outstanding individuals who made lasting contributions to probability and statistics in very different ways: Frank Ramsey, (...) R. A. Fisher, Alan Turing, and Abraham de Moivre. The last group of essays deals with the problem of 'predicting the unpredictable' - making predictions when the range of possible outcomes is unknown in advance. The essays weave together the history and philosophy of these subjects and document the fascination that they have exercised for more than three centuries. (shrink)

_The Philosophy of Action: An Anthology_ is an authoritative collection of key work by top scholars, arranged thematically and accompanied by expert introductions written by the editors. This unique collection brings together a selection of the most influential essays from the 1960s to the present day. An invaluable collection that brings together a selection of the most important classic and contemporary articles in philosophy of action, from the 1960’s to the present day No other broad-ranging and detailed coverage of this (...) kind currently exists in the field Each themed section opens with a synoptic introduction and includes a comprehensive further reading list to guide students Includes sections on action and agency, willing and trying, intention and intentional action, acting for a reason, the explanation of action, and free agency and responsibility Written and organised in a style that allows it to be used as a primary teaching resource in its own right. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines accounts of the moral basis of compensatory duties that explain such duties as the continuation, in some way, of the pre-wrong normative situation. I identify, contrast, and assess three versions of this view—duty continuity, right continuity, and reasons continuity. I argue that each version is defensible, once properly articulated. The article responds to a range of objections to these views that have not received much critical attention by their proponents.

We propose an "explanation scheme" for why the Gibbs phase average technique in classical equilibrium statistical mechanics works. Our account emphasizes the importance of the Khinchin-Lanford dispersion theorems. We suggest that ergodicity does play a role, but not the one usually assigned to it.

I explore Mandeville’s account of moral judgement and its implications for the understanding of hypocrisy. According to Mandeville, we have a psychological need to like ourselves sufficiently, so as to carry on with our lives. Because our self-liking necessarily depends on the opinions others form of us, we are extraordinarily sensitive to praise and condemnation. The practice of moral judgement exploits this sensitivity. Hypocrisy is an intrinsic element of this practice.

What can nurse scientists learn from Rorty in the development of a philosophical foundation? Indeed, Rorty in his 1989 text entitled Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity tantalizes the reader with debates of reason 'against' philosophizing. Forget truth seeking; move on to what matters. Rorty would rather the 'high brow' thinking go to those that do the work in order to make the effort useful. Nursing as an applied science, has something real that is worth looking at, and that nurse researchers need (...) to think about. And as a profession built upon relationships, we should be thinking of the exchanges we have with those around us, of the contrasts in vocabularies used and of the contingencies involved, letting this launch us into our imaginings and areas of enquiry. The business of nurse researchers is to study what nurses do – how we care; Rorty would have us care. But, not to dismiss the reflective thinker as Rorty advocates for the self-doubting ironist to continue to seek the final vocabulary, the ideal of what 'this' means, accepting this as the best to be offered at the time. As a science struggling to find foundation, we need only to look at what we do and value – as antifoundational as Rorty portrays himself, Rorty 'ironically' may have revealed a foundation for nursing science that is consistent with its path. (shrink)

When a handful of people thrive while whole industries implode and millions suffer, it is clear that something is wrong with our economy. The wealth of the few is disconnected from the misery of the many. In Civilizing the Economy, Marvin Brown traces the origin of this economics of dissociation to early capitalism, showing how this is illustrated in Adam Smith's denial of the central role of slavery in wealth creation. In place of the Smithian economics of property, Brown (...) proposes that we turn to the original meaning of economics as household management. He presents a new framework for the global economy that reframes its purpose as the making of provisions instead of the accumulation of property. This bold new vision establishes the civic sphere as the platform for organizing an inclusive economy and as a way to move toward a more just and sustainable world. (shrink)

It seems to me that the ingredients of most theories both in Artificial Intelligence and in Psychology have been on the whole too minute, local, and unstructured to account–either practically or phenomenologically–for the effectiveness of common-sense thought. The "chunks" of reasoning, language, memory, and "perception" ought to be larger and more structured; their factual and procedural contents must be more intimately connected in order to explain the apparent power and speed of mental activities.

The aim of this paper is to defend a novel characterization of epistemic luck. Helping myself to the notions of epistemic entitlement and adequate explanation, I propose that a true belief suffers from epistemic luck iff an adequate explanation of the fact that the belief acquired is true must appeal to propositions to which the subject herself is not epistemically entitled. The burden of the argument is to show that there is a plausible construal of the notions of epistemic entitlement (...) and adequate explanation on which the resulting characterization of epistemic luck, though admittedly programmatic, has several important virtues. It avoids difficulties which plague modal accounts of epistemic luck; it can explain the conflicting temptations one can feel in certain alleged cases of epistemic luck; it offers a novel account of the value of knowledge, without committing itself to any particular analysis of knowledge; and it illuminates the significance for epistemology of the phenomenon of epistemic luck itself. (shrink)

This paper has the aim of making Johannes von Kries’s masterpiece, Die Principien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung of 1886, a little more accessible to the modern reader in three modest ways: first, it discusses the historical background to the book ; next, it summarizes the basic elements of von Kries’s approach ; and finally, it examines the so-called “principle of cogent reason” with which von Kries’s name is often identified in the English literature.

L’espace parents dans la séparation ( eps ) de Mons (Belgique) est un dispositif d’accueil des parents en situation de séparation hautement conflictuelle. Le travail s’élabore autour de la réflexion commune avec les parents sur la qualité de la relation coparentale dans l’intérêt des enfants. Cet article vise à expliciter les processus et les outils utilisés dans le cadre de l’ eps. Après avoir développé les ancrages épistémologiques et le dispositif en lui-même, les auteurs proposent de montrer, au travers d’une (...) illustration clinique, les processus en place dans la construction de « l’équipe parentale ». (shrink)

In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism. We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual practice” and the “moral intuition practice”, which we take to raise some difficult (...) normative and meta‐normative questions for theorists of all stripes. (shrink)

Illustrates how using ethics in decision making can improve communication, resolve disagreements, and set just standards for worker-management relations. Presents strategies for how organizations can use ethics to uncover values and beliefs, and determine whether they are acting upon just and moral decisions.

In the context of the mandated phaseout of methyl bromide, California’s strawberry industry has increased its use of chloropicrin, another soil fumigant that has long been on the market. However, due to its 2010 designation as a toxic air contaminant, the US Environmental Protection Agency and California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation have developed enhanced application protocols to mitigate exposures of the chemical to bystanders, nearby residents, and farmworkers. The central feature of these mitigation technologies are enhanced buffer zones between treated (...) fields and nearby buildings. Not only do buffer zones inherently privilege neighbors over farmworkers, but the determinations of the size of these buffer zones are also based on acceptable threshold levels and probabilities that allow significant exposures to those they are designed to protect. Moreover, these protocols require human monitors to detect sensory irritation. While the science and technology studies literature is highly useful for understanding the inextricability of science and politics in developing protective measures and is attentive to what counts as data in setting acceptable thresholds, it tends to overlook that social sorting is intrinsic to such regulation. We thus turn to Foucault’s biopolitics to make sense of regulations that are designed to protect but inherently allow some to become ill. Doing so illuminates how determinations of the bright line are at once technical–political as well as implicit decisions about whose bodies count. (shrink)

This paper introduces an innovative curricular approach—the Health Humanities Portrait Approach —and its pedagogical tool—the Health Humanities Portrait. Both enable health professions learners to examine pressing social issues that shape, and are shaped by, experiences of health and illness. The Portrait Approach is grounded in a set of “critical portraiture” principles that foster humanities-driven analytical skills. The HHP’s architecture is distinctively framed around a pressing social theme and utilizes a first-person narrative and scholarship to explore how the dimensions of the (...) personal and the structural are mutually constituted. We argue that when creator-educators adopt the Portrait Approach and its critical portraiture principles to design and teach the HHP, they enable learners to become proficient in synthesizing and analyzing—with both depth and breadth—the human and social dimensions of patients’ lives. This inventive curricular intervention provides a needed contribution to health professions education in that it utilizes health humanities methodologies to elucidate the multiple aspects of health, illness, disability, and healthcare. (shrink)

I consider the broad perspectives in biology known as ‘functionalism’ and ‘structuralism’, as well as a modern version of functionalism, ‘adaptationism’. I do not take a position on which of these perspectives is preferable; my concern is with the prior question, how should they be understood? Adapting van Fraassen’s argument for treating materialism as a stance, rather than a factual belief with propositional content, in the first part of the paper I offer an argument for construing functionalism and structuralism as (...) stances also. The argument draws especially on Gould’s insights concerning functionalism and structuralism, in particular their apparent historical continuity from the pre-Darwinian period through to today. In the second part of the paper I consider Godfrey-Smith’s distinction between empirical and explanatory adaptationism, and suggest that while the former is an empirical scientific hypothesis, the latter is closely related to the functionalist stance. (shrink)

This study was undertaken to investigate whether work variables identified in theory and research as being related to employee experiences/behaviours add to the understanding and explain employees' experiences of workplace harassment. The extent to which social cognitive theory (SCT), specifically moral disengagement, explains the processes by which work characteristics are related to harassment was also examined. The purpose of the study was to identify the presence of relationships among work characteristics, satisfaction, moral disengagement and workplace harassment. According to the results, (...) employees with negative opinions of their work tended to experience negative affect and to believe that it is acceptable to harm others. The results of this study provide evidence of (1) relationships between harassment and several workplace characteristics and (2) the applicability of SCT to the explanation of how work characteristics relate to harassment. (shrink)

The most important problem is philosophical deontic logic is to determine the logical form of expressions of conditional obligation. The dissertation shows first that this problem is closely related to David Lewis's well-known "problem about permission"--a problem concerning the characterization of changes in normative systems. The dissertation contains a solution to the problem about permission, as well as an argument that expressions of conditional obligation cannot be represented satisfactorily by means of some combination of monadic deontic operators and a counterfactual (...) conditional . ;Lewis formulates the problem about permission in terms of a language game for imperative and permission sentences. In order to solve the problem it is necessary first to point out the shortcoming in Lewis's game that it cannot be used satisfactorily to provide semantics for "contrary to duty" imperatives. Having revised the game it is possible to define the concept of relative defeasibility between imperatives. It is in terms of this concept that a solution to the problem about permission is formulated. ;The "revised game" is used as well to discuss problems concerning reasoning from sets of rules, principles, and facts to "all things considered" conclusions. It is argued that two distinct senses or uses of 'ought' must be distinguished in order to represent such reasoning satisfactorily. The role of the notion ceteris paribus is discussed. The notion is given a precise definition in terms of the possible worlds semantics of the "revised game" and it is argued that the notion is not as significant in normative reasoning as commonly is supposed. An alternative notion is defined and defended. (shrink)