During the Nazi era, physicians provided expertise and a veneer of legitimacy enabling crimes against humanity. In a creative educational initiative to address current ethical dilemmas in clinical medicine, we conduct ethics learning missions bringing senior physicians to relevant Nazi era sites in either Germany or Poland. The tours share a core curriculum contextualising history and medical ethics, with variations in emphasis. Tours to Germany provide an understanding of the theoretical origins of the ethical violations and crimes of Nazi physicians. (...) Tours to Poland address the magnitude of the Nazi physician’s atrocities as well as displays of heroism by Jewish and righteous among the nations' physicians. Exemplary as well as shameful physician behaviour is analysed from an ethical perspective. A combination of unique educational methodologies maximises learning and personal growth, enabling participants to examine ethically complex clinical situations with extrapolation to modern-day medical practice. Learning is designed with relevance to contemporary medical ethics dilemmas such as beginning and end-of-life issues, providing tenets from which participants can develop as more ethical and informed physicians. Participant feedback confirms efficacy and worth of these growth-promoting ethics learning tours which should be expanded to other international groups and settings. (shrink)

Traditional definitions of lying require that a speaker believe that what she asserts is false. Sam Fox Krauss seeks to jettison the traditional belief requirement in favour of a necessary condition given in a credence-accuracy framework, on which the liar expects to impose the risk of increased inaccuracy on the hearer. He argues that this necessary condition importantly captures nearby cases as lies which the traditional view neglects. I argue, however, that Krauss's own account suffers from an identical drawback of (...) being unable to explain nearby cases; and even worse, that account fails to distinguish cases of telling lies from cases of telling the truth. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In this article, we review and build on intergenerational and behavioral ethics research to consider how the motive to build a lasting legacy can impact ethical behavior in intergenerational decision making. We discuss how people can utilize their relationships to organizations to craft their legacies. Further, we elucidate how the legacy motive can enhance business ethics, incorporating theory and empirical findings from research on intergenerational decision making, generativity, and terror management theory to develop the legacy construct and to outline the (...) psychological underpinnings of motivations to leave a positive legacy. We discuss the ways in which legacies can provide a link between life-meaning and pro-social motivation, and we consider the ways in which individuals’ social environments can moderate the intensity of the legacy motive and can impact legacy-building behavior by determining the types of legacies that are valued. Finally, we highlight the implications of these ideas for ethical behavior and sustainable decision making in business contexts. (shrink)

This exploration into spirituality and climate change employs the “four paths” of the creation spirituality tradition. The author recognizes those paths in the rich teachings of Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si' and applies them in considering the nobility of the scientist's vocation. Premodern thinkers often resisted any split between science and religion. The author then lays out the basic archetypes for recognizing the sacredness of creation, namely, the Cosmic Christ (Christianity); the Buddha Nature (Buddhism); the Image of God (Judaism); the (...) “Primordial Man” (Hinduism), as well as the premodern universal teaching of “God as Beauty.” He addresses the subject of evil which deserves serious attention in the face of the realities posed by climate change and the resistance to addressing them. In the concluding section, the author speaks of a new Order of the Sacred Earth that was launched in fall 2017 to gather persons of whatever spiritual tradition or none to devote themselves to preserving Mother Earth. (shrink)

A priest, scholar, and popularizer of Western mysticism explores Meister Eckhart's wide influence and radical teachings -- his ecumenical thinking; advocacy for social, economic, and gender justice; teachings about ecology; and championing of artistic creativity. Includes metaphorical meetings between Eckhart and the Dalai Lama, Thomas Merton, and others.

Jurors customarily do their work with very little by way of instruction from the court, other than about the law. This suggests that they enter the jury room with the relevant cognitive and interactional tools at the ready, drawn from everyday life. This paper focuses on a specific conversational device jurors use to do their work: conditional-contrastive inculpations, whereby the defendant’s actions are compared unfavorably to what a normal, innocent person would have done, with the implication that the discrepancy indicates (...) guilt. We examine the logic, variants, sequential precursors, and immediate consequences of this phenomenon in two real-life American criminal juries deliberating the same charges. This study offers a rare glimpse into the operation of real juries, and specifically the way in which they appropriate a practice from ordinary conversation in order to perform the unordinary work demanded of them by the legal system. (shrink)

Dance is an enjoyable, non-therapy-focused activity that may provide a range of benefits for people with Parkinson’s. The internal simulation of movement through observation, imitation, and imagery, is intrinsic to dance and may contribute to functional improvements for people with Parkinson’s. This study explored the feasibility and potential benefits of a dance program designed by a collaborative team of dance artists, researchers, physiotherapists, and people living with Parkinson’s. The program incorporated motor simulation through observation, imitation and imagery of movement, supported (...) by creative themes, expression, and music. A 6-week pilot trial of the program was conducted with 10 people with Parkinson’s. A focus group following the trial (N= 8) provided insights into the use of imagery, observation and imitation within dance, and the link between creativity and functional outcomes, as well as indicating multidimensional benefits of dance as reported in previous studies. Exploratory outcome measures also suggested potential effects on motor simulation, functional dexterity, and quality of life. The present study demonstrates the feasibility of a co-developed dance program for Parkinson’s and indicates how creative elements of dance may support functional outcomes. Future research should examine the role of motor simulation processes in dance for Parkinson’s, including the potential to develop transferable cognitive-motor skills. This study also highlights the value of collaborative partnerships in designing dance for health programs, which may optimise beneficial effects by using creative approaches to incorporate evidence-based elements, with guidance from individuals with lived experience to ensure the relevance to their goals. (shrink)

In Sovereignty’s Promise: The State as Fiduciary, Evan Fox-Decent uses the idea of fiduciary relationships to explain the legitimate exercise of governmental authority. He makes use of the idea of the state as a fiduciary for the people to ground an account of the duty to obey the law, to explain the proper relationships between colonial (or “settler”) societies and aboriginal populations, the role of agency discretion and judicial review in the administrative state, the rule of law, the relationship between (...) law and morality, and the foundations of human rights. While I was not convinced by several of the arguments, the book does have many important virtues. In particular, it provides a clear discussion of the idea of fiduciary relationships and duties that is useful for, and should be largely accessible to, non-lawyers. And, though I do not think that Fox-Decent has established all that he hoped to in the book, he does a good job of showing how fiduciary relationships are relevant to the above issues and worth considering. (shrink)

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...) to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what? (shrink)

Encyclopedia entry covering the growing literature on the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (and its rivals), the Knowledge Norm of Action (and pragmatic encroachment), the Knowledge Norm of Belief, and the Knowledge Norm of Disagreement.

The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from both the phenomenal (...) conception of evidence and the knowledge-first view of evidence. (shrink)

Hope, in its propositional construction "I hope that p," is compatible with a stated chance for the speaker that not-p. On fallibilist construals of knowledge, knowledge is compatible with a chance of being wrong, such that one can know that p even though there is an epistemic chance for one that not-p. But self-ascriptions of propositional hope that p seem to be incompatible, in some sense, with self-ascriptions of knowing whether p. Data from conjoining hope self-ascription with outright assertions, with (...) first- and third-person knowledge ascriptions, and with factive predicates suggest a problem: when combined with a plausible principle on the rationality of hope, they suggest that fallibilism is false. By contrast, the infallibilist about knowledge can straightforwardly explain why knowledge would be incompatible with hope, and can offer a simple and unified explanation of all the linguistic data introduced here. This suggests that fallibilists bear an explanatory burden which has been hitherto overlooked. (shrink)

What is the relationship between lying, belief, and knowledge? Prominent accounts of lying define it in terms of belief, namely telling someone something one believes to be false, often with the intent to deceive. This paper develops a novel account of lying by deriving evaluative dimensions of responsibility from the knowledge norm of assertion. Lies are best understood as special cases of vicious assertion; lying is the anti-paradigm of proper assertion. This enables an account of lying in terms of knowledge: (...) roughly, lying is telling someone something you know ain't so. (shrink)

Hope is an attitude with a distinctive epistemological dimension: it is incompatible with knowledge. This chapter examines hope as it relates to knowledge but also to probability and inductive considerations. Such epistemic constraints can make hope either impossible, or, when hope remains possible, they affect how one’s epistemic situation can make hope rational rather than irrational. Such issues are especially relevant to when hopefulness may permissibly figure in practical deliberation over a course of action. So I consider cases of second-order (...) inductive reflection on when one should, or should not, be hopeful for an outcome with which one has a long record of experience: in other words, what is the epistemology behind when one should, if ever, stop hoping for outcomes which have failed one many times in the past? (shrink)

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...) And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has focused almost exclusively on propositional knowledge. This paper considers an underexplored area of epistemology, namely knowledge of persons: if propositional knowledge is a state of mind, consisting in a subject's attitude to a (true) proposition, the account developed here thinks of interpersonal knowledge as a state of minds, involving a subject's attitude to another (existing) subject. This kind of knowledge is distinct from propositional knowledge, but it exhibits a gradability characteristic of context-sensitivity, and admits of shifty thresholds. (...) It is supported by a wide range of unexplored linguistic data and intuitive cases; and it promises to illuminate debates within epistemology, philosophy of religion, and ethics. (shrink)

Some philosophers oppose recent arguments for the Knowledge Norm of Assertion by claiming that assertion, being an act much like any other, will be subject to norms governing acts generally, such as those articulated by Grice for the purpose of successful, cooperative endeavours. But in fact, Grice is a traitor to their cause; or rather, they are his dissenters, not his disciples. Drawing on Grice's unpublished papers, I show that he thought of asserting as a special linguistic act in need (...) of its own norm, and he tied his maxim of Quality to knowledge. I also develop a simple Gricean-inspired argument showing that the Quality maxim is not dependent on the Cooperative Principle. If it is not thus dependent, then the Cooperative Principle cannot be the explanation of, or source of normativity for, the Quality maxim. Thus, leveraging the insights informing the maxim of Quality actually provides the resources for a distinctive positive case that knowledge is the constitutive norm of assertion. (shrink)

This book examines a main theme in religious epistemology, namely, the possibility of knowledge of God. Most often philosophers consider the rationality or justification of propositional belief about God, particularly beliefs about the existence and nature of God; and they will assess the conditions under which, if there is a God, such propositional beliefs would be knowledge, particularly in light of counter-evidence or the availability of religious disagreement. This book surveys such familiar areas, then turns toward newer and less-developed terrain: (...) interpersonal epistemology, namely what it is to know another person. It then explores the prospects for understanding what it might take to know God relationally, the contours of which are significant for many theistic traditions. (shrink)

If knowledge is sensitive to practical stakes, then whether one knows depends in part on the practical costs of being wrong. When considering religious belief, the practical costs of being wrong about theism may differ dramatically between the theist (if there is no God) and the atheist (if there is a God). This paper explores the prospects, on pragmatic encroachment, for knowledge of theism (even if true) and of atheism (even if true), given two types of practical costs: namely, by (...) holding a false belief, or by missing out on a true belief. These considerations set up a more general puzzle of epistemic preference when faced with the choice between two beliefs, only one of which could become knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter covers contemporary work on disagreement, detailing both the conceptual and normative issues in play in the debates in mainstream analytic epistemology, and how these relate to religious diversity and disagreement. §1 examines several sorts of disagreement, and considers several epistemological issues: in particular, what range of attitudes a body of evidence can support, how to understand higher-order evidence, and who counts as an epistemic “peer”. §2 considers how these questions surface when considering disagreements over religion, including debates over (...) the nature of evidence and truth in religion, epistemic humility, concerns about irrelevant influences and about divine hiddenness, and arguments over exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Finally, §3 summarizes the contributors’ essays in this volume. (shrink)

This article explores the principles of interaction that shape grammatical practices of conversational speech cross-linguistically. Seven such principles are explored, and the grammatical practices they give rise to are illustrated. The role of these principles in shaping non-linguistic behavior is also touched on.

Assertion is governed by an epistemic norm requiring knowledge. This idea has been hotly debated in recent years, garnering attention in epistemology, philosophy of language, and linguistics. This chapter presents and extends the main arguments in favor of the knowledge norm, from faulty conjunctions, several conversational patterns, judgments of permission, excuse, and blame, and from showing how. (Paired with a chapter by Peter J. Graham and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen, "Knowledge is Not Our Norm of Assertion.").

Recent epistemology offers an account of what it is to know other persons. Such views hold promise for illuminating several issues in philosophy of religion, and for advancing a distinctive approach to religious epistemology. This paper develops an account of interpersonal knowledge, and clarifies its relation to propositional and qualitative knowledge. I then turn to our knowledge of God and God's knowledge of us, and compare my account of interpersonal knowledge with important work by Eleonore Stump on "Franciscan" knowledge. I (...) examine how interpersonal knowledge may figure in liturgical practice, in diffusing the problem of divine hiddenness, and in motivating a novel understanding of divine love. I also explore the possibility of epistemic injustice arising from dismissal or neglect of our religious testimony to one another, or of divine testimony to humanity, focusing specifically on the import of interpersonal knowledge. (shrink)

Expert testimony figures in recent debates over how best to understand the norm of assertion and the domain-specific epistemic expectations placed on testifiers. Cases of experts asserting with only isolated second-hand knowledge (Lackey 2011, 2013) have been used to shed light on whether knowledge is sufficient for epistemically permissible assertion. I argue that relying on such cases of expert testimony introduces several problems concerning how we understand expert knowledge, and the sharing of such knowledge through testimony. Refinements are needed to (...) clarify exactly what principles are being tested by such cases; but once refined, such cases raise more questions than they answer. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a fertile period of theorizing within mainstream epistemology which has had a dramatic impact on how epistemology is done. Investigations into contextualist and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skeptical challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and practical environment. New insights from social epistemology and formal epistemology about defeat, testimony, a priority, probability, and the nature of evidence all have a potentially revolutionary effect on how we understand our epistemological (...) place in the world. Religion is the place where such rethinking can potentially have its deepest impact and importance. Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new ideas into philosophy of religion and the epistemology of religious belief. -/- Knowledge, Belief, and God incorporates these myriad new developments in mainstream epistemology, and extends these developments to questions and arguments in religious epistemology. The investigations proposed in this volume offer substantial new life, breadth, and sophistication to issues in the philosophy of religion and analytic theology. They pose original questions and shed new light on long-standing issues in religious epistemology; and these developments will in turn generate contributions to epistemology itself, since religious belief provides a vital testing ground for recent epistemological ideas. (shrink)

What individuates the speech act of prediction? The standard view is that prediction is individuated by the fact that it is the unique speech act that requires future-directed content. We argue against this view and two successor views. We then lay out several other potential strategies for individuating prediction, including the sort of view we favor. We suggest that prediction is individuated normatively and has a special connection to the epistemic standards of expectation. In the process, we advocate some constraints (...) that we think a good theory of prediction should respect. (shrink)

Epistemological questions about the significance of disagreement have advanced in concert with broader developments in social epistemology concerning testimony, the nature of expertise and epistemic authority, the role of institutions, group belief, and epistemic injustice (among others). During this period, related issues in the epistemology of religion have reemerged as worthy of new consideration, and available to be situated with new conceptual tools. This volume explores many of the issues at the intersection of the epistemology of disagreement and religious epistemology: (...) in particular, how to think carefully about religious diversity and disagreement, balancing epistemic humility with personal conviction, the place of religious belief in our social lives, and how best to think about truths concerning religion. (shrink)

Epistemologists focus primarily on cases of knowledge, belief, or credence where the evidence which one possesses, or on which one is relying, plays a fundamental role in the epistemic or normative status of one's doxastic state. Recent work in epistemology goes beyond the evidence one possesses to consider the relevance for such statuses of evidence which one does not possess, particularly when there is a sense in which one should have had some evidence. I focus here on Sanford Goldberg's approach (...) ("Should Have Known," Synthese, forthcoming; and "On the Epistemic Significance of Evidence You Should Have Had," Episteme 2016, this issue); but the discussion will interest anyone working on epistemic defeat. (shrink)

Epistemologists have shown increased interest in the epistemic significance of disagreement, and in particular, in whether there is a rational requirement concerning belief revision in the face of peer disagreement. This article examines some of the general issues discussed by epistemologists, and then considers how they may or may not apply to the case of religious disagreement, both within religious traditions and between religious (and non-religious) views.

Artificial moral agents raise complex ethical questions both in terms of the potential decisions they may make as well as the inputs that create their cognitive architecture. There are multiple differences between human and artificial cognition which create potential barriers for artificial moral agency, at least as understood anthropocentrically and it is unclear that artificial moral agents should emulate human cognition and decision-making. It is conceptually possible for artificial moral agency to emerge that reflects alternative ethical methodologies without creating ontological (...) challenges or existential crises for human moral agents. (shrink)

Linda Zagzebski's "Epistemic Authority" (Oxford University Press, 2012) brings together issues in social epistemology with topics in moral and political philosophy as well as philosophy of religion. In this paper I criticize her discussion of self-trust and rationality, which sets up the main argument of the book; I consider how her view of authority relates to some issues of epistemic authority in testimony; and I raise some concerns about her treatment of religious epistemology and religious authority in particular.

The lottery and preface paradoxes pose puzzles in epistemology concerning how to think about the norms of reasonable or permissible belief. Contextualists in epistemology have focused on knowledge ascriptions, attempting to capture a set of judgments about knowledge ascriptions and denials in a variety of contexts (including those involving lottery beliefs and the principles of closure). This article surveys some contextualist approaches to handling issues raised by the lottery and preface, while also considering some of the difficulties encountered by those (...) approaches. (shrink)

Since the 1980s, the mass media have changed the way they cover major political stories, like foreign policy crises. As a consequence, what the public learns about these events has changed. More media outlets cover major events than in the past, including the entertainment-oriented soft news media. When they do cover a political story, soft news outlets focus more on than traditional news media and less on the political or strategic context, or substantive nuances, of policy debates. Many Americans who (...) previously ignored most political news now attend to some information about major political events, like wars, via the soft news media. These changes have important implications for democratic politics. Most importantly, a large number of particularly persuadable potential voters are now tuning in to politics via soft news outlets. This gives politicians an incentive to develop strategies for reaching out to them. Such individuals care less about the nuances of policy and more about the personality of leaders and any sensational human drama that a policy, like a war, entails. Soft news consumers care less about geopolitics than about body bags. Politicians who want their votes are therefore likely to emphasize body bags more than geopolitics. In short, the media environment changes both the style and substance of politics in democracies. (shrink)

Many epistemologists are enamored with a defeat condition on knowledge. In this paper we present some implementation problems for defeatism, understood along either internalist or externalist lines. We then propose that one who accepts a knowledge norm of belief, according to which one ought to believe only what one knows, can explain away much of the motivation for defeatism. This is an important result, because on the one hand it respects the plausibility of the intuitions about defeat shared by many (...) in epistemology; but on the other hand, it obviates the need to provide a unified account of defeat which plays well with the most plausible views of how knowledge fits with evidential probability. (shrink)

Reference guide to Paul Grice and the literature arising from his work, particularly in philosophy of language and mind.

The extended Church-Turing thesis posits that any computable function can be calculated efficiently by a probabilistic Turing machine. If this thesis held true, the global effort to build quantum computers might ultimately be unnecessary. The thesis would however be strongly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. BosonSampling - the sampling from a distribution of n photons undergoing some linear-optical process - is a recently developed, and experimentally accessible example of (...) such a task [1]. (shrink)

A great deal of ink has been spilt debating the relative merits of foundationalism and coherentism in contemporary epistemology. In this dissertation, I argue that the debate itself, lively as it's been, rides atop a fundamental mistake. Careful examination of the defenses of these views indicates that both sides rest on a set of problematic presuppositions about justification and the nature of mind. More specifically, they all assume, in one form or another, that epistemic dependence must be inferential, and, as (...) a result, that direct access to the world could only be understood as resting on a class of entities which asymmetrically convey justification to other beliefs without receiving support from them. Revealing these assumptions promises to show that there is a much larger range of options for explaining our knowledge of the world than we can see when we are in the grips of an approach to epistemology and the philosophy of mind which requires us to choose between foundationalism and coherentism. (shrink)

This essay expands upon the suggestion that Lessing's infamous ‘ditch’ is actually three ditches: temporal, metaphysical, and existential gaps. It examines the complex problems these ditches raise, and then proposes that Kierkegaard's Fragments and Postscript exhibit a similar triadic organizational structure, which may signal a deliberate attempt to engage and respond to Lessing's three gaps. Viewing the Climacean project in this way offers an enhanced understanding of the intricacies of Lessing's rationalist approach to both religion and historical truth, and illuminates (...) Climacus's subjective response to Lessing. (shrink)