How should knowledge be analyzed? Compositionally, as having constituents like belief and justification, or as an atomic concept? In making arguments for or against these perspectives, epistemologists have begun to use experimental evidence from developmental psychology and developmental linguistics. If we were to conclude that knowledge were developmentally prior to belief, then we might have a good basis to claim that belief is not a constituent of knowledge. In this review, I present a broad range of developmental evidence from the (...) past decade and discuss some of the implications it has for the proper analysis of knowledge. The orthodox perspective from the developmental literature was one where children fail to understand belief and knowledge concepts until later in childhood, with typical asymmetries in belief attribution and knowledge attribution. But what emerges from both a discussion of newer findings and a contextualization of older findings is a picture of development whereby core competence with belief and knowledge concepts emerges much earlier than previously thought that apparent failures in later childhood may be explained by other aspects of development than conceptual development and that there is no clear evidence that knowledge attributions emerge earlier than belief attributions. (shrink)

This Element presents a philosophical exploration of the concept of the 'model organism' in contemporary biology. Thinking about model organisms enables us to examine how living organisms have been brought into the laboratory and used to gain a better understanding of biology, and to explore the research practices, commitments, and norms underlying this understanding. We contend that model organisms are key components of a distinctive way of doing research. We focus on what makes model organisms an important type of model, (...) and how the use of these models has shaped biological knowledge, including how model organisms represent, how they are used as tools for intervention, and how the representational commitments linked to their use as models affect the research practices associated with them. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

Independence was a core value of the movement for disability rights. People with disabilities did not have to be dependent, advocates claimed; they were robbed of autonomy by poverty, social prejudice, and architectural barriers. Recently, critics have noted that the emphasis on independence equates personhood with autonomy, reason, and self-awareness, thereby excluding those who are incapable of self-determination. The stigma of dependency is communicated to caregivers whose work is devalued and undercompensated. These values are echoed in the life writing (...) of people with disabilities, which tends to present a singular narrative voice, even when the author requires assistance in the physical or intellectual work of composition. The 1979 Mexican memoir-testimonio Gaby Brimmer, collaboratively authored by the acclaimed journalist Elena Poniatowska, Brimmer, her mother, and her paid caregiver is a notable exception. Consisting of interwoven dialogue among its three informants, Gaby Brimmer enacts dependency at the level of form, while exploring the challenges and opportunities of interdependence in societies that devalue the giving and receiving of care. (shrink)

This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences' form is distinct from that of ordinary subject–predicate sentences, and that this fundamental difference explains the construction's unusual grammatical and discourse properties.

Narrative analysis, creative writing, and interactive reflective writing have been identified as valuable for professional identity formation and resilience among medical and premedical students alike. This study proposes that medical student blogs are novel pedagogical tools for fostering peer-to-peer learning in academic medicine and are currently underutilized as a near-peer resource for premedical students to learn about the medical profession. To evaluate the pedagogical utility of medical student blogs for introducing core themes in the medical humanities, the authors conducted (...) qualitative analysis of one hundred seventy-six reflective essays by baccalaureate premedical students written in response to medical student-authored narrative blog posts. Using an iterative thematic approach, the authors identified common patterns in the reflective essays, distilled major themes, coded the essays, and conducted narrative analysis through close reading. Qualitative analysis identified three core themes and one overarching theme. The premedical students’ essays demonstrated significant self-reflection in response to near-peer works, discussed their perceptions of medical professionalism, and expressed concerns about their future progress through the medical education system. The essays consistently attributed the impact of the medical student narratives to the authors’ status as near-peers. The authors conclude that reading and engaging in reflective writing about near-peer blog posts encourages premedical students to develop an understanding of core concepts in the medical humanities and promotes their reflection on the profession of medicine. Thus, incorporating online blogs written by medical trainees as narrative works in medical humanities classrooms is a novel pedagogical method for fostering peer-to-peer learning in academic medicine. (shrink)

Despite the stereotypical, outsider view of Thailand as a thriving hub of international sex tourism, traditional and local constructions of Thainess instead privilege the position of the ‘good’ Thai woman—a model of sexual propriety, demure physicality and aesthetic perfection. This is the image of femininity that is heralded by Thailand's Tourist Authority and by government agencies alike as a marketable symbol of cultural refinement and national pride. But this disturbing ‘utopian’ construction of femininity might for some be considered a dystopia (...) shaped by forms of power centred on elite urban rule. In mainstream definitions of Thainess, the monstrous and grotesque inverses of ‘good’ womanhood are located in the ‘dystopian’ visions of rural-based folk traditions that abound with malevolent female spirits and demons, and in the contemporary Thai horror films that draw on these tropes. Adopted by Thai feminists and by street protestors in Bangkok at times of recent political unrest, portrayals of a ‘monstrous-feminine’ have been adopted as central to a carnivalesque strategy of response and resistance to elite discourses of control. Such forces serve to symbolically disturb and destabilise middle-class constructions of a Utopian vision of Thainess with Bangkok as its cultural core. This paper examines instances of how and why the counter-strategy of primitivism and monstrosity has developed, and the extent to which it translates ‘dystopian’ expressions of female sexuality in new imaginaries of ‘dystopia’ as a space of liberation from stultifying cultural and political norms. (shrink)

By most measures, the impact of international human rights law ratification in the Arab Gulf region primarily in the 1990s and 2000s has been minimal. Scholars have found little evidence of correlation between ratification of the core human rights conventions with the minimal improvements in human rights practice in the region. Ratification of most human rights instruments Arab Gulf states in recent decades has, however, offered new cases from which to explore the impact of international human rights law in (...) countries where human rights monitors find protections to be most limited. Using the case of Kuwait’s ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, this article examines the impact of ratification in 1994 on discourses on discrimination against women in national press on human rights in the country. Through analysis of reporting in national newspaper Al-Anba, the article identifies how ratification has shaped the language used in national press reporting on women’s rights to increasingly reference the convention and frame rights violations in the language of “discrimination.” In tracing these connections between the convention and related content in local press, the article identifies new avenue to explore the “impact” of human rights treaty ratification, even when formal changes in laws and policies so far have been limited. (shrink)

People with disabilities (PWD) comprise a significant part of the population yet experience some of the most profound health disparities. Among the greatest barriers to quality care are inadequate health professions education related to caring for PWD. Drawing upon the expertise of health professions educators in medicine, public health, nursing, social work, and physician assistant programs, this forum showcases innovative methods for teaching core disability skills and concepts grounded in disability studies and the health humanities. Each of the essays (...) offers practical guidance for developing curricular interventions appropriate for students at various levels of training and familiarity with disability to be implemented in classroom discussions, case-based learning, lectures, panels, and clinical simulations across the full spectrum of pre-health and health professions education. (shrink)

Theological ethics, particularly Christian theological ethics, is very well-equipped both to treat the interests and needs of future generations as a genuine and pressing concern – and also to evade some of the questions they pose about temporality, by appealing to judgement beyond history. Phenomenological approaches to the question of future generations are important as a counterbalance to this tendency in theological ethics, insofar as they force us to remain with, and wrestle with, the relation to future persons as future. (...) In this article I show that drawing on phenomenological approaches, in order to attend to temporality, produces an account of justice and responsibility to future generations that is more adequate theologically, as well as ethically. Attending to how the other, the future and the imperative of justice interrelate yields an approach to theological ethics that does not need to assume for the ethicist the God’s-eye view – the view from outside time, narrative or interpersonal encounter – and that is thus able to grapple with the core questions raised by bringing future generations into ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.3 (2004) 107-115 [Access article in PDF] The Search for Narrative Laura Felleman Fattal The most cursory cultural investigator cannot help but notice that the visual arts have become a significant source and impetus for the narrative of contemporary books, theater, and dance. In recent memory, the following theatrical and dance performances "Contact" by Susan Stroman and John Weidman, "Art" by Yasmina Reza, "Sunday (...) in the Park with George" by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, "Les Miserables" by Claude-Michel Schfonberg/music and others, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" by Steve Martin, and "The Sleep of Reason," by Antonio Buero-Vallego have taken the not-so-dead-life (natura morta) or still life of painting into the vital arena of the performing arts. The quest to seek intra-discipline aesthetics among dance, music, theater, and the visual arts is not the charge, but instead a turn to establish a narrative that has brought about this invasion of interactivity between the arts. Clearly defined boundaries between the arts have beenfading since Fluxus, Happenings, and Performance Art for over half a century. In the early part of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp's chess games and use of the fourth dimension of time in his numerous produced and pondered pieces all speak to the interrelatedness of the arts.Contemporary novels based on historical themes and subjects have created characters based on the lives and works of famous and intriguing artists such as Michelangelo Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and Jan Vermeer. The silence and pensive qualities of the figures of Jan Vermeer, the seventeenth-century Dutch painter, have been the catalyst for two books, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland and the Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.1 Vreeland combines the mystic of the Vermeer paintings' characters with the impoverished history of the refugee status of its owners. In various parts of Vreeland's book the authenticity of the Vermeer painting becomes a subtext for describing the work. [End Page 107] Just the lament of some Dutch art historians. Where has such a treasure gone, or some such thing? He turned to pour us both a brandy. So why could this not be? It's his same window opening inward at the left that he has used so often, the same splash of pale yellow light. Take a look at the figures in the tapestry on the table. Same as in nine other paintings. Same Spanish chair with lion's head finials that he used in eleven canvases, same brass studs in the leather. Same black and white tiles placed diagonally on the floor.2A few pages later the interest in the authenticity of the painting continues: No, no signature. But that was not unusual. He often failed to sign his work. Besides, he had at least seven styles of signature. For Vermeer, signatures are not definite evidence. Technique is. Look at the direction of the brush's stroke, those tiny grooves of the brush hairs. They have their lighted and their shaded side. Look elsewhere. You'll find overlapping layers of paint no thicker than silk thread that give a minute difference in shade. That's what makes it a Vermeer.3In Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer's slow and meticulous technique, obsessive involvement with his models and his assiduous composition of light over textures of both animate and inanimate surfaces in the painting become the core of the novel. He had come in and was standing in the studio, looking out a window. "Take a seat, please, Greit," he said, his back to me.I sat in the chair by the harpsichord. I did not touch it — I had never touched an instrument except to clean it. As I waited I studied the paintings he had hung on the back wall that would form part of the concert painting. There was a landscape on the left, and on the right a picture of three people — a woman playing a lute, wearing a dress that revealed much of... (shrink)

Segmentation of post-operative glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is essential for the planning of Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) treatment and other clinical applications. Recent methods developed for pre-operative GBM segmentation perform poorly on post-operative GBM MRI scans. In this paper we present a method for the segmentation of GBM in post-operative patients. Our method incorporates an ensemble of segmentation networks and the Kullback–Leibler divergence agreement score in the objective function to estimate the prediction label uncertainty and cope with noisy labels and inter-observer (...) variability. Moreover, our method integrates the surgery type and computes non-tumorous tissue delineation to automatically segment the tumor. We trained and validated our method on a dataset of 340 enhanced T1 MRI scans of patients that were treated with TTFields (270 scans for train and 70 scans for test). For validation, we developed a tool that uses the uncertainty map along with the segmentation result. Our tool allows visualization and fast editing of the tissues to improve the results dependent on user preference. Three physicians reviewed and graded our segmentation and editing tool on 12 different MRI scans. The validation set average (SD) Dice scores were 0.81 (0.11), 0.71 (0.24), 0.64 (0.25), and 0.68 (0.19) for whole-tumor, resection, necrotic-core, and enhancing-tissue, respectively. The physicians rated 72% of the segmented GBMs acceptable for treatment planning or better. Another 22% can be edited manually in a reasonable time to achieve a clinically acceptable result. According to these results, the proposed method for GBM segmentation can be integrated into TTFields treatment planning software in order to shorten the planning process. To conclude, we have extended a state-of-the-art pre-operative GBM segmentation method with surgery-type, anatomical information, and uncertainty visualization to facilitate a clinically viable segmentation of post-operative GBM for TTFields treatment planning. (shrink)

Corporate diversity initiatives have neither yielded higher financial returns for companies nor created significantly greater equity and equality of outcome for socially disadvantaged groups within organisations. There has been a systematic failure of diversity initiatives, as the strategic business importance of diversity has been avoided. Researchers argue that effective diversity management is dependent upon appropriate structures and systems, not upon human resource management training alone. This article discusses the impact of the design, introduction and application of the ‘Diversity Quality Cycle’. (...) This model allows for the embedding of the values of equality of opportunity and cultural diversity throughout core business functions, and for positive long-term change. A mixed-method approach was taken; Participative Action Research is the main methodology employed, within which quantitative data were generated, analysed and interpreted. The main case study organisation is a Further Education College in the West of England. (shrink)

A joke is amusing if and only if it’s fitting to be amused by it; an act is regrettable if and only if it’s fitting to regret it. Many philosophers accept these biconditionals and hold that analogous ones obtain between a wide range of additional evaluative properties and the fittingness of corresponding responses. Call these the _fit–value biconditionals_. The biconditionals give us a systematic way of recognizing the role of fit in our ethical practices; they also serve as the bedrock (...) of various metaethical projects, such as fitting-attitude analysis of value and the ‘fittingness first’ approach. Yet despite the importance of the biconditionals, there is very little discussion of their proper interpretation. This paper argues that any plausible interpretation of the fit_–_value biconditionals must disarm several kinds of apparent counterexample. For instance, that an achievement is pride-worthy doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to take pride in it because the achievement might not be mine or that of anyone close to me; that a joke is amusing doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to be amused by it for six straight months; and that a person is loveable doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to love him romantically because that person might be my sibling. We consider possible responses to such counterexamples and develop what we consider the most promising interpretation of the biconditionals. The upshot is that certain widespread assumptions about fit and its relation to value and reasons should be reconsidered. (shrink)

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new (...) word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language. (shrink)

In this volume, Rachel Giora explores how the salient meanings of words - the meanings that stand out as most prominent and accessible in our minds - shape how we think and how we speak. For Giora, salient meanings display interesting effects in both figurative and literal language. In both domains, speakers and writers creatively exploit the possibilities inherent in the fact that, while words have multiple meanings, some meanings are more accessible than others. Of the various meanings weencode (...) in our mental lexicon for a given word or expression, we ascribe greater cognitive priority to some over others. Interestingly, the most salient meaning is not always the literal meaning. Giora argues that it is cognitively prominent salient meanings, rather than literal meanings, that play the most important role in the comprehension and production of language. She shows that even though context begins to affect comprehension immediately, it does so without obstructing the early accessing of salient meanings. Thus, the meaning we first attend to is the salient word meaning, regardless of contextual bias. Knowledge of salient meanings turns out to play a major role, perhaps the most important role, in the process of using and understanding of language. Going beyond the familiar effects of literal meaning and context, the Graded Salience Hypothesis presents the most comprehensive explanation for how we use language for meaning. In this volume, Giora presents her new model for the first time in a book-length treatment, with original and illuminating perspectives that will be of interest to linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and all who want to know more about just how we understand what we mean. (shrink)

We offer an interpretation of the mental files framework that eliminates the metaphor of files, information being contained in files, etc. The guiding question is whether, once we move beyond the metaphors, there is any theoretical role for files. We claim not. We replace the file-metaphor with two theses: the semantic thesis that there are irreducibly relational representational facts (viz. facts about the coordination of representations); and the metasemantic thesis that processes tied to information-relations ground those facts. In its canonical (...) statement, the ‘file’-theory makes reference to a certain kind of relational representational feature, and a certain kind of mental activity. Mental files need not come into it. In short, we posit mental filing without mental files. Our interpretation avoids awkward problems that arise on the standard interpretation and clarifies the explanatory commitments of the theory. (shrink)

This article employs Foucauldian and feminist analytics to advance a critical approach to wearable digital health- and activity-tracking devices. Following Foucault’s insight that the growth of individual capabilities coincides with the intensification of power relations, I argue that digital self-tracking devices (DSTDs) expand individuals’ capacity for self-knowledge and self-care at the same time that they facilitate unprecedented levels of biometric surveillance, extend the regulatory mechanisms of both public health and fashion/beauty authorities, and enable increasingly rigorous body projects devoted to the (...) attainment of normative femininity. These technologies of surveillance, normalization, and discipline thus function to augment, and facilitate the cooperation of, neoliberal-era biopower and post-feminist patriarchal power. My analysis of digital self-tracking devices’ instrumentality to biopower and patriarchy contributes to the emergent field of critical digital health studies and builds new connections between political, social, and feminist theories of embodiment; biopower studies; fat studies; and trans-disciplinary body studies. (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Judgment has often been interpreted by scholars as comprising separate treatments of three uneasily connected topics: beauty, biology, and empirical knowledge. Rachel Zuckert's book interprets the Critique as a unified argument concerning all three domains. She argues that on Kant's view, human beings demonstrate a distinctive cognitive ability in appreciating beauty and understanding organic life: an ability to anticipate a whole that we do not completely understand according to preconceived categories. This ability is necessary, moreover, for (...) human beings to gain knowledge of nature in its empirical character as it is, not as we might assume it to be. Her wide-ranging and original study will be valuable for readers in all areas of Kant's philosophy. (shrink)

If funding allocation is an indicator of a field’s priorities, then the priorities of the field of bioethics are misaligned because they perpetuate injustice. Social justice mandates priority for the factors that drive systematic disadvantage, which tend not to be the areas supported by funding within academic bioethics. Current funding priorities violate social justice by overemphasizing technologies that aim to enhance the human condition without addressing underlying structural inequalities grounded in racism, and by deemphasizing areas of inquiry most frequently pursued (...) by Scholars of Color. This lack of attention to upstream determinants of health in bioethics research perpetuates a gap in the resources needed to understand the experiences of communities disproportionately experiencing poor health, which is itself a form of epistemic injustice. Both social and epistemic injustices are apparent in the impact of these funding priorities on people of color, both in the public and in the bioethics community. (shrink)

It is tempting to hold that guilt‐tripping is morally wrong, either because it is objectionably manipulative, or because it involves gratuitously aiming to make another person suffer, or both. In this article, I develop a picture of guilt according to which guilt is a type of pain that incorporates a commitment to its own justification on the basis of the subject's wrongdoing. This picture supports the hypothesis that feeling guilty is an especially efficient means for a wrongdoer to come to (...) more deeply understand why her behavior was wrong; it is precisely because guilt is painful and involves a self‐reflexive justificatory element that it is able to play this role. Such a picture, moreover, preserves the possibility that deliberately making others feel guilty needn't involve aiming gratuitously to harm them and needn't be objectionably manipulative. It follows that we should be surprisingly sanguine about the practice of inducing guilt in wrongdoers as a means of facilitating their moral edification. (shrink)

This paper offers three objections to Leslie’s recent and already influential theory of generics :375–403, 2007a, Philos Rev 117:1–47, 2008): her proposed metaphysical truth-conditions are subject to systematic counter-examples, the proposed disquotational semantics fails, and there is evidence that generics do not express cognitively primitive generalisations.

The bioethical principle of autonomy is problematic regarding the future of the embryo who lacks the ability to self-advocate but will develop this defining human capacity in time. Recent experiments explore the use of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats /Cas9 for germline engineering in the embryo, which alters future generations. The embryo’s inability to express an autonomous decision is an obvious bioethical challenge of germline engineering. The philosopher Joel Feinberg acknowledged that autonomy is developing in children. He advocated that (...) to reserve this future autonomy, parents should be guided to make ethical decisions that provide children with open futures. Here, Feinberg’s 1980 open future theory is extended to the human embryo in the context of CRISPR germline engineering. Although the embryo does not possess the autonomous decision-making capacity at the time of germline engineering, the parental decision to permanently change the unique genetic fabric of the embryo and subsequent generations disregards future autonomy. Therefore, germline engineering in many instances is objectionable considering Feinberg’s open future theory. (shrink)

The imaginative context in which artificial intelligence is embedded remains a crucial touchstone from which to understand and critique both the histories and prospective futures of an AI-driven world. A recent article from Cave and Dihal sets out a narrative schema of four hopes and four corresponding fears associated with intelligent machines and AI. This article seeks to respond to the work of Cave and Dihal by presenting a gendered reading of this schema of hopes and fears. I offer a (...) brief genealogy of narratives which feature female automata, before turning to examine how gendered technology today—particularly AI assistants like Siri and Alexa—reproduces the historical narratives associated with intelligent machines in new ways. Through a gendered reading of the hopes and fears associated with AI, two key responses arise. First, that the affective reactions to intelligent machines cannot be readily separated where such machines are gendered female. And second, that the gendering of AI technologies today can be understood as an attempt to reconcile the opposing hopes and fears AI produces, and that this reconciliation is based on the association of such technologies with traditional notions of femininity. Critically, a gendered reading enables us to problematize the narratives associated with AI and expose the power asymmetries that lie within, and the technologies which arise out of, such narratives. (shrink)

There's been a great deal of interest in epistemology regarding what it takes for a hearer to come to know on the basis of a speaker's say-so. That is, there's been much work on the epistemology of testimony. However, what about when hearers don't believe speakers when they should? In other words, what are we to make of when testimony goes wrong? A recent topic of interest in epistemology and feminist philosophy is how we sometimes fail to believe speakers due (...) to inappropriate prejudices – implicit or explicit. This is known as epistemic injustice. In this article, I discuss Miranda Fricker's groundbreaking work on epistemic injustice, as well as more recent developments that both offer critique and expansion on the nature and extent of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

This article discusses recent theories of the meaning of generics. The discussion is centred on how the theories differ in their approach to addressing the primary difficulty in providing a theory of generic meaning: The notoriously complex ways in which the truth conditions of generics seem to vary. In addition, the article summarizes considerations for and against each theory.

Stephen Jay Gould argued that the shape of animal life as we know it is a radically contingent accident of history determined more by fortune than comparative functional merit. Acknowledging the formative role of contingency in macroevolution is crucial, Gould believed, to vanquishing the lingering vestiges of progressivism that continue to buttress anthropocentric views of life. Gould’s contingency thesis has come under fire in recent years by proponents of convergent evolution who argue that not only is replication ubiquitous in evolution, (...) but also that it indicates an evolutionary process charging inexorably toward ever more complex and human-like outcomes. We argue here that although convergentist approaches are widely seen as inimical to the Gouldian view of life, in fact the two are indispensable allies in the anti-progressivist crusade, particularly in relation to the evolution of mind. We illustrate this by examining the progressivist foundations of comparative cognition science and the ongoing resistance to attributions of convergent minds. (shrink)

Rachel Cohon offers an original interpretation of the moral philosophy of David Hume, focusing on two areas.

Normativity is widely regarded as the ability to make evaluative judgments based on a shared system of social norms. When normativity is viewed through the cognitively demanding lens of human morality, however, the prospect of finding social norms innonhuman animals rapidly dwindles and common causal structures are overlooked. In this paper, I develop a biofunctionalist account of social normativity and examine its implications for how we ought to conceptualize, explain, and study social norms in the wild. I propose that we (...) think of social normative systems as behavior-regulatory power structures that resolve conflicts between nested levels of selection in favor of the higher level. I argue that the best case for social norms outside of humans is not in the animals one might expect, such as primates or other large-brained vertebrates, but rather in social insects. Finally, I engage with a number of potential objections to this unorthodox proposal. (shrink)

It has become popular of late to identify the phenomenon of thinking a singular thought with that of thinking with a mental file. Proponents of the mental files conception of singular thought claim that one thinks a singular thought about an object o iff one employs a mental file to think about o. I argue that this is false by arguing that there are what I call descriptive mental files, so some file-based thought is not singular thought. Descriptive mental files (...) are mental files for which descriptive information plays four roles: determines which object the file is about, if any, it sets limits on possible mistakes that fall within the scope of successful reference for the file, it acts as a ‘gatekeeper’ for the file, and it determines persistence conditions for the file. Contrary to popular assumption, a description playing these roles is consistent with the file-theoretic framework. Recognising this allows us to distinguish the notion of singular thought from that of file-thinking and better understand the nature and role of both. (shrink)

This paper examines what it is for a condition to be a disease. It falls into two sections. In the first I examine the best existing account of disease (as proposed by Christopher Boorse) and argue that it must be rejected. In the second I outline a more acceptable account of disease. According to this account, by disease we mean a condition that it is a bad thing to have, that is such that we consider the afflicted person to have (...) been unlucky, and that can potentially be medically treated. All three criteria must be fulfilled for a condition to be a disease. The criterion that for a condition to be a disease it must be a bad thing is required to distinguish the biologically different from the diseased. The claim that the sufferer must be unlucky is needed to distinguish diseases from conditions that are unpleasant but normal, for example teething. Finally, the claim that for a condition to be a disease it must be potentially medically treatable is needed to distinguish diseases from other types of misfortune, for example economic problems and legal problems. (shrink)

On the traditional relationalist conception of singular thought, a thought has singular content when it is based on an ‘information relation’ to its object. Recent work rejects relationalism and suggests singular thoughts are distinguished from descriptive thoughts by their inferential role: only thoughts with singular content can be employed in ‘direct’ inferences, or inferences that ‘trade on identity’. Firstly this view is insufficiently clear, because it conflates two distinct ideas—one about a kind of inference, the other a kind of process (...) that grounds inferences—under the title, ‘trading on identity’. Secondly, this leaves us without a notion that can be used as an alternative to relationalism about singular thought. The first notion is no more applicable to singular than to descriptive thought. The second may help us better understand singular thought, but does so, not by replacing the view that singular thoughts are information-based, but by helping us understand the nature of information-based thought. (shrink)

The standard view amongst philosophers of language and linguists is that the logical form of generics is quantificational and contains a covert, unpronounced quantifier expression Gen. Recently, some theorists have begun to question the standard view and rekindle the competing proposal, that generics are a species of kind-predication. These theorists offer some forceful objections to the standard view, and new strategies for dealing with the abundance of linguistic evidence in favour of the standard view. I respond to these objections and (...) show that their strategies fail. I offer a novel argument in favour of the standard view that I call the binder argument. The upshot of this argument is that if one rejects the existence of Gen, then one is committed to rejecting the existence of covert structure in general. (shrink)

Classifying Madness (Springer, 2005) concerns philosophical problems with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, more commonly known as the D.S.M. The D.S.M. is published by the American Psychiatric Association and aims to list and describe all mental disorders. The first half of Classifying Madness asks whether the project of constructing a classification of mental disorders that reflects natural distinctions makes sense. Chapters examine the nature of mental illness, and also consider whether mental disorders fall into natural kinds. The (...) second half of the book addresses epistemic worries. Even supposing a natural classification system to be possible in principle, there may be reasons to be suspicious of the categories included in the D.S.M. I examine the extent to which the D.S.M. depends on psychiatric theory, and look at how it has been shaped by social and financial factors. I aim to be critical of the D.S.M. without being antagonistic towards it. Ultimately, however, I am forced to conclude that although the D.S.M. is of immense practical importance, it is unlikely to come to reflect the natural structure of mental disorders. (shrink)

This paper is about the relevance of attitude-ascriptions to debates about singular thought. It examines a methodology (common to early acquaintance theorists [Kaplan 1968] and recent critics of acquaintance [Hawthorne and Manley 2012], which assumes that the behaviour of ascriptions can be used to draw conclusions about singular thought. Although many theorists (e.g. [Recanati 2012]) reject this methodology, the literature lacks a detailed examination of its implications and the challenges faced by proponents and critics. I isolate an assumption of the (...) methodology, which I call the tracking assumption: that an attitude-ascription which states that s Φ's that P is true iff s has an attitude, of Φ-ing, which is an entertaining of the content P (with entertain used in a stipulated sense). I argue that the tracking assumption must be rejected, not because it has deflationary consequences, but because it leads to unstable commitments. I also show that there are independent reasons to reject it, because ordinary attitude ascriptions underdetermine even the truth-conditions of the mental-states they ascribe. However, I argue, this does not involve rejecting the claim that attitude-ascriptions express relations between agents and contents. Instead, they state different relations depending on contextual factors other than the nature of the mental-states ascribed. (shrink)

We have structured our response according to five questions arising from the commentaries: (i) What is sentience? (ii) Is sentience a necessary or sufficient condition for moral standing? (iii) What methods should guide comparative cognitive research in general, and specifically in studying invertebrates? (iv) How should we balance scientific uncertainty and moral risk? (v) What practical strategies can help reduce biases and morally dismissive attitudes toward invertebrates?

Increasingly, metaphors are the target of political critique: Jewish groups condemn Holocaust imagery; mental health organizations, the metaphorical exploitation of psychosis; and feminists, “rape metaphors.” I develop a novel model for making sense of such critiques of metaphor.

In this book, Rachel Zuckert provides the first overarching account of Johann Gottfried Herder's complex aesthetic theory. She guides the reader through Herder's texts, showing how they relate to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy of art, and focusing on two main concepts: aesthetic naturalism, the view that art is natural to and naturally valuable for human beings as organic, embodied beings, and - unusually for Herder's time - aesthetic pluralism, the view that aesthetic value takes many diverse and culturally (...) varying forms. Zuckert argues that Herder's theory plays a pivotal role in the history of philosophical aesthetics, marking the transition from the eighteenth-century focus on aesthetic value as grounded in human nature to the nineteenth-century focus on art as socially significant and historically variable. Her study illuminates Herder's significance as an innovative thinker in aesthetics, and will interest a range of readers in philosophy of art and European thought. (shrink)

This book is about the norms of the speech act of assertion. This is a topic of lively contemporary debate primarily carried out in epistemology and philosophy of language. Suppose that you ask me what time an upcoming meeting starts, and I say, “4 p.m.” I’ve just asserted that the meeting starts at 4 p.m. Whenever we make claims like this, we’re asserting. The central question here is whether we need to know what we say, and, relatedly, whether what we (...) assert must be true. If the meeting is really at 3:30 p.m., you’ll be late, and probably rather upset that I told you the wrong time. In some sense, it seems like I’m on the hook for having said something false. This sense that I’ve done something wrong suggests that there are certain standards of evaluating assertions: a way of distinguishing between good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. We call these standards norms. And so the debate about what, if any, norms govern the linguistic practice of assertion is known as the norms of assertion debate. When one’s assertion satisfies the norm, we say that the assertion is warranted. -/- Various philosophers have typically focused their views of the norms of assertion on articulating the level of epistemic support required for properly asserting. Some argue, for example, that one must know what one asserts. Others argue that one merely needs to justifiably believe what one asserts–an epistemic standing weaker than knowledge. The purpose of this book is to defend what I propose as the central norm governing our practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm. Here’s what it looks like: -/- One may assert that p only if: One has supportive reasons for p, The relevant conventional and pragmatic elements of the context are present, and One asserts that p at least in part because the assertion that p satisfies and. -/- In rough outline, the standards for warrantedly asserting shift with changes in context, although knowledge is never required for warrantedly asserting. In fact, in some special contexts, speakers may warrantedly lie. This latter feature particularly sets apart my view from others in the debate. This also means that truth, knowledge, and even belief aren’t necessary conditions for warrantedly asserting. (shrink)

This paper has a narrow and a broader target. The narrow target is a particular version of what I call the mental-files conception of singular thought, proposed by Robin Jeshion, and known as cognitivism. The broader target is the MFC in general. I give an argument against Jeshion's view, which gives us preliminary reason to reject the MFC more broadly. I argue Jeshion's theory of singular thought should be rejected because the central connection she makes between significance and singularity does (...) not hold. However, my argument grants Jeshion's claim that there is a connection between significance and file-thinking. The upshot is not only that we have reason to reject Jeshion's significance constraint on singular thought, but that we have reason to question the connection made by MFC proponents between file-thinking and singularity. (shrink)

Given the potential dangers of unethical decisions in the workplace, it has become increasingly important for managers to hire, and promote into leadership positions, those who are morally inclined. Behavioral ethics research has contributed to this effort by examining an array of individual difference variables that play a role in morality. However, past research has focused mostly on direct causal effects and not so much on the processes through which different factors, especially those that are morality based, decrease unethical choices. (...) The purpose of the current research is to examine the process, which includes both subconscious and conscious decision pathways, through which moral attentiveness curbs unethical decision making at the individual level. The findings of a study employing about 200 participants and a cheating task reveal that both accurate ethical prototypes and moral awareness of the situation decreased unethical decisions, and moral attentiveness was found to be positively related to both of these constructs. In addition, having accurate ethical prototypes was found to be a partial mediator between perceptual moral attentiveness and less cheating, while moral awareness was found to be a partial mediator between reflective moral attentiveness and less cheating. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Ambiguity in our experience of embodiment online has prevented us from confidently extending existing scholarship to the domain of online sociality. In recent decades, research across the disciplines has been undergirded by themes related to embodiment, restoring to prominence a theme previously neglected in part thanks to the rise of feminist scholars within the academy. We have not, however, adequately appealed to this corpus when theorizing forms of life happening online. In this paper I hope to bridge this gap by (...) bringing forward phenomenological evidence about the nature of online embodiment. This paper presents the findings from a research project that used phenomenological interviews to elicit descriptions of lived embodiment from participants singing in online choirs during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that these descriptions reveal anchoring and discounting as central features of their experience, two dynamics of the body schema as described by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception that underpin participant experiences of sensory disjunction. I furthermore take pains to show how the form of embodiment operative in the online choirs has the characteristics of intercorporeality, a reciprocal two-sided form of embodied subjectivity. After explaining how Husserl and Merleau-Ponty each define intercorporeality, I suggest that what I am calling an auditory intercorporeality underlies reported features of participant experience in the choirs, such as we-experience and coordination. (shrink)