Tout usage particulier d’un concept provenant du sens commun ou des sciences naturelles est susceptible d’être contesté pour de bonnes ou mauvaises raisons ; mais quelle que soit la force des raisons, elles impliquent généralement la supposition d’un accord concernant le type d’usage qui est approprié au concept en question, entre son utilisateur et quiconque conteste l’usage particulier qui en est...

The starting point for this paper is the ongoing debate about the relation between research and policy in education. Recent developments in England and Scotland are reviewed in the context of political and academic arguments about the nature and function of research activity. The defensiveness of the research community in the face of professional and political attacks is examined critically. A case study of the Higher Still programme is used to illustrate the complexity of the relationships between evidence, ideology, values (...) and professional practice. It is argued that the research community needs to become more politically sophisticated and to advance a clearer vision of its social function in advanced democratic societies if its potential contribution to educational development is to be realised. The dangers of a retreat to a narrow empirical role are highlighted. (shrink)

We welcome Mikhalevich & Powell’s (2020) (M&P) call for a more “‘inclusive”’ animal ethics, but we think their proposed shift toward a moral framework that privileges false positives over false negatives will require radically revising the paradigm assumption in animal research: that there is a clear line to be drawn between sentient beings that are part of our moral community and nonsentient beings that are not.

Le présent dossier a pour vocation d’introduire le lectorat francophone à une analyse philosophique de la conceptualité dont la riche postérité outre-Manche et outre-Atlantique fut inversement proportionnelle à l’intérêt qu’elle a suscité ailleurs, notamment en France, durant un demi-siècle. L’auteur de cette analyse, Walter Bryce Gallie, est un philosophe écossais relativement...

We motivate five constraints on theorizing about sensory experience. We then propose a novel form of naturalistic intentionalism that succeeds where other theories fail by satisfying all of these constraints. On the proposed theory, which we call structure matching tracking intentionalism, brains states track determinables. Internal structural features of those states select determinates of those determinables for presentation in experience. We argue that this theory is distinctively well-positioned to both explain internal-phenomenal structural correlations and accord external features a role in (...) fixing phenomenology. In addition, we use the theory to shed light on how one comes to experience “missing shades”. (shrink)

While the balance between individual privacy and government monitoring or corporate surveillance has been a frequent topic across numerous disciplines, the issue of privacy within the family has been largely ignored in recent privacy debates. Yet privacy intrusions between parents and children or between adult partners or spouses can be just as profound as those found in the more “public spheres” of life. Popular access to increasingly sophisticated forms of electronic surveillance technologies has altered the dynamics of family relationships. Monitoring, (...) mediated and facilitated by practices of both covert and overt electronic surveillance, has changed the nature of privacy within the family. Parents are tracking children via GPS-enabled cell phone tracking software and are monitoring the Internet use of family members. Parents, siblings, and children are also posting information about their family members online, often without consent, and are creating social media profiles for others online. Prior scholarly work in philosophy and law has primarily addressed the privacy of children from third parties, usually commercial entities, and in the context of making medical decisions. Less attention has been directed at exploring a more general right of privacy of one family member against parents, siblings, children, or spouses. In this article, we do just that. We consider several moral rules that determine appropriate privacy boundaries within the family. More specifically, we will consider when overt or covert surveillance of a child, spouse, or partner by an adult family member is morally permitted. (shrink)

Introduction: the advance of governmentality -- Foucault, power, and governmentality: introduction; what is governmentality?; beyond the microphysics of power?; from theory of the state to genealogy of the state; history of the art of government; pastoral power; raison d'état; liberal governmentality; five propositions on foucault and governmentality -- Governmentality 3.4.7.: introduction; governmentality after Foucault; governmentality and the political sciences; some problems in governmentality -- Foucault effect redux? some notes on international governmentality studies: constellation; a few preliminary observations; problems and debates (...) in international governmentality studies -- Reconnecting governmentality and genealogy: introduction; genealogy and governmentality; pluralizing genealogy; practicing genealogy; lines of descent: the family tree of power?; counter-memory and re-serialization; the retrieval of forgotten struggles and subjugated knowledges -- Conclusion: encountering governmentality: governmentality as a new cartography of power; from mapping to encountering; governmentality and politics. (shrink)

The Architectonics of Meaning is a lucid demonstration of the purposes, methods, and implications of philosophical semantics that both supports and builds on Richard McKeon's and other noted pluralists' convictions that multiple philosophical approaches are viable. Watson ingeniously explores ways to systematize these approaches, and the result is a well-structured instrument for understanding texts. This book exemplifies both general and particular aspects of systematic pluralism, reorienting our understanding of the realms of knowing, doing, and making.

Given the importance of scientific research in shaping our perception of the world, and our senses of what policies will and won’t succeed in altering that world, it is of great practical, political, and moral importance that we carry out scientific research with integrity. The phenomenon of scientific fraud stands in the way of that, as scientists may knowingly enter claims they take to be false into the scientific literature, often knowingly doing so in defiance of norms they profess allegiance (...) to. In this chapter we take a look at some of the causes of scientific fraud, and how it might be manifested in large-scale research teams and situations of anonymous authorship. We find that such cases make trouble for what might seem like intuitive answers to the question “who should be held responsible for this fraud?”, and we argue that in such cases it would be better to hold the entire community responsible for seeing to it that there is less fraud. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Getting Out of the Gate Banking the Turn in Pursuit of Fairness Counting Down the Laps in Pursuit of Happiness The Bell Lap Notes.

Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...) the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it. I develop what Bernard Williams might call a vindicatory genealogy of envy, thereby allowing us to see that envy, rather than undermining egalitarian intuitions, can in fact play a distinct justificatory role (when it is fitting), which undermines the Envy Objection. (shrink)

In the last two decades, philosophy of neuroscience has predominantly focused on explanation. Indeed, it has been argued that mechanistic models are the standards of explanatory success in neuroscience over, among other things, topological models. However, explanatory power is only one virtue of a scientific model. Another is its predictive power. Unfortunately, the notion of prediction has received comparatively little attention in the philosophy of neuroscience, in part because predictions seem disconnected from interventions. In contrast, we argue that topological predictions (...) can and do guide interventions in science, both inside and outside of neuroscience. Topological models allow researchers to predict many phenomena, including diseases, treatment outcomes, aging, and cognition, among others. Moreover, we argue that these predictions also offer strategies for useful interventions. Topology-based predictions play this role regardless of whether they do or can receive a mechanistic interpretation. We conclude by making a case for philosophers to focus on prediction in neuroscience in addition to explanation alone. (shrink)

Altruistic self-sacrifice is rare, supererogatory, and not to be expected of any rational agent; but, the possibility of giving up one's life for the common good has played an important role in moral theorizing. For example, Judith Jarvis Thomson (2008) has argued in a recent paper that intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice suggest that something has gone wrong in philosophical debates over the trolley problem. We begin by showing that her arguments face a series of significant philosophical objections; however, our project (...) is as much constructive as critical. Building on Thomson's philosophical argument, we report the results of a study that was designed to examine commonsense intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice. We find that a surprisingly high proportion of people judge that they should give up their lives to save a small number of unknown strangers. We also find that the willingness to engage in such altruistic self-sacrifice is predicted by a person's religious commitments. Finally, we show that folk-moral judgments are sensitive to agent-relative reasons in a way that diverges in important ways from Thomson's proposed intuitions about the trolley problem. With this in mind, we close with a discussion of the relative merits of folk intuitions and philosophical intuitions in constructing a viable moral theory. (shrink)

Multivariate pattern analysis, or MVPA, has become one of the most popular analytic methods in cognitive neuroscience. Since its inception, MVPA has been heralded as offering much more than regular univariate analyses, for—we are told—it not only can tell us which brain regions are engaged while processing particular stimuli, but also which patterns of neural activity represent the categories the stimuli are selected from. We disagree, and in the current paper we offer four conceptual challenges to the use of MVPA (...) to make claims about neural representation. Our view is that the use of MVPA to make claims about neural representation is problematic. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an empirically-driven approach to the relationship between conceptual and non-conceptual representations. I begin by clarifying Wilfrid Sellars's distinction between a non-conceptual capacity to picture significant aspects of our world, and a capacity to stabilize semantic content in the form of conceptual representations that signify those aspects of the world that are relevant to our shared practices. I argue that this distinction helps to clarify the reason why cognition must be understood as embodied and situated. Drawing (...) on recent models of attention and valuation, I then argue that the human brain constructs a dynamic model of the world that it has encountered, encoding higher-level regularities in the form of linguistically structured representations. And I conclude by arguing that this approach to cognition provides a set of critical resources for understanding the situated nature of social cognition. (shrink)

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the (...) United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography. (shrink)

This chapter examines the recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy that has targeted the commonsense understanding of group minds. It begins by setting up the conceptual and empirical terrain on which claims about the group mind in commonsense psychology have been constructed. The chapter explains an analysis of the cross‐cultural data, which suggest a greater willingness to ascribe collective mentality in East Asian cultures. It addresses that the different strands of data together support the claim that commonsense psychology is (...) committed to a form of methodological holism, which allows for properties of individuals that critically depend on group membership. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this does not cut against philosophical and scientific attempts to defend the existence of collective intentions and group minds; it merely suggests that such projects must move beyond commonsense strategies for predicting and explaining individual behavior. (shrink)

Dorothy Edgington’s work has been at the centre of a range of ongoing debates in philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. This work has focused, although by no means exclusively, on the overlapping areas of conditionals, probability, and paradox. In what follows, I briefly sketch some themes from these three areas relevant to Dorothy’s work, highlighting how some of Dorothy’s work and some of the contributions of this volume fit in to these debates.

ABSTRACTÉmilie du Châtelet’s recently-discovered Essai sur l’optique offers new insights into her early natural philosophy. Here I analyse the Essai in detail, focusing on Du Châtelet’s use of attr...

This article describes and discusses research into lifelong learning in secondary schools that was undertaken at the Australian Council for Educational Research. The project explored ways of helping secondary school students develop an intrinsic interest in learning, in the belief that such an approach will encourage young people to keep learning throughout their lives. Skills and values that help young people to develop characteristics of lifelong learners are outlined. The article suggests that development of these characteristics may be impeded by (...) the strong influence of competitive end-of-school assessment in many schools, and the difficulty of changing the practices and attitudes of some of the people who play a significant role in a young person's education: parents and teachers. (shrink)

I think it will be generally admitted that if Oxford philosophers have any claim to have added in recent years to the store of our philosophical ideas, it lies in their published works on the theory of conduct. I don’t think it can be claimed that, even in this sphere, they have given us many new and illuminating positive truths. After reading Mr. Ross, Professor Prichard, and Mr. Joseph, we are left, I think, with the impression that the whole subject (...) is much more intricate and puzzling than we should have thought possible. I intend in this paper to try and discover what is true in the theories of these three moralists on one of the most difficult and puzzling of ethical problems, viz., “What Renders a Right Act Right?” Professor Prichard and Mr. Ross, in the main, stand together; it is regrettable that Professor Prichard's published work is so very meagre. And if in quoting from his article in Mind , 1912, on “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake,” I am doing him an injustice in attributing to him any views which he no longer holds, I am sorry; but modesty in publishing has its penalties, and anyhow, the article is too guilty an offender to get off free, for its annoying subtleties started the whole trouble, and led indirectly to Some Problems in Ethics and the Right and the Good. (shrink)

Contribución de eruditos autores sobre aspectos trascendentales de la teoría pura del derecho. Esta obra debe verse como una expresión de esa renovada ocupación con los problemas de la doctrina de Kelsen.

This book develops a novel approach to distributed cognition and collective intentionality. It is argued that collective mentality should be only be posited where specialized subroutines are integrated in a way that yields skillful, goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to concerns that are relevant to a group as such.

This paper discusses a crisis of accountability that arises when scientific collaborations are massively epistemically distributed. We argue that social models of epistemic collaboration, which are social analogs to what Patrick Suppes called a “model of the experiment,” must play a role in creating accountability in these contexts. We also argue that these social models must accommodate the fact that the various agents in a collaborative project often have ineliminable, messy, and conflicting interests and values; any story about accountability in (...) a massively distributed collaboration must therefore involve models of such interests and values and their methodological and epistemic effects. (shrink)

Does the brain behave indeterministically? I argue that accounting for ion channels, key functional units in the brain, requires indeterministic models. These models are probabilistic, so the brain does behave indeterministically in a weak sense. I explore the implications of this point for a stronger sense of indeterminism. Ultimately I argue that it is not possible, either empirically or through philosophical argument, to show that the brain is indeterministic in that stronger sense.

The neural reuse framework developed primarily by Michael Anderson proposes that brain regions are involved in multiple and diverse cognitive tasks and that brain regions flexibly and dynamically interact in different combinations to carry out cognitive functioning. We argue that the evidence cited by Anderson and others falls short of supporting the fundamental principles of neural reuse. We map out this problem and provide solutions by drawing on recent advances in network neuroscience, and we argue that methods employed in network (...) neuroscience provide the means to fully engage in a research program operating under the principles of neural reuse. (shrink)

This Article presents an innovative institutional strategy for global climate protection, quite distinct from, but ultimately complementary to and supportive of the currently stalled UNFCCC climate treaty negotiations. The bottom-up strategy relies on a variety of smallerscale transnational cooperative arrangements, involving not only states but sub-national jurisdictions, firms, and CSOs, to undertake activities whose primary goal is not climate mitigation but which will achieve greenhouse gas reductions as an inherent byproduct. This strategy avoids the inherent problems in securing an enforceable (...) treaty to secure the global public good of climate protection by mobilizing other incentives - including economic self-interest, energy security, cleaner air, and furtherance of international development - to motivate such actors to cooperate on actions that will also benefit the climate. These bottom-up regimes will contribute to global climate action not only by achieving emissions reductions in the short-term, but also by linking the bottom-up regimes to the UNFCCC system through greenhouse gas monitoring and reporting systems. In these ways, the bottom-up strategy will help secure eventual agreement on a global climate treaty. (shrink)

El profesor Robert Walter, el más eminente representante de la Teoría Pura del Derecho en nuestro tiempo, estudia en "Hans Kelsen, la Teoría Pura del Derecho y el problema de la justicia" y "Normas y enunciados sobre normas", los dos textos que componen esta obra, los puntos centrales del pensamiento filosófico y jurídico de Hans Kelsen.

Critics of functionalism about the mind often rely on the intuition that collectivities cannot be conscious in motivating their positions. In this paper, we consider the merits of appealing to the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity. We demonstrate that collective mentality is not an affront to commonsense, and we report evidence that demonstrates that the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity is, to some extent, culturally specific rather (...) than universally held. This being the case, we argue that mere appeal to the intuitive implausibility of collective consciousness does not offer any genuine insight into the nature of mentality in general, nor the nature of consciousness in particular. (shrink)

En este trabajo presentamos los fundamentos teóricos de una propuesta para el abordaje didáctico de concepciones teleológicas de los y las estudiantes en la enseñanza de la Biología. La propuesta en cuestión supone acudir al modo en que Darwin lidió con las concepciones teleológicas dominantes entre sus contemporáneos, para proponer una estrategia general a través de la cual se podría incidir sobre las intuiciones teleológicas de los estudiantes, de modo que se pueda facilitar el aprendizaje de la teoría de la (...) selección natural. Sugeriremos también que esta propuesta implica un modo original de apelar a la analogía entre el cambio teórico en la Historia de la Ciencia y el aprendizaje de las ciencias. (shrink)

Summary For the study of the first year of life, Sander, Stern, and Gomez each chose the adult–infant relationship as the unit of analysis; they followed its development, respectively, in moments of meeting, in the proto-conversation and in the focus of attention. The authors explicitly refer to the Gestalt theory and support the need to interpret the behavior of the child as part of a wider context, as the experiences of a person in relation since birth.

Se resume en esta obra el vasto y complejo sistema teórico-jurídico de Hans Kelsen, el jurista más grande de nuestro siglo. La doctrina de Kelsen y en particular su Teoría Pura del Derecho han conocido muchas vicisitudes y ataques debidos más a prejuicios políticos y racistas que a una verdadera confrontación con sus tesis. El autor enfatiza en el hecho de que la doctrina jurídica de Kelsen no es una teoría terminada y archivada sino en permanente desarrollo, una teoría a (...) cuya ulterior construcción están convocados todos los juristas. (shrink)