This anthology is a thorough introduction to classic literature for those who have not yet experienced these literary masterworks. For those who have known and loved these works in the past, this is an invitation to reunite with old friends in a fresh new format. From Shakespeare's finesse to Oscar Wilde's wit, this unique collection brings together works as diverse and influential as The Pilgrim's Progress and Othello. As an anthology that invites readers to immerse themselves in the masterpieces of (...) the literary giants, it is must-have addition to any library. (shrink)

Enactivists frequently argue their account heralds a revolution in cognitive science: enactivism will unseat cognitivism as the dominant paradigm. We examine the lines of reasoning enactivists employ in stirring revolt, but show that none of these prove compelling reasons for cognitivism to be replaced by enactivism. First, we examine the hard sell of enactivism: enactivism reveals a critical explanatory gap at the heart of cognitivism. We show that enactivism does not meet the requirements to incite a paradigm shift in the (...) Kuhnian sense—there is no internal crisis in cognitivism. Nor does it provide inherently better explanations of cognition as some have claimed. Second, we consider the soft sell of enactivism: enactivism provides a more attractive, parsimonious, or clear-eyed lens on cognition. This move proves to boil down to a misunderstanding of how theories are selected in science. Instead we lend support to a broader and more desirable way to conceive of enactivism, the recent proposal that enactivism is a philosophy of nature. We explain how a philosophy of nature does more than support a single research paradigm by integrating scientific questions into a cohesive picture. (shrink)

This paper considers a new problem for desire theories of well-being. The problem claims that these theories are implausible because they misvalue the effects of fleeting desires, long-standing desires, and fluctuations in desire strength on well-being. I begin by investigating a version of the desire theory of well-being, simple concurrentism, that fails to capture intuitions in these cases. I then argue that desire theories of well-being that are suitably stability-adjusted can avoid this problem. These theories claim that the average strength (...) of a desire, and the length of time that it is held, both influence the extent to which its fulfilment or frustration affects well-being. I end by considering whether value-fulfilment theories of well-being have a more attractive response to this problem. I find that these theories have significant downsides that make them unappealing alternatives. (shrink)

Exploring the relevance of biological discovery to philosophical topics such as perception, freedom, determinism, and ethical values, J.Z. Young's provocative book illuminates the significant links between these philosophical concepts and recent developments in biology and the neurosciences. In clear-cut language, Young describes the brain and its functions, examining questions concerning physical makeup versus "real" self, the awareness of our moral sense, and how human consciousness differs from that of other animals. He approaches perception not as a passive process but as (...) an active search for information, suggesting that human knowledge develops from a special process--essential to all organisms--of gathering information for survival. (shrink)

Constitutivist accounts of self-knowledge argue that a noncontingent, conceptual relation holds between our first-order mental states and our introspective awareness of them. I explicate a constitutivist account of our knowledge of our own beliefs and defend it against criticisms recently raised by Christopher Peacocke. According to Peacocke, constitutivism says that our second-order introspective beliefs are groundless. I show that Peacocke’s arguments apply to reliabilism not to constitutivism per se, and that by adopting a functionalist account of direct accessibility a constitutivist (...) can avoid reliabilism. I then argue that the resulting view is preferable to Peacocke’s own account of self-knowledge. (shrink)

This article demonstrates that non-mechanistic, dynamical explanations are a viable approach to explanation in the special sciences. The claim that dynamical models can be explanatory without reference to mechanisms has previously been met with three lines of criticism from mechanists: the causal relevance concern, the genuine laws concern, and the charge of predictivism. I argue, however, that these mechanist criticisms fail to defeat non-mechanistic, dynamical explanation. Using the examples of Haken et al.’s model of bimanual coordination, and Thelen et al.’s (...) dynamical field model of infant perseverative reaching, I show how each mechanist criticism fails once the standards of Woodward’s interventionist framework are applied to dynamical models. An even-handed application of Woodwardian interventionism reveals that dynamical models are capable of producing genuine explanations without appealing to underlying mechanistic details. 1Introduction2Interventionism and Mechanistic Explanation 2.1Causal relevance and ideal interventions2.2Invariance2.3Explanation3Covering-Laws and Dynamical Explanation 3.1Dynamical models3.2Covering-law explanation3.3Prediction4Causal Relevance 4.1The causal relevance concern4.2Intervening on dynamical models4.3Test case I: The Haken–Kelso–Bunz model4.4Test case II: Dynamical field model5Genuine Laws 5.1The genuine laws concern5.2Using invariance in place of laws5.3Test case I: The Haken–Kelso–Bunz model5.4Test case II: Dynamical field model6Prediction 6.1Predictivism6.2Crude and invariant prediction7Interventionist Criticism of the Haken–Kelso–Bunz Model8Dynamical Explanation8Conclusion. (shrink)

The formulation and proof of Hume’s Law and several related inference barrier theses.

The philosophy of logical atomism.--Logical atomism.

We propose a Bayesian framework for the attribution of knowledge, and apply this framework to generate novel predictions about knowledge attribution for different types of “Gettier cases”, in which an agent is led to a justified true belief yet has made erroneous assumptions. We tested these predictions using a paradigm based on semantic integration. We coded the frequencies with which participants falsely recalled the word “thought” as “knew” (or a near synonym), yielding an implicit measure of conceptual activation. Our experiments (...) confirmed the predictions of our Bayesian account of knowledge attribution across three experiments. We found that Gettier cases due to counterfeit objects were not treated as knowledge (Experiment 1), but those due to intentionally-replaced evidence were (Experiment 2). Our findings are not well explained by an alternative account focused only on luck, because accidentally-replaced evidence activated the knowledge concept more strongly than did similar false belief cases (Experiment 3). We observed a consistent pattern of results across a number of different vignettes that varied the quality and type of evidence available to agents, the relative stakes involved, and surface details of content. Accordingly, the present findings establish basic phenomena surrounding people’s knowledge attributions in Gettier cases, and provide explanations of these phenomena within a Bayesian framework. (shrink)

What does it mean to "trust?" What makes us feel secure enough to place our confidence—even at times our welfare—in the hands of other people? Is it possible to "trust" an institution? What exactly do people mean when they claim to "distrust" their governments? As difficult as it may be to define, trust is essential to the formation and maintenance of a civil society. In Trust and Trustworthiness political scientist Russell Hardin addresses the standard theories of trust and articulates (...) his own new and compelling idea: that much of what we call trust can be best described as "encapsulated interest." Research into the roles of trust in our society has offered a broad range of often conflicting theories. Some theorists maintain that trust is a social virtue that cannot be reduced to strategic self-interest; others claim that trusting another person is ultimately a rational calculation based on information about that person and his or her incentives and motivations. Hardin argues that we place our trust in persons whom we believe to have strong reasons to act in our best interests. He claims that we are correct when we assume that the main incentive of those whom we trust is to maintain a relationship with us—whether it be for reasons of economic benefit or for love and friendship. Hardin articulates his theory using examples from a broad array of personal and social relationships, paying particular attention to explanations of the development of trusting relationships. He also examines trustworthiness and seeks to understand why people may behave in ways that violate their own self-interest in order to honor commitments they have made to others. The book also draws important distinctions between vernacular uses of "trust" and "trustworthiness," contrasting, for example, the type of trust (or distrust) we place in individuals with the trust we place in institutions Trust and Trustworthiness represents the culmination of important new research into the roles of trust in our society; it offers a challenging new voice in the current discourse about the origins of cooperative behavior and its consequences for social and civic life. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust. (shrink)

Mechanistic explanations are often said to explain because they reveal the causal structure of the world. Conversely, dynamical models supposedly lack explanatory power because they do not describe causal structure. The only way for dynamical models to produce causal explanations is via the 3M criterion: the model must be mapped onto a mechanism. This framing of the situation has become the received view around the viability of dynamical explanation. In this paper, I argue against this position and show that dynamical (...) models can themselves reveal causal structure and consequently produce nonmechanistic, dynamical explanations. Taking the example of cell fates from systems biology, I show how dynamical models, and specifically the attractor landscapes they describe, identify the causes of cell differentiation and explain why cells select particular fates. These dynamical features of the system better fit Woodward’s (2010, 2018) criteria of specificity and proportionality and make them the best candidate causes of cell fates than mechanisms. I also show how these causes are irreducible and inaccessible to mechanistic models, making 3M unworkable and counterproductive in this case. Dynamical models can reveal dynamical causes and thereby provide causal explanations. (shrink)

In this book, Russell Winslow analyzes contemporary discourses in microbiology and evolutionary inheritance theory to foreground the metaphysical prejudices that unreflectively subtend these discourses, highlight and illuminate an emergent prejudice of an ecological ontology in microbiology, and determine what interpretive possibilities it affords.

This book explores the rise of theoretical physics in 19th century Germany. The authors show how the junior second physicist in German universities over time became the theoretical physicist, of equal standing to the experimental physicist. Gustav Kirchhoff, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Max Planck are among the great German theoretical physicists whose work and career are examined in this book. Physics was then the only natural science in which theoretical work developed into a major teaching and research specialty in its (...) own right. Readers will discover how German physicists arrived at a well-defined field of theoretical physics with well understood and generally accepted goals and needs. The authors explain the nature of the work of theoretical physics with many examples, taking care always to locate the research within the workplace. The book is a revised and shortened version of Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein, a two-volume work by the same authors. This new edition represents a reformulation of the larger work. It retains what is most important in the original work, while including new material, sharpening discussions, and making the research more accessible to readers. It presents a thorough examination of a seminal era in physics. (shrink)

Fried and Kollár constructed a fully faithful functor from the category of graphs to the category of fields. We give a new construction of such a functor and use it to resolve a longstanding open problem in computable model theory, by showing that for every nontrivial countable structure${\cal S}$, there exists a countable field${\cal F}$of arbitrary characteristic with the same essential computable-model-theoretic properties as${\cal S}$. Along the way, we develop a new “computable category theory”, and prove that our functor and (...) its partially defined inverse are computable functors. (shrink)

When one wants to use citizen input to inform policy, what should the standards of informedness on the part of the citizens be? While there are moral reasons to allow every citizen to participate and have a voice on every issue, regardless of education and involvement, designers of participatory assessments have to make decisions about how to structure deliberations as well as how much background information and deliberation time to provide to participants. After assessing different frameworks for the relationship between (...) science and society, we use Philip Kitcher's framework of Well-Ordered Science to propose an epistemic standard on how citizen deliberations should be structured. We explore what potential standards follow from this epistemic framework focusing on significance versus scientific and engineering expertise. We argue that citizens should be tutored on the historical context of why scientific questions became significant and deemed scientifically and socially valuable, and if citizens report that they are capable of weighing in on an issue then they should be able to do so. We explore what this standard can mean by looking at actual citizen deliberations tied to the 2014 NASA ECAST Asteroid Initiative Citizen forums. We code different vignettes of citizens debating alternative approaches for Mars exploration based upon what level of information seemed to be sufficient for them to feel comfortable in making a policy position. The analysis provides recommendations on how to design and assess future citizen assessments grounded in properly conveying the historical value context surrounding a scientific issue and trusting citizens to seek out sufficient information to deliberate. (shrink)

In this paper we examine how the use of robots in caring for elders can impact the meaningfulness of elders’ lives. We present a framework for understanding ‘meaningfulness in life’, and then apply that framework in discussing ways in which the use of robots to assist in activities of daily living can preserve, enhance or undermine the meaningfulness of elders’ lives. We conclude with a discussion of if and how having false beliefs about companion robots can affect meaningfulness in the (...) life of the person having those false beliefs. (shrink)

First published in 1984. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this article, we present ideas related to three key aspects of mindfulness training: the regulation of attention via noradrenaline, the importance of working memory and its various components (particularly the central executive and episodic buffer), and the relationship of both of these to mind-wandering. These same aspects of mindfulness training are also involved in the preparation and execution of movement and implicated in the pathophysiology of psychosis. We argue that by moving in a mindful way, there may be an (...) additive effect of training as the two elements of the practice (mindfulness and movement) independently, and perhaps synergistically, engage common underlying systems (the default mode network). We discuss how working with mindful movement may be one route to mindfulness training for individuals who would struggle to sit still to complete the more commonly taught mindfulness practices. Drawing on our clinical experience working with individuals with severe and enduring mental health conditions, we show the real world application of these ideas and how they can be used to help those who are suffering and for whom current treatments are still far from adequate. (shrink)

Objective—To explore the opinions of unpaid healthy volunteers on the payment of research subjects.Design—Prospective cohort.Setting—Southern Alberta, Canada.Participants—Medically eligible persons responding to recruiting advertisements for a randomised vaccine trial were invited to take part in a study of informed consent at the point at which they formally consented or refused trial participation. Of 72 invited, 67 returned questionnaires at baseline and 54 at follow-up.Outcome measures—Proportions of persons who agreed or disagreed with three close-ended statements on the payment of research subjects; themes (...) and categories identified by content analysis of responses to an open-ended question.Results—A minority agreed with paying either patient or healthy volunteer participants. Opinions did not change over time. Participants' comments addressed: benefits and drawbacks to research participation; benefits and drawbacks to paying research participants; conditions under which payment of research subjects would be acceptable, and the nature of acceptable recognition. Acceptable conditions were to improve problematic recruitment, to reimburse costs, and to recognise participants, particularly for their time investment. Both non-monetary and monetary recognition of volunteers were thought to be appropriate.Conclusions—Most unpaid volunteers disagreed with paying research participants. The themes arising from their comments are similar to those that have been raised by ethicists and suggest that recognising the time and effort of participants should receive greater emphasis than presently occurs. (shrink)

We use the Low Basis Theorem of Jockusch and Soare to show that all computable algebraic fields are d-computably categorical for a particular Turing degree d with d' = θ", but that not all such fields are 0'-computably categorical. We also prove related results about algebraic fields with splitting algorithms, and fields of finite transcendence degree over ℚ.

Fish, S. Georgics of the mind: Bacon's philosophy and the experience of his Essays.--Brett, R. L. Thomas Hobbes.--Watt, I. Realism and the novel.--Tuveson, E. Locke and Sterne.--Kampf, L. Gibbon and Hume.--Frye, N. Blake's case against Locke.--Abrams, M. H. Mechanical and organic psychologies of literary invention.--Ryle, G. Jane Austen and the moralists.--Schneewind, J. B. Moral problems and moral philosophy in the Victorian period.--Donagan, A. Victorian philosophical prose: J. S. Mill and F. H. Bradley.--Pitcher, G. Wittgenstein, nonsense, and Lewis Carroll.--Bolgan, A. C. (...) The philosophy of F. H. Bradley and the mind and art of T. S. Eliot: an introduction.--Davie, D. Yeats, Berkeley, and Romanticism.--Ross, M. L. The mythology of friendship: D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and "The Blind man".--Rosenbaum, S. P. The philosophical realism of Virginia Woolf.--Bibliography (p. 357-360). (shrink)

Despite recent advances in ways to prevent transmission of HIV from a mother to her child during pregnancy, infants continue to be born and become infected with HIV, particularly in southern Africa where HIV prevalence is the highest in the world. In this region, emphasis has shifted from voluntary HIV counselling and testing to routine testing of women during pregnancy. There have also been proposals for mandatory testing. Could mandatory testing ever be an option, even in high-prevalence settings? Many previous (...) examinations of mandatory testing have dealt with it in the context of low HIV prevalence and a well-resourced health care system. In this discussion, different assumptions are made. Within this context, where mandatory testing may be a strategy of last resort, the objections to it are reviewed. Special attention is paid in the discussion to the entrenched vulnerability of women in much of southern Africa and how this contributes to both HIV prevalence and ongoing challenges for preventing HIV transmission during pregnancy. While mandatory testing is ethically plausible, particularly when coupled with guaranteed access to treatment and care, the discussion argues that the moment to employ this strategy has not yet come. Many barriers remain for pregnant women in terms of access to testing, treatment and care, most acutely in the southern African setting, despite the presence of national and international human rights instruments aimed at empowering women and removing such barriers. While this situation persists, mandatory HIV testing during pregnancy cannot be justified. (shrink)

First published in 1984. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Mechanistic explanations, according to one prominent account, are derived from objective explanations (Craver 2007, 2014 ). Mechanistic standards of explanation are in turn pulled from nature, and are thereby insulated from the values of investigators, since explanation is an objectively defined achievement grounded in the causal structure of the world (Craver 2014 ). This results in the closure of mechanism’s explanatory standards—it is insulated from the values, norms and goals of investigators. I raise two problems with this position. First, it (...) relies on several ontological claims which, while plausible, fail to guarantee the objectivity of mechanistic explanatory standards to the degree of certainty required. Second, Craver’s position itself introduces a value–laden explanatory standard—the 3M requirement (Kaplan & Craver 2011 )—which undermines the closure of explanatory standards. I show how in practice mechanistic explanation is in part guided by explanatory taste, shorthand for background contextual values that influence our standards of explanation. Mechanism often has a particular pragmatically-oriented taste for control, and gerrymanders explanatory standards in order to obtain it. I conclude by arguing that objectivity, rather than being obtained through the right set of explanatory standards, is better thought of as the result of processes of intersubjective criticism, which renders visible the contextual values of communities of investigators and allows them to be controlled for (Longino 1990 ). (shrink)

Scholarship on faculty and student perceptions of plagiarism is plagued by a vast, scattered constellation of perspectives, context, and nuance. Cultural, disciplinary, and institutional subtitles, among others in how plagiarism is defined and perspectives about it tested obfuscate consensus about how students and faculty perceive and understand plagiarism and what can or should be done about those perspectives. However, there is clear consensus that understanding how students and faculty perceive plagiarism is foundational to mitigating and preventing plagiarism. This study takes (...) up the challenge of investigating its own institution’s student and faculty perspectives on plagiarism by testing whether students and instructors differentiate between different kinds or genres of plagiarism, and measuring differences in their perception of seriousness or severity of those genres. Using a device modified from the ‘plagiarism spectrum’ published by Turnitin®, the researchers implemented a campus-wide survey of faculty and student perceptions, and analyzed the data using two different methodologies to ensure results triangulation. This study demonstrates both students and faculty clearly differentiate between kinds of plagiarism, but not on their severity. This study demonstrates both students and faculty clearly differentiate the severity between kinds of plagiarism, but not on the specific rank or order of their severity. Further, this study’s novel methodology is demonstrated as valuable for use by other academic institutions to investigate and understand their cultures of plagiarism. (shrink)

Virtue ethicists sometimes say that a right action is what a virtuous person would do, characteristically, in the circumstances. But some have objected recently that right action cannot be defined as what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances because there are circumstances in which a right action is possible but in which no virtuous person would be found. This objection moves from the premise that a given person ought to do an action that no virtuous person would do, (...) to the conclusion that the action is a right action. I demon‐strate that virtue ethicists distinguish “ought” from “right” and reject the assumption that “ought” implies “right.” I then show how their rejection of that assumption blocks this “right but not virtuous” objection. I conclude by showing how the thesis that “ought” does not imply “right” can clarify a further dispute in virtue ethics regarding whether “ought” implies “can.”. (shrink)

There are many ways that biological theory can inform ethical discussions of genetic engineering and biomedical enhancement. In this essay, we highlight some of these potential contributions, and along the way provide a synthetic overview of the papers that comprise this special issue. We begin by comparing and contrasting genetic engineering with programs of selective breeding that led to the domestication of plants and animals, and we consider how genetic engineering differs from other contemporary biotechnologies such as embryo selection. We (...) go on to consider the implications of genetic engineering for human nature, human evolution, and persistence of the human species. Finally, we question whether genetic interventions warrant the extraordinary ethical scrutiny they are often given, and we show how the misleading “genetic blueprint” metaphor has imposed a faulty structure on the enhancement debate. We conclude by considering the nature of biological development and the sobering limits it places on what genetic engineering can reasonably hope to achieve. (shrink)

In book 3 of his Republic, Plato has Socrates undertake an assessment of the educational curriculum that the city (which is being constructed by him in speech) will implement for its youth. Consequently we see that Socrates assigns to poetry a crucial importance; by their imitation of it, poetry shapes the citizens with an initial formation, casts them within a certain orientation, and places them on a path leading in an already conceived direction, toward some unarticulated good. Thus, in forming (...) this city and the souls of its citizens, Socrates first conducts a censorship of the content of the formative myths of the city in an attempt to orchestrate a certain fail-safe against ambiguity and against falling off .. (shrink)