We examined the efficacy of including a research intermediary (RI) during the consent process in reducing participants' perceptions of coercion to enroll in a research study. Eighty-four drug court clients being recruited into an ongoing study were randomized to receive a standard informed consent process alone (standard condition) or with an RI (intermediary condition). Before obtaining consent, RIs met with clients individually to discuss remaining concerns. Findings provided preliminary evidence that RIs reduced client perceptions that their participation might influence how (...) clinical and judicial staff view them. This suggests that using RIs may improve participant autonomy in clinical studies. (shrink)

Evidence suggests that research participants often fail to recall much of the information provided during the informed consent process. This study was conducted to determine the proportion of consent information recalled by drug court participants following a structured informed consent procedure and the neuropsychological factors that were related to recall. Eighty-five participants completed a standard informed consent procedure to participate in an ongoing research study, followed by a 17-item consent quiz and a brief neuropsychological battery 2 weeks later. Participants performed (...) within the normal range on most of the neuropsychological measures, although roughly one third showed deficits on measures of executive functioning. Participants failed to recall over 65% of the consent information within 2 weeks of entering the study, and their recall was significantly correlated with verbal IQ, drug problem severity, reading ability, memory, and attention. These factors may be useful in determining whether research participants require enhanced consent procedures. (shrink)

Introduction Research supports the efficacy of both a remedial consent procedure ) and a motivational consent procedure for improving recall of informed consent to research. Although these strategies were statistically superior to standard consent, effects were modest and not clinically significant. This study examines a combined incentivised consent and CF procedure that simplifies the cognitive task and increases motivation to learn consent information.Methods We randomly assigned 104 individuals consenting to an unrelated host study to a consent as usual condition or (...) an incentivised CF condition . All participants were told they would be quizzed on their consent recall following their baseline assessment and at 4 monthly follow-ups. ICF participants were also informed that they would earn $5 for each correct answer and receive CF as needed.Results Quiz scores in the two conditions did not differ at the first administration ; however, ICF scores were significantly higher at each subsequent administration .Conclusions The ICF procedure increased consent recall from 72% to 83%, compared with the CAU condition in which recall decreased from 69% to 59%. This supports the statistical and clinical utility of a combined remedial and motivational consent procedure for enhancing recall of study information and human research protections. (shrink)

This study examined the efficacy of corrected feedback for improving consent recall throughout the course of an ongoing longitudinal study. Participants were randomly assigned to either a corrected feedback or a no-feedback control condition. Participants completed a consent quiz 2 weeks after consenting to the host study and at months 1, 2, and 3. The corrected feedback group received corrections to erroneous responses and the no-feedback control group did not. The feedback group displayed significantly greater recall overall and in specific (...) content areas. Results support the use of corrected feedback for improving consent recall. (shrink)

Ss, holding either extreme or moderate initial attitudes, wrote counterattitudinal essays in a test of contradictory hypotheses derived from Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory and Bem’s self-perception theory. The results indicated, as predicted by dissonance theory, that Ss holding extreme initial attitudes showed more attitude change after counterattitudinal advocacy than Ss holding moderate initial attitudes. It was demonstrated that the results were not due to regression effects, to the production of differentially persuasive essays across the extremity conditions, or to the (...) fact that Ss holding extreme attitudes had more ’’room for. (shrink)

_Real Essentialism_ presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many, if not most, philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. _Real Essentialism_ reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essentialist metaphysics, defending the reality and knowability (...) of essence, the possibility of objective, immutable definition, and its relevance to contemporary scientific and metaphysical issues such as whether essence transcends physics and chemistry, the essence of life, the nature of biological species, and the nature of the person. (shrink)

We examine two different descriptions of the behavioral functions of the hippocampal system. One emphasizes spatially organized behaviors, especially those using cognitive maps. The other emphasizes memory, particularly working memory, a short-term memory that requires iexible stimulus-response associations and is highly susceptible to interference. The predictive value of the spatial and memory descriptions were evaluated by testing rats with damage to the hippocampal system in a series of experiments, independently manipulating the spatial and memory characteristics of a behavioral task. No (...) dissociations were found when the spatial characteristics of the stimuli to be remembered were changed; lesions produced a similar deficit in both spatial and nonspatial test procedures, indicating that the hippocampus was similarly involved regardless of the spatial nature of the task. In contrast, a marked dissociation was found when the memory requirements were altered. Rats with lesions were able to perform accurately in tasks that could be solved exclusively on the basis of reference memory. They performed at chance levels and showed no signs of recovery even with extensive postoperative training in tasks that required working memory. In one experiment all the characteristics of the reference memory and working memory procedures were identical except the type of memory required. Consequently, the behavioral dissociation cannot be explained by differences in attention, motivation, response inhibition, or the type of stimuli to be remembered. As a result of these experiments we propose that the hippocampus is selectively involved in behaviors that require working memory, irrespective of the type of material that is to be processed by that memory. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.

DCPS is a connectionist production system interpreter that uses distributed representations. As a connectionist model it consists of many simple, richly interconnected neuron‐like computing units that cooperate to solve problems in parallel. One motivation for constructing DCPS was to demonstrate that connectionist models are capable of representing and using explicit rules. A second motivation was to show how “coarse coding” or “distributed representations” can be used to construct a working memory that requires far fewer units than the number of different (...) facts that can potentially be stored. The simulation we present is intended as a detailed demonstration of the feasibility of certain ideas and should not be viewed as a full implementation of production systems. Our current model only has a few of the many interesting emergent properties that we eventually hope to demonstrate: It is damage‐resistant, it performs matching and variable binding by massively parallel constraint satisfaction, and the capacity of its working memory is dependent on the similarity of the items being stored. (shrink)

Proponents of physical intentionality argue that the classic hallmarks of intentionality highlighted by Brentano are also found in purely physical powers. Critics worry that this idea is metaphysically obscure at best, and at worst leads to panpsychism or animism. I examine the debate in detail, finding both confusion and illumination in the physical intentionalist thesis. Analysing a number of the canonical features of intentionality, I show that they all point to one overarching phenomenon of which both the mental and the (...) physical are kinds, namely finality. This is the finality of ‘final causes’, the long-discarded idea of universal action for an end to which recent proponents of physical intentionality are in fact pointing whether or not they realise it. I explain finality in terms of the concept of specific indifference, arguing that in the case of the mental, specific indifference is realised by the process of abstraction, which has no correlate in the case of physical powers. This analysis, I conclude, reveals both the strength and weakness of rational creatures such as us, as well as demystifying the way in which powers work. (shrink)

The Dead Donor Rule holds that removing organs from a living human being without their consent is wrongful killing. The rule still prevails in most countries, and I assume it without argument in order to pose the question: is it possible to have a metaphysically correct, clinically relevant analysis of human death that makes organ donation possible? I argue that the two dominant criteria of death, brain death and circulatory death, are both empirically and metaphysically inadequate as definitions of human (...) death, and therefore of no epistemic value in themselves. I first set out a neo-Aristotelian theory of death as separation of soul (understood as organising principle) and body, which is then fleshed out as loss of organismic integrity. The brain and circulatory criteria are shown to have severe weaknesses as physiological manifestations of loss of integrity. Given the mismatch between what death is metaphysically speaking, and the dominant criteria accepted by clinicians and philosophers, it turns out that only actual bodily decomposition is a sure sign of death. In this I differ from Alan Shewmon, whose important work I discuss in detail. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealisedexplanation gamein which players collaborate to find the best explanation(s) for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal patterns of (...) variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a (conditionally) optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

"Nivison brings out the exciting variety within Confucian thought, as he interprets and elucidates key thinkers from over two thousand years, from Confucius himself, through Mencius and Xunzi, to such later Confucians as Wang Yangming, Dai Zhen, and Zhang Xuecheng."--Cover.

As machine learning has gradually entered into ever more sectors of public and private life, there has been a growing demand for algorithmic explainability. How can we make the predictions of complex statistical models more intelligible to end users? A subdiscipline of computer science known as interpretable machine learning (IML) has emerged to address this urgent question. Numerous influential methods have been proposed, from local linear approximations to rule lists and counterfactuals. In this article, I highlight three conceptual challenges that (...) are largely overlooked by authors in this area. I argue that the vast majority of IML algorithms are plagued by (1) ambiguity with respect to their true target; (2) a disregard for error rates and severe testing; and (3) an emphasis on product over process. Each point is developed at length, drawing on relevant debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. Examples and counterexamples from IML are considered, demonstrating how failure to acknowledge these problems can result in counterintuitive and potentially misleading explanations. Without greater care for the conceptual foundations of IML, future work in this area is doomed to repeat the same mistakes. (shrink)

The old scholastic principle of the "convertibility" of being and goodness strikes nearly all moderns as either barely comprehensible or plain false. "Convertible" is a term of art meaning "interchangeable" in respect of predication, where the predicates can be exchanged salva veritate albeit not salva sensu: their referents are, as the maxim goes, really the same albeit conceptually different. The principle seems, at first blush, absurd. Did the scholastics literally mean that every being is good? Is that supposed to include (...) a cancer, a malaria parasite, an earthquake that kills millions? If every being is good, then no being is bad—but how can that be? To the contemporary philosophical mind, such bafflement is understandable. It derives from the systematic dismantling of the great scholastic edifice that took place over half a millennium. With the loss of the basic concepts out of which that edifice was built, the space created by those concepts faded out of existence as well. The convertibility principle, like virtually all the other scholastic principles (not all, since some do survive and thrive in analytic philosophy), could not persist in a post-scholastic space wholly alien to it. (shrink)

The distinction between the essence of an object and its properties has been obscured in contemporary discussion of essentialism. Locke held that the properties of an object are exclusively those features that ‘flow’ from its essence. Here he follows the Aristotelian theory, leaving aside Locke’s own scepticism about the knowability of essence. I defend the need to distinguish sharply between essence and properties, arguing that essence must be given by form and that properties flow from form. I give a precise (...) definition of what the term of art ‘flow’ amounts to, and apply the distinction to various kinds of taxonomic issues. (shrink)

mix of the concrete and the abstract (if we include universals, laws, propositions and the like), but whichever of these is the case, the world is not purely abstract, as a formal structure is. One might claim, however, that the world is a structure1 in the sense that it instantiates a structure and is nothing else. In other words, all there is to the..

We live in a liberal, pluralistic, largely secular society where, in theory, there is fundamental protection for freedom of conscience generally and freedom of religion in particular. There is, however, both in statute and common law, increasing pressure on religious believers and conscientious objectors to act in ways that violate their sincere, deeply held beliefs. This is particularly so in health care, where conscientious objection is coming under extreme pressure. I argue that freedom of religion and conscience need to be (...) put on a sounder footing both legislatively and by the courts, particularly in health care. I examine a number of important legal cases in the UK and US, where freedom of religion and conscience have come into conflict with government mandates or equality and anti-discrimination law. In these and other cases we find one of two results: either the conscientious objector loses out against competing rights, or the conscientious objector succeeds, but due to what I consider unsound judicial reasoning. In particular, cases involving cooperation in what the objector considers morally impermissible according to their beliefs have been wrongly understood by some American courts. I argue that a reasonable theory of cooperation incorporated into judicial thinking would enable more acceptable results that gave sufficient protection to conscientious objectors without risking a judicial backlash against objectors who wanted to take their freedoms too far. I also venture into broader, more controversial waters concerning what I call freedom of dissociation – the fundamental right to withdraw from associating with people, groups, and activities. It is no more than the converse of freedom of association, which all free societies recognise as a basic right. How far should freedom of dissociation go? What might society be like if freedom of dissociation were given more protection in law than it currently has? It would certainly give freedom of religion and conscience a substantial foundation, but it could also lead to discriminatory behaviour to which many people would object. I explore some of these issues, before going back to the narrower area of freedom of conscience and religion in health care, making some proposals about how the law could strengthen these basic pillars of a liberal, free society. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

Things change. If anything counts as a datum of metaphysics, that does. Change occurs in many ways: it can be accidental or substantial; essential or non-essential; intrinsic or extrinsic; subjective or objective. Changes can be physical, spatial, quantitative, qualitative, natural, artefactual, conceptual, linguistic. Events are arguably best defined as changes in an object or objects. All change is from something and into something, and hence is at least a two-term relation, involving a term from which and a term to which.

To the extent that dualism is even taken to be a serious option in contemporary discussions of personal identity and the philosophy of mind, it is almost exclusively either Cartesian dualism or property dualism that is considered. The more traditional dualism defended by Aristotelians and Thomists, what I call hylemorphic dualism, has only received scattered attention. In this essay I set out the main lines of the hylemorphic dualist position, with particular reference to personal identity. First I argue that overemphasis (...) of the problem of consciousness has had an unhealthy effect on recent debate, claiming instead that we should emphasize the concept of form. Then I bring in the concept of identity by means of the notion of substantial form. I continue by analyzing the relation between form and matter, defending the traditional theses of prime matter and of the unicity of substantial form. I then argue for the immateriality of the substantial form of the human person, viz. the soul, from an account of the human intellect. From this follows the soul's essential independence of matter. Finally, although the soul is the immaterial bearer of personal identity, that identity is still the identity of an essentially embodied being. I explain how these ideas are to be reconciled. Footnotesa I am grateful to Stephen Braude, John Cottingham, John Haldane, David Jehle, Joel Katzav, Eduardo Ortiz, and Fred Sommers for helpful comments and discussion of a draft of this essay. I would also like to thank Ellen Paul, whose suggestions have helped greatly to improve the essay's style and content. (shrink)

Contemporary liberal societies are seeing increasing pressure on individuals to act against their consciences. Most of the pressure is directed at freedom of religion but it also affects ethical beliefs more generally, contrary to the recognition of freedom of religion and conscience as a basic human right. I propose that freedom of dissociation, as a corollary of freedom of association, could be a practical and ethically acceptable solution to the conscience problem. I examine freedom of association and explain how freedom (...) of dissociation follows from it, showing how dissociation protects freedom of religion and conscience. Extreme cases, such as the problem of the Satanist nurse, can be handled within a dissociationist framework, so it is reasonable to think less extreme cases can also be dealt with. The serious objection that dissociationism entails unjust discrimination is answered primarily by appeal to the need for ‘full and fair access’ to goods and services by all groups. I then allay important concerns about what kind of liberal society we should want to live in. Next, I refute the charge that a dissociationist society violates liberalism's ‘higher good’, arguing that liberalism strictly does not have a higher good. I conclude with some reflections on what a dissociationist society might look like. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Good and Evil is the first, full-length contemporary defence, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, of the Scholastic theory of good and evil - the theory of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and most medieval and Thomistic philosophers. Goodness is analysed as obedience to nature. Evil is analysed as the privation of goodness. Goodness, surprisingly, is found in the non-living world, but in the living world it takes on a special character. The book analyses various kinds of goodness, showing (...) how they fit into the Scholastic theory. The privation theory of evil is given its most comprehensive contemporary defence, including an account of truthmakers for truths of privation and an analysis of how causation by privation should be understood. In the end, all evil is deviance - a departure from the goodness prescribed by a thing's essential nature. Key Features: Offers a comprehensive defence of a venerable metaphysical theory, conducted using the concepts and methods of analytic philosophy. Revives a much neglected approach to the question of good and evil in their most general nature. Shows how Aristotelian-Thomistic theory has more than historical relevance to a fundamental philosophical issue, but can be applied in a way that is both defensible and yet accessible to the modern philosopher. Provides what, for the Scholastic philosopher, is arguably the only solid metaphysical foundation for a separate treatment of the origins of morality. (shrink)

Necessity and sufficiency are the building blocks of all successful explanations. Yet despite their importance, these notions have been conceptually underdeveloped and inconsistently applied in explainable artificial intelligence, a fast-growing research area that is so far lacking in firm theoretical foundations. In this article, an expanded version of a paper originally presented at the 37th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, we attempt to fill this gap. Building on work in logic, probability, and causality, we establish the central role of (...) necessity and sufficiency in XAI, unifying seemingly disparate methods in a single formal framework. We propose a novel formulation of these concepts, and demonstrate its advantages over leading alternatives. We present a sound and complete algorithm for computing explanatory factors with respect to a given context and set of agentive preferences, allowing users to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for desired outcomes at minimal cost. Experiments on real and simulated data confirm our method’s competitive performance against state of the art XAI tools on a diverse array of tasks. (shrink)

The Guise of the Good thesis has received much attention since Anscombe's brief defence in her book Intention. I approach it here from a less common perspective - indirectly, via a theory explaining how it is that moral behaviour is even possible. After setting out how morality requires the employment of a fundamental test, I argue that moral behaviour involves orientation toward the good. Immoral behaviour cannot, however, involve orientation to evil as such, given the theory of evil as privation. (...) There must always be orientation to good of some kind for immorality even to be possible. Evil can, nevertheless, be intended, but this must be carefully understood in terms of the metaphysic of good and evil I set out. Given that metaphysic, the Guise of the Good is a virtual corollary. (shrink)

This paper tests the following hypothesis: that the prime matter of classical Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics is numerically identical to energy. Is P=E? After outlining the classical Aristotelian concept of prime matter, I provide the master argument for it based on the phenomenon of substantial change. I then outline what we know about energy as a scientific concept, including its role and application in some key fields. Next, I consider the arguments in favour of prime matter being identical to energy, followed by (...) the arguments against. The method used is that of ontological profile comparison: does the profile of prime matter match, in key features, that of energy? An affirmative answer, that P=E, would be a momentous discovery: it would show that one of the most neglected and derided ideas of pre-modern metaphysics – a contributor to its downfall in the wake of the Scientific Revolution – was right all along. From a negative answer we would still learn much about the interaction of science and metaphysics. It turns out, however, given what we currently know, that the answer is not quite as simple as one might hope. (shrink)

Unsupervised learning algorithms are widely used for many important statistical tasks with numerous applications in science and industry. Yet despite their prevalence, they have attracted remarkably little philosophical scrutiny to date. This stands in stark contrast to supervised and reinforcement learning algorithms, which have been widely studied and critically evaluated, often with an emphasis on ethical concerns. In this article, I analyze three canonical unsupervised learning problems: clustering, abstraction, and generative modeling. I argue that these methods raise unique epistemological and (...) ontological questions, providing data-driven tools for discovering natural kinds and distinguishing essence from contingency. This analysis goes some way toward filling the lacuna in contemporary philosophical discourse on unsupervised learning, as well as bringing conceptual unity to a heterogeneous field more often described by what it isnot(i.e., supervised or reinforcement learning) than by what itis. I submit that unsupervised learning is not just a legitimate subject of philosophical inquiry but perhaps the most fundamental branch of all AI. However, an uncritical overreliance on unsupervised methods poses major epistemic and ethical risks. I conclude by advocating for a pragmatic, error-statistical approach that embraces the opportunities and mitigates the challenges posed by this powerful class of algorithms. (shrink)

This collection of essays by leading sinologists, historians, and philosophers both challenges and extends the work of David Nivison, whose contributions range across moral philosophy, religious thought, intellectual history, and Chinese language. Nivison himself replies to each essay.

Applied Ethics focuses the central concepts of traditional morality from the companion book Moral Theory - rights, justice, the good, virtue, and the fundamental value of human life - on a number of pressing contemporary problems, including abortion, euthanasia, animals, capital punishment, and war.

The narratives studied by schema-based models or story grammars are generally simpler than those found in literary texts, such as short stones or novels. Literary narratives are indeterminate, exhibiting conflicts between schemata and frequent ambiguities in the status of narrative elements. An account of the process of comprehending such complex narratives is beyond the reach of purely cognitive models. It is argued that during comprehension response is controlled by affect, which directs the creation of schemata more adequate to the text. (...) Several properties of affect that make it appropriate for this model of narrative are discussed. A short story by Virginia Woolf is analysed in the light of the proposed model. A study with readers of the story is described, which illustrates the process of schema formation: Shifts in the relative importance of story phrases across the reading and the comments made by readers point to a process of schema creation under the control of affect. It is argued that affect may play a more productive role in cognitive processes than is generally acknowledged. (shrink)

Transhumanism is the school of thought that advocates the use of technology to enhance the human species, to the point where some supporters consider that a new species altogether could arise. Even some critics think this at least a technological possibility. Some supporters also believe the emergence of a new, improved, superhuman species raises no special ethical questions. Through an examination of the metaphysics of species, and an analysis of the essence of the human species, I argue that the existence (...) of an embodied, genuinely superhuman species is a metaphysical impossibility. Finally, I point out an interesting ethical consideration that this metaphysical truth raises. (shrink)

The vigorous legal and ethical debates over conscientious objection have taken place largely within the domain of health care. Is this because conscience in medicine is of a special kind, or are th...