Incompatibilists often claim that we experience our agency as incompatible with determinism, while compatibilists challenge this claim. We report a series of experiments that focus on whether the experience of having an ability to do otherwise is taken to be at odds with determinism. We found that participants in our studies described their experience as incompatibilist whether the decision was (i) present-focused or retrospective, (ii) imagined or actual, (iii) morally salient or morally neutral. The only case in which participants did (...) not give incompatibilist judgments was when the question was explicitly about whether one’s ignorance of the future was compatible with determinism. This lends empirical support to claims made by incompatibilists about the experience of agency, while also showing that compatibilist accounts of ability are inadequate to the reported phenomenology. Our results also inform recent debates about the presuppositions of deliberation. (shrink)

Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we used a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the mental lexicon. Network measures at different levels of analysis (degree, network distance, and closeness centrality) were used to investigate the influence of network structure on picture naming accuracy and errors by people with (...) Anomic, Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's aphasia. Our results reveal that word retrieval is influenced by the multiplex lexical network structure in at least two ways—(a) the accuracy of production and error type on incorrect productions were influenced by the degree and closeness centrality of the target word, and (b) error type also varied in terms of network distance between the target word and produced error word. Taken together, the analyses demonstrate that network science techniques, particularly the use of the multiplex lexical network to simultaneously represent semantic and phonological relationships among words, reveal how the structure of the mental lexicon influences language processes beyond traditionally examined psycholinguistic variables. We propose a framework for how the multiplex lexical network approach allows for understanding the influence of mental lexicon structure on word retrieval processes, with an eye toward a better understanding of the nature of clinical impairments, like aphasia. (shrink)

Prefaces was the last of four books by Søren Kierkegaard to appear within two weeks in June 1844. Three Upbuilding Discourses and Philosophical Fragments were published first, followed by The Concept of Anxiety and its companion--published on the same day--the comically ironic Prefaces. Presented as a set of prefaces without a book to follow, this work is a satire on literary life in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, a lampoon of Danish Hegelianism, and a prefiguring of Kierkegaard's final collision with Danish Christendom. Shortly (...) after publishing Prefaces, Kierkegaard began to prepare Writing Sampler as a sequel. Writing Sampler considers the same themes taken up in Prefaces but in yet a more ironical and satirical vein. Although Writing Sampler remained unpublished during his lifetime, it is presented here as Kierkegaard originally envisioned it, in the company of Prefaces. (shrink)

An important motivation for relational theories of color is that they resolve apparent conflicts about color: x can, without contradiction, be red relative to S1 and not red relative to S2. Alas, many philosophers claim that the view is incompatible with naive, phenomenally grounded introspection. However, when we presented normal adults with apparent conflicts about color (among other properties), we found that many were open to the relationalist's claim that apparently competing variants can simultaneously be correct. This suggests that, philosophers' (...) claims to the contrary notwithstanding, introspection does not supply authoritative and unambiguous reason to reject color relationalism. (shrink)

The basis of property rights is a central problem in political philosophy. The core philosophical dispute concerns whether property rights are natural facts, independent of human conventions. In this article, we examine adult judgments on this issue. We find evidence that familiar property norms regarding external objects (e.g., fish and strawberries) are treated as conventional on standard measures of authority dependence and context relativism. Previous work on the moral/conventional distinction indicates that people treat property rights as moral rather than conventional (...) (e.g., Dahl & Waltzer, 2020; Nucci & Turiel, 1993; Tisak & Turiel, 1984). However, these studies explicitly assume that one person owns property that another steals. Study 1 explores judgments of authority dependence regarding ownership in cases that explicitly appeal to stealing and prior ownership as compared to cases that omit such explicit appeals. We find that participants tend to treat ownership as authority dependent when explicit appeals to stealing are absent, but not when the explicit appeals are present. Study 2 examines intuitions about authority dependence of ownership violations as compared to canonical conventional and harm-based moral violations. We find that ownership violations are treated as more authority dependent than harm-based moral violations. This all suggests that some central property norms are treated as conventional. However, we also find that the conventionality of property norms is restricted in several ways. In study 3, we find that people do not treat norms of self-ownership as conventional. Other people cannot take your hair or skin cells even if the teacher says it's okay. Study 4 uses a measure of context relativism to examine the conventionality of ownership norms, comparing different possible norms of ownership. We find that participants regard takings that are violations in their own culture as permissible in other cultures; however, only some foreign norms are deemed acceptable. In study 5 we find another limitation – participants think it's impermissible to take resources from someone based on a new property norm that is retrospectively imposed. Finally, in study 6 we explore whether some takings might be judged to be morally (non-conventionally) wrong as a function of scarcity. We find that when asked about another culture that allows taking, participants tend to say that taking a food item from the person who caught it is permissible when the food is plentiful, but not when the food is scarce. (shrink)

We develop a partial solution to the meta-problem of consciousness that builds on our previous psychological account of an apparent explanatory gap. Drawing from empirical work on explanatory cognition and conceptual development, we sketch a profile of cognitive systems for which primitive concepts facilitate explanatory gaps. This account predicts that there will be multiple explanatory gaps. We suggest that this is borne out by the existence of primitivist theories in multiple philosophical domains.

Although linguistic nativism has received the bulk of attention in contemporary innateness debates, moral nativism has perhaps an even deeper ancestry. If linguistic nativism is Cartesian, moral nativism is Platonic. Moral nativism has taken a backseat to linguistic nativism in contemporary discussions largely because Chomsky made a case for linguistic nativism characterized by unprecedented rigor. Hence it is not surprising that recent attempts to revive the thesis that we have innate moral knowledge have drawn on Chomsky’s framework. I’ll argue, however, (...) that the recent attempts to use Chomsky-style arguments in support of innate moral knowledge are uniformly unconvincing. The central argument in the Chomskian arsenal, of course, is the Poverty of the Stimulus (POS) argument. In section 1, I will set out the basic form of the POS argument and the conclusions about domain specificity and innate propositional knowledge that are supposed to follow. In section 2, I’ll distinguish 3 hypotheses about innateness and morality: rule nativism, moral principle nativism, and moral judgment nativism. In sections 3-5 I’ll then consider each of these hypotheses in turn. I’ll argue that while there is some reason to favor rule nativism, the arguments that moral principles and moral judgment derive from innate moral knowledge don’t work. The capacity for moral judgment is better explained by appeal to innate affective systems rather than innate moral knowledge. In the final section, I’ll suggest that the role of such affective mechanisms in structuring the mind complicates the standard picture about poverty of the stimulus arguments and nativism. For the affective mechanisms that influence cognitive structures can make contributions that are neither domain general nor domain specific. (shrink)

The sequencing of the human genome and decreasing costs of sequencing technology have led to the notion of ‘personalized medicine’. This has been taken by some authors to indicate that personalized medicine will provide individualized treatments solely based on one’s DNA sequence. We argue this is overly optimistic and misconstrues the notion of personalization. Such interpretations fail to account for economic, policy and structural constraints on the delivery of healthcare. Furthermore, notions of individualization based on genomic data potentially take us (...) down the road of genetic reductionism obscuring the role of environmental factors in disease and ill health. We propose that one should see personalized medicine as a way of using personal genomic information to stratify individuals into subpopulations and suggest that personalized medicine be seen within a broader idea of personalized healthcare, reflecting healthcare that integrates personal genomic data into cultural, environmental and personal contexts. (shrink)

Alexis de Tocqueville asserted that America had no truly great literature, and that American writers merely mimicked the British and European traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This new edited collection masterfully refutes Tocqueville's monocultural myopia and reveals the distinctive role American poetry and prose have played in reflecting and passing judgment upon the core values of American democracy. The essays, profiling the work of Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Updike, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Willa Cather, (...) Walker Percy, and Tom Wolfe, reveal how America's greatest writers have acted as society's most ardent cheerleaders and its most penetrating critics. Christine Dunn Henderson's exciting new work offers literature as a portal through which to view the philosophical principles that animate America's political order and the mores which either reinforce or undermine them. (shrink)

Williams (1970) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's psychological characteristics; other frames lead us to think that the self persists even after the loss of one's distinctive psychological characteristics. The current paper takes an empirical approach to these issues. We find that framing does affect whether or not people judge that persistence of psychological characteristics is (...) required for persistence of self. Open-ended, abstract questions about what is required for survival tend to elicit responses that appeal to the importance of psychological characteristics. This emphasis on psychological characteristics is largely preserved even when participants are exposed to a concrete case that yields conflicting intuitions over whether memory must be preserved in order for a person to persist. Insofar as our philosophical theory of personal identity should be based on our intuitions, the results provide some support for the view that psychological characteristics really are critical for persistence of self. (shrink)

Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context gathers leading thinkers from across the humanities and social sciences in a critical engagement with the recent work of political philosopher James Tully. Tully's work extends through discourses including interventions in the history of moral and political thought, contemporary political philosophy, democracy, citizenship, imperialism, recognition and cultural diversity. The essays in this volume engage with this work to explore Tully's increasingly relevant question: how to enact democratic practices of freedom within and against relationships (...) of imperialism? (shrink)

A disturbing economic reality confronts consumers today: thousands of farm workers are enslaved in U.S. agricultural fields, forced to work without pay amid deplorable conditions and under the constant threat of violence. If structural economic injustices perpetuate modern‐day agricultural slavery, then it is necessary to promote consumer practices that resist these abusive dynamics. But a consumption‐oriented strategy does not necessarily restore either personal agency or communal relations damaged by agricultural trafficking. This essay proposes a framework for aesthetic solidarity that cultivates (...) affective bonds necessary for building communities of resistance characterized by mutuality, equality, and participation. (shrink)

Laudato si’, with its articulation of a familial ecology reflecting Francis’s Latin American context, expands the subject of solidarity in Catholic social teaching and thought. Yet, this ecological vision of family fails to attend to the problem of gender subordination latent in Catholic social teaching, including in its approaches to ecology. A vision of solidarity that eradicates gender and ecological subordination must elaborate a familial ecology characterized by both mercy and equality.

Discussions of harm are central in the climate ethics literature. Especially in the rapidly emerging body of work addressing the question of whether or not individuals are morally responsible for their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, whether or in what way individuals’ emissions are harmful is a hotly debated question. John Nolt’s recent paper, “How harmful are the average American’s greenhouse gas emissions?” illustrates the prevalence of this framing (Nolt 2011). Here I take a step back and ask what we mean (...) by the concept “harmful” when talking about climate change. I argue, as several respondents to Nolt have suggested (e.g., Attfield 2011, Odenbaugh 2011), that we should not be so quick to apply our standard .. (shrink)

This book stems from an examination of how Western philosophy has accounted for the foundations of law. In this tradition, the character of the “sovereign” or “lawgiver” has provided the solution to this problem. But how does the sovereign acquire the right to found law? As soon as we ask this question we are immediately confronted with a convoluted combination of jurisprudence and theology. The author begins by tracing a lengthy and deeply nuanced exchange between Derrida and Nancy on the (...) question of community and fraternity and then moves on to engage with a diverse set of texts from the Marquis de Sade, Saint Augustine, Kant, Hegel, and Kafka. These texts—which range from the canonical to the apocryphal—all struggle in their own manner with the question of the foundations of law. Each offers a path to the law. If a reader accepts any path as it is and follows without question, the law is set and determined and the possibility of dialogue is closed. The aim of this book is to approach the foundations of law from a series of different angles so that we can begin to see that those foundations are always in question and open to the possibility of dialogue. (shrink)

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases (...) (Weinberg et al. 2001). In light of these findings on cultural differences, two experiments were conducted which explored intuitions about reference in Westerners and East Asians. Both experiments indicate that, for certain central cases, Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view. These results constitute prima facie evidence that semantic intuitions vary from culture to culture, and the paper argues that this fact raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference. (shrink)

A collection of personal narratives and essays, Living Professionalism is designed to help medical students and residents understand and internalize various aspects of professionalism. These essays are meant for personal reflection and above all, for thoughtful discussion with mentors, with peers, with others throughout the health care provider community who care about acting professionally.

Reid's unusual primary/secondary quality distinction is drawn along epistemic lines. Reid takes an epistemic turn because of Locke's failure to draw a metaphysical distinction. Secondary qualities differ from primary qualities in virtue of the fact that we acquire notions of secondary qualities via the mediation of sensations. Primary qualities require no such mediation. In one respect, the analysis I set out renders qualities relative to agents. I address whether Reid advocates a dispositional theory of secondary qualities, whether the phenomenology of (...) color underlying Reid's theory is tenable, and whether Reid's distinction coheres well with his theory of perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Measuring neuronal activity with electrophysiological methods may be useful in detecting neurological dysfunctions, such as mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). This approach may be particularly valuable for rapid detection in at-risk populations including military service members and athletes. Electrophysiological methods, such as quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) and recording event-related potentials (ERPs) may be promising; however, the field is nascent and significant controversy exists on the efficacy and accuracy of the approaches as diagnostic tools. For example, the specific measures derived from an (...) electroencephalogram (EEG) that are most suitable as markers of dysfunction have not been clearly established. A study was conducted to summarize and evaluate the statistical rigor of evidence on the overall utility of qEEG as an mTBI detection tool. The analysis evaluated qEEG measures/parameters that may be most suitable as fieldable diagnostic tools, identified other types of EEG measures and analysis methods of promise, recommended specific measures and analysis methods for further development as mTBI detection tools, identified research gaps in the field, and recommended future research and development thrust areas. The qEEG study group formed the following conclusions: 1. Individual qEEG measures provide limited diagnostic utility for mTBI. However, many measures can be important features of qEEG discriminant functions, which do show significant promise as mTBI detection tools. 2. ERPs offer utility in mTBI detection. In fact, evidence indicates that ERPs can identify abnormalities in cases where EEGs alone are nondisclosing. 3. The standard mathematical procedures used in the characterization of mTBI EEGs should be expanded to incorporate newer methods of analysis including nonlinear dynamical analysis, complexity measures, analysis of causal interactions, graph theory and information dynamics. 4. and 5. are too long to include here. (shrink)

Miguel A. De La Torre rejects hope as the ethical basis for a politically effective and truly liberative form of solidarity. Kelly Brown Douglas, on the other hand, articulates a critical retrieval of hope emphasizing the interpretive relationship between the cross, the lynching tree, and the resurrection. Reading De La Torre and Douglas’s works through Natalie Carnes’s theological aesthetics suggests that their respective works can be engaged as “iconoclasms of fidelity,” or the salutary breaking of idolatrous images toward recovering faithful (...) ones. Examining #SprayTheirNames murals that were created in response to state violence against Black people in the United States, I argue that Carnes’s aesthetics framework holds the violence of the crucifixion and promise of resurrection in visual tension, thus decrying violent oppression while offering a beautiful and dangerous memory that catalyzes hope-filled movement in defense of Black lives. (shrink)

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one's intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology has shown systematic differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases. In light of these findings on (...) cultural differences, two experiments were conducted which explored intuitions about reference in Westerners and East Asians. Both experiments indicate that, for certain central cases, Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view. These results constitute prima facie evidence that semantic intuitions vary from culture to culture, and that paper argues that this fact raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy. The present review focuses on research in experimental philosophy on four central questions. First, why is it that people's moral judgments appear to influence their intuitions about seemingly nonmoral questions? Second, do people think that moral questions have objective answers, or do they see morality as fundamentally relative? Third, do people believe in free will, and do they see free (...) will as compatible with determinism? Fourth, how do people determine whether an entity is conscious? (shrink)

Reading disability has been considered as a disconnection syndrome. Recently, an increasing number of studies have emphasized the role of subcortical regions in reading. However, the majority of research on reading disability has focused on the connections amongst brain regions within the classic cortical reading network. Here, we used graph theoretical analysis to investigate whether subcortical regions serve as hubs during reading both in Chinese children with reading disability and in age-matched typically developing children using a visual rhyming judgment task (...) and a visual meaning judgment task. We found that the bilateral thalami were the unique hubs for typically developing children across both tasks. Additionally, subcortical regions were also unique hubs for typically developing children but only in the rhyming task. Among these subcortical hub regions, the left pallidum showed reduced connectivity with inferior frontal regions in the rhyming judgment but not semantic task in reading disabled compared with typically developing children. These results suggest that subcortical-cortical disconnection, which may be particularly relevant to the phonological and phonology-related learning process, may be associated with Chinese reading disability. (shrink)

It used to be a commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people’s moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn’t particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or political science. Philosophers were concerned, in a very general way, with questions about how..

Consider the following claim: “If an agent comes to be bad through a process that entirely bypasses her ability to appreciate and to respond to reasons, including moral reasons, she is not a responsible agent at all” (Levy 2007). Psychopathy is a wonderful example here, since there’s reason to think it has a strong genetic component. But why should we accept this claim that we have to absolve those who are born irrevocably bad?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theology from the Trenches: Reflections on Urban Ministry by Roger J. GenchNichole M. FloresTheology from the Trenches: Reflections on Urban Ministry Roger J. Gench LOUISVILLE, KY: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2014. 151 PP. $17.00Beginning from reflections on his own lived experience of pastoral ministry in Baltimore and Washington, DC, Roger Gench engages both the theological and practical dimensions of community organizing, especially as this work relates to the (...) orienting principles of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). Gench first asserts the necessity of continual articulation of theological reasons for public engagement before elaborating some crucial theological aspects of the IAF's core principles. Gench's commitment to theological justification for IAF principles is especially evident in his treatment of the theme of self-interest as underpinning for organizing in religious communities. He interprets self-interest within the practical and theological context of relationship. Within the IAF worldview, individuals come to greater self-understanding only in conversation with others. Gench uncovers the relational demands of self-interest based on the practical dimensions of uncovering self-interest.Gench offers several rich images that illuminate his theological vision for urban ministry. The first is the "cruciform covenant," which springs forth from brokenness and devastation while moving toward justice and restoration. Cruciformity draws attention to abuses of power in the urban environment and underscores God's promise of personal and social redemption. Thus, the cruciform covenant gestures to the ways that God reaches out to humans amid brokenness rather than an assertion of God's wrathful judgment on humanity. Another helpful theological image in this text is the "three-legged stool"—the integration of mind, will, and heart—which offers an accessible theological anthropology of human wholeness and flourishing as a resource in the struggle for justice. Gench contends that a justice-oriented ministry requires engagement of multidimensional personhood, an anthropology crucial for forging public dialogue and fostering effective community organizing.Gench's text excels at knitting together ethics and practical reflection within the context of the urban parish. The author's relatable and authentic voice gives the text the feel of a narrative, one that keeps the pages turning and keeps the reader involved in the outcome of the various campaigns. One might even walk away from the text convinced of the necessity of urban parishes to become involved in local campaigns for justice. Gench's perspective is deeply and [End Page 197] authentically Reformed but with an eye toward ecumenical and interreligious cooperation in campaigns based on self-interest and oriented toward the common good. The text sometimes struggles to gain critical distance from the IAF model even as it acknowledges human sin, finitude, and the risks associated with the exercise of self-interested politics. Still, its ecumenical methodology makes it an attractive option for a broad range of Christian communities seeking to organize around social justice issues.Gench writes in an accessible manner, reflecting on his own experiences of pastoral ministry in two different urban contexts. For this reason, his work will be of particular interest to those engaged in, preparing for, or studying community organizing in an ecclesial setting. The questions and practical meditations at the end of each chapter make this an engaging text for seminary students, congregations, and religious organizers seeking to situate political engagement within a Reformed theological framework. The text will also be of great interest to religious and theological ethicists examining grassroots organizing practices and theological approaches to themes of solidarity, participation, justice, and workers' rights.Nichole M. FloresUniversity of VirginiaCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivators for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane Journal of Philosophy 96:217–240 1999, Strawson 1986). And a number of recent studies find that people give apparently incompatibilist responses in vignette studies. When participants are presented with a description of a causal deterministic universe, they tend to deny that people (...) are morally responsible in that universe. Although this suggests that people are intuitive incompatibilists, Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray, in a recent series of important papers, have developed an important challenge to this interpretation. They argue that people confuse determinism with bypassing, the idea that one’s mental states lack causal efficacy. Murray and Nahmias present new experiments that seem to confirm the bypassing hypothesis. In this paper, we use structural equation modeling to re-examine the issue. We find support instead for an incompatibilist explanation of the bypassing results, i.e., incompatibilist judgments seem to cause bypassing judgments. We hypothesize that this phenomenon occurs because people think of decisions as essentially indeterministic; thus, when confronted with a description of determinism they tend to think that decisions do not even occur. We provide evidence for this in three subsequent studies which show that many participants deny that people make decisions in a deterministic universe; by contrast, most participants tend to allow that people add numbers in a deterministic universe. Together, these studies suggest that bypassing results don’t reflect a confusion, but rather the depth of the incompatibilist intuition. (shrink)

: Kühberger et al. show that producing the Langer effect is considerably more difficult than has been assumed. Although their results clearly demonstrate a need for further exploration of the Langer effect, none of their arguments undermines the evidence against simulation theory that we presented in Nichols et al. . In our study the actor subjects did show an effect, but the prediction subjects did not predict it, despite the fact that they were provided with all the details of (...) the actor's situation. Further, we report additional evidence that corroborates our empirical case against simulation theory. (shrink)

Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of (...) participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism. (shrink)

Occam's razor—the idea that all else being equal, we should pick the simpler hypothesis—plays a prominent role in ordinary and scientific inference. But why are simpler hypotheses better? One attractive hypothesis known as Bayesian Occam's razor is that more complex hypotheses tend to be more flexible—they can accommodate a wider range of possible data—and that flexibility is automatically penalized by Bayesian inference. In two experiments, we provide evidence that people's intuitive probabilistic and explanatory judgments follow the prescriptions of BOR. In (...) particular, people's judgments are consistent with the two most distinctive characteristics of BOR: They penalize hypotheses as a function not only of their numbers of free parameters but also as a function of the size of the parameter space, and they penalize those hypotheses even when their parameters can be “tuned” to fit the data better than comparatively simpler hypotheses. (shrink)

In The Ethics of Food, Gregory E. Pence brings together a collection of voices who share the view that the ethics of genetically modified food is among the most pressing societal questions of our time. This comprehensive collection addresses a broad range of subjects, including the meaning of food, moral analyses of vegetarianism and starvation, the safety and environmental risks of genetically modified food, issues of global food politics and the food industry, and the relationships among food, evolution, and human (...) history. (shrink)

Thought experiments have played a central role in philosophical methodology, largely as a means of elucidating the nature of our concepts and the implications of our theories.1 Particular attention is given to widely shared “folk” intuitions – the basic untutored intuitions that the layperson has about philosophical questions.2 The folk intuition is meant to underlie our core metaphysical concepts, and philosophical analysis is meant to explicate or sometimes refine these naïve concepts. Consistency with the deliverances of folk intuitions is a (...) sign that the philosopher is making contact with his object of interest. In order to explore folk concepts, people are often asked to provide their intuitions about a state of affairs in some alternate universe or possible world, one that differs in particular, precise ways from the way things are in the actual world. Here we provide evidence that people’s intuitions about moral responsibility sometimes diverge across worlds even when the facts about these worlds are the same. Which world one considers actual affects at least some philosophical judgments, suggesting that it is not just possible worlds to which our intuitions are tied. We will present several possible explanations for the asymmetry we have identified, and we’ll consider some implications for philosophical intuition. (shrink)

Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom demonstrates the importance of time as a central category for political theory. The historical struggle over the control of time is of analytical, moral, and practical significance, such that any project aiming to establish a meaningful relationship between freedom and equality must begin by reconceptualizing time. Whereas the labor movement's original fight for time sought to limit the length of the working day, the fight for time today must address the new realities of the (...) colonization of time, which increasingly extends beyond work to free time and leisure. Decolonizing Time reconsiders discretionary time as a measure of freedom through the concept of temporal autonomy as developed through the Aristotelian-Marxist, critical, and feminist theory traditions. The research is further enriched by the respective contributions of critical race theory. (shrink)

Recent work in folk metaethics finds a correlation between perceived consensus about a moral claim and meta-ethical judgments about whether the claim is universally or only relatively true. We argue that consensus can provide evidence for meta-normative claims, such as whether a claim is universally true. We then report several experiments indicating that people use consensus to make inferences about whether a claim is universally true. This suggests that people's beliefs about relativism and universalism are partly guided by evidence-based reasoning. (...) In a final study, we show that the rejection of universalism does not generate a simple subjectivism but is associated with a more moderate relativism on which highly atypical positions are regarded as mistaken. (shrink)

Online medical reference websites are utilized by health care providers to enhance their education and decision making. However, these resources may not adequately reveal pharmaceutical-author interactions and their potential conflicts of interest. This investigation: evaluates the correspondence of two well-utilized CoI databases: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments and ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs and quantifies CoIs among authors of a publicly available point of care clinical support website which is used to inform evidence-based medicine decisions. Two data (...) sources were used: the hundred most common drugs and the top fifty causes of death. These topics were entered into a freely available database. The authors were then input into CMSOP and PDD and compensation and number of payments were determined for 2013–2015. The subset of highly compensated authors that also reported “Nothing to disclose” were further examined. There was a high degree of similarity between CMSOP and PDD for compensation and payment number. The amount received was 1.4% higher in CMSOP than in PDD. The articles where the authors had received the greatest compensation were in neurology, oncology, and endocrinology. Two authors reporting “Nothing to disclose” received appreciable and potentially relevant compensation. CMSOP and PDD produced almost identical results. CoIs were common among authors but self-reporting may be an inadequate reporting mechanism. Recommendations are offered for improving the CoI transparency of pharmaceutical-author interactions in point-of-care electronic resources. (shrink)

Online medical reference websites are utilized by health care providers to enhance their education and decision making. However, these resources may not adequately reveal pharmaceutical-author interactions and their potential conflicts of interest. This investigation: evaluates the correspondence of two well-utilized CoI databases: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments and ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs and quantifies CoIs among authors of a publicly available point of care clinical support website which is used to inform evidence-based medicine decisions. Two data (...) sources were used: the hundred most common drugs and the top fifty causes of death. These topics were entered into a freely available database. The authors were then input into CMSOP and PDD and compensation and number of payments were determined for 2013–2015. The subset of highly compensated authors that also reported “Nothing to disclose” were further examined. There was a high degree of similarity between CMSOP and PDD for compensation and payment number. The amount received was 1.4% higher in CMSOP than in PDD. The articles where the authors had received the greatest compensation were in neurology, oncology, and endocrinology. Two authors reporting “Nothing to disclose” received appreciable and potentially relevant compensation. CMSOP and PDD produced almost identical results. CoIs were common among authors but self-reporting may be an inadequate reporting mechanism. Recommendations are offered for improving the CoI transparency of pharmaceutical-author interactions in point-of-care electronic resources. (shrink)

Online medical reference websites are utilized by health care providers to enhance their education and decision making. However, these resources may not adequately reveal pharmaceutical-author interactions and their potential conflicts of interest. This investigation: evaluates the correspondence of two well-utilized CoI databases: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments and ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs and quantifies CoIs among authors of a publicly available point of care clinical support website which is used to inform evidence-based medicine decisions. Two data (...) sources were used: the hundred most common drugs and the top fifty causes of death. These topics were entered into a freely available database. The authors were then input into CMSOP and PDD and compensation and number of payments were determined for 2013–2015. The subset of highly compensated authors that also reported “Nothing to disclose” were further examined. There was a high degree of similarity between CMSOP and PDD for compensation and payment number. The amount received was 1.4% higher in CMSOP than in PDD. The articles where the authors had received the greatest compensation were in neurology, oncology, and endocrinology. Two authors reporting “Nothing to disclose” received appreciable and potentially relevant compensation. CMSOP and PDD produced almost identical results. CoIs were common among authors but self-reporting may be an inadequate reporting mechanism. Recommendations are offered for improving the CoI transparency of pharmaceutical-author interactions in point-of-care electronic resources. (shrink)

A central goal of contemporary cognitive science is the explanation of cognitive abilities or capacities. [Cummins 1983] During the last three decades a wide range of cognitive capacities have been subjected to careful empirical scrutiny. The adult's ability to produce and comprehend natural language sentences and the child's capacity to acquire a natural language were among the first to be explored. [Chomsky 1965, Fodor, Bever & Garrett 1974, Pinker 1989] There is also a rich literature on the ability to solve (...) mathematical problems [Greeno 1983], the ability to recognize objects visually [Rock 1983, Gregory 1970, Marr 1982], the ability to manipulate and predict the behavior of middle sized physical objects [McClosky 1983, Hayes 1985], and a host of others. (shrink)

We have recently presented evidence for cross-cultural variation in semantic intuitions and explored the implications of such variation for philosophical arguments that appeal to some theory of reference as a premise. Devitt (2011) and Ichikawa and colleagues (forthcoming) offer critical discussions of the experiment and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. In this response, we reiterate and clarify what we are really arguing for, and we show that most of Devitt’s and Ichikawa and colleagues’ criticisms fail to address (...) our concerns. (shrink)