By way of the complex topography of the Phaedrus, Plato raises the question of his authorship and the consequences it has for the reader’s reception of Socrates, by likening Socrates’ changing status in the text to the complex mythological traditions surrounding the rape and abduction of Helen of Troy (amidst a grove of plane trees). As Socrates is likened to the excessive and “duplicitous” Helen and her various “eidolic” apeareances, the question of the dialogue appears to shift from “who is (...) Socrates?” to a more postmodern formulation: which Socrates? (shrink)

By way of the complex topography of the Phaedrus, Plato raises the question of his authorship and the consequences it has for the reader’s reception of Socrates, by likening Socrates’ changing status in the text to the complex mythological traditions surrounding the rape and abduction of Helen of Troy (amidst a grove of plane trees). As Socrates is likened to the excessive and “duplicitous” Helen and her various “eidolic” apeareances, the question of the dialogue appears to shift from “who is (...) Socrates?” to a more postmodern formulation: which Socrates? (shrink)

Objective: To report results from a national survey of coordinators and managers of clinical research studies in the US on their perceptions of and experiences with scientific misconduct.Methods: Data were collected using the Scientific Misconduct Questionnaire-Revised. Eligible responses were received from 1645 of 5302 surveys sent to members of the Association of Clinical Research Professionals and to subscribers of Research Practitioner, published by the Center for Clinical Research Practice, between February 2004 and January 2005.Findings: Overall, the perceived frequency of misconduct (...) was low. Differences were noted between workplaces with regard to perceived pressures on investigators and research coordinators, and on the effectiveness of the regulatory environment in reducing misconduct. First-hand experience with an incident of misconduct was reported by 18% of respondents. Those with first-hand knowledge of misconduct were more likely to report working in an academic medical setting, and to report that a typical research coordinator would probably do nothing if aware that a principal investigator or research staff member was involved in an incident of misconduct.Conclusion: These findings expand the knowledge on scientific misconduct by adding new information from the perspective of research coordinators. The findings provide some data supporting the influence of workplace climate on misconduct and also on the perceived effectiveness of institutional policies to reduce scientific misconduct. (shrink)

We have several intuitive paradigms of defeating evidence. For example, let E be the fact that Ernie tells me that the notorious pet Precious is a bird. This supports the premise F, that Precious can fly. However, Orna gives me *opposing* evidence. She says that Precious is a dog. Alternatively, defeating evidence might not oppose Ernie's testimony in that direct way. There might be other ways for it to weaken the support that Ernie's testimony gives me for believing F, without (...) the new evidence itself intuitively constituting reasons to believe one way or the other about Precious's flight ability. An example: Ursula tells me that Ernie has no idea what Precious's species is; he's just guessing. She may not herself want to or be in a position to weigh in about Precious's real species or flight ability. I call defeating evidence of this sort *undermining evidence. (shrink)

Consider the argument: Circus-1 Men in clown suits are handing out tickets. So, probably: Circus-2 There’s a circus in town. So: Circus-3 There’s an entertainment venue in town. Presumably you’d be able to warrantedly believe Circus-2 on the basis of Circus-1. And we can suppose you’re reasonably certain that wherever there are circuses, there are entertainment venues. So you’d seem to be in a position to reasonably go on to infer Circus-3.

This paper is a survey of how economists and philosophers approach the issue of comparisons. More precisely, it is about what formal representation is appropriate whenever our ability to compare things breaks down. We restrict our attention to failures that arise with ordinal comparisons. We consider a number of formal approaches to this problem including one based on the idea of parity. We also consider the claim that the failure to compare things is a consequence of vagueness. We contrast two (...) theories of vagueness; fuzzy set theory and supervaluation theory. Some applications of these theories are described. (shrink)

(revisions posted 12/5/2006) to appear in Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology, ed. by Sanford Goldberg (to be published by Oxford in 2006 or 2007) Michael McKinsey formulated an argument that raises a puzzle about the relation between externalism about content and our introspective awareness of content. The puzzle goes like this: it seems like I can know the contents of my thoughts by introspection alone; but philosophical reflection tells me that the contents of those thoughts are externalist, and (...) so I couldn. (shrink)

The age of modern biomedical science has raised many difficult ethical questions. Accordingly, leaders in bioethics have articulated methods to direct the on-going discourse while providing the systems necessary for making morally efficient decisions. In this thought-provoking study, Ashley John Moyse suggests a theory of ethics that interrupts and transforms the contemporary and abstract modes of moral discourse. Moyse moves the moral discussion of bioethics beyond abstract ends, obligations, and common moral categories. At the same time, he challenges readers (...) to take seriously the concrete moral tasks of existence. Moyse engages with Karl Barth's philosophical and theological thinking in order to investigate the moral discussions surrounding biomedical ethics. The book engagingly illuminates a path toward moral discernment that recognizes the significance of human flourishing. According to Moyse, Barth's moral theology not only grounds humans as ontologically relational but also fuels responsibility to, with, and for one's neighbors. (shrink)

Diagnostic testing can be used for many purposes, including testing to facilitate the clinical care of individual patients, testing as an inclusion criterion for clinical trial participation, and both passive and active surveillance testing of the general population in order to facilitate public health outcomes, such as the containment or mitigation of an infectious disease. As such, diagnostic testing presents us with ethical questions that are, in part, already addressed in the literature on clinical care as well as clinical research (...) (such as the rights of patients to refuse testing or treatment in the clinical setting or the rights of participants in randomized controlled trials to withdraw from the trial at any time). However, diagnostic testing, for the purpose of disease surveillance also raises ethical issues that we do not encounter in these settings, and thus have not been much discussed. In this paper we will be concerned with the similarities and differences between the ethical considerations in these three domains: clinical care, clinical research, and public health, as they relate to diagnostic testing specifically. Via an examination of the COVID-19 case we will show how an appeal to the concept of diagnostic justice helps us to make sense of the (at times competing) ethical considerations in these three domains. (shrink)

What does the development of a truly robust contemporary theory of domination require? Ashley J. Bohrer argues that it is only by considering all of the dimensions of race, gender, sexuality, and class within the structures of capitalism and imperialism that we can understand power relations as we find them nowadays. Bohrer explains how many of the purported incompatibilities between Marxism and intersectionality arise more from miscommunication rather than a fundamental conceptual antagonism. As the first monograph entirely devoted to (...) this issue, »Marxism and Intersectionality« serves as a tool to activists and academics working against multiple systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression. (shrink)

Values -- Tolerance -- Tolerant people -- Being tolerant of family -- Being tolerant of friends -- Being tolerant of neighbours -- Ways to be tolerant -- Being aware of others -- Respecting different kinds of families -- Accepting other cultures -- Including others -- Learning from others -- Being patient -- Personal set of values.

Programmatic secularism aims to secure public reason from rival rationalities, notably those from religious experience and education. The gathering of knowledge in clinical ethics into a concrete array of consensus claims and consensus-derived principles are thought by Janet Malek to secure such public reason—an essential tool for clinical ethics consultants to execute their professional role. The author compares this gathering of knowledge to an understanding of what technology is. Accordingly, the following interrogates Malek’s programmatic secularism, which is a moral technique (...) that not only homogenizes moral dialogue but also dehumanizes persons as it tyrannizes the creative freedom for moral conversation and genuine encounter. Thus, the reader is encouraged to dissent of such a vision for delimiting the role of clinical ethics consultants according to the rule and measure of technology, the ontology of our age. (shrink)

Consider the skeptic about the external world. Let’s straightaway concede to such a skeptic that perception gives us no conclusive or certain knowledge about our surroundings. Our perceptual justification for beliefs about our surroundings is always defeasible—there are always possible improvements in our epistemic state which would no longer support those beliefs. Let’s also concede to the skeptic that it’s metaphysically possible for us to have all the experiences we’re now having while all those experiences are false. Some philosophers dispute (...) this, but I do not. The skeptic I want to consider goes beyond these familiar points to the much more radical conclusion that our perceptual experiences can’t give us any knowledge or even justification for believing that our surroundings are one way rather than another. (shrink)

This book disseminates practical solutions to the automation of open and distance learning. It discusses computational methods, algorithms, implemented prototype systems, and applications of open and distance learning. It also provides state-of-the-art research on the impact and general principles of ethical computer use in academics, while also emphasizing the cyber philosophical aspect of human-computer interaction.

This chapter contains sections titled: Goldilocks Epistemology: Not Too Soft, Not Too Firm, but Just Right Sex Talk: You Should Know Better Epistemology Helps You Be More You (… in bed) How To Get Better Sex From Epistemologists The View from Here.

An ongoing debate in affective science concerns whether certain discrete, “basic” emotions have evolutionarily based signals that are easily, universally, and innatel...

Understanding everyday behavior relies heavily upon understanding our ability to improvise, how we are able to continuously anticipate and adapt in order to coordinate with our environment and others. Here we consider the ability of musicians to improvise, where they must spontaneously coordinate their actions with co-performers in order to produce novel musical expressions. Investigations of this behavior have traditionally focused on describing the organization of cognitive structures. The focus, here, however, is on the ability of the time-evolving patterns of (...) inter-musician movement coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of complex dynamical systems to provide a new understanding of what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action. We demonstrate this approach through the application of cross wavelet spectral analysis, which isolates the strength and patterning of the behavioral coordination that occurs between improvising musicians across a range of nested time-scales. Revealing the sophistication of the previously unexplored dynamics of movement coordination between improvising musicians is an important step towards understanding how creative musical expressions emerge from the spontaneous coordination of multiple musical bodies. (shrink)

Musical improvisation is a natural case of human pattern formation, and Walton and colleagues investigate the way that different contextual constraints affect patterns of improvisation and their aesthetic quality. The authors find that coordination patterns are more diversified between two musicians when the musical space in which to improvise is relatively more constrained. They also find that listeners experience more diversified, complementary patterns between musicians as more enjoyable and harmonious.

According to the powerful qualities view, properties are both powerful and qualitative. Indeed, on this view the powerfulness of a property is identical to its qualitativity. Proponents claim that this view provides an attractive alternative to both the view that properties are pure powers and the view that they are pure qualities. It remains unclear, however, whether the claimed identity between powerfulness and qualitativity can be made coherent in a way that allows the powerful qualities view to constitute this sort (...) of alternative. I argue here that this can be done, given a particular conception of both the qualitativity and powerfulness of properties. On this conception, a property is qualitative just in the sense that its essence is fixed independently of any distinct properties, and it is powerful just if its essence grounds its dispositional role. (shrink)

Something about this argument sounds funny. As we’ll see, though, it takes some care to identify exactly what Moore has done wrong. Iwill assume that Moore knows premise (2) to be true. One could inquire into how he knows it, and whether that knowledge can be defeated; but Iwon’t. I’ll focus instead on what epistemic relations Moore has to premise (1) and to his conclusion (3). It may matter which epistemic relations we choose to consider. Some philosophers will diagnose Moore’s (...) argument using Contextualist machinery. They’ll say. (shrink)

It is often taken for granted that our desires can contribute to what it is rational for us to do. This paper examines an account of desire—the ‘guise of the good’— that promises an explanation of this datum. I argue that extant guise-of-the-good accounts fail to provide an adequate explanation of how a class of desires—basic desires—contributes to practical rationality. I develop an alternative guise-of-the-good account on which basic desires attune us to our reasons for action in virtue of their (...) biological function. This account emphasises the role of desire as part of our competence to recognise and respond to normative reasons. (shrink)

The use of nonhuman animals as models in research and drug testing is a key route through which contemporary scientific knowledge is certified. Given ethical concerns, regulation of animal research promotes the use of less “sentient” animals. This paper draws on a documentary analysis of legal documents and qualitative interviews with Named Veterinary Surgeons and others at a commercial laboratory in the UK. Its key claim is that the concept of animal sentience is entangled with a particular imaginary of how (...) the general public or wider society views animals. We call this imaginary societal sentience. Against a backdrop of increasing ethnographic work on care encounters in the laboratory, this concept helps to stress the wider context within which such encounters take place. We conclude that societal sentience has potential purchase beyond the animal research field, in helping to highlight the affective dimension of public imaginaries and their ethical consequences. Researching and critiquing societal sentience, we argue, may ultimately have more impact on the fate of humans and nonhumans in the laboratory than focusing wholly on ethics as situated practice. (shrink)

There is a deep distrust of experts in America today. Influenced by populist politics, many question or downright ignore the recommendations of scientists, scholars, and others with specialized training. It appears that expertise, a critical component of democratic life, no longer appeals to wide swaths of the body politic. On Expertise is a robust defense of the expert class. Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher examines modern and ancient theories of expertise through the lens of rhetoric and interviews some forty professionals, revealing (...) how they understand their own expertise and how they came to be known as “experts.” She shows that expertise requires not only knowledge and skill but also, crucially, an acknowledgment by others—both specialists and laypeople—that one is a credible authority. At its heart, expertise is a rhetorical construct, and to be persuasive, experts must have the ability to apply their knowledge and skills rightly—in the right way, at the right time, to achieve the right end. Ultimately, Mehlenbacher argues that experts apply their technical knowledge effectively and win others’ trust through acting prudently and cultivating goodwill. Timely, practical, and sophisticated, On Expertise provides vital scaffolding for our understanding of expertise and its real-world application. This book is essential for beginning the work of rehabilitating the expert class amid a politics of extreme populism and anti-intellectualism. (shrink)

This article surveys work in epistemology since the mid-1980s. It focuses on contextualism about knowledge attributions, modest forms of foundationalism, and the internalism/externalism debate and its connections to the ethics of belief.

Ashley J. Bohrer argues that it is only by considering race, gender, sexuality, and ability within the structures of capitalism and imperialism that we can understand power relations. Bohrer explains how the purported incompatibilities between Marxism and intersectionality arise more from miscommunication than a fundamental conceptual antagonism.

_the a priori role_ (for word T). For instance, perhaps anyone who understands the word _water_ is able to know, without appeal to any further a posteriori information, that _water_ refers to the clear, drinkable natural kind whose instances are predominant in our oceans and lakes (if _water_ refers at all.

Moral distress, is, at its core, an organizational problem. It is experienced on a personal level, but its causes originate within the system itself. In this commentary, we argue that moral distress is not inherently good, that effective interventions must address the external sources of moral distress, and that while there is a place for resilience in the healthcare professions, it cannot be an effective antidote to moral distress.

Modern longitudinal studies collect feature data at many timepoints, often of the same order of sample size. Such studies are typically affected by dropout and positivity violations. We tackle these problems by generalizing effects of recent incremental interventions to accommodate multiple outcomes and subject dropout. We give an identifying expression for incremental intervention effects when dropout is conditionally ignorable and derive the nonparametric efficiency bound for estimating such effects. Then we present efficient nonparametric estimators, showing that they converge at fast (...) parametric rates and yield uniform inferential guarantees, even when nuisance functions are estimated flexibly at slower rates. We also study the variance ratio of incremental intervention effects relative to more conventional deterministic effects in a novel infinite time horizon setting, where the number of timepoints can grow with sample size and show that incremental intervention effects yield near-exponential gains in statistical precision in this setup. Finally, we conclude with simulations and apply our methods in a study of the effect of low-dose aspirin on pregnancy outcomes. (shrink)

Many philosophers have suggested that claims of need play a special normative role in ethical thought and talk. But what do such claims mean? What does this special role amount to? Progress on these questions can be made by attending to a puzzle concerning some linguistic differences between two types of 'need' sentence: one where 'need' occurs as a verb, and where it occurs as a noun. I argue that the resources developed to solve the puzzle advance our understanding of (...) the metaphysics of need, the meaning of 'need' sentences, and the function of claims of need in ethical discourse. (shrink)

In this article, we consider infants’ acquisition of foundational aspects of language and emotion through the lens of statistical learning. By taking a comparative developmental approach, we highlight ways in which the learning problems presented by input from these two rich communicative domains are both similar and different. Our goal is to encourage other scholars to consider multiple domains of human experience when developing theories in developmental cognitive science.

Developing a care plan in a critical care context can be challenging when the therapeutic alliance between clinicians and families is compromised by anger. When these cases occur, clinicians often turn to clinical ethics consultants to assist them with repairing this alliance before further damage can occur. This paper describes five different reasons family members may feel and express anger and offers concrete strategies for clinical ethics consultants to use when working with angry families acting as surrogate decision makers for (...) critical care patients. We reviewed records of consults using thematic analysis between January 2015 and June 2016. Each case was coded to identify whether the case involved a negative encounter with an angry family. In our review, we selected 11 cases with at least one of the following concerns or reasons for anger: perceived or actual medical error, concerns about the medical team’s competence, miscommunication, perceived conflict of interest or commitment, or loss of control. To successfully implement these strategies, clinical ethics consultants, members of the medical team, and family members should share responsibility for creating a mutually respectful relationship. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that ethics and evidence are intricately intertwined within the clinical practice of differential diagnosis. Too often, when a disease is difficult to diagnose, a physician will dismiss it as being “not real” or “all in the patient’s head.” This is both an ethical and an evidential problem. In the paper my aim is two-fold. First, via the examination of two case studies (late-stage Lyme disease and Addison’s disease), I try to elucidate why this kind of (...) dismissal takes place. Then, I propose a potential solution to the problem. I argue that instead of dismissing a patient’s illness as “not real,” physicians ought to exercise a compassionate suspension of judgment when a diagnosis cannot be immediately made. I argue that suspending judgment has methodological, epistemic, and ethical virtues and therefore should always be preferred to patient dismissal in the clinical setting. (shrink)