The present article examines how people’s belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal (...) behavior represented as being causally related to one’s afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is “like” to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people’s interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive “system” dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment. (shrink)

We investigated whether (a) people positively reevaluate the characters of recently dead others and (b) supernatural primes concerning an ambient dead agent serve to curb selfish intentions. In Study 1, participants made trait attributions to three strangers depicted in photographs; one week later, they returned to do the same but were informed that one of the strangers had died over the weekend. Participants rated the decedent target more favorably after learning of his death whereas ratings for the control targets remained (...) unchanged between sessions. This effect was especially pronounced for traits dealing with the decedent’s prosocial tendencies (e.g., ethical, kind). In Study 2, a content analysis of obituaries revealed a similar emphasis on decedents’ prosocial attributes over other personality dimensions (e.g., achievement-relatedness, social skills). Finally, in Study 3, participants who were told of an alleged ghost in the laboratory were less likely to cheat on a competitive task than those who did not receive this supernatural prime. The findings are interpreted as evidence suggestive of adaptive design. (shrink)

The commentaries are a promising sign that a research programme on the cognitive science of souls will continue to move toward empirical and theoretical rigor. Most of the commentators agree that beliefs in personal immortality, in the intelligent design of souls, and in the symbolic meaning of natural events can provide new insight into human social evolution. In this response I clarify and extend the evolutionary model, further emphasizing the adaptiveness of the cognitive system that underlies these beliefs.

Consciousness, as a higher-order cognitive capacity allowing for the explicit representation of abstract mental states, might be the incidental byproduct of design features from other adaptive systems, such as those governing expansion of the frontal lobes in primates. Although such abilities may have occurred entirely by chance, the standardized entrenchment of this representational capacity in human cognition may have posed engineering dilemmas for natural selection in that consciousness could not be easily removed without disrupting the adaptive features of other design (...) solutions. If so, then those organisms saddled with the burden of higher-order representation by the occurrence of these chance events were suddenly assaulted with a series of social problems previously unencountered by any other species in evolutionary history. Such consciousness-based problems constituted enormous selective pressure for generating ancestrally adaptive psychological programs designed to cope with them. Each of these design solutions was, by necessity, generated and progressively pruned over an extraordinarily short span of geological time. In addition, these programs ran into conflict with more ancient primate social adaptations — such as those underlying sexual coercion and violence — that did not evolve to be sensitive to the epistemic positions of others. These mosaic processes have likely resulted in selection for innumerable algorithmic properties driving human-specific behaviors which are both proximally and ultimately caused by consciousness. Consciousness by itself should be classified as maladaptive; what is adaptive are those psychological programs in place to support its incidental and problematic arrival in the human brain. (shrink)

Atran & Norenzayan's (A&N's) target article effectively combines the insights of evolutionary biology and interdisciplinary cognitive science, neither of which alone yields sufficient explanatory power to help us fully understand the complexities of supernatural belief. Although the authors' ideas echo those of other researchers, they are perhaps the most squarely grounded in neo-Darwinian terms to date. Nevertheless, A&N overlook the possibility that the tendency to infer supernatural agents' communicative intent behind natural events served an ancestrally adaptive function.

Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at (...) work. In this paper, we show how this argument by analogy is flawed with respect to the case of second‐order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states. (shrink)

We propose a coevolutionary model of secrecy and stigmatization. According to this model, secrecy functions to conceal potential fitness costs detected in oneself or one’s genetic kin. In three studies, we found that the content of participants’ distressing secrets overlapped significantly with three domains of social information that were important for inclusive fitness and served as cues for discriminating between rewarding and unrewarding interaction partners: health, mating, and social-exchange behavior. These findings support the notion that secrecy functions primarily as a (...) defense against stigmatization by suppressing information about oneself or one’s kin that evolutionarily has been devalued in mating and social exchange. (shrink)

This chapter inquires into an initially rather startling claim Sebastian Rödl makes in his Self-Consciousness and Objectivity (SC&O): that the power of judgment is not a power among other powers, but rather “the power” (p. 60). It traces Rödl’s sophisticated understanding of powers, as presented in SC&O, in terms of a distinction between “simple powers”, such as a pear tree’s power to blossom, on the one hand, and “self-conscious powers”, such as the power of judgment, on the other. Reflection on (...) related distinctions that SC&O makes between forms of explanation and forms of necessity yields the insight that these two kinds of power cannot be kept apart. The chapter discusses various attempts to bring them together in a satisfactory way and concludes with a proposal in which the idea of givenness plays a central role, in such a way that the initially startling claim can be seen to make sense. (shrink)

Power enthusiasts are engaged in two projects: developing a decent metaphysical account of powers, and applying that account in order to make progress on various other philosophical issues, ranging from narrowly related topics such as causality to further removed ones such as free will, reasoning, or perception. I argue that an intermediate step may be taken, one that explores ‘varieties of power’ while still staying within the realm of, of ‘pure’ powers metaphysics. Taking this intermediate step provides a much more (...) interesting basis for those involved in project, ‘applied’ powers metaphysics. I articulate four such varieties of power by exploring various dimensions in which the explanatory profile of a power can be extended. I then briefly survey how these relate to various further metaphysical issues. (shrink)

Although contemporary powers metaphysics largely understands itself as a metaphysical realist undertaking, recently powers have come to the surface also within an idealist context. This paper aims to characterize and motivate an absolute idealist conception of powers. I compare realist and idealist powers metaphysics in their respective responses to Humean scepticism concerning powers, thereby motivating the claim that the very idea of a power is actually best understood as an idealist idea. I continue to characterize the absolute idealist’s understanding of (...) power, for which it is necessary to see that the content of her power notion is inseparable from the way in which she arrives at that notion. I close with a brief reflection on the absolute idealist’s understanding of the power of thought, which is where idealist and realist powers metaphysics diverge most radically. (shrink)

Humeans take reality to be devoid of ‘necessary connections’: things just happen. Laws of nature are to be understood in terms of what ‘just happens’, not vice versa. Here the Humean needs some conception of what it is that ‘just happens’ – a conception of the Humean mosaic. Lewis’s Humeanism incorporates such a conception in the form of a Lewis-style metaphysics of objects, properties, and modality. Newer versions of Humeanism about laws of nature, such as the Better Best Systems approach, (...) typically reject such a Lewisian metaphysics, but it remains unclear what they can offer in its place. By exploring different candidate conceptions, this paper sheds light on the limits of Humeanism about laws of nature: not all conceptions of the Humean mosaic form a suitable basis for a Humean theory of laws. In fact, only a metaphysics roughly in line with Lewis’s will do. The paper ends with a tentative generalization of this result, thus pointing to the ‘limit’ of Humeanism in general: taking the Humean way of thinking to its limit results in a rejection of the whole idea of such a mosaic – and hence of Humean mosaic-based accounts of anything. (shrink)

Life poses a threat to materialism. To understand the phenomena of animate nature, we make use of a teleological form of explanation that is peculiar to biology, of explanations in terms of what I call the ‘vital categories’ – and this holds even for accounts of underlying physico-chemical ‘mechanisms’. The materialist claims that this teleological form of explanation does not capture what is metaphysically fundamental, whereas her preferred physical form of explanation does. In this essay, I do three things. (1) (...) I argue that the ‘vital categories’, such as life form and life-process, do not reduce to the ‘physical categories’ and show that there are no grounds for the materialist's metaphysically limiting claim; (2) I sketch a positive view on how vital and physical explanations can both apply to a given phenomenon, and on how they interrelate; and (3) I show that this view meshes nicely with evolutionary theory, despite being committed to a form of ‘biological essentialism’. (shrink)

Frege taught us how to understand one form of predication: an atemporal one. There is also a different, temporal form of predication, which I briefly introduce. Accordingly, there are two fundamentally different approaches to time: a reductive one, aiming to account for time in terms of Frege’s atemporal predication, and a non-reductive one, insisting that the temporal form of predication is sui generis, and that time is to be understood in its terms. I do not directly argue for or against (...) reductionism in this paper. Rather, by evaluating the debates on endurantism–perdurantism, A-theory–B-theory, and presentism–eternalism, I argue that these debates, although aiming to be fundamental, largely boil down to mere quarrels between alternative reductive approaches. We should take notice of this fact and reorient ourselves within the debate on time accordingly: the real issue is whether we should reduce or not. I briefly sketch in what sense endurantism, A-theory, and presentism may be developed on a properly anti-reductionist basis. (shrink)

In her seminal essay ‘Causality and Determination’, Elizabeth Anscombe very decidedly announced that “physical indeterminism” is “indispensable if we are to make anything of the claim to freedom”. But it is clear from that same essay that she extends the scope of that claim beyond freedom–she suggests that indeterminism is required already for animal self-movement. Building on Anscombe’s conception of causality and determinism, I will suggest that it extends even further: life as such already requires physical indeterminism. Furthermore, I show (...) that we can, on this basis, arrive at the idea of varieties of determinism, along with a corresponding variety of incompatibilist theses. From this Anscombean vantage point, the free will discussion takes on a quite different outlook. The question whether free agency can coexist with determinism on the level of blind physical forces, which preoccupies the philosopher of free will, turns out to conflate a whole series of compatibility questions: not just whether life is compatible with physical determinism, but also whether animal self-movement is compatible with ‘biological determinism’, and whether free agency is compatible with ‘animal determinism’. (shrink)

What is the best question reductionists would have to answer but cannot, and why exactly is there no reductionist answer to that question? To answer this question, we need to identify the relevant question.

It is surprisingly hard to define presentism. Traditional definitions of the view, in terms of tensed existence statements, have turned out not to to be capable of convincingly distinguishing presentism from eternalism. Picking up on a recent proposal by Tallant, I suggest that we need to locate the break between eternalism and presentism on a much more fundamental level. The problem is that presentists have tried to express their view within a framework that is inherently eternalist. I call that framework (...) the Fregean nexus, as it is defined by Frege’s atemporal understanding of predication. In particular, I show that the tense-logical understanding of tense which is treated as common ground in the debate rests on this very same Fregean nexus, and is thus inadequate for a proper definition of presentism. I contrast the Fregean nexus with what I call the original temporal nexus, which is based on an alternative, inherently temporal form of predication. Finally, I propose to define presentism in terms of the original temporal nexus, yielding original presentism. According to original presentism, temporal propositions are distinguished from atemporal ones not by aspects of their content, as they are on views based on the Fregean nexus, but by their form—in particular, by their form of predication. (shrink)

It is often claimed that principles of individuation imply essential properties of the things individuated. For example, sets are individuated by their members, hence sets have their members essentially. But how does this inference work? First I discuss the form of such inferences, and conclude that the essentialist inference is not a purely formal matter: although there is a form which all principles of individuation have in common, it is not true that any statement of that form is a principle (...) of individuation, and hence there is no valid inference based purely on that form. However, I argue that there is a viable version of the essentialist inference nonetheless. The resources for a proper reconstruction of this type of inference can be gathered from reflections upon the role principles of individuation play in the project of the ontologist: such principles turn out to carry a modal weight similar to that of definitions or conceptual truths. It follows that, no matter how austere the ontology, some portion of essentialist modality is inevitable. (shrink)

There is an influential conception of intentional agency in terms of just beliefs and desires. And there is an equally influential conception that adds intentions as separate ingredients. It remains disputed whether adding intentions is really necessary, and what difference that addition exactly makes. I argue that adding intentions is required, but only because and insofar as it makes room for a distinctively practical kind of reasoning. I critically consider Bratman's main considerations in support of adding intentions, viz., conduct-control, inertia, (...) and input for practical reasoning, and argue that a desire-belief theorist can easily accommodate those. I then reconsider all three Bratmanian considerations in order to establish a more fundamental difference in terms of a robust notion of practical reasoning. Such a difference can be found if we place Bratman's considerations in the light of Sebastian Rödl's idea of a measure or order of practical reasoning. (shrink)

The most basic divide amongst analytic metaphysicians separates realists from anti-realists. By examining certain characteristic and problematic features of these two families of views, we uncover their underlying metametaphysicalorientations, which turn out to coincide. This shared philosophical picture that underlies both the realist and the anti-realist project we call the Modern Picture. It rests on a crucial distinction between reality as it is for us and reality as it is in itself. It is argued that this distinction indeed generates the (...) realism/anti-realism dichotomy, and is also responsible for the problematic aspects highlighted earlier. We conclude by sketching an alternative philosophical picture that rejects the distinction between reality as it is for us and reality as it is in itself, which we call the Aristotelian Picture, and consider whether it is able to avoid the issues to which the Modern Picture gives rise. (shrink)

Graham Priest has argued that Yablo’s paradox involves a kind of ‘hidden’ circularity, since it involves a predicate whose satisfaction conditions can only be given in terms of that very predicate. Even if we accept Priest’s claim that Yablo’s paradox is self-referential in this sense—that the satisfaction conditions for the sentences making up the paradox involve a circular predicate—it turns out that there are paradoxical variations of Yablo’s paradox that are not circular in this sense, since they involve satisfaction conditions (...) that are not recursively specifiable, and hence not recognizable in the sense required for Priest’s argument. In this paper I provide a general recipe for constructing infinitely many such noncircular Yabloesque paradoxes, and conclude by drawing some more general lessons regarding our ability to identify conditions that are necessary and sufficient for paradoxically more generally. (shrink)

Graham Priest has argued that Yablo’s paradox involves a kind of ‘hidden’ circularity, since it involves a predicate whose satisfaction conditions can only be given in terms of that very predicate. Even if we accept Priest’s claim that Yablo’s paradox is self-referential in this sense—that the satisfaction conditions for the sentences making up the paradox involve a circular predicate—it turns out that there are paradoxical variations of Yablo’s paradox that are not circular in this sense, since they involve satisfaction conditions (...) that are not recursively specifiable, and hence not recognizable in the sense required for Priest’s argument. In this paper I provide a general recipe for constructing infinitely many such noncircular Yabloesque paradoxes, and conclude by drawing some more general lessons regarding our ability to identify conditions that are necessary and sufficient for paradoxically more generally. (shrink)

Managers conduct open market repurchases for many different reasons, including to distribute excess cash. However, the most widely discussed explanation for OMRs is the “signaling theory:” that managers announce OMRs to signal that the stock is underpriced. The first purpose of this paper is to show that the signaling theory is theoretically problematic—in part because it assumes managers deliberately sacrifice their own wealth to increase that of shareholders—as well as inconsistent with much of the empirical evidence. The second purpose of (...) the paper is to put forward an alternative explanation for managers’ use of OMRs: the managerial-opportunism theory. This theory, which assumes that managers seek to maximize their own wealth, predicts that managers announce OMRs both when the stock is underpriced and when it is not. When the stock is underpriced, managers may announce and conduct an OMR to transfer value to themselves and other remaining shareholders. When managers wish to sell a large portion of their shares, they announce an OMR to boost the stock price before selling their shares. The paper shows that managerial opportunism is not only a more plausible motive for OMRs than is signaling, it is also more consistent with the empirical data. The paper concludes by describing some testable predictions of the theory. (shrink)

Higher-order theories account for intransitive consciousness by using the transitive notion ‘awareness-of.’ I argue that this notion implies a form of ‘seeming’ that the higher-order approach requires, yet cannot account for. I show that, if the relevant kind of seeming is declared to be present in all representational states, the seeming in question is objectionably trivialized; while using the higher-order strategy to capture not only intransitive consciousness but also the relevant kind of seeming results in an infinite regress. Finally, highlighting (...) distinctive features of representations that explain why they display seeming amounts to abandoning the higher-order approach altogether. (shrink)

Anscombe’s 1971 inaugural lecture at Cambridge, entitled ‘Causality and Determination’, has had a lasting influence on a remarkably broad range of philosophers and philosophical debates, touching on fundamental topics in philosophy of science, action theory, the free will debate, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. Especially where anti-reductionist or pluralist strands of philosophical thought are being seriously considered, one should not be surprised to find references to Anscombe’s lecture. Moreover, there appears to be a growing interest in Anscombe’s comprehensive philosophical (...) outlook, as attested by the recent publication of a weighty collection of essays spanning that outlook in its full breadth in the prestigious Routledge Philosophical Minds series. Against this background it is apt that now, 50 years after the original lecture, a Topical Collection sees the light, circling around the most central themes from Anscombe’s lecture, with a particular emphasis on the question how these hang together, how they form part of the larger philosophical project that Anscombe obviously intended the lecture to highlight. This Introduction motivates the Topical Collection, and introduces the various contributions against that background. (shrink)

This article aims to introduce Bell’s work to philosophical audiences while also presenting his work for consideration within our contemporary discussions of race and racism. Bell’s contributions to our understanding of race have gone largely unnoticed, and that those who consider themselves philosophers of race are unfamiliar with the contributions of the intellectual father of Critical Race Theory is not only a failure of intellectual scholarship, but it is also a missed opportunity to take seriously the claims of a legal, (...) political, and philosophical titan. The first section of this paper seeks to present Bell’s paradigm of racial realism and its constituent components. The second section explores what has led to Bell’s near complete exclusion from the discipline of philosophy, and philosophy of race specifically. The third section addresses the contributions that Bell’s theories can make to our contemporary discussions of race within the discipline of philosophy. (shrink)

Sebastian Rödl's Self-Consciousness and Objectivity is one of the most original and thought-provoking books in philosophy of mind for the last several years. An ambitious defence of absolute idealism, Rödl rejects the idea that reality is simply something given, and instead advances the position that all reality is accessible to thought because reality is already included in judgment. In this outstanding collection, a roster of international contributors critically examine the significance of Rödl's arguments and take the themes of his book (...) in new directions. The volume concludes with an extensive response by Sebastian Rödl to his critics, making it essential reading for those interested in contemporary debates in analytic philosophy, philosophy of mind and philosophical idealism. (shrink)

What does the unity of a thought consist in? The analytic tradition typically accepts the Fregean answer to this question: a thought is, in the fundamental case, the result of applying a concept to an appropriate range of objects. Yet upon reflection this turns out to be insufficient. I follow Rödl’s exploration of the unity of temporal thoughts, which shows this unity to be differentiated in such a way as to give rise to the basic metaphysical categories of time, causality, (...) essence, and power. These considerations seem to warrant three conclusions: first, reality is conceptual in nature; second, metaphysics and logic are one and the same subject; and third, these two conclusions are to be taken in an absolute metaphysical sense. (shrink)

The introduction of genes into plants encoding potent antibacterial proteins, derived from insects, may significantly augment the level of their resistance to bacterial disease. Using modern techniques, genes of choice can be introduced into plant tissue and this tissue can be manipulated to produce viable plants. The potato has been chosen as the model system, not only because of its plasticity of development, which allows for the relatively easy regeneration of whole plants from transformed tissue, but also because the potato (...) ranks among the top four plants in the world in terms of economic importance. (shrink)

(Expected) adverse effects of the ‘ICT Revolution’ on work and opportunities for individuals to use and develop their capacities give a new impetus to the debate on the societal implications of technology and raise questions regarding the ‘responsibility’ of research and innovation (RRI) and the possibility of achieving ‘inclusive and sustainable society’. However, missing in this debate is an examination of a possible conflict between the quest for ‘inclusive and sustainable society’ and conventional economic principles guiding capital allocation (including the (...) funding of research and innovation). We propose that such conflict can be resolved by re-examining the nature and purpose of capital, and by recognising mainstream economics’ utilitarian foundations as an unduly restrictive subset of a wider Aristotelian understanding of choice. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001788471; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 26-43.; Physical Description: diag, table ; Language(s): English; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

Scientific interest in religion often focusses on the “puzzle of belief”: how people develop and maintain religious beliefs despite a lack of evidence and the significant costs that those beliefs incur. A number of researchers have suggested that humans are predisposed towards supernatural thinking, with innate cognitive biases engendering, for example, the misattribution of intentional agency. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that nonbelievers often act “as if” they believe. For example, atheists are reluctant to sell the very souls (...) they deny having, or to angrily provoke the God they explicitly state does not exist. In our own recent work, participants who claimed not to believe in the afterlife nevertheless demonstrated a physiological fear response when informed that there was a ghost in the room. Such findings are often interpreted as evidence for an “implicit” belief in the supernatural that operates alongside (and even in contradiction to) an individual’s conscious (“explicit”) religious belief. In this article, we investigate these arguably tenuous constructs more deeply and suggest some possible empirical directions for further disentangling implicit and explicit reasoning. (shrink)

The practice of burying objects with the dead is often claimed as some of the earliest evidence for religion, on the assumption that such “grave goods” were intended for the decedents’ use in the afterlife. However, this assumption is largely speculative, as the underlying motivations for grave‐good practices across time and place remain little understood. In the present work, we asked if explicit and implicit religious beliefs (particularly those concerning the continuity of personal consciousness after death) motivate contemporary grave‐good practices. (...) Across three studies, and comparing participants from the United States and NZ, we measured grave‐good deposition at actual or hypothetical funerals, finding that jewelry, photographs, and other items with sentimental, emotional, and relationship value were common. In addition, intuitive afterlife reasoning (as measured by people's attributions of mental states to the dead) motivated grave‐good decision‐making for about half (Study 2) or more (Study 3) people, including afterlife nonbelievers (“extinctivists”), while those who held explicit (i.e., stated) afterlife beliefs were more likely to participate in the practice. The decision to leave grave goods was also associated with magical contagion beliefs and a need for personal comfort, while other motivations, such as social signaling, were less common. Our results suggest that “afterlife use” is a common motivation for grave‐good practices, and that humans possess evolutionarily early intuitions about postdeath consciousness. (shrink)

BackgroundDefensive practice occurs when physicians provide services, such as tests, treatments and referrals, mainly to reduce their perceived legal or reputational risks, rather than to advance patient care. This behaviour is counter to physicians’ ethical responsibilities, yet is widely reported in surveys of doctors in various countries. There is a lack of qualitative research on the drivers of defensive practice, which is needed to inform strategies to prevent this ethically problematic behaviour.MethodsA qualitative interview study investigated the views and experiences of (...) physicians in Australia on defensive practice and its contribution to low value care. Interviewees were recruited based on interest in medico-legal issues or experience in a health service involved in ‘Choosing Wisely’ initiatives. Semi-structured interviews averaged 60 min in length. Data were coded using the Theoretical Domains Framework, which encapsulates theories of behaviour and behaviour change.ResultsAll participants (n = 17) perceived defensive practice as a problem and a contributor to low value care. Behavioural drivers of defensive practice spanned seven domains in the TDF: knowledge, focused on inadequate knowledge of the law and the risks of low value care; skills, emphasising patient communication and clinical decision-making skills; professional role and identity, particularly clinicians’ perception of patient expectations and concern for their professional reputation; beliefs about consequences, especially perceptions of the beneficial and harmful consequences of defensive practice; environmental context and resources, including processes for handling patient complaints; social influences, focused on group norms that encourage or discourage defensive behaviour; and emotions, especially fear of missing a diagnosis. Overall, defensive practice is motivated by physicians’ desire to avoid criticism or scrutiny from a range of sources, and censure from their professional peers can be a more potent driver than perceived legal consequences.ConclusionsThe findings call for strengthening knowledge and skills, for example, to improve clinicians’ understanding of the law and their awareness of the risks of low value care and using effective communication strategies with patients. Importantly, supportive cultures of practice and organisational environments are needed to create conditions in which clinicians feel confident in avoiding defensive practice and other forms of low value care. (shrink)

Given that an analysis of disposition ascription cannot be made in terms of a simple subjunctive conditional, we present a multiply qualified conditional analysis that places disposition ascription within an implicit fundamental causal conceptual typography within which a disposition ascription is embedded, framed, and understood. By placing the multiply qualified analysis within an implicit causal matrix involving a focal cause, pathway of influence, mechanism of action, contributing/partial cause, mediator, extrinsic moderator,, intrinsic moderator, and manifestation, we show how this analysis evades (...) counterexamples and arguments raised against the simple conditional analysis. We then indicate how the causal conceptual landscape provides a roadmap for unpacking and explicating parameters of the ceteris paribus qualifier to acquit the analysis of charges of being vacuous or irredeemably vague. (shrink)