Nurses in Ghana believe that training, practise, practitioner and policy reforms are required for total nursing profession reform to be effective. Their views for role reformation in the nursing profession, which is currently needed, are not only academic but also clinically relevant in the pursuit of health equity and quality nursing care. We explored and described nurses’ views on their roles in the profession using data collected from 24 professional nurses in three regional hospitals in Ghana. Using an inductive descriptive (...) qualitative design, data were gathered and analysed using a qualitative content analysis to describe the views of the nurses. Four major themes, namely practise reforms, practitioner reforms, training reforms and policy reforms have emerged in relation to role reformation in the nursing profession. Three strategic areas, practitioner attitudes, new training modalities and policy realignment, must be reviewed and remodelled for better positioning of the nursing profession before its entire role reformation. (shrink)

Contents \t\t\t\t\t \tTRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION \t\t1 \t \tNOTE ON THE TRANSLATION \t\t39 \t OBSERVATIONS ON THE FEELING OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME \t\t\t\t\t \tSECTION ONE: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Distinct Objects of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime \t\t45 \tSECTION TWO: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime.

Fallibilists claim that one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Jessica Brown offers a compelling defence of this view against infallibilists, who claim that it is contradictory to claim to know and yet to admit the possibility of error.

Delusions are deeply evidence-resistant. Patients with delusions are unmoved by evidence that is in direct conflict with the delusion, often responding to such evidence by offering obvious, and strange, confabulations. As a consequence, the standard view is that delusions are not evidence-responsive. This claim has been used as a key argumentative wedge in debates on the nature of delusions. Some have taken delusions to be beliefs and argued that this implies that belief is not constitutively evidence-responsive. Others hold fixed the (...) evidenceresponsiveness of belief and take this to show that delusions cannot be beliefs. Against this common assumption, I appeal to a large range of empirical evidence to argue that delusions are evidence-responsive in the sense that subjects have the capacity to respond to evidence on their delusion in rationally permissible ways. The extreme evidence-resistance of delusions is a consequence of powerful masking factors on these capacities, such as strange perceptual experiences, motivational factors, and cognitive biases. This view makes room for holding both that belief is constitutively evidence-responsive and that delusions are beliefs, and it has important implications for the study and treatment of delusions. (shrink)

There are at least two different aspects of our rational evaluation of agents’ doxastic attitudes. First, we evaluate these attitudes according to whether they are supported by one’s evidence (substantive rationality). Second, we evaluate these attitudes according to how well they cohere with one another (structural rationality). In previous work, I’ve argued that substantive and structural rationality really are distinct, sui generis, kinds of rationality – call this view ‘dualism’, as opposed to ‘monism’, about rationality – by arguing that the (...) requirements of substantive and structural rationality can come into conflict. In this paper, I push the dialectic on this issue forward in two main ways. First, I argue that the most promising ways of resisting the diagnosis of my cases as conflicts still end up undermining monism in different ways. Second, supposing for the sake of argument that we should understand the cases as conflicts, I address the question of what we should do when such conflicts arise. I argue that, at least in a prominent kind of conflict case, the coherence requirements take precedence over the evidential requirements. (shrink)

This essay is an accessible introduction to the proof paradox in legal epistemology. -/- In 1902 the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine filed an influential legal verdict. The judge claimed that in order to find a defendant culpable, the plaintiff “must adduce evidence other than a majority of chances”. The judge thereby claimed that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal proof. -/- In this essay I first motivate the claim that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal (...) proof. I then introduce and motivate a knowledge-centred explanation of this fact. The knowledge-centred explanation rests on two premises. The first is that legal proof requires knowledge of culpability. The second is that one cannot attain knowledge that p from bare statistical evidence that p. To motivate the second premise, I suggest that beliefs based on bare statistical evidence fail to be safe—they could easily be wrong—and bare statistical evidence cannot eliminate relevant alternatives. -/- I then cast doubt on the first premise; I argue that legal proof does not require knowledge. I thereby dispute the knowledge-centred explanation of the inadequacy of bare statistical evidence for legal proof. Instead of appealing to the nature of knowledge, I suggest we should seek a more direct explanation by appealing to those more foundational epistemic properties, such as safety or eliminating relevant alternatives. (shrink)

Many who think that naked statistical evidence alone is inadequate for a trial verdict think that use of probability is the problem, and something other than probability – knowledge, full belief, causal relations – is the solution. I argue that the issue of whether naked statistical evidence is weak can be formulated within the probabilistic idiom, as the question whether likelihoods or only posterior probabilities should be taken into account in our judgment of a case. This question also identifies a (...) major difference between the Process Reliabilist and Probabilistic Tracking views of knowledge and other concepts. Though both are externalist, and probabilistic, epistemic theories, Tracking does and Process Reliabilism does not put conditions on likelihoods. So Tracking implies that a naked statistic is not adequate evidence about an individual, and does not yield knowledge, whereas the Reliabilist thinks it gives justified belief and knowledge. Not only does the Tracking view imply that naked statistical evidence is insufficient for a verdict, but it gives us resources to explain why, in terms of risk and the special conditions of a trial. (shrink)

Contentless experience involves an absence of mental content such as thought, perception, and mental imagery. In academic work it has been classically treated as including states like those aimed for in Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation. We have used evidence synthesis to select and review 135 expert texts from within the three traditions. In this paper we identify the features of contentless experience referred to in the expert texts and determine whether the experiences are the same or different across the (...) practices with respect to each feature. We identify 65 features reported or implied in one or more practices, with most being reported or implied in all three. While there are broad similarities in the experiences across the traditions, we find that there are differences with respect to four features and possibly many others. The main difference identified is that Shamatha involves substantially greater attentional stability and vividness. Another key finding is that numerous forms of content are present in the experiences, including wakefulness, naturalness, calm, bliss/joy, and freedom. The findings indicate that meditation experiences described as contentless in the academic literature can in fact involve considerable variation, and that in many and perhaps most cases these experiences are not truly contentless. This challenges classical understandings in academic research that in these so-called contentless experiences all content is absent, and that the experiences are therefore an identical state of _pure consciousness_ or consciousness itself. Our assessment is that it remains an open question whether the experiences aimed for in the three practices should be classed as pure consciousness. Implications of our analysis for neuroscientific and clinical studies and for basic understandings of the practices are discussed. (shrink)

While many philosophers of science have accorded special evidential significance to tests whose results are "novel facts", there continues to be disagreement over both the definition of novelty and why it should matter. The view of novelty favored by Giere, Lakatos, Worrall and many others is that of use-novelty: An accordance between evidence e and hypothesis h provides a genuine test of h only if e is not used in h's construction. I argue that what lies behind the intuition that (...) novelty matters is the deeper intuition that severe tests matter. I set out a criterion of severity akin to the notion of a test's power in Neyman-Pearson statistics. I argue that tests which are use-novel may fail to be severe, and tests that are severe may fail to be use-novel. I discuss the 1919 eclipse data as a severe test of Einstein's law of gravity. (shrink)

Much of the intuitive appeal of evidentialism results from conflating two importantly different conceptions of evidence. This is most clear in the case of perceptual justification, where experience is able to provide evidence in one sense of the term, although not in the sense that the evidentialist requires. I argue this, in part, by relying on a reading of the Sellarsian dilemma that differs from the version standardly encountered in contemporary epistemology, one that is aimed initially at the epistemology of (...) introspection but which generalizes to theories of perceptual justification as well. (shrink)

Bayesian approaches to rationality require that a person’s degrees of belief be coherent. Among other implications, coherence requires that a person has the same degree of belief in every logically equivalent proposition. However, a person can have evidence for a claim without having evidence for all its propositional equivalences. This paper explores this conflict and argues that a person may be perfectly rational by virtue of responding to their evidence, even if their credences are not coherent. The paper also challenges (...) the idea that it is always better to have more coherent credence, highlighting the fundamental role that evidence plays in rational belief. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering and consider consequences for how to understand epistemic normativity. Though the view that there are such norms seems intuitive, it has found surprisingly little defense. Rather, many philosophers have argued that norms on evidence-gathering can only be practical or moral. On a prominent evidentialist version of this position, epistemic norms only apply to responding to the evidence one already has. Here we challenge the orthodoxy. First, we argue that (...) there is no significant normative difference between responding to evidence you have and gathering more evidence. Second, we argue that our practices of epistemically criticizing agents for their poor evidence-gathering indicate the existence of epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Finally, we show that our thesis has important implications for recent debates about the relationship between epistemic norms and inquiry. (shrink)

A favoured argument of many of the eighteenth-century Deists was that the concept of miracle is inconsistent with the supposed perfection of God and thus the occurrence of miracles would constitute evidence against, rather than for, God. In the latter part of the twentieth century we meet very similar arguments in the writings of Christine Overall and James Keller who claim that the occurrence of miracles would imply an arbitrariness and caprice unworthy of a divine agent.

I make some remarks about whether evidence of valenced responses constitutes evidence of valenced states, and therefore of sentience, in organisms.

This lucid book is the first to be wholly dedicated to Hume's theory of personal identity, and presents a bold new interpretation which bears directly on ...

When a circular coin is rotated in depth, is there any sense in which it comes to resemble an ellipse? While this question is at the center of a rich and divided philosophical tradition (with some scholars answering affirmatively and some negatively), Morales et al. (2020, 2021) took an empirical approach, reporting 10 experiments whose results favor such perspectival similarity. Recently, Burge and Burge (2022) offered a vigorous critique of this work, objecting to its approach and conclusions on both philosophical (...) and empirical grounds. Here, we answer these objections on both fronts. We show that Burge and Burge’s critique rests on misunderstandings of Morales et al.’s claims; of the relation between the data and conclusions; and of the philosophical context in which the work appears. Specifically, Burge and Burge attribute to us a much stronger (and stranger) view than we hold, involving the introduction of “a new entity” located “in some intermediate position(s) between the distal shape and the retinal image.” We do not hold this view. Indeed, once properly understood, most of Burge and Burge’s objections favor Morales et al.’s claims rather than oppose them. Finally, we discuss several questions that remain unanswered, and reflect on a productive path forward on these issues of foundational scientific and philosophical interest. (shrink)

Begins by explaining then proving a generalized language dependence result similar to Goodman's "grue" problem. I then use this result to cast doubt on the existence of an objective evidential favoring relation (such as "the evidence confirms one hypothesis over another," "the evidence provides more reason to believe one hypothesis over the other," "the evidence justifies one hypothesis over the other," etc.). Once we understand what language dependence tells us about evidential favoring, our options are an implausibly strong conception of (...) the a priori, a hard externalism on which agents are unable to determine what their evidence favors, or a subjectivist view that makes evidential favoring relative to features of the agent. (shrink)

In her recent `Facts about incoherence as non-evidential epistemic reasons‘ Eva Schmidt defends the claim that not all epistemic reasons are provided by evidence. Schmidt presents three cases describing agents with incoherent beliefs and argues that, in each case, the fact that an agent’s beliefs are incoherent provides her with a non-evidential epistemic reason to suspend judgment on the issue that her beliefs are about. While I find the suggestion that facts about incoherence can play positive roles in our cognitive (...) lives intriguing, I have three reservations about Schmidt’s view: the first concerns her conceptual framework—I think it is less neutral than it appears to be—the second concerns the view’s behavior in certain kinds of scenarios involving higher-order evidence, and the third has to do with some implausible consequences of the view. I also hint at an alternative account of the positive role of facts about incoherence. (shrink)

Graciela De Pierris presents a novel interpretation of the relationship between skepticism and naturalism in Hume's epistemology, and a new appraisal of Hume's place within early modern thought. Contrary to dominant readings, she argues that Hume does offer skeptical arguments concerning causation and induction in Book I, Part III of the Treatise, and presents a detailed reading of the skeptical argument she finds there and how this argument initiates a train of skeptical reasoning that begins in Part III and culminates (...) in Part IV. She goes on to demonstrate that Hume was committed to the Newtonian inductive method while rejecting the place of the supernatural in our understanding of nature. (shrink)

Many people have recently argued that we need to distinguish between experiences and seemings and that this has consequences for views about how perception provides evidence. In this article I spell out my take on these issues by doing three things. First, I distinguish between mere sensations like seeing pitch black all around you and perceptual experiences like seeing a red apple. Both have sensory phenomenology in presenting us with sensory qualities like colors, being analog in Dretske's sense, and being (...) fine-grained. However, only the latter have furthermore a perceptual phenomenology characterized by objectification and related dualities of perspectivality/completion and variation/constancy. Second, I elaborate on the reasons for thinking that both mere sensations and perceptual experiences need to be distinguished from accompanying seemings that passively assign things into conceptual categories and thereby tell you something about them. For example, when you look at a red apple and have the relevant recognitional abilities it will also normally seem to you that this is an apple. Finally, I argue that the best version of the popular dogmatist view about evidence is one which claims that it's neither experiences nor seemings by themselves, but rather the right sorts of composites of experiences and seemings that provide evidence. (shrink)

This volume is an interdisciplinary attempt to insert a broader, historically informed perspective into current political and academic debates on the issue of evidence and the reliability of scientific knowledge. Evidence in Action is the perfect resource for all those interested in the relationship between science, technology, and the role of knowledge in society.

This paper explores one way in which the view that emotions can be epistemically justified stands in tension with two common views in epistemology; namely, that doxastic justification entails propositional justification, and that propositional justification is entirely determined by the (inferential) support relations between one's evidence and a given proposition. A tentative solution to the tension is provided.

This book contains essays presented at a symposium on evidence and data presented by the America Philosophical Society. The essays discuss the role of evidence in interpreting anthropological fieldwork; human psychology; the mechanisms of artificial intelligence; and claims about the past. The natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities are all represented.

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called the suppressed evidence. This fallacy is as simple as it seems: one commits the fallacy when one presents evidence or an argument for a position but leaves out (or suppresses) relevant evidence that would weaken or show false one's conclusion. Suppression of evidence is commonly found in the (mis)presentation of statistics. Suppression of evidence is most common among conspiracy theorists. The fallacy of suppressing the evidence can come (...) from left, right, or center. According to The Skeptics Dictionary, scientists sometimes do it, reporters do it, and pretty much everybody does it now and again. It is an extremely effective way to make one's argument appear stronger than it is. But those interested in the truth should always present all the evidence they can, regardless of whether it hurts or hinders what they want to believe. (shrink)

Several current theories have essences as primary drivers of inductive potential: e.g., people infer dogs share properties because they share essences. We investigated the possibility that people take occupational roles as having robust inductive potential because of a different source: their position in stable social institutions. In Studies 1–4, participants learned a novel property about a target, and then decided whether two new individuals had the property (one with the same occupation, one without). Participants used occupational roles to robustly generalize (...) rights and obligations, functional behaviors, personality traits, and skills. In Studies 5–6, we contrasted occupational roles (via label) with race/gender (via visual face cues). Participants reliably favored occupational roles over race/gender for generalizing rights and obligations, functional behaviors, personality traits, and skills (they favored race/gender for inferring leisure behaviors and physiological properties). Occupational roles supported inferences to the same extent as animal categories (Studies 4 and 6). In Study 7, we examined why members of occupational roles share properties. Participants did not attribute the inductive potential of occupational roles to essences, they attributed it to social institutions. In combination, these seven studies demonstrate that any theory of inductive potential must pluralistically allow for both essences and social institutions to form the basis of inductive potential. (shrink)

What is the epistemological value of perceptual experience? In his recently influential paper, “The Skeptic and the Dogmatist”1, James Pryor develops a seemingly plausible answer to this question. Pryor’s answer comprises the following three theses: (F) “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.” (517) (PK) “This justification that you get merely by having an experience as of p can sometimes (...) suffice to give you knowledge that p is the case.” (520) (D) “When it perceptually seems to you as if p is the case, you have a kind of justification for believing p that does not presuppose or rest on your justification for anything else, which could be cited in argument (even an ampliative argument) for p. To have this justification for believing p, you need only have an experience that represents p as being the case. No further awareness or reflection or background beliefs are required.” (519) Let’s use the phrase “fallibilist dogmatism” to refer to the conjunction of (F), (PK), and (D).2 Pryor does not argue for either (F) or (PK) in his paper; he simply shares the widespread and plausible assumption that (F) and (PK) are both true. But the conjunction of (F) and (PK) implies that we can have knowledge on the basis of defeasible justification. And this view leads to paradox. Consider the following individually plausible but jointly incompatible statements. (shrink)

This chapter addresses Immanuel Kant and the potential impasse of any philosophical account of religious experience. Various attempts within phenomenology are explored to broaden the notion of givenness and evidence beyond the parameters of object-givenness. Then, the chapter deals with a phenomenology of religious experience as an irreducible sphere of human experience, and its unique style of evidence and modalisations. For Kant, experience is limited to one mode of givenness in which objects of knowledge are actively constituted with the direct (...) implication that one cannot meaningfully speak of a religious experience. The recognition of the different quality of givenness in religious experience implicated the significant matter of religious evidence. (shrink)

In the contemporary epistemological literature, peer disagreement is often taken to be an instance of a more general phenomenon of “higher-order evidence.” Correspondingly, its epistemic significance is often thought to turn on the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence in general. This chapter attempts to evaluate this claim, and in doing so to clarify some points of unclarity in the current literature – both about what it is for evidence to be “higher-order,” and about the relationship between disagreement and higher-order evidence. (...) We will begin by considering some candidate definitions of “higher-order evidence,” and offering our own definition that attempts to capture the phenomenon of interest. We will then consider, in light of this definition, whether disagreement and its epistemic significance are best-understood as a kind of higher-order evidence. We’ll argue that although peer disagreement can be epistemically significant qua higher-order evidence, this role doesn’t exhaust its significance, and that it can also serve as straightforward first-order evidence. Finally, we’ll suggest that inattention to this latter point has made broadly conciliatory views about peer disagreement seem somewhat easier to resist than they in fact are. (shrink)

Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) reviewers often provide similar feedback across applications, which suggests that the problem lies in researcher awareness of key issues rather than novel, unsolvable challenges. If common problems can be addressed before lodgement by applicants referencing clear evidence-based supports (e.g., FAQs on common application shortcomings), it would improve efficiency for HREC members and expedite approvals. We aim to inform such supports by analysing the patterns in the most frequent feedback made by HREC members during review processes. (...) We collected every instance (N = 4,195) of feedback made on N = 197 ‘low-risk’ protocols by all HREC staff (N = 16) at one institution over the course of a full year (2019). Reflexive thematic analysis to identify themes (and content analysis to determine relative frequency) revealed that the top three themes are consistent with existing literature: Consent, Administrative, and Methodological concerns. However, we identified important new themes that are not captured in previous research, including ‘Risk to Researchers’, ‘Commercial benefit, scope and scale’, ‘Diversity’ (covering issues of cultural sensitivity, language and accessibility), as well as fair right to a complaints process. Our thorough exploration of information-rich primary data marks an important methodological improvement over previous studies and offers a theoretical contribution to understanding themes that have heretofore been overlooked in the ethics review process. By identifying the common challenges experienced in HREC review we can better inform tailored supports to applicants (by extension reducing workload burdens on HREC systems) and reduce their perceived barriers to engaging in challenging but meaningful research. (shrink)

Since the start of the new millennium, many contemporary jurisdictions have been revisiting the fundamental principles of their civil procedures. Even the core areas of the civil process are not left untouched, including the way in which evidence is introduced, collected and presented in court. One generator of the reforms in the field of evidence-taking in recent decades has been slow and inefficient litigation. Both in Europe and globally, reaching a balance between the demands of factual accuracy and the need (...) to adjudicate disputes in a swift, cost-effective and efficient way is still one of the key challenges. The second reason that many countries are reforming their law of evidence is related to cultural and technological changes in modern societies. As the balance between, on the one side, traditional human rights such as the right to privacy and due process is shifting towards, on the other side, the modern need for security, efficiency and quick access to justice, the perception of what is admissible or not in the context of evidence-taking is changing as well."--Back cover. (shrink)

This monograph poses a series of key problems of evidential reasoning and argumentation. It then offers solutions achieved by applying recently developed computational models of argumentation made available in artificial intelligence. Each problem is posed in such a way that the solution is easily understood. The book progresses from confronting these problems and offering solutions to them, building a useful general method for evaluating arguments along the way. It provides a hands-on survey explaining to the reader how to use current (...) argumentation methods and concepts that are increasingly being implemented in more precise ways for the application of software tools in computational argumentation systems. It shows how the use of these tools and methods requires a new approach to the concepts of knowledge and explanation suitable for diverse settings, such as issues of public safety and health, debate, legal argumentation, forensic evidence, science education, and the use of expert opinion evidence in personal and public deliberations. (shrink)

Assume that it is your evidence that determines what opinions you should have. I argue that since you should take peer disagreement seriously, evidence must have two features. (1) It must sometimes warrant being modest: uncertain what your evidence warrants, and (thus) uncertain whether you’re rational. (2) But it must always warrant being guided: disposed to treat your evidence as a guide. Surprisingly, it is very difficult to vindicate both (1) and (2). But diagnosing why this is so leads to (...) a proposal—Trust—that is weak enough to allow modesty but strong enough to yield many guiding features. In fact, I claim that Trust is the Goldilocks principle—for it is necessary and sufficient to vindicate the claim that you should always prefer to use free evidence. Upshot: Trust lays the foundations for a theory of disagreement and, more generally, an epistemology that permits self-doubt—a modest epistemology. (shrink)

An evidence-based approach to crime and justice policy can go a long way toward ensuring that the best available research is considered in decisions that bear on the public good. However, the term "evidence-based" is characterized by a great deal of rhetoric. Indeed, there remains a marked disjuncture between calls for "evidence-based" policy and an understanding of what it means for policy to be "evidence-based." The calls for evidence-based policy nonetheless provide a powerful foundation for propelling a movement toward bringing (...) about rational, cost-effective, and humane policies for the betterment of society. This handbook showcases the state of research on evidence-based crime and justice policy and the challenges that impede its creation and use. The volume has three core objectives: to promote new and productive ways to think about evidence-based policy; to demonstrate how research can contribute to and guide evidence-based policy in juvenile justice, criminal justice, and alternatives to system responses; and to identify strategies that can increase reliance on evidence-based policy. To meet these objectives, each chapter is guided by several central questions: What do we know about evidence-based policy and practice in crime and justice? How can we improve knowledge of evidence-based policy and practice? How can we promote more use of evidence-based policy and practice? Taken as a whole, the volume emphasizes the critical need for policies that are grounded in high-quality research, that address critical research gaps, and that fully acknowledge the limitations of what extant research can do to inform policy decisions. (shrink)

The law views with suspicion statistical evidence, even evidence that is probabilistically on a par with direct, individual evidence that the law is in no way suspicious of. But it has proved remarkably hard to either justify this suspicion, or to debunk it. In this paper, we connect the discussion of statistical evidence to broader epistemological discussions of similar phenomena. We highlight Sensitivity – the requirement that a belief be counterfactually sensitive to the truth in a specific way – as (...) a way of epistemically explaining the legal suspicion towards statistical evidence. Still, we do not think of this as a satisfactory vindication of the reluctance to rely on statistical evidence. Knowledge – and Sensitivity, and indeed epistemology in general – are of little, if any, legal value. Instead, we tell an incentive-based story vindicating the suspicion towards statistical evidence. We conclude by showing that the epistemological story and the incentive-based story are closely and interestingly related, and by offering initial thoughts about the role of statistical evidence in morality. (shrink)

This chapter presents a typology of the different kinds of inductive inferences we can draw from our evidence, based on the explanatory relationship between evidence and conclusion. Drawing on the literature on graphical models of explanation, I divide inductive inferences into (a) downwards inferences, which proceed from cause to effect, (b) upwards inferences, which proceed from effect to cause, and (c) sideways inferences, which proceed first from effect to cause and then from that cause to an additional effect. I further (...) distinguish between direct and indirect forms of downwards and upwards inferences. I then show how we can subsume canonical forms of inductive inference mentioned in the literature, such as inference to the best explanation, enumerative induction, and analogical inference, under this typology. Along the way, I explore connections with probability and confirmation, epistemic defeat, the relation between abduction and enumerative induction, the compatibility of IBE and Bayesianism, and theories of epistemic justification. (shrink)

This chapter explores whether and when experience can be evidence. It argues that experiences can be evidence, and that this claim is compatible with just about any epistemological theory. It evaluates the most promising argument for the conclusion that certain experiences (e.g., seeming to see) are always evidence for believing what the experiences represent. While the argument is very promising, one premise needs further defense. The argument also depends on a certain connection between reasonable belief and the first person perspective.

This book presents strategies for using systemic theory and evidence-based practice in schools to support students, the adults in their lives, and their wider communities. Beginning by introducing and explaining the Advocating Students-within-Environments (ASE) theory, each chapter then addresses a specific school-based issue, such as academic achievement, crisis, trauma, and resiliency, from a systemic and environmental lens. Practical and accessible, the chapters are filled with case examples, evidence-base interventions, and helpful tools to show how counselors can incorporate the approach into (...) their practice. Extending beyond school and student problems, this text also explores greater system functioning, such as community outreach and state level intervention, discussing advocacy and political issues. This book is essential for school-based professionals who are looking for new ways to work with students, families, and their communities. It will also be of interest to mental health professionals who work systemically, such as marriage and family therapists and community counselors. (shrink)

This paper assesses the epistemic challenges of giving nutrition advice to elite athletes in light of recent philosophical discussion concerning evidence-based practice. Our trust in experts largely depends on the assumption that their advice is based on reliable evidence. In many fields, the evaluation of the reliability of evidence is made on the basis of standards that originate from evidence-based medicine. I show that at the Olympic or professional level, implementing nutritional plans in real-world competitions requires contextualization of knowledge in (...) a way that contravenes the tenets of evidence-based thinking. Nutrition experts need to be able to combine and apply evidence from multiple sources, including the previous successes and failures of particular athletes. I argue that in this sense, the practice of elite sport nutrition embodies casuistic reasoning. (shrink)