Knowing who benefits financially from a securities trade is necessary for the detection, prosecution and deterrence of illegal securities trading. Foreign jurisdictions with banking or securities secrecy laws are frequently used as a platform for illegal activity to frustrate law enforcement. This paper considers the extent to which Canadian law gives effect to so-called foreign blocking legislation. We conclude that while Canadian law does not generally give effect to foreign blocking legislation, it imposes only limited requirements on market intermediaries to (...) collect beneficial ownership information. Regulators are therefore left with the option of obtaining assistance from their foreign counterparts. (shrink)

This chapter proposes that encountering the Other through the face can be conditioned by social and built technologies. In “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” Emmanuel Levinas relates his experience as a prisoner of war, held in a forced-labor camp in Nazi Germany. He contrasts being denied his humanity by other humans, “called free” (DF, 152), while being recognized as human—indeed as a friend—by a dog the prisoners named Bobby. The episode suggests that though the concept of the (...) face applies to humans, the face is not enough for facing, at least not in the setting of the camp. By contrast, the prisoners seem able to face and be faced by Bobby, even if Levinas remains inconclusive about whether the face applies to animals elsewhere. It follows that the face is operating less like a property, and more like a capacity, a mode as Levinas calls it. But what conditions encountering an Other in this mode? If the face is neither sufficient for facing, nor prior to it, then what conditions facing (or effacing)? I propose that social structures, techniques, architectures, professional roles, and so on matter in coming to face (or efface) the Other. I conclude this from analyzing human-animal encounters in a scientific space of exception: the animal lab. Building on empirical accounts of animal research, I propose that animal research is populated by what I call “technologies of effacement.” These include: (1) built architectures; (2) entering and exit procedures; (3) protective garments and equipment; (4) identification and labeling techniques; and (5) experimental protocols. These technologies serve other manifest ends, but they operate to condition encounters between humans and animals in the lab: they help block the face of humans and animals. (shrink)

This paper argues that challenges that are grand in scope such as "lifelong health and wellbeing", "climate action", or "food security" cannot be addressed through scientific research only. Indeed scientific research could inhibit addressing such challenges if scientific analysis constrains the multiple possible understandings of these challenges into already available scientific categories and concepts without translating between these and everyday concerns. This argument builds on work in philosophy of science and race to postulate a process through which non-scientific notions become (...) part of science. My aim is to make this process available to scrutiny: what I call founding everyday ideas in science is both culturally and epistemologically conditioned. Founding transforms a common idea into one or more scientifically relevant ones, which can be articulated into descriptively thicker and evaluatively deflated terms and enable operationalisation and measurement. The risk of founding however is that it can invisibilise or exclude from realms of scientific scrutiny interpretations that are deemed irrelevant, uninteresting or nonsensical in the domain in question-but which may remain salient for addressing grand-in-scope challenges. The paper considers concepts of "wellbeing" in development economics versus in gerontology to illustrate this process. (shrink)

This essay unpacks a seeming paradox: a concept used to formulate, promote, and legitimate oppressive ideologies—a concept used to formulate mistaken, because they were typological, biological theories about human diversity—is, it seems, the same concept that now promises to deliver wonderful, socially sensitized, innovative results in social and genetic epidemiology. But how could that be? How could scientists expect a concept as problematic as ordinary race to deliver useful scientific results? I propose that there is a process for retranslating Ballungen (...) race concepts in appropriate ways to make them fit and work within social scientific and bioscientific contexts. (shrink)

This collection addresses two different audiences: 1) historians and philosophers of the life sciences reflecting on collaborations across disciplines, especially as regards defining and addressing Grand Challenges; 2) researchers and other stakeholders involved in cross-disciplinary collaborations aimed at tackling Grand Challenges in the life and medical sciences. The essays collected here offer ideas and resources both for the study and for the practice of goal-driven cross-disciplinary research in the life and medical sciences. We organise this introduction in three sections. The (...) first section provides some background and context. The second motivates our take on this topic and then outlines the central ideas of each paper. The third section highlights the specificity and significance of this approach by considering: a) how this collection departs from existing literature on inter- and trans-disciplinarity, b) what is characteristic about this approach, and c) what role this suggests for the history and philosophy of the life sciences in addressing Grand Challenges. (shrink)

Causation is in trouble—at least as it is pictured in current theories in philosophy and in economics as well, where causation is also once again in fashion. In both disciplines the accounts of causality on offer are either modelled too closely on one or another favoured method for hunting causes or on assumptions about the uses to which causal knowledge can be put—generally for predicting the results of our efforts to change the world. The first kind of account supplies no (...) reason to think that causal knowledge, as it is pictured, is of any use; the second supplies no reason to think our best methods will be reliable for establishing causal knowledge. So, if these accounts are all there is to be had, how do we get from method to use? Of what use is knowledge of causal laws that we work so hard to obtain? (shrink)

I propose that the intensification of meat production ironically makes meat concepts available to be populated by plants. I argue that what I call “technologies of effacement” facilitate the intensification of animal farming and slaughter by blocking face-to-face encounters between animals and people (Levinas 1969; Efstathiou 2018, 2019). My previous ethnographic work on animal research identifies technologies of effacement as including (a) architectures and the built environment, (b) entry and exit rules, (c) special garments, (d) naming and labeling procedures, (...) and (e) protocols for handling animals (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). Building on ethnographic research by Dawn Coppin (2003) and Nöellie Vialles (1994), in the United States and France respectively, I propose that (a) Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) buildings, gestation, and farrowing crates; (b) rules for entering and exiting the slaughterhouse; (c) white slaughterhouse garments; (d) unique identification systems; and (e) “trapping” animals before stunning can all operate as technologies of effacement. Though developed to serve other manifest aims, like hygiene, expediency, or safety, these technologies operate to sustain routine, inviting one to look at animals as tokens of a known type while blocking encounters between humans and animals (and also among animals) as radically different, morally significant Others (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). (shrink)

I propose that meat replacement is to meat, as drag is to gender. Meat replacement has the potential to shake concepts of meat, like drag does for gender. Meat replacements not only mimic meat but disclose how meat itself is performed in carnivorous culture -and show that it may be performed otherwise. My approach is inspired by the show RuPaul’s Drag Race. The argument builds on an imitation of Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, performed by replacing ‘drag/ gender/ sex/ (...) heterosexism’ terms and relations in Butler’s text with ‘meat replacement/ meat/ species/ carnism’ ones. (shrink)

Our main research question is how pliable Norwegian meat consumption practices are. However it is not any type of elasticity we are interested in. We are specifically interested in the scope for what we dub the “4Rs” of responsible meat consumption within existing food systems: 1. Reducing the amount of animal-based proteins used 2. Replacing animal-based protein with plant-based, or insect-based alternatives 3. Refining processes of utilization of animal-based protein to minimize emissions, loss and waste 4. Recognising animal-based protein as (...) precious –i.e. recognising the people and the animals involved in meat production. -/- These four principles are derived by analogy to ethical principles guiding the use of animals in research, the so-called “3Rs”, namely: the imperatives to reduce the number of animals needed to make a scientific inference, to replace animal experiments with other types of research, and where not possible to replace ‘more’ with ‘less’ sentient creatures, and to refine the experimental setup so it minimises the discomfort and/or distress inflicted upon the animals (Russell and Burch, 1959). There are no such principles guiding the use of animals in farming, given the farming industry intrinsically relies on increasing its resources, of which animals are one. The current profile of climate change however opens up a way to re-appreciate meat –indeed what we articulate as the fourth principle of recognizing the preciousness of meat, above, given planetary boundaries. We proceed to reflect on how these 4Rs can be modulated, from a cultural-social perspective, that is, we look at cultural factors that could stretch current food practices along the 4R aspects. (shrink)

Causation is in trouble—at least as it is pictured in current theories in philosophy and in economics as well, where causation is also once again in fashion. In both disciplines the accounts of causality on offer are either modelled too closely on one or another favoured method for hunting causes or on assumptions about the uses to which causal knowledge can be put—generally for predicting the results of our efforts to change the world. The first kind of account supplies no (...) reason to think that causal knowledge, as it is pictured, is of any use; the second supplies no reason to think our best methods will be reliable for establishing causal knowledge. So, if these accounts are all there is to be had, how do we get from method to use? Of what use is knowledge of causal laws that we work so hard to obtain? (shrink)

With increasing publication and data production, scientific knowledge presents not simply an achievement but also a challenge. Scientific publications and data are increasingly treated as resources that need to be digitally ‘managed.’ This gives rise to scientific Knowledge Management : second-order scientific work aiming to systematically collect, take care of and mobilise first-hand disciplinary knowledge and data in order to provide new first-order scientific knowledge. We follow the work of Leonelli, Efstathiou and Hislop in our analysis of the use (...) of KM in semantic systems biology. Through an empirical philosophical account of KM-enabled biological research, we argue that KM helps produce new first-order biological knowledge that did not exist before, and which could not have been produced by traditional means. KM work is enabled by conceiving of ‘knowledge’ as an object for computational science: as explicated in the text of biological articles and computable via appropriate data and metadata. However, these founded knowledge concepts enabling computational KM risk focusing on only computationally tractable data as knowledge, underestimating practice-based knowing and its significance in ensuring the validity of ‘manageable’ knowledge as knowledge. (shrink)

This paper offers a moral history of the industrialisation of seaweed harvesting in Norway. Industrialisation is often seen as degrading natural resources. Ironically, we argue, it is precisely the scale and scope of industrial utilisation that may enable non-instrumental valuations of natural resources. We use the history of the Norwegian seaweed industry to make this point. Seaweed became increasingly interesting to harvest as a fruit and then as a crop of the sea in the early twentieth century following biochemical applications (...) for alginates derived from seaweed. When harvesting was mechanised, however, attention turned to the environmental and aesthetic value of kelp forests. Further, the sale of the industry to the American FMC corporation flagged the national value of these plants. In sum epistemic, aesthetic and moral appreciations of natural resources are tangled up and co-evolve with their industrial utilisation, in an ecology of values. Our account uses interview and ethnographic material from key sites in Norway. (shrink)

We have two theses about scientific knowledge in the age of computation. Our general claim is that scientific Knowledge Management practices emerge as second-order practices whose aim is to systematically collect, take care of and mobilise first-hand disciplinary knowledge and data. Our specific thesis is that knowledge management practices are transforming biological research in at least three ways. We argue that scientific Knowledge Management a. operates with founded concepts of biological knowledge as explicated and computable, b. enables new outputs and (...) ways of knowing within biology, and c. risks enforcing objectivist epistemologies of knowledge as some one objective thing. (shrink)

This paper examines how aesthetic ideals shaped the practice of Nazi medicine. It proposes that Nazi eugenics relied on the conflation of norms of health with norms of beauty determined and performed by Nazi cultures of action. Though theories of biological holism served as vehicles of Nazi ideology, they did so contingently. The anti-totalitarian thinking of biological holist Kurt Goldstein shows that the use of biological holism to promote Nazi ideology was not inevitable. This examination of aesthetic influences on Nazi (...) medicine shows that traditionally speaking ‘non-rational’ factors shaped the Nazi biomedical program’s aims and methods. (shrink)

This paper offers a moral history of the industrialisation of seaweed harvesting in Norway. Industrialisation is often seen as degrading natural resources. Ironically, we argue, it is precisely the scale and scope of industrial utilisation that may enable non-instrumental valuations of natural resources. We use the history of the Norwegian seaweed industry to make this point. Seaweed became increasingly interesting to harvest as a fruit and then as a crop of the sea in the early twentieth century following biochemical applications (...) for alginates derived from seaweed. When harvesting was mechanised, however, attention turned to the environmental and aesthetic value of kelp forests. Further, the sale of the industry to the American FMC corporation flagged the national value of these plants. In sum epistemic, aesthetic and moral appreciations of natural resources are tangled up and co-evolve with their industrial utilisation, in an ecology of values. Our account uses interview and ethnographic material from key sites in Norway. (shrink)

1. A Historical Look at Unity 2. Field Guide to Modern Concepts of Reduction and Unity 3. Kitcher's Revisionist Account of Unification 4. Critics of Unity 5. Integration Instead of Unity 6. Reduction via Mechanisms 7. Case Studies in Reduction and Unification across the Disciplines.

Efforts to professionalize the field of bioethics have led to the development of the Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified (HEC-C) Program intended to credential practicing healthcare ethics consultants (HCECs). Our team of professional ethicists participated in the inaugural process to support the professionalization efforts and inform our views on the value of this credential from the perspective of ethics consultants. In this paper, we explore the history that has led to this certification process, and evaluate the ability of the HEC-C Program to (...) meet the goals it has set forth for HCECs. We describe the benefits and weaknesses of the program and offer constructive feedback on how the process might be strengthened, as well as share our team’s experience in preparing for the exam. (shrink)

This article serves as an introduction to the laws-of-biology debate. After introducing the main issues in an introductory section, arguments for and against laws of biology are canvassed in Section 2. In Section 3, the debate is placed in wider epistemological context by engaging a group of scholars who have shifted the focus away from the question of whether there are laws of biology and toward offering good accounts of explanation(s) in the biological sciences. Section 4 introduces two relatively new (...) pieces of science – metabolic scaling theory and ecological stoichiometry – that have not been topics of much discussion by philosophers but are relevant because they have at least some of the hallmarks of laws of nature. Section 5 concludes by pointing out that discovering laws of biology, if any there be, will not necessarily answer the questions raised by the debate in the first place: we will still want to know how biology compares to other sciences, how to characterize its systems and processes, and whether accounts in terms of laws always or usually constitute adequate explanations in various sciences. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction What Are the Biological Sciences (Not)? Systematics Ecology and Evolution Levels of Selection Conclusion References.

Exploring whether clades can reproduce leads to new perspectives on general accounts of biological development and individuation. Here we apply James Griesemer's general account of reproduction to clades. Griesemer's account of reproduction includes a requirement for development, raising the question of whether clades may bemeaningfully said to develop. We offer two illustrative examples of what clade development might look like, though evaluating these examples proves difficult due to the paucity of general accounts of development. This difficulty, however, is instructive about (...) what a general account of development should look like and how it may usefully be applied to research problems (further suggesting a means for evaluating general accounts of development). Reproduction also requires individuation of parent and offspring. We argue that there is no special problem of individuating older and younger clades. The vagaries involved with determining when clades begin, mature, and end are precisely the same as those that arise when the same questions are asked of cells, organisms, or species. Though the question of clade reproduction and selection may still be open, the process of discovery presents new insights into old problems. (shrink)

Groups, individuals, and evolutionary restraints : the making of the contemporary debate over group selection Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-14 DOI 10.1007/s10539-011-9255-5 Authors Andrew Hamilton, Center for Biology and Society, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-4501 USA Christopher C. Dimond, Center for Biology and Society, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-4501 USA Journal Biology and Philosophy Online ISSN 1572-8404 Print ISSN 0169-3867.

Philosophy of the Special Sciences, edited by Fritz Allhof, Blackwell Press.

According to population biologist Richard Levins, every discipline has a “strategy of model building,” which involves implicit assumptions about epistemic goals and the types of abstractions and modeling approaches used. We will offer suggestions about how to model complex systems based upon a strategy focusing on independence in modeling. While there are many possible and desirable modeling strategies, we will contrast a model-independence-focused strategy with the more common modeling strategy of adding increasing levels of detail to a model. Levins calls (...) the latter approach a ‘brute force’ strategy of modeling, which can encounter problems as it attempts to add increasing details and predictive precision. In contrast, a model-independence-focused strategy, which we call a ‘pluralistic strategy,’ draws off of Levins’s use of an assemblage of multiple, simple and—critically—independent models of ecological systems in order to do predictive and explanatory analysis. We use the example of model analysis of levee failure during Hurricane Katrina to show what a pluralistic strategy looks like in engineering. Depending on one’s strategy, one can deliberately engineer the set of available models in order to have more independent and complementary models that will be more likely to be accurate. We offer advice on ways of making models independent as well as a set of epistemic goals for model development that different models can emphasize. (shrink)

According to population biologist Richard Levins, every discipline has a “strategy of model building,” which involves implicit assumptions about epistemic goals and the types of abstractions and modeling approaches used. We will offer suggestions about how to model complex systems based upon a strategy focusing on independence in modeling. While there are many possible and desirable modeling strategies, we will contrast a model-independence-focused strategy with the more common modeling strategy of adding increasing levels of detail to a model. Levins calls (...) the latter approach a ‘brute force’ strategy of modeling, which can encounter problems as it attempts to add increasing details and predictive precision. In contrast, a model-independence-focused strategy, which we call a ‘pluralistic strategy,’ draws off of Levins’s use of an assemblage of multiple, simple and—critically—independent models of ecological systems in order to do predictive and explanatory analysis. We use the example of model analysis of levee failure during Hurricane Katrina to show what a pluralistic strategy looks like in engineering. Depending on one’s strategy, one can deliberately engineer the set of available models in order to have more independent and complementary models that will be more likely to be accurate. We offer advice on ways of making models independent as well as a set of epistemic goals for model development that different models can emphasize. (shrink)

The world is an untidy place, and the sciences—all of them—reflect this. One source of this untidiness is the relationship between levels of organization. Reducing macrolevels to microlevels—explaining the former in terms of the latter—has met with successes but has never been the whole story. In the biological sciences, there has been much attention lately to the shortcomings of reductionism on the grounds that (i) it changes the subject rather than explaining, (ii) it leads to a myopically molecular view of (...) the biological world, and (iii) the behavior or behaviors of complex systems are often very poorly predicted based solely on their microproperties. It is just for these reasons that biologists of many stripes have called for a move away from reductionism and toward a new kind of biology for the 21st century. But what shape might this new biology take? (shrink)

The present stage in the development of our society is marked by serious changes in social morality. The building of communism is entering a new stage. The man of the communist future is taking shape and being perfected before our eyes. Under these conditions, the Party - and this was emphasized at its Twenty-Fourth Congress - requires of a worker in the arts a thorough examination of contemporary life and of its hero to the full extent of his talent, and (...) demands that his ethical convictions and awareness of spirit be developed. Since this is the case, it is natural that literary criticism faces new, lofty tasks: tasks of analyzing literature in connection with those economic, societal, and moral processes which characterize social existence today. This was stated clearly both at the Party Congress and in the Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU "On Criticism in Literature and the Arts" [O literaturno-khudozhestvennoi kritiki]. (shrink)

The history of science often has difficulty connecting with science at the lab-bench level, raising questions about the value of history of science for science. This essay offers a case study from taxonomy in which lessons learned about particular failings of numerical taxonomy in the second half of the twentieth century bear on the new movement toward DNA barcoding. In particular, it argues that an unwillingness to deal with messy theoretical questions in both cases leads to important problems in the (...) theory and practice of identifying taxa. This argument makes use of scientific and historical considerations in a way that the authors hope leads to convincing conclusions about the history of taxonomy as well as about its present practice. (shrink)

The liar paradox in its simplest form is the following argument. Consider the sentence 'this sentence is false'; call that the "liar sentence". Suppose the liar sentence is true. Then, since it says it is false, the liar sentence is false. So our supposition that it is true was mistaken, and the liar sentence must be false. But that's precisely what the liar sentence says, so it is true after all. The liar sentence is, therefore, both true and false---an absurd (...) result. ;Hans Herzberger has argued that several solutions to the Grelling paradox exhibit a common pattern: the very devices we introduce in order to avoid one version of the paradox are integral components of new versions of the paradox. Herzberger suggests that this is typical of semantic paradox in general. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of this dissertation examine several possible solutions to the liar---especially appeals to language levels and to contexts---and attempt to locate these possible solutions in Herzberger's pattern. ;There is some reason to think that this pattern is inescapable---that is, that the liar paradox is ultimately unsolvable---so the remaining two chapters of this dissertation explore what follows from the claim that it is unsolvable. Chapter 4 develops an argument from the claim that the liar is unsolvable to the claim that we cannot understand ourselves. Chapter 5, then, attempts to make sense of this circumstance by invoking a Nietzschean view of thinking and truth---perspectivalism, which holds that all thinking concerns interpretation and that there are no uninterpreted facts. Given some perspectivalist assumptions, we can see how it is inevitable that we will be unable to understand ourselves---and how we can nevetherless attain a certain limited kind of understanding. Perspectivalism also recommends a certain intellectual humility: if everything is interpretation, then no view of mine can be a comprehensive and accurate view of the way the world really is. This by itself is not a surprising claim; the surprising claim is that the liar paradox is the basis of it. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;It is the aim of this thesis to consider two accounts of 1st-person utterances that are often mistakenly conflated--viz. that involving the 'no-reference' view of 'I', and that of the non-assertoric thesis of avowals. The first account says that in a large range of 'psychological' uses, 'I' is not a referring expression; the second, that avowals of 1st-personal 'immediate' experience are primarily 'expressive' and not genuine assertions. ;The two (...) views are expressions of what I term 'Trojanism'. This viewpoint constitutes one side of a 'Homeric Opposition in the Metaphysics of Experience', and has been endorsed by Wittgenstein throughout his writings; it has received recent expression in Professor Anscombe's article 'The First Person'. I explore the ideas of these writers in some depth, and consider to what extent they stand up to criticism by such notable 'Greek' contenders as P. F. Strawson and Gareth Evans. ;I first give neutral accounts of the key-concepts on which subsequent arguments are based. These are the immunity to error through misidentification of certain 1st-person utterances, the guaranteed reference of 'I', avowal, and the Generality Constraint. I consider the close relation of Trojanism to solipsism and behaviourism, and then assess the effectiveness of two arguments for that viewpoint--Anscombe's Tank Argument and the argument from IEM. Though each is appealing, neither is decisive; to assess Trojanism properly we need to look at the non-assertoric thesis of avowals, which alone affords the prospect of a resolution of the really intractable problems of the self generated by Cartesianism. ;In the course of the latter assessment I consider the different varieties of avowal, broadening the discussion beyond the over-used example 'I am in pain'. I explore Wittgenstein's notion of 'expression', and discuss how this notion may help to explain the authority a subject possesses on his mental states as expressed in avowals. My conclusion is that an expressive account of avowals can provide a satisfactory counter to the Cartesian account of authority without our needing recourse to a non-assertoric or even to a non-cognitive thesis. ;Discussion of self-consciousness is implicit in discussion of the Homeric Opposition, but there is in addition a short chapter on the concept itself. (shrink)

Does history really matter? As a historian, and more importantly as a teacher of history, I have become convinced of the need to raise this question in my introductory classes. Too often this fundamental query is left for upper-division “theory” courses, or never broached at all. At a certain point historians, like most of us I imagine, stop asking why we do what we do and just get on with doing it. But with history, the question of why we engage (...) in it or whether it is worthwhile at all is absolutely vital. (shrink)

The global pandemic needs to mark a turning point for the peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand. How can we make sure that our culturally diverse nation charts an equitable and sustainable path through and beyond this new world? In a less affluent future, how can we ensure that all New Zealanders have fair access to opportunities? One challenge is to preserve the sense of common purpose so critical to protecting each other in the face of Covid-19. How can we centre (...) what we have learnt about resilience within Māori and wider Pacific communities in our reforms? How can public understanding of Covid-19 science create a platform for the future social valuing of expertise? How can we ensure that the impact of Covid-19 in New Zealand results in a more sustainable, and inclusive workforce–for instance by expanding our perceptions of the value of our workers through promoting digital inclusion? To meet these challenges, we must reimagine our existing traditions of thought, breathing new life into perennial concepts and debates. Our paper indicates some of the ways that Philosophy is central to this collective reimagining, highlighting solutions to be found across our rich philosophical traditions. (shrink)