Background Physicians face competing values of truth-telling and beneficence when deception may be employed in patient care. The purposes of this study were to assess resident physicians' attitudes towards lying, explore lie types and reported reasons for lying. Method After obtaining institutional review board review and receiving exempt status, posts written by Loma Linda University resident physicians in response to forum questions in required online courses were collected from 2002 to 2007. Responses were blinded and manually coded by two investigators (...) using NVivo software. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data were performed with links to various attributes. A 95% binomial proportion CI was used to analyse the attribute data. Results The study found that the majority of residents would disclose the truth about medical errors. Similarly, many residents would disclose the truth regarding unanticipated events, especially if the error was serious enough to result in a malpractice suit. However, many residents would not reveal a near miss event because they believe it has no impact on patient health. Some residents would deceive the insurance company for additional patient benefits. Of those willing to lie, only a small group gave self-serving reasons. Conclusions This study demonstrates that the ethical issues related to deception that trouble attending physicians also exist at the resident physician level. Residents primarily lie for altruistic reasons and rarely for egoistic or self-serving purposes that may or may not result in harm to patients, insurance companies and/or physicians themselves. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION I What is teleology? If you ever look closely at an ants' nest, you will see an intricate network of pathways and chambers teeming with ...

This book offers a compelling examination of the problem of evil and the doctrine of sin. It engages with and advances extant discussions on the topic by drawing together philosophical arguments, theological reflections, scientific evidence, Biblical exegesis, and real-life stories. The chapters provide a comprehensive evaluation of objections by anti-theodicists and atheists, and bring recent philosophical work concerning the arguments for Christian theism and advances in science and religion to bear on the discussion. The author defends the Cosmic Conflict Theodicy (...) against philosophical and theological objections, and uses it together with the Connection Building Theodicy, Adamic Fall Theodicy, arguments for divine hiddenness, and Afterlife Theodicy to address the vexing problem of horrendous evil. (shrink)

An argument that the deepest disagreement can on occasion be resolved albeit over time.

I offer a new deductive formulation of the Moral Argument for the existence of God which shows how one might argue for the conclusion that, if one affirms moral realism (traditionally understood as a metaethical view which acknowledges the existence of objective moral truths), one should affirm theism. The new formulation shows that these objective moral truths are either brute facts, or they are metaphysically grounded in an impersonal entity, a non-divine personal entity, or a divine personal entity i.e., God. (...) I illustrate how the alternatives to God can in principle be excluded based on the essential characteristics of those alternative hypotheses and of certain objective moral truths. I demonstrate that my deductive formulation is better than other formulations, and that it is helpful for future work on the Moral Argument. (shrink)

This book develops a novel argument which combines the Kalam with the Thomistic Cosmological Argument. It approaches an ongoing dispute concerning whether there is a First Cause of time from a radically new point of view, namely by demonstrating that there is such a First Cause without requiring the controversial arguments against concrete infinities and against traversing an actual infinite (although the book presents original defenses of these arguments as well). This book also develops a novel philosophical argument for the (...) Causal Principle, namely that ‘everything that begins to exist has a cause’, and offers a detailed discussion on whether a First Cause of time can be avoided by a causal loop. It also addresses epistemological issues related to the Cosmological Argument which have been relatively neglected by recent publications, and demonstrates (contra Hawking et al) the continual relevance and significance of philosophy for answering ultimate questions. -/- . (shrink)

In this book, Andrew Inkpin considers the disclosive function of language—what language does in revealing or disclosing the world. His approach to this question is a phenomenological one, centering on the need to accord with the various experiences speakers can have of language. With this aim in mind, he develops a phenomenological conception of language with important implications for both the philosophy of language and recent work in the embodied-embedded-enactive-extended tradition of cognitive science. -/- Inkpin draws extensively on the (...) work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, showing how their respective conceptions of language can be combined to complement each other within a unified view. From the early Heidegger, Inkpin extracts a basic framework for a phenomenological conception of language, comprising both a general picture of the role of language and a specific model of the function of words. Merleau-Ponty’s views are used to explicate the generic “pointing out”—or presentational—function of linguistic signs in more detail, while the late Wittgenstein is interpreted as providing versatile means to describe their many pragmatic uses. Having developed this unified phenomenological view, Inkpin explores its broader significance. He argues that it goes beyond the conventional realism/idealism opposition, that it challenges standard assumptions in mainstream post-Fregean philosophy of language, and that it makes a significant contribution not only to the philosophical understanding of language but also to 4e cognitive science. (shrink)

This article provides an ethical analysis of the U.S. practice guideline update on disorders of consciousness. Our analysis focuses on the guideline’s recommendations regarding the use of investigational neuroimaging methods to assess brain‐injured patients. Complex and multifaceted ethical issues have emerged because these methods alter the clinical understanding of consciousness. We address issues of false hope, patient suffering, and cost. We argue that, in spite of these concerns, there is significant benefit to using neuroimaging to assess brain‐injured patients in most (...) cases. (shrink)

The Incarnation, traditionally understood as the metaphysical union between true divinity and true humanity in the one person of Jesus Christ, is one of the central doctrines for Christians over the centuries. Nevertheless, many scholars have objected that the Scriptural account of the Incarnation is incoherent. Being divine seems to entail being omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, but the New Testament portrays Jesus as having human properties such as being apparently limited in knowledge, power, and presence. It seems logically impossible that (...) any single individual could possess such mutually exclusive sets of properties, and this leads to scepticism concerning the occurrence of the Incarnation in history. A Kryptic Model of the Incarnation aims to provide a critical reflection of various attempts to answer these challenges and to offer a compelling response integrating aspects from analytic philosophy of religion, systematic theology, and historical-critical studies. Loke develops a new Kryptic model of the Incarnation, drawing from the Greek word Krypsis meaning ’hiding’, and proposing that in a certain sense Christ’s supernatural properties were concealed during the Incarnation. (shrink)

This article distinguishes between a telic and a deontic version of Derek Parfit's influential Priority View. Employing the distinction, it shows that the existence of variations in how intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts should be resolved fails to provide a compelling case in favour of relational egalitarianism and against all pure versions of the Priority View. In addition, the article argues that those variations are better understood as providing counterevidence to certain distribution-sensitive versions of consequentialism.

This commentary critically examines a recent qualitative study, published in this issue of Neuroethics, on the attitudes of family caregivers toward evidence of covert consciousness in brain-injured patients.

The main argument of this paper is that philosophical difficulties regarding scientific discovery arise mainly because philosophers base their arguments on a flawed picture of scientific research. Careful examination of N. R. Hanson's treatment of Kepler's discovery not only puts the rationality of this discovery beyond question, it also reveals what its rationality consists in. We can retrieve the point stressed by Hanson concerning the rational character of discoveries such as Kepler's even as we reject the type of "logical" analysis (...) he proposes. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas devoted a substantial proportion of his greatest works to the virtues. Yet, despite the availability of these texts, Aquinas’s virtue ethics remains mysterious, leaving readers with many unanswered questions. In this book, Pinsent argues that the key to understanding Aquinas’s approach is to be found in an association between: a) attributes he appends to the virtues, and b) interpersonal capacities investigated by the science of social cognition, especially in the context of autistic spectrum disorder. The book uses this (...) research to argue that Aquinas’s approach to the virtues is radically non-Aristotelian and founded on the concept of second-person relatedness. To demonstrate the explanatory power of this principle, Pinsent shows how the second-person perspective gives interpretation to Aquinas’s descriptions of the virtues and offers a key to long-standing problems, such as the reconciliation of magnanimity and humility. The principle of second-person relatedness also interprets acts that Aquinas describes as the fruition of the virtues. Pinsent concludes by considering how this approach may shape future developments in virtue ethics. (shrink)

Many explanations in physics rely on idealized models of physical systems. These explanations fail to satisfy the conditions of standard normative accounts of explanation. Recently, some philosophers have claimed that idealizations can be used to underwrite explanation nonetheless, but only when they are what have variously been called representational, Galilean, controllable or harmless idealizations. This paper argues that such a half-measure is untenable and that idealizations not of this sort can have explanatory capacities.

Formed in the wake of May 1968, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was a radical resistance movement active in France in the early 1970's. Theorist Michel Foucault was heavily involved. This book collects interdisciplinary essays that explore the GIP's resources both for Foucault studies and for prison activism today.

In the first half of the paper, it is argued that while the prospects for a criterion for demarcating scientific theories from pseudoscientific ones are exceedingly dim, it is a mistake to fall back to the position that these differ only with regard to how well they are confirmed. One may admit that different pseudoscientific theories are flawed in different ways yet still insist that their flaws are structural rather than empirical in character. In the second half of the paper, (...) this view is extended to cover the cases of pseudoscientific correlations and therapies, and it is suggested that the pseudosciences are best thought of as radically flawed practices. (shrink)

A common methodological adage holds that diverse evidence better confirms a hypothesis than does the same amount of similar evidence. Proponents of Bayesian approaches to scientific reasoning such as Horwich, Howson and Urbach, and Earman claim to offer both a precise rendering of this maxim in probabilistic terms and an explanation of why the maxim should be part of the methodological canon of good science. This paper contends that these claims are mistaken and that, at best, Bayesian accounts of diverse (...) evidence are crucially incomplete. This failure should lend renewed force to a long-neglected global worry about Bayesian approaches. (shrink)

In this article, I present an argument that suggests neuroscience should inform judgments of decision-making capacity. First, I review key behavioral and neurocognitive data to demonstrate that neuroscientific tests might be predictive of decision-making capacity, and that these tests might inform clinical judgments of capacity. Second, I argue that, consistent with the principles of autonomy and justice, such data should inform judgements of decision-making capacity. While the neuroscience of decision-making capacity still requires time to mature, there is strong reason to (...) believe that neuroscience might assist clinicians in adjudicating difficult cases in the future. This article focuses on the assessment of capacity in brain injury patients who have profound communication impairments, however, the overarching aim of the article is to highlight the potential use of neuroscience to improve our understanding of the relationship between cognition and decision-making capacity. (shrink)

Duhem's discussion of physical theories as natural classifications is neither antithetical nor incidental to the main thrust of his philosophy of science. Contrary to what is often supposed, Duhem does not argue that theories are better thought of as economically organizing empirical laws than as providing information concerning the nature of the world. What he is primarily concerned with is the character and justification of the scientific method, not the logical status of theoretical entities. The crucial point to notice is (...) that he took the principle of the autonomy of physics to be of paramount importance and he developed the conception of natural classification in opposition to accounts of physical theories that contravened it. (shrink)

The human primate is a deeply cultural species, our cognition being shaped by culture, and cultural transmission amounting to an “epidemic of mental representations” (Sperber, 1996). The architecture of this aspect of human cognition has been shaped by our evolutionary past in ways that we can now begin to discern through comparative studies of other primates. Processes of social learning (learning from others) are important for cognitive science to understand because they are cognitively complex and take many interrelated forms; they (...) shape traditions, cultures and nonsocial aspects of cognition; and in turn they may be shaped by their cultural context. The study of primate social learning and culture has in recent years enjoyed a renaissance, providing a wealth of new findings, key aspects of which are reviewed. The focus is on cognitive issues, including learning about the consequences, sequential structure and hierarchical organization of actions; relating stored knowledge to the assimilation of new social knowledge; feedback guiding the construction of imitations; conceptual grasp of imitation; and the reciprocal relationship between social learning and culture. (shrink)

ABSTRACTStephen Puryear argues that William Lane Craig's view, that time as duration is logically prior to the potentially infinite divisions that we make of it, involves the idea that time is prior to any parts we conceive within it. He objects that PWT entails the Priority of the Whole with respect to Events, and that it subverts the argument, used by proponents of the Kalam Cosmological Argument such as Craig, against an eternal past based on the impossibility of traversing an (...) actual infinite sequence of events. I argue that proponents of KCA can affirm that time is not discrete, nor is it continuous with actual infinite number of parts or points, but rather that it is a continuum with various parts yet without an actual infinite number of parts or points. I defend this view, and I reply to Puryear's other objections. (shrink)

Many skeptics throughout the centuries have accused the New Testament characterization of the incarnation as being incoherent. The reason is that it appears impossible that any person can exemplify human properties such as ignorance, fatigability, and spatial limitation, as the New Testament testifies of Jesus, while possessing divine properties such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence at the same time. This paper proposes a possible model which asserts that at the incarnation, the Logo's mind was divided into conscious and preconscious, and (...) the divine properties were transferred from the conscious into the preconscious, which became part A of Jesus' preconscious. Simultaneously, the conscious acquired newly created human properties, while a human preconscious which would become part B of Jesus' preconscious and a human body were also created. It is demonstrated that this model does not suffer from the problems that beset other models such as Apollinarianism, two-consciousness Christology, and ontological Kenoticism, and that based on this model the full attributes of divinity and humanity of Jesus as testified by the Scriptures could have simultaneously coexisted in one person without contradiction. (shrink)

Evans’ 1968 ANALOGY system was the first computer model of analogy. This paper demonstrates that the structure mapping model of analogy, when combined with high‐level visual processing and qualitative representations, can solve the same kinds of geometric analogy problems as were solved by ANALOGY. Importantly, the bulk of the computations are not particular to the model of this task but are general purpose: We use our existing sketch understanding system, CogSketch, to compute visual structure that is used by our existing (...) analogical matcher, Structure Mapping Engine (SME). We show how SME can be used to facilitate high‐level visual matching, proposing a role for structural alignment in mental rotation. We show how second‐order analogies over differences computed via analogies between pictures provide a more elegant model of the geometric analogy task. We compare our model against human data on a set of problems, showing that the model aligns well with both the answers chosen by people and the reaction times required to choose the answers. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that nonhuman animals can be subject to epistemic injustice. I consider Miranda Fricker’s (2007) account of the nature of the harm of epistemic injustice and highlight that it requires that a knower be invested in being recognized as a knower. I argue that a focus on know-how, rather than testimony or concepts for self-understanding and communication, can serve to highlight how nonhuman animals can suffer epistemic injustice without an investment in recognition, by focusing on distributive (...) justice concerning epistemic goods. Drawing from work in animal ethology and movement ecology, I argue that human interruption of animal lifeways has negative downstream effects on nonhuman animals’ ability to acquire ‘answers’ to ‘questions’ they have an interest in answering: namely, acquiring both true beliefs about conspecifics and their environment, as well as acquisition of behaviors and skills that enable everyday successful coping, and that these interruptions can constitute epistemic injustice. (shrink)

In this article, I present an argument that suggests neuroscience should inform judgments of decision-making capacity. First, I review key behavioral and neurocognitive data to demonstrate that neuroscientific tests might be predictive of decision-making capacity, and that these tests might inform clinical judgments of capacity. Second, I argue that, consistent with the principles of autonomy and justice, such data should inform judgements of decision-making capacity. While the neuroscience of decision-making capacity still requires time to mature, there is strong reason to (...) believe that neuroscience might assist clinicians in adjudicating difficult cases in the future. This article focuses on the assessment of capacity in brain injury patients who have profound communication impairments, however, the overarching aim of the article is to highlight the potential use of neuroscience to improve our understanding of the relationship between cognition and decision-making capacity. (shrink)

:In this paper, the author argues that Joseph Fins’ mosaic decisionmaking model for brain-injured patients is untenable. He supports this claim by identifying three problems with mosaic decisionmaking. First, that it is unclear whether a mosaic is a conceptually adequate metaphor for a decisionmaking process that is intended to promote patient autonomy. Second, that the proposed legal framework for mosaic decisionmaking is inappropriate. Third, that it is unclear how we ought to select patients for participation in mosaic decisionmaking.

Discourse between pupils represents a core element of citizenship education in England. However, as it is currently presented within the curriculum, discourse adopts the form of the rather broad terms of 'discussion' and 'debate'. These terms are diffuse, and in themselves offer little pedagogical guidance for teachers implementing the curriculum in schools. Moreover, there has been little academic reflection in England as to how theoretical ideas on civic dialogue may usefully inform approaches to pupil discourse. For this reason, how pupils (...) experience discursive learning activities is likely to depend on how individual schools and teachers understand the terms 'discussion' and 'debate' and the way in which this understanding is translated into pupil learning activities. This article explores how recourse to deliberative democratic theory, and in particular to the principle of contestatory deliberative democracy found within recent republican writing, may be useful in helping educators to consider critically the capacities needed for effective civic discourse as a well as the outcomes of pupils' dialogical engagement. (shrink)

One of the key achievements of critical realism has been to expose the modernist myth of universal reason, which holds that authentic knowledge claims must be objectively ‘pure’, uncontaminated by the subjectivity of local place, specific time and particular culture. Wright aims to address the lack of any substantial and sustained engagement between critical realism and theological critical realism with particular regard to: (a) the distinctive ontological claims of Christianity; (b) their epistemic warrant and intellectual legitimacy; and (c) scrutiny of (...) the primary source of the ontological claims of Christianity, namely the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. As such, it functions as a prolegomena to a much needed wider debate, guided by the under-labouring services of critical realism, between Christianity and various other religious and secular worldviews. This important new text will help stimulate a debate that has yet to get out of first gear. This book will appeal to academics, graduate and post-graduate students especially, but also Christian clergy, ministers and informed laity, and members of the general public concerned with the nature of religion and its place in contemporary society. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to show how scientific explanation functions in the context of idealized models. It argues that the aspect of explanation most urgently requiring investigation is the nature of the connection between global theories and explanatory local models. This aspect is neglected in traditional accounts of explanation. The paper examines causal, minimal model, and structural accounts of model-based explanation. It argues that they too fail to offer an account of the connection with global theory that can (...) justify the explanatory power of an idealized local model, and consequently these accounts are unable effectively to distinguish explanatory from non-explanatory models. On the account proposed here, scientific explanation requires theoretical integration between the local model described in the explanation and a global theory with independent explanatory power. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ : Le but de W.V. Quine, dans «Deux dogmes de l’empirisme», n’est pas de prouver contre tous que la distinction analytique/synthétique est intenable ni de fournir une conception originale de la connaissance. Il veut plutôt ébranler l’attrait de l’empiriste pour la distinction et montrer ce en quoi réside un empirisme exempt de dogme. En me concentrant sur §§1-3 et §6, je soutiens que son traitement de l’analyticité est structuré par des hypothèses philosophiques fondamentales et que la conception de la (...) connaissance qu’il défend l’habite depuis fort longtemps. «Deux Dogmes» est moins facilement invalidé quand il est interprété en référence aux premières conférences de Quine sur Carnap. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to show how scientific explanation functions in the context of idealized models. It argues that the aspect of explanation most urgently requiring investigation is the nature of the connection between global theories and explanatory local models. This aspect is neglected in traditional accounts of explanation. The paper examines causal, minimal model, and structural accounts of model-based explanation. It argues that they too fail to offer an account of the connection with global theory that can (...) justify the explanatory power of an idealized local model, and consequently these accounts are unable effectively to distinguish explanatory from non-explanatory models. On the account proposed here, scientific explanation requires theoretical integration between the local model described in the explanation and a global theory with independent explanatory power. (shrink)

This paper discusses the idea that trade – the practice of regularised exchange of goods or services between nation-states for mutual advantage under an orchestrated system of rules – can generate moral duties, duties that exist between only participants in the activity. It considers this idea across three duties often cited as duties of trade: duties not to harm; duties to provide certain basic goods; and duties to distribute benefits and burdens fairly. The paper argues that these three duties seem (...) unlikely contenders for duties thought in some sense to supervene on trade, the former two because they seem to exist regardless of the existence of trade and the latter because it seems to apply to a group more widely conceived than to be coherently thought centred on trade. It concludes that, at least across these three duties, it is more plausible to think that they are duties which, although possibly having relevance for how trade is conducted, do not emerge from the practice and are, rather, grounded elsewhere. (shrink)

There is a long and distinguished history of ethical thought in both business and medicine dating back to ancient times. Yet, the emergence of distinct academic disciplines ("business ethics" and "bioethics") which are also tied to broader social movements is a very recent phenomenon. In spite of the apparent affinities that would seem to emerge from this connection, many have argued that the differences between business and medicine make any constructive interaction between business ethics and bioethics minimal. Indeed, little has (...) been done to specifically examine the potential for collaboration and interdisciplinary research. This paper argues that there is considerable potential for constructive interaction between these two movements based on three major arguments: that the differences between medicine and business have been exaggerated, that both the fields face a number of urgent problems that are common to each, and that the model of bioethics can serve as a useful guide for business ethicists. (shrink)

Summary The argument of this paper is (1) that, contrary to what is often thought, there are cases of disagreement among scientists concerning the relative acceptability of theories which do not turn on nonrational or extra-scientific considerations, (2) that agreement cannot be secured without adversely affecting the scientific enterprise as we know it, and (3) that disagreement can be accommodated within a theory of scientific rationality and progress based on the idea that the relative acceptability of scientific theories is a (...) function of their relative problem-solving effectiveness.The diversity of our opinions does not proceed from some men being more rational than others but solely from the fact that our thoughts pass through diverse channels and the same objects are not considered by all.’ Descartes, Discourse on Method. (shrink)