Baker claims to provide an example of mathematical explanation of an empirical phenomenon which leads to ontological commitment to mathematical objects. This is meant to show that the positing of mathematical entities is necessary for satisfactory scientific explanations and thus that the application of mathematics to science can be used, at least in some cases, to support mathematical realism. In this paper I show that the example of explanation Baker considers can actually be given without postulating mathematical objects and thus (...) cannot be used by the mathematical realist. I also show that, despite this, mathematics keeps playing an important methodological role in the explanation and does not reduce to a merely computational or descriptive framework. (shrink)

Since 2010, the European Journal of Anaesthesiology has required the reporting of five items concerning ethical approval in articles describing human research: ethics committee’s name and address, chairperson’s name, study’s protocol number and approval date. We aimed to assess whether this requirement has helped to identify and to contact the referenced ethics committees. In this cross-sectional study, we analysed articles requiring ethical approval, according to the Swiss federal law for human research and published in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology in (...) 2011. Ethics committees were searched through our institutional Internet access based on information provided in the articles. The last search was performed in November 2015. Numbers of items reported, of ethics committees identified, and of those that confirmed having provided ethical approval are reported. Of 76 articles requiring ethical approval, 74 declared it. Ethics committees’ names and addresses were mentioned in 63/74, protocol numbers in 51/74, approval dates in 48/74, and chairpersons’ names in 45/74. We could identify 44/74 committees; 36/74 answered our inquiry and 24/74 confirmed their role. Thirty-four of 74 articles reported all five items; in 25/34, we were able to identify an ethics committee, 18/34 answered our inquiry, and 15/34 confirmed their role. Forty of 74 articles reported ≤4 items; in 19/40, we were able to identify an ethics committee, 18/40 answered our inquiry, and 9/40 confirmed their role. Reporting five items significantly increased identification of ethics committees and their confirmation of ethical approval. Twelve of 74 ethics committees were unable to confirm their role in approving the study. Even when details concerning ethical approval were reported in these studies of human research, we were unable to identify almost half of the ethics committees concerned. The reporting of five items, compared with reporting ≤4, was associated with facilitated identification of ethics committees, and increased the likelihood that they would be able to confirm the study’s approval. Future research should identify which information facilitates identification of, and contact with, ethics committees. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A belief is correct if and only if the believed proposition is true. Some philosophers argued that from this standard of correctness it is possible to derive the statement of a norm, a claim about what a subject ought to do. Many formulations of the standard in terms of an ‘ought’-claim have been suggested, but all resulted affected by some problem. My aim in this article is to suggest a new formulation of the standard in ‘ought’-terms based on an (...) analysis of the relations occurring between the notions of correctness and ‘ought’. My suggested formulation is that, for any subject S and proposition p, according to the standard of correctness, given that S believes that p, it ought to be that p. (shrink)

Believing in free will may arise from a biological need for control. People induced to disbelieve in free will show impulsive and antisocial tendencies, suggesting a reduction of the willingness to exert self-control. We investigated whether undermining free will affects two aspects of self-control: intentional inhibition and perceived self-control. We exposed participants either to anti-free will or to neutral messages. The two groups then performed a task that required self-control to inhibit a prepotent response. No-free will participants showed less intentional (...) inhibitions than controls, suggesting a reduction of self-control. We assessed perceived self-control by asking participants whether the response resulted from a deliberate intention or from an impulsive reaction. Perceived self-control was lower in the no-free will group than in control group. Our findings show that undermining free will can degrade self-control and provide insights into how disbelieving in free will leads to antisocial tendencies. (shrink)

Biologists and philosophers often use the language of determination in order to describe the nature of developmental phenomena. Accounts in terms of determination have often been reductionist. One common idea is that DNA is supposed to play a special explanatory role in developmental explanations, namely, that DNA is a developmental determinant. In this article we try to make sense of determination claims in developmental biology. Adopting a manipulationist approach, we shall first argue that the notion of developmental determinant is causal. (...) We suggest that two different theses concerning developmental determination can be articulated: determination of occurrence and structural determination. We shall argue that, while the first thesis is problematic, the second, opportunely qualified, is feasible. Finally, we shall argue that an analysis of biological causation in terms of determination cannot account for entangled dynamics. Characterising causal entanglement as a particular kind of interactive causation whereby difference-making causes ascribable to different levels of biological organisation influence a particular ontogenetic outcome, we shall, via two illustrative examples, diagnose some potential limits of a reductionist, molecular and intra-level understanding of biological causation. (shrink)

This paper challenges the common assumption that some phenotypic traits are quantitative while others are qualitative. The distinction between these two kinds of traits is widely influential in biological and biomedical research as well as in scientific education and communication. This is probably due to both historical and epistemological reasons. However, the quantitative/qualitative distinction involves a variety of simplifications on the genetic causes of phenotypic variability and on the development of complex traits. Here, I examine three cases from the life (...) sciences that show inconsistencies in the distinction: Mendelian traits, Mendelian diseases, and polygenic mental disorders. I show that these traits can be framed both quantitatively and qualitatively depending, for instance, on the methods through which they are investigated and on specific epistemic purposes. This suggests that the received view of quantitative and qualitative traits has a limited heuristic power—limited to some local contexts or to the specific methodologies adopted. Throughout the paper, I provide directions for framing phenotypes beyond the quantitative/qualitative distinction. I conclude by pointing at the necessity of developing a principled characterisation of what phenotypic traits, in general, are. (shrink)

Aim of the present paper is to provide a formal characterization of various different notions of responsibility within groups of agents (Who did that? Who gets the blame? Who is accountable for that? etc.). To pursue this aim, the papers proposes an organic analysis of organized collective agency by tackling the issues of organizational structure, role enactment, organizational activities, task-division and task-allocation. The result consists in a semantic framework based on dynamic logic in which all these concepts can be represented (...) and in which various notions of responsibility find a formalization. The background motivation of the work consists in those responsibility-related issues which are of particular interest for the theory and development of multi-agent systems. (shrink)

Linguistic data are commonly considered a defeasible source of evidence from which it is legitimate to draw philosophical hypotheses and conclusions. Traditionally epistemologists have relied almost exclusively on linguistic data from western languages, with a primary focus on contemporary English. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in cross-linguistic studies in epistemology. In this entry, we provide a brief overview of cross-linguistic data discussed by contemporary epistemologists and the philosophical debates they have generated.

A recent view in contemporary epistemology holds that practical reasoning is governed by an epistemic norm. Evidence for the existence of this norm is provided by the ways in which we assess our actions and reasoning on the basis of whether certain epistemic conditions are satisfied. Philosophers disagree on what this norm is—whether it is knowledge, justified belief or something else. Nobody however challenges the claim that practical reasoning is governed by such a norm. I argue that assuming the existence (...) of an epistemic norm of practical reasoning is neither the only nor the best way to accommodate the available data. I introduce and defend an alternative account that avoids the assumption. According to this account, the relevant epistemic assessments of action and reasoning are instrumental assessments relative to the regulation conditions of a non-epistemic norm. (shrink)

In the recent literature, it has been shown that the wave function in the de Broglie–Bohm theory can be regarded as a new kind of field, i.e., a "multi-field", in three-dimensional space. In this paper, I argue that the natural framework for the multi-field is the original second-order Bohm’s theory. In this context, it is possible: i) to construe the multi-field as a real-valued scalar field; ii) to explain the physical interaction between the multi-field and the Bohmian particles; and iii) (...) to clarify the status of the energy-momentum conservation and the dynamics of the theory. (shrink)

While environmental claims are increasingly used by companies to appeal consumers, they also attract greater scrutiny from independent parties interested in consumer protection. Consumers are now able to compare corporate environmental claims against external, often disconfirming, information to form their brand attitudes and purchase intentions. What remains unclear is how the level of information specificity of both the environmental claims and external disconfirming information interact to influence consumer reactions. Two experiments address this gap in the CSR communication literature. When specific (...) claims are countered by specific external information, consumers report more negative brand attitudes and lower purchase intentions. The effect is serially mediated by skepticism toward the claims and lack of corporate credibility. We conclude by discussing strategies that firms can utilize to avoid information dilution and ensure that external disconfirming information percolates to consumers as specific. (shrink)

Davide Panagia’s Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity is volume fifteen of Modernity and Political Thought, the Rowman & Littlefield series in contemporary political theory.

The idea of civil society is one of the oldest and most contested in Western political and sociological thought. Among the social sciences, anthropology has been the discipline that has prompted the boldest critiques of the concept. This paper argues that the “revival” of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe in one particular field—that of environmental activism—has been contingent with the outcomes of EU enlargement policies. I introduce the case study of one of the most complex and contested transport (...) development projects in Central Eastern Europe: the Budapest Ring Road. I maintain that within the EU enlargement project alternative forms of political power have been built from below and that they eventually come to compete with the state (and local governments) to influence decision-making processes. These forms, to be individuated in the emergence of environmental activism, take shape at local, state and transnational levels and aim, although often contradictorily, at restituting political agency under the condition of lowering public participation in decision-making processes. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that mapping-based accounts of applications cannot be comprehensive and must be supplemented by analyses of other, qualitatively different, forms of application. I support these claims by providing a detailed discussion of the application of mathematics to a problem of election design that is prominent in social choice theory.

The concept of authority crosses many social sciences, but there is a lack of common taxonomy and definitions on this topic. The aims of this review are: to define the basic characteristics of the authority relationship, reaching a definition suitable for the different domains of social psychology and social sciences; to bridge the gap between individual and societal levels of explanation concerning the authority relationship, by proposing an interpretation within the framework of social representations. The authority relationship can be conceived (...) as a negotiation of meanings and it is closely linked to shared value orientation and the attribution of meanings negotiated within a society. We assume that the authority relationship is socially constructed and represents both a shared representation of society and a normative principle of social life. A multidisciplinary approach is adopted, crossing definitions and studies provided in sociology, political science, law and social psychology. (shrink)

In the mid fourth century b.c. some Roman gentes drew on a Pythagorean tradition. In this tradition, Numa's role of Pythagoras’ disciple connected Rome with Greek elites and culture. The Marcii, between 304 and 300 b.c., used Numa's figure, recently reshaped by the Aemilii and the Pinarii for their propaganda, to promote the need for a plebeian pontificate. After the approval of the Ogulnium plebiscite, the needs for this kind of propaganda fell away. When Marcius Censorinus became censor, Numa's pontificate (...) was no longer relevant for promoting the gens. For this reason, the Marcii used another genealogy for similar propagandistic effect: the figure of Marsyas, a symbol of plebeian ideals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 113-126 [Access article in PDF] Dissenting Words:A Conversation with Jacques Rancière 1 Davide Panagia:In your writings you highlight the political efficacy of words. In The Names of History, for instance, this emphasis is discussed most vividly in terms of what you refer to as an "excess of words" that marks the rise of democratic movements in the seventeenth century. Similarly, in On The Shores of (...) Politics, you begin your discussion with an excursus on the end of politics as the end of the promise. Finally, in Dis-agreement you speak of "the part of those who have no-part" as voicing a "wrong" for the sake of equality.In each of these instances, however, your treatment of words (and language more generally) is very different from those thinkers of the "linguistic turn" in political philosophy who expound on an ethics of deliberation as the first virtue of modern democracies. For that matter, your approach is quite different from those thinkers who focus on the aporias of language as such.Could you discuss this thematic of the proliferation of words in your thinking about democratic politics?Would it be fair to characterize your research on and exposition of democratic thinking as a "poetics of politics"?Rancière's Reply:In order to address your question adequately, it would be wise to enlarge the sense of "linguistic turn" you invoke. In its most generally accepted sense, the linguistic turn in philosophy consists in ascribing to linguistic processes certain phenomena and specifiable modes of relating objects attributed, in a previous instance, either to factual processes or lines of thought. This approach is not limited to the two figures you invoke in your question. The linguistic turn also has two stages of development that, from my experience, have been more noticeable in France than in the United States. The first phase, then, emerged with Lévi-Strauss and his structural approach to social relations founded on a linguistic model of relationality, subsequently reprised in Lacan's psychoanalytic notion that "the unconscious is structured like a language" that, in its turn, conjoins the energetic mental processes Freud discusses to linguistic practices. The primacy of "the linguistic" thus granted language all the properties of the Freudian unconscious [End Page 113] along with those of a Marxist notion of infrastructure. The Saussurian opposition between langue and parole provided a privileged status to a linguistic model whose role was that of a general law that unconsciously structures the behavior of individuals and societies. It is on the basis of these parameters that the structuralist moment of the linguistic turn was constituted. At one and the same time, the analysis of speech acts became first and foremost a "symptomatic" analysis of those procedures of misrecognition that linguistically structured both the behavior of individuals and social relations. When we "read" Le Capital with Althusser, the interpretive and methodological schema for linguistic phenomena operated like a kind of "policing of the enunciated": that is, a search for those unsuccessful (i.e., inadequate) modes of expression that exemplify such symptomatic procedures of misrecognition.The second phase of the linguistic turn constituted itself more ambiguously. For those who shared intellectual experiences similar to my own, this version involved a critique of the langue/infrastructure model; that is, a further and more favorable consideration of the value of the political and the linguistic games therein that, according to the Althusserian/Marxist model (and, indeed, with structuralism more generally), were to be treated as ideological artifacts. In a very real sense, it all began with the May '68 assertion that "we are all German Jews"--an entirely ideological statement, the validity of which, if analyzed at the level of its content, one finds to rest entirely on the capacity to overturn the political relationship between the order of designations and that of events by emphasizing the gap that separates subject and predicate. From there, an entire field of understanding speech acts as political gestures opened up: a field that reconfigured the division between words and things while rearranging the distinction between legitimate... (shrink)

Bohmian mechanics is a realistic interpretation of quantum theory. It shares the same ontology of classical mechanics: particles following continuous trajectories in space through time. For this ontological continuity, it seems to be a good candidate for recovering the classical limit of quantum theory. Indeed, in a Bohmian framework, the issue of the classical limit reduces to showing how classical trajectories can emerge from Bohmian ones, under specific classicality assumptions. In this paper, we shall focus on a technical problem that (...) arises from the dynamics of a Bohmian system in bounded regions; and we suggest that a possible solution is supplied by the action of environmental decoherence. However, we shall show that, in order to implement decoherence in a Bohmian framework, a stronger condition is required rather than the usual one. (shrink)

This paper recognizes a specific correspondence between biological evolution and technological development and on this basis tries to set up a semioticapproach to the evolutionary phenomenon of exaptation. To do this, the existence of a historical-structural and pragmatic analogy between organs and tools is shown, which in turn implies on a communicative ground the dissolution of some of their traditional distinctive att ributes. Finally, a philosophical-analytical approach to natural and cultural functions is applied to define three types of exaptations.

This paper aims to clarify some conceptual aspects of decoherence that seem largely overlooked in the recent literature. In particular, I want to stress that decoherence theory, in the standard framework, is rather silent with respect to the description of (sub)systems and associated dynamics. Also, the selection of position basis for classical objects is more problematic than usually thought: while, on the one hand, decoherence offers a pragmatic-oriented solution to this problem, on the other hand, this can hardly be seen (...) as a genuine ontological explanation of why the classical world is position-based. This is not to say that decoherence is not useful to the foundations of quantum mechanics; on the contrary, it is a formidable weapon, as it accounts for a realistic description of quantum systems. That powerful description, however, becomes manifest when decoherence theory itself is interpreted in a realist framework of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim at rethinking the concept of obesity in a way that better captures the connection between underlying medical aspects, on the one hand, and an individual’s developmental history, on the other. Our proposal rests on the idea that obesity is not to be understood as a phenotypic trait or character; rather, obesity represents one of the many possible states of a more complex phenotypic trait that we call ‘energy metabolism.’ We argue that this apparently simple conceptual (...) shift can help solve important theoretical misconceptions regarding the genetics, epigenetics, and development of obesity. In addition, we show that our proposal can be fruitfully paired with the concept of developmental channeling of a trait, which connects to the study of the plasticity and canalization of complex traits. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of our approach on the assessment, treatment, and social narratives of obesity. (shrink)

Previous research on the interpersonal effects of emotions in negotiation suggested that bargainers obtain higher outcomes expressing anger, when it is not directed against the counterpart as a person and it is perceived as appropriate. Instead, other studies indicated that successful negotiators express positive emotions. To reconcile this inconsistency, we propose that the direction of the effects of emotions depends on their perceived target, that is, whether the negotiators’ emotions are directed toward their opponent’s proposals or toward their own ‘exit (...) option’. An ultimatum game scenario experiment showed that negotiators who express positive emotion rather than negative, in addition to benefits in terms of relationship fortification, received better offers when participants perceived the negotiators’ emotions directed toward their own ‘exit option’. These findings indicate that positive emotions may signal the availability of better ‘exit option’, suggesting that happiness expressions can be strategically used to maximize both material and relational outcomes. (shrink)

My claim in this article is that the thesis that Buddhism has no God, insofar as it is taken to apply to Buddhism universally, is false. I defend this claim by interpreting a central text in East-Asian Buddhism – The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna – through the lenses of perfect being theology (PBT), a research programme in philosophy of religion that attempts to provide a description of God through a two-step process: (1) defining God in terms of maximal greatness; (...) (2) inferring the properties or attributes that God must have in virtue of satisfying the definition. My argument comprises two steps. First, I argue that, since PBT is a method for providing a description of God starting from a definition of God, any text that contains a PBT ipso facto contains a notion of God. Second, I argue through textual evidence that The Awakening articulates a PBT, concluding that it contains a notion of God. Since the method of PBT leaves open what descriptions are to be inferred, my argument allows me to conclude that a text contains a notion of God without previously committing to any particular conception of the divine, which makes it particularly versatile and powerful. (shrink)

This study uses a quasi-experimental design to investigate what happens to individual socially responsible attitudes when they are exposed to group dynamics. Findings show that group engagement increases individual attitudes toward social responsibility. We also found that individuals with low attitudes toward social responsibility are more likely to change their opinions when group members show more positive attitudes toward social responsibility. Conversely, individuals with high attitudes do not change much, independent of group characteristics. To better analyze the effect of group (...) dynamics, the study proposes to split social responsibility into relative and absolute components. Findings show that relative social responsibility is correlated with but different from absolute social responsibility although the latter is more susceptible than the former to group dynamics. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic poses extraordinary public health challenges. In order to respond to such challenges, most democracies have relied on so-called ‘evidence-based’ policies, which supposedly devolve to science the burden of their justification. However, the biomedical sciences can only provide a theory-laden evidential basis, while reliable statistical data for policy support is often scarce. Therefore, scientific evidence alone cannot legitimise COVID-19 public health policies, which are ultimately based on political decisions. Given this inevitable input on policy-making, the risk of arbitrariness (...) is ubiquitous and democratic scrutiny becomes essential to counter it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the standards of scientific and democratic scrutiny have been, as a matter of fact, substantially lowered. This erosion potentially damages democracy. (shrink)

Entailment relations, introduced by Scott in the early 1970s, provide an abstract generalisation of Gentzen’s multi-conclusion logical inference. Originally applied to the study of multi-valued logics, this notion has then found plenty of applications, ranging from computer science to abstract algebra. In particular, an entailment relation can be regarded as a constructive presentation of a distributive lattice and in this guise it has proven to be a useful tool for the constructive reformulation of several classical theorems in commutative algebra. In (...) this paper, motivated by these concrete applications, we state and prove a cut-elimination result for inductively generated entailment relations. We analyse some of its consequences and describe the existing connections with analogous results in the literature. (shrink)

This paper is an account of the co-construction of categorical identity and personal identity among human beings. As people recognize themselves within a socially sanctioned categorical scheme, they reproduce that scheme, and hence institutional and personal reflexivity occur as a joint movement that, at the same time, can be seen as an exercise in social control. The inspirations for this account are lan Hacking's view about the distinctiveness of social kinds from natural kinds, and Dan Sperber's idea about cultural communication (...) as a form of social epidemiology. (shrink)

Status anxiety, the constant concern about individuals’ position on the social ladder, negatively affects social cohesion, health, and wellbeing. Given previous findings showing that status anxiety is associated with economic inequality, we aimed in this research to test this association experimentally. A cross-sectional study was run in order to discard confounding effects of the relationship between perceived economic inequality and status anxiety, and to explore the mediating role of a competitive climate. Then we predicted that people assigned to a condition (...) of high inequality would perceive more status anxiety in their social context, and they would themselves report higher status anxiety. Thus, in an experimental study PEI was manipulated. In Study 1, PEI uniquely predicted status anxiety, and perceived competitiveness mediated the relationship. In Study 2 PEI increased perceived contextual status anxiety, a specific form of perceived competitiveness based on socioeconomic status. Moreover, preliminary evidence of an indirect effect was found from PEI to personal status anxiety, through perceived contextual status anxiety. These preliminary findings provide experimental evidence for the effects of economic inequality on status anxiety and the mechanism involved. Economic inequality makes people feel that they live in a society where they are constantly concerned and competing with each other for their SES. These results could have important implications as health and wellbeing could be promoted by reducing economic inequalities and the competitive and materialistic environments of our societies. (shrink)

The problem of free will is among the most fascinating and disputed questions throughout the history of philosophy and psychology. Traditionally limited to philosophical and theological debate, in the last decades it has become a matter of scientific investigation. The theoretical and methodological advances in neuroscience allowed very complex psychological functions related to free will (conscious intentions, decision-making, and agency) to be investigated. In parallel, neuroscience is gaining momentum in the media, and various scientific findings are claimed to provide evidence (...) that free will is nothing more than an illusion. Why do neuroscientific findings have such a strong impact on our notion of free will? Does it really matter what neuroscience tells us about free will? Here we critically examine studies in experimental philosophy, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience that attempt to provide an empirical answer to these questions. This overview of the literature demonstrates that inducing disbelief in free will has an impact on folk psychology, social behavior and intentional action. (shrink)

In 1976, the Genetics Society of America published a document entitled “Resolution of Genetics, Race, and Intelligence.” This document laid out the Society’s position in the IQ controversy, particularly that on scientific and ethical questions involving the genetics of intellectual differences between human populations. Since the GSA was the largest scientific society of geneticists in the world, many expected the document to be of central importance in settling the controversy. Unfortunately, the Resolution had surprisingly little influence on the discussion. In (...) 1979, William Provine analyzed the possible factors that decreased the impact of the Resolution, among them scientists’ limited understanding of the relationship between science and ethics. Through the analysis of unpublished versions of the Resolution and exchanges between GSA members, I will suggest that the limited impact of the statement likely depended on a shift in the aims of the GSA due to the controversies that surrounded the preparation of the document. Indeed, the demands of the membership made it progressively more impartial in both scientific and political terms, decreasing its potential significance for a wider audience. Notably, the troubled history of the Resolution raises the question of what can make effective or ineffective the communication between scientists and the public—a question with resonance in past and present discussions on topics of social importance. (shrink)