Evidence-based medicine has always required integration of patient values with ‘best’ clinical evidence. It is widely recognized that scientific practices and discoveries, including those of EBM, are value-laden. But to date, the science of EBM has focused primarily on methods for reducing bias in the evidence, while the role of values in the different aspects of the EBM process has been almost completely ignored.

In this article, we conceptualize the under investigated and under theorized relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV) and business responsibility. As an urgent social issue, IPV—understood as abuse of power within the context of an intimate partner relationship, mainly perpetrated by men and involving a pattern of behavior—has been studied for decades in many disciplines. A less common yet vital research perspective is to examine IPV as it relates to the business and to ask how organizations should engage with IPV. (...) In response to this question, we contribute a framework drawing from two distinctions in the business responsibility scholarship: the assumed role of the organization (responsibility to the firm/market; responsibility to the broader socio-political-economic environment); and the second focused on the approach to conceptualizing ethics (justice/fairness; ethics of care). Thus, we explicate four approaches to business responsibility and IPV, which serve the purposes of mapping three selected contributions, identifying limitations of these approaches, and opening up future research opportunities. (shrink)

Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN). This is paired with insights from 21 network members on aspects that have allowed STSFAN to (...) thrive, even amid a global pandemic. Our hope is that these insights will encourage others to cultivate their own intellectual communities, where they too can receive the support they need to deepen their scholarship and strengthen their intellectual relationships. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors’ experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; and (3) propose ways to overcome these barriers. We encourage funding bodies to develop mechanisms that ensure funded projects respect the integrity of social science expertise and (...) incorporate its insights. We also call for the integration of social scientific questions and methods in interdisciplinary projects from the outset, and for a genuine curiosity on the part of STEM and social science researchers alike about the knowledge and skills each of us has to offer. We contend that cultivating such integration and curiosity within interdisciplinary collaborations will make them more enriching for all researchers involved, and more likely to generate socially beneficial outcomes. (shrink)

The use of Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom is becoming more widespread, as educators begin to recognise their use as effective learning and teaching tools. Web 2.0 facilitates new modes of social interaction that offer the potential to enrich university educational activities. New roles, structures and activities can be enabled, engendering new forms of creativity and increasing the availability of and extent of access to information. Yet in achieving this, such platforms shift the traditional boundaries between educators and their (...) students, between personal and professional lives, raising issues of integrity and pedagogy in unexpected ways. This paper reflects on three personal narratives to examine some of these challenges; the authors conclude by highlighting concerns that universities need to address. (shrink)

Charlotte Witt covers a remarkable amount of ground in this concise and elegantly written book. Coming in at under 150 pages, she artfully weaves together Aristotle’s theory of functions with contemporary work on cultural transmission and apprenticeship, ideas about self-creation with theories of aspiration and transformative experience, and reflections on the relationships among social norms and games with thoughts about social roles and the nature of hierarchy. At the heart of it is an elaboration and defense of a thoroughly (...) externalist account of social normativity. Witt takes skilled experts, especially artisans like chefs and carpenters, as paradigm cases for theorizing about social normativity. She uses them to argue that the ultimate source of many normative obligations is found not in the acquiescence, attitudes, or any other features internal to those on whom those obligations fall. Rather, the demands are rooted in the world itself, and flow from specific circumstances, especially from the constraints those circumstances impose on different actors in virtue of the tasks they need to perform. The result is a view that depicts social normativity not just as external to individuals but also unavoidably role specific; what is right for a chef is not necessarily right for a carpenter, and what makes for a good nurse might make for a poor drill sergeant. Witt’s presentation of this package of ideas is both careful and austere, and it makes for a wonderfully thought provoking read. Social Goodness: On the Ontology of Social Norms will reward the careful attention of anyone interested in social ontology, especially the metaphysical foundations of normativity, the nature of social norms, and the relationship between social roles and the self. (shrink)

We argue that work on norms provides a way to move beyond debates between proponents of individualist and structuralist approaches to bias, oppression, and injustice. We briefly map out the geography of that debate before presenting Charlotte Witt’s view, showing how her position, and the normative ascriptivism at its heart, seamlessly connects individuals to the social reality they inhabit. We then describe recent empirical work on the psychology of norms and locate the notions of informal institutions and soft structures (...) with respect to it. Finally, we argue that the empirical resources enrich Witt’s ascriptivism, and that the resulting picture shows theorists need not, indeed should not, choose between either the individualist or structuralist camp. (shrink)

Preface Introduction Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith: Outline of Life, Times, and Legacy Part One: Adam Smith: Heritage and Contemporaries 1: Nicholas Phillipson: Adam Smith: A Biographer's Reflections 2: Leonidas Montes: Newtonianism and Adam Smith 3: Dennis C. Rasmussen: Adam Smith and Rousseau: Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment 4: Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith and Early Modern Thought Part Two: Adam Smith on Language, Art and Culture 5: Catherine Labio: Adam Smith's Aesthetics 6: James Chandler: Adam Smith as Critic 7: Michael C. (...) Amrozowicz: Adam Smith: History and Poetics 8: C. Jan Swearingen: Adam Smith on Language and Rhetoric: The Ethics of Style, Character, and Propriety Part Three: Adam Smith and Moral Philosophy 9: Christel Fricke: Adam Smith: The Sympathetic Process and the Origin and Function of Conscience 10: Duncan Kelly: Adam Smith and the Limits of Sympathy 11: Ryan Patrick Hanley: Adam Smith and Virtue 12: Eugene Heath: Adam Smith and Self-Interest Part Four: Adam Smith and Economics 13: Tony Aspromourgos: Adam Smith on Labour and Capital 14: Nerio Naldi: Adam Smith on Value and Prices 15: Hugh Rockoff: Adam Smith on Money, Banking, and the Price Level 16: Maria Pia Paganelli: Commercial Relations: from Adam Smith to Field Experiments Part Five: Adam Smith on History and Politics 17: Spiros Tegos: Adam Smith: Theorist of Corruption 18: David M. Levy & Sandra J. Peart: Adam Smith and the State: Language and Reform 19: Fabrizio Simon: Adam Smith and the Law 20: Edwin van de Haar: Adam Smith on Empire and International Relations Part Six: Adam Smith on Social Relations 21: Richard Boyd: Adam Smith, Civility, and Civil Society 22: Gavin Kennedy: Adam Smith on Religion 23: Samuel Fleischacker: Adam Smith and Equality 24: Maureen Harkin: Adam Smith and Women Part Seven; Adam Smith: Legacy and Influence 25: Spencer J. Pack: Adam Smith and Marx 26: Craig Smith: Adam Smith and the New Right 27: Tom Campbell: Adam Smith: Methods, Morals and Markets 28: Amartya Sen: The Contemporary Relevance of Adam Smith. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Gender is a book about gender essentialism: what it is and why it might be true.

The central question of this paper is: are deterministic and indeterministic descriptions observationally equivalent in the sense that they give the same predictions? I tackle this question for measure-theoretic deterministic systems and stochastic processes, both of which are ubiquitous in science. I first show that for many measure-theoretic deterministic systems there is a stochastic process which is observationally equivalent to the deterministic system. Conversely, I show that for all stochastic processes there is a measure-theoretic deterministic system which is observationally equivalent (...) to the stochastic process. Still, one might guess that the measure-theoretic deterministic systems which are observationally equivalent to stochastic processes used in science do not include any deterministic systems used in science. I argue that this is not so because deterministic systems used in science even give rise to Bernoulli processes. Despite this, one might guess that measure-theoretic deterministic systems used in science cannot give the same predictions at every observation level as stochastic processes used in science. By proving results in ergodic theory, I show that also this guess is misguided: there are several deterministic systems used in science which give the same predictions at every observation level as Markov processes. All these results show that measure-theoretic deterministic systems and stochastic processes are observationally equivalent more often than one might perhaps expect. Furthermore, I criticise the claims of the previous philosophy papers Suppes (1993, 1999), Suppes and de Barros (1996) and Winnie (1998) on observational equivalence. (shrink)

This chapter offers a reinterpretation of Heidegger’s conception of the social world (das Man) in order to overcome the tension between its conflicting positive and negative characterisations in Being and Time. Rejecting a purely positive or a purely negative reading of das Man, the chapter follows Stephen Mulhall in carving out a middle ground between the two. The chapter takes seriously Heidegger’s claim that it is possible for das Man to undergo an authentic transformation, exploring how best to conceive of (...) this idea. It is argued that the authentic transformation of das Man and the everyday way of being it engenders, is most productively understood with reference to Dasein’s relation to das Man and the way Dasein grasps the world as meaningful. Through this reading it is shown how both an authentic and an inauthentic mode of everydayness can be accommodated. The chapter concludes with an examination of the consequences of this interpretation, arguing for the critical and political potential of authenticity as an attentive and engaged mode of being-in-the-world. (shrink)

In cases of complicity in one’s own unfreedom and in structural injustice, it initially appears that agents are only vicariously responsible for their complicity because of the roles circumstantial and constitutive luck play in bringing about their complicity. By drawing on work from the phenomenological tradition, this paper rejects this conclusion and argues for a new responsive sense of agency and responsibility in cases of complicity. Highlighting the explanatory role of stubbornness in cases of complicity, it is argued that although (...) agents may only be vicariously responsible for becoming complicit, they can be held more directly responsible for entrenching their complicity. The complicit agent is responsible for their complicity to the extent that they fail to take responsibility for it. (shrink)

This paper addresses the actual practice of justifying definitions in mathematics. First, I introduce the main account of this issue, namely Lakatos's proof-generated definitions. Based on a case study of definitions of randomness in ergodic theory, I identify three other common ways of justifying definitions: natural-world justification, condition justification, and redundancy justification. Also, I clarify the interrelationships between the different kinds of justification. Finally, I point out how Lakatos's ideas are limited: they fail to show how various kinds of justification (...) can be found and can be reasonable, and they fail to acknowledge the interplay among the different kinds of justification. (shrink)

We argue that concerns about double-counting -- using the same evidence both to calibrate or tune climate models and also to confirm or verify that the models are adequate --deserve more careful scrutiny in climate modelling circles. It is widely held that double-counting is bad and that separate data must be used for calibration and confirmation. We show that this is far from obviously true, and that climate scientists may be confusing their targets. Our analysis turns on a Bayesian/relative-likelihood approach (...) to incremental confirmation. According to this approach, double-counting is entirely proper. We go on to discuss plausible difficulties with calibrating climate models, and we distinguish more and less ambitious notions of confirmation. Strong claims of confirmation may not, in many cases, be warranted, but it would be a mistake to regard double-counting as the culprit. (shrink)

A popular view in contemporary Boltzmannian statistical mechanics is to interpret the measures as typicality measures. In measure-theoretic dynamical systems theory measures can similarly be interpreted as typicality measures. However, a justification why these measures are a good choice of typicality measures is missing, and the paper attempts to fill this gap. The paper first argues that Pitowsky's (2012) justification of typicality measures does not fit the bill. Then a first proposal of how to justify typicality measures is presented. The (...) main premises are that typicality measures are invariant and are related to the initial probability distribution of interest (which are translation-continuous or translation-close). The conclusions are two theorems which show that the standard measures of statistical mechanics and dynamical systems are typicality measures. There may be other typicality measures, but they agree about judgements of typicality. Finally, it is proven that if systems are ergodic or epsilon-ergodic, there are uniqueness results about typicality measures. (shrink)

In the current paper, our aim is to explore the latent power dynamics surrounding corporate social responsibility in developing countries. To do this, we synthesize an analytic framework that borrows from both cross-cultural management literature as well as feminist considerations of power. We then use the framework to examine three streams of CSR literature. Our analysis uncovers the prevalence of arguments and discussions about indigenous and power-over themes rather than more generative, endogenous, and power-to themes. The paper concludes with the (...) suggestion for more space in the CSR literature for examining the realities and potentialities of local SME CSR expressions to counterbalance the overwhelming focus on MNCs. Such counterbalancing can better lead to the recognition that power and domination are not the only important dynamics to examine in CSR research. Just as important is the need for a more nuanced consideration of the role and contributions of different actors to the continuously unfolding CSR discourse. (shrink)

This article examines initial-condition dependence and initial-condition uncertainty for climate projections and predictions. The first contribution is to provide a clear conceptual characterization of predictions and projections. Concerning initial-condition dependence, projections are often described as experiments that do not depend on initial conditions. Although prominent, this claim has not been scrutinized much and can be interpreted differently. If interpreted as the claim that projections are not based on estimates of the actual initial conditions of the world or that what makes (...) projections true are conditions in the world, this claim is true. However, it can also be interpreted as the claim that simulations used to obtain projections are independent of initial-condition ensembles. This article argues that evidence does not support this claim. Concerning initial-condition uncertainty, three kinds of initial-condition uncertainty are identified. The first is the uncertainty associated with the spread of the ensemble simulations. The second arises because the theoretical initial ensemble cannot be used in calculations and has to be approximated by finitely many initial states. The third uncertainty arises because it is unclear how long the model should be run to obtain potential initial conditions at pre-industrial times. Overall, the discussion shows that initial-condition dependence and uncertainty in climate science are more complex and important issues than usually acknowledged. 1Introduction2Projections and Predictions 2.1Predictions2.2Projections3Initial-Condition Dependence 3.1Projections 3.1.1Dynamical conditions justifying independence of initial conditions?3.1.2What projections can and cannot provide3.2Predictions4Initial-Condition Uncertainty 4.1Projections4.2Predictions5ConclusionAppendix. (shrink)

Feminist Metaphysics is the first collection of articles addressing metaphysical issues from a feminist perspective.

We are all immersed in a sea of social norms, but they are sometimes tricky to observe with any clarity. They are often invisible to us and emerge only when they are not observed. Social norms are important to understand because they are both limiting of our freedom, such as gendered and racialized norms, and at the same time the very conditions of our agency. Social Goodness presents an original, externalist answer to the question of the source or origin of (...) social role normativity. Rather than grounding social normativity in the attitudes of persons, the book argues for an externalism that roots social role normativity in the social world itself: in its positions, institutions, and larger architecture. The core insight of externalism is that the function or structural feature of an enterprise or activity can bring with it normative demands quite independently of the attitudes of those who engage with it. According to the artisanal model, just as a carpenter, ceramicist, or chef is responsive to and evaluable under a set of artisanal norms or techniques, so too is a mother and or an academic or a President. The source of normativity is this technique or expertise, independent of the preferences, endorsements, or recognitive attitudes of individuals. The artisanal model for social role normativity has resources to explain both the "stickiness" or persistence of social norms and our ability to criticize existing norms and to engage in normative self-creation--to create new normative selves. The artisanal model also has resources to capture and express the social situatedness, locality, and materiality of social roles. The relational ontology of social roles, implicit in the artisanal model, provides a useful frame to consider both hierarchical and oppressive social relations. (shrink)

Equilibrium is a central concept of statistical mechanics. In previous work we introduced the notions of a Boltzmannian alpha-epsilon-equilibrium and a Boltzmannian gamma-epsilon-equilibrium. This was done in a deterministic context. We now consider systems with a stochastic micro-dynamics and transfer these notions from the deterministic to the stochastic context. We then prove stochastic equivalents of the Dominance Theorem and the Prevalence Theorem. This establishes that also in stochastic systems equilibrium macro-regions are large in requisite sense.

Feminists have always been concerned with how the clothes women wear can reinforce and reproduce gender hierarchy. However, they have strongly disagreed about what to do in response: some have suggested that the key to feminist liberation is to stop caring about how one dresses; others have replied that the solution is to give women increased choices. In this paper, we argue that neither of these dominant approaches is satisfactory and that, ultimately, they have led to an impasse that pervades (...) the contemporary feminist debate. The problem is that both sides of the debate understand women’s complicity in patriarchal subordination as a matter of what women wear and do. Instead, we propose a phenomenological analysis that understands complicity as based in our relations to our clothes. Starting from this phenomenological perspective, we sketch a new relational feminist ethics of dressing. This alternative ethical paradigm cannot yield a simple recipe for how to dress or tell us what garments are off-limits. But it can offer a way to make critical feminist judgements about clothes without veering into a stifling new prescriptivism. (shrink)

This book develops an account of what substance is in terms of the notion of independence. As the authors note, there is a tradition of defining substance as independent that begins with Aristotle. But what notion of independence can provide an adequate definition of substance? The authors find traditional attempts to define independence, including Aristotle’s, inadequate on a number of grounds, and they propose an alternative account. As a preface to this undertaking, the authors consider and reject a number of (...) standard objections to their project, and as an afterword, they argue that the notion of spiritual substance is as intelligible as the notion of material substance. (shrink)

In ____Womanizing Nietzsche,__ Kelly Oliver uses an analysis of the position of woman in Nietzsche's texts to open onto the larger question of philosophy's relation to the feminine and the maternal. Offering readings from Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Freud and Lacan, Oliver builds an innovative foundation for an ontology of intersubjective relationships that suggests a new approach to ethics.

Substance and Essence in Aristotle is a close study of Aristotle's most profound—and perplexing—treatise: Books VII-IX of the Metaphysics. These central books, which focus on the nature of substance, have gained a deserved reputation for their difficulty, inconclusiveness, and internal inconsistency. Despite these problems, Witt extracts from Aristotle's text a coherent and provocative view about sensible substance by focusing on Aristotle's account of form or essence. After exploring the context in which Aristotle's discussion of sensible substance takes place, Witt turns (...) to his analysis of essence. Arguing against the received interpretation, according to which essences are classificatory, Witt maintains that a substance's essence is what causes it to exist. In addition, Substance and Essence in Aristotle challenges the orthodox view that Aristotelian essences are species-essences, defending instead the controversial position that they are individual essences. Finally, Witt compares Aristotelian essentialism to contemporary essentialist theories, focusing in particular on Kripke's work. She concludes that fundamental differences between Aristotelian and contemporary essentialist theories highlight important features of Aristotle's theory and the philosophical problems and milieu that engendered it. (shrink)

The past twenty five years have seen an explosion of feminist writing on the philosophical canon, a development that has clear parallels in other disciplines like literature and art history. Since most of the writing is, in one way or another, critical of the tradition, a natural question to ask is: Why does the history of philosophy have importance for feminist philosophers? This question assumes that the history of philosophy is of importance for feminists, an assumption that is warranted by (...) the sheer volume of recent feminist writing on the canon. This entry explores the different ways that feminist philosophers are interacting with the Western philosophical tradition. (shrink)

The guiding question of this paper is: how similar are deterministic descriptions and indeterministic descriptions from a predictive viewpoint? The deterministic and indeterministic descriptions of concern in this paper are measure-theoretic deterministic systems and stochastic processes, respectively. I will explain intuitively some mathematical results which show that measure-theoretic deterministic systems and stochastic processes give more often the same predictions than one might perhaps have expected, and hence that from a predictive viewpoint these descriptions are quite similar.

If there is to be any progress in the debate about what sort of positive moral status Kant can give the emotions, we need a taxonomy of the terms Kant uses for these concepts. It used to be thought that Kant had little room for emotions in his ethics. In the past three decades, Marcia Baron, Paul Guyer, Barbara Herman, Nancy Sherman, Allen Wood and others have argued otherwise. Contrary to what a cursory reading of the Groundwork may indicate, Kant (...) thinks the emotions play an important role in the moral life. I want to extend the work of Baron, Guyer, Herman, Sherman and Wood in three ways. First, I will set out in a diagram Kant's taxonomy of feelings and emotions. Agreement on such a taxonomy should make it easier to evaluate debates about Kant and the emotions. Second, I will focus on a certain subclass of emotions – reason-caused affects – that have previously received little attention, even from these Kant scholars. Third, these scholars base much of their defence of Kant on his later works – especially the Metaphysics of Morals and the Anthropology – but Kant's fairly rich taxonomy of the emotions, including reason-caused affects, is clearly in place at least as early as the Critique of Judgment . I believe that the Critique of Judgment is an importantly ignored resource for understanding the moral role of the emotions for Kant. The third Critique makes positive, philosophically interesting claims about the emotions and morality. Kant emphasizes certain roles for emotions in this work that he develops to the same extent nowhere else. Nevertheless, the Critique of Judgment goes all but unmentioned by many who write on these issues. In what follows, I will defend as many of my claims as possible using the third Critique. (shrink)

It can be shown that certain kinds of classical deterministic and indeterministic descriptions are observationally equivalent. Then the question arises: which description is preferable relative to evidence? This paper looks at the main argument in the literature for the deterministic description by Winnie (The cosmos of science—essays of exploration. Pittsburgh University Press, Pittsburgh, pp 299–324, 1998). It is shown that this argument yields the desired conclusion relative to in principle possible observations where there are no limits, in principle, on observational (...) accuracy. Yet relative to the currently possible observations (of relevance in practice), relative to the actual observations, or relative to in principle observations where there are limits, in principle, on observational accuracy the argument fails. Then Winnie’s analogy between his argument for the deterministic description and his argument against the prevalence of Bernoulli randomness in deterministic descriptions is considered. It is argued that while the arguments are indeed analogous, it is also important to see they are disanalogous in another sense. (shrink)

Childhood cancers are life-threatening diseases that affect not only the child but the whole family. Although rates of survival are high with modern therapy, childhood cancers are still serious and...

This highly original book examines, for the first time, how the patient movement, which works to improve the quality of healthcare, can actually be considered an emancipation movement when led by its radical elements.

There is a surprising number of deformed animal kinds mentioned in Aristotle’s biological works. The number is surprising because, according to the standard understanding of deformed animals in Aristotle, it should be zero. And the number is significant because there are just too many deformed kinds at too many classificatory levels mentioned in too many works to dismiss them as a minor aberration or as an infiltration of folk belief into biology proper. This paper has two goals. The first is (...) to develop an interpretation of deformed animal kinds in Aristotle, which focuses on the meaning of deformity applied to kinds. To my knowledge there is no adequate interpretation of the meaning of deformity applied to kinds in the scholarly literature. (shrink)

when it is actually heating water; an object is perceptible only when it is actually being 1 perceived-- and so on. But, it is part of the notion of a causal power that it exists whether or not it is active. In order to respond to this challenge Aristotle draws a distinction between two ways of being a power; when it is active the power exists actually; when it is inactive it exists potentially. Contemporary writers have noted that we need (...) a way of understanding powers that includes their present but inactive existence, although Aristotle’s ontological response to this difficulty might seem wrong-headed or unnecessary. One objectionable aspect to his solution is the inherently teleological relationship between being x potentially and being x actually. Second, Aristotle does not draw an ontological distinction between those powers that operate with reason, and those that do not. He does provide different conditions of realization for the two kinds of powers, but those conditions are variants within the same ontology of causal powers. In this regard, Aristotle offers one possible realist framework of causal powers that sees human action on a continuum with the physical sciences rather than as categorically different from them, and therefore requiring an entirely different explanatory framework. It is important to note, however, that Aristotle’s paradigmatic physical science is biology and his framework for understanding natural living beings is teleological. Perhaps a better way to put this is that Aristotle’s understanding of the physical sciences is entirely different from ours, and it is a good question how relevant Aristotle’s unified framework of causal powers is given current conceptions of the physical sciences, and the centrality of physics and chemistry as models of the physical sciences. The common theme that unites both of these aspects of Aristotle’s ontology of causal powers is the central presence of teleology. (shrink)

Recently, Widerker has attacked Fischer’s contention that one could use Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities to show that even from a libertarian viewpoint an agent might be morally responsible for a decision that he could not have avoided. Fischer has responded by: (a) arguing that Widerker’s criticism presupposes the falsity of Molinism and (b) presenting a version of libertarianism which avoids Widerker’s criticism. Here we argue that: (i) Fischer’s first response is unconvincing and undermines Molinism itself; (ii) (...) the version of libertarianism he presents is fallacious, and (iii) even on the version of libertarianism he proposes, avoid ability remains a necessary condition for moral responsibility. (shrink)