Research involving human subjects is much more stringently regulated than many other nonresearch activities that appear to be at least as risky. A number of prominent figures now argue that research is overregulated. We argue that the reasons typically offered to justify the present system of research regulation fail to show that research should be subject to more stringent regulation than other equally risky activities. However, there are three often overlooked reasons for thinking that research should be treated as a (...) special case. First, research typically involves the imposition of risk on people who do not benefit from this risk imposition. Second, research depends on public trust. Third, the complexity of the moral decision making required favors ethics committees as a regulative solution for research. (shrink)
This paper argues that it is possible to knowingly believe something while judging that one ought not to believe it and (so) viewing the belief as manifesting a sort of failure. I offer examples showing that such ‘alienated belief’ has several potential sources. I contrast alienated belief with self-deception, incontinent (or akratic) belief and half-belief. I argue that the possibility of alienated belief is compatible with the so-called ‘transparency’ of first-person reflection on belief, and that the descriptive and expressive difficulties (...) it involves stem from well-understood sources. I conclude by speculating that endorsed belief is in important respects like intentional action. Reflection on the possibility of alienated belief may thus help us to see one respect in which an agent can be responsible for her attitudes. (shrink)
Ebbs’s aim is to “come to terms with and move beyond currently entrenched ways of looking at central topics in the philosophy of language and mind”. The entrenched perspectives are Metaphysical Realism, the view that “we can make ‘objective’ assertions only if we can ‘grasp’ metaphysically independent ‘truth conditions”’, and Scientific Naturalism, “Quine’s view that ‘it is within science itself that reality is to be identified and described”’. Ebbs intends to replace these with what he calls the “Participant Perspective,” from (...) which alone, he says, a satisfactory understanding of our linguistic behavior can be had. His work constitutes, I think, a stimulating and highly original contribution to the field. (shrink)
A natural view is that linguistic understanding is a source of justification or evidence: that beliefs about the meaning of a text or speech act are prima facie justified when based on states of understanding. Neglect of this view is largely due to the widely held assumption that understanding a text or speech act consists in knowledge or belief. It is argued that this assumption rests, in part, on confusing occurrent states of understanding and dispositions to understand. It is then (...) argued that occurrent states of understanding are not states of belief of knowledge since a subject may fail to believe that a text or speech act means what she understands it to mean if she doubts the reliability or truth- fulness of that understanding. States of understanding, it is maintained, belong in the same epistemic category as states of perception and memory. (shrink)
The thesis that anything conceivable is possible plays a central role in philosophical debates about the self. Discussions about free will have focused, at least in the last hundred years, on whether a free yet determined action is conceivable. If it is, and if anything conceivable is possible, then a deterministic physics would by itself pose no obstacle to human freedom. Current debates about the nature and value of personal survival turn on whether it is conceivable for a person to (...) move from one body to another. Discussions about the topic of John Perry’s impressive book, the relation between a person’s mental and physical states, has recently centered on whether it is conceivable for physically identical beings to differ in their conscious experiences. Some claim that zombies, beings physically just like us but without any conscious experiences at all, are conceivable. If they are, and if anything conceivable is possible, then it would seem to follow that facts about conscious experience are not physical. In short, some form of mind-body dualism would have to be right after all. (shrink)
Widescopism, as I call it, holds that names are synonymous with descriptions that are required to take wide scope over modal adverbs. Scott Soames has recently argued that Widescopism is false. He identifies an argument that is valid but which, he claims, a defender of Widescopism must say has true premises and a false conclusion. I argue, first, that a defender of Widescopism need not in fact say that the target arguments conclusion is false. Soames argument that she must confuses, (...) I claim, modal adverbs and modal predicates. I then argue that even if she did reject the conclusion, she could nonetheless hold that the target arguments first premise is ambiguous as between a true reading, on which the argument is invalid, and a false reading, on which the argument is valid. I conclude that Soames argument against Widescopism fails. (shrink)
Direct-to-consumer advertising is banned in Australia, and instead pharmaceutical companies use disease awareness campaigns as a strategy to raise public awareness of conditions for which the company produces a treatment. This practice has been justified by promoting individual autonomy and public health, but it has attracted criticism regarding medicalisation of normal health and ageing, and exaggeration of the severity of the condition in question, imbalanced reporting of risks and benefits, and damaging the patient–clinician relationship. While there are benefits of disease (...) awareness promotion, there is another possible adverse consequence that has not yet been rigorously considered: the possibility of inducing a nocebo response via the campaign. We will discuss the creation of a nocebo response in this context. (shrink)
A natural view is that linguistic understanding is a source of justification or evidence: that beliefs about the meaning of a text or speech act are prima facie justified when based on states of understanding. Neglect of this view is largely due to the widely held assumption that understanding a text or speech act consists in knowledge or belief. It is argued that this assumption rests, in part, on confusing occurrent states of understanding and dispositions to understand. It is then (...) argued that occurrent states of understanding are not states of belief of knowledge since a subject may fail to believe that a text or speech act means what she understands it to mean if she doubts the reliability or truthfulness of that understanding. States of understanding, it is maintained, belong in the same epistemic category as states of perception and memory. (shrink)
A recurring objection to the exploration, development and deployment of radical new technologies is based on their implications with regards to social justice. In this article, using synthetic biology as an example, I explore this line of objection and how we ought to think about justice in the context of the development and introduction of radically new technologies. I argue that contrary to popular opinion, justice rarely provides a reason not to investigate, develop and introduce radical new technologies, although it (...) may have significant implications for how they ought to be introduced. In particular I focus on the time dependency of justice objections and argue that often these function by looking only at the implications of the introduction of the technology at the point of introduction, rather than the more important long-term impact on patterns of distribution and opportunity. (shrink)
I argue that entertaining a proposition is not an action. Such events do not have intentional explanations and cannot be evaluated as rational or not. In these respects they contrast with assertions and compare well with perceptual events. One can control what one thinks by doing something, most familiarly by reciting a sentence. But even then the event of entertaining the proposition is not an action, though it is an event one has caused to happen, much as one might cause (...) oneself to see a book by looking at it. I also discuss how this may support the view that thinking about the world is a source of information about it. (shrink)
Some philosophical proposals seem to die hard. In a recent paper, Jason Stanley has worked to resurrect the description theory of reference, at least as it might apply to natural kind terms like ‘elm’ (Stanley, 1999). The theory’s founding idea is that to understand ‘elm’ one must know a uniquely identifying truth about elms. Famously, Hilary Putnam showed that ordinary users of ‘elm’ may understand it while lacking such knowledge, and may even be unable to distinguish elms from beeches (Putnam, (...) 1975). In response, Stanley claims that linguistic understanding in the case of natural kind terms comes in levels, and that only those at the top level need have the knowledge in question. The description theory, in Stanley’s hands, applies only to those with top level understanding and it is their understanding that fixes the term’s reference. To use the term successfully, those with inferior understanding need only be defer- ential to those at the top. However, Stanley’s appeal to expert knowledge fails to revive the description theory. (shrink)
Did Donald Davidson agree with G.E.M. Anscombe that action requires a distinctive form of agential awareness? The answer is No, at least according to the standard interpretation of Davidson’s account of action. A careful study of Davidson’s early writings, however, reveals a much more subtle conception of the role of agential belief in action. While the role of the general belief in Davidson’s theory is familiar and has been much discussed, virtually no attention has been paid to the singular belief. (...) This essay makes a start on remedying this neglect. I begin, in section 1, by examining Davidson’s claim that for a desire or belief to rationalize and cause an action it must have a suitable generality. It must, he says, be ‘logically independent’ of the action itself. While he was clear about this requirement in the case of the desire that forms part of a person’s primary reason, I show in section 2 that his early treatment of belief confuses general and singular beliefs. This confusion reflects his failure clearly to distinguish the two roles belief can play in his account of action: as rationalizing cause and as agential awareness. Somewhat surprisingly, though, after he carefully drew the distinction and announced that intentional action requires practical knowledge, he pretty much ignored it. This may explain why some have assumed that Davidson parted ways with Anscombe on this. But a careful study of their writings shows that in fact they held remarkably similar views on the nature and need for practical knowledge. (shrink)
New genetic technologies can not only be used to ‘cure’ many significant healthcare conditions, but at least potentially they can be used in ways that either change the user’s identity significantly and/or cause a different person to come into existence. It might be argued that these technologies present a challenge for Luck Egalitarians – the essence of this challenge being the claim that, given a commitment towards luck neutralisation, a Luck Egalitarian ought to be committed to equalisation of talent using (...) this technology, which appears repugnant. In the present contribution I will argue that this challenge is not as powerful as it appears, and that Luck Egalitarianism has sufficient resources to resist a commitment to equalisation of talent of a repugnant kind. Furthermore it provides us a useful framework to consider the introduction of technologies of this nature. (shrink)
This paper is about what is distinctive about first-person beliefs. I discuss several sets of puzzling cases of first-person belief. The first focus on the relation between belief and action, while the second focus on the relation of belief to subjectivity. I argue that in the absence of an explanation of the dispositional difference, individuating such beliefs more finely than truth conditions merely marks the difference. I argue that the puzzles reveal a difference in the ways that I am disposed (...) to revise my beliefs about myself. This point develops the insight that Anscombe and others had that those of an agent's beliefs about himself that manifest that special self-consciousness are not based on observation, testimony or inference. The puzzles show that this kind of self-consciousness involves, not a special kind of belief or even a special kind of self-reference, but a special kind of belief revision policy. (shrink)
Contemporary philosophy of mind has tended to make the believer disappear. In response, Matt Boyle and Pamela Hieronymi have argued that believing is an act or activity, not a mental state. I argue that this response fails to fully critique contemporary accounts of believing. Such accounts assume that states of believing are particulars; with semantic properties; that we attend to in reflection and act on in inference; and with a rich causal life of their own. Together, these assumptions leave no (...) room for the believer in an account of believing. But these assumptions are not entailed by the idea that believing is a mental state. Careful reflection on other kinds of states helps us see how to put the believer back in the heart of our account of believing. (shrink)
This article considers the question whether belief ascriptions exhibit context dependence. I first distinguish two potential forms of context dependence in belief ascription. Propositional context dependence concerns what the subject believes, whereas attitudinal context dependence concerns what it is to believe a proposition. I then discuss three potential sources of PCD and two potential sources of ACD. Given the nature of this article, my discussion will provide only an overview of these various forms and sources of context dependence. Along the (...) way I will identify areas where continued research is needed. (shrink)
In this paper, I try to make sense of the idea that true knowledge attributions characterize something that is more valuable than true belief and that survives even if, as Contextualism implies, contextual changes make it no longer identifiable by a knowledge attribution. I begin by sketching a familiar, pragmatic picture of assertion that helps us to understand and predict how the words “S knows that P” can be used to draw different epistemic distinctions in different contexts. I then argue (...) that the examples provided by Cohen and DeRose meant to illustrate Contextualism fail to do so, and I construct an example that does. I conclude by considering the response that an objective assessment of skepticism depends, not on what we might use sentences of the form “S knows that P” to say, but on what such sentences themselves say—on their literal, context-invariant meanings. I argue that there is little reason to believe that our words have such context-invariant meanings, and I suggest that the pragmatic picture of assertion can secure a rich enough conception of objectivity to address the skeptic. (shrink)
This paper is about the dispositional difference that demonstrative and indexical beliefs make. More specifically, it is about the dispositional difference between my believing that NN is P and my believing that I, myself, am P. Identifying a dispositional difference in this kind of case is especially challenging because those beliefs have the very same truth conditions. My question is this: how can a difference in belief that makes no difference to one’s conception of the world nonetheless make a difference (...) to one’s actions and reactions? I will argue that the dispositions associated with indexical beliefs are best of thought of as likebelief revision policies: they make no difference to the content of our conception of the world, but they govern how we canchange and revise that conception, and in so doing contribute to making rational action possible. Seeing all of this will help usto better understand how it is that first-person indexical beliefs manifest self-consciousness. (shrink)
What I wish to consider here is how understanding something is related to the justification of beliefs about what it means. Suppose, for instance, that S understands the name “Clinton” and has a justified belief that it names Clinton. How is S’s understanding related to that belief’s justification? Or suppose that S understands the sentence “Clinton is President”, or Jones’ assertive utterance of it, and has a justified belief that that sentence expresses the proposition that Clinton is President, or that (...) Jones said that Clinton is President. How is S’s understanding related to the justifications of these beliefs? (shrink)
The common ground in an inquiry consists of what the participants agree on, at least for the sake of the inquiry. The relations between the factual and linguistic components of common ground are notoriously difficult to trace. I clarify them by exploring how modal disagreements – disagreements about how things might be – interact with the linguistic and the factual common ground. I argue that modal agreement is essential to common ground of any kind.
