I outline a number of parallels between trust and distrust, emphasising the significance of situations in which both trust and distrust would be an imposition upon the (dis)trustee. I develop an account of both trust and distrust in terms of commitment, and argue that this enables us to understand the nature of trustworthiness. Note that this article is available open access on the journal website.

In this paper, I argue that there is a notion of 'counterfactual success' which stands to knowledge how as true belief stands to propositional knowledge. (I attempt to avoid the question of whether knowledge how is a type of propositional knowledge.).

You can trust your friends. You should trust your friends. Not all of your friends all of the time: you can reasonably trust different friends to different degrees, and in different domains. Still, we often trust our friends, and it is often reasonable to do so. Why is this? In this paper I explore how and whether friendship gives us reasons to trust our friends, reasons which may outstrip or conflict with our epistemic reasons. In the final section, I will (...) sketch some related questions concerning trust based on the trustee’s race, gender, or other social identity. (shrink)

What kind of entity is a committee, a book group or a band? I argue that committees and other such social groups are concrete, composite particulars, having ordinary human beings amongst their parts. So the committee members are literally parts of the committee. This mereological view of social groups was popular several decades ago, but fell out of favour following influential objections from David-Hillel Ruben. But recent years have seen a tidal wave of work in metaphysics, including the metaphysics of (...) parts and wholes. We now have the resources to rehabilitate the mereological view of social groups. I show how this can be done, and why we should bother. (shrink)

The ethics of autonomous vehicles has received a great amount of attention in recent years, specifically in regard to their decisional policies in accident situations in which human harm is a likely consequence. Starting from the assumption that human harm is unavoidable, many authors have developed differing accounts of what morality requires in these situations. In this article, a strategy for AV decision-making is proposed, the Ethical Valence Theory, which paints AV decision-making as a type of claim mitigation: different road (...) users hold different moral claims on the vehicle’s behavior, and the vehicle must mitigate these claims as it makes decisions about its environment. Using the context of autonomous vehicles, the harm produced by an action and the uncertainties connected to it are quantified and accounted for through deliberation, resulting in an ethical implementation coherent with reality. The goal of this approach is not to define how moral theory requires vehicles to behave, but rather to provide a computational approach that is flexible enough to accommodate a number of ‘moral positions’ concerning what morality demands and what road users may expect, offering an evaluation tool for the social acceptability of an autonomous vehicle’s ethical decision making. (shrink)

We articulate a view of natural kinds as complex universals. We do not attempt to argue for the existence of universals. Instead, we argue that, given the existence of universals, and of natural kinds, the latter can be understood in terms of the former, and that this provides a rich, flexible framework within which to discuss issues of indeterminacy, essentialism, induction, and reduction. Along the way, we develop a 'problem of the many' for universals.

In this chapter, I examine Lewis's ideas about ontological innocence, ontological commitment and double-counting, in his discussion of composition as identity in Parts of Classes. I attempt to understand these primarily as epistemic or methodological claims: how far can we get down this route without adopting radical metaphysical theses about composition as identity?

Analytic metaphysics is in resurgence; there is renewed and vigorous interest in topics such as time, causation, persistence, parthood and possible worlds. We who share this interest often pay lip-service to the idea that metaphysics should be informed by modern science; some take this duty very seriously.2 But there is also a widespread suspicion that science cannot really contribute to metaphysics, and that scientific findings grossly underdetermine metaphysical claims. For some, this prompts the thought ‘so much the worse for metaphysics’; (...) others mutter ‘so much the worse for science’. (shrink)

Much of what we learn from talking and listening does not qualify as testimonial knowledge: we can learn a great deal from other people without simply accepting what they say as being true. In this article, I examine the ways in which we acquire skills or knowledge how from our interactions with other people, and I discuss whether there is a useful notion of testimonial knowledge how.Keywords: Knowledge how; Practical knowledge; Tacit knowledge; Testimony; Skills; Assertion.

Vague existence can seem like the worst kind of vagueness in the world, or seem to be an entirely unintelligible notion. This bad reputation is based upon the rumour that if there is vague existence then there are non-existent objects. But the rumour is false: the modest brand of vague existence entailed by certain metaphysical theories of composition does not deserve its bad reputation.

People are described as suffering from impostor syndrome when they feel that their external markers of success are unwarranted, and fear being revealed as a fraud. Impostor syndrome is commonly framed as a troubling individual pathology, to be overcome through self-help strategies or therapy. But in many situations an individual’s impostor attitudes can be epistemically justified, even if they are factually mistaken: hostile social environments can create epistemic obstacles to self-knowledge. The concept of impostor syndrome prevalent in popular culture needs (...) greater critical scrutiny, as does its source, the concept of impostor phenomenon which features in psychological research. (shrink)

Material objects extend through space by having different spatial parts in different places. But how do they persist through time? According to some philosophers, things have temporal parts as well as spatial parts: accepting this is supposed to help us solve a whole bunch of metaphysical problems, and keep our philosophy in line with modern physics. Other philosophers disagree, arguing that neither metaphysics nor physics give us good reason to believe in temporal parts.

If the property _being a methane molecule_ is a universal, then it is a structural universal: objects instantiate _being a methane molecule_ just in case they have the right sorts of proper parts arranged in the right sort of way. Lewis argued that there can be no satisfactory account of structural universals; in this paper I provide a satisfactory account.

I argue that, despite van Inwagen’s pessimism about the task, it is worth looking for answers to his General Composition Question. Such answers or ‘principles of composition’ tell us about the relationship between an object and its parts. I compare principles of composition with criteria of identity, arguing that, just as different sorts of thing satisfy different criteria of identity, they may satisfy different principles of composition. Variety in criteria of identity is not taken to reflect ontological variety in the (...) identity relation; I discuss whether variety in principles of composition should be taken to reflect ontological variety in the composition relation. (shrink)

If we are sympathetic to the project of naturalising metaphysics, how should we approach the metaphysics of the social world? What role can the social sciences play in metaphysical investigation? In the light of these questions, this paper examines three possible approaches to social metaphysics: inference to the best explanation from current social science, conceptual analysis, and Haslanger-inspired ameliorative projects.

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 38-40.

In this chapter I explore how epistemic injustice (as discussed by Miranda Fricker) can arise in connection with knowledge how. I attempt to bypass the question of whether knowledge how is a type of propositional knowledge, and instead focus on some distinctive ways in which knowledge how is sometimes sought, identified or ignored.

This is a critical notice of Ladyman and Ross et al's Every Thing Must Go. I argue that they mischaracterise much of so-called 'analytic metaphysics', and that they could have usefully drawn upon the resources of current metaphysics in order to articulate their own views more clearly. The piece appears in a symposium which also includes contributions by Kyle Stanford and Paul Humphreys, with responses from Ladyman and Ross.

This is a very introductory introduction to some ways in which the special and general theories of relativity may bear upon metaphysical questions about the nature of time and space, and the persistence of objects.

Conspiracy theorists believe that powerful agents are conspiring to achieve their nefarious aims and also to orchestrate a cover-up. People who suffer from impostor syndrome believe that they are not talented enough for the professional positions they find themselves in, and that they risk being revealed as inadequate. These are quite different outlooks on reality, and there is no reason to think that they are mutually reinforcing. Nevertheless, there are intriguing parallels between the patterns of trust and distrust which underpin (...) both conspiracy theorising and impostor thinking. In both cases subjects distrust standard sources of information, instead regarding themselves as especially insightful into the underlying facts of the matter. In both cases, seemingly-anomalous data takes on special significance. And in both cases, the content of belief dictates the epistemic behaviour of the believer. This paper explores these parallels, to suggest new avenues of research into both conspiracy theorising and impostor syndrome, including questions about whether impostor syndrome inevitably involves a personal failure of rationality, and issues about how, if at all, it is possible to convince others to abandon either conspiracy theories or impostor attitudes. (shrink)

I claim that, if persisting objects have temporal parts, then there are non-supervenient relations between those temporal parts. These are relations which are not determined by intrinsic properties of the temporal parts. I use the Kripke-Armstrong 'rotating homogeneous disc' argument in order to establish this claim, and in doing so I defend and develop that argument. This involves a discussion of instantaneous velocity, and of the causes and effects of rotation. Finally, I compare alternative responses to the rotating disc argument, (...) and consider the implications of my arguments for the doctrines of Humean Supervenience and unrestricted mereology. (shrink)

This is a short response to a paper by Trenton Merricks in which he argues against the following doctrine: Microphysical Supervenience (MS) Necessarily, if atoms A1 through An compose an object that exemplifies intrinsic qualitative properties Q1 through Qn, then atoms like A1 through An (in all their respective intrinsic qualitative properties), related to one another by all the same restricted atom-to-atom relations as A1 through An, compose an object that exemplifies Q1 through Qn.

ABSTRACTThe Ant Trap is a terrific book, which opens up new opportunities to use philosophical methods in the social realm, by drawing on the tools and techniques of contemporary metaphysics. Epstein uses concepts of dependence, constitution, and grounding, of parts and whole, of membership and kindhood, both to clarify existing accounts of social reality and to develop an account of his own. Whilst I admire the general strategy, I take issue with some aspects of Epstein’s implementation, notably his distinction between (...) grounding and anchoring. I recommend that he give up this distinction, which is not crucial to his project. (shrink)

In his Material Beings, Peter van Inwagen distinguishes two questions about parthood. What are the conditions necessary and sufficient for some things jointly to compose a whole? What are the conditions necessary and sufficient for a thing to have proper parts? The first of these, the Special Composition Question (SCQ), has been widely discussed, and David Lewis has argued that an important constraint on any answer to the SCQ is that it should not permit borderline cases of composition. This is (...) a far-reaching claim, since many plausible-seeming accounts of composition do permit borderline cases. Ned Markosian has recently directed our attention to the second, the neglected Inverse Special Composition Question (ISCQ). I will argue that those who accept Lewis’s constraint on answers to the SCQ should accept an analogous constraint on answers to the ISCQ, and I will discuss the effects of such a constraint. (shrink)

If overstatements were a symptom of the agency conflict, pay-for-performance sensitivities should have increased in response to the additional penalties for misreporting imposed by SOX. Our finding of their decrease is inconsistent with the view that overstatements were an unintended consequence of incentive pay prior to 2002. To corroborate our interpretation, we show that CEO pay-for-performance sensitivities are higher among firms whose shareholders stand to benefit from overstatements; this cross-sectional relationship weakens significantly after SOX; and the within-firm decrease in pay-for-performance (...) sensitivity is most pronounced among firms with high pre-SOX shareholder benefits from overstatements. (shrink)

There is very little literature on the actual decision-making frameworks used by general practitioners with respect to ethical issues and virtually none on the impact of personal experiences of illness on this. This study aimed to investigate what these frameworks might be and if and how they were altered by doctors’ own illness experience. Twenty general practitioners were recruited, 10 having had a previous serious medical illness and 10 having no such history. They participated in a semi-structured interview, including case (...) vignettes, recorded and analysed using qualitative thematic analysis. Being a patient themselves altered general practitioners’ decision-making by enhancing physician empathy, increasing ease at discussing difficult topics, having a greater willingness to support patient choice and a wider ability to provide a greater diversity of therapeutic strategies, with the role of empathy being the most noticeable difference between the groups. Doctors who had not had a severe personal illnes... (shrink)

The ethics of treating the seriously and critically ill have not been static throughout the ages. Twentieth century medicine has inherited from the nineteenth century a science which places an inappropriate weight on diagnosis over prognosis and management, combined with a seventeenth century duty to prolong life. However other earlier ethical traditions, both Hippocratic and Christian, respected both the limitations of medicine and emphasised the importance of prognosis. This paper outlines some of the historical precedents for the treatment of the (...) critically ill, and also how the current paradigm limits clinical practice and causes ethical tensions. An understanding that other paradigms have been ethically acceptable in the past allows wider consideration and acceptance of alternatives for the future. However future alternatives will also have to address the role of technology, given its importance in this area of medicine. (shrink)

This study examines the processes ofdecision-making used by intensive care(critical care) specialists. Ninety-ninespecialists completed a questionnaire involvingthree clinical cases, using a novel methodologyinvestigating the role of uncertainty andtemporal-related factors, and exploring a rangeof ethical issues. Validation and triangulationof the results was done via a comparison studywith a medically lay, but highly informed groupof 37 law students. For both study groups,constructing reasons for a decision was largelyan interpretative and imaginative exercise thatwent beyond the data (as presented), commonlyresulting in different reasons supporting (...) thesame conclusions and similar reasons supportingopposite conclusions. The skills of ethicalimagination and interpretation were related toan individual''s prior lived experience,construed in the broadest sense. Application ofthese skills of ethical imagination andinterpretation always occurred, to some degree,in a state of uncertainty and almost alwaysinvolved temporal relationships.Using these results, a theory of ethicaldecision-making is proffered. Three levels ortypes of reasoning processes may be present.Type I decision-making involves the applicationof rules, usually in a deductive fashion. TypeII decision-making is characterised by aprocess where a plurality of reasons arebalanced, weighed and sifted with each other.Type III decision-making is intimately linkedwith respondents lived experiences and `crafts''the content of type I and II reasoningprocesses, via the application of ethicalimagination and interpretation. Relationshipsbetween these three types of reasoningprocesses, and with narrative ethics, are alsodiscussed. (shrink)

This article explores the psychological literature on rationalization and connects it with contemporary questions about the role of in-house lawyers in ethical dilemmas. Using the case study of AWB Ltd, the exclusive marketer of Australian wheat exports overseas, it suggests that rationalizations were influential in the perpetuation by in-house lawyers of AWB's payment of kickbacks to the Iraqi regime. The article explores how lawyers' professional rationalizations can work together with commercial imperatives to prevent in-house lawyers from seeing ethical issues as (...) those outside the organisation would see them. In particular, where lawyers over-identify with their client's commercial point of view and convince themselves that their role is primarily about providing 'technical' advice on commercial matters, wilful or unintended 'ethical blindness' can result. Lawyers can end up involved in or perpetuating serious misconduct by their client organizations. (shrink)

This article contributes to existing feminist technoscience analyses by proposing a new tool for examining how norms governing viable and unviable bodies are discursively constructed in an increasingly technologized world. This tool is the result of synthesizing two existing concepts: white noise from the field of media theory/information studies, and the abject from psychosemiotics/gender studies. Synthesizing these two concepts produces an enriched term for detecting interrelations between discursive disturbances and disturbances in bodily norms. In this article, the synthesized concept is (...) used as a tool to analyse material concerning the assignment of International Nonproprietary Names to biotechnological drugs. Biotech offers itself as a prime testing ground for this new tool, replete as it is with bodily anxieties, powerful discourses and innovative technologies. This article compares three versions of an INN guidance document showing how anxieties about bodily norms are reflected in, and managed through, these documents. (shrink)

Roughly speaking, perdurantism is the view that ordinary objects persist through time by having temporal parts, whilst endurantism is the view that they persist by being wholly present at different times. (Speaking less roughly will be important later.) It is often thought that perdurantists have an advantage over endurantists when dealing with objects which appear to coincide temporarily: lumps, statues, cats, tail-complements, bisected brains, repaired ships, and the like. Some cases – personal fission, for example – seem to involve temporary (...) coincidence between objects of the same kind. Other cases – a cat and its flesh, a statue and its lump – seem to involve objects of different kinds. (shrink)