I consider recent strategies proposed by econometricians for extrapolating causal effects from experimental to target populations. I argue that these strategies fall prey to the extrapolator’s circle: they require so much knowledge about the target population that the causal effects to be extrapolated can be identified from information about the target alone. I then consider comparative process tracing as a potential remedy. Although specifically designed to evade the extrapolator’s circle, I argue that CPT is unlikely to facilitate extrapolation in typical (...) econometrics and evidence-based policy applications. To argue this, I offer a distinction between two kinds of extrapolation, attributive and predictive, the latter being prevalent in econometrics and evidence-based policy. I argue that CPT is not helpful for predictive extrapolation when using the kinds of evidence that econometricians and evidence-based policy researchers prefer. I suggest that econometricians may need to consider qualitative evidence to overcome this problem. (shrink)

The language theory of Mikhail Bakhtin does not fall neatly under any single rubric - 'dialogism,' 'marxism,' 'prosaics,' 'authorship' - because the philosophic foundation of his writing rests ambivalently between phenomenology and Marxism. The theoretical tension of these positions creates philosophical impasses in Bakhtin's work, which have been neglected or ignored partly because these impasses are themselves mirrored by the problems of antifoundationalist and materialist tendencies in literary scholarship. In Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism Michael Bernard-Donals examines various incarnations (...) of phenomenological and materialist theory - including the work of Jauss, Fish, Rorty, Althusser, and Pecheux - and places them beside Bakhtin's work, providing a contextualised study of Bakhtin, a critique of the problems of contemporary critics, and an original contribution to literary theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that an important type of experiment-target inference, extrapolating causal effects, requires models to be successful. Focusing on extrapolation in Evidence-Based Policy, it is ar...

In Simulation and Similarity, Michael Weisberg offers a similarity-based account of the model–world relation, which is the relation in virtue of which successful models are successful. Weisberg’s main idea is that models are similar to targets in virtue of sharing features. An important concern about Weisberg’s account is that it remains silent on what it means for models and targets to share features, and consequently on how feature-sharing contributes to models’ epistemic success. I consider three potential ways of concretizing the (...) concept of shared features: as identical, quantitatively sufficiently close, and sufficiently similar features. I argue that each of these concretizations faces significant challenges, leaving unclear how Weisberg’s account substantially contributes to elucidating the relation in virtue of which successful models are successful. Against this background, I outline a pluralistic revision and argue that this revision may not only help Weisberg's account evade several of the problems that I raise, but also offers a novel perspective on the model–world relation more generally. 1Introduction 2Weisberg’s Feature-Sharing Account 3What Is a Shared Feature? 3.1Identity 3.2Sufficient closeness 3.3Sufficient similarity 4Turning Weisberg’s Account ‘Upside Down’ 5Conclusion. (shrink)

Acceding to the demand that public policy should be based on “the best available evidence” can come at significant moral cost. Important policy questions cannot be addressed using “the best available evidence” as defined by the evidence-based policy paradigm; the paradigm can change the meaning of questions so that they can be addressed using the preferred kind of evidence; and important evidence that does not meet the standard defined by the paradigm can get ignored. We illustrate these problems in three (...) contexts of evidence-based policy. (shrink)

Public policymakers and institutional decision-makers routinely face questions about whether interventions “work”: does universal basic income improve people’s welfare and stimulate entrepreneurial activity? Do gated alleyways reduce burglaries or merely shift the crime burden to neighbouring communities? What is the most cost-effective way to improve students’ reading abilities? These are empirical questions that seem best answered by looking at the world, rather than trusting speculations about what will be effective. Evidence-based policy (EBP) is a movement that concretizes this intuition. It (...) maintains that policy should be based on evidence of “what works.” Not any evidence will do, however. Following on the heels of its intellectual progenitor, evidence-based medicine (EBM), EBP insists on the use of high-quality evidence produced in accordance with rigorous methodological standards. Though intuitively compelling, EBP has attracted significant criticism from methodologists, political scientists, and philosophers. This chapter provides a critical overview of EBP through a philosophical lens, reviewing and discussing some of the most pressing challenges that EBP faces and outlining some proposals for improving it. I first provide a brief overview of EBP and distinguish a broader and narrower understanding of it. I then review existing lines of criticism of EBP, two of which are considered in detail. The first elaborates how EBP struggles with extrapolation, that is, the use of evidence from study populations to make inferences about the effects of policies on novel target populations. The second maintains that EBP’s methodological tenets are deeply entwined with moral and political values, which can threaten EBP’s promise to promote objectivity in policymaking. Finally, I make some proposals for how EBP could be improved going forward. (shrink)

Proponents of evidence-based policy (EBP) call for public policy to be informed by high-quality evidence from randomized controlled trials. This methodological preference aims to promote several epistemic values, e.g. rigor, unbiasedness, precision, and the ability to obtain causal conclusions. I argue that there is a trade-off between these epistemic values and several non-epistemic, moral and political values. This is because the evidence afforded by preferred EBP methods is differentially useful for pursuing different moral and political values. I expand on how (...) this challenges ideals of value-freedom and -neutrality in EBP, and offer suggestions for how EBP methodology might be revised. (shrink)

Scientific models can be performative: they can causally affect the phenomena they are intended to represent. The existing literature offers two responses. The appraisal view emphasizes that performativity can sometimes be a good-making model attribute, e.g., when predictions steer the public’s behavior in desirable ways. The mitigation view seeks to endogenize agents’ behavioral response to model-issued forecasts to get rid of performativity instead. This paper argues that neither approach is fully compelling: the appraisal view encounters severe concerns about moral values (...) illegitimately encroaching on how modelers construct and use models, while the mitigation view fails to acknowledge that endogenization is itself a choice that involves substantive value-judgments relating to the desirability of certain social outcomes. (shrink)

Extrapolating causal effects is becoming an increasingly important kind of inference in Evidence-Based Policy, development economics, and microeconometrics more generally. While several strategies have been proposed to aid with extrapolation, the existing methodological literature has left our understanding of what extrapolation consists of and what constitutes successful extrapolation underdeveloped. This paper addresses this lack in understanding by offering a novel account of successful extrapolation. Building on existing contributions pertaining to the challenges involved in extrapolation, this more nuanced and comprehensive account (...) seeks to provide tools that facilitate the scrutiny of specific extrapolative inferences and general strategies for extrapolation. Offering such resources is important especially in view of the increasing amounts of real-world decision-making in policy, development, and beyond that involve extrapolation. (shrink)

Ethics for OCR Religious Studies: The Complete Resource for AS and A2 is the perfect guide for students taking AS and A2 courses in the OCR GCE Religious Studies specification. Ethics for OCR provides a rigorous and accessible introduction to both historical and contemporary ethical debates. Drawing on insights from recent examiners’ reports and mark schemes, and following the OCR course outline closely, Mark Coffey and Dennis Brown’s landmark book includes: - Up-to-date discussions of key debates in religious ethics (...) - Ethical theories set in their historical context - Attention given to contemporary developments in law, science, technology, and society - A thorough guide to writing the perfect exam answer - A detailed exposition of OCR’s assessment criteria and how best to meet them - Profiles of leading ethical, philosophical and religious thinkers, a chapter by chapter glossary, and helpful chapter summaries - Discussion points, activity boxes and past paper questions The most comprehensive book on the market, Ethics for OCR Religious Studies provides a rigorous and accessible introduction to both historical and contemporary ethical debates, including chapters on sexual and environmental and business ethics. Written with verve and clarity, the book’s user-friendly style and attention to detail will help students of all abilities to achieve their best. (shrink)

The recent wave of generative AI (GAI) systems like Stable Diffusion that can produce images from human prompts raises controversial issues about creatorship, originality, creativity and copyright. This paper focuses on creatorship: who creates and should be credited with the outputs made with the help of GAI? Existing views on creatorship are mixed: some insist that GAI systems are mere tools, and human prompters are creators proper; others are more open to acknowledging more significant roles for GAI, but most conceive (...) of creatorship in an all-or-nothing fashion. We develop a novel view, called CCC (collective-centered creation), that improves on these existing positions. On CCC, GAI outputs are created by collectives in the first instance. Claims to creatorship come in degrees and depend on the nature and significance of individual contributions made by the various agents and entities involved, including users, GAI systems, developers, producers of training data and others. Importantly, CCC maintains that GAI systems can sometimes be part of a co-creating collective. We detail how CCC can advance existing debates and resolve controversies around creatorship involving GAI. (shrink)

This paper investigates how intuitions about scientific discovery using artificial intelligence can be used to improve our understanding of scientific discovery more generally. Traditional accounts of discovery have been agent-centred: they place emphasis on identifying a specific agent who is responsible for conducting all, or at least the important part, of a discovery process. We argue that these accounts experience difficulties capturing scientific discovery involving AI and that similar issues arise for human discovery. We propose an alternative, collective-centred view as (...) superior for understanding discovery, with and without AI. This view maintains that discovery is performed by a collective of agents and entities, each making contributions that differ in significance and character, and that attributing credit for discovery depends on various finer-grained properties of the contributions made. Detailing its conceptual resources, we argue that this view is considerably more compelling than its agent-centred alternative. Considering and responding to several theoretical and practical challenges, we point to concrete avenues for further developing the view we propose. (shrink)

A collection of essays examining the extent to which rhetoric's relation to the sacred is one of ineffability and how our response to the sacred integrates the divine (or the altogether other) into the human order.

Travel provides countless opportunities for wonder. The breadth of human experience enabled by traversing new territory includes curiosity, excitement, and surprise. However, achieving this breadth may well be better left unfulfilled. Gulliver’s interactions with the King of Brobdingnag in Book II of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) raise interesting questions regarding travel and its effects on the traveller. This essay argues that Gulliver’s Travels draws upon Locke’s insights into travel as an endeavour with the potential to be didactic, ultimately presenting a case (...) against the universal benefit of embarking on a voyage. Swift’s text offers little hope for the existence of the type of traveller who would be improved rather than corrupted by the experience, which suggests that wonders of travel ought to be avoided. This generates a counter-Enlightenment riposte to liberal assumptions concerning the possibility and likelihood of individual edification through pursuing the wonders of travel. (shrink)

Travel provides countless opportunities for wonder. The breadth of human experience enabled by traversing new territory includes curiosity, excitement, and surprise. However, achieving this breadth may well be better left unfulfilled. Gulliver’s interactions with the King of Brobdingnag in Book II of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) raise interesting questions regarding travel and its effects on the traveller. This essay argues that Gulliver’s Travels draws upon Locke’s insights into travel as an endeavour with the potential to be didactic, ultimately presenting a case (...) against the universal benefit of embarking on a voyage. Swift’s text offers little hope for the existence of the type of traveller who would be improved rather than corrupted by the experience, which suggests that wonders of travel ought to be avoided. This generates a counter-Enlightenment riposte to liberal assumptions concerning the possibility and likelihood of individual edification through pursuing the wonders of travel. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Academic freedom is typically understood as a means of protecting faculty rights against the violence—physical or intellectual—of the state or of the institution’s administration. This article argues that academic freedom may be seen as a form of violence, insofar as it is potentially threatening to the methodological and institutional stasis of colleges and universities.

ABSTRACT Pandemics and plagues function rhetorically, by doing violence to the structures of discourse, sociality, hospitality, and mutual engagement that characterize ethical human interaction. They infect us, as rhetorical subjects, and reorient our capacity for engagement. The coronavirus's “novelty” renders it uncertain as to how long it will last or who will be infected next; the near-uniform response to it has been a forced distance of ourselves from others and a displacement from our itineraries and our locations. Through COVID-19 we (...) are learning that pandemic does violence to our sense of place, to how we think of respite, and has highlighted our sense of vulnerability in the midst of others. (shrink)

For the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, it is the presence of the other that obliges the human to speak. What makes the subject a subject is not only the other’s presence but the compulsion to speak, and that compulsion marks the subject as displaced, called into question. The other—the neighbor, the stranger—makes us responsible and marks the subject as always necessarily in relation, a relation that troubles the subject because while we are compelled to respond, that response inevitably fails to contain, (...) to name, that relation. In Levinas’s formulation, the altogether other—the divine—presents us with the paradigmatic case in which the subject is compelled or called by that which exceeds our capacity to understand .. (shrink)

The central argument of this book is that the interrelated ideas of the educated person and a liberal education are in need of serious rethinking. The book contributes to this rethinking through an analysis of influential historical and contemporary treatments of liberal education, as well as scholarship in feminist theory and critical pedagogy. The book concludes by presenting a new ideal of the educated person and a reconceptualization of liberal education.

Einstein claimed that the fundamental dynamical insight of special relativity was the equivalence of mass and energy. I disagree. Not only are mass and energy not equivalent but talk of such equivalence obscures the real dynamical insight of special relativity, which concerns the nature of 4-forces and interactions more generally. In this paper I present and defend a new ontology of special relativistic particle dynamics that makes this insight perspicuous and I explain how alleged cases of mass–energy conversion can be (...) accommodated within that ontology. (shrink)

Levinas proposed a "politics of suffering" that requires all political actors to be willing to engage in the quotidian world not according to the "natural law" but according to those "rules" that make themselves evident in that engagement itself. Israel, the one place such a politics might be lived, appeared to be a space occupied by a citizenry - after 1948, a large number of whom survived the Holocaust- who understood vulnerability in its most radical form. This essay examines the (...) extent to which Levinas's "political thought" works and how such a politics has fared in the contemporary Middle East. (shrink)

Is there a distinctly Jewish rhetoric? It's a worthwhile (and difficult) question to answer: with its several thousand-year-old tradition of disquisition, argument, knowledge making, and philosophy, a Jewish rhetoric, whatever it might look like, would have a longer tradition than the Greco-Roman one that has served as the underpinning of most of what we think of as Western philosophy. The Jewish and Hellenic worlds shared trade routes, cultural space, and texts beginning in the first millennium BCE, and in the thousand (...) years between the rise of Athens as a hub of literacy and philosophy and the partition of the Roman Empire, Jewish culture underwent a drastic shift as Jews went from the Babylonian exile, to the .. (shrink)

What is it exactly that we are attributing to a thing when we judge it to be good? According to the orthodox answer, at least in some cases when we judge that something is good we are attributing to it a monadic property. That is, good things are “just plain good.” I reject the orthodox view. In arguing against it, I begin with the idea that a plausible account of goodness must take seriously the intuitive claim that there is something (...) in common between moral and non-moral goodness—something in virtue of which it makes sense to call ‘good’ both the things that are morally good and the things that are non-morally good. However, it is implausible that all judgments about the goodness of things attribute a monadic property to those things, as this does not capture what we mean when we judge something to be non-morally good. Instead, I propose and defend my own relational theory of goodness according to which goodness is a relation that holds between things and ends (or goals). That is, goodness is a relational property such that to be good is to be related in the relevant way to some goal or another. This is true in both the mundane everyday cases and in loftier cases concerned with moral goodness. (shrink)

The abbot and apocalyptic theorist Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) created many enigmatic medieval diagrams. His Liber figurarum, produced in Cosenza and based on now-lost prototypes, consists of painted figurae that concretized the central tenets of his many apocalyptic treatises, sermons, hymns, and letters. These diagrammatic images are attributed to his hand or to the first generation of followers, and, collectively, they constitute a subcategory of apocalyptic art that elides narrative norms. This essay explores a single figura that features a (...) chromatic seven-headed dragon inspired by the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation. Analysis of the diagram and comparison to painted content in a contemporary polemical text reveals the figura’s pivotal role in the pictorial formation of anti-Islamic content in the twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries. (shrink)

Using agency theory, this study empirically examined the relationship between board composition and corporate philanthropy. Generally, the ratio of insiders to outsiders, the percentage of insider stock ownership, and the proportion of female and minority board members were found to be positively and significantly associated with firms'' charitable contributions.

There is growing consensus that teaching computer ethics is important, but there is little consensus on how to do so. One unmet challenge is increasing the capacity of computing students to make decisions about the ethical challenges embedded in their technical work. This paper reports on the design, testing, and evaluation of an educational simulation to meet this challenge. The privacy by design simulation enables more relevant and effective computer ethics education by letting students experience and make decisions about common (...) ethical challenges encountered in real-world work environments. This paper describes the process of incorporating empirical observations of ethical questions in computing into an online simulation and an in-person board game. We employed theValues at Playframework to transform empirical observations of design into a playable educational experience. First, we conducted qualitative research to discover when and how values levers—practices that encourage values discussions during technology development—occur during the design of new mobile applications. We then translated these findings into gameplay elements, including the goals, roles, and elements of surprise incorporated into a simulation. We ran the online simulation in five undergraduate computer and information science classes. Based on this experience, we created a more accessible board game, which we tested in two undergraduate classes and two professional workshops. We evaluated the effectiveness of both the online simulation and the board game using two methods: a pre/post-test of moral sensitivity based on the Defining Issues Test, and a questionnaire evaluating student experience. We found that converting real-world ethical challenges into a playable simulation increased student’s reported interest in ethical issues in technology, and that students identified the role-playing activity as relevant to their technical coursework. This demonstrates that roleplaying can emphasize ethical decision-making as a relevant component of technical work. (shrink)

Extrapolating causal effects from experiments to novel populations is a common practice in evidence-based-policy, development economics and other social science areas. Drawing on experimental evidence of policy effectiveness, analysts aim to predict the effects of policies in new populations, which might differ importantly from experimental populations. Existing approaches made progress in articulating the sorts of similarities one needs to assume to enable such inferences. It is also recognized, however, that many of these assumptions will remain surrounded by significant uncertainty in (...) practice. Unfortunately, the existing literature says little on how analysts may articulate and manage these uncertainties. This paper aims to make progress on these issues. First, it considers several existing ideas that bear on issues of uncertainty, elaborates the challenges they face, and extracts some useful rationales. Second, it outlines a novel approach, called the support graph approach, that builds on these rationales and allows analysts to articulate and manage uncertainty in extrapolation in a systematic and unified way. (shrink)

'Religion and Ethics for OCR' is an indeal guide for students taking either the new AS level or A level qualifications offered by OCR. Drawing on insights gained over years of teaching and following the OCR course outlines closely, Mark Coffey and Dennis Brown's landmark book includes: up-to-date discussions of key debates in religion and ethics; ethical theories set in their historical context; discussion of contemporary developments in science, technology and society; helpful guidance on writing the perfect exam answer; (...) and, detailed guidance on OCR's assessment criteria and how best to meet them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The tension between freedom of speech and academic freedom results from the contradiction between democracy and expertise, resulting in a rhetorical “gray zone” that stymies faculty appeals to due process and constitutional protection. It’s not so much that certain “uncivil” words and utterances cannot be said in this gray zone; it’s that such words, when said, require one’s ejection from the demos. In an examination of the case of Steven Salaita, I’ll show how the tyranny of the demos, in (...) the guise of “civility,” “community standards,” or “institutional values,” trumps academic freedom, and how the commonplace of democracy—understood as public opinion—can and does compel faculty silence. (shrink)

This book presents an analysis of masculinity construction in a large corpus of women’s magazines, adopting a feminist Critical Stylistic approach to reveal how men are talked about and ‘sold’ to women as part of a successful performance of hegemonic femininity. This novel approach identifies women’s magazines as sites of ‘lad culture’ that perpetuate ideologies more commonly associated with the ‘laddism’ of male-targeted media. It examines how stereotypical images of men as naturally aggressive and obsessed with sex are promoted, as (...) well as considering some of the ways in which women’s magazines contribute to the social construction of normative understandings of gender and sexuality more broadly. This engaging work will offer fresh insights to students and scholars of Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Stylistics, and Gender and Communication Studies. (shrink)

In the summer of 2015 the governor of Wisconsin signed an omnibus budget bill that, among other things, removed tenure from state statute—forcing the Board of Regents to rewrite it into board policy documents—and attempted to undermine aspects of shared governance that had been part of life at the university since the founding of the system in the early 1970s. Two years later, the Wisconsin Assembly passed a bill that directed the university to "strive to remain neutral on the public (...) policy controversies of the day". These actions and others like them in Wisconsin are part of a wider trend for states, particularly in those dominated by conservative legislatures and governors, to... (shrink)

How should Christians interact with historical violence in their own tradition? Faced with a barrage of arguments from the ‘New Atheists’ that this killing invalidates biblical truth claims, Christians might be tempted to ignore or excuse these darker episodes. This article argues that they should be willing to confess the failings of the past, place the violent acts in a careful reading of their historical context and re-examine these acts in light of scripture.

The prescription of practice guidelines for consent in neonatal care that are appropriate for all interventions faces substantial problems. Current practice varies widely. Consent in neonatal care is compromised by postnatal constraints on information sharing and decision-making. Empirical research shows marked individual and cultural variation in the degree to which parents want to contribute to decision-making on behalf of their infants. Conflict between the parents’ wishes and the infant’s best interests could arise if consent for a recommended intervention were refused, (...) and parental refusal of consent may have to be overridden. Consent to an appropriate package of care (such as special, intensive or palliative care) may be morally preferable to a universal requirement to seek consent for all individual interventions entailed by that package. (shrink)