The publication in 1959 of Russell and Burch's ThePrinciplesofHumaneExperimentalTechnique initiated a new era in the history of the debate between science and animal protection, the era of alternatives. Although Russell and Burch never used the word, and although the animal protection movement was somewhat moribund at the time in both England and the United States, within a decade of the book's publication a number of signs indicating a resurgence of public interest in the issue began to appear. At the same (...) time, increased knowledge and understanding of neurophysiology and ethology heightened scientific awareness of the significance of humane treatment in the laboratory and professionalized laboratory animal science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reaching the Age of Majority:The Life Trajectory of the CIHR Institute of AgingYves Joanette, Anne Martin-Matthews, Réjean Hebert, and Joanne GoldbergThe Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) was created in 2001 under the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Act S.C. 2000, c. 6 (Government of Canada, 2000). The creation of CIHR was in follow-up to the Canadian Medical Research Council (MRC) as well as to the National Health (...) Research and Development Program of Health Canada that, up until that point in time, had supported the breadth of health research in Canada. Two important characteristics of CIHR were crucial for the development of research on aging. The first was that CIHR, unlike MRC, was entrusted with the challenge of supporting the whole spectrum of health research, from the basic biomedical perspective to clinical research, research on health services and policies as well as social aspects of health research, not to mention research on ethics and other perspectives (including the science of research). The second characteristic of the nascent CIHR that impacted the community of research on aging was the decision that a small part of the overall CIHR budget would be used to address priority-driven questions or topics (strategic competitions), while the majority of the budget would be invested in grants and awards programs that would be investigator-initiated, as in the time of the MRC (open competition). Since its inception, CIHR has included 13 institutes that are central to the priority-driven actions. Institutes not only play an important convener role within their communities and among their stakeholders, but they are also expected to listen to the needs, gaps and opportunities in their area and to introduce initiatives---most of the time involving more than one Institute---in order to tackle these needs and gaps and to seize upon the opportunities.The Institute of Aging was introduced at the same time as the other 12 Institutes and it is clear that many challenges were awaiting the new Institute since, at that time, research on aging was still in its early years. This article is about the trajectory of the CIHR Institute of Aging in its first 18 years of existence. Having now reached an age that is either the age of majority or quite close to it, it is important to be able to provide a reflection on the evolution of the priorities over this period, while also taking a peek at some of the priorities that will surely come in the near future.The Early Years (2001-2004)The founding Scientific Director of the Institute of Aging was Dr. Réjean Hébert. A well-known and prolific [End Page 1] geriatrician and researcher, Dr. Hébert was the perfect person to launch the Institute. One of his first actions was, in fact, to harmonize the French and English names of the Institute. In French, the name of the Institute focused on Aging (Institut du vieillissement) while, in English, the name of the Institute focused on Healthy Aging. The CIHR Institute of Healthy Aging thus became the CIHR Institute of Aging in all versions of its documentation. But above and beyond this important name change, the real work of Dr. Hebert, accompanied by the first Institute Advisory Board1, chaired by Prof. Dorothy Pringle, was to identify the gaps, the needs and the opportunities. After a rigorous process came the first Strategic Plan of the CIHR Institute of Aging, which was clearly influenced by Dr. Réjean Hébert's vision of the aging population as an opportunity, instead of a catastrophe, for our society that comes, of course, with its own challenges. Dr. Hébert left CIHR during his first mandate as he was called upon to become the Dean of his Faculty, and then went on to become the first CIHR Scientific Director to sit as a Minister of Health and Social Services in the Québec Government. The main outcomes of Dr. Hebert's years (2001-2004) can be summarized as follows2.• Organizing many workshops and meetings to ensure that the Institute of Aging would become the premier national convener for research on aging, bridging between disciplines... (shrink)

It has been alleged that the demands of friendship conflict with the norms of epistemology—in particular, that there are cases in which the moral demands of friendship would require one to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, and thereby come to believe something in violation of ordinary epistemic standards on justified or responsible belief :329–351, 2004; Stroud in Ethics 116:498–524, 2006; Hazlett in A luxury of the understanding: on the value of true belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). (...) The burden of this paper is to explain these appearances away. I contend that the impression of epistemic partiality in friendship dissipates once we acknowledge the sorts of practical and epistemic reasons that are generated by our values: value-reflecting reasons. The present proposal has several virtues: it requires fewer substantial commitments than other proposals seeking to resist the case for epistemic partiality ; it is independently motivated, as it cites a phenomenon—value-reflecting reasons—we have independent reasons to accept; it provides a single, unified account of how various features of friendship bear on belief-formation; and makes clear how it is the very value we place on friendship itself that ensures against epistemic partiality. (shrink)

This article presents a critical examination of the process of stakeholder dialogue in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field. It utilises data from a three-year research project into stakeholder dialogue processes to discuss three central themes: first, what is meant by the term ‘dialogue’, both from a theoretical perspective and from its practical application within CSR; second, the challenges of creating effective dialogue; and third, measuring and assessing the potential outcomes of dialogue. In providing a critical overview of these themes, (...) the article examines the nature of organisational learning through stakeholder engagement and dialogue. It questions the motives behind engagement in dialogue and highlights some of the potential challenges for organisational learning posed by opting for a stakeholder dialogue approach. It argues that organisations engaging in stakeholder dialogue must have a clear understanding of the implications of undertaking a dialogue process and have a long-term perspective regarding the outcomes and learning likely to emerge from it. While stakeholder dialogue may produce significant results, it is argued, many of these may be difficult to quantify on a short-term basis. (shrink)

Trust is central to the therapeutic relationship, but the epistemic asymmetries between the expert healthcare provider and the patient make the patient, the trustor, vulnerable to the provider, the trustee. The narratives of pain sufferers provide helpful insights into the experience of pain at the juncture of trust, expert knowledge, and the therapeutic relationship. While stories of pain sufferers having their testimonies dismissed are well documented, pain sufferers continue to experience their testimonies as being epistemically downgraded. This kind of epistemic (...) injustice has received limited treatment in bioethics. In this paper, we examine how a climate of distrust in pain management may facilitate what Fricker calls epistemic injustice. We critically interrogate the processes through which pain sufferers are vulnerable to specific kinds of epistemic injustice, such as testimonial injustice. We also examine how healthcare institutions and practices privilege some kinds of evidence and ways of knowing while excluding certain patient testimonies from epistemic consideration. We argue that providers ought to avoid epistemic injustice in pain management by striving toward epistemic humility. Epistemic humility, as a form of epistemic justice, may be the kind disposition required to correct the harmful prejudices that may arise through testimonial exchange in chronic pain management. (shrink)

The effect of concurrent movement on incidental versus intentional statistical learning was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants learned the statistical regularities embedded within familiarization stimuli implicitly, whereas in Experiment 2 they were made aware of the embedded regularities and were instructed explicitly to learn these regularities. Experiment 1 demonstrated that while the control group were able to learn the statistical regularities, the resistance-free cycling group and the exercise group did not demonstrate learning. This is in contrast with (...) the findings of Experiment 2, where all three groups demonstrated significant levels of learning. The results suggest that the movement demands, rather than the physiological stress, interfered with statistical learning. We suggest movement activates the striatum, which is not only responsible for motor control but also plays a role in incidental learning. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the nature of our epistemic entitlement to rely on certain belief-forming processes—perception, memory, reasoning, and perhaps others—is not restricted to one's own belief-forming processes. I argue as well that we can have access to the outputs of others’ processes, in the form of their assertions. These two points support the conclusion that epistemic entitlements are “interpersonal.” I then proceed to argue that this opens the way for a non-standard version of anti-reductionism in the epistemology (...) of testimony, and a more “extended” epistemology—one that calls into question the epistemic significance that has traditionally been ascribed to the boundaries separating individual subjects. (shrink)

For older workers, self-employment is an important alternative to waged employment. Drawing on social learning theory and social cognitive career theory we examine how attitudes toward one’s own aging, future time perspective (captured by perceived time left to live) and perceived support from referent individuals predict self-efficacy for entrepreneurship and outcome expectations, influencing self-employment interest. Findings from a sample of professional association members (n = 174, mean age 52.5 years), revealed that an open-ended time perspective relates positively to entrepreneurial self-efficacy, (...) while social support relates positively to outcome expectations. Consistent with social cognitive career theory, entrepreneurial self-efficacy mediated the relationship between future time perspective and interest in self-employment, and outcome expectations mediated the relationship between social support and interest in self-employment. This study extends current career and entrepreneurship theory in several ways. First, the inclusion of age-related psychosocial and sociocultural factors in the study model shed light on the intersection between older age, the contextual environment and development of self-employment interest. Second, the findings support earlier arguments that older entrepreneurship is a social process whereby the social context in which people work and live influences their interest in entrepreneurship, and that entrepreneurial behavior among older peop... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to articulate and defend a particular role for ethico-political values in social epistemology research. I begin by describing a research programme in social epistemology—one which I have introduced and defended elsewhere. I go on to argue that by the lights of this research programme, there is an important role to be played by ethico-political values in knowledge communities, and an important role in social epistemological research in describing the values inhering in particular knowledge communities. (...) I conclude by noting how, even as it expands its focus beyond the traditional one to include descriptions of our “knowledge practices,” this sort of project relates to some of the core questions that have been pursued by traditional epistemology. (shrink)

What responsibilities does each of us have to reduce or limit our greenhouse gas emissions? Advocates of individual emissions reductions acknowledge that there are limits to what we can reasonably demand from individuals. Climate ethics has not yet systematically explored those limits. Instead, it has become popular to suggest that such judgements should be ‘context-sensitive’ but this does not tell us what role different contextual factors should play in our moral thinking. The current approach to theory development in climate ethics (...) is not likely to be the most effective way to fill this gap. In existing work, climate ethicists use hypothetical cases to consider what can be reasonably demanded of individuals in particular situations. In contrast, ‘climate ethics with an ethnographic sensibility’ uses qualitative social science methods to collect original data in which real individuals describe their own situations. These real-life cases are more realistic, more detailed and cover a broader range of circumstances than hypothetical cases. Normative analysis of real-life cases can help us to develop a more systematic understanding of the role that different contextual factors should play in determining individual climate responsibilities. It can also help us to avoid the twin dangers of ‘idealization’ and ‘special pleading’. (shrink)

Many epistemologists agree that even very young children sometimes acquire knowledge through testimony. In this paper I address two challenges facing this view. The first (building on a point made in Lackey (2005)) is the defeater challenge, which is to square the hypothesis that very young children acquire testimonial knowledge with the fact that children (whose cognitive immaturity prevents them from having or appreciating reasons) cannot be said to satisfy the No‐Defeaters condition on knowledge. The second is the extension challenge, (...) which is to give a motivated, extensionally‐adequate account of the conditions on testimonial knowledge in early childhood. Neither challenge can be met merely by endorsing externalism about knowledge; but we can meet both by reconceiving the process that eventuates in the child’s consumption of testimony. My central thesis is that this process should be seen as implicating features of the child’s social environment. The result is a novel anti‐individualistic externalism about knowledge. (shrink)

This paper reviews recent philosophical work on assertion, with a special focus on work exploring the theme of assertion's norm. It concludes with a brief section characterizing several open questions that might profitably be explored from this perspective.

Applying Grice's account of conventional and conversational implicature, and Frankfurt's account of bullshit, shows that Donald J. Trump's language falls into a category beyond Frankfurt's own.

In this paper we give reasons to think that reflective epistemic subjects cannot possess mere animal knowledge. To do so we bring together literature on defeat and higher-order evidence with literature on the distinction between animal knowledge and reflective knowledge. We then defend our argument from a series of possible objections.

Written by an international team of leading scholars, this collection of thirteen new essays explores the implications of semantic externalism for self-knowledge and skepticism, bringing recent developments in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and epistemology to bear on the issue. Structured in three parts, the collection looks at self-knowledge, content transparency, and then meta-semantics and the nature of mental content. The chapters examine a wide range of topics in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, (...) including 2D semantics, transparency views of self-knowledge, and theories of linguistic understanding, as well as epistemological debates on contextualism, contrastivism, pragmatic encroachment, anti-luminosity arguments and testimony. The scope of the volume will appeal to graduate students and researchers in epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, cognitive science, psychology and linguistics. (shrink)

Alessandra Tanesini’s insightful paper explores the moral and epistemic harms of arrogance, particularly in conversation. Of special interest to her is the phenomenon of arrogance-induced silencing, whereby one speaker’s arrogance either prevents another from speaking altogether or else undermines her capacity to produce certain speech acts such as assertions. I am broadly sympathetic to many of Tanesini’s claims about the harms associated with this sort of silencing. In this paper I propose to address what I see as a lacuna in (...) her account. I believe that the arrogant speaker can put those he silences in the morally outrageous position in which their own silence contributes to their oppression. While nothing in Tanesini’s account would predict or explain this, the wrinkle I propose will aim to do so in a way that is in the spirit of her account. To do so, I will need to expand the focus of discussion: instead of concentrating on silencing, I will consider the phenomenon of silence. When one is silent in the face of a mutually observed assertion, one’s silence will be interpreted by others. I argue that under certain widespread conditions, a hearer’s silence in the face of the arrogant speaker’s assertions is likely to be falsely interpreted as indicating her assent to the assertion, and such an interpretation of the hearer’s silence will bring new harms in its wake—in particular, harms to the hearer who was silenced, and also harms to the community at large. When we combine these new harms with the ones Tanesini identified in her paper, we reach the further conclusion that the harms of silencing are potentially far worse than many have imagined. (shrink)

This article argues that positioning disclosure as a primary remedy in addressing the ethical problems posed by conflicts of interest in medicine and health is an error. Instead, bioethical resources should be devoted to the problems associated with sequestration, defined as the elimination of relationships between commercial industries and health professionals in all cases where it is remotely feasible. The argument begins by arguing that adopting Andrew Stark’s conceptual framework for COIs leads to advantages in understanding COIs and in ordering (...) priorities for intervention. The article then draws on prior work establishing that COIs are, under ordinary epidemiologic standards, properly regarded as population health hazards. This justifies attention to possible remedies, of which disclosure generates by far the most analysis. Such primacy is unwarranted given the extensive evidence suggesting that disclosure as a remedy for COIs is at best ineffective. ‘At best’ is justified because the evidence also shows that disclosure may have a perverse effect, intensifying biased behaviors. Expending significant attention on an ineffective or even deleterious intervention is unjustified and also crowds out devotion of resources to the real problems that attend sequestration. Therefore, disclosure ought to be regarded as a lower priority among possible COI interventions. (shrink)

According to anti‐reductionism, audiences have a default (but defeasible) epistemic entitlement to accept observed testimony. This paper explores the prospects of arguing from this premise to a conclusion in ethics, to the effect that speakers enjoy a default (but defeasible) moral entitlement to expect to be trusted when they testify. After proposing what I regard as the best attempt to link the two, I conclude that any argument from the one to the other will depend on a strong epistemological assumption (...) that has not yet been discussed in this connection. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the "female condition" of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a "politics of alterity" with applications for feminist practice.

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the "female condition" of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a "politics of alterity" with applications for feminist practice.

"Gray Matters is a thorough examination of the main topics in recent philosophy of mind. It aims at surveying a broad range of issues, not all of which can be subsumed under one position or one philosopher's theory. In this way, the authors avoid neglecting interesting issues out of allegiance to a given theory of mind." --Book Jacket.

Among the many virtues Duncan Pritchard ascribes to his disjunctivist position in Epistemic Disjunctivism, he claims it defeats the skeptic in an attractive fashion. In this paper I argue that his engagement with the skeptic is not entirely successful.

We show from an abstract comparison principle that the Mitchell order is linear on sufficiently strong ultrafilters: normal ultrafilters, Dodd solid ultrafilters, and assuming GCH, generalized normal ultrafilters. This gives a conditional answer to the well-known question of whether a [Formula: see text]-supercompact cardinal [Formula: see text] must carry more than one normal measure of order 0. Conditioned on a very plausible iteration hypothesis, the answer is no, since the Ultrapower Axiom holds in the canonical inner models at the finite (...) levels of supercompactness. (shrink)

Assertions belong to the family of speech acts that make claims regarding how things are. They include statements, avowals, reports, expressed judgments, and testimonies—acts which are relevant across a host of issues not only in philosophy of language and linguistics but also in subdisciplines such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Over the past two decades, the amount of scholarship investigating the speech act of assertion has increased dramatically, and the scope of such research (...) has also grown. The Oxford Handbook of Assertion explores various dimensions of the act of assertion: its nature; its place in a theory of speech acts, and in semantics and meta-semantics; its role in epistemology; and the various social, political, and ethical dimensions of the act. Essays from leading theorists situate assertion in relation to other types of speech acts, exploring the connection between assertions and other phenomena of interest not only to philosophers but also to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, lawyers, computer scientists, and theorists from communication studies. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are cases in which a speaker S's observation of the fact that her assertion that p is accepted by another person enhances the strength of S's own epistemic position with respect to p, as compared to S's strength of epistemic position with respect to p prior to having made the assertion. I conclude by noting that the sorts of consideration that underwrite this possibility may go some distance towards explaining several aspects of our (...) group life as epistemic subjects—in particular, groupthink and group polarization. (shrink)

I illustrate how a basic kind of universal rationality can be profitably combined with undeniable instances of relativism. I do so by engaging Michael Friedman’s recent response to a challenge from Thomas Kuhn.

For any reader needing a concise explanation of a subject in law The New Oxford Companion to Law is the ideal reference work. Providing greater depth than legal dictionaries but always accessible to the non-expert, entries in the Companion cover all areas of law and legal systems and are extensively cross-referenced for ease of navigation.

In the first of a trilogy of articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine in May 2015, physician–journalist Lisa Rosenbaum observes that the crucial question regarding conflicts of interest between physicians and commercial industry is the extent to which interactions between the two are “beneficial or harmful to patients?”. She goes on to note that the answer to this question “depends on how you define harm,”1 and argues that many of the claims of harm flowing from COI are (...) incomplete, insufficient, or are based on “suggestive extrapolations from data”. If there are benefits to be gained from physician–industry relationships, and if the evidence... (shrink)

Whether or not all assertion counts as testimony (a matter not addressed here), it is argued that not all testimony involves assertion. Since many views in theepistemology of testimony assume that testimony requires assertion, such views are (at best) insufficiently general. This result also points to what we might call the epistemic significance of assertion as such.

Despite the salient experience of encoding threatening events, these memories are prone to distortions and often non-veridical from encoding to recall. Further, threat has been shown to preferentially disrupt the binding of event details and enhance goal-relevant information. While extensive work has characterised distinctive features of emotional memory, research has not fully explored the influence threat has on temporal memory, a process putatively supported by the binding of event details into a temporal context. Two primary competing hypotheses have been proposed; (...) that threat can impair or enhance temporal memory. We analysed two datasets to assess temporal memory for an in-person haunted house experience. In study 1, we examined the temporal structure of memory by characterising memory contiguity in free recall as a function of individual levels of heart rate as a proxy of threat. In study 2, we replicated marginal findings of threat-related increases in memory contiguity found in study 1. We extended these findings by showing threat-related increases in recency discriminations, an explicit test of temporal memory. Together, these findings demonstrate that threat enhances temporal memory regarding free recall structure and during explicit memory judgments. (shrink)

This study examined the effect of a prior bout of exercise on implicit cognition. Specifically, we examined whether a prior bout of moderate intensity exercise affected performance on a statistical learning task in healthy adults. A total of 42 participants were allocated to one of three conditions—a control group, a group that exercised for 15 min prior to the statistical learning task, and a group that exercised for 30 min prior to the statistical learning task. The participants in the exercise (...) groups cycled at 60% of their respective V˙O2max. Each group demonstrated significant statistical learning, with similar levels of learning among the three groups. Contrary to previous research that has shown that a prior bout of exercise can affect performance on explicit cognitive tasks, the results of the current study suggest that the physiological stress induced by moderate-intensity exercise does not affect implicit cognition as measured by statistical learning. (shrink)

The concept of evil plays a central role in many of Peter French’s publications. He defines evil as “a human action that jeopardizes another person’s (or group’s) aspirations to live a worthwhile life (or lives) by the willful infliction of undeserved harm on that person(s)” (French 2011, 61, 95). Inspired by Harry Frankfurt’s work on the importance of what we care about, French argues that “the life a person leads is worthwhile if what he or she really gives a damn (...) about satisfies some condition(s) of value” (2011, 189). Through an analysis of the concept of “worthwhile”, I endeavor to show that French’s account of evil is correct although his definition of a worthwhile life is too demanding. Defining an evil act as one that willfully imperils another’s aspirations to live a worthwhile life is a welcome addition to the philosophical literature dedicated to the analysis of evil. Much of this literature identifies evil as severe, intolerable, or excessive harm, but these descriptions remain vague. When is harm precisely severe, intolerable, or excessive? French provides an original and plausible interpretation of these kinds of evil harm by explaining them in terms of an impediment to aspirations to live a worthwhile life. However, French’s definition of a worthwhile life is too strong and hence excludes unmistakable instances of evil. It is quite possible that someone who cares about nonvaluable things, or someone lacking cares altogether, or non-human animals (who might fall into either one of these two categories), could be victims of evil. Therefore, if evil is an act that jeopardizes another’s aspirations to live a worthwhile life, then the necessary condition of a worthwhile life cannot be that one gives a damn about something of value; it must be something far less demanding. In order to retain the central insight in French’s account of evil, I offer an alternative suggestion concerning what makes a life worthwhile. To this end, I distinguish a worthwhile life from a meaningful, valuable, significant, or good life. Focusing on the definition and use of the word “worthwhile”, I find that a worthwhile life is one that is worth the time and effort of the individual whose life it is. Jeopardizing another’s ability to make such a determination about her life lies at the hardened heart of evil. (shrink)