The acknowledgement of basic human vulnerability in relationships between mental health service users and professionals working in community-based mental health services (in Norway) was a starting point. The purpose was to explore how users of these services describe and make sense of their meetings with other people. The research is collaborative, with researcher and person with experienced-based knowledge cooperating through the research process. Data is derived from 19 interviews with 11 people who depend on mental health services for assistance at (...) least three times a week. Data is analysed according to the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results confirm that reciprocity is fundamental for relationships, and that recognizing the individual entails personal involvement. The participants describe a struggle, and recognizing this struggle may help the professional to achieve a deeper understanding of the individual. (shrink)

IntroductionHigh healthcare costs make illness precarious for both patients and their families’ economic situation. Despite the recent focus on the interconnection between health and financial risk at the systemic level, the ethical conflict between concerns for potential health benefits and financial risk protection at the household level in a low-income setting is less understood.MethodsUsing a seven-step ethical analysis, we examine a real-life dilemma faced by families and health workers at the micro level in Ethiopia and analyse the acceptability of limiting (...) treatment for an ill newborn to protect against financial risk. We assess available evidence and ethical issues at stake and discuss the dilemma with respect to three priority setting criteria: health maximisation, priority to the worse-off and financial risk protection.ResultsGiving priority to health maximisation and extra priority to the worse-off suggests, in this particular case, that limiting treatment is not acceptable even if the total well-being gain from reduced financial risk is taken into account. Our conclusion depends on the facts of the case and the relative weight assigned to these criteria. However, there are problematic aspects with the premise of this dilemma. The most affected parties—the newborn, family members and health worker—cannot make free choices about whether to limit treatment or not, and we thereby accept deprivations of people’s substantive freedoms.ConclusionIn settings where healthcare is financed largely out-of-pocket, families and health workers face tragic trade-offs. As countries move towards universal health coverage, financial risk protection for high-priority services is necessary to promote fairness, improve health and reduce poverty. (shrink)

Background:The global COVID-19 pandemic has imposed challenges on healthcare systems and professionals worldwide and introduced a ´maelstrom´ of ethical dilemmas. How ethically demanding situations are handled affects employees’ moral stress and job satisfaction.Aim:Describe priority-setting dilemmas, moral distress and support experienced by nurses and physicians across medical specialties in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Western Norway.Research design:A cross-sectional hospital-based survey was conducted from 23 April to 11 May 2020.Ethical considerations:Ethical approval granted by the Regional Research Ethics Committee in (...) Western Norway (131421).Findings:Among the 1606 respondents, 67% had experienced priority-setting dilemmas the previous two weeks. Healthcare workers who were directly involved in COVID-19 care, were redeployed or worked in psychiatry/addiction medicine experienced it more often. Although 59% of the respondents had seen adverse consequences due to resource scarcity, severe consequences were rare. Moral distress levels were generally low (2.9 on a 0–10 scale), but higher in selected groups (redeployed, managers and working in psychiatry/addiction medicine). Backing from existing collegial and managerial structures and routines, such as discussions with colleagues and receiving updates and information from managers that listened and acted upon feedback, were found more helpful than external support mechanisms. Priority-setting guidelines were also helpful.Discussion:By including all medical specialties, nurses and physicians, and various institutions, the study provides information on how the COVID-19 mitigation also influenced those not directly involved in the COVID-19 treatment of patients. In the next stages of the pandemic response, support for healthcare professionals directly involved in outbreak-affected patients, those redeployed or those most impacted by mitigation strategies must be a priority.Conclusion:Empirical research of healthcare workers experiences under a pandemic are important to identify groups at risks and useful support mechanisms. (shrink)

En su libro Sobre la revolución Hannah Arendt trató de saldar cuentas tanto con la tradición liberal como con la marxista; esto es, con las dos tradiciones políticas que han dominado los últimos 150 años. Su tesis básica es que ambos, marxistas y liberales demócratas, han malentendido que lo que era verdaderamente revolucionario en las modernas revoluciones era el siempre frustrado intento de una "constitutiolibertatis" - la intención de establecer un espacio político de libertad pública en el cual las personas, (...) como ciudadanos libres e iguales, puedan tomar control de sus asuntos comunes. En este artículo, el autor trata de mostrar cómo la idea arendtiana de democracia directa o "consejo" democrático, idea que tomada literalmente parece ingenua, puede ser usada productivamente si fuera integrada -en vez de opuesta- allegado liberal democrático-socialista. (shrink)

¿Qué quiere decir comprender una manifestación? Una respuesta evidente y plausible a primera vista sería: Quiere decir comprender lo que dice un hablante y cómo piensa lo que dice. El sentido de una manifestación se comprende aquí como el resultado de dos fuerzas: la de la significación de una oración y la de la intención de un hablante que quiere decir (hacer comprender) algo.

El liberalismo de Carlos S. Nino evolucionó desde sus primeros trabajos vinculados al derecho penal, hacia la construcción de una teoría de la democracia deliberativa. Desde sus comienzos, siguiendo a los autores liberales clásicos como John Stuart Mill, hasta el final en donde adhirió a un liberalismo igualitario, hubo construcciones que acompañaron este proceso, como el concepto de autonomía personal, y también ciertos ideales morales, como un oposición concreta al perfeccionismo. El texto presenta al liberalismo de Nino al comienzo y (...) al final de su obra para mostrar que el antiperfeccionismo originado en el liberalismo clásico que servía de base para construir su concepción de la autonomía, se mantuvo inalterado durante todo este proceso de evolución dificultando la compatibilización de su teoría de la responsabilidad penal con su teoría de la democracia deliberativa, orientada hacia el liberalismo igualitario. (shrink)

To the degree that citizens have participated in, or derived benefits from, social in- stitutions that have helped cause serious, life-threatening, or rights-threatening envi- ronmental injustice (EIJ), this article argues that they have duties either to stop their participation in these institutions or to compensate for it by helping to reform them. (EIJ occurs whenever children, poor people, minorities, or other subgroups bear dis- proportionate burdens of life-threatening or seriously harmful pollution.) After briefly defining “human rights,” the article defends the (...) four-premise responsibility argument. The argument is that people have duties to compensate for the serious, life-threatening, or rights-threatening EIJ from which they benefit, and that this compensation ideally ought to take the form of helping to reform social institutions that help cause EIJ. As such, this responsibility argument relies on two basic claims. One claim is that because citizens have benefited from, and therefore contributed to, EIJ they bear ethical respon- sibility to help stop it. The second claim is that because citizens participate in nations and institutions whose policies and practices help cause EIJ, they also have democratic responsibility to help stop it. The article closes by responding to four basic objections to this argument. (shrink)

This paper sketch out an account of Albrecht Wellmer's reception of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. What Albrecht Wellmer looks for in Wittgenstein is the possibility to answer the problem of the theoretical place of the criticism and the skills to argue with Adorno´s messianic utopianism and Jürgen Habermas and Karl Otto Apel´s idealizations and formalisms. Thereby the paper will show that Wittgenstein's philosophical-linguistic criticism enables Wellmer to recover the mundane ground for a skeptical critical theory of any (...) foundationalisms. (shrink)

Gutenbergs tryckteknik ledde till en medierevolution som förändrades Europa. I 1500-talets början spreds litteratur, grafik och vetenskap, men också nyhetsblad om katastrofer, pamfletter om invaderande turkar och religiösa stridsskrifter. Medan mycket ännu vägde blommade renässanshumanismen genom Erasmus av Rotterdam. Han stod bakom en femtedel av Europas böcker, och skulle ge framtiden ett viktigt arv. Nina Burton skriver om Erasmus och hans tid så att man känner sig vara med när han träffar konstnärerna och de intellektuella? Albrecht Dürer, Holbein d.y., (...) Paracelsus, Thomas More och Luther? lika väl som påvar, kejsare, pedagoger och rebeller. Genom honom möter man en hel epok. Vilken var Erasmus hemlighet? I sina brev klottrade han självporträtt med dubbla ansikten, och hans förmåga att se två sidor födde ett samtal bortom all fanatism? en dröm om ett gränslöst Europa, där kultur och vetenskap knöt nya samband. Men då religiösa strider började skaka världen fick han mäktiga fiender. Erasmus visade vilken roll litteraturen kan spela i en dramatisk tid som har många likheter med vår egen. (shrink)

This much-anticipated work is a rich and insightful collection of essays that restores women and minorities to the arena of political theory and debate.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

Philosophical attention to animals can be found in a wide range of texts throughout the history of philosophy, including discussions of animal classification in Aristotle and Ibn Bâjja, of animal rationality in Porphyry, Chrysippus, Aquinas and Kant, of mental continuity and the nature of the mental in Dharmakīrti, Telesio, Conway, Descartes, Cavendish, and Voltaire, of animal self-consciousness in Ibn Sina, of understanding what others think and feel in Zhuangzi, of animal emotion in Śāntarakṣita and Bentham, and of human cultural uniqueness (...) in Xunzi. In recent years, there has been increased attention to animal minds in philosophical discussions across many areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Given that nonhuman animals share some biological and psychological features with humans, and that we share community, land, and other resources, consideration of nonhuman animals has much to contribute to our philosophical activities. -/- Contemporary philosophy of animal minds often also engages with the sciences of animal cognition and behavior. The science of comparative cognition is a thriving area of research, complementing the philosophical study in two ways. For one, philosophers of animal cognition can use claims resulting from animal cognition studies as premises in philosophical discussions. For example, Jacob Beck (2012) relies on pigeons’ abilities to compare quantities to argue for nonconceptual content; Sidney Carls-Diamante (forthcoming) appeals to octopus behavior and physiology to defend embodied cognition; Richard Moore (2016a) refers to ape gestural communication to rethink the requirements for intentional communication; Andrew Barron and Colin Klein (2016) appeal to insect cognition research to defend new theories of consciousness; Sarah Vincent, Rebecca Ring, and Kristin Andrews (2019) cite dolphins’ social practices to argue for the existence of norms that do not require metacognition. -/- In addition, philosophers of animal cognition can examine the epistemology and methods used to justify the claims that arise from the science. Research into animal cognition has resulted in surprising claims about animal capacities, such as sociality in garter snakes (Skinner & Miller 2020), tool-use in ants (Maák et al. 2017), mirror self-recognition in fish (Kohda et al. 2019), empathy in rats (Bartal et al. 2011), social learning in fruit flies (Danchin et al. 2018), episodic memory in dogs (Fugazza et al. 2020), addition and subtraction in bees (Howard et al. 2019). How should we evaluate such claims? -/- Some philosophers have argued that animal cognition research is held to a higher standard than human cognition research, and that scientists working with animals are sometimes asked to solve skeptical problems (Halina 2015). Others have challenged scientific assumptions about the relationship between brain size and intelligence, as well as biases against invertebrates (Mikhalevich & Powell 2020). -/- Animal cognition research challenges philosophers to consider that many capacities and behaviors often assumed to require language, sophisticated technological capacities, or legal systems may in fact be had by other animals who lack these properties. In this way, animal cognition research often surprises us by showing that sophisticated-looking activity can be caused through rather simple mechanisms. -/- 1. What is Animal Cognition? 2. Philosophical Assumptions in the Study of Animal Cognition 2.1 Theory-ladenness 2.2 Value-ladenness 2.3 Objectivity 2.4 Simplicity 2.5 Summary 3. Animal Cognition Applied to Philosophy 3.1 The problem of other minds 3.2 The mind-body problem 3.3 Consciousness 3.4 Thought 3.5 Communication 3.6 Social understanding 3.7 The influence of animal cognition on value theory 3.7.1 Ethics 3.7.2 Political theory 3.8 Summary Bibliography Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries. (shrink)

How do feminists in the United Kingdom view spirituality and religion? What are their religious and spiritual attitudes, beliefs, and practices? What role do spirituality and religion play in feminists’ lives? This article presents findings from an interview-based study of 30 feminists in England, Scotland, and Wales. It identifies three characteristics of feminists’ approaches to religion and spirituality: They are de-churched, are relational, and emphasize practice. These features warrant a new approach to feminists’ relationships with religion and spirituality. Rather than, (...) as others have done, equating feminism with secularism, secularization, or alternative spiritualities, the article reveals the complex ways feminists forge religio-spiritual lives. The interview data demonstrate that it is unwise to see “spirituality” and “religion” as analytically distinct. Instead, drawing on the growing field of scholarship on “lived religion,” the article proposes conceptualizing feminist spirituality as lived religion. (shrink)

Explores the theories of democratic individualism articulated in the works of the American transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey, and African-American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison.

To answer tantalizing questions such as whether animals are moral or how morality evolved, I propose starting with a somewhat less fraught question: do animals have normative cognition? Recent psychological research suggests that normative thinking, or ought-thought, begins early in human development. Recent philosophical research suggests that folk psychology is grounded in normative thought. Recent primatology research finds evidence of sophisticated cultural and social learning capacities in great apes. Drawing on these three literatures, I argue that the human variety of (...) social cognition and moral cognition encompass the same cognitive capacities and that the nonhuman great apes may also be normative beings. To make this argument, I develop an account of animal social norms that shares key properties with Cristina Bicchieri's account of social norms but which lowers the cognitive requirements for having a social norm. I propose a set of four early developing prerequisites implicated in social cognition that make up what I call naïve normativity: the ability to identify agents, sensitivity to in-group/out-group differences, the capacity for social learning of group traditions, and responsiveness to appropriateness. I review the ape cognition literature and present preliminary empirical evidence supporting the existence of social norms and naïve normativity in great apes. While there is more empirical work to be done, I hope to have offered a framework for studying normativity in other species, and I conclude that we should be open to the possibility that normative cognition is yet another ancient cognitive endowment that is not human-unique. (shrink)

Paternalistic interventions restrict individuals’ liberty or autonomy so as to guide their decisions towards options that are more beneficial for them than the ones they would choose in the absence of such interventions. Although some philosophers have emphasised that there is a case for justifiable paternalism in certain circumstances, much of contemporary moral and political philosophy works from a strong presumption against paternalistic interventions. However, Richard Arneson has argued that there are egalitarian reasons that support the case for paternalism: paternalistic (...) interventions can protect poor decision-makers from making ‘bad’ choices, thus preventing inequalities between them and those with better decision-making skills. This paper seeks to clarify and advance our understanding of the egalitarian argument for paternalism. Arneson’s argument adds an important and often neglected dimension to the debate about paternalism but also raises a number of questions about equality, paternalism and the relationship between the two. (shrink)

Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and ...

Once upon a time, not too long ago, the question about apes and ethics had to do with moral standing—do apes have interests or rights that humans ought to respect? Given the fifty years of research on great ape cognition, life history, social organization, and behavior, the answer to that question seems obvious. Apes have emotions and projects, they can be harmed, and they have important social relationships.

In this essay, I suggest that Spinoza acknowledges a distinction between formal reality that is infinite and timelessly eternal and formal reality that is non-infinite (i. e., finite or indefinite) and non-eternal (i. e., enduring). I also argue that if, in Spinoza’s system, only intelligible causation is genuine causation, then infinite, timelessly eternal formal reality cannot cause non-infinite, non-eternal formal reality. A denial of eternal-durational causation generates a puzzle, however: if no enduring thing – not even the sempiternal, indefinite individual (...) composed of all finite, enduring things – is caused by the infinite, eternal substance, then how can Spinoza consistently hold that the one infinite, eternal substance is the cause of all things and that all things are modes of that substance? At the end of this essay, I sketch how Spinoza could deny eternal-durational causation while still holding that an infinite, eternal God is the cause of all things and that all things are modes. I develop the interpretation more in the companion essay.1 1 In “Spinoza’s Monism II,” in the next issue of this journal. (shrink)

An old question in Spinoza scholarship is how finite, non-eternal things transitively caused by other finite, non-eternal things (i. e., the entities described in propositions like E1p28) are caused by the infinite, eternal substance, given that what follows either directly or indirectly from the divine nature is infinite and eternal (E1p21–23). In “Spinoza’s Monism I,” “Spinoza’s Monism I,” in the previous issue of this journal. I pointed out that most commentators answer this question by invoking entities that are indefinite and (...) sempiternal, but argued that perhaps we should not be so quick to assume that in Spinoza’s system, an infinite and eternal substance could cause such indefinite, sempiternal entities. But if such eternal-durational causation is denied, then it seems harder to see how Spinoza’s system could be coherent: if Spinoza holds that the infinite, eternal substance cannot cause anything that is not infinite and not eternal, then how can he also hold that all things are modes immanently caused by substance (E1p15, E1p18, E1p25)? In this essay, I explain how Spinoza’s system could be understood in light of a denial of eternal-durational causation. On the interpretation I offer, God is the cause of all things and all things are modes because the essences of all things follow from the divine nature and all essences enjoy infinite, eternal reality as modes immanently caused by the infinite, eternal substance. The same non-substantial essences can also be conceived as enjoying non-infinite, non-eternal reality, but so conceived, they are enduring, finite (or sempiternal, indefinite) entities that cannot be conceived as modes caused by and inhering in the one infinite, eternal substance. I conclude by pointing out that if we take this interpretive route, we do have to understand Spinoza as committed to acosmism, or a denial of the reality of the world – at least the world of enduring, finite things. (shrink)

This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research (...) program encompassing both revisionary and more traditionally inspired approaches to folk psychology. After reviewing the origins of pluralistic folk psychology, the papers in the current issue are introduced. These papers fall into three thematic clusters: Folk-psychological strategies beyond propositional attitude attribution ; Enculturation and regulative folk psychology ; and Defenses of pluralism. (shrink)

My two principal aims in this essay are interconnected. One aim is to provide a new interpretation of the ‘infinite modes’ in Spinoza’s Ethics. I argue that for Spinoza, God, conceived as the one infinite and eternal substance, is not to be understood as causing two kinds of modes, some infinite and eternal and the rest finite and non-eternal. That there cannot be such a bifurcation of divine effects is what I take the ‘infinite mode’ propositions, E1p21–23, to establish; E1p21–23 (...) show that each and every one of the immanent effects of an infinite and eternal God is an infinite and eternal mode. The other aim is to show that these propositions can be understood as part of an extended critical response to Descartes’s infamous doctrine that God creates eternal truths and true and immutable natures. If we have the correct (Spinozan) conceptions of what God is and how God works, we see that an eternal and infinite God can only be understood to cause ‘eternal truths,’ and that these eternal truths are infinite and eternal modes of God. (shrink)

The study of animal cognition raises profound questions about the minds of animals and philosophy of mind itself. Aristotle argued that humans are the only animal to laugh, but in recent experiments rats have also been shown to laugh. In other experiments, dogs have been shown to respond appropriately to over two hundred words in human language. In this introduction to the philosophy of animal minds Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems and debates as they cut (...) across animal cognition and philosophy of mind. She addresses the following key topics: what is cognition, and what is it to have a mind? What questions should we ask to determine whether behaviour has a cognitive basis? the science of animal minds explained: ethology, behaviourist psychology, and cognitive ethology rationality in animals animal consciousness: what does research into pain and the emotions reveal? What can empirical evidence about animal behaviour tell us about philosophical theories of consciousness? does animal cognition involve belief and concepts; do animals have a ‘Language of Thought’? animal communication other minds: do animals attribute ‘mindedness’ to other creatures? moral reasoning and ethical behaviour in animals animal cognition and memory. Extensive use of empirical examples and case studies is made throughout the book. These include Cheney and Seyfarth’s ververt monkey research, Thorndike’s cat puzzle boxes, Jensen’s research into humans and chimpanzees and the ultimatum game, Pankseep and Burgdorf’s research on rat laughter, and Clayton and Emery’s research on memory in scrub-jays. Additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary make this an indispensable introduction to those teaching philosophy of mind, animal cognition. It will also be an excellent resource for those in fields such as ethology, biology and psychology. (shrink)

**For my more recent views of the third kind of cognition, see my "Finding Oneself in God"** -/- Abstract: Cognition of the third kind, or scientia intuitiva, is supposed to secure beatitudo, or virtue itself (E5p42). But what is scientia intuitiva, and how is it different from (and superior to) reason? I suggest a new answer to this old and vexing question at the core of Spinoza’s project in the Ethics. On my view, Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva resembles Descartes’s scientia more (...) than has been appreciated. Although Spinoza’s God is not Descartes’s benevolent, transcendent God, Spinoza agrees with Descartes that the highest certainty requires that a cognizer correctly conceive of God and her causal relation to God; it is only with cognition of the third kind that a cognizer can be certain that her adequate (that is, clear and distinct) representations of extramental things agree with formally real, extramental ideata, and so are true. If this is right, a reading of Spinoza that has dominated scholarship since the Ethics’ publication is misguided: for Spinoza, it is not always the case that having (and recognizing that one has) a clear and distinct idea is sufficient for knowing that that idea is true. I end the chapter by suggesting why scientia is intuitive for Spinoza: Spinoza attempts to avoid Cartesian-Circle-style circularity by insisting that a cognizer must intuit the correct representation of God and God’s relation to things. (shrink)

Birch sketches out an ingenious account of how the psychology of social norms emerged from individual-level norms of skill. We suggest that these individual-level norms of skill are likely to be much more widespread than Birch suggests, extending deeper into the hominid lineage, across modern great ape species, all the way to distantly related creatures like honeybees. This suggests that there would have been multiple opportunities for social norms to emerge from skill norms in human prehistory.

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 6, June 2022.

Agonizing care: care ethics, agonistic feminism and a political theory of care ‘Care’ is central to nursing theory and practice, and has been described in a variety of ways. Intense conversations about care have been developing in other fields of study as well, from the social sciences to the humanities. Care ethics has grown out of intellectual exchange between feminist thought, moral theory and the critique of traditional western political philosophy. However, care ethics is not without its critics, as these (...) accounts of care have also sparked vigorous challenges. This paper traces the construct of care through nursing theory, care ethics, feminist critiques of moral and political theory and agonistic feminism to outline a set of problematics that a political theory of care should engage. It discusses how care is conventionally posited in more or less essentialist, universalizing and naturalizing terms. It introduces the ideas of feminist theorists who resist dichotomizing care and the political, and situate care in the context of power and politics. The tensions between care feminism and agonistic feminism are highlighted in order to explore the potential of theorizing both care and nursing in political terms. (shrink)

This article asserts the significance of the portrayal of the political art of statesmanship as weaving, and aims to show how this image emphasizes two main aspects of the political art of statesmanship. Firstly, the image implies a three-dimensionality, both through the process of weaving and through the thickness of the protective fabric this produces, that in turn indicates the vital aspect of corporeality in politics. Secondly, weaving as a paradigmatic example of the art of statesmanship presents a way of (...) incorporating different entities and joining diverse threads into a cohesive unity, without reducing them to a form of sameness as mere mathematical counting would. These two aspects are in turn connected to an emphasis on the importance in good statesmanship of recognizing the specificity of the occasion and the variety and difference of the innumerable qualities to be interlaced in weaving the fabric of a good society. (shrink)

Comparative psychology, the multidisciplinary study of animal behavior and psychology, confronts the challenge of how to study animals we find cute and easy to anthropomorphize, and animals we find odd and easy to objectify, without letting these biases negatively impact the science. In this Element, Kristin Andrews identifies and critically examines the principles of comparative psychology and shows how they can introduce other biases by objectifying animal subjects and encouraging scientists to remain detached. Andrews outlines the scientific benefits of (...) treating animals as sentient research participants who come from their own social contexts and with whom we will be in relationship. With discussions of science's quest for objectivity, worries about romantic and killjoy theories, and debates about chimpanzee cognition between primatologists who work in the field and those in the lab, Andrews shows how scientists can address the different biases through greater integration of the subdisciplines of comparative psychology. (shrink)

Derk Pereboom's Four-Case Argument is among the most famous and resilient manipulation arguments against compatibilism. I contend that its resilience is not a function of the argument's soundness but, rather, the ill-gotten gain from an ambiguity in the description of the causal relations found in the argument's foundational case. I expose this crucial ambiguity and suggest that a dilemma faces anyone hoping to resolve it. After a thorough search for an interpretation which avoids both horns of this dilemma, I conclude (...) that none is available. Rather, every metaphysically coherent interpretation invites either a hard- or soft-line reply to Pereboom's argument. I then consider a recharacterization of the dilemma which seems to clear the way for the defence of a revised Four-Case Argument. I address this rejoinder by identifying a still more fundamental problem shared by all viable interpretations of the manipulation cases, showing that each involves a type of manipulation which undermines the victim's agency. Because this diagnosis supports a soft-line reply to every viable interpretation of the argument and can be endorsed by any compatibilist, I consider it the final piece of the Soft-line Solution to the Four-Case Argument. Finally, I suggest a new taxonomy of manipulation arguments, arguing that none that employs the suppressive variety of manipulation found in Pereboom's argument offers a threat to compatibilism. -/- (For direct download option, search Kristin M. Mickelson, Soft-line Solution). (shrink)

The view that folk psychology is primarily mindreading beliefs and desires has come under challenge in recent years. I have argued that we also understand others in terms of individual properties such as personality traits and generalizations from past behavior, and in terms of group properties such as stereotypes and social norms (Andrews 2012). Others have also argued that propositional attitude attribution isn’t necessary for predicting others’ behavior, because this can be done in terms of taking Dennett’s Intentional Stance (Zawidzki (...) 2013), appealing to social structures (Maibom 2007), shared norms (McGeer 2007) or via solution based heuristics for reaching equilibrium between social partners (Morton 2003). But it isn’t only prediction that can be done without thinking about what others think; we can explain and understand people in terms of their personality traits, habitual behaviors, and social practices as well. The decentering of propositional attitude attributions goes hand in hand with a move away from taking folk psychology to be primarily a predictive device. While experiments examining folk psychological abilities in children, infants, and other species still rest on asking subjects to predict behavior, theoretical investigations as to the evolutionary function of folk psychology have stressed the role of explanation (Andrews 2012) and regulative functions (McGeer 2007, Zawidzki 2013, Fenici 2011). In this paper I argue that an explanatory role for folk psychology is also a regulative role, and that language is not required for these regulative functions. I will start by drawing out the relationship between prediction, explanation, and regulation of behavior according to both mindreading approaches to folk psychology and the pluralistic account I defend. I will argue that social cognition does not take the form of causal reasoning so much as it does normative reasoning, and will introduce the folk psychological spiral. Then I will examine the cognitive resources necessary for participating in the folk psychological spiral, and I will argue that these cognitive resources can be had without language. There is preliminary evidence that some other species understand one another through a normative lens that, through looping effects, creates expectations that community members strive to live up to. (shrink)

The terms ‘compatibilism’ and ‘incompatibilism’ were introduced in the mid-20th century to name conflicting views about the logical relationship between the thesis of determinism and the thesis that someone has free will. These technical terms were originally introduced within a specific research paradigm, the classical analytic paradigm. This paradigm is now in its final stages of degeneration and few free-will theorists still work within it (i.e. using its methods, granting its substantive background assumptions, etc.). This chapter discusses how the ambiguity (...) of the terms ‘incompatibilism’ and ‘compatibilism’ took root and why it matters to the contempory debate. I explain why the ambiguity of these anachronistic terms, though relatively innocuous when they were first introduced, is now encouraging theorists to tolerate and perpetuate serious philosophical errors (e.g. to conflate relations as different in kind and importance as correlation and causation, to knowingly promote invalid arguments, and to equivoate on jargon in ways that keep the free-will debate mired in psuedo-stalemates). I also suggest a new paradigm for anyone looking for relief from the confusion and deadlock created by the use of inadequate classical narratives and jargon. -/- A selection from the publication is available to download here. For full version, please gmail me, username: kristin.mickelson.42 -/- . (shrink)

We examine the claim that the methodology of psychology leads to a bias in animal cognition research against attributing “anthropomorphic” properties to animals . This charge is examined in light of a debate on the role of folk psychology between primatologists who emphasize similarities between humans and other apes, and those who emphasize differences. We argue that while in practice there is sometimes bias, either in the formulation of the null hypothesis or in the preference of Type-II errors over Type-I (...) errors, the bias is not the result of proper use of the Neyman and Pearson hypothesis testing method. Psychologists’ preference for false negatives over false positives cannot justify a preference for avoiding anthropomorphic errors over anthropectic errors. (shrink)