The standard way of representing an epistemic state in formal philosophy is in terms of a set of sentences, corresponding to the agent’s beliefs, and an ordering of those sentences, reflecting how well entrenched they are in the agent’s epistemic state. We argue that this wide-spread representational view – a view that we identify as a “Quinean dogma” – is incapable of making certain crucial distinctions. We propose, as a remedy, that any adequate representation of epistemic states must also include (...) the agent’s research agenda, i.e., the list of question that are open or closed at any given point in time. If the argument of the paper is sound, a person’s questions and practical interests, on the one hand, and her beliefs and theoretical values, on the other, are more tightly interwoven than has previously been assumed to be the case in formal epistemology. (shrink)

This study focuses on investigating habits in perioperative nursing culture, which are often simply accepted and not normally considered or discussed. A hermeneutical approach was chosen as the means of understanding perioperative nurses' experiences of and reflections on operating theatre culture. Focus group discussions were used to collect data, which was analysed using hermeneutical text analysis. The results revealed three main categories of habits present in perioperative nursing culture: habits that promote ethical values (by temporary friendship with patients, showing respect (...) for each other, and spending time on reflection on ethics and caring); habits that hinder progress (by seeing the patient as a surgical case, not acknowledging colleagues, and not talking about ethics); and habits that set the cultural tone (the hidden power structure and achieving more in less time). (shrink)

In a seminal book, Alvin I. Goldman outlines a theory for how to evaluate social practices with respect to their “veritistic value”, i.e., their tendency to promote the acquisition of true beliefs in society. In the same work, Goldman raises a number of serious worries for his account. Two of them concern the possibility of determining the veritistic value of a practice in a concrete case because we often don't know what beliefs are actually true, and even if we did, (...) the task of determining the veritistic value would be computationally extremely difficult. Neither problem is specific to Goldman's theory and both can be expected to arise for just about any account of veritistic value. It is argued here that the first problem does not pose a serious threat to large classes of interesting practices. The bulk of the paper is devoted to the computational problem, which, it is submitted, can be addressed in promising terms by means of computer simulation. In an attempt to add vividness to this proposal, an up-and-running simulation environment is presented and put to some preliminary tests. (shrink)

Gunnar Olsson's tale follows an explorer from the oldest creation epics extant to the power struggles of today, an attempt to codify the taken-for-granted, a struggle with the invisible powers that make us so obedient and so predictable.

The aim of our survey was to capture the attitudes of Swedes to marginal donors and xenotransplantation. Modern biotechnology makes it possible to replace non-functioning organs, cells, and genes. Nonetheless, people may have reservations and fears about such treatments. With the survey, Attitudes of the General Public to Transplants, we have sought to expose the ambivalence that arises when medical possibilities are juxtaposed with ideas of risk. The design of the questionnaire originates from the interdisciplinary cooperation between ethnologists, medical scientists, (...) and geneticists. By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, it is possible to illustrate the complexity that characterises people’s view of modern biomedicine. People’s reflections are based on a personal and situation bound morality, which does not necessarily coincide with what they generally consider as ethically justifiable. (shrink)

Returning to the origins of education, Becoming Pedagogue explores its role in today's society by reuniting philosophy with pedagogy. It investigates the aesthetics, ethics and politics of childhood, education and what a teacher really does, enabling educators to define and perform their profession as per its historical and intellectual roots. Reflecting on the practice, science and knowledge-tradition of pedagogy as well as abstract and formalist discourse at all levels, Olsson's work evokes real and free aspects of educational experiences and events. (...) Through a close reading of French philosopher Henri Bergson's major works, historical and contemporary pedagogical resources as well as the pedagogy developed in the early childhood centres in Reggio Emilia, Italy, it develops a critical-cum-creative methodology that both analyses the present educational situation as well as creates new pedagogical alternatives. Using brand new perspectives as well as practical examples of what teachers do, Becoming Pedagogue will provide students, educators and researchers tools for critiquing simplified ideas of what a teacher is as well as giving them inspiration to experiment with alternative ways of teaching. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Frankfurt's Meno Challenge Reliabilist Solutions Frankfurt's Puzzle about Bullshit A Social Epistemology Perspective References.

This book theorizes subversive action, a neglected mechanism in the new institutionalism literature. Subversive action is political in nature, secretly undermining some institutions to open up alternative ideas or to secure existing institutions by secretly undermining adversaries. An example is a politician who promises change in public, but does something else behind the scenes to preserve the status quo. The book addresses the nature and meaning of subversive action and the contexts that give rise to it, as well as how (...) it can work as an important mechanism behind institutional change and continuity. The book will interest students and scholars of public policy, public administration and political science. (shrink)

A revised edition of an undergraduate text for students in history of psychology courses. Designed for one semester, covers: the history of psychology in ancient philosophy, structuralism, neurophysiology, functionalism, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and gestalt theories. The new edition has expanded.

This study presents findings from an ontological and contextual determination of the concept of dignity. The study had a caritative and caring science perspective and a hermeneutical design. The aim of this study was to increase caring science knowledge of dignity and to gain a determination of dignity as a concept. Eriksson’s model for conceptual determination is made up of five part-studies. The ontological and contextual determination indicates that dignity can be understood as absolute dignity, the spiritual dimension characterized by (...) responsibility, freedom, duty, and service, and relative dignity, characterized by the bodily, external aesthetic dimension and the psychical, inner ethical dimension. Dignity exists in human beings both as absolute and relative dignity. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel proof of the conservativity of the intuitionistic theory of strictly positive fixpoints, $$\widehat{{\textrm{ID}}}{}_{1}^{{\textrm{i}}}{}$$ ID ^ 1 i, over Heyting arithmetic ($${\textrm{HA}}$$ HA ), originally proved in full generality by Arai (Ann Pure Appl Log 162:807–815, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apal.2011.03.002). The proof embeds $$\widehat{{\textrm{ID}}}{}_{1}^{{\textrm{i}}}{}$$ ID ^ 1 i into the corresponding theory over Beeson’s logic of partial terms and then uses two consecutive interpretations, a realizability interpretation of this theory into the subtheory generated by almost negative fixpoints, and (...) a direct interpretation into Heyting arithmetic with partial terms using a hierarchy of satisfaction predicates for almost negative formulae. It concludes by applying van den Berg and van Slooten’s result (Indag Math 29:260–275, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indag.2017.07.009) that Heyting arithmetic with partial terms plus the schema of self realizability for arithmetic formulae is conservative over $${\textrm{HA}}$$ HA. (shrink)

Book Review of Luc Bovens and Stephan Hartmann *Bayesian Epistemology* by Erik J. Olsson.

In this paper we examine C. I. Lewis's view on the roleof coherence – what he calls ''congruence'' – in thejustification of beliefs based on memory ortestimony. Lewis has two main theses on the subject. His negativethesis states that coherence of independent items ofevidence has no impact on the probability of a conclusionunless each item has some credibility of its own. Thepositive thesis says, roughly speaking, that coherenceof independently obtained items of evidence – such asconverging memories or testimonies – raises (...) the probabilityof a conclusion to the extent sufficient for epistemicjustification, or, to use Lewis's expression, ''rationaland practical reliance''.It turns out that, while thenegative thesis is essentially correct, astrong positive connection between congruence andprobability – a connection of the kind Lewis ultimatelyneeds in his validation of memory – is contingent on thePrinciple of Indifference. In the final section we assess therepercussions of the latter fact for Lewis's theory in particularand for coherence justification in general. (shrink)

Background: Ethics and dignity in prehospital emergency care are important due to vulnerability and suffering. Patients can lose control of their body and encounter unfamiliar faces in an emergency situation. Objective: To describe what specialist ambulance nurse students experienced as preserved and humiliated dignity in prehospital emergency care. Research design: The study had a qualitative approach. Method: Data were collected by Flanagan’s critical incident technique. The participants were 26 specialist ambulance nurse students who described two critical incidents of preserved and (...) humiliated dignity, from prehospital emergency care. Data consist of 52 critical incidents and were analyzed with interpretive content analysis. Ethical considerations: The study followed the ethical principles in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Findings: The result showed how human dignity in prehospital emergency care can be preserved by the ambulance nurse being there for the patient. The ambulance nurses meet the patient in the patient’s world and make professional decisions. The ambulance nurse respects the patient’s will and protects the patient’s body from the gaze of others. Humiliated dignity was described through the ambulance nurse abandoning the patient and by healthcare professionals failing, disrespecting, and ignoring the patient. Discussion: It is a unique situation when a nurse meets a patient face to face in a critical life or death moment. The discussion describes courage and the ethical vision to see another human. Conclusion: Dignity was preserved when the ambulance nurse showed respect and protected the patient in prehospital emergency care. The ambulance nurse students’ ethical obligation results in the courage to see when a patient’s dignity is in jeopardy of being humiliated. Humiliated dignity occurs when patients are ignored and left unprotected. This ethical dilemma affects the ambulance nurse students badly due to the fact that the morals and attitudes of ambulance nurses are reflected in their actions toward the patient. (shrink)

Dieses Buch versammelt einige der führenden Köpfe heutiger pragmatischer Philosophie zu einem konstruktiven Gespräch über die Zukunft des Pragmatismus. Robert B. Brandom, dessen Theorie der Bedeutung im Mittelpunkt mehrerer Beiträge des Bandes steht, hat das Einleitungskapitel geschrieben. Sämtliche zentrale Problemstellungen der pragmatischen Tradition werden aus teilweise sehr unterschiedlichen Perspektiven eingehend beleuchtet. Neben den Artikeln von Brandom und den Herausgebern, André Fuhrmann und Erik J. Olsson, enthält das Buch Originalbeiträge von Michael Esfeld, Wolfram Hinzen, Friedrich Kambartel, Isaac Levi, Ulrich Metschl, Cheryl (...) Misak, Jaroslav Peregrin, Sven Rosenkranz, Hans Rott und Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage with the question of the normative content of the resilience concept. The issues are approached in two consecutive steps. First, we proceed from a narrow construal of the resilience concept – as the ability of a system to absorb a disturbance – and show that under an analysis of normative concepts as evaluative concepts resilience comes out as descriptive. In the second part of the paper, we argue that (1) for systems of interest (primarily social (...) systems or system with a social component) we seem to have options with respect to how they are described and (2) that this matters for what is to be taken as a sign of resilience as opposed to a sign of the lack of resilience for such systems. We discuss the implications of this for how the concept should be applied in practice and suggest that users of the resilience concept face a choice between versions of the concept that are either ontologically or normatively charged. (shrink)

Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual’s semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1-hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals have a small-world structure with short distances between words and high clustering. The distribution of links follows a power law truncated by an exponential cutoff, meaning that most words (...) are poorly connected and a minority of words has a high, although bounded, number of connections. Existing aggregate networks mirror the individual link distributions, and so they are not scale-free, as has been previously assumed; still, there are properties of individual structure that the aggregate networks do not reflect. A simulation of the new sampling process suggests that it can uncover the true structure of an individual’s semantic memory. (shrink)

We prove that four theses commonly associated with coherentism are incompatible with the representation of a belief state as a logically closed set of sentences. The result is applied to the conventional coherence interpretation of the AGM theory of belief revision, which appears not to be tenable. Our argument also counts against the coherentistic acceptability of a certain form of propositional holism. We argue that the problems arise as an effect of ignoring the distinction between derived and non-derived beliefs, and (...) we suggest that the kind of coherence relevant to epistemic justification is the coherence of non-derived beliefs. (shrink)

It is tempting to think that, if a person's beliefs are coherent, they are also likely to be true. This truth conduciveness claim is the cornerstone of the popular coherence theory of knowledge and justification. Erik Olsson's new book is the most extensive and detailed study of coherence and probable truth to date. Setting new standards of precision and clarity, Olsson argues that the value of coherence has been widely overestimated. Provocative and readable, Against Coherence will make stimulating reading for (...) epistemologists and anyone with a serious interest in truth. (shrink)

The paper presents and defends a Bayesian theory of trust in social networks. In the first part of the paper, we provide justifications for the basic assumptions behind the model, and we give reasons for thinking that the model has plausible consequences for certain kinds of communication. In the second part of the paper we investigate the phenomenon of overconfidence. Many psychological studies have found that people think they are more reliable than they actually are. Using a simulation environment that (...) has been developed in order to make our model computationally tractable we show that in our model inquirers are indeed sometimes better off from an epistemic perspective overestimating the reliability of their own inquiries. We also show, by contrast, that people are rarely better off overestimating the reliability of others. On the basis of these observations we formulate a novel hypothesis about the value of overconfidence. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to describe specialist ambulance nurse students’ experiences of ethical conflicts and dilemmas in prehospital emergency care. In the autumn of 2015, after participating in a mandatory lecture on ethics, 24 specialist ambulance nurse students reported experiences and interpretations concerning conflicts and ethical dilemmas from prehospital emergency care. The text consisted of 24 written critical incidents which were interpreted using hermeneutic text interpretation. The text revealed three themes: Not safeguarding a patient’s body and identity; Not (...) agreeing on the care actions; and Not treating the patient with dignity. The SANs experiences ethical dilemmas and conflict of values when they witness how others violate a patient’s dignity. Discussion and reflection is based on ethical conflicts and dilemmas experienced when students see how caregivers do not safeguard the patient’s body or identity. When caregivers have a conflicting will, it results in patients not being treated in an ethical manner. Also, seeing how caregivers put themselves in a power position over patients is described as an ethical dilemma that students experience when they choose not to intervene. (shrink)

According to the Argument from Disagreement (AD) widespread and persistent disagreement on ethical issues indicates that our moral opinions are not influenced by moral facts, either because there are no such facts or because there are such facts but they fail to influence our moral opinions. In an innovative paper, Gustafsson and Peterson (Synthese, published online 16 October, 2010) study the argument by means of computer simulation of opinion dynamics, relying on the well-known model of Hegselmann and Krause (J Artif (...) Soc Soc Simul 5(3):1–33, 2002; J Artif Soc Soc Simul 9(3):1–28, 2006). Their simulations indicate that if our moral opinions were influenced at least slightly by moral facts, we would quickly have reached consensus, even if our moral opinions were also affected by additional factors such as false authorities, external political shifts and random processes. Gustafsson and Peterson conclude that since no such consensus has been reached in real life, the simulation gives us increased reason to take seriously the AD. Our main claim in this paper is that these results are not as robust as Gustafsson and Peterson seem to think they are. If we run similar simulations in the alternative Laputa simulation environment developed by Angere and Olsson (Angere, Synthese, forthcoming and Olsson, Episteme 8(2):127–143, 2011) considerably less support for the AD is forthcoming. (shrink)

The coherentist theory of justification provides a response to the sceptical challenge: even though the independent processes by which we gather information about the world may be of dubious quality, the internal coherence of the information provides the justification for our empirical beliefs. This central canon of the coherence theory of justification is tested within the framework of Bayesian networks, which is a theory of probabilistic reasoning in artificial intelligence. We interpret the independence of the information gathering processes (IGPs) in (...) terms of conditional independences, construct a minimal sufficient condition for a coherence ranking of information sets and assess whether the confidence boost that results from receiving information through independent IGPs is indeed a positive function of the coherence of the information set. There are multiple interpretations of what constitute IGPs of dubious quality. Do we know our IGPs to be no better than randomization processes? Or, do we know them to be better than randomization processes but not quite fully reliable, and if so, what is the nature of this lack of full reliability? Or, do we not know whether they are fully reliable or not? Within the latter interpretation, does learning something about the quality of some IGPs teach us anything about the quality of the other IGPs? The Bayesian-network models demonstrate that the success of the coherentist canon is contingent on what interpretation one endorses of the claim that our IGPs are of dubious quality. (shrink)

Research programs regularly compete to achieve the same goal, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA or the construction of a TEA laser. The more the competing programs share information, the faster the goal is likely to be reached, to society’s benefit. But the “priority rule”-the scientific norm according to which the first program to reach the goal in question must receive all the credit for the achievement-provides a powerful disincentive for programs to share information. How, then, is (...) the clash between social and individual interest resolved in scientific practice? This chapter investigates what Robert Merton called science’s “communist” norm, which mandates universal sharing of knowledge, and uses mathematical models of discovery to argue that a communist regime may be on the whole advantageous and fair to all parties, and so might be implemented by a social contract that all scientists would be willing to sign. (shrink)

A representation theorem is obtained for contraction operators that are based on Levi's recent proposal that selection functions should be applied to the set of saturatable contractions, rather than to maximal subsets as in the AGM framework. Furthermore, it is shown that Levi's proposal to base the selection on a weakly monotonic measure of informational value guarantees the satisfaction of both of Gärdenfors' supplementary postulates for contraction. These results indicate that Levi has succeeded in constructing a well-behaved operation of contraction (...) that does not satisfy the postulate of recovery. (shrink)

Roger Lundin traces how pragmatism and its reliance on experience eclipsed nature and religion as the ultimate moral authority. He explores why Americans prize experience as highly as they do, what they build out of it in works of culture and their daily lives, how they manage to make sense of it, and where people might turn when they reach the limits of experience.

Roger Lundin traces how pragmatism and its reliance on experience eclipsed nature and religion as the ultimate moral authority. He explores why Americans prize experience as highly as they do, what they build out of it in works of culture and their daily lives, how they manage to make sense of it, and where people might turn when they reach the limits of experience.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.