Ethical issues related to comparative effectiveness research, or research that compares existing standards of care, have recently received considerable attention. In this paper we focus on how Ethics Review Committees should evaluate the risks of comparative effectiveness research. We discuss what has been a prominent focus in the debate about comparative effectiveness research, namely that it is justified when “nothing is known” about the comparative effectiveness of the available alternatives. We argue that this focus may be misleading. Rather, we (...) should focus on the fact that some experts believe that the evidence points in favor of one intervention, whereas other experts believe that the evidence favors the alternative. We will then introduce a case that illustrates this point, and based on that, discuss how ERCs should deal with such cases of expert disagreement. We argue that ERCs have a duty to assess the range of expert opinions and based on that assessment arrive at a risk judgment about the study under consideration. We also argue that assessment of expert disagreement is important for the assignment of risk level to a clinical trial: what is the basis for expert opinions, how strong is the evidence appealed to by various experts, and how can clinical trial monitoring affect the possible increased risk of clinical trial participation. (shrink)

This essay argues that the distinction between lying and misleading while not lying is sensitive to discourse structure. It shows that whether an utterance is a lie or is merely misleading sometimes depends on the topic of conversation, represented by so-called questions under discussion. It argues that to mislead is to disrupt the pursuit of the goal of inquiry—that is, to discover how things are. Lying is seen as a special case requiring assertion of disbelieved (...) information, where assertion is characterized as a mode of contributing information to a discourse that is sensitive to the state of the discourse itself. The resulting account is applied to a number of ways of exploiting the lying-misleading distinction, involving conversational implicature, incompleteness, presuppositions, and prosodic focus. The essay shows that assertion, and hence lying, is preserved from subquestion to superquestion under a strict entailment relation between questions, and it discusses ways of lying and misleading in relation to multiple questions. (shrink)

There is a growing interest in comparison of international health care data with the hope that such studies will enable individual systems to learn from other systems. Such comparisons, however, presuppose that there exist common criteria for evaluating health care systems. The main thesis of this paper is that these comparative studies are misleading because they employ inappropriate operationalizations of these criteria because the operarionalizations are based upon mistaken global conceptualizations of the criteria in question. The essay provides a (...) methodological critique of what has been done and sets a new agenda for future research. (shrink)

I give a new argument for the moral difference between lying and misleading. First, following David Lewis, I hold that conventions of truthfulness and trust fix the meanings of our language. These conventions generate fair play obligations. Thus, to fail to conform to the conventions of truthfulness and trust is unfair. Second, I argue that the liar, but not the misleader, fails to conform to truthfulness. So the liar, but not the misleader, does something unfair. This account entails (...) that bald-faced lies are wrong, that we can lie nonlinguistically, and that linguistic innovation is morally significant. (shrink)

We intuitively make a distinction between _lying_ and _misleading_. On the explanation of this phenomenon favored here—the _adverbial_ account—the distinction tracks whether the content and its truth-committing force are literally conveyed. On an alternative _commitment_ account, the difference between lying and misleading is predicated instead on the strength of assertoric commitment. One lies when one presents with full assertoric commitment what one believes to be false; one merely misleads when one presents it without full assertoric commitment, by merely (...) hinting or otherwise implying it. Now, as predicted by the well-supported assumption that we can also assert with pictures, the lying/misleading distinction appears to intuitively show up there too. Here I’ll explain how the debate confronting the two accounts plays out both in general and in that case, aiming to provide support for the adverbial account. (shrink)

This article discusses recent work on lying and its relation to deceiving and misleading. Two new developments in this area are considered: first, the acknowledgment of the phenomenon of lying without the intent to deceive , and second, recent work on the distinction between lying and merely misleading. Both are discussed in relation to topics in philosophy of language, the epistemology of testimony, and ethics. Critical surveys of recent theories are offered and challenges and open (...) questions for further research are indicated. (shrink)

I begin by discussing views about the permissibility of lying by political leaders. Sections II and III address historically important lies and lies about history and the historical record. These two categories overlap - some lies about the historical record were historically important events. In section IV, I discuss the related notion of half-truths and give examples of misleading/deceptive half-truths about history. In the final section of this chapter, I briefly discuss the obligations of historians to give truthful (...) accounts of historical events. (shrink)

Sam Berstler defends a general moral advantage for misleading over lying by arguing that liars, but not misleaders, act unfairly toward the other members of their linguistic community. This article spells out three difficulties for Berstler’s account. First, though Berstler aims to avoid an error theory, it is dubitable that her account fits with intuitions on the matter. Second, there are some lies that do not exhibit the unfairness Berstler identifies. Third, fairness is not the only morally relevant (...) difference between lying and misleading. (shrink)

Andreas Stokke presents a comprehensive study of lying and insincere language use. He investigates how lying relates to other forms of insincerity and explores the kinds of attitudes that go with insincere uses of language. -/- Part I develops an account of insincerity as a linguistic phenomenon. Stokke provides a detailed theory of the distinction between lying and speaking insincerely, and accounts for the relationship between lying and deceiving. A novel framework of assertion underpins the analysis (...) of various kinds of insincere speech, including false implicature and forms of misleading with presuppositions, prosodic focus, and semantic incompleteness. -/- Part II sets out the relationship between what is communicated and the speaker's attitudes. Stokke develops the view of insincerity as a shallow phenomenon that is dependent on conscious attitudes rather than deeper motivations. The various of ways of speaking while being indifferent toward what one communicates are covered, and the phenomenon of 'bullshitting' is distinguished from lying and other forms of insincerity. Finally, an account of insincere uses of interrogative, imperative, and exclamative utterances is also given. (shrink)

1. Lying -- 2. The problem of what is said -- 3. What is said -- 4. Is lying worse than merely misleading? -- 5. Some interesting cases.

An important moral category—dishonest speech—has been overlooked in theoretical ethics despite its importance in legal, political, and everyday social exchanges. Discussion in this area has instead been fixated on a binary debate over the contrast between lying and ‘merely misleading’. Some see lying as a distinctive wrong; others see it as morally equivalent to deliberately omitting relevant truths, falsely insinuating, or any other species of attempted verbal deception. Parties to this debate have missed the relevance to their (...) disagreement of the notion of communicative dishonesty. Communicative dishonesty need not take the form of a lie, yet its wrongness does not reduce to the wrongness of seeking to deceive. This paper therefore proposes a major shift of attention away from the lying/misleading debate and towards the topic of communicative dishonesty. Dishonesty is not a simple notion to define, however. It presupposes a difficult distinction between what is and is not expressed in a given utterance. This differs from the more familiar distinction between what is and is not said, the distinction at the heart of the lying/misleading debate. This paper uses an idea central to speech act theory to characterize dishonesty in terms of the utterer’s communicative intentions, and applies the resulting definition to a variety of contexts. (shrink)

The distinction between lying and mere misleading is commonly tied to the distinction between saying and conversationally implicating. Many definitions of lying are based on the idea that liars say something they believe to be false, while misleaders put forward a believed-false conversational implicature. The aim of this paper is to motivate, spell out, and defend an alternative approach, on which lying and misleading differ in terms of commitment: liars, but not misleaders, commit themselves to (...) something they believe to be false. This approach entails that lying and misleading involve speech-acts of different force. While lying requires the committal speech-act of asserting, misleading involves the non-committal speech-act of suggesting. The approach leads to a broader definition of lying that can account for lies that are told while speaking non-literally or with the help of presuppositions, and it allows for a parallel definition of misleading, which so far is lacking in the debate. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that lying differs from mere misleading in a way that can be morally relevant: liars commit themselves to something they believe to be false, while misleaders avoid such commitment, and this difference can make a moral difference. Even holding all else fixed, a lie can therefore be morally worse than a corresponding misleading utterance. But, we argue, there are also cases in which the difference in commitment makes lying (...) morally better than misleading, as well as cases in which the difference is not morally relevant. This view conflicts with the two main positions philosophers have defended in the ethics of lying and misleading, which entail either that lying is in virtue of its nature worse than misleading or that there is no morally relevant difference between lying and misleading. (shrink)

How can we capture the intuitive distinction between lying and misleading? According to a traditional view, the difference boils down to whether the speaker is saying (as opposed to implying) something that they believe to be false. This view is subject to known objections; to overcome them, an alternative view has emerged. For the alternative view, what matters is whether the speaker can consistently deny that they are committed to knowing the relevant proposition. We point out serious flaws (...) for this alternative view, and sketch a simpler alternative that incorporates key insights of the traditional view. (shrink)

This study investigated attitudes toward the use of deception in negotiation, with particular attention to the distinction between deception regarding the informational elements of the interaction (e.g., lying about or misrepresenting needs or preferences) and deception about emotional elements (e.g., misrepresenting one's emotional state). We examined how individuals judge the relative ethical appropriateness of these alternative forms of deception, and how these judgments relate to negotiator performance and long-run reputation. Individuals viewed emotionally misleading tactics as more ethically appropriate (...) to use in negotiation than informational deception. Approval of deception predicted negotiator performance in a negotiation simulation and also general reputation as a negotiator, but the nature of these relationships depended on the kind of deception involved. (shrink)

Salvaging the Concept of Nudge 1 makes a number of good points about how the concept of a nudge should be understood, and a number of important distinctions in specifying more precisely the important idea of freedom of choice. As Saghai suggests, this is a first cut, and more work needs to be done in clarifying the issues so as to make the idea of a nudge a useful tool for policy purposes.In this Commentary, I want to explore some of (...) the difficulties that remain in getting a clear understanding of the ideas used to clarify the idea of freedom of choice, in particular, the idea that some influences are easily resistible and some are not. In particular, I am interested in the use of various deceptive modes such as lying, failure to disclose and misleading utterances. I believe that there is an important ambiguity in thinking about these deceptive modes which throws some doubt on the adequacy of the idea of resistibility.The key definitions are the following:Substantial Non-control: A's influence to get B to α is substantially non-controlling when B could easily not α if she did not want to α.Easy resistibility: A's influence is easily resistible if B is able to effortlessly oppose the …. (shrink)

This paper discusses a novel kind of argument for assessing the moral significance of acts of lying and misleading. It is based on considerations about valuable social norms that might be eroded by these actions, because these actions function as signals. Given that social norms can play an important role in supporting morality, individuals have a responsibility to preserve such norms and to prevent ‘cultural slopes’ that erode them. Depending on whether there are norms against lying, (...) class='Hi'>misleading, or both, and how likely it is that they might be eroded, these actions can thus have different moral significance. In cases in which the rule ‘do not lie’, as a relatively simple rule, functions as a ‘focal point’, acts of misleading are often morally preferable. In other words, in such cases the possibility of ‘cultural slopes’ can ground a context-dependent slippery slope argument for a moral difference between lying and misleading. (shrink)

One recurrent objection against minimalism is that minimal contents have no theoretical role. It has recently been argued that minimal contents serve to draw the distinction between lying and misleading. In Sect. 1 and Sect. 2 I summarise the main argument in support of that claim and contend that it is inconclusive. In Sect. 3 I discuss some cases of lying and some of misleading that raise difficulties for minimalism. In Sect. 4 I make a diagnosis (...) of the failure of minimalism with those cases. In Sect. 5 I strengthen the case against minimal contents by addressing two received says-based definitions of lying. My analysis of the failure of minimalism suggests that the distinction between lying and misleading, at least in some important cases, calls for a kind of utterance content that is grounded on conventions of language. (shrink)

Sam Berstler has recently argued for a fairness-based moral difference between lying and misleading. According to Berstler, the liar, but not the misleader, unfairly free rides on the Lewisian conventions which ground public-language meaning. Although compelling, the pragmatic and metasemantic backdrop within which this moral reason is located allows for the generation of a vicious explanatory circle. Simply, this backdrop entails that no speaker has ever performed an assertion. As I argue, escaping the circle requires rejecting Berstler’s fairness-based (...) reason against lying. The problem is a general one: the wrong of lying cannot be founded on the goods of language. (shrink)

Browne 1 (this issue ) argues that what may appear to be a benevolent practice-disclosing the sex of a fetus to expecting parents who wish to know-is in fact an epistemically problematic and, as a result, ethically questionable medical practice. Browne worries that not only will the disclosure of fetal sex encourage sex-selective abortions (an issue we will not take up here), but also that it will convey a misleading and pernicious message about the relationship between sex and gender. (...) More specifically, she contends that the practice of disclosure is problematic because (1) it purports to establish the gender of the developing baby based on information about the baby's sex, whereas this is not a warranted inference because while sex is determined by biological factors, gender is determined by social factors and (2) it conflates (biological) sex with (social) gender or encourages such conflation or reduction and thereby promotes 'essentialistic' thinking about gender that is closely linked to sexism and social injustice. If (1) is true, then disclosing fetal sex amounts to misinforming or misleading prospective parents-and since misinforming patients is wrong, the act of disclosing is also wrong. However, beyond the wrongs of misinforming patients, the practice also perpetuates the harms associated with a rigidly gendered society through endorsing the message in (2), thus lending the authority of the medical profession to the gender-essentialist ideas that have underpinned, and continue to drive, sexism and social injustice. This analysis leads Browne to recommend that clinicians be prohibited from informing parents about the sex of their developing fetus. -/- We agree with Browne that gender essentialism-the notion that 'femaleness' and 'maleness' carve out distinct natural classes with innate, immutable properties-is not only a false metaphysical thesis, but also a pernicious idea insofar as the sexist attitudes it fosters motivate policies that systematically violate the human rights of women, as well as those of the LGBTQ community. However, we do not think that the disclosure of fetal sex misinforms prospective parents about the gender of their baby, nor do we believe that such disclosure presupposes or promotes gender essentialism properly understood. (shrink)

This volume provides new insights on lying and (intentionally) misleading in and out of the courtroom, a timely topic for scholarship and society. Not all deceptive statements are lies; not every lie under oath amounts to perjury---but what are the relevant criteria? Taxonomies of falsehood based on illocutionary force, utterance context and speakers' intentions have been debated by linguists, moral philosophers, social psychologists and cognitive scientists. Legal scholars have examined the boundary between actual perjury and garden-variety lies. The (...) fourteen previously unpublished essays in this book apply theoretical and empirical tools to delineate the landscape of falsehood, half-truth, perjury, and verbal manipulation, including puffery, bluffing, and bullshit. The papers in this collection address conceptual and ethical aspects of lying vs. misleading and the correlation of this opposition with the Gricean pragmatic distinction between what is said and what is implicated. The questions of truth and lies addressed in this volume have long engaged the attention of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, organizational research, and the law, and researchers from all these fields will find this book of interest. (shrink)

Prior stock repurchase studies have found evidence that the announcement of a repurchase program sends a positive signal to the market. Firms engaging in open-market repurchase programs do not have to report how, when, and if they actually repurchased any shares. Evidence following the stock market crash of 1987 indicates that many firms announcing repurchase plans did not actually repurchase any share and, by their own admission, had no intention of repurchasing shares. Companies announcing plans and not following through are (...) apparently within the letter of the law. However, we argue that companies announcing plans with no intention of repurchasing shares are guilty of either lying or sending false signals. These companies create distrust in the investment community and intentionally mislead the public in violation of the SEC's antifraud provisions. Changes in the reporting procedures concerning repurchase plans are ethically and legally warranted. (shrink)

Partial lying denotes the cases where we partially believe something to be false but nevertheless assert it with the intent to deceive the addressee. We investigate how the severity of partial lying may be determined and how partial lies can be classified. We also study how much epistemic damage an agent suffers depending on the level of trust that she invests in the liar and the severity of the lies she is told. Our analysis is based on the (...) results from exploratory computer simulations of an arguably rational Bayesian agent who is trying to determine how biased a coin is while observing the coin tosses and listening to a liar’s misleading predictions about the outcomes. Our results provide an interesting testable hypothesis at the intersection of epistemology and ethics, namely that in the longer term partial lies lead to more epistemic damage than outright lies. (shrink)

Are philosophers regularly led into error by misleading pictures, grammatical appearances, illusions and fictions? An affirmative answer to this question lies at the heart of the writings of the later Wittgenstein on mind and language. Another affirmative answer was given much earlier by Anton Marty. The two Austrian philosophers think that philosophers regularly succumb to certain temptations which lie in natural language. Many of the examples given by the two philosophers are indeed the same. I set out the similarities (...) between the two accounts of misleading pictures and argue that many aspects of the two accounts can be defended independently of the very different conceptions of the philosophy of Marty and Wittgenstein. The paper shows how important it is to consider Wittgenstein’s Austrian predecessors if he is to be understood. (shrink)

This volume provides new insights on lying and (intentionally) misleading in and out of the courtroom, a timely topic for scholarship and society. Not all deceptive statements are lies; not every lie under oath amounts to perjury--but what are the relevant criteria? Taxonomies of falsehood based on illocutionary force, utterance context and speakers' intentions have been debated by linguists, moral philosophers, social psychologists and cognitive scientists. Legal scholars have examined the boundary between actual perjury and garden-variety lies. The (...) fourteen previously unpublished essays in this book apply theoretical and empirical tools to delineate the landscape of falsehood, half-truth, perjury, and verbal manipulation, including puffery, bluffing, and bullshit. The papers in this collection address conceptual and ethical aspects of lying vs. misleading and the correlation of this opposition with the Gricean pragmatic distinction between what is said and what is implicated. The questions of truth and lies addressed in this volume have long engaged the attention of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, organizational research, and the law, and researchers from all these fields will find this book of interest. (shrink)

Business success depends on the ability to build trust. Trusted brands succeed and sustain. Trusted leaders inspire followers, grow companies, revenues, and futures. But sadly, deceit has infected business and become widespread. Far too many leaders now use their own 'alternative facts', to mislead and mis-inform their customers, colleagues, and communities. The skilfulness and ease with which some leaders now lie has become a Lie-Ability. And when customers stop trusting the products, services, or the stories a leader tells, then the (...) business suffers. If business leaders don't lead a truth renaissance, we are all lost. People no longer trust politicians or the media. And many of the institutions and professions we used to turn to have also lost trust. The only people that can really save us now are business leaders. We need to become truth advocates and activists. We must re-establish a new norm where we tell the truth to ourselves, to our employees, to our shareholders, to our customers and to society at large. This book explores the 7 Deadly Lies that business tells itself, the 7 Dark Arts of Deception that are still used with monotonous regularity to manipulate the narrative. We offer C-suite leaders and senior managers a clear path out of deceit. We offer a solution to the Lie-Ability of some leaders by developing a deeper understanding of truth, how to reclaim it and how to build back trust. (shrink)

It is widely held that all lies are assertions: the traditional definition of lying entails that, in order to lie, speakers have to assert something they believe to be false. It is also widely held that assertion contrasts with presupposition and, in particular, that one cannot assert something by presupposing it. Together, these views imply that speakers cannot lie with presuppositions—a view that Andreas Stokke has recently explicitly defended. The aim of this paper is to argue that speakers can (...) lie with presuppositions, and to discuss some of the implications this outcome has for current research on lying, assertion and presupposition. (shrink)

The World Medical Association’s revised Declaration of Helsinki endorses the view that all trial participants in every country are entitled to the worldwide best standard of care. In this paper the authors show that this requirement has been rejected by every national and international committee that has examined this issue. They argue that the consensus view now holds that it is ethically permissible, in some circumstances, to provide research participants less than the worldwide best care. Finally, the authors show that (...) there is also consensus regarding the broad conditions under which this is acceptable. (shrink)

Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed‐false claims, for instance by (...) merely conversationally implicating them. In this paper, we subject this claim to an empirical test. In a preregistered study of 300 participants, we investigate how people judge cases of implicit deceptions that would usually be excluded by the traditional definition of lying (i.e., conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and nonverbal actions). Our results show that people do in fact consider it possible to lie by indirect means, suggesting that people have a broader concept of lying than is usually assumed. Moreover, our findings indicate that lie judgments are closely tied to the extent to which agents are perceived as having committed themselves to the believed‐false claims they have communicated. We discuss the implications of our results for the traditional definition of lying and propose a new commitment‐based definition of lying that can account for the findings of our experiment. (shrink)

There is a clear intuitive difference between lying and attempting to mislead. Recent efforts to analyse this difference, and to define lying in ways that respect it, are motivated by the conviction that the difference is important or significant in some way. Traditionally, the importance of the lying-misleading distinction has been cashed out in moral terms, but this approach faces a number of challenges. The purpose of this paper is to suggest and develop a different way (...) in which the lying-misleading distinction might be important: it might matter aesthetically. I propose that the aesthetic significance of the distinction inheres in a more prominent experienced disharmony in lying as compared with attempting to mislead. (shrink)

Saying too little and saying too much : critical notice of Lying, Misleading, and What is Said by Jennifer Saul.

This paper analyses Steven Vogel's claim that his account of a post-natural environmental philosophy solves the dualism problem within the field. Through what I will call a novel critique of social constructionism, this paper examines whether Vogel's attempt succeeds or whether it reinforces the problem he wants to solve. Could the ontological foundations of social constructivism themselves be in conflict with Vogel's stated aim of overcoming the human/nature dualism? The last part of the paper focuses on the significance and role (...) of a post-natural environmental philosophy for the field of environmental philosophy in general. (shrink)

This article explores possibilities for establishing dialogues between feminism and constructivism in the field of technology studies. Based on an overview of Norwegian feminist debates about technology, it indicates several points where feminism and constructivism meet and can mutually benefit from each other. The article critically examines feminist studies questioning the problems of technological determinism, social deternacnism, and essentialism. It criticizes constructivism for a lack of concern for gender and politics but holds that it is still possible to use theoretical (...) tools from constructivism in feminist analyses. Fruitful dialogues require the application of the principle of symmetry to the dcalogues and sharing some common ground and mutual recognation of each other's strengths and weaknesses. (shrink)

The current study uses a two-wave longitudinal survey to explores the influence mechanism of the family environment on adolescents’ academic achievement. The family environment is measured by parents and children’s reports, including family atmosphere, parent–child interaction, and family rules, to reveal the mediating effect of adolescents’ positive or negative peers between the family environment and academic achievement, and whether the gap between self- and parental educational expectation plays a moderating effect. This study uses the data of the China Education Panel (...) Study ; the survey samples include 9,449 eighth-grade students, establishing a multilevel moderated mediating effect model. The results showed the family environment and peer interaction quality can positively predict adolescents’ academic achievement. Using the KHB test, peer interaction quality plays a partial mediating role in the process of family environment positively affecting academic achievement, and the mediating ratio is 27.5%. The educational expectation gap moderates the effect of the family environment on academic achievement and also on peer interaction quality. Therefore, from the perspective of environment and important others, to correctly grasp the academic achievement of junior high school students in the process of socialization, it is necessary to recognize that the family environment, peer interaction quality, and educational expectation gap play an important role. (shrink)

The article analyses the debate on egg donation in Norway using source material from the parliamentary debate of amendments to the Biotechnology Law. In both policy documents on bioethics and the Biotechnology Law, gender is not a spoken issue, but bringing egg and sperm directly to the fore highlights how gender is implicated in bioethics debates. Gender perceptions affect the understanding of `what egg and sperm may do' at the same time as the debate sets established perceptions of gender in (...) motion. In Norway, gender equality is a valid and important premise within the general political debate. It is, however, contested as a valid argument in the context of egg donation, which therefore becomes a field of negotiations about the limits of equal opportunities. The article analyses the egg donation debate as a process of cultural co-production and asks how the Norwegian emphasis on gender equality influences the debate on egg donation and, vice versa, how debates of assisted reproductive technology reopen debates on gender in relation to reproduction and parenthood. (shrink)

Franke, Dulcinati and Pouscoulous also examine a form of covert lying, by considering to what extent speakers use implicatures to deceive their addressee. The participants in their online signaling game had to describe a card, which a virtual coplayer then had to select. When the goal was to deceive rather than help the coplayer, participants produced more false descriptions (overt lies), but also more uninformative descriptions (covert lies by means of an implicature). [73].

In this paper, the author argues that the requirement to conduct randomised clinical trials to inform policy in cases where one wants to identify a cheaper alternative to known effective but expensive interventions raises an important ethical issue. This situation will eventually arise whenever there are resource constraints, and a policy decision has been made not to fund an intervention on cost effectiveness grounds. It has been thought that this is an issue only in extremely resource poor settings. This paper (...) gives an example from the United Kingdom illustrating that this is also a problem faced by richer countries. (shrink)

With a specific example from Norway and inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, this article demonstrates how today’s educational rhetoric lacks the language and will to recognise a key pedagogical dimension in education: what happens when the normative ambitions of education and students meet. At best, teaching students life skills to mitigate their mental health issues is naive. Inspired by Ahmed, such an initiative might actually work against its purpose. At a time when educational outcomes are emphasised in (...) local and international political contexts, I argue that the task of philosophy of education should be 1) to reclaim the significance of the pedagogical dimension in education and 2) to philosophise on what negative emotions such as unhappiness require of education. (shrink)

One of the recent trends in dealing with the concept of lying has been to argue that the idea that one needs to deceive someone in order to lie has been accepted too hastily. In Lying and Insincerity Stokke shares this opinion and proposes a definition of lying based on the notion of common ground that includes bald-faced lies. Additionally, he rejects the idea that lying can be accomplished with pragmatic means such as conversational implicatures and (...) proposes a formal distinction between lying and misleading. In this review, I present the content of Stokke’s book and critically discuss the two points mentioned above. (shrink)

ArgumentDuring the 1950s it became apparent that antibiotics could not conquer all microbes, and a series of tests were developed to assess the susceptibility of microbes to antibiotics. This article explores the development and standardization of one such testing procedure which became dominant in the Nordic region, and how the project eventually failed in the late 1970s. The standardization procedures amounted to a comprehensive scheme, standardizing not only the materials used, but also the methods and the interpretation of the results. (...) Focusing on Sweden and Norway in particular, the article shows how this comprehensive standardization procedure accounted for several co-dependent factors and demanded collaboration within and across laboratories. Whereas literature on standardization has focused mostly on how facts and artefacts move within and across laboratories, I argue for the importance of also attending to regions and territories. More particularly, while arguing that the practices, ideals, and politics related to what have been called the “Nordic welfare state” were contributing to the design of the standardized procedure in the laboratory, I also argue that Scandinavia was drawn together as a unified region with and by these very same practices. (shrink)