ABSTRACTAlthough social anxiety symptoms are robustly linked to biased self-evaluations across time, the mechanisms of this relation remain unclear. The present study tested three maladaptive emotion regulation strategies – state post-event processing, state experiential avoidance, and state expressive suppression – as potential mediators of this relation. Undergraduate participants rated their social skill in an impromptu conversation task and then returned to the laboratory approximately two days later to evaluate their social skill in the conversation again. Consistent with expectations, state post-event (...) processing and state experiential avoidance mediated the relation between social anxiety symptoms and worsening self-evaluations of social skill, particularly for positive qualities. State expressive suppression did not mediate the relation between social anxiety symptoms and cha... (shrink)

High-profile failures in financial trading have led to interest in how the culture of the industry produces risky and unethical behaviours among traders. Yet, there is no established theoretical framework for studying this: we apply safety culture theory to examine ten recent high-profile trading mishaps investigated by the UK financial regulator. The results show that the dimensions of safety culture used to understand organisational accidents in domains such as aviation also explain failures in Risk Management within financial trading organisations. This (...) counters narratives focusing on traders who are unethical ‘rule breakers’, and emphasises the value of a systemic approach, whereby safety culture theory is used to explain why risky behaviours in financial trading occur. Safety culture therefore provides a conceptual basis for further research on risky and unethical behaviours in financial trading, alongside providing insights for possible intervention. (shrink)

This book provides a theoretical and practical exploration of the constitutional bar against cruel and unusual punishments, excessive bail, and excessive fines. It explores the history of this prohibition, the current legal doctrine, and future applications of the Eighth Amendment. With contributions from the leading academics and experts on the Eighth Amendment and the wide range of punishments and criminal justice actors it touches, this volume addresses constitutional theory, legal history, federalism, constitutional values, the applicable legal doctrine, punishment theory, prison (...) conditions, bail, fines, the death penalty, juvenile life without parole, execution methods, prosecutorial misconduct, race discrimination, and law & science. (shrink)

In this issue, Morain and Largent (2023) raise a pressing issue arising in the context of embedded research—the nature and extent of investigator duties to patient-participants when the line betwee...

The debate between legal constitutionalists and critics of constitutional rights and judicial review is an old and lively one. While the protection of minorities is a pivotal aspect of this debate, the protection of disenfranchised minorities has received little attention. Policy-focused discussion—of the merits of the Human Rights Act in Britain for example—often cites protection of non-citizen migrants, but the philosophical debate does not. Non-citizen residents or ‘denizens’ therefore provide an interesting test case for the theory of rights as trumps (...) on ordinary representative politics. Are they the ultimate success story of the human rights framework? Or was Michael Walzer correct to describe government of denizens by citizens as a modern form of ‘tyranny’? This paper argues that neither liberal rights theorists nor democratic republicans provide a coherent response to the existence of denizens. Liberal rights theorists overstate the extent to which a politically powerless status can secure individual rights, while democratic republicans idealise the political process and wrongly assume that all those affected by laws are eligible for political participation. The paper outlines an alternative model for assessing the accountability of states to their non-citizen population, informed by the republican ideal of non-domination. It identifies gaps in state accountability to denizens–such as where there is inadequate diplomatic protection—and argues that these gaps are particularly troubling if their exit costs of leaving the state are high. (shrink)

Indirect speech acts—responding “I forgot to wear my watch today” to someone who asked for the time—are ubiquitous in daily conversation, but are understudied in current neurobiological models of language. To comprehend an indirect speech act like this one, listeners must not only decode the lexical-semantic content of the utterance, but also make a pragmatic, bridging inference. This inference allows listeners to derive the speaker’s true, intended meaning—in the above dialog, for example, that the speaker cannot provide the time. In (...) the present work, we address this major gap by asking non-aphasic patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and brain-damaged controls with amnestic mild cognitive impairment to judge simple question-answer dialogs of the form: “Do you want some cake for dessert?” “I’m on a very strict diet right now,” and relate the results to structural and diffusion MRI. Accuracy and reaction time results demonstrate that subjects with bvFTD, but not MCI, are selectively impaired in indirect relative to direct speech act comprehension, due in part to their social and executive limitations, and performance is related to caregivers’ judgment of communication efficacy. MRI imaging associates the observed impairment in bvFTD to cortical thinning not only in traditional language-associated regions, but also in fronto-parietal regions implicated in social and executive cerebral networks. Finally, diffusion tensor imaging analyses implicate white matter tracts in both dorsal and ventral projection streams, including superior longitudinal fasciculus, frontal aslant, and uncinate fasciculus. These results have strong implications for updated neurobiological models of language, and emphasize a core, language-mediated social disorder in patients with bvFTD. (shrink)

This article examines the role of historical science in clarifying the causal structure of complex natural processes. I reject the pervasive view that historical science does not uncover natural regularities. To show why, I consider an important methodological distinction in geology between uniformitarianism and actualism; methodological actualism, the preferred method of geologists, often relies on historical reconstructions to test the stability of currently observed processes. I provide several case studies that illustrate this, including one that highlights how historical narratives can (...) improve predictive models. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue, contra Prinz, that empathy is a crucial component of our moral lives. In particular, I argue that empathy is sometimes epistemologically necessary for identifying the right action; that empathy is sometimes psychologically necessary for motivating the agent to perform the right action; and that empathy is sometimes necessary for the agent to be most morally praiseworthy for an action. I begin by explaining what I take empathy to be. I then discuss some alleged problems (...) for empathy and explain why some argue that empathy is unnecessary and sometimes even problematic in the moral domain. Next, I criticize a prominent alternative to an empathy-based morality. Finally, I argue that that empathy is sometimes epistemologically and psychologically necessary for doing the right thing and is sometimes necessary for moral worth. I conclude with a discussion of the important role of empathy in our everyday lives. (shrink)

Should you care less about your distant future? What about events in your life that have already happened? How should the passage of time affect your planning and assessment of your life? Most of us think it is irrational to ignore the future but harmless to dismiss the past. But this book argues that rationality requires temporal neutrality.

Artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers her first-person perspective of entanglements of light and air during the 2020–21 pandemic from her position in academia and Florida.

Various authors have attempted to understand knowledge-wh—or knowledge ascriptions that include an interrogative complement. I present and explain some of the analyses offered so far and argue that each view faces some problems. I then present and explain a newanalysis of knowledge-wh that avoids these problems and that offers several other advantages. Finally I raise some problems for invariantism about knowledge-wh and I argue thatcontextualism about knowledge-wh fits nicely with a very natural understanding of the nature of questions.

In this issue, Lynch and colleagues discuss lessons learned from the “Operation Warp Speed” response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States—both about what to do and what not to do fo...

Rare genetic diseases collectively impact millions of individuals in the United States. These patients and their families share many challenges including delayed diagnosis, lack of knowledgeable providers, and limited economic incentives to develop new therapies for small patient groups. As such, rare disease patients and families often must rely on advocacy, including both self-advocacy to access clinical care and public advocacy to advance research. However, these demands raise serious concerns for equity, as both care and research for a given disease (...) can depend on the education, financial resources, and social capital available to the patients in a given community. In this article, we utilize three case examples to illustrate ethical challenges at the intersection of rare diseases, advocacy and justice, including how reliance on advocacy in rare disease may drive unintended consequences for equity. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities for diverse stakeholders to begin to address these challenges. (shrink)

The work of science is a linguistic act. However, like history and philosophy of science, language has frequently been isolated from science content due to factors such as school departmentalization and narrow definitions of what it means to teach, know, and do science. This conceptual article seeks to recognize and recognize—to understand and yet rethink—science content in light of the vision of science expected by academic standards. Achieving that vision requires new perspectives in science teaching and teacher education that look (...) into the role that science language expectations play in science content. These perspectives reposition attention to language from a hidden, overlooked, or outsourced aspect of science teaching, to one at its core. To help bring teachers and teacher educators into this integrative view of science content, this article offers a mirror, a prism, and a lens as three metaphorical tools to explore the essential roles that language plays for, in, and as science content. The reflection, refraction, and refocusing of science content reveal complex science language expectations that function alongside facts, figures, and formulas of science as gatekeeping mechanisms that, once noticed, cannot be ignored or marginalized in science teaching and science teacher education. (shrink)

Religious pluralism (the view that all the great world religions are equally true) is largely motivated by the fear that religious exclusivism ( the view that there is just one correct religion) leads to intolerance and oppression of those holding differing religious views. I claim that this suggests a false dichotomy: either be a tolerant pluralist or an intolerant exclusivist. I argue, first, that the seventeenth-century doctrine of toleration supports the claim that exclusivists of differing sects can peacefully coexist and, (...) second, that religious pluralism has harmful consequences. Exclusivism (tempered by toleration) is the best solution to the challenge of religious diversity. (shrink)

Philosophers like to worry about luck. And well they should. Luck poses potential difficulties for knowledge, moral appraisal, and freedom. The primary target of this paper will be the last of these concerns . Recent arguments from luck have been levied against libertarian accounts of free will, including agent-causal ones. One general goal of this paper will be to demonstrate the truth of an often overlooked claim about responsibility-undermining luck. Part of this task will include illustrating what is genuinely worrisome (...) about luck in the context of free will. It will turn out that the problem is not fundamentally a problem of explanation. Another aim will be to argue that the truth of this claim about luck reveals a problem for event-causal libertarianism but has yet to reveal a problem for the agent-causal view. For the purposes of this paper, it will be assumed that luck does indeed undermine free action and moral responsibility. But it will be argued that agent-caused actions have not been shown to be "lucky.". (shrink)

Timothy Williamson thinks that every object is a necessary, eternal existent. In defense of his view, Williamson appeals primarily to considerations from modal and tense logic. While I am uncertain about his modal claims, I think there are good metaphysical reasons to believe permanentism: the principle that everything always exists. B-theorists of time and change have long denied that objects change with respect to unqualified existence. But aside from Williamson, nearly all A-theorists defend temporaryism: the principle that there are temporary (...) existents. I think A-theorists are better off without this added commitment, but I will not argue for that in any great detail here. Instead, I will contend that a very tempting A-theoretic argument for temporaryism is unsound. In the first half of the paper, I will develop the Moorean “common sense” argument for temporaryism and dispute its central premise, namely that temporaryism is a valid generalization from highly plausible beliefs about change. I will argue that given the pervasive vagueness in our ordinary beliefs about change and the background commitments of all A-theories, no party can claim to be the common sense view because no party can accommodate most of our common sense beliefs about change in existence. In the second half of the paper, I will propose a permanentist A-theory that explains all change over time as a species of property change. I call it the minimal A-theory, since it dispenses with the change in existence assumption. As we'll see, the permanentist alternative performs well enough in explaining our ordinary beliefs about change, and it has better prospects for answering some objections commonly levied against A-theories. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against Peter van Inwagen’s claim (in “Free Will Remains a Mystery”), that agent-causal views of free will could do nothing to solve the problem of free will (specifically, the problem of chanciness). After explaining van Inwagen’s argument, I argue that he does not consider all possible manifestations of the agent-causal position. More importantly, I claim that, in any case, van Inwagen appears to have mischaracterized the problem in some crucial ways. Once we are clear on (...) the true nature of the problem of chanciness, agent-causal views do much to eradicate it. (shrink)

Many studies focused on the letter and sound co-occurrences to account for the well-documented syllable-based effects in French in visual (pseudo)word processing. Although these language-specific statistical properties are crucial, recent data suggest that studies which go all-in on phonological and orthographic regularities may be misguided in interpreting how – and why – readers locate syllable boundaries and segment clusters. Indeed, syllable-based effects could depend on more abstract, universal phonological constraints that rule and govern how letter and sound occur and co-occur, (...) and readers could be sensitive to sonority – a universal phonological element – for processing (pseudo)words. Here, we investigate whether French adult skilled readers rely on universal phonological sonority-related markedness continuum across the syllable boundaries for segmentation (e.g., from marked, illegal intervocalic clusters /zl/ to unmarked, legal intervocalic clusters /lz/). To address this question, we ran two tasks with 128 French adult skilled readers using two versions of the illusory conjunction paradigm (Task 1 without white noise; Task 2 with white noise). Our results show that syllable location and segmentation in reading is early and automatically modulated by phonological sonority-related markedness in the absence or quasi-absence of statistical information, and does not require acoustic-phonetic information. We discuss our results towards the overlooked role of phonological universals and the over-trusted role of statistical information during reading processes. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Why so Blue? Women and the Blues Stealing the Blues Conclusion Notes.

Pulling from theories of social exchange, deonance, and fairness heuristics, this study focuses on the relationship between overall justice climate and both the prosocial and deviant behaviors of groups. Specifically, it considers two contextual boundary conditions on this effect—corporate social responsibility and group moral identity. Results from a laboratory experiment are presented, which show a significant effect for overall justice climate and a two-way interaction between overall justice climate and CSR on group-level prosocial and deviant behaviors, and a marginally significant (...) interaction of group moral identity with overall justice climate on group deviance. The implications of contextual influences on workplace ethics and justice are discussed. (shrink)

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience is a transcript of a video, a chapter in an interdisciplinary research project. Artist Meghan Moe Beitiks interviewed people with personal or pro...

The work of Sankary et al. (2022) provides valuable insights into the experiences of participants exiting brain device research. Empirical bioethics research such as this is critical to understandi...

A-theorists think there is a fundamental difference between the present and other times. This concern shows up in what kinds of properties they take to be instantiated, what objects they think exist and how they formalize their views. Nearly every contemporary A-theorist assumes that her metaphysics requires a tense logic – a logic with operators like and. In this paper, I show that there is at least one viable A-theory that does not require a logic with tense operators. And I (...) will argue that three common indispensability arguments for tense operators are unsound. (shrink)

The question of whether humans are free to make their own decisions has long been debated and it continues to be a controversial topic today. In _Free Will: The Basics_ readers are provided with a clear and accessible introduction to this central but challenging philosophical problem. The questions which are discussed include: Does free will exist? Or is it illusory? Can we be free even if everything is determined by a chain of causes? If our actions are not determined, does (...) this mean they are just random or a matter of luck? In order to have the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility, must we have alternatives? What can recent developments in science tell us about the existence of free will? Because these questions are discussed without prejudicing one view over others and all technical terminology is clearly explained, this book is an ideal introduction to free will for the uninitiated._ _. (shrink)

Power is widely acknowledged as central to Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy. There is ongoing debate over whether singular human beings or, instead, plural relationships, are the true source of power. After tracing the debate between the individualist and relationist interpretations, I offer an alternative option which, I argue, can accommodate both the individual and the relation together. Hobbesian power, I contend, is an appearance of a human being as having a means to satisfy his desires and, hence, while power belongs (...) to an individual, it only appears in relation to another who recognizes him as such. In closing, I reflect on the political implications of this notion of power in connection with desire. (shrink)

Hobbes's justification for original maternal dominion is often evaluated in connection to the ambiguous status of women in his political thought. Many feminist interpreters explain this ambiguity as a contradiction: following Carole Pateman, they see maternal dominion as one term of the “paradox of parental power.” The first aim of this article is to elaborate a second, alternative approach within some critical responses to Pateman's reading. Rather than as one part of a contradiction, in these interpretations maternal dominion emerges as (...) a self-standing form of authority that is very different from patriarchal domination. By offering a new synthesis of some of these interpretations, I aim to show this second view as more comprehensive and compelling than that offered by Pateman. Then, building upon this view, I give a new reading of the concept of preservation that establishes the mother's dominion as an intersubjective practice that reflects an awareness about the interdependent conditions for human well-being and, hence, challenges the standard approach to Hobbesian individualism and sovereign power. Finally, drawing from my interpretation of preservation, I offer a new way to understand Hobbes's argument that “parental authority is derived from the child's consent.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History: From Hobbes to Marx by David JamesMeghan RobisonDavid James. Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History: From Hobbes to Marx. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 256. Hardback, $70.00.In his newest monograph, David James offers an elaborate, well-wrought reflection on human freedom and its limits by considering five canonical modern philosophers: Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Judging from the table of contents, the book (...) appears to be a work in the history of philosophy: each of the chronologically organized chapters examines a different aspect of necessity, history, and freedom in one of the five philosophers just mentioned. By focusing on those thinkers, James tracks a progression in the modern reflection on the nature of freedom and its relation to constraint. Specifically, he argues that such a progression culminates, with Marx, in finally getting the right understanding of the relation between freedom and two kinds of necessity—one practical, the other historical. This is an extremely ambitious book, and its scope is extensive: by its end, James has considered more than thirty philosophical works spanning nearly two hundred years. Yet, even though it makes several contributions to various longstanding scholarly debates, Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History is not a work of intellectual history. Its main seven chapters—each of which offers a richly complex interpretative analysis that is sure to challenge any reader, even a specialist—are preceded by an introduction that explains that the book's aim is to contribute to a vision of society where necessity and freedom are reconciled. This aim is not a mere framing device but structures the book's contents as well its interpretive method.On James's account, the project of reconciling freedom with necessity—which was initiated by Rousseau in the eighteenth century and then developed by each of the modern philosophers examined in this book (with the exception of Hobbes [9])—remains incomplete. James explains this incompleteness as in part due to the success of the "two-liberties" conception of freedom outlined by Isaiah Berlin which he understands as the "liberal" idea according to which liberty begins and ends where others are prohibited from interfering in one's freedom and the "neo-republican" idea according to which the mere threat of domination is a constraint on freedom. Both views of liberty are essentially negative, James argues, and also deficient because they entail an impoverished and incorrect idea of constraint. To get beyond this viewpoint, James proposes to augment the idea of constraint that such a viewpoint entails by including both additional forms of practical constraint and a positive idea of freedom as self-determination (1). James explains the importance of the concept of self-determination by stressing the role it played in "gaining control over social and historical conditions and forces that generate avoidable practical constraints on human agency that may or may not interfere in people's lives" (2). To this end, he locates a productive tension between freedom as self-determination and practical constraint: the former is limited by the latter which, at the same time, it seeks to abolish. The "two-liberties" view cannot grasp this tension, James argues, because, in tying agency back to a "clearly identifiable agent," it overlooks the plural nature of freedom (2). In short, freedom and necessity remain unreconciled because we have not understood the nature of constraint and its relation to freedom as self-determination.James seeks to fill this "knowledge gap" by returning to what Kant, Hegel, and Marx said on freedom and necessity (both practical and historical) when they reflected on the transition to a society in which freedom and necessity are eventually reconciled. Specifically, James tries to identify new possibilities implicit in those three thinkers' accounts and to "kick the tires," so to speak, by looking for holes in their understanding of practical necessity. In particular, he focuses on what Kant's, Hegel's, and Marx's understanding of freedom and necessity might entail about the role of suffering in the transition toward a society in which freedom and necessity are reconciled. In combing through those three thinkers' arguments for inconsistencies, contradictions, and pregnant loose threads, James strives to... (shrink)

Pierre Duhem’s philosophy of science was criticized by several of his contemporaries for being surreptitiously influenced by his Catholic faith. In his essay “Physics of a Believer,” Duhem defends himself against this appraisal. In this paper, I detail Duhem’s argument and reconstruct his view concerning the relationship between theoretical science and religious belief. Ultimately, Duhem claims that the propositions of physical theory cannot contradict the propositions of religious belief because they do not share a domain of reference. To clarify why (...) Duhem holds this view, I present a case study: the discovery of entropy. By examining how the term “entropy” was introduced into thermo-dynamic theory, a story with which Duhem was intimately familiar, much of the apparent conflict in Duhem’s philosophy of science is resolved. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a novel account of knowledge ascriptions with concealed questions as complements. I begin by discussing various theories of knowledge-the proposed in the literature and raising some problems for each. I then present and explain my positive proposal, arguing that knowledge ascriptions with concealed questions as complements say that the subject stands in the knowledge relation to a question. I claim that this view avoids the problems facing other accounts and offers a unified account of knowledge-the, (...) knowledge-wh, and, importantly, other attitudes with interrogative complements. On this account, when we utter any attitude ascription that contains an explicit question, an indirect question, or a concealed question, we say that some subject stands in the relevant relation to a question. (shrink)

A‐theorists of time postulate a deep distinction between the present, past and future. Settling on an appropriate logic for such a view is no easy matter. This Philosophy Compass article describes one of the most vexing formal problems facing A‐theorists. It is commonly thought that A‐theories can only be formally expressed in a tense logic: a logic with operators like P and F . And it seems natural to think that we live in a world where objects come to exist (...) and cease to exist as time passes. Indeed, this is typically a key component of the most prominent kind of A‐theory, presentism. But the temporary existence assumption cannot be upheld in any tense logic with a standard quantification theory. I will explain the problem and outline the philosophical and logical considerations that generate it. I will then consider two possible solutions to the problem – one that targets our logic of quantification and one that targets our assumptions about change. I survey the costs of each solution. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)