Most scientific theories are globally inconsistent. Chunk and Permeate is a method of rational reconstruction that can be used to separate, and identify, locally consistent chunks of reasoning or explanation. This then allows us to justify reasoning in a globally inconsistent theory. We extend chunk and permeate by adding a visually transparent way of guiding the individuation of chunks and deciding on what information permeates from one chunk to the next. The visual representation is in the form of bundle diagrams. (...) We then extend the bundle diagrams to include not only reasoning in the presence of inconsistent information or reasoning in the logical sense of deriving a conclusion from premises, but more generally reasoning in the sense of trying to understand a phenomenon in science. This extends the use of the bundle diagrams in terms of the base space and the fibres. We then apply this to a case in physics, that of understanding binding energies in the nucleus of an atom using together inconsistent models: the liquid drop model and the shell model. We draw some philosophical conclusions concerning scientific reasoning, paraconsistent reasoning, the role of logic in science and the unity of science. (shrink)

The scientific study of consciousness emerged as an organized field of research only a few decades ago. As empirical results have begun to enhance our understanding of consciousness, it is important to find out whether other factors, such as funding for consciousness research and status of consciousness scientists, provide a suitable environment for the field to grow and develop sustainably. We conducted an online survey on people’s views regarding various aspects of the scientific study of consciousness as a field of (...) research. 249 participants completed the survey, among which 80% were in academia, and around 40% were experts in consciousness research. Topics covered include the progress made by the field, funding for consciousness research, job opportunities for consciousness researchers, and the scientific rigor of the work done by researchers in the field. The majority of respondents (78%) indicated that scientific research on consciousness has been making progress. However, most participants perceived obtaining funding and getting a job in the field of consciousness research as more difficult than in other subfields of neuroscience. Overall, work done in consciousness research was perceived to be less rigorous than other neuroscience subfields, but this perceived lack of rigor was not related to the perceived difficulty in finding jobs and obtaining funding. Lastly, we found that, overall, the global workspace theory was perceived to be the most promising (around 28%), while most non-expert researchers (around 22% of non-experts) found the integrated information theory (IIT) most promising. We believe the survey results provide an interesting picture of current opinions from scientists and researchers about the progresses made and the challenges faced by consciousness research as an independent field. They will inspire collective reflection on the future directions regarding funding and job opportunities for the field. (shrink)

Previously conducted research has determined that physiological and psychophysiological communications evident during pregnancy are vital to the bond formed prenatally. These innate biological responses are further enhanced through psychophysiological factors, such as maternal prenatal stress, which attest to the essential communication between a mother and child in maternal–fetal attachment. A consideration of these factors is necessary with the increase in assisted reproductive technology, such as in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and elective cesarean section, as this may affect the development of the (...) maternal–fetal bond. It would be of benefit to the child, the mother, and every society to seek a more complete understanding of the intricate maternal–fetal bond, as the first friendship developed at the beginning of human life. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

El propósito de este texto es tematizar la precariedad con las herramientas de la filosofía política. Buscaremos equilibrar horizontes conceptuales con prácticas políticas para pensar la acción democrática en nuestro contexto. Nuestro argumento se compone de cuatro premisas. Primero, que elfalso dilema entre teoría y práctica nos permite explorar una relación de tensión creativa entre ambas para conceptualizar la precariedad. Segundo, que la construcción teórica de la precariedad responde tanto a ideas y conceptos como a instituciones y discursos que configuran (...) las vidas de quienes la experimentan. Tercero, que los distintos usos del concepto de precariedad permiten reconocer una fuente común de vulneración de derechos relacionada con la configuración del trabajo en el orden neoliberal. Cuarto, que relacionar la conceptualización de lo plebeyo con la de lo precario nos permite pensar prácticas democráticas renovadas. (shrink)

This paper details the experience of planning, orchestrating, teaching, and participating in a writing-intensive, team-taught, introductory philosophy class designed to expand the diversity of voices included in philosophical study. Accordingly, this article includes the various perspectives of faculty, TAs, and students in the class. Faculty authors discuss the administrative side of the course, including its planning and goals, its texts and structure, its working definition of “philosophy,” its balance of canonical and non-canonical texts, the significant resistance met in getting the (...) course approved, the complex pedagogical difficulties that attend teaching non-canonical texts, the motivation and execution of the course’s writing-intensive dimension, and a summary of student evaluations of the course. The TA authors reflect on the high level of student engagement and interest compared to other introductory philosophy courses, the perception that students found the material highly relevant to their own lives, and the capacity of the material to bring about philosophical insight for the instructors in the class. The student author offers a favorable account of the class and remarks on how the structure of the course aided the accessibility and relevance of the texts. (shrink)

The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. The article starts by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. It is argued that the growth imperative of capitalist economies, as well as other particular characteristics detailed below, are the main drivers of the ecological crisis and exacerbated trends already underway. Further, the planetary boundaries framework can support interpretations that do not solely emphasize technocratic operational approaches and costs, (...) but also assume that these alone can be the solution. (shrink)

The notion of societal boundaries aims to enhance the debate on planetary boundaries. The focus is on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controversial process – based on normative judgments, ethical concerns, and socio-political struggles – it has the potential to offer guidelines for a just, social-ecological transformation.

This book offers a systematized overview of Ian Hacking's work. It presents Hacking’s oeuvre as a network made up of four interconnected key nodes: styles of scientific thinking & doing, probability, making up people, and experimentation and scientific realism. Its central claim is that Michel Foucault’s influence is the underlying thread that runs across the Canadian philosopher’s oeuvre. Foucault’s imprint on Hacking’s work is usually mentioned in relation to styles of scientific reasoning and the human sciences. This research shows that (...) Foucault’s influence can in fact be extended beyond these fields, insofar the underlying interest to the whole corpus of Hacking’s works, namely the analysis of conditions of possibility, is stimulated by the work of the French philosopher. Displacing scientific realism as the central focus of Ian Hacking’s oeuvre opens up a very different landscape, showing, behind the apparent dispersion of his works, the far-reaching interest that amalgamates them: to reveal the historical and situated conditions of possibility for the emergence of scientific objects and concepts. This book shows how Hacking’s deployment concepts such as looping effect, making up people, and interactive kinds, can complement Foucauldian analyses, offering an overarching perspective that can provide a better explanation of the objects of the human sciences and their behaviors. (shrink)

Lorraine Daston ha señalado la influencia que The emergence of probability de Ian Hacking ha tenido en su trayectoria intelectual y en su elección de la etiqueta epistemología histórica para describir su trabajo. Hacking, por su parte, ha respondido a estos señalamientos que, en primer lugar, Daston y sus colegas no hacen epistemología, sino que más bien estudian conceptos epistemológicos como objetos que evolucionan y mutan; en segundo lugar, que su trabajo sobre la probabilidad no es epistemología histórica sino, en (...) todo caso, lo que él llama metaepistemología histórica o, mejor aún, ontología histórica. En el presente trabajo, analizo en qué forma entienden Daston y Hacking el tipo de investigación que denominan respectivamente epistemología y metaepistemología histórica, y exploro sus convergencias y divergencias con el fin de establecer posibles relaciones, intereses y antecedentes compartidos. Por último, sostengo que la obra de Hacking puede ser visualizada como resultado de investigaciones que caracterizan a la epistemología histórica, como consecuencia de su interés, estimulado por la lectura de Michel Foucault, en el análisis de las condiciones históricas de posibilidad para la emergencia de conceptos y objetos científicos. (shrink)

Resumen Michel Foucault estudia la denostada escuela cínica en dos momentos de su obra: en 1978 en una conferencia titulada La filosofía analítica de la política, en pleno período de estudio de la gubernamentalidad, los cínicos ejemplifican una actitud crítica ante el poder político, y en 1984, en su último curso en el Cóllege de France, los cínicos como último escalafón de la parresía ética, como correspondencia entre el logos y el bíos, como ejemplo de vrai vie. Este artículo pretende (...) mostrar la conexión entre ambos momentos, la interconexión entre una actitud crítica del filósofo frente a la política y un decir verdadero encarnado en la vida como escándalo de verdad.Michel Foucault studies the reviled cynical school in two moments of his work: in 1978 in a conference entitled The Analytical Philosophy of Politics, in full period of study of governmentality, the cynics exemplify a critical attitude to political power, and in 1984, in his last year at the Cóllege de France, the cynics as the last ladder of ethical parrhesia, as correspondence between the logos and the bios, as an example of vrai vie. This article aims to show the connection between both moments, the interconnection between a critical attitude of the philosopher against politics and a true saying embodied in life as a real scandal. (shrink)

The starting point of this essay is the logical and political objection that Plato made against poetry, as well as the lack of distinction that he specified as the origin of its dangerousness, and which modernity converted into the condition of possibility of certain egalitarian forms of sensible experience and material life. I will then look at the function that the historical rearticulation of Platonic idealism has fulfilled from Romanticism to the present day in the age-old dispute between philosophy and (...) poetry, paying particular attention to the different readings of Hölderlin and Mallarmé carried out by Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Agamben as symbols of the disfiguration of poetry. I will analyze the tension between sense and sound as the founder of an irreducible territory that opens a potentiality indicative of its political force. Lastly, I will turn to Michel Foucault’s The Government of Self and Others to analyze the function of messianism and parrhesia in the contemporary characterization of political poetry and its conflicts with the truth-telling of philosophy. (shrink)

In order to examine whether the usual identification of neoliberal ideas with an ideological discourse is valid, this paper starts off with an analysis of what Marx terms commodity fetishism in Capital, based on which a certain sense of the concept of ideology may be inferred which would result in its being both true and false. In order to determine whether this definition of ideology may be applied to neoliberal theory, we look at its fundamental features and how they continue (...) with or break away from economic liberalism as studied in Michel Foucault’s Birth of biopolitics. Attention is later moved to the characteristics detected by David Harvey in the socalled flexible accumulation as the latest stage of capitalism which coincides with the political implementation of neoliberal doctrine. At the end of the road travelled, it is hypothesised that this theory would be a form of ideology containing a dimension of both truth and falsehood, in line with Marx’s thought. (shrink)

Ian Hacking has defined himself as a philosopher in the analytic tradition. However, he has also recognized the profound influence that Michel Foucault had on much of his work. In this article I analyse the specific imprint of certain works by Foucault—in particular Les mots et les choses—in two of Hacking’s early works: Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? and The Emergence of Probability. I propose that these texts not only share a debt of Foucauldian thought, but also are part (...) of what I believe is Hacking’s central project: the analysis of the historical and situated conditions of possibility for the emergence of concepts and of objects, inspired also by the French philosopher’s thought. (shrink)

In the article we carry out a reading of the dossier on Herculine Barbin, a 19th century hermaphrodite who commits suicide at the age of 29 after having been legally reassigned to the "opposite sex", which Michel Foucault recovered from the medico-legal annals of the XIX century and published in 1978. A reading that emphasizes the subjective and experiential nature of Herculine's memoirs, as well as the critical nature that Foucault attributes to them and how this allows him to question (...) the idea that there is a "true sex" and, therefore, a “legitimate sexual identity”. Based on the above, we strive to show how the memories show the violent functioning of the binary regime of sexuality and the heteronormative character of the "sex-gender continuum", which allows us to recover the relevance of the project of a "desexualization of the pleasure” that Foucault used as the radical political strategy that would allow us to arrive at a new, fuller and freer economy of the body and its pleasures. (shrink)

La Ilustración es un gran torrente que marcó un hito en la Historia del mundo, por sus implicaciones po-líticas, sociales, culturales y económicas. Este fenómeno es conocido popularmente desde Kant como la en-trada en la mayoría de edad de la sociedad: abandonar viejos fanatismos y tener valor de servirse del propio entendimiento. El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar las interpretaciones dominantes de este fenómeno his-tórico que han marcado su recepción en la academia y mostrar la singular aproximación del filósofo (...) francés Michel Foucault. (shrink)

El empeño de claridad ilimitada del pensamiento fenomenológico no se distingue de la vocación de iluminar y orientar la acción humana en medio de la Historia y sus desastres. El redescubrimiento, nunca agotado, de las fuentes vivas del sentido (fenomenología genética) y la meditación sobre la experiencia radical del sentido (el mundo de la vida), sirven, de la mano del último Husserl, de Patocka, de Michel Henry, para sugerir que también la Historia terrible de nuestro siglo es, a la inversa, (...) pieza básica de contraste de la vitalidad de la fenomenología. (shrink)

First published: 2010; Previous edition: 2012..

What is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a general theory of mental content. The content of conscious experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. Michelle Montague focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the (...) notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. She argues that all experience essentially involves all four things, and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in experience lies in giving a correct specification of the nature of these four things and the relations between them. (shrink)

Prenatal genetic testing is becoming available for an increasingly broad set of diseases, and it is only a matter of time before parents can choose to test for hundreds, if not thousands, of genetic conditions in their fetuses. Should access to certain kinds of fetal genetic information be limited, and if so, on what basis? We evaluate a range of considerations including reproductive autonomy, parental rights, disability rights, and the rights and interests of the fetus as a potential future child. (...) We conclude that parents should be able to access information that could be useful during pregnancy, but that testing for non-medical information should be limited. Next, we argue that the government lacks a compelling state interest in regulating prenatal genetic testing and propose that regulation should occur through medical professional organizations. Finally, we present a framework for determining what testing physicians should recommend, offer neutrally, or not offer at all. (shrink)

This study interrogates the Gap campaign from a political economic perspective to determine whether it goes beyond merely touting the virtuous line of social responsibility. Critics cite the irony of capitalist-based solutions that perpetuate the inequities they are trying to address. Others suggest the aid generated is problematic in and of itself because it keeps Africa from becoming self-sufficient. This research contends the purpose of the Gap’s participation is genuine, going beyond window dressing and the surface level benefit of capitalistic (...) enterprise, and is in fact linked to a higher motive of propagating ethical trade which ultimately offers African beneficiaries a path to financial independence. However, because the message of the current Gap advertising campaign does convey a false sense of doing good, another advertising approach is warranted. (shrink)

The B-theory of time holds that McTaggart’s A-series of past, present, and future is reducible to the B-series of events running from earlier to later. According to the date-theory—originally put forth by J.J.C. Smart and later endorsed by by D.H. Mellor—the truth conditions of tensed or Asentence-tokens can be given in terms of tenseless or B-sentences and, therefore, A-sentence-tokens do not ascribe any A-determinations of pastness, presentness, or futurity. However, as Nathan Oaklander has argued, the date-theory does not provide an (...) adequate analysis of the ontological truth conditions of irreducible A-propositions. I show that the co-reporting theory—which holds that for every A-sentence-token there is a B-sentence that differs in sense but reports the same event or state of affairs—escapes the objections Oaklander has addressed against the date-theory. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with the intentionality of emotions. Desires and cognitions are the traditional paradigm cases of intentional attitudes, and one very direct approach to the question of the intentionality of emotions is to treat it as sui generis—as on a par with the intentionality of desires and cognitions but in no way reducible to it. A more common approach seeks to reduce the intentionality of emotions to the intentionality of familiar intentional attitudes like desires and cognitions. (...) In this paper, I argue for the sui generis approach. (shrink)

Trust is a fundamental aspect of the moral treatment of stakeholders within the organization–stakeholder relationship. Stakeholders trust the organization to return benefit or protections from harm commensurate with their contributions or stakes. However, in many situations, the firm holds greater power than the stakeholder and therefore cannot necessarily be trusted to return the aforementioned duty to the stakeholder. Stakeholders must therefore rely on the trustworthiness of the organization to fulfill obligations in accordance to Phillips’ principle of fairness (Business Ethics Quarterly7(1), (...) 1997, 51–66), particularly where low-power stakeholders may not be fully consenting (Van Buren III, Business Ethics Quarterly11(3), 2001, 481–499). The construct of organizational trustworthiness developed herewith is presented as a possible solution to the problem of unfairness in organization–stakeholder relations. While organizational trustworthiness does not create an ethical obligation where none existed before, stakeholders who lack power will likely be treated fairly when organizational trustworthiness is present. (shrink)

The development of an ethical perspective of HRM that is both employee centered and explicitly normative and, as such, distinct from dominant and criticalperspectives of HRM has progressed in recent years. Reliance on the traditional “threesome” of rights/justice theories, deontology and consequentialism, however, has limited debate to micro-level issues and the search for a “solution.” By understanding the employment relationship as a stakeholder relationship, we open the ethical analysis of HRM to the pluralism and pragmatism that stakeholder theory has to (...) offer. In doing this, we can address both the broader need for HRM to offer a more comprehensive account of our humanity and the specific requisite for HRM to treat employees as moral persons with “names and faces.”. (shrink)

Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape the minds of all those who belong to them, for better or worse, usually without their being self-consciously aware of it. Indeed, in contemporary neoliberal societies, (...) it is generally for the worse. In The Mind-Body Politic, Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind—in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what they call essentially embodied minds—and make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and also our essentially embodied lives for the better. (shrink)

The human species is more reliant on cultural adaptation than any other species, but it is unclear how observational learning can give rise to the faithful transmission of cultural adaptations. One possibility is that teaching facilitates accurate social transmission by narrowing the range of inferences that learners make. However, there is wide disagreement about how to define teaching, and how to interpret the empirical evidence for teaching across cultures and species. In this article I argue that disputes about the nature (...) and prevalence of teaching across human societies and nonhuman animals are based on a number of deep-rooted theoretical differences between fields, as well as on important differences in how teaching is defined. To reconcile these disparate bodies of research, I review the three major approaches to the study of teaching – mentalistic, culture-based, and functionalist – and outline the research questions about teaching that each addresses. I then argue for a new, integrated framework that differentiates between teaching types according to the specific adaptive problems that each type solves, and apply this framework to restructure current empirical evidence on teaching in humans and nonhuman animals. This integrative framework generates novel insights, with broad implications for the study of the evolution of teaching, including the roles of cognitive constraints and cooperative dilemmas in how and when teaching evolves. Finally, I propose an explanation for why some types of teaching are uniquely human, and discuss new directions for research motivated by this framework. (shrink)

As a central organizing institution in society, marriage presents an idealized package for sociosexual relations that reproduces and intertwines gender power dynamics and heterosexual desire. This package is sustained, in part, by the ideology of romantic love—a set of beliefs that constructs only a particular configuration of sexual and gender practices as natural, normal, and right. Drawing on interviews with 45 people, this study examines how people negotiate marital relationships that do not fit into this normative configuration— mixed-orientation marriages. Participants' (...) resolutions to these situations, whether they divorced or created asexual or sexual nonmonogamous marriages, were heavily shaped by their belief in the ideology of romantic love, illustrating how heteronormative relations can be held in place by normalizing ideologies. (shrink)

This article presents an overview for clinician investigators on the concepts of decision-making capacity and vulnerability as related to human subjects research. Tools for capacity assessment and unacknowledged sources of vulnerability are discussed, and the practical gaps in current informed consent requirements related to impaired capacity and potential vulnerability are described. Options are suggested for research discussions when full regulatory consent is not possible and an exception from informed consent does not apply.

The emergence of environmental governance practices raises a fundamental question as to whether they are substantive or symbolic. Toward that end, we analyze the relationship between a firm’s environmental governance and its environmental management as reflected in its ultimate outcome, environmental performance. We posit that substantive practices would bring changes in organizations, most notably in terms of improved environmental performance, whereas symbolic practices would portray organizations as environmentally committed without making meaningful changes to their operations. Focusing on a sample of (...) environmentally sensitive firms, results are consistent with environmental governance mechanisms being predominantly part of a symbolic approach to manage stakeholder perceptions on environmental management, having little substantial impact on organizations. Statistical analyses show mostly that there is no relation between environmental governance mechanisms and environmental performance, measured in terms of regulatory compliance, pollution prevention, and environmental capital expenditures. However, there is some indication that environmental incentives are associated with pollution prevention. Interviews with corporate directors shed further light on these results by underlining that environmental governance mechanisms are employed at the board level to protect the organization from reputational and/or regulatory harm, but are not necessarily intended to proactively improve environmental performance. (shrink)

I propose solutions to two longstanding interpretive questions about J.G. Fichte’s 1796–97 Foundations of Natural Right: 1. What does Fichte mean when he describes the theory of right as ‘independent’ of moral theory, and what motivates that independence thesis? 2. What does Fichte mean when he describes requirements of right and the principle of right as ‘hypothetical’ imperatives, and how is that characterization consistent with his claim to have derived the concept of right as a condition of possibility of self-consciousness? (...) Answers to both questions are motivated by an approach to the text that looks at it through the lens of Fichte’s 1798 System of Ethics, into which its results must fit if, as Fichte believes, the possibility of morally sanctioned interactions with others requires standing in some law-governed political relationship with them. (shrink)

International documents on ethical conduct in clinical research have in common the principle that potential harms to research participants must be proportional to anticipated benefits. The anticipated benefits that can justify human research consist of direct benefits to the research participant, and societal benefits, also called social value. In first-in-human research, no direct benefits are expected and the benefit component of the risks-benefit assessment thus merely exists in social value. The concept social value is ambiguous by nature and is used (...) in numerous ways in the research ethics literature. Because social value justifies involving human participants, especially in early human trials, this is problematic. (shrink)

Much human adaptation depends on the gradual accumulation of culturally transmitted knowledge and technology. Recent models of this process predict that large, well-connected populations will have more diverse and complex tool kits than small, isolated populations. While several examples of the loss of technology in small populations are consistent with this prediction, it found no support in two systematic quantitative tests. Both studies were based on data from continental populations in which contact rates were not available, and therefore these studies (...) do not provide a test of the models. Here, we show that in Oceania, around the time of early European contact, islands with small populations had less complicated marine foraging technology. This finding suggests that explanations of existing cultural variation based on optimality models alone are incomplete because demography plays an important role in generating cumulative cultural adaptation. It also indicates that hominin populations with similar cognitive abilities may leave very different archaeological records, a conclusion that has important implications for our understanding of the origin of anatomically modern humans and their evolved psychology. (shrink)

Abstract:In this paper, I dispute what I callpsychological internalismabout moral responsibility, which comprises most classic accounts as well as newer neurobiological ones, and I defendpsychological externalismabout moral responsibility instead. According to psychological internalism, an agent's moral responsibility is determined solely or primarily by her intentional states. I argue that psychological internalism is empirically challenged by recent findings in social psychology and cognitive science. In light of the empirical evidence, I contend that moral responsibility depends on historical and environmental factors to (...) a much greater degree than previously appreciated. Thus, moral responsibility is not just in the head: indeed, it is much less in the head than typically assumed. (shrink)