Purpose– The purpose of this paper is twofold: to provide an overview of related studies and to highlight research gaps and questions that need to be addressed. Research conducted in three-dimensional (3D) online environments constitutes a different research context, not least because it involves the recruitment of avatars in the research process. Researchers need to appreciate better the ethical concerns that arise in this novel, fast-evolving context and how these concern different stakeholders.Design/methodology/approach– The paper employs an interdisciplinary desk-research approach. It (...) critically reviews related literature, highlights the involved stakeholders, discusses ethical issues from a marketing research perspective and concludes with a discussion of related studies and research gaps, providing direct future research avenues.Findings– The characteristics of the 3D online environments and the behaviour and experiences of their users set the boundaries and guide the way regarding the ethical research in this context.Research limitations/implications– The paper does not present primary empirical results, instead it reviews and critiques related literature in 3D online environments and sets the agenda for future research.Practical implications– The paper provides ethical guidelines and identifies blurred areas in conducting or participating in research in 3D online environments.Originality/value– Based on earlier studies and examples of ethical concerns when studying 3D online environments, this paper emphasises the parameters that should be taken into consideration in current and future research studies. (shrink)

La autora presenta algunas criticas generales al proyecto de reducir las leyes causales a probabilidades. Además, muestra que las leyes causales son imprescindibles para poder diferenciar las strategias efectivas de las que no lo son y da un criterio para considerar cuando podemos deducir causalidad a través de datos estadísticos.

What does it mean to think critically about politics at a time when inequality is increasing worldwide, when struggles for the recognition of difference are eclipsing struggles for social equality, and when we lack any credible vision of an alternative to the present order? Philosopher Nancy Fraser claims that the key is to overcome the false oppositions of "postsocialist" commonsense. Refuting the view that we must choose between "the politics of recognition" and the "politics of redistribution," Fraser argues for (...) an integrative approach that encompasses the best aspects of both. (shrink)

We currently have on offer a variety of different theories of causation. Many are strikingly good, providing detailed and plausible treatments of exemplary cases; and all suffer from clear counterexamples. I argue that, contra Hume and Kant, this is because causation is not a single, monolithic concept. There are different kinds of causal relations imbedded in different kinds of systems, readily described using thick causal concepts. Our causal theories pick out important and useful structures that fit some familiar cases—cases we (...) discover and ones we devise to fit. (shrink)

Social isolation and loneliness are ongoing threats to health made worse by the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. During the pandemic, half the globe's population have been placed under strict physical distancing orders and many long-term care facilities serving older adults went into lockdown mode, restricting access to all visitors, including family members. Before the pandemic emerged, a 2020 National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report warned of the underappreciated adverse effects of social isolation and loneliness on health, especially among (...) older populations. Social isolation and loneliness predict all-cause mortality at rates that rival clinical risk factors, such as obesity and smoking; they are associated with greater incidence of psychological, cognitive, and physical morbidities. This paper sets forth a proposal to design robots to function as companions and friends for socially isolated and lonely older people during pandemic emergencies and in aging societies more generally. “The proposal” section presents and defends the proposal. The “Replies to objections” section answers objections based on coercive design, replacement of humans with robots, privacy incursions, and counterfeit companionship. The “Conclusion” section submits that sociable robots offer a promising avenue for addressing social isolation and loneliness during pandemics and hold promise for aging societies more broadly. (shrink)

The claims of RCTs to be the gold standard rest on the fact that the ideal RCT is a deductive method: if the assumptions of the test are met, a positive result implies the appropriate causal conclusion. This is a feature that RCTs share with a variety of other methods, which thus have equal claim to being a gold standard. This paper describes some of these other deductive methods and also some useful non-deductive methods, including the hypothetico-deductive method. It argues (...) that with all deductive methods, the benefit that the conclusions follow deductively in the ideal case comes with a great cost: narrowness of scope. This is an instance of the familiar trade-off between internal and external validity. RCTs have high internal validity but the formal methodology puts severe constraints on the assumptions a target population must meet to justify exporting a conclusion from the test population to the target. The paper reviews one such set of assumptions to show the kind of knowledge required. The overall conclusion is that to draw causal inferences about a target population, which method is best depends case-by-case on what background knowledge we have or can come to obtain. There is no gold standard. (shrink)

Epistemic trustworthiness is defined as a complex character state that supervenes on a relation between first- and second-order beliefs, including beliefs about others as epistemic agents. In contexts shaped by unjust power relations, its second-order components create a mutually supporting link between a deficiency in epistemic character and unjust epistemic exclusion on the basis of group membership. In this way, a deficiency in the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness plays into social/epistemic interactions that perpetuate social injustice. Overcoming that deficiency and, along (...) with it, normalized practices of epistemic exclusion, requires developing a self-critical perspective on the partial, socially-located character of one's perspective and the consequent epistemic value of inclusiveness. (shrink)

This paper argues that we can see our lives as a snapshot happening now or as a moving picture extending across time. These dual ways of seeing our lives inform how we conceive of the problem of age group justice. A snapshot view sees age group justice as an interpersonal problem between distinct age groups. A moving picture view sees age group justice as a first-person problem of prudential choice. This paper explores these different ways of thinking about age group (...) justice and illustrates them using a principle of respect for human dignity, understood in terms of reasonable support for floor level central human capabilities at each stage of life. I argue that different frames are suitable for different kinds of decisions, and each provides a true, but partial, picture of aging and age group justice. (shrink)

: This essay aims to clarify the value of developing systematic studies of ignorance as a component of any robust theory of knowledge. The author employs feminist efforts to recover and create knowledge of women's bodies in the contemporary women's health movement as a case study for cataloging different types of ignorance and shedding light on the nature of their production. She also helps us understand the ways resistance movements can be a helpful site for understanding how to identify, critique, (...) and transform ignorance. (shrink)

This collection of writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, the renowned French critic and poet, delves into the history of philosophy to locate a fundamentally poetic modus operandi there. The book represents a daring mixture of Nancy’s philosophical essays, writings about artworks, and artwork of his own. With theoretical rigor, Nancy elaborates on the intrinsic multiplicity of art as a concept of “making,” and outlines the tensions inherent in the faire, the “making” that characterizes the very process of production (...) and thereby the structure of poetry in all its forms. Nancy shows that this multiplication that belongs to the notion of art makes every single work communicate with every other, all material in the artwork appeal to some other material, and art the singular plural of a praxis of the finite imparting of an infinity which is actually there in every utterance. In the collection, Nancy engages with the work of, among others, François Martin, Maurice Blanchot, and On Kawara. (shrink)

In Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey offers a razor-sharp analysis of the split between public and private, fact and feelings.

Un essai qui prend l'époque à revers pour répondre à la question de la faillite de la communauté.

Academic research is increasingly centering on interdisciplinary work. Strong interdisciplinary research (SIR), involving researchers from very different fields, such as scientists and humanists, is often encouraged, if not required, by funding agencies. I argue that two intellectual virtues, open-mindedness and intellectual humility, are crucial for overcoming obstacles to SIR and achieving success. In part I, I provide a primer on intellectual virtue and the two virtues in question. In part II, I distinguish SIR from weak interdisciplinary research (WIR), which involves (...) research teams from neighboring fields, such as physics and chemistry, and from disciplinary research (DR), which involves researchers from the same discipline. I also outline what counts as success in SIR, and explain why it’s more challenging to attain than in WIR and DR. In part III, I explain how both intellectual virtues are essential for achieving success in SIR and for overcoming obstacles that can arise in its pursuit. (shrink)

Should you wash your hands? -- Are workarounds ethical? -- Turfing, bending, and gaming -- Dirty hands and the semiclear conscience -- Problems of humanity -- Ethics without heroics : foreseeing moral problems in complex systems.

In evaluating science, philosophers tends to focus on general laws and on their truth. I urge a shift in focus to the reliability of the panoply of outputs science produces and in tandem, from the general to the particular. Here I give five arguments to support this, including many, many scientific outputs, which must be supposed reliable if we are to warrant our general principles, aren’t truth-apt; and reliability invites the crucial question, ‘Reliable for what?’ Getting clear the particular purpose (...) is essential for effective action and just evaluation. (shrink)

In this paper the claim that laws of nature are to be understood as claims about what necessarily or reliably happens is disputed. Laws can characterize what happens in a reliable way, but they do not do this easily. We do not have laws for everything occurring in the world, but only for those situations where what happens in nature is represented by a model: models are blueprints for nomological machines, which in turn give rise to laws. An example from (...) economics shows, in particular, how we use--and how we need to use--models to get probabilistic laws. (shrink)

The volume brings together for the first time original essays by leading philosophers working on powers in relation to metaphysics, philosophy of natural and social science, philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, ethics and social and political philosophy. In each area, the concern is to show how a commitment to real causal powers affects discussion at the level in question. In metaphysics, for example, realism about powers is now recognized as providing an alternative to orthodox accounts of causation, modality, properties (...) and laws. Dispositional realist philosophers of science, meanwhile, argue that a powers ontology allows for a proper account of the nature of scientific explanation. In the philosophy of mind there is the suggestion that agency is best understood in terms of the distinctive powers of human beings. Those who take virtue theoretic approaches in epistemology and ethics have long been interested in the powers that allow for knowledge and/or moral excellence. In social and political philosophy, finally, powers theorists are interested in the powers of sociological phenomena such as collectivities, institutions, roles and/or social relations, but also in the conditions of possibility for the cultivation of the powers of individuals. The book will be of interest to philosophers working in any of these areas, as well as to historians of philosophy, political theorists and critical realists. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have had little to say about ‘middle-range theory’ although much of what is done in science and of what drives its successes falls under that label. These lectures aim to spark an interest in the topic and to lay groundwork for further research on it. ‘Middle’ in ‘middle range’ is with respect to the level both of abstraction and generality. Much middle-range theory is about things that come under the label ‘mechanism’. The lectures explore three different kinds (...) of mechanism: struc tural mechanisms or underlying systems that afford causal pathways; causal-chain mechanisms that are represented in what in policy contexts are called ‘theories of change’ and for which I give an extended account following the causal process theory of Wesley Salmon; and middle-range-law mechanisms like those discussed by Jon Elster, which I claim are —and rightly are— rampant throughout the social sciences. The theory of the democratic peace, that democracies do not go to war with democracies, serves as a running example. The discussions build up to the start of, first, an argument that reliability in social (and natural) science depends not so much on evidence as it does on the support of a virtuous tangle of practices (without which there couldn’t even be evidence), and second, a defence of a community-practice centred instrumentalist understanding of many of the central basic principles that we use (often successfully) in social (and in natural) science for explanation, prediction and evaluation. (shrink)

This essay aims to clarify the value of developing systematic studies of ignorance as a component of any robust theory of knowledge. The author employs feminist efforts to recover and create knowledge of women's bodies in the contemporary women's health movement as a case study for cataloging different types of ignorance and shedding light on the nature of their production. She also helps us understand the ways resistance movements can be a helpful site for understanding how to identify, critique, and (...) transform ignorance. (shrink)

A good many models used in physics and economics offer descriptions of imaginary situations, using a combination of mathematics and natural language. The descriptions are both thin - not much about the situation is filled in - and unrealistic - what is filled in is not true of many real situations. Yet we want to use the results of these models to inform our conclusions about a range of actually occurring situations. I propose we interpret many of these models as (...) fables. The actual happenings in the model are only one concrete instantiation of a lesson that is more widely applicable ‘when expressed in more abstract language.' A fable generally comes with the abstract lesson attached; parables, by contrast, usually require an interpretation from outside. Models, then, tend to be more like parables than fables. The right abstract interpretation is not supplied by the model itself. The central problem, then, is where shall it come from? (shrink)

The three important target articles make a strong case for regarding racism as a public health crisis. Each calls for advocacy by the bi...

Charlemagne's monogram -- Introduction -- The problem of consciousness -- The earliest vision -- Truth, being, and mind -- The Kehre -- The essence of truth -- The later Heidegger -- Reading Heidegger after Heidegger -- Being not a soul but the unmediated discovery of being.

A topic of special importance when it comes to responsibility and implicit bias is responsibility for knowledge. Are there strategies for becoming more responsible and respectful knowers? How might we work together, not just as individuals but members of collectives, to reduce the negative effects of bias on what we see and believe, as well as the wrongs associated with epistemic injustice? To explore these questions, Chapter 9 introduces the concept of epistemic responsibility, a set of practices developed through the (...) cultivation of basic epistemic virtues, such as open-mindedness, epistemic humility, and diligence that help knowers seek information about themselves, others, and the world. (shrink)

A theoretical approach relying on quantum computation in microtubules within neurons can potentially resolve the enigmatic features of visual consciousness, but raises other questions. For example, how can delicate quantum states, which in the technological realm demand extreme cold and isolation to avoid environmental ‘decoherence’, manage to survive in the warm, wet brain? And if such states could survive within neuronal cell interiors, how could quantum states grow to encompass the whole brain? We present a physiological model for visual consciousness (...) that can accommodate brain-wide quantum computation according to the Penrose–Hameroff ‘Orch OR’ model. In this view, visual consciousness occurs as a series of several-hundred-millisecond epochs, each comprising ‘crescendo sequences’ of quantum computations occurring at ∼40 Hz. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004) 191-211 [Access article in PDF] Oratory and Rhetoric in Renaissance Medicine Nancy G. Siraisi Hunter College In Renaissance medical practice rhetoric had an ambiguous reputation. Many authors warned physicians against use of persuasion or repeated some version of the truism that patients are cured not by eloquence but by medicines. On the other hand, physicians were also reminded that by (...) speaking well they helped patients to have confidence in their advice and to understand directions, which in turn facilitated cure.1 Yet some aspects of medical culture of the period between 1450 and 1600 seem profoundly attentive to rhetoric, at least as regards the use of language, performative elements, and the influence of these features in ancient models (most notably Galen himself).2 One area in which rhetoric had an unambiguous, acknowledged, and essential place was in the medical orations pronounced at university ceremonies. A sample follows: Pursuit of all these different things by study, investigation of obscurities with ingenuity, conquest of difficulties with industry, and—after penetrating into the very fibers of the earth and searching everywhere into the arcana of the whole of nature and from all herbs, fruits, trees, animals, gems, and even poisons—inquiry after remedies and the proper way to use them for all the ills of human life from so many authors, so many disciplines, and even from the very stars: these things, I say, [End Page 191] have uncovered so many hidden cures, been attained with such arduous powers of the mind, completed with so much effort of memory, offer so many things necessary for the health of the entire human race in common, that does not indeed [the entire enterprise of medicine] seem to have been superhuman and really in a certain way divine?3This nicely exuberant example of Renaissance medical rhetoric exemplifies the genre in several respects. The oration to which it belongs was originally delivered to an academic faculty of medicine by a physician; it shows the impact in medical settings of the revival of epideictic rhetoric, and its author drew on learned sources and commonplaces about medicine that belonged to a store of broadly humanistic erudition, shared both in and outside the medical profession. In fact the only truly distinctive feature of this passage is its author. It comes from Erasmus's Encomium medicinae, which he wrote in 1499 for a friend—a physician named Gysbertus—to deliver to the medical faculty of the University of Paris.4If Gysbertus was exceptionally fortunate in his ghost, many other surviving medical orations are internal products of medical faculties, the work of university masters or students of medicine. But whoever their authors, orations delivered in or written for an academic medical setting offer some telling illustrations both of the way in which certain kinds of humanistic interests and requirements came to penetrate medical learning and of the reaction of humanistic rhetoric to medicine. "Medical humanism" is usually understood to encompass both the core enterprise of intensive philological study, editing, and translation of Greek medical texts—never the occupation of more than a handful of hellenist scholars—and also the reception and scientific influence of the fruits of their labors among a wider medical audience. But Renaissance medicine was also a humanistic discipline in a much broader and more inclusive sense; that is, it both fostered and provided ample scope for the development among learned physicians of interests characteristic of humanistic culture in general: rhetoric, history, biography, fascination with remote peoples and places, and antiquarianism. At the same time, as the passage from Erasmus quoted [End Page 192] above demonstrates, humanists outside the medical profession interested themselves in medicine and controlled a stock of rhetorical commonplaces on the subject. To be sure, the penetration of terminology and concepts from medicine into the general culture long antedated the Renaissance.5 But the revival of rhetoric together with attention to ancient sources and commonplaces provided humanist observers with new tools for commenting, sometimes in quite specific and detailed terms, on the contemporary medical scene, a phenomenon... (shrink)

Drug testing is widely deployed in the United States throughout the public and private sectors. This case study uses two emergent drug-testing technologies—hair analysis and the sweat patch—as examples of techniques of governance that should be subjected to the political equivalent of strict scrutiny. The article contributes to conceptual debates in science and technology studies, arguing that the study of social structure and subject formation should be integral rather than epiphenomenal to analysis in the transdisciplinary field of science and technology (...) studies. The article contextualizes the development and deployment of drug-testing technologies within the structural and epistemological categories of racial and ethnic difference, gender, sexuality, and class formation. Conflicts between proponents of the technologies and critical advocates who seek to constrain their use mark sites of productive theoretical engagement with structural sociology, racial formation theory, critical race theory, and feminist critique.1 Finally, the article demonstrates how STS analyses can contribute to the struggles of strategic counterpublics as they advocate for changing the meaning and material consequences of suspect technologies. (shrink)

The editors introduce the core areas of current debate within historical theory, bringing the reader as up to date with continuing debates and current developments as is possible. This important handbook brings together in one volume discussions of the role of modernity, empiricism, realism, post-modernity and deconstruction in the historian’s craft. Chapters are written by leading writers from around the world and cover a wide spread of historical sub-disciplines, such as social history, intellectual history, narrative, gender, memory, psycho-analysis and cultural (...) studies, taking in, along the way, the work of thinkers such as Paul Ricouer, Michel Foucault and Hayden White. (shrink)

Explore how mathematics has shaped how we look at and understand the world. From figuring out Earth's circumference using geometry to developing load-bearing arches, young readers will be engaged as they learn about real world math applications.

The principle of modernity -- A history of religion -- Artificial populations -- The collective -- Images of truth from Anselm to Badiou -- The radical enlightenment of Spinoza and Kant -- Modernity as ground zero -- Of gods, laws, rabbis, and ends.