In many countries, science is challenged by science-related populism, which deems the common sense of “ordinary people” superior to the knowledge of “academic elites”. Individual support for science-related populism can be associated with people’s communication behavior: On the one hand, people who hold science-related populist attitudes may inform themselves differently about science; they may even be disconnected from societal discourse around science. On the other hand, they may communicate more actively on social media and in interpersonal conversations. We test this (...) using nationally representative survey data from Switzerland. Results show that science-related populists use TV and social networking sites more often to get information about science. They are also more likely to communicate about science in social media comments. However, science-related populist attitudes are not associated with a general preference for social media over journalistic media. Science-related populism has thus not (yet) fueled a “science-related public disconnection”. We also run multiverse analyses, which show further nuances of our results, and discuss implications for science communication. (shrink)

We demonstrate that Statistical significance (Chow 1996) includes straw man arguments against (1) effect size, (2) meta-analysis, and (3) Bayesianism. We agree with the author that in experimental designs, H0 “is the effect of chance influences on the data-collection procedure . . . it says nothing about the substantive hypothesis or its logical complement” (Chow 1996, p. 41).

Studying knowledge utilization and related processes calls for a conceptual framework. We look at the actors that engage in these processes in a specific field of human activity, and the interfaces and linkages between them, as a Knowledge and Information System (KIS). Although this KIS perspective originates from agriculture it also can be applied to other knowledge domains. Evidence gathered shows that for a KIS to be effective the actors (e.g., researchers, extensionalists, and clients) must act synergically. This inspired us (...) to look for basic KIS principles that indicate opportunities for intervention. This article provides a brief state-of-the-art overview, presents some insights gained to date; and states the main issues for the use of information technology in knowledge management. (shrink)

We consider the implications for the ethical evaluation of research programs of two fundamental changes in the revised research ethical guideline of the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences. The first is the extension of scope that follows from exchanging “biomedical” for “health‐related” research, and the second is the new evaluative basis of “social value,” which implies new ethical requirements of research. We use the example of antibiotic resistance interventions to explore the need to consider the instances of what (...) we term the pragmatic risks of such interventions to evaluate the social value of certain kinds of health‐related research. These (pragmatic) risks severely threaten the social value of interventions in every area where human and social responses significantly impact on their effectiveness. Thus, the social value of health‐related research needed to demonstrate its effectiveness depends on the extent and successful management of such risks. Research designed to take into account the management of pragmatic risks also gives rise to similar types of risks, and the potential for social value in light of those risks needs to be considered in ethical reviews based on the new guidelines. We argue that, to handle this new expanded task, the international system of research ethical review addressed by the guidelines needs institutional development. (shrink)

In his famous 1982 paper, Allen Newell [22, 23] introduced the notion of knowledge level to indicate a level of analysis, and prediction, of the rational behavior of a cognitive arti cial agent. This analysis concerns the investigation about the availability of the agent knowledge, in order to pursue its own goals, and is based on the so-called Rationality Principle (an assumption according to which "an agent will use the knowledge it has of its environment to achieve its goals" [22, (...) p. 17]. By using the Newell's own words: "To treat a system at the knowledge level is to treat it as having some knowledge, some goals, and believing it will do whatever is within its power to attain its goals, in so far as its knowledge indicates" [22, p. 13]. In the last decades, the importance of the knowledge level has been historically and system- atically downsized by the research area in cognitive architectures (CAs), whose interests have been mainly focused on the analysis and the development of mechanisms and the processes governing human and (arti cial) cognition. The knowledge level in CAs, however, represents a crucial level of analysis for the development of such arti cial general systems and therefore deserves greater research attention [17]. In the following, we will discuss areas of broad agree- ment and outline the main problematic aspects that should be faced within a Common Model of Cognition [12]. Such aspects, departing from an analysis at the knowledge level, also clearly impact both lower (e.g. representational) and higher (e.g. social) levels. (shrink)

In diesem Band werden Beiträge gesammelt, die sich nicht nur auf rein formal logische Aspekte, sondern auch auf Probleme beziehen, die mit der Erkenntnistheorie, der Naturphilosophie und der Dialektik in Verbindung stehen. Iván de los Ríos Gutiérrez stellt die Aristotelische Kontingenzlehre dar. Miguel García-Valdecasas erörtert die wissenschaftstheoretischen Fundamente der Aristotelischen Nous-Lehre. Joseph Li Vecchi entwickelt ein formales Modell für Inferenzen, die auf der Grundlage von analogischen Verhältnissen basieren. Niels Öffenberger charakterisiert die abgeleiteten Wahrheitswerte, die sich durch die Dichotomie der (...) schlichten Wahrheit und der schlichten Falschheit ergeben. Paloma Pérez-Ilzarbe und María Cerezo verteidigen durch eine Interpretation der Struktur der Assertion die Gültigkeit des Bivalenz prinzips im Rahmen der Aristotelischen Wahrheitstheorie. Gabriela Rossi präsentiert eine systematische Darstellung der Rolle der lysis als Instrument der Aristotelischen Dialektik. Mirko Skarica untersucht die zeitgenössische Rezeption der Aristotelischen Auffassung des einfachen prädikativen Satzes bei Vertretern sowohl der analytischen als auch der phänomenologischen Tradition. Alejandro G. Vigo charakterisiert das Aristotelische Modell der Kausalerklärung in der Naturphilosophie in Verbindung mit dem Begriff eines sog. Hintergrundsholismus. (shrink)

Any complete theory of speaking must take the dialogical function of language use into account. Pickering & Garrod (P&G) make some progress on this point. However, we question whether their interactive alignment model is the optimal approach. In this commentary, we specifically criticize (1) their notion of alignment being implemented through priming, and (2) their claim that self-monitoring can occur at all levels of linguistic representation.

Until the late 19th century scientists almost always assumed that the world could be described as a rule-based and hence deterministic system or as a set of such systems. The assumption is maintained in many 20th century theories although it has also been doubted because of the breakthrough of statistical theories in thermodynamics (Boltzmann and Gibbs) and other fields, unsolved questions in quantum mechanics as well as several theories forwarded within the social sciences. Until recently it has furthermore been assumed (...) that a rule-based and deterministic system was also predictable if only the rules were known, but this assumption has now been undermined by modern chaos-theory describing rule-based and deterministic, but unpredictable systems, while catastrophe-theory delivers a set of types describing various kinds of instability and conditions for the stability of a given system. Hence the main trait in the theoretical development in the 20th-century science can be described as a basic modification and limitation of some of the fundamental and strong assumptions forwarded in the previous epochs of modern science. Ironically, the very same process has been a process in which the human capacity to intervene in nature has expanded dramatically and mainly with the help of the very same theories, and not least because they allow nature to be described and made manipulable on a lower level and a more fine-grained scale. While the overall theoretical consistency between the various theories has gone, the reach of human intervention in nature has increased based on quite new dimensions whether in the area of physics (e.g.: energy technologies, chemical technologies, nanotechnologies etc.) or biology (ge¬netic manipulation) or in the area of psychology, sociology and culture (artificial simulations of mental processes, new means of communication, implying changes in the social infrastructure and cultural behaviour etc.). While some of these changes and new conditions can be reflected from within the conceptual framework of rule-based systems, albeit more complex than formerly recognized, others seem to give rise to the question of whether there are »systems« and relations between different systems in the world which are not rule-based? For instance, it seems to be obvious that the notion of instability represents a major conceptual break with former theories of rule-based systems, as the stability of the latter is an axiomatically given property implied in the very notion of rule-based systems, while instability can only be the result of external influence which should be explained as the result of another rule-based sy¬stem. While there are no difficulties implied concerning the stability of rule-based systems, the notion of unstable states of a system raises the question of how there can be a system at all if there are no invariant stabilising principles? This is the first question which I will address. And I shall do so by taking two examples of such systems as my point of departure. The first example will be the computer and the second will be ordinary language. In both cases I will argue that the stability of these systems (which are both defined by the existence/presence of human intentions) are provided by the help of - differently organised - redundancy functions which both allow the maintenance of systems in unstable macro-states, suspension of previous rules, underdetermination and overdetermination and generation/emergence/creation of new rules more or less independent of previous rules by the help of optional recursions to the permanently accessible underlying levels as for instance the level of binary representation in computers. Since the notion of redundancy is both controversial as such and often avoided, the concept is discussed (as defined in Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of information and in the semiotic framework of J. J. Greimas) and leading to a more general definition in which the redundancy functions serve to overcome noisy conditions, but at the cost of rule-based stability, determination, and predictability. A second question will be how the notion of rule-generating systems relates to the notion of anticipatory systems and it will be argued that rule-generating systems share some features with an¬ticipatory systems and that the former from a certain viewpoint can be seen as a subclass of the latter, although anticipative features are not necessarily a part of the definition of rule-generating systems. On the other hand, it will be discussed whether anticipatory systems which are not rule-generating systems can exist and it will be argued that the capacity to anticipate is strongly limited if it is not part of a rule-generating system. Therefore, it is concluded that the most powerful anticipatory systems need to be rule-generating systems. (shrink)

It is widely held that there are important differences between indicative conditionals (e.g. “If the authors are linguists, they have written a linguistics paper”) and subjunctive conditionals (e.g. “If the authors had been linguists, they would have written a linguistics paper”). A central difference is that indicatives and subjunctives convey different stances towards the truth of their antecedents. Indicatives (often) convey neutrality: for example, about whether the authors in question are linguists. Subjunctives (often) convey the falsity of the antecedent: for (...) example, that the authors in question are not linguists. This paper tests prominent accounts of how these different stances are conveyed: whether by presupposition or conversational implicature. Experiment 1 tests the presupposition account by investigating whether the stances project – remain constant – when embedded under operators like negations, possibility modals, and interrogatives, a key characteristic of presuppositions. Experiment 2 tests the conversational-implicature account by investigating whether the stances can be cancelled without producing a contradiction, a key characteristic of implicatures. The results provide evidence that both stances – neutrality about the antecedent in indicatives and the falsity of the antecedent in subjunctives – are conveyed by conversational implicatures. (shrink)

In this paper, a critical discussion is made of the role of entailments in the so-called New Paradigm of psychology of reasoning based on Bayesian models of rationality (Elqayam & Over, 2013). It is argued that assessments of probabilistic coherence cannot stand on their own, but that they need to be integrated with empirical studies of intuitive entailment judgments. This need is motivated not just by the requirements of probability theory itself, but also by a need to enhance the interdisciplinary (...) integration of the psychology of reasoning with formal semantics in linguistics. The constructive goal of the paper is to introduce a new experimental paradigm, called the Dialogical Entailment task, to supplement current trends in the psychology of reasoning towards investigating knowledge-rich, social reasoning under uncertainty (Oaksford and Chater, 2019). As a case study, this experimental paradigm is applied to reasoning with conditionals and negation operators (e.g. CEM, wide and narrow negation). As part of the investigation, participants’ entailment judgments are evaluated against their probability evaluations to assess participants’ cross-task consistency over two experimental sessions. (shrink)

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people’s moral attitudes toward the triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not (...) stem from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels–but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favoured utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas–and such support was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarisation surrounding Covid-19, moral views about critical care triage differed modestly, if at all, between liberals and conservatives. Taken together, our findings highlight people’s robust support for utilitarian measures in the face of a global public health threat, and illustrate how the dominant methods in moral psychology (e.g. trolley cases) may deliver insights that do not generalise to real-world moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Intuitively, we lack the standing to blame others in light of moral norms that we ourselves don't take seriously: if Adam is unrepentantly aggressive, say, he lacks the standing to blame Celia for her aggressiveness. But why does blame have this feature? Existing proposals try to explain this by reference to specific principles of normative ethics – e.g. to rule‐consequentialist considerations, to the wrongness of hypocritical blame, or principles of rights‐forfeiture based on this wrongness. In this paper, I suggest a (...) fundamentally different approach. Employing Timothy Williamson's idea of ‘constitutive rules’ of speech acts, I argue that this feature of blame is simply constitutive of any essentially moral form of disapproval. So if Adam had the standing to disapprove of Celia's aggressiveness in some form, necessarily, this disapproval couldn't be blame. If I'm right, this proposal thus not only answers our main question, but also sheds an interesting novel light on the very nature of blame. If we didn't have a form of disapproval with that feature, we wouldn't have our practice of holding each other to moral norms. (shrink)

COVID-19 vaccine refusal seems like a paradigm case of irrationality. Vaccines are supposed to be the best way to get us out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet many people believe that they should not be vaccinated even though they are dissatisfied with the current situation. In this paper, we analyze COVID-19 vaccine refusal with the tools of contemporary philosophical theories of responsibility and rationality. The main outcome of this analysis is that many vaccine-refusers are responsible for the belief that (...) they should not be vaccinated and epistemically rational in holding it. This is an important result because it provides insights into the legitimacy of certain public health policies. In particular, this result shows that a public health policy that would abandon the project of convincing certain vaccine-refusers with reasons – e.g., by simply making vaccination compulsory – is prima facie illegitimate. (shrink)

Clinical decisions are expected to be based on factual evidence and official values derived from healthcare law and soft laws such as regulations and guidelines. But sometimes personal values instead influence clinical decisions. One way in which personal values may influence medical decision-making is by their affecting factual claims or assumptions made by healthcare providers. Such influence, which we call ‘value-impregnation,’ may be concealed to all concerned stakeholders. We suggest as a hypothesis that healthcare providers’ decision making is sometimes affected (...) by value-impregnated factual claims or assumptions. If such claims influence e.g. doctor–patient encounters, this will likely have a negative impact on the provision of correct information to patients and on patients’ influence on decision making regarding their own care. In this paper, we explore the idea that value-impregnated factual claims influence healthcare decisions through a series of medical examples. We suggest that more research is needed to further examine whether healthcare staff’s personal values influence clinical decision-making. (shrink)

The potential capacity for robots to deceive has received considerable attention recently. Many papers explore the technical possibility for a robot to engage in deception for beneficial purposes (e.g., in education or health). In this short experimental paper, I focus on a more paradigmatic case: robot lying (lying being the textbook example of deception) for nonbeneficial purposes as judged from the human point of view. More precisely, I present an empirical experiment that investigates the following three questions: (a) Are ordinary (...) people willing to ascribe deceptive intentions to artificial agents? (b) Are they as willing to judge a robot lie as a lie as they would be when human agents engage in verbal deception? (c) Do people blame a lying artificial agent to the same extent as a lying human agent? The response to all three questions is a resounding yes. This, I argue, implies that robot deception and its normative consequences deserve considerably more attention than they presently receive. (shrink)

Statements containing epistemic modals (e.g., “by spring 2023 most European countries may have the Covid-19 pandemic under control”) are common expressions of epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, previous published findings (Knobe & Yalcin, 2014; Khoo & Phillips, 2018) on the opposition between Contextualism and Relativism for epistemic modals are re-examined. It is found that these findings contain a substantial degree of individual variation. To investigate whether participants differ in their interpretation of epistemic modals, an experiment with multiple phases and sessions (...) is used to classify participants according to the three semantic theories of Relativism, Contextualism, and Objectivism. Through this study, some of the first empirical evidence for the kind of truth-value shifts postulated by semantic Relativism is presented. It is furthermore found that participants’ disagreement judgments match their truth evaluations and that participants are capable of distinguishing between truth and justification. In a second experimental session, it is investigated whether participants thus classified follow the norm of retraction which Relativism uses to account for argumentation with epistemic modals. Here the results are less favorable for Relativism. In a second experiment, these results are replicated and the normative beliefs of participants concerning the norm of retraction are investigated following work on measuring norms by Bicchieri (2017). Again, it is found that on average participants show no strong preferences concerning the norm of retraction for epistemic modals. Yet, it was found that participants who had committed to Objectivism and had training in logics applied the norm of retraction to might-statements. These results present a substantial challenge to the account of argumentation with epistemic modals presented in MacFarlane (2014), as discussed. Keywords: Epistemic Modals, Relativism, Norm Conflicts, Retraction, Semantics, Truth Conditions, Argumentation. (shrink)

Contextualism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims (involving e.g. predicates of personal taste or epistemic modals) depends on the context of utterance. Relativism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of assessment. Both views make concrete, empirically testable predictions about how such claims are used by ordinary English language speakers. This chapter surveys some of the recent empirical literature on the topic and presents four new experiments (total N=724). Consistent with contextualism (...) and inconsistent with relativism, the results suggest that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of utterance, not the context of assessment. (shrink)

On Anscombe's view, intentional actions are characterized by a specific type of knowledge (practical knowledge) possessed by the agents that perform them. Recently, interest in Anscombean action theory has been renewed. Sarah Paul argues that Anscombean action theory faces a serious problem: It fails to discriminate between an action’s intended aim or purpose and its foreseen side effects. Since Anscombeans conceive practical knowledge as the formal cause of intentional actions, Paul dubs this a problem of “deviant formal causation.” In this (...) paper I will show that Anscombean action theory can escape Paul’s critique by employing a sufficiently developed conception of practical knowledge. It will turn out that Anscombeans can precisely capture the difference between intended aim and foreseen side effect in terms of differences in the agent’s knowledge. (shrink)

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people’s moral attitudes toward triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not stem (...) from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels--but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favored utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas—and such support was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarization surrounding Covid-19, moral views about critical care triage differed modestly, if at all, between liberals and conservatives. Taken together, our findings highlight people’s robust support for utilitarian measures in the face of a global public health threat, and illustrate how hypothetical scenarios in moral psychology (e.g. trolley cases) should strive for more experiential and psychological realism, otherwise their results might not generalize to real-world moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Background and aim Healthcare professionals are regularly exposed to moral challenges in patient care potentially compromising quality of care and safety of patients. Preventive clinical ethics support aims to identify and address moral problems in patient care at an early stage of their development. This study investigates the occurrence, risk factors, early indicators, decision parameters, consequences and preventive measures of moral problems. Method Semi-structured expert interviews were conducted with 20 interprofessional healthcare professionals from 2 university hospitals in Basel, Switzerland. A (...) Likert scale questionnaire was completed by the interviewees and analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Results Healthcare professionals are frequently exposed to a variety of moral problems, such as end-of-life decisions, resource allocation and assessing the patient's will or decisional capacity. Thirty-four different risk factors for moral problems are identified, e.g. patient vulnerability, divergent values or world views, inadequate resources or poor ethical climate. Twenty-one early indicators are recognised such as disagreement between healthcare professionals, patients and relatives, emotional disturbances, gut feeling or conflict of conscience. A variety of preventive measures are suggested and presented in a preventive clinical ethics support process model. The most helpful measures are early ethical conversations with colleagues, early team-internal ethical case discussions and an ethics-trained contact person on the ward. Ethics training, kerbside consultations, proactive ethics consultations, ethics screening and rounds are also considered helpful. Conclusions Clinical ethics support services should not only offer reactive and complex, but also proactive and low-threshold support for healthcare professionals, patients and relatives. (shrink)

Many political theorists are multiculturalists. They believe that states ought to support and accommodate minority cultures, even if they disagree about when such support and accommodations are due and what forms they should take. In this contribution, I argue that multiculturalists have failed to notice an important objection against a wide range of multiculturalism policies. This objection is predicated on the notion that when states support and accommodate minority cultures, they should support and accommodate many subcultures and individualistic conceptions of (...) the good as well. However, since a significant proportion of multiculturalism policies imposes financial costs on society, it will often be prohibitively expensive for states to support and accommodate citizens’ subcultures and individualistic conceptions of the good on an equal basis. The result is that implementing such policies is likely to end up discriminating against certain groups, which might include e.g. fervent football fans, globe-trotters, mountain climbers, motor bikers, Hippies, and artists. I conclude by considering six reasons for giving preferential treatment to minority cultures that would allow multiculturalists to avoid this implication, which invoke, inter alia, the depth, duration, and involuntariness of cultural commitments; the role of culture in allowing people to live autonomously; and cultural rights to political self-determination. None are found to be convincing. (shrink)

G Langford; Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 2, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 31–41, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1968.tb00442.x.

Truthmaker theorists hold that propositions about higher-level entities (e.g. the proposition that there is a heap of sand) are often made true by lower-level entities (e.g. by facts about the configuration of fundamental particles). This generates a problem: what should we say about these higher-level entities? On the one hand, they must exist (since there are true propositions about them), on the other hand, it seems that they are completely superfluous and should be banished for reasons of ontological parsimony. Some (...) truthmaker theorists—most prominently David Armstrong—have tried to solve this puzzle by arguing that these entities are ‘an ontological free lunch’, i.e. real existents that are still ‘no addition of being’. This answer is prima facie attractive, but I argue in this paper that the standard approaches to truthmaking—modal theories and grounding theories—are unable to vindicate the doctrine of the ontological free lunch, and thus fail to solve the problem of higher-level entities. Fortunately, there is a non-standard account of truthmaking available, the reductive explanation account, which succeeds where the standard approaches fail. (shrink)

Many people want to live in liberal democracies because they are liberal and democratic. Yet it would be mistaken, indeed naive, to assume that this applies to all would-be residents. Just as some inhabitants of liberal democracies oppose one or more fundamental liberal-democratic values and principles, so there are foreign would-be residents who do so, who might include individuals with e.g. Jihadist, Neo-Nazi, and radical anarchist views. Proceeding on the assumption that there exists no unconditional moral right to immigrate, this (...) article asks whether it is ever morally permissible for liberal democracies to deny residence to nonnationals based on evidence that theypersonallyhold extremist views. I argue that this is sometimes the case. Specifically, my contention is that even if we adopt a cosmopolitan perspective on which states are not allowed to prioritise the interests of their own citizens and residents over those of foreign nonresidents, there are two conditions under which such exclusions are justified even when refugees are being refused admission. (shrink)

Cervical spinal cord injuries often lead to loss of motor function in both hands and legs, limiting autonomy and quality of life. While it was shown that unilateral hand function can be restored after SCI using a hybrid electroencephalography/electrooculography brain/neural hand exoskeleton, it remained unclear whether such hybrid paradigm also could be used for operating two hand exoskeletons, e.g., in the context of bimanual tasks such as eating with fork and knife. To test whether EEG/EOG signals allow for fluent and (...) reliable as well as safe and user-friendly bilateral B/NHE control, eight healthy participants as well as four chronic tetraplegics performed a complex sequence of EEG-controlled bilateral grasping and EOG-controlled releasing motions of two exoskeletons visually presented on a screen. A novel EOG command performed by prolonged horizontal eye movements to the left or right was introduced as a reliable switch to activate either the left or right exoskeleton. Fluent EEG control was defined as average “time to initialize” grasping motions below 3 s. Reliable EEG control was assumed when classification accuracy exceeded 80%. Safety was defined as “time to stop” all unintended grasping motions within 2 s. After the experiment, tetraplegics were asked to rate the user-friendliness of bilateral B/NHE control using Likert scales. Average TTI and accuracy of EEG-controlled operations ranged at 2.14 ± 0.66 s and 85.89 ± 15.81% across healthy participants and at 1.90 ± 0.97 s and 81.25 ± 16.99% across tetraplegics. Except for one tetraplegic, all participants met the safety requirements. With 88 ± 11% of the maximum achievable score, tetraplegics rated the control paradigm as user-friendly and reliable. These results suggest that hybrid EEG/EOG B/NHE control of two assistive devices is feasible and safe, paving the way to test this paradigm in larger clinical trials performing bimanual tasks in everyday life environments. (shrink)

G. N. A. Vesey; X—Being and Feeling, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 69, Issue 1, 1 June 1969, Pages 133–148, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteli.

G. E. L. Owen; I*—The Presidential Address: Particular and General, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 79, Issue 1, 1 June 1979, Pages 1–22, https.

G. C. J. Midgley; XIV—Linguistic Rules, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 271–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.

This essay argues that prediction markets, as one approach for aggregating dispersed private information, may not only be praised for their epistemic accuracy. They also feature characteristics that are morally desirable from the point of view of epistemic justice. Notably, they are a promising approach when we are trying to address testimonial injustice. The impersonality of market transactions effectively tackles the issue of identity prejudice, which underlies many forms of testimonial injustice. This is not to say that prediction markets do (...) not pose challenges for epistemic justice of their own like the risk of excluding knowers based on ability to pay. Or, in light of identity prejudice’s systematicity, the risk of discouraging some knowers because of differences in education or social background that lead to a certain unease when faced with prediction markets. The essay discusses these challenges, concedes limitations but also offers countermeasures to certain worries – e.g. hosting prediction markets on a play-money basis. Throughout, the essay addresses the question of the potential scope of using prediction markets for epistemic purposes, notably by means of the practical example of a prediction market for monetary policy. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles, seems to challenge common sense. Waves behave like particles; particles behave like waves. You can tell where a particle is, but not how fast it is moving--or vice versa. An electron faced with two tiny holes will travel through both at the same time, rather than one or the other. And then there is the enigma of creation ex nihilo, in which small particles appear with their so-called antiparticles, only to disappear (...) the next instant in a tiny puff of energy. Since its inception, physicists and philosophers have struggled to work out the meaning of quantum mechanics. Some, like Niels Bohr, have responded to quantum mechanics' mysteries by replacing notions of position and velocity with probabilities. Others, like Einstein and Penrose, have disagreed and think that the entire puzzle reflects not a fundamental principle of nature but our own ignorance of basic scientific processes. Sneaking a Look at God's Cards offers the general reader a deep and real understanding of the problems inherent to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, from its inception to the present. The book presents a balanced overview of current debates and explores how the theory of quantum mechanics plays itself out in the real world. Written from the perspective of a leading European physicist, the book looks extensively at ideas from both sides of the Atlantic and also considers what philosophers have contributed to the scientific discussion of this field. Sneaking a Look at God's Cards sets out what we know about the endlessly fascinating quantum world, how we came to this understanding, where we disagree, and where we are heading in our quest to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible. (shrink)

This article argues that the reduction of the morality of killing in war to the morality of killing in self-defense by ‘reductive-individualist’ revisionist just war theories is inconsistent, because when those theories apply the moral notion of self-defense to the morality of killing in war, they do not preserve the two conceptions of the “individual” inherent in this notion. The article demonstrates this inconsistency in two steps: First, it disentangles the two conceptions of the individual inherent to the notion of (...) self-defense, namely (1) that the individual is an “entity” potentially bearing a right to self-defense (unlike, e.g., groups) and (2) that the individual is a “particular,” where “particular” signifies that every human is different from every other human. The conception of the individual as a “particular” is tied to the idea that a justification grounded in a rule of self-defense is necessarily “concrete,” in the sense of referring to individually given and specific perceptions or cases, as opposed to “abstract,” in the sense of being detached from specific perceptions or cases. The article then demonstrates that reductive individualism reflects the first notion of the individual, but not the second. Due to the “loss” of the individual as a “particular”, the reductive-individualist reduction of the morality of killing in war to the morality of killing in self-defense is inconsistent, and hence its justification of killing in war grounded in self-defense is not concrete. Since such a justification must be concrete, reductive individualism cannot offer a justification for belligerent killing. (shrink)

Ignorance is said to be the most widely accepted explanation of what makes choices hard (Chang 2017). But despite its apparent popularity, the debate on hard choices has been dominated by tetrachotomist (e.g., “parity”) and vagueness views. In fact, there is no elaborate ignorance account of hard choices. This article closes this research gap. In so doing, it connects the debate on hard choices with that on transformative experiences (Paul 2014). More precisely, an option’s transformative character can prevent us from (...) epistemically accessing its expected value, promoting ignorance of how to rank the options. Methods of achieving an advance assessment of transformative experiences such as fine-graining, consulting testimony, and using higher-order facts can sometimes evade this epistemic blockade, but not always. Therefore, in cases where these methods fail, a choice can be hard because of our ignorance. The prominent hard choice between two careers could be such a case. (shrink)

As people grow old, many risk becoming chronically lonely which is associated with e.g. depression, dementia, and increased mortality. Whoever else should help to protect them from this risk, various philosophers have argued that any children that they might have will often be among them. Proceeding on this assumption, this article considers what filial duties to protect ageing parents from loneliness consist of, or might consist of. I develop my answer by showing that a view that may be intuitively plausible, (...) namely that they simply require children to visit their ageing parents regularly when they can do so at reasonable cost and call, text, and/or email them from time to time, is defective in three respects. First, it ignores children’s potential responsibilities to encourage and/or facilitate social interaction between their parents and third parties. Second, it ignores their potential responsibilities to help provide their parents with non-human companionship. Third, it elides over their duties to coordinate their efforts to offer loneliness protection with others. What I end up proposing instead, then, is an approach for protecting ageing parents from loneliness that is multi-faceted. (shrink)

The lack of engagement of philosophy with decisions made under conditions of risk and uncertainty has lately received increasing attention. But philosophers have devoted little thought to the development of a conceptual framework for distinguishing different types of risks. This article begins by illustrating the need for a more nuanced conceptual framework. As the normative considerations risks give rise to are highly varied, ethicists need to distinguish between different types of risks. It then offers two ideas. First, it proposes that (...) we understand ‘risk’ as a multi-dimensional concept, i.e. a concept that can always be evaluated in different dimensions, e.g. a qualitative, a quantitative and an epistemic dimension. While this understanding of risk underlies the current practice of risk analysis, making it explicit is of value, in particular for the philosophical debate. It draws attention to the diversity of risks, helps to group them sensibly and sharpens existing arguments. Second, the article introduces a novel account of the notion ‘systemic risk’. Criticising existing accounts, it proposes we understand ‘systemic risk’ as referring to a risk that endangers the functioning of a system and originates in the system or its background noise, where a system is conceived of as a set of interdependent, interacting components that form a complex, functionally defined whole. The article identifies a number of structural features shared by systemic risks and evaluates the distinctive normative considerations they give rise to. It then argues that the notion ‘systemic risk’ is particularly suited to characterise some of the most pressing risks faced in an increasingly interconnected world. While the notion ‘systemic risk’ rests on the understanding of ‘risk’ as a multi-dimensional concept, it also complements it. Its necessity shows that in addressing risks, it is sometimes helpful to move beyond a characterisation based solely on their dimensions. (shrink)

This essay examines a new way to exercise democratic control over the market. Instead of a democratic government interfering with a market’s outcomes (e.g. via taxes or minimum wages), we may also “democratize” the market by requiring that all relevant group agents who participate in that market (notably: firms) be democratically governed. This is what I call an agent-democratic market. The purpose of this essay is to argue for the claim that agent-democratic markets are a normatively viable way to democratize (...) the market – and potentially constitute a genuine alternative to the standard approach of subjecting market outcomes to democratic control. (shrink)

G. E. L. Owen; XVI—Gilbert Ryle, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 265–270, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/7.