This paper introduces taxonomy of clinical uncertaintes and argues that the choice of scientific method should match the underlying level of uncertainty. Clinical trial is one of these methods aiming to resolve clinical uncertainties. Whenever possible these uncertainties should be quantified. The paper further shows that the still ongoing debate about the usage of "equipoise" vs. "uncertainty principle" vs. "indifference" as an entry criterion to clinical trials actually refers to the question "whose uncertainty counts". This question is intimately linked to (...) the control of research agenda, which is not quantifiable and hence is not solvable to equal acceptability to all interested parties. The author finally shows that there is a predictable relation between [acknowledgement of] uncertainty (the moral principle) on which trials are based and the ultimate outcomes of clinical trials. That is, [acknowledgement of] uncertainty determines a pattern of success in medicine and drives clinical discoveries. (shrink)

A person's cognitive map, or knowledge of large‐scale space, is built up from observations gathered as he travels through the environment. It acts as a problem solver to find routes and relative positions, as well as describing the current location. The TOUR model captures the multiple representations that make up the cognitive map, the problem‐solving strategies it uses, and the mechanisms for assimilating new information. The representations have rich collections of states of partial knowledge, which support many of the performance (...) characteristics of common‐sense knowledge. (shrink)

v. 1. Charmides. Lysis. Laches. Protagoras. Euthydemus. Cratylus. Phaedrus. Ion. Symposium.--v. 2. Meno. Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Georgias. Appendix I: Lesser Hippias. Alcibiades I. Menexenus. Appenddix II: Alcibiades II. Eryxias.--v. 3. Republic. Timaeus. Critias.--v. 4. Pharmenides. Theaetetus. Sophist. Statesman. Philebus.--v. 5 Laws. Index to the writings of Plato.

It is often assumed that morally permissible acts are morally better than impermissible acts. We call this claim Betterness of Permissibility. Yet, we show that some striking counterexamples show that the claim’s truth cannot be taken for granted. Furthermore, even if Betterness of Permissibility is true, it is unclear why. Apart from appeals to its intuitive plausibility, no arguments in favour of the condition exist. We fill this lacuna by identifying two fundamental conditions that jointly entail betterness of permissibility: ‘reasons (...) monotonicity of permissibility’ and the ‘weak classical view’. We then argue that there are good reasons for accepting both of the fundamental conditions. We note that there exist plausible moral theories that reject one of the fundamental conditions. However, the way in which those theories reject the fundamental conditions does not allow them to endorse the counterexamples that motivate the belief that Betterness of Permissibility might be false. (shrink)

In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

In the fifth century BCE, Melissus of Samos developed wildly counterintuitive claims against plurality, change, and the reliability of the senses. This book provides a reconstruction of the preserved textual evidence for his philosophy, along with an interpretation of the form and content of each of his arguments. A close examination of his thought reveals an extraordinary clarity and unity in his method and gives us a unique perspective on how philosophy developed in the fifth century, and how Melissus came (...) to be the most prominent representative of what we now call Eleaticism, the monistic philosophy inaugurated by Parmenides. The rich intellectual climate of Ionian enquiry in which Melissus worked is explored and brought to bear on central questions of the interpretation of his fragments. This volume will appeal to students and scholars of early Greek philosophy, and also those working on historical and medical texts. (shrink)

Can SRI be a means to make investors both virtuous and prosperous? This paper argues that there can be significant tensions between these goals, and that SRI (and indeed all investment) should not allow the pursuit of maximizing investment returns to prevail over an ethical agenda of promoting social and economic justice and environmental protection. The discourse on SRI has changed dramatically in recent years to the point where its capacity to promote social emancipation, sustainable development and other ethical goals (...) is in jeopardy. Historically, SRI was a boutique sector of the market dominated by religious-based investors who sought to invest in accordance with the tenets of their faith. From the early 1970s, the aspirations of the SRI movement morphed significantly in the context of the divestment campaign against South Africa's apartheid regime. No longer were social investors satisfied with just avoiding profit from immoral activities; instead, they also sought to change the behavior of others. Business case SRI is a problematic SRI benchmark for several reasons: often there is a countervailing business case for financing irresponsible activities, given the failure of markets to capture all social and environmental externalities; secondly, even if investors care about such concerns, there may be no means of financially quantifying their significance for investment purposes; and, thirdly, even if such factors can be financially quantified, they may be deemed to be such long-term financial costs or benefits that they become discounted and ignored. The ethics case for SRI and ethical business practices more generally takes the view that both investors and the companies they fund have ethical responsibilities that trump the pursuit of profit maximization. Ethical investment should be grounded on this foundation. However, it may not be enough. To keep ethical investment ethical will likely require institutionalizing new norms and governance standards, in such domains as reforming fiduciary duties and the internal governance of financial organizations. SRI's own codes of conduct including the UNPRI have yet to demonstrate the robustness to move the financial community beyond business as usual. (shrink)

While many theories of well-being are able to capture some of our central intuitions about well-being, e.g. avoiding alienation worries, they typically do so at the cost of not being able to capture others, e.g. explaining deprivation. However, both of these intuitions are important and any comprehensive theory of well-being ought to attempt to strike the best balance in responding to both concerns. In light of this, I develop and defend a theory of well-being which holds that our well-being depends, (...) in part, on the nature of our well-being qua person, a class whose members are defined by their possessing certain cognitive and volitional capacities including those capacities constitutive of autonomy. I argue that this theory of well-being is able to address concerns about alienation and deprivation, along with capturing the importance of autonomy to well-being, better than many popular subjective and objective theories of well-being. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the relationship between physical quantities and physical states in quantum theories. I argue against the claim made by Arageorgis that the approach to interpreting quantum theories known as Algebraic Imperialism allows for “too many states.” I prove a result establishing that the Algebraic Imperialist has very general resources that she can employ to change her abstract algebra of quantities in order to rule out unphysical states.

In contemporary free will theory, a significant number of philosophers are once again taking seriously the possibility that human beings do not have free will, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. (Free will is understood here as whatever satisfies the control condition of moral responsibility.) Free will theorists commonly assume that giving up the belief that human beings are morally responsible implies giving up all our beliefs about desert. But the consequences of giving up the belief that (...) we are morally responsible are not quite this dramatic. Giving up the belief that we are morally responsible undermines many, and perhaps most, of the desert claims we are pretheoretically inclined to accept. But it does not undermine desert claims based on the sheer fact of personhood. Even in the absence of belief in moral responsibility, personhood-based desert claims require us to respect persons and their rights. So personhood-based desert claims can provide a substantial role for desert in free will skeptics' ethical theories. (shrink)

The olfactory system processes smells in a structural manner that is unlike the composition of thoughts or language, suggesting that some of the content of our olfactory experiences are represented in a format that does not involve concepts. Consequently, formative non-conceptual content is offered as an alternative theory of non-conceptual content according to which the difference between conceptual and non-conceptual states is simply a matter of the format of their structural parts and relations within a system of representations. Aside from (...) the theoretical merits of rethinking the quagmire of a debate regarding non-conceptual content as a format issue, studying olfaction shows that formative non-conceptual content is empirically plausible. (shrink)

In criticism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, more attention has been paid in recent years to the unconventional side of Lily Bart. Wai-Chee Dimock, for example, calls Lily “something of a rebel”, while Benjamin D. Carson and Elaine Showalter place her as “intruder” and “outsider” in her society, respectively. Ruth Bernard Yeazell admits at least “the faltering pulse of resistance” in Lily, and Maureen Howard describes her as “just unconventional enough”. Lily as a conformist is an (...) obvious picture to paint, which is why exploring her non-conformism in criticism has been so stimulating and fruitful. However, even with so much focus on her unconventionality, few critics have.. (shrink)

The argument for modal collapse is partly responsible for the widespread rejection of the so-called Principle of Sufficient Reason in recent times. This paper discusses the PSR against the background of the recent debate about grounding and develops principled reasons for rejecting the argument from modal collapse.

Some proponents of mechanistic explanation downplay the significance of how-possibly explanations. We argue that developing accounts of mechanisms that could explain a phenomenon is an important aspect of scientific reasoning, one that involves imagination. Although appeals to imagination may seem to obscure the process of reasoning, we illustrate how, by examining diagrams we can gain insights into the construction of mechanistic explanations.

One implication of Bell’s theorem is that there cannot in general be hidden variable models for quantum mechanics that both are noncontextual and retain the structure of a classical probability space. Thus, some hidden variable programs aim to retain noncontextuality at the cost of using a generalization of the Kolmogorov probability axioms. We generalize a theorem of Feintzeig to show that such programs are committed to the existence of a finite null cover for some quantum mechanical experiments, i.e., a finite (...) collection of probability zero events whose disjunction exhausts the space of experimental possibilities. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of authors have defended the coherence and philosophical utility of the notion of metaphysical indeterminacy. Concurrently, the idea that reality can be stratified into more or less fundamental ‘levels’ has gained significant traction in the literature. Here, I examine the relationship between these two notions. Specifically, I consider the question of what metaphysical determinacy at one level of reality tells us about the possibility of metaphysical determinacy at other more or less fundamental levels. Towards this (...) end, I propose a novel conception of the way in which fundamental states of affairs determine derivative states of affairs in the presence of indeterminacy and construct a corresponding formal model of multilevel systems that demonstrates the compatibility of determinacy at the fundamental level with indeterminacy at higher levels, thereby rebutting Barnes' suggestion that indeterminacy at any level of reality implies indeterminacy at the fundamental level. (shrink)

In the 1970s and 1980s, a handful of legal theorists addressed the problem of criminal justice for offenders who faced criminogenic social disadvantages. Their discussions were provocative but alternatively unpersuasive and underdeveloped. More recently, in the wake of mass incarceration in America, philosophers have put forth new analyses that make important headway but remain scattered, partial, and in need of a systematic and integrated review. In this article, I reconstruct and critique the most prominent and well-developed explanations yet offered of (...) the distinctive moral problems that offenders’ criminogenic social disadvantages may pose for criminal justice. I conclude that some views are misguided, others are unduly limited, and one – based on the ideals of fair opportunity to avoid crime and punishment – is particularly promising but as yet underdeveloped. (shrink)

Scientists routinely solve the problem of supplementing one’s store of variables with new theoretical posits that can explain the previously inexplicable. The banality of success at this task obscures a remarkable fact. Generating hypotheses that contain novel variables and accurately project over a limited amount of additional data is so difficult—the space of possibilities so vast—that succeeding through guesswork is overwhelmingly unlikely despite a very large number of attempts. And yet scientists do generate hypotheses of this sort in very few (...) tries. I argue that this poses a dilemma: either the long history of scientific success is a miracle, or there exists at least one method or algorithm for generating novel hypotheses with at least limited projectibility on the basis of what’s available to the scientist at a time, namely a set of observations, the history of past conjectures, and some prior theoretical commitments. In other words, either ordinary scientific success is miraculous or there exists a logic of discovery at the heart of actual scientific method. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that even if one accepts non-cognitivism about trust, the view that trust is not a species of and does not require belief, one should reject voluntarism about trust, the view that we can trust directly at will. There is good reason to think that we cannot trust directly at will, in the way that we can act, and this is so regardless of whether trust requires belief.

It’s not clear what supervaluationists should say about propositional content. Does a vague sentence, e.g., ‘Harry is bald’, express one proposition, or a barrage of propositions, or none at all? Or is the matter indeterminate? The supervaluationist canon is not decisive on the issue; authoritative passages can be cited in favor of each of the proposals just mentioned. Furthermore, some detractors have argued that supervaluationism is incapable of providing any coherent account of propositional content. This paper considers each of the (...) proposals for how many propositions are expressed by a vague sentence: none, some, all, or it’s indeterminate. Most of these proposals turn out to be unworkable in the metalanguage. I conclude that orthodox supervaluationists—those who identify truth with supertruth—must either relax the standard requirement that propositions be bivalent, or else alter the standard relation between sentences and propositions in which a sentence inherits its truth-conditions from the proposition it expresses. The best option going forward for the orthodox supervaluationist is perhaps the most surprising—amend the requirement that propositions be bivalent. I argue that propositions having supervaluational truth-conditions are best suited to fill the propositional roles in the semantic theory of a vague language. These propositions admit of truth-value gaps, and gappy propositions are controversial, but I argue that they earn their keep. (shrink)

Classical accounts of intertheoretic reduction involve two pieces: first, the new terms of the higher-level theory must be definable from the terms of the lower-level theory, and second, the claims of the higher-level theory must be deducible from the lower-level theory along with these definitions. The status of each of these pieces becomes controversial when the alleged reduction involves an infinite limit, as in statistical mechanics. Can one define features of or deduce the behavior of an infinite idealized system from (...) a theory describing only finite systems? In this paper, I change the subject in order to consider the motivations behind the definability and deducibility requirements. The classical accounts of intertheoretic reduction are appealing because when the definability and deducibility requirements are satisfied there is a sense in which the reduced theory is forced upon us by the reducing theory and the reduced theory contains no more information or structure than the reducing theory. I will show that, likewise, there is a precise sense in which in statistical mechanics the properties of infinite limiting systems are forced upon us by the properties of finite systems, and the properties of infinite systems contain no information beyond the properties of finite systems. (shrink)

Manipulation arguments aim to show that compatibilism is false. Usually, they aim to undermine compatibilism by first eliciting the intuition that a manipulated agent is not morally responsible. Patrick Todd's (2012) Moral Standing Manipulation Argument instead aims to first elicit the intuition that a manipulator cannot blame her victim. Todd then argues that the best explanation for why a manipulator cannot blame her victim is that incompatibilism is true. In this paper, I present three lines of defence against this argument (...) for those who agree a manipulator cannot blame her victim. (shrink)

Antes incluso de que la España de 1992 celebrara e l V centenario del descubrimiento de América, Ferlosio publi có en la prensa varios textos críticos sobre la con q uista que luego fueron reuni dos en Esas Yndias equivocadas y malditas. Comentarios a la historia. Part iend o de aquí, p lante o la s pregunta s de qué es la historia y cómo debería escribirse y ensayo una r esp uesta de sde la crítica de la violencia de (...) Benjamin y la identificación que hace Ferlosio de Historia, Dios, dominación y s entido, fundamento de l a m ora l expiatoria y el principio de intercambio de bienes por valores. D esarrollar é la tesis, compartida por Ferlosio, Dussel y Lomax, de que 1492 fue el año eje entre la Reconquista de la península ibérica y la conquista de América, r etrocederé a la fusión de Cristianismo e Imperio Romano en Nicea, presentare la caracterización hecha por Ferlo sio de la guerra escatológica, cuyo garante es Dios, y rastrear é los antecedentes estoic os d el sentido. Finalizaré con Dussel para m o stra r cómo el discurso histórico puede ser c rític o (Benjamin), transitiv o ( Ferlosio ) y congénito con su objeto ( Timeo ), se lib e re de la lógica del Sentido (Ferlosio) y n o tenga que taparse los ojos ante lo que dice ( Anne Carson ). (shrink)

“Sophisticated” theories of welfare face two potentially devastating criticisms. They are based upon two claims: that theories of welfare should be tested for what they imply about newborn infants and that even if a theory of welfare is intended to apply only to adults, we might still have sufficient reason to reject it because it implies an implausible divergence between adult and neonatal welfare. It has been argued we ought reject sophisticated theories of welfare because they have significantly counterintuitive implications (...) about neonatal welfare and because they imply an implausible divergence between the welfare of adults and that of newborns. I argue against both claims. (shrink)

In the Resolution of the Second Antinomy of the first Critique and the Dynamics chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Sciences, Kant presents his critical views on mereology, the study of parts and wholes. He endorses an unusual position: Matter is said to be infinitely divisible without being infinitely divided. It would be mistaken to think that matter consists of infinitely many parts—rather, parts “exist only in the representation of them, hence in the dividing”. This view, according to which (...) parts are created through division somehow, was criticized as obscure early on, and has not received much attention since. Against this trend, I show how a coherent position, which I call Mereological Conceptualism, can be extracted from the sparse textual basis. (shrink)

It is shown that the standard definitions of truth-functionality, though useful for their purposes, ignore some aspects of the usual informal characterisations of truth-functionality. An alternative definition is given that results in a stronger notion which pays attention to those aspects.

Gaskin's book The Unity of the Proposition is very rich in material. I will focus only on its central thesis: Gaskin holds that Bradley's regress (more precisely, one particular version of it) is not only innocent, but in fact philosophically significant because it plays a crucial role in solving what Gaskin calls the problem of the unity of the proposition . In what follows, I first explain what that problem is meant to be ( section 1 ), then I present (...) and criticise Gaskin's proposal about how Bradley's regress bears on the problem ( section 2 ), and finally I sketch an alternative approach to the problem ( section 3 ). (shrink)