Members of societies involved in an intractable conflict usually consider costs that stem from the continuation of the conflict as unavoidable and even justify for their collective existence. This perception is well-anchored in widely shared conflict-supporting narratives that motivate them to avoid information that challenges their views about the conflict. However, since providing information about such major costs as a method for moderating conflict-related views has not been receiving much attention, in this research, we explore this venue. We examine what (...) kind of costs, and under what conditions, exposure to major costs of a conflict affects openness to information and conciliatory attitudes among Israeli Jews in the context of the intractable Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Study 1 revealed that interventions based on messages providing information on mental health cost, economic cost, and cost of the conflict to Israeli democracy had no significant effect on perceptions of the participants of these prices, openness to new information about the conflict, or support for conciliatory policies. However, the existing perceptions that participants had about the cost of the conflict to Israeli democracy were positively associated with openness to alternative information about the conflict and support for conciliatory policies. Therefore, in Study 2, we tested whether providing information about future potential costs to the two fundamental characteristics of Israel, a democracy or a Jewish state, created by the continuation of the conflict, will induce attitude change regarding the conflict. The results indicate that information on the future cost to the democratic identity of Israel significantly affected the attitude of the participants regarding the conflict, while the effect was moderated by the level of religiosity. For secular participants, this manipulation created more openness to alternative information about the conflict and increased support for conciliatory policies, but for religious participants, it backfired. We discuss implications for the role of information about losses and the relationship between religiosity and attitudes regarding democracy and conflict. (shrink)

This article examines the historically embedded relations of three 19th-century phenomena in which the non-consuming body is constituted as a spectacle of admiration. These three phenomena, known as Fasting Women, Living Skeletons and Hunger Artists, all emerged and disappeared in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Viewing the emergence and disappearance of the three phenomena as embedded in the historical crossroads of pre-modern and modern ethics, the article argues that each of these phenomena corresponds differently to the clash between (...) modern `rationality' and the pre-modern celebration of `miracles'. The article maintains that while Fasting Women epitomized that clash by becoming (a highly contested) spectacle of `the miraculous', the Living Skeletons transcended the clash by portraying a spectacle of liminal corporeality (the `living dead') and the Hunger Artists announced the dissolution of that very clash by performing a spectacle of `the controlled self'. Through a focus on the spectacle of fasting (i.e. the appeared, performed, `gazed at' act of fasting), a phenomenological typology of the three phenomena is outlined. I suggest that while Fasting Women and Living Skeletons embodied a spectacle of a lean body, which does not require suffering, the Hunger Artists embodied a spectacle of hunger centred on suffering and pain. The phenomenological `mapping' of these phenomena is then considered in the context of `performativity theory' and proposed as a frame of reference for a sociological study of anorexia nervosa. (shrink)

Citizenship under Fire examines the relationship among civic education, the culture of war, and the quest for peace. Drawing on examples from Israel and the United States, Sigal Ben-Porath seeks to understand how ideas about citizenship change when a country is at war, and what educators can do to prevent some of the most harmful of these changes.Perhaps the most worrisome one, Ben-Porath contends, is a growing emphasis in schools and elsewhere on social conformity, on tendentious teaching of history, (...) and on drawing stark distinctions between them and us. As she writes, "The varying characteristics of citizenship in times of war and peace add up to a distinction between belligerent citizenship, which is typical of democracies in wartime, and the liberal democratic citizenship that is characteristic of more peaceful democracies."Ben-Porath examines how various theories of education--principally peace education, feminist education, and multicultural education--speak to the distinctive challenges of wartime. She argues that none of these theories are satisfactory on their own theoretical terms or would translate easily into practice. In the final chapter, she lays out her own alternative theory--"expansive education"--which she believes holds out more promise of widening the circles of participation in schools, extending the scope of permissible debate, and diversifying the questions asked about the opinions voiced. (shrink)

When a nation declares war, it rarely takes time to define the concept. When a peace treaty is signed, governments and peoples assume that they know what to exp.

Medical science at its core aims to preserve health and eliminate disease, but a common theme in scientific discovery is the application of findings in ways that were not the primary intent. The development of diagnostic modalities to predict the health of resulting children has been a fundamental aim underpinning research into prenatal and preimplantation diagnostic modalities; however, the knowledge gained has in some cases been utilized for nonmedical purposes. As an example, amniocentesis developed to determine whether the pregnancy is (...) chromosomally normal also provides information about the sex of the fetus, which normally does not affect health. The emerging gene‐editing technologies that could be used to repair mutated disease‐causing genes in an embryo will presumably also be able to be used to alter traits unrelated to disease. And yet, I will argue, the desire to preserve the mystery of reproduction remains a central value in humans’ quest to reproduce. This yearning to maintain the mysteries will likely temper the development of strategies to alter our genome and affect the genetic identities of our offspring. In my experience as an obstetrician and reproductive endocrinology and infertility subspecialist, people want to have, not the best possible baby, but rather their own baby. (shrink)

This collection, published in 1988, brings an innovative perspective to research in social cognition.

Most theories and hypotheses in psychology are verbal in nature, yet their evaluation overwhelmingly relies on inferential statistical procedures. The validity of the move from qualitative to quantitative analysis depends on the verbal and statistical expressions of a hypothesis being closely aligned – that is, that the two must refer to roughly the same set of hypothetical observations. Here, I argue that many applications of statistical inference in psychology fail to meet this basic condition. Focusing on the most widely used (...) class of model in psychology – the linear mixed model – I explore the consequences of failing to statistically operationalize verbal hypotheses in a way that respects researchers' actual generalization intentions. I demonstrate that although the “random effect” formalism is used pervasively in psychology to model intersubject variability, few researchers accord the same treatment to other variables they clearly intend to generalize over. The under-specification of random effects imposes far stronger constraints on the generalizability of results than most researchers appreciate. Ignoring these constraints can dramatically inflate false-positive rates, and often leads researchers to draw sweeping verbal generalizations that lack a meaningful connection to the statistical quantities they are putatively based on. I argue that failure to take the alignment between verbal and statistical expressions seriously lies at the heart of many of psychology's ongoing problems, and conclude with a discussion of several potential avenues for improvement. (shrink)

We examine whether the "evidence of evidence is evidence" principle is true. We distinguish several different versions of the principle and evaluate recent attacks on some of those versions. We argue that, whatever the merits of those attacks, they leave the more important rendition of the principle untouched. That version is, however, also subject to new kinds of counterexamples. We end by suggesting how to formulate a better version of the principle that takes into account those new counterexamples.

In the engaging and thought-provoking book The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids and the Kids We Have, Bonnie Rochman addresses the question of choice in human reproduction through the lens of knowledge. Asserting that the desire for knowledge is the central theme of modern-day reproduction, she asks, “Is genetic knowledge empowering or fear-inducing or both?” Yet the question at the heart of the book goes beyond knowledge. Rochman delves into whether genetic information is (...) actionable and then examines the corollary question of whether individuals should make decisions based on this data. Do parents want to choose the kinds of kids they have? Certainly, most parents would do what they could to prevent their child from having a painful, life-limiting disease. But that is the extreme. And while genetic technologies generally start by targeting the extreme, the inevitable byproduct is the ability to know about and affect the fringe. It is at the borders that the critical questions lie. Taking advantage of reproductive choices has potentially life-altering and permanent consequences not only for the chooser but also for the resulting child, the family unit, and society. (shrink)

We are currently witnessing a sharp rise in the use of algorithmic decision-making tools. In these instances, a new wave of policy concerns is set forth. This article strives to map out these issues, separating the wheat from the chaff. It aims to provide policy makers and scholars with a comprehensive framework for approaching these thorny issues in their various capacities. To achieve this objective, this article focuses its attention on a general analytical framework, which will be applied to a (...) specific subset of the overall discussion. The analytical framework will reduce the discussion to two dimensions, every one of which addressing two central elements. These four factors call for a distinct discussion, which is at times absent in the existing literature. The two dimensions are the specific and novel problems the process assumedly generates and the specific attributes which exacerbate them. While the problems are articulated in a variety of ways, they most likely could be reduced to two broad categories: efficiency and fairness-based concerns. In the context of this discussion, such problems are usually linked to two salient attributes the algorithmic processes feature—its opaque and automated nature. (shrink)

The relationship between adults and children in liberal democracies is based on two flawed assumptions that are widespread: first, that childhood is an impediment, a passing phase of impaired maturity; and second, that children benefit from the proliferation of rights ascribed to them. Social institutions, and particularly the education system, are correspondingly misconstrued. This article focuses on the combined effect of vulnerability and autonomy as they construct contemporary childhood. I conclude that adults' obligations rather than children's rights are the appropriate (...) social, political and educational basis for adult society's relations with children. (shrink)

In this paper we present an informal review of our recent work whose goal is to develop a mathematical theory of the physical phenomenon of emission and absorption of radiation by systems of nonrelativistic matter such as atoms and molecules.

This paper deals about dualities for bounded prelinear Hilbert algebras. In particular, we give an Esakia-style duality between the algebraic category of bounded prelinear Hilbert algebras and a category of H-spaces whose morphisms are certain continuous p-morphisms.

The philosophy of measurement studies the conceptual, ontological, epistemic, and technological conditions that make measurement possible and reliable. A new wave of philosophical scholarship has emerged in the last decade that emphasizes the material and historical dimensions of measurement and the relationships between measurement and theoretical modeling. This essay surveys these developments and contrasts them with earlier work on the semantics of quantity terms and the representational character of measurement. The conclusions highlight four characteristics of the emerging research program in (...) philosophy of measurement: it is epistemological, coherentist, practice oriented, and model based. (shrink)

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), such as ChatGPT, shows great promise and potential and is gradually being used in mental health care, but it also raises ethical concerns. These relate t...

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.

This work develops an epistemology of measurement, that is, an account of the conditions under which measurement and standardization methods produce knowledge as well as the nature, scope, and limits of this knowledge. I focus on three questions: (i) how is it possible to tell whether an instrument measures the quantity it is intended to? (ii) what do claims to measurement accuracy amount to, and how might such claims be justified? (iii) when is disagreement among instruments a sign of error, (...) and when does it imply that instruments measure different quantities? Based on a series of case studies conducted in collaboration with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), I argue for a model-based approach to the epistemology of physical measurement. To measure a physical quantity, I argue, is to estimate the value of a parameter in an idealized model of a physical process. Such estimation involves inference from the final state (‘indication’) of a process to the value range of a parameter (‘outcome’) in light of theoretical and statistical assumptions. Contrary to contemporary philosophical views, measurement outcomes cannot be obtained by mapping the structure of indications. Instead, measurement outcomes as well as claims to accuracy, error and quantity individuation can only be adjudicated relative to a choice of idealized modelling assumptions. (shrink)

Axiomatic measurement theories are commonly interpreted as claiming that, in order to quantify an empirical domain, the qualitative structure of data about that domain must be mapped to a numerical structure. Such mapping is supposed to be established independently, i.e., without presupposing that the domain can be quantified. This interpretation is based on two myths: that it is possible to independently infer the qualitative structure of objects from empirical data, and that the adequacy of numerical representations can only be justified (...) by mapping such qualitative structures to numerical ones. I dispel the myths and show that axiomatic measurement theories provide an inadequate characterization of the kind of evidence required to detect quantities. (shrink)

Suppose we learn that we have a poor track record in forming beliefs rationally, or that a brilliant colleague thinks that we believe P irrationally. Does such input require us to revise those beliefs whose rationality is in question? When we gain information suggesting that our beliefs are irrational, we are in one of two general cases. In the first case we made no error, and our beliefs are rational. In that case the input to the contrary is misleading. In (...) the second case we indeed believe irrationally, and our original evidence already requires us to fix our mistake. In that case the input to that effect is normatively superfluous. Thus, we know that information suggesting that our beliefs are irrational is either misleading or superfluous. This, I submit, renders the input incapable of justifying belief revision, despite our not knowing which of the two kinds it is. (shrink)

In this book, Tal S. Shamir sets out to identify cinema as a novel medium for philosophy and an important way of manifesting and developing philosophical thought. The volume presents a comprehensive analysis of the nature of philosophy's potential-or, more strongly put, its need-to be manifested cinematically. Drawing on the fields of cinema, philosophy, and media studies, Cinematic Philosophy adds film to the traditional list of ways through which philosophy can be created, concentrating on the unique potential of the cinematic (...) medium to effectively put forward and create philosophy. In the process, the book opens up innovative horizons for new types of knowledge and wisdom grounded in contemporary contexts and philosophical thought. Philosophy, best characterized as the love of wisdom, is not dependent on a specific medium nor solely situated within written text or oral lectures. Shamir asserts that philosophy can, should, and must be manifested and identified in a range of different platforms. (shrink)

This article develops a model-based account of the standardization of physical measurement, taking the contemporary standardization of time as its central case study. To standardize the measurement of a quantity, I argue, is to legislate the mode of application of a quantity concept to a collection of exemplary artefacts. Legislation involves an iterative exchange between top-down adjustments to theoretical and statistical models regulating the application of a concept, and bottom-up adjustments to material artefacts in light of remaining gaps. The model-based (...) account clarifies the cognitive role of ad hoc corrections, arbitrary rules, and seemingly circular inferences involved in contemporary timekeeping, and explains the stability of networks of standards better than its conventionalist and constructivist counterparts. 1 Introduction2 Making Time Universal2.1 Stability and accuracy2.2 Multiple realizability2.3 The challenges of synchronicity2.4 Divergent standards2.5 The leap second3 The Two Faces of Stability3.1 An explanatory challenge3.2 Conventionalist explanations3.3 Constructivist explanations4 Models and Standardization4.1 A third alternative4.2 Stability reconceived4.3 Legislative freedom4.4 Discovering gaps4.5 Nature and society entangled4.6 Remark on scope5 Conclusions. (shrink)

When discrepancies are discovered between the outcomes of different measurement procedures, two sorts of explanation are open to scientists. Either some of the outcomes are inaccurate or the procedures are not measuring the same quantity. I argue that, due to the possibility of systematic error, the choice between and is underdetermined in principle by any possible evidence. Consequently, foundationalist criteria of quantity individuation are either empty or circular. I propose a coherentist, model-based account of measurement that avoids the underdetermination problem, (...) and use this account to explain how scientists individuate quantities in practice. (shrink)

This article develops a model-based account of the standardization of physical measurement, taking the contemporary standardization of time as its central case-study. To standardize the measurement of a quantity, I argue, is to legislate the mode of application of a quantity-concept to a collection of exemplary artefacts. Legislation involves an iterative exchange between top-down adjustments to theoretical and statistical models regulating the application of a concept, and bottom-up adjustments to material artefacts in light of remaining gaps. The model-based account clarifies (...) the cognitive role of ad hoc corrections, arbitrary rules and seemingly circular inferences involved in contemporary timekeeping, and explains the stability of networks of standards better than its conventionalist and constructivist counterparts. (shrink)

When a nation declares war, it rarely takes time to define the concept. When a peace treaty is signed, governments and peoples assume that they know what to exp.

Contrary to the claim that measurement standards are absolutely accurate by definition, I argue that unit definitions do not completely fix the referents of unit terms. Instead, idealized models play a crucial semantic role in coordinating the theoretical definition of a unit with its multiple concrete realizations. The accuracy of realizations is evaluated by comparing them to each other in light of their respective models. The epistemic credentials of this method are examined and illustrated through an analysis of the contemporary (...) standardization of time. I distinguish among five senses of ‘measurement accuracy’ and clarify how idealizations enable the assessment of accuracy in each sense. (shrink)

The Self-Intimation thesis has it that whatever justificatory status a proposition has, i.e., whether or not we are justified in believing it, we are justified in believing that it has that status. The Infallibility thesis has it that whatever justificatory status we are justified in believing that a proposition has, the proposition in fact has that status. Jointly, Self-Intimation and Infallibility imply that the justificatory status of a proposition closely aligns with the justification we have about that justificatory status. Self-Intimation (...) has two noteworthy implications. First, assuming that we never have sufficient justification for a proposition and for its negation, we can derive Infallibility from Self-Intimation. Interestingly, there seems to be no equivalently simple way to derive Self-Intimation from Infallibility. This asymmetry provides reason for thinking that bottom-level justification rather than top-level justification drives the explanation for why the levels of justification align. Second, Self-Intimation suggests a counterintuitive treatment of information concerning what justificatory status a proposition has. It follows from Self-Intimation that we always have justification for the truth about whether a proposition is justified for us, and therefore, that higher-order evidence could change what we should believe on this matter only by misleading us. This permits forming beliefs about whether a proposition is justified for us without regard to higher-order evidence, and thus reveals a reason for thinking that top-level justification is evidentially inert. (shrink)