This paper investigates the dynamic and performative construction of publics in public engagement exercises. In this investigation, we, on the one hand, analyse how public engagement settings as political machineries frame particular kinds of roles and identities for the participating publics in relation to ‘the public at large’. On the other hand, we study how the participating citizens appropriate, resist and transform these roles and identities, and how they construct themselves and the participating group in relation to wider publics. The (...) empirical basis of our argument is a discussion of four different kinds of participation events in Austria. Building on these observations we develop conclusions about the public up-take of public participation in technoscience and the role of public engagement in current techno-political cultures. (shrink)

Donald Davidson writes that “[r]easons for intending to do something are very much like reasons for action, indeed one might hold that they are exactly the same except for time.” That the reasons for forming an intention and the reasons for acting as intended are in some way related is a widely accepted claim. But it can take different forms: (1) the reasons may mirror each other so that there is a (derivative) reason to intend whenever there is a reason (...) to act; or (2) they may reduce to just one kind: perhaps all reasons for action are really reasons for forming intentions.3 Or the other way around: (3) all reasons for intentions are really reasons to act. The three versions are not equally strong contenders though. The third - that reasons to intend could reduce to reasons to act - seems unlikely. After all, there may be reasons to form future-directed intentions, in particular, independently of the reason to act as intended. The second suggestion falls prey to different considerations: reasons to act can, at least sometimes, be reasons to produce a certain outcome, quite independently of the intention with which the action is done, or whether it is done intentionally at all. In these cases, the reason to act is not (or not obviously) a reason to intend. Therefore, I don’t pursue the possibility of a reduction in this paper. My focus is on the first, non-reductive proposal. I will discuss various versions of it in some detail, but ultimately reject it. (shrink)

In recent years, the metaverse—some form of immersive digital extension of the physical world—has received much attention. As tech companies present their bold visions, scientists and scholars have also turned to metaverse issues, from technological challenges via societal implications to profound philosophical questions. This article contributes to this growing literature by identifying the possibilities of two dystopian metaverse scenarios, namely one based on the _experience machine_ and one based on _demoktesis_—two concepts from Nozick (_Anarchy_, _State_, _and Utopia_, Basic Books, 1974). (...) These dystopian scenarios are introduced, and the potential for a metaverse to evolve into either of them is explained. The article is concluded with an argument for why the two dystopian scenarios are not strongly wedded to any particular theory of ethics or political philosophy, but constitute a more general contribution. (shrink)

In his seminal paper, “Moral Luck,” Bernard Williams begins to develop an account of responsibility for unintentional aspects of our agency. It rests on a crucial distinction of success and failure, internal or external to an agent’s project. I argue that a success which results from conditions that are internal to a project is not a lucky success, nor is a failure which results from something that is internal to the project just unlucky. There is no internal luck. Responsibility-defying luck (...) is always external. An important result of this exploration is that Williams’s view opens a path for understanding responsibility neither as being concerned with reactive attitudes such as indignation or blame, nor in a common rationalist way as being based on an agent’s reason-responsiveness. Instead, responsibility depends on how a person’s actions relate to the exercise of her abilities in the pursuit of her projects and how they are integrated into her life. (shrink)

In this essay I examine the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the post-secular state. I argue that, although their views on the relation of religion and politics converge in certain respects, a profound difference remains between their overall approaches. Their disagreement on the epistemic status of religious as opposed to secular moral reasons, and on the role religious arguments can play in the public sphere testify to a deeper schism. Thus what might at first seem like a (...) quarrel about details proves to be a fundamental philosophical divide on the issue of modernity. I conclude that Taylor’s model of post-secularism is more promising as an approach to the challenge posed by growing religious and cultural diversity, for, if understood as a version of “reiterative universalism,” it avoids both moral relativism and Eurocentrism. (shrink)

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics the notion of reality plays a central role. The present article focuses on the ethical implications of the Chalcedonian Christology underlying this concept. This approach is tied to the debate on the relationship between the universal and specific identity of Christian social ethics in public discourse. In the opening section the article outlines the pertinence of this debate with regard to Bonhoeffer's Christological ethic. In the following section the article analyzes Bonhoeffer's concept of reality and the (...) implied Chalcedonian traits. With this foundation established the article raises the question about its social ethical implications. The final part of the article argues that Bonhoeffer's ethics and ecclesiology cannot be separated from each other, explaining why Bonhoeffer's notion of reality leads to an assertion of the church's role in letting reality become real. In the light of Bonhoeffer's notion of reality the last section argues for the reconciliation of Christian witness and participation in public discourse. (shrink)

The debate on the role and identity of Christian social ethics in liberal democracy touches upon the question about the relationship between universality and specificity. Rather than argue for the difference between these approaches, it can be argued that they are to be understood in a differentiated unity with each other. This idea can be substantiated by a figurative appropriation of a Chalcedonian Christology, particularly the communicatio idiomatum . The communicative dimension of this concept has been found to be useful (...) for a reinterpretation of the idea of responsibility. By engaging contemporary positions of communicative ethics, H. Richard Niebuhr's understanding of responsibility as responsiveness, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christological concept of responsibility in a constructive dialogue with each other, the article has attempted to outline main tenets of a responsive concept of responsibility based on a broadly conceived Chalcedonian Christology. This responsive understanding of responsibility serves as the foundation of a third position beyond the futile antagonism of liberalism and communitarianism. Hereby it maintains the reasonableness of a liberal democratic assertion of a common political discourse, and yet it also contends the necessity of authentic particular worldviews and outlooks. In its argument for such a third-way thinking it hopes to contribute with an understanding where these positions are seen in a constructive relationship – rather than in contrast – with each other. (shrink)

Bei Kant tauchen viele antike Autoren und Theorien auf. In dieser ersten Gesamtbearbeitung zum Thema wird gegen eine langjährige Forschungsmeinung gezeigt, dass nicht so sehr Platon und Aristoteles als vielmehr der hellenistischen Philosophie die entscheidende Rolle für sein Denken zukommt. Anhand der drei Kritiken werden Konstanzen und Umbrüche seines Antikeverständnisses herausgearbeitet und in ihren Konsequenzen für die Kantdeutung beleuchtet.

Zwischen 1920 und 1925 kam es nach Vorarbeiten von Jones, Abraham, Stärcke, van Ophuijsen und Alexander sowie in Abrahams Hauptwerk, dem Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido, zu einer Veränderung der psychoanalytischen Theorie, die sich vor allem auf die Stellung der Aggression bezog. Die stärkere Gewichtung der präödipalen Aggression wurde in London in erster Linie von Abrahams Analysanden James und Edward Glover durchgeführt. Ihre Arbeiten bereiteten den Boden für die Rezeption von Melanie Klein, einer weiteren Abraham-Analysandin, die ihrerseits von Alix Strachey, (...) auch sie eine Analysandin Abrahams, sowie von Ernest Jones unterstützt wurde. Klein entwickelte in der Analyse mit Kindern eine Technik, die sich bevorzugt auf die Wahrnehmung und Deutung der Aggression in der Stunde bezog. All dies, ohne dass Freud die neue Linie begrüßt hätte, was aber seit dem Erstarken der lokalen Gruppen in Berlin und London nicht mehr so stark ins Gewicht fiel. Gleichwohl blieb die Frage nach der Stellung der Aggression in der Schwebe, während sich Freud bis zuletzt für das Primat des Sexuellen aussprach und sich von den Positionen der hier erwähnten Schüler zwischen 1920 und 1925 mehrere Male ausdrücklich distanzierte. (shrink)

Many of the things we do in the course of a day we don't do intentionally: blushing, sneezing, breathing, blinking, smiling—to name but a few. But we also do act intentionally, and often when we do we act for reasons. Whether we always act for reasons when we act intentionally is controversial. But at least the converse is generally accepted: when we act for reasons we always act intentionally. Necessarily, it seems. In this paper, I argue that acting intentionally is (...) not in all cases acting for a reason. Instead, intentional agency involves a specific kind of control. Having this kind of control makes it possible to modify one's action in the light of reasons. Intentional agency opens the possibility of acting in the light of reasons. I also explain why when we act with an intention we act for reasons. In the second part of the paper, I draw on these results to show that the dominant view of reasons to intend and the rationality of intentions should be rejected. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities, advantages and difficulties of corpus-based analyses of semantic and pragmatic aspects of language in one particular field, namely the linguistic expression of emotion concepts. For this purpose, a methodological procedure is proposed and an exemplary analysis of the emotion concept “fear” in English is performed. The procedure combines Kövecses' lexical approach and Stefanowitsch's metaphorical pattern analysis with additional concepts from corpus linguistics such as semantic preference and semantic prosody. (...) The results of the study show that such a corpus-based analysis of emotion words offers several advantages. Firstly, by exploring the surroundings of the search word in a vast amount of text, we are not only able to find evidence of conceptual metaphor and metonymy that structure the emotion concept and of related emotion concepts, but also we can enrich the description of the emotion concept with information from a series of dimensions and add a pragmatic viewpoint by revealing an explicit or implicit evaluation of the emotion. The second advantage offered by a corpus-based approach lies in the possibility of quantifying results, i.e., comparing the frequency, productivity and creative use of individual metaphors and metonymies, which is especially interesting in view of contrastive studies. (shrink)

That the extraordinary narrative experiment known as theSatyriconhas regularly stimulated scholarly investigation into the relationship between status and freedom is not surprising for a work, the longest surviving section of which features an excessive dinner party at the house of alibertus. Much of the discussion has concentrated on the depiction of the dinner's host and his freedmen friends. Following the lead of F. Zeitlin and others in seeing the depiction of a ‘freedmen's milieu’ in theCena, J. Bodel argued in a (...) seminal paper published twenty years ago that theCenaopens a window onto the ‘freedman's mentality’. The last ten years or so have seen a revival of the theme, with much emphasis on the display of an open society in theCena, even a Saturnalian world-view, based on a suspension or reversal of the traditional social hierarchies, all framed by a general air of excessive liberality: whatever satirical lens theSatyricon’s author is seen to have projected onto Trimalchio and his freedmen friends,theyare understood as celebrating ‘freedom's defining difference’. In the light of such a unifying conceptualization of theCena’s motley crew, it is not surprising that scholars have come to understand the libertine assemblage as a reflection of ‘the social class of the “freedmen” in first-centurya.d.Italy’. After all, ‘class’ can be defined as ‘a number of individuals (persons or things) possessing common attributes’, and, with specific regard to human society, as ‘a division of society according to status’. (shrink)

Wang (_Philosophy & Technology_ 35, 2022) introduces a Foucauldian power account of algorithmic transparency. This short commentary explores when this power account is appropriate. It is first observed that the power account is a constructionist one, and that such accounts often come with both factual and evaluative claims. In an instance of Hume’s law, the evaluative claims do not follow from the factual claims, leaving open the question of how much constructionist commitment (Hacking, 1999) one should have. The concept of (...) acts in equilibrium (Nozick, 1981) is then used to explain how different individuals reading Wang can end up with different evaluative attitudes towards algorithmic transparency, despite factual agreement. The commentary concludes by situating constructionist commitment inside a larger question of how much to think of our actions, identifying conflicting arguments. (shrink)

Background: Recent research has demonstrated that depressed individuals show impairments in inhibiting irrelevant emotional material, and that these impairments are linked to rumination. Cognitive inhibition, however, is not a unitary construct but consists of several components which operate at different stages of information processing. The present study was designed to assess two components of inhibition and examine their relation to depression and rumination in a sample of clinically depressed and healthy control participants. Methods: Twenty-two individuals diagnosed with a current depressive (...) episode and 27 never-disordered control participants completed an Emotional Flanker Task to assess individual differences in interference control and a modification of the Working Memory Selection Task to assess individual differences in the ability to discard no longer relevant emotional material from working memory. Participants completed self-report measures to assess depressive symptoms and rumination. Results: Clinically depressed compared to control participants showed significantly reduced interference control of irrelevant negative information. The groups, however, did not differ in their ability to discard no longer relevant negative information from working memory. In contrast, rumination was associated with difficulty removing no longer relevant negative material from working memory but not with deficits in interference control. Conclusions: Results highlight the importance of differentiating among components of inhibition to gain a better understanding of cognitive mechanisms underlying depression and rumination. (shrink)

Freuds Entwurf von »Trauer und Melancholie« vom Februar 1915, der 1996 publiziert wurde, steht im Zentrum der Untersuchung. Nach einer Zusammenfassung der Thesen des Entwurfs werden Ferenczis und Abrahams Reaktionen auf den Text sowie Freuds Kommentar zu ihren Stellungnahmen dargestellt. Freuds partielle Übernahme von Ferenczis Introjektion und seine Zurückhaltung gegenüber Abrahams »Munderotik und Sadismus« werden erörtert sowie die Frage, ob und inwiefern die Einwürfe der Schüler in die Endfassung von »Trauer und Melancholie« einflossen, insbesondere Abrahams theoretischer Ansatz. Abschließend wird der (...) Begriff der narzisstischen Identifizierung, der den Kern von Freuds Verständnis der Depression bildet, mit seinen aus der gleichen Zeit stammenden Ausführungen über die »Vorstufen der Liebe« zu einem Bild der narzisstischen Beziehung zwischen Subjekt und Objekt zusammengefügt, unter Betonung der klinischen Relevanz der von Freud entwickelten Differenz zwischen der narzisstischen und libidinösen Besetzung des Objekts. (shrink)

Childhood overweight and obesity, especially among migrant children, are current health problems in several European countries. In the present study the prevalence of overweight and obesity among migrant children from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia was documented and compared with that of Austrian children in Vienna. Anthropometric data from 1786 children were collected at the ages of 6, 10 and 15 years. Body mass was estimated by means of the body mass index and percentile curves were used to determine weight (...) status. The prevalence of overweight and obesity was found to be significantly higher among migrant children. Children and adolescents from the former Yugoslavia and Turkish girls exhibited especially high rates of overweight and obesity. Biosocial and cultural factors are discussed as causes of these observations. (shrink)

It is an assumption common to many theories of rationality that all practical reasons are based on a person's given desires. I shall call any approach to practical reasons which accepts this assumption a "Humean approach". In spite of many criticisms, the Humean approach has numerous followers who take it to be the natural and inevitable view of practical reason. I will develop an argument against the Humean view aiming to explain its appeal, as well as to expose its mistake. (...) I focus on just one argument in favour of the Humean approach, which I believe can be constructed as the background idea of many Humean accounts: the argument from motivation. (shrink)

Recent advances in artificial intelligence offer many beneficial prospects. However, concerns have been raised about the opacity of decisions made by these systems, some of which have turned out to be biased in various ways. This article makes a contribution to a growing body of literature on how to make systems for automated decision-making more transparent, explainable, and fair by drawing attention to and further elaborating a distinction first made by Nozick between first-level bias in the application of standards and (...) second-level bias in the choice of standards, as well as a second distinction between discrimination and arbitrariness. Applying the typology developed, a number of illuminating observations are made. First, it is observed that some reported bias in automated decision-making is first-level arbitrariness, which can be alleviated by explainability techniques. However, such techniques have only a limited potential to alleviate first-level discrimination. Second, it is argued that second-level arbitrariness is probably quite common in automated decision-making. In contrast to first-level arbitrariness, however, second-level arbitrariness is not straightforward to detect automatically. Third, the prospects for alleviating arbitrariness are discussed. It is argued that detecting and alleviating second-level arbitrariness is a profound problem because there are many contrasting and sometimes conflicting standards from which to choose, and even when we make intentional efforts to choose standards for good reasons, some second-level arbitrariness remains. (shrink)

In Jeffrey P. Bishop's The Anticipatory Corpse it is argued that the dead body has become epistemologically normative in contemporary medicine. In order to regain the communal bonds necessary for the responsive encounter with the other, medicine is in need of living traditions. This leads Bishop to question whether only theology can save medicine. The present essay takes up on this question with a reply from a Bonhoefferian anthropology, arguing for the embodied human being as being-there-with-others and shows how this (...) is Christologically shaped. The broader aim of the essay is to contribute to the debate on embodiment in theological bioethics. The essay maintains a normative understanding of the corporeal reality of what it means to be human and yet argues that this must always be understood in connection with the responsive relation to the other. (shrink)

As more decisions are made by automated algorithmic systems, the transparency of these systems has come under scrutiny. While such transparency is typically seen as beneficial, there is a also a critical, Foucauldian account of it. From this perspective, worries have recently been articulated that algorithmic transparency can be used for manipulation, as part of a disciplinary power structure. Klenk (Philosophy & Technology 36, 79, 2023) recently argued that such manipulation should not be understood as exploitation of vulnerable victims, but (...) rather as indifference to whether the information provided enhances decision-making by revealing reasons. This short commentary on Klenk uses Berlin’s (1958) two concepts of liberty to further illuminate the concept of transparency as manipulation, finding alignment between positive liberty and the critical account. (shrink)

The present study analyzes body fat distribution, a well-known and important indicator of reproductive capability, in young women between 18 and 28 years of age (mean=23.3 years) suffering from secondary amenorrhea and therefore temporary infertility resulting from self-starvation. Body composition parameters estimated by means of dual energy x-ray absorptiometry and the fat distribution index, indicating body shape, were compared with those of healthy controls. Although members of the infertile, amenorrheic group exhibited dramatically low body weight and total amount of body (...) fat, and therefore a marked negative energy balance in comparison with the healthy controls, the sex-specific fat distribution patterns did not differ between infertile and fertile young women. In contrast, the lower the weight and total fat amount, the more gynoid the fat distribution, even in infertile women. This observation may be interpreted in an evolutionary sense: Our ancestors had to cope with frequent food shortages, even starvation, and therefore lengthy periods of negative energy balance. In addition to pregnancy and lactation, temporary infertility as a result of long-term negative energy balance was not an uncommon phenomenon in female life histories. Nevertheless, after a time of plenty, reproductive function recovered, and therefore the gynoid fat distribution patterns in temporarily infertile young women may be interpreted as signal of reproductive capability, which resumes after a time of surplus. (shrink)

The impact of hysterectomy without oophorectomy and with no malignant purpose on body composition and postmenopausal weight gain was tested in 184 Viennese females aged between 47 and 57 years. Hysterectomized women were significantly heavier than those who experienced a spontaneous menopause. The amount of fat tissue, especially in the abdominal region, was significantly higher in hysterectomized women. Furthermore, they were reported to have experienced a significantly higher weight gain since menopause. No significant differences in bone mass were found. Psychological (...) stress factors and hormonal changes following hysterectomy are discussed as possible causes of these differences. (shrink)

This article explores the development of victim rights in sentencing through a comparative analysis of the rights of family victims in homicide sentencing proceedings across Australia, the United States, England and Wales and Canada. Of the various rights afforded to victims of crime, the use of family victim impact evidence in the sentencing of homicide offenders has proven most contentious, with various courts grappling with the weight such evidence ought to play in sentencing proceedings. In homicide cases where the family (...) of the deceased victim submits a statement, all Australian and international jurisdictions except the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) have resolved to allow the consideration of such statements on the basis inter alia that family victims may incur harms potentially relevant to the sentencing process. New South Wales continues to reject such evidence on the basis that family statements may value the deceased’s life above that of another. This article considers the status of family impact statements in homicide cases by examining the treatment of family victims in sentencing law on an international basis, with particular focus on pilot schemes in England and Wales, where family victims have been provided personal counsel at public expense, for use in homicide cases. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a person can have a reason to do what she cannot do. In a nutshell, the argument is that a person can have derivate reasons relating to an action that she has a non-derivative reason to perform. There are clear examples of derivative reasons that a person has in cases where she cannot do what she (non-derivatively) has reason to do. She couldn’t have those derivative reasons, unless she also had the non-derivative reason to (...) do what she cannot do. I discuss a number of objections to this view, in particular two: (1) The objection that if there were reasons to do what one cannot do, many of those would be ‘crazy reasons’, and (2) the worry that if there were such reasons, then agents would have reasons to engage in futile deliberations and tryings. I develop an explanation of ‘crazy reasons’ that shows that not all reasons to do the impossible are crazy and only those that are need to be filtered out, and, regarding the second objecting, I show that the reasons for trying as well as for taking the means to doing something—instrumental reasons in a broad sense—are different from the reasons for performing the action in the first place. They are affected by impossibility, and we can explain why that is so. The view I argue for is that a person may have a reason to do what she cannot do, but she does not have a reason to try to do so or to take means to realizing the impossible. (shrink)

Experimental research shows that human sentence processing uses information from different levels of linguistic analysis, for example, lexical and syntactic preferences as well as semantic plausibility. Existing computational models of human sentence processing, however, have focused primarily on lexico‐syntactic factors. Those models that do account for semantic plausibility effects lack a general model of human plausibility intuitions at the sentence level. Within a probabilistic framework, we propose a wide‐coverage model that both assigns thematic roles to verb–argument pairs and determines a (...) preferred interpretation by evaluating the plausibility of the resulting (verb, role, argument) triples. The model is trained on a corpus of role‐annotated language data. We also present a transparent integration of the semantic model with an incremental probabilistic parser. We demonstrate that both the semantic plausibility model and the combined syntax/semantics model predict judgment and reading time data from the experimental literature. (shrink)

Rooted in Assyriology with a strong interdisciplinary outlook, this book offers the first comprehensive study of ancient Mesopotamian notions of the human person, including semantic analyses of Akkadian terms for body parts and multiple ...

This article sheds light on the ‘European citizenship paradox’, which emerges as a result of the tensions between EU citizenship norms and member‐state practices in the context of regional disparities and social inequalities that market integration arguably deepens. I claim that a transnational, politically inclusive European citizenship would provide for public spaces where unjust practices can be submitted to a respectful but no less ruthless critical analysis, where violent impositions and infringements can be disqualified by insisting on human and European (...) citizenship rights and norms. Assessing alternative citizenship models, I argue that a purely liberal‐market, a republican or a cosmopolitan citizenship model all appear to fail to resolve this paradox, unless they include deliberative procedures based on the recognition of different collective identities. (shrink)

Modern society makes extensive use of automated algorithmic decisions, fueled by advances in artificial intelligence. However, since these systems are not perfect, questions about fairness are increasingly investigated in the literature. In particular, many authors take a Rawlsian approach to algorithmic fairness. This article aims to identify some complications with this approach: Under which circumstances can Rawls’s original position reasonably be applied to algorithmic fairness decisions? First, it is argued that there are important differences between Rawls’s original position and a (...) parallel algorithmic fairness original position with respect to risk attitudes. Second, it is argued that the application of Rawls’s original position to algorithmic fairness faces a boundary problem in defining relevant stakeholders. Third, it is observed that the definition of the least advantaged, necessary for applying the difference principle, requires some attention in the context of algorithmic fairness. Finally, it is argued that appropriate deliberation in algorithmic fairness contexts often require more knowledge about probabilities than the Rawlsian original position allows. Provided that these complications are duly considered, the thought-experiment of the Rawlsian original position can be useful in algorithmic fairness decisions. (shrink)

Das Placebo - konzipiert, um die Wirksamkeit des Arzneimittels objektiv zu überprüfen - entfaltet selbst unterschiedliche Eigenschaften und erzeugt vielfältige Effekte. Anhand von Vertreter_innen der Philosophie, wie Fleck, Rheinberger, Foucault, Baudrillard, Latour und Haraway, zeigt Ulrike Neumaier, dass sich - stellt man das Placebo in den Mittelpunkt einer Untersuchung - nicht nur in der Medizin Begriffe wie »Krankheit« und »Körper« verändern. Vielmehr wird sichtbar, wie Wissenschaft, Technik und Gesellschaft sich vernetzen, wie sich dadurch der Begriff von »Wissenschaft« wandelt und (...) warum vom Zeitalter der Technowissenschaften gesprochen werden kann. (shrink)

Before the EU General Data Protection Regulation entered into force in May 2018, we witnessed an intense struggle of actors associated with data-dependent fields of science, in particular health-related academia and biobanks striving for legal derogations for data reuse in research. These actors engaged in a similar line of argument and formed issue alliances to pool their collective power. Using descriptive coding followed by an interpretive analysis, this article investigates the argumentative repertoire of these actors and embeds the analysis in (...) ethical debates on data sharing and biobank-related data governance. We observe efforts to perform a paradigmatic shift of the discourse around the General Data Protection Regulation-implementation away from ‘protecting data’ as key concern to ‘protecting health’ of individuals and societies at large. Instead of data protection, the key risks stressed by health researchers became potential obstacles to research. In line, exchange of information with data subjects is not a key concern in the arguments of biobank-related actors and it is assumed that patients want ‘their’ data to be used. We interpret these narratives as a ‘reaction’ to potential restrictions for data reuse and in line with a broader trend towards Big Data science, as the very idea of biobanking is conceptualized around long-term use of readily prepared data. We conclude that a sustainable implementation of biobanks needs not only to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, but must proactively re-imagine its relation to citizens and data subjects in order to account for the various ways that science gets entangled with society. (shrink)

Our beliefs and opinions are shaped by others, making our social networks crucial in determining what we believe to be true. Sometimes this is for the good because our peers help us form a more accurate opinion. Sometimes it is for the worse because we are led astray. In this context, we address via agent-based computer simulations the extent to which patterns of connectivity within our social networks affect the likelihood that initially undecided agents in a network converge on a (...) true opinion following group deliberation. The model incorporates a fine-grained and realistic representation of belief and trust, and it allows agents to consult outside information sources. We study a wide range of network structures and provide a detailed statistical analysis concerning the exact contribution of various network metrics to collective competence. Our results highlight and explain the collective risks involved in an overly networked or partitioned society. Specifically, we find that 96% of the variation in collective competence across networks can be attributed to differences in amount of connectivity and clustering, which are negatively correlated with collective competence. A study of bandwagon or “group think” effects indicates that both connectivity and clustering increase the probability that the network, wholly or partly, locks into a false opinion. Our work is interestingly related to Gerhard Schurz’s work on meta-induction and can be seen as broadly addressing a practical limitation of his approach. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that the most fruitful approach to developing normative models of argument quality is one that combines the argumentation scheme approach with Bayesian argumentation. Three sample argumentation schemes from the literature are discussed: the argument from sign, the argument from expert opinion, and the appeal to popular opinion. Limitations of the scheme-based treatment of these argument forms are identified and it is shown how a Bayesian perspective may help to overcome these. At the same time, (...) the contributions of the standard scheme-based approach are highlighted, and it is argued that only a combination of the insights of different traditions will yield a complete normative theory of argument quality. (shrink)