The ArgumentThis paper sets out a framework for understanding how the scientific community constructs computer simulation as an epistemically and pragmatically useful methodology. The framework is based on comparisons between simulation and the loosely-defined categories of “theoretical work” and “experimental work.” Within that framework, the epistemological adequacy of simulation arises from its role as a mathematical manipulation of a complex, abstract theoretical model. To establish that adequacy demands a detailed “theoretical” grasp of the internal structure of the computer program. Simultaneously, (...) the pragmatic usefulness of simulation arises from its role as a “virtual laboratory.” That role is made possible by black-boxing the internal structure of the program, such that the scientist can interact with the computer in an intuitive, “experimental” manner. Thus simulation is rendered authoritative, opening up encoded theories to a novel, “experimental” type of manipulation. (shrink)

This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The Anti-Compounding Injustice principle or aci. Compounding injustice and the aci principle are likely to be relevant when analyzing the moral issues raised by “big data” and its combination with the computational power of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Past injustice can infect the data used in algorithmic decisions in two distinct ways. Sometimes prior (...) injustice undermines the accuracy of the data itself. In these contexts, improving accuracy will also help to avoid compounding injustice. Other times, past injustice produces real-world differences among people with regard to skills, health, wealth, and other traits that employers, lenders, and others seek to measure. When decisions are based on accurate data that itself results from prior injustice, these decisions can also compound injustice. This second dynamic has received less attention than the first but is especially important because improving the accuracy of data will not mitigate this unfairness. (shrink)

Exploring the philosophical foundations of discrimination law as it exists in several jurisdictions, this collection of all new essays bridges the gap between abstract philosophical work on justice and fairness and legal work on specific types of discrimination.

Clinical research employing the randomized clinical trial has, traditionally, been understood to pose an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, each patient ought to get the treatment that best meets her needs, as judged by the patient in consultation with her doctor. On the other hand, the method most helpful to advancing our understanding about what treatments are indeed best able to meet patient needs is the randomized trial, which necessitates that each patient's care is decided not by physician judgment (...) or patient choice but instead by random assignment. The tension can be described as a conflict between the interests of individual patients who are sick today, and the interests of the group of people who will become sick in the future and would benefit from advances in medical understanding. How one ought to balance these important and often competing interests is an important ethical question that resists easy resolution. (shrink)

Clinical research employing the randomized clinical trial has, traditionally, been understood to pose an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, each patient ought to get the treatment that best meets her needs, as judged by the patient in consultation with her doctor. On the other hand, the method most helpful to advancing our understanding about what treatments are indeed best able to meet patient needs is the randomized trial, which necessitates that each patient's care is decided not by physician judgment (...) or patient choice but instead by random assignment. The tension can be described as a conflict between the interests of individual patients who are sick today, and the interests of the group of people who will become sick in the future and would benefit from advances in medical understanding. How one ought to balance these important and often competing interests is an important ethical question that resists easy resolution. (shrink)

This paper analyses the hidden use of new axioms in set-theoretic practice with a focus on large cardinal axioms and presents a general overview of set-theoretic practices using large cardinal axioms. The hidden use of a new axiom provides extrinsic reasons in support of this axiom via the idea of verifiable consequences, which is especially relevant for set-theoretic practitioners with an absolutist view. Besides that, the hidden use has pragmatic significance for further important sub-groups of the set-theoretic community---set-theoretic practitioners with (...) a pluralist view and set-theoretic practitioners who aim for ZFC-proofs. By describing this, the paper gives a more complete picture of new axioms in set-theoretic practice. These observations, for instance, show that set-theoretic practitioners interested in ZFC-proofs use tools that go beyond ZFC. The analysis is based on empirical data that was collected in an extensive interview study with set-theoretic practitioners. (shrink)

This book brings into focus both the positive and negative aspects that technology places on the professional identity of librarians, highlighting the new methods involved in data management, communication, and library information education and research.

The Wilderness of Dreams: Exploring the Religious Meanings of Dreams in Modem Western Culture. Kelly Bulkeley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. 309 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Philosophical aesthetics emerges out of eighteenth-century discussions of taste that paid scant attention to the experience of tasting and ingesting food. Sarah Worth diagnoses this historical oversight and offers an unexpected remedy. She argues that we should start our analysis of aesthetic taste over again, this time beginning with the pleasures of the tongue and mouth, and work out from there to consider the kinds of experience, knowledge, and appreciation that belong to eating and savoring. As she argues, our ability (...) to make gustatory discriminations and to determine what tastes good and why is not as different from our aesthetic judgments as philosophers and other aesthetic theorists might have led us to believe. In this engaging and readable book, Worth persuasively argues that food and its many tastes deserve serious philosophical consideration.Worth explores a number of puzzles that arise when we try to make sense of the concept of taste. She disentangles the metaphorical sense of taste understood as a reasoned judgment expressing aesthetic preferences from the literal sense of taste which involves our sensory experiences when food is in our mouths. She discusses good and bad taste, food and pleasure, authentic and inauthentic food, “food porn”—those impossibly glamourized images of food that we find in advertising and magazines and cookbooks and social media—and the role of recipes in the practice of cooking. She places our everyday experiences of food in the context of wider relationships and activities including cultivation, harvesting, processing, shipping, and purchasing, as well as the preparation and cooking meals for family and friends. The book is punctuated by many of the usual philosophical suspects (Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Bullough and Sibley) as well as critical and feminist theorists, food sociologists, and a number of famous chefs including Fannie Farmer, Julie Child, and Nigella Lawson. If Worth endorses a particular metaphilosophy of food, it would be that of the Slow Food movement, which is the subject of Chapter Three. (shrink)

This volume rethinks the relations between form and forms of communication, calling for a new logic of representation; it examines the manner in which ...

This dissertation inquires into the interpretation of agents' actions and utterances, and into the role of narrative theory in that interpretation. My thesis is that psychological explanation is an agent-centred, narrative-based interpretive practice. Agent-centred interpretation takes the form of narrative because such interpretations are governed by the need to discover or impose an intelligible explanatory pattern on events involving others like ourselves. I argue that narrative form is not a secondary way of construing action, but is what enables us to (...) recognize the intelligibility of agents' actions. Thus it is a main task of the dissertation to draw attention to the poetical nature of interpretation, and to the auto-poetical nature of self-interpreting agents. Interpretation is in essence intersubjective and communicative, and is doubly committed to intelligibility, since it must not only make sense of an agent's action, but also show how that action could have made sense to her. Conceiving of interpretation as an example of intersubjective communication allows me to present a poetics of psychological explanation. Not only does such a poetics outline the formal constraints on the interpretation of agents and their actions; it also allows me to show that the constraints in question are narrative constraints. (shrink)

Beyond “A Lecture on Ethics,” Wittgenstein says little on the topic of ethics, despite professing a great respect for ethics. I argue that while Wittgenstein ceases to speak of ethics, his account fits equally within his Tractarian and post-Tractarian writing. On both accounts of language, ethics remains nonsense, but it is not insignificant nonsense. However, because Wittgenstein holds ethics to concern absolute values that are in principle inexpressible, his anti-theoretical conception of ethics fails to offer guidance in how one ought (...) to live. That is, ethics ultimately cannot be show unless it can, in some sense, be said. (shrink)

While feminist philosophy has had much to say on the topic of reason, little has been done to develop a specifically feminist account of the concept. I argue for a virtue account of mind grounded in contemporary approaches to rationality. The evolutionary stance adopted within most contemporary theories of mind implicitly entails a rejection of central elements of Cartesianism. As a result, many accounts of rationality are anti-modern is precisely the sorts of ways that feminists demand. I maintain that a (...) virtue account of rationality can provide a satisfactory answer to Benhabib’s question in Situating of the Self: what concept of reason are we willing to defend? (shrink)

Epistemologists debate the nature of epistemic responsibility. Rarely do they consider the implications of this debate on assigning responsibility for undesirable beliefs such as racist and sexist ones. Contrary to our natural tendency to believe and to act as if we are responsible for holding undesirable beliefs, empirical evidence indicates that beliefs such as implicit biases are not only unconsciously held but are intractably held. That is, even when we become consciously aware of our biases, we have enormous difficulty changing (...) them and believing differently than we do. This paper considers five responses to epistemic involuntarism. It considers how each response provides or fails to provide a principled means for holding individuals epistemically responsible for their undesirable beliefs. The involuntaristic nature of at least some beliefs seems obvious, but, in the end, we can choose to cultivate epistemic virtues that can influence these beliefs. (shrink)

Although feminists have spilled a great deal of ink criticizing Enlightenment conceptions of rationality, the time has come to consider constructing a positive account. Recent attempts to construct an account of rationality as a virtue concept reflect many feminist complaints concerning Enlightenment rationality, and, thus, I maintain that feminism should take seriously such a conception. Virtue rationality offers a more diverse account of rationality without sacrificing the fundamental normativity of the concept. Furthermore, the narrower concept of reasonableness, promises to provide (...) a ground for distinguishing among better and worse epistemic perspectives, which is a task critical to the success of the feminist project. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the history of the bedwetting alarm, invented in 1938 by two psychologists to cure enuresis, or bedwetting, using the principles of classical conditioning. Infused with the optimism of behaviorism, the bedwetting alarm unexpectedly proved difficult to implement in practice, bearing a multitude of unanticipated complications that hindered its widespread acceptance. Introduced as a medical and psychological technology, in practice the alarm was also a child‐rearing device, encouraging the kind of behavioristic attitudes that had prompted its initial (...) development, while simultaneously promoting the child‐centered approach that would become dominant in the early 1950s. The life story of the bedwetting alarm muddies the traditional account of how child‐rearing theories progressed in tidy succession, suggesting both that behavioristic approaches did not die out in the 1930s and that elements of permissive child‐rearing were being considered earlier than we traditionally assume. (shrink)

A UN report, which comprehensively documents the advance of global population ageing, was released on 1 October 2012, the International Day of Older Persons. In the West, this development has been accelerated by and will be profoundly experienced by the baby boomers. As they reach ages historically linked with retirement their numbers are rising, as are expectations for annual age-related public spending. Vulnerabilities are regularly being exposed in terms of medical care, social care and inadequate retirement planning. This makes acceptance (...) of the traditional narrative for ageing, including passivity, complacency and accelerating dependency, patently unsustainable. Medical and technological advancements have given this cohort an achievement award in terms of longer, healthier lives and there is a choice to make. Either substantive changes to redefine this life stage are made or the salutary lesson afforded by the new longevity could be squandered. (shrink)

Intentional, ‘commonsense,’ or ‘folk’ psychology is, as Jerry Fodor has remarked, ubiquitous. Explanations of what we say and do in terms of our reasons for acting are the stock in trade of intentional psychology. But there is a question whether explanations in terms of reasons are properly explanatory. Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett, to name two, have defended intentional psychology and its reason‐explanations. Still, many philosophers – including Fodor, Davidson and Dennett – fail to pay due attention to the narrative (...) basis of such agent‐centered accounts of action. In this paper, I argue that psychological explanation is an agent‐centered, narrative‐based interpretive practice. To make my case, I present a poetics of psychological explanation: seven elements which collectively describe what makes psychological explanations work. Narrative form allows us to represent the temporal arc of agents’ actions – as well as the temporal arc of their reasoning about their actions, both prospective and retrospective. It allows us to negotiate between the canonical and the exceptional in human experience, and thus to account for actions that strike us as puzzling or unusual – whether the puzzle originates in our suboptimal understanding or the agent's suboptimal reasoning. And it allows us to juxtapose different perspectives on any action. Such juxtapositioning gives us a mechanism for coming to see how an action that strikes us as misguided might have been construed by the agent as reasonable given her understanding of her circumstances. After establishing the seven elements of the poetics, I address the objection that narrative‐based accounts of intentional action are not properly explanatory. (shrink)

I examine three themes central to Denis Dutton’s philosophy of art. To understand the artworks of non-Western cultures, we must understand how to identify what artistic category these works in fact belong to. Though the perceived properties of a work of art do not seem to change when it is revealed to be a forgery, there is a reason why forgeries are “artistic crimes.” In both cases, a “work of art” is not simply the object produced (the painting, for example), (...) but rather the contextualized performance undertaken by the artist that brings about the finished product. (shrink)

This chapter examines the emergence of a distinctively analytic approach to film as art. I begin with an overview of Berys Gaut’s claim that the philosophy of film art is, roughly speaking, organized around three levels of analysis: the film medium; film narrative and aesthetics; and philosophical themes that emerge in films. Next I trace the emergence of an analytic philosophy of film as art in the work of Alexander Sesonske and Francis Sparshott. Sesonske and Sparshott each draw attention to (...) the central features of film aesthetics—notably to the ways in which film treats time and space. I conclude by discussing contemporary developments such as “film as philosophy.”. (shrink)

In Defense of ReadingWorthSarah E.rowman & littlefield. 2017. pp. 219. £24.95.