This chapter describes the potential far‐reaching consequences of contemplative higher education for the fields of science and medicine.

Causation is a topic of perennial philosophical concern. As well as being of intrinsic interest, almost all philosophical concepts — such as knowledge, beauty, and moral responsibility — involve a causal dimension. Nonetheless, attempts to provide a satisfactory account of the nature of causation have typically led to barrages of counterexamples. I hope to show that a number of the difficulties plaguing theories of causation have a common source.Most philosophical theories of causation describe a binary relation between cause and effect, (...) or at any rate, a relation that reduces to such a binary relation when certain background information is held fixed. Indeed, most theories provide the same general account of when this relation holds: in order to evaluate whether C causes E, we must make a comparison between two cases, which we may neutrally label as C and ∼C. Where theories of causation differ, of course, is in precisely what is being so compared. Regularity theories of causation require a comparison between what actually happens whenever C occurs, and what actually happens, elsewhere and elsewhen, when C does not occur. (shrink)

This book proposes guidelines for constructing and evaluating definitions of terms, i.e. words or phrases of general application. The guidelines extend to adoption of nomenclature. The book is meant to be a practical guide for people who find themselves in their daily lives or their employment producing or evaluating definitions of terms. It can be consulted rather than being read through. The book’s theoretical framework is a distinction, due to Robert H. Ennis, of three dimensions of definitions: the act of (...) the definer, the content of the definition, and its form. The act of a definer is what the definer does in defining a term; the book distinguishes, following Ennis, three basic acts of defining: reporting, stipulating, and advocating. The content of a definition is in one sense the information that the definition conveys and in another sense the words in its defining part. The form of a definition is the way it is expressed, for example as a definition by genus and differentia. (shrink)

The epistemologist John Pollock has implemented computationally an architecture for a rational agent which he calls OSCAR. OSCAR models both practical and theoretical (or epistemic) reasoning. I argue that Pollock's model of practical reasoning, which has seven components, is superior not only to the two-component belief-desire model stemming from Aristotle, but also to the three-component belief-desire-intention model developed especially by Michael Bratman. Despite its advantages, Pollock's model of practical reasoning is incomplete in at least three respects: it is solipsistic, it (...) is egoistic and it is unsocial. (shrink)

O que o grande cineasta Hitchcock tem a nos dizer sobre a pandemia que vivemos? Como a Covid-19 abriu uma possibilidade de assistir ao filme Os pássaros que não era evidente em sua época? Nessa via de mão-dupla, é como se Hitchcock pudesse nos ajudar a pensar a pandemia atual, mas apenas porque ela permitiu enxergar algo novo em Os pássaros. É o caso de pensar o que elementos da natureza não-humana, sejam pássaros ou vírus, dizem sobre o (...) antropocentrismo da civilização moderna. (shrink)

The "tree of life" iconography, representing the history of life, dates from at least the latter half of the 18th century, but evolution as the mechanism providing this bifurcating history of life did not appear until the early 19th century. There was also a shift from the straight line, scala naturae view of change in nature to a more bifurcating or tree-like view. Throughout the 19th century authors presented tree-like diagrams, some regarding the Deity as the mechanism of change while (...) others argued for evolution. Straight-line or anagenetic evolution and bifurcating or cladogenetic evolution are known in biology today, but are often misrepresented in popular culture, especially with anagenesis being confounded with scala naturae. Although well known in the mid 19th century, the geologist Edward Hitchcock has been forgotten as an early, if not the first author to publish a paleontologically based "tree of life" beginning in 1840 in the first edition of his popular general geology text Elementary Geology. At least 31 editions were published and those between 1840 and 1859 had this "paleontological chart" showing two trees, one for fossil and living plants and another for animals set within a context of geological time. Although the chart did not vary in later editions, the text explaining the chart did change to reflect newer ideas in paleontology and geology. Whereas Lamarck, Chambers, Bronn, Darwin, and Haeckel saw some form of transmutation as the mechanism that created their "trees of life," Hitchcock, like his contemporaries Agassiz and Miller, who also produced "trees of life," saw a deity as the agent of change. Through each edition of his book Hitchcock denounced the newer transmutationist hypotheses of Lamarck, then Chambers, and finally Darwin in an 1860 edition that no longer presented his tree-like "paleontological chart.". (shrink)

A relação entre filosofia e cinema está cada vez mais presente nas reflexões dos filósofos contemporâneos. Muitos deles escreveram livros que unem pensamentos filosóficos e análises fílmicas. Em geral, esta interdiscursividade lhes permitiu pôr na berlinda a concepção de imagem pressuposta tanto na filosofia como no cinema. Trata-se de examinar as teorias e a análise que Gilles Deleuze e Jacques Rancière fizeram de Vertigo, de Alfred Hitchcock, para entender a relação que ambos estabeleceram entre filosofia e prática fílmica analítica. (...) O objetivo final é problematizar as conexões entre imagem e narrativa, que se revelam nessa junção e que fazem parte da tradição filosófica e cinematográfica. Ao mesmo tempo, propomos uma análise que considere o texto e a linguagem cinematográfica a partir da imagem, subvertendo desta forma a abordagem tradicional. (shrink)

The taxonomy and analysis of fallacies in Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations pre-date the formal logic of his Prior Analytics A4-6. Of the 64 fully described examples of ?sophistical refutations? which are fallacious because they are only apparently valid, 49 have the wrong number of premisses or the wrong form of premiss or conclusion for analysis by the Prior Analytics theory of the categorical syllogism. The rest Aristotle either frames so that they do not look like categorical syllogisms or analyses in a (...) quite different way than by categorical syllogistic. (shrink)

Recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has shown that judgments of actual causation are often influenced by consideration of defaults, typicality, and normality. A number of philosophers and computer scientists have also suggested that an appeal to such factors can help deal with problems facing existing accounts of actual causation. This article develops a flexible formal framework for incorporating defaults, typicality, and normality into an account of actual causation. The resulting account takes actual causation to be both graded and (...) comparative. We then show how our account would handle a number of standard cases. 1 Introduction2 Causal Models3 The HP Definition of Actual Causation4 The Problem of Isomorphism5 Defaults, Typicality, and Normality6 Extended Causal Models7 Examples7.1 Omissions7.2 Knobe effects7.3 Causes versus background conditions7.4 Bogus prevention7.5 Causal chains7.6 Legal doctrines of intervening causes7.7 Pre-emption and short circuits8 Conclusion. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical literature on causation has focused on the concept of actual causation, sometimes called token causation. In particular, it is this notion of actual causation that many philosophical theories of causation have attempted to capture.2 In this paper, we address the question: what purpose does this concept serve? As we shall see in the next section, one does not need this concept for purposes of prediction or rational deliberation. What then could the purpose be? We will argue (...) that one can gain an important clue here by looking at the ways in which causal judgments are shaped by people‘s understanding of norms. (shrink)

Judea Pearl has been at the forefront of research in the burgeoning field of causal modeling, and Causality is the culmination of his work over the last dozen or so years. For philosophers of science with a serious interest in causal modeling, Causality is simply mandatory reading. Chapter 2, in particular, addresses many of the issues familiar from works such as Causation, Prediction and Search by Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines. But philosophers with a more general interest in (...) causation will also profit from reading Pearl’s book, especially the material in chapters 7, 9, and 10, which is self-contained and less technical than other parts of the book. The present review is aimed primarily at readers of the second type. (shrink)

Probability theory is a key tool of the physical, mathematical, and social sciences. It has also been playing an increasingly significant role in philosophy: in epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of religion, and elsewhere. This Handbook encapsulates and furthers the influence of philosophy on probability, and of probability on philosophy. Nearly forty articles summarise the state of play and present new insights in various areas of research at the intersection of these two fields. The articles will be (...) of special interest to practitioners of probability who seek a greater understanding of its mathematical and conceptual foundations, and to philosophers who want to get up to speed on the cutting edge of research in this area. The volume begins with a primer on those parts of probability theory that we believe are most important for philosophers to know, and the rest is divided into seven main sections: History; Formalism; Alternatives to Standard Probability Theory; Interpretations and Interpretive Issues; Probabilistic Judgment and Its Applications; Applications of Probability: Science; and Applications of Probability: Philosophy. (shrink)

This book brings together in one place David Hitchcock’s most significant published articles on reasoning and argument. In seven new chapters he updates his thinking in the light of subsequent scholarship. Collectively, the papers articulate a distinctive position in the philosophy of argumentation. Among other things, the author:• develops an account of “material consequence” that permits evaluation of inferences without problematic postulation of unstated premises.• updates his recursive definition of argument that accommodates chaining and embedding of arguments and allows (...) any type of illocutionary act to be a conclusion. • advances a general theory of relevance.• provides comprehensive frameworks for evaluating inferences in reasoning by analogy, means-end reasoning, and appeals to considerations or criteria.• argues that none of the forms of arguing ad hominem is a fallacy.• describes proven methods of teaching critical thinking effectively. (shrink)

Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in (...) ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers. (shrink)

“Probabilistic Causation” designates a group of theories that aim to characterize the relationship between cause and effect using the tools of probability theory. The central idea behind these theories is that causes change the probabilities of their effects. This article traces developments in probabilistic causation, including recent developments in causal modeling. A variety of issues within, and objections to, probabilistic theories of causation will also be discussed.

_Seeing the World through Children’s Eyes_ brings an overarching emphasis on ‘seeing’ to early years research and provides an opportunity to see and hear from leading researchers in the field concerning how they work with visual methodologies in their early years research.

an observation to formulate a theory, it is no surprise that the resulting theory accurately captures that observation. However, when the theory makes a novel prediction—when it predicts an observation that was not used in its formulation—this seems to provide more substantial confirmation of the theory. This paper presents a new approach to the vexed problem of understanding the epistemic difference between prediction and accommodation. In fact, there are several problems that need to be disentangled; in all of them, the (...) key is the concept of overfitting. We float the hypothesis that accommodation is a defective methodology only when the methods used to accommodate the data fail to guard against the risk of overfitting. We connect our analysis with the proposals that other philosophers have made. We also discuss its bearing on the conflict between instrumentalism and scientific realism. Introduction Predictivisms—a taxonomy Observations Formulating the problem What might Annie be doing wrong? Solutions Observations explained Mayo on severe tests The miracle argument and scientific realism Concluding comments. (shrink)

Standard models of adolescent risk taking posit that the cognitive abilities of adolescents and adults are equivalent, and that increases in risk taking that occur during adolescence are the result of socio emotional differences in impulsivity, sensation seeking, and lack of self-control. Fuzzy-trace theory incorporates these socio emotional differences. However, it predicts that there are also cognitive differences between adolescents and adults, specifically that there are developmental increases in gist-based intuition that reflects understanding. Gist understanding, as opposed to verbatim-based analysis, (...) generally has been hypothesized to have a protective effect on risk taking in adolescence. Gist understanding is also an essential element of informed consent regarding risks in medical decision- making. Evidence thus supports the argument that adolescents’ status as mature minors should be treated as an exception rather than a presumption, because accuracy in verbatim analysis is not mature gist understanding. Use of the exception should be accompanied by medical experts’ input on the bottom-line gist of risks involved in treatment. (shrink)

Making a Difference presents fifteen original essays on causation and counterfactuals by an international team of experts. Collectively, they represent the state of the art on these topics. The essays in this volume are inspired by the life and work of Peter Menzies, who made a difference in the lives of students, colleagues, and friends. Topics covered include: the semantics of counterfactuals, agency theories of causation, the context-sensitivity of causal claims, structural equation models, mechanisms, mental causation, causal exclusion argument, free (...) will, and the consequence argument. (shrink)

Following Dretske (1977), there has been a considerable body of literature on the role of contrastive stress in causal claims. Following van Fraassen (1980), there has been a considerable body of literature on the role of contrastive stress in explanations and explanation-requesting why-questions. Amazingly, the two bodies of literature have remained almost entirely disjoint. With an understanding of the contrastive nature of ordinary causal claims, and of the linguistic roles of contrastive stress, it is possible to provide a unified account (...) of both phenomena. I provide such an account from within the framework of a probabilistic theory of causation. Relations of screening-off, long familiar to researchers in probabilistic causality, play a central role in this account. (shrink)

Introduction / Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Peter Hitchcock, and Sophia A. McClennen -- Theory and history -- The rights to debt? / Sophia A. McClennen -- Kant at the Federal Reserve : on the aesthetics of quantitative easing / Peter Hitchcock -- Materialism : debt and sensuality / Christopher Breu -- The indebted man's cognitive mapping : boundaries and biohorror in the neoliberal debt economy / Liane Tanguay -- Living in the debt age -- The debt experience / (...) Jeffrey J. Williams -- Paying your debt to society : the neoliberal state and the logic of quid pro quo / Esther Peeren -- Indebted youth and neoliberalism / Tyler J. Pollard -- Austerity politics and the neoliberal target austerity politics and the neoliberal targeting of the body in public education / Kenneth J. Saltman -- Resisting the debt age -- On debt resistance / Jeffrey R. Di Leo -- Debt and financial literacy education : an ethics for capital or the other / Chris Arthur -- Student debt and the social functions of consolidation college / Christopher Newfield -- Confronting the creditor class / Andrew Ross -- Index. (shrink)

Showcasing original arguments for well-defined positions, as well as clear and concise statements of sophisticated philosophical views, this volume is an ...

In the Sleeping Beauty problem, Beauty is uncertain whether the outcome of a certain coin toss was heads or tails. One argument suggests that her degree of belief in heads should be 1/3, while a second suggests that it should be 1/2. Prima facie, the argument for 1/2 appears to be stronger. I offer a diachronic Dutch Book argument in favor of 1/3. Even for those who are not routinely persuaded by diachronic Dutch Book arguments, this one has some important (...) morals. (shrink)

In The Uses of Argument, Stephen Toulmin proposed a model for the layout of arguments: claim, data, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, backing. Since then, Toulmin’s model has been appropriated, adapted and extended by researchers in speech communications, philosophy and artificial intelligence. This book assembles the best contemporary reflection in these fields, extending or challenging Toulmin’s ideas in ways that make fresh contributions to the theory of analysing and evaluating arguments.

There are a wide variety of theories of causation available in the philosophical literature. For the philosopher working in philosophy of mind, who makes use of causal concepts, what is to be made of this embarrassment of riches? By considering a variety of theoretical perspectives, she can discover which principles or assumptions about causation are robust, and which hold only within particular frameworks. In particular, she should be suspicious when the different premises in an argument can only be made true (...) by shifting between different theories of causation. I illustrate these themes using the causal exclusion argument. (shrink)

One of the motivations for Salmon's (1984) causal theory of explanation was the explanatory irrelevance exhibited by many arguments conforming to Hempel's covering-law models of explanation. However, the nexus of causal processes and interactions characterized by Salmon is not rich enough to supply the necessary conception of explanatory relevance. Salmon's (1994) revised theory, which is briefly criticized on independent grounds, fares no better. There is some possibility that the two-tiered structure of explanation described by Salmon (1984) may be pressed into (...) service, but more work would have to be done. Ironically, Salmon's difficulties are similar to those suffered by his seventeenth-century predecessors. (shrink)

A number of recent papers have criticized what they call the dynamical interpretation of evolutionary theory found in Elliott Sober’s The Nature of Selection. Sober argues that we can think of evolutionary theory as a theory of forces analogous to Newtonian mechanics. These critics argue that there are several important disanalogies between evolutionary and Newtonian forces: Unlike evolutionary forces, Newtonian forces can be considered in isolation, they have source laws, they compose causally in a straightforward way, and they are intermediate (...) causes in causal chains. Here we defend and extend the forces analogy by arguing that each of these criticisms is based on a misunderstanding of Newtonian forces. Our discussion also has the interesting consequence that natural selection turns out to be more similar to forces such as friction and elastic forces rather than the more canonical gravitation. (shrink)

There are many ways of attaching two objects together: for example, they can be connected, linked, tied or bound together; and the connection, link, tie or bind can be made of chain, rope, or cement. Every one of these binding methods has been used as a metaphor for causation. What is the real significance of these metaphors? They express a commitment to a certain way of thinking about causation, summarized in the following thesis: ‘In any concrete situation, there is an (...) objective fact of the matter as to whether two events are in fact bound by the causal relation. It is the aim of philosophical inquiry to analyze this objective relation.’ Through a variety of examples, I hope to cast doubt on this seemingly innocuous thesis. The problem lies not with the word ‘objective’, but with the word ‘the’. The goal of a philosophical account of causation should not be to capture the causal relation, but rather to capture the many ways in which the events of the world can be bound together. 1 The metaphors 2 Unpacking the metaphors 3 Theories of causation 4 The two assassins 5 The birth control pills 6 The smoker-protector gene 7 The bicycle thief 8 Further examples 8.1 Indeterminism 8.2 Probability-lowering causes 8.3 Parts vs wholes 8.4 Symmetric overdetermination 8.5 Delayers 8.6 Causation by omission 8.7 Double prevention/disconnection 8.8 Preemptive prevention 8.9 Quantitative variables 9 Conclusion. (shrink)