The Science and Religion Forum (SRF) seeks to be the premier organization promoting the discussion between science and religion in the United Kingdom for academics, professionals, and interested lay people. Each year, the SRF holds a conference tackling a topical issue, and in 2019 focused on artificial intelligence and robotics. This article introduces the thematic section which is made up of three papers from that conference and provides a summary of the event.

The Science and Religion Forum (SRF) seeks to be the premier organization promoting the discussion between science and religion in the United Kingdom. Each year, the SRF holds a conference tackling a topical issue, and in 2017 focused on mental well‐being, neuroscience, and religion. This article introduces the thematic section which is made up of five papers from that conference. As a new field within the science and religion academy, these articles are both wide‐ranging and detailed. This introductory article locates (...) this section within the academy and argues that its place is not only valid but vital, given the increase of mental health problems and the need for medicine, church, and society to answer this problem and present ways to help. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright's 1983 book How the Laws of Physics Lie argued that theories of physics often make use of idealisations, and that as a result many of these theories were not true. The present paper looks at idealisation in logic and argues that, at least sometimes, the laws of logic fail to be true. That might be taken as a kind of skepticism, but I argue rather that idealisation is a legitimate tool in logic, just as in physics, and recognising (...) this frees logicians up to use false laws where these are helpful. (shrink)

Recent work on analyticity distinguishes two kinds, metaphysical and epistemic. This paper argues that the distinction allows for a new view in the philosophy of logic according to which the claims of logic are metaphysically analytic and have distinctive modal profiles, even though their epistemology is holist and in many ways rather Quinean. It is argued that such a view combines some of the more attractive aspects of the Carnapian and Quinean approaches to logic, whilst avoiding some famous problems.

Why is it important for people to agree on and articulate shared reasons for just laws, rather than whatever reasons they personally find compelling? What, if any, practical role does public reason play in liberal democratic politics? We argue that the practical role of public reason can be better appreciated by examining the confluence of normative and positive political theory; the former represented here by liberal social contract theory of John Rawls and others, and the latter by rational choice or (...) game theory. Citizens in a diverse society face a practical as well as a moral problem. How can they have confidence that others will reciprocate their commitment to supporting governing principles that depart from their own ideal conceptions of truth and value in order to be reasonable to all? Citizens face a practical problem of mutual assurance that public reason helps them solve, and solve as a matter of common knowledge. The solution, on both views, requires citizens’ reciprocal commitment to basing law on a system of shared reasons. Both views place public reason at the core of liberal democratic politics in conditions of diversity, and for quite similar reasons. Our argument illustrates the complementary roles of positive and values-based analysis in constitutional design. (shrink)

Is it harder to acquire knowledge about things that really matter to us than it is to acquire knowledge about things we don't much care about? Jason Stanley 2005 argues that whether or not the relational predicate 'knows that' holds between an agent and a proposition can depend on the practical interests of the agent: the more it matters to a person whether p is the case, the more justification is required before she counts as knowing that p. The evidence (...) for Stanley's thesis includes a number of intuitive judgments about examples. In this paper we provide parallel examples for which Stanley's thesis requires unwelcome knowledge-attributions, and argue that this is possible because his thesis conflicts with familiar and plausible principles about knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter explores reasons to doubt the defensibility of the “weak theory of sustainability” that informs and justifies the use of cost-benefit analysis by environmental regulators. As the argument reveals, inasmuch as the weak theory equates what is sustainable with what sustains the satisfaction of human preferences, it has the surprising philosophical wherewithal to make climate-changing activities sustainable, at least in principle. This would be so if human ingenuity made possible the replacement of ecosystem services with technological alternatives. And it (...) would be particularly so if the aesthetic goods that derive from nature – goods which are resistant to quantification – are excluded from environmental cost-benefit analyses. But it is also true if those aesthetic goods are reduced to mere human preferences that can be measured through indirect market-based means, for aesthetic preferences are remarkably adaptive.Inasmuch as people can be expected to come to appreciate landscapes degraded by climate change, those who defend a weak theory of sustainability can expect that climate change will not long be at odds with what people find aesthetically pleasing. However, as the growing literature on “nature-deficit disorder” suggests, while aesthetic preferences may be elastic, aesthetic needs are not. As climate change progressively strips us of nature’s goods, we will lose the ability to meet crucial aesthetic needs. The irony is clear: As our aesthetic preferences bend towards the acceptance of ecological loss, we will predictably lose our preferences for meeting our own enduring aesthetic needs. We can thus expect climate change to cause us to prefer what we do not need and to need what we do not prefer. And this implies that climate change is the reductio ad absurdum of the weak theory of sustainability that dominates contemporary environmental regulation. (shrink)

Recent work on analyticity distinguishes two kinds, metaphysical and epistemic. This paper argues that the distinction allows for a new view in the philosophy of logic according to which the claims of logic are metaphysically analytic and have distinctive modal profiles, even though their epistemology is holist and in many ways rather Quinean. It is argued that such a view combines some of the more attractive aspects of the Carnapian and Quinean approaches to logic, whilst avoiding some famous problems.

A barrier to entailment exists if you can't get conclusions of a certain kind from premises of another. One of the most famous barriers in philosophy is Hume's Law, which says that you can't get normative conclusions from descriptive premises, or in slogan form: you can't get an ought from an is. This barrier is highly controversial, and many famous counterexamples were proposed in the last century. But there are other barriers which function almost as philosophical platitudes: no Universal conclusions (...) from Particular premises, no Future conclusions from premises about the Past, and no claims that attribute Necessity from premises that merely tell us how things happen to be in the Actual world. Barriers to Entailment proposes a unified logical account of five barriers that have played important roles in philosophy, in the process showing how to diagnose proposed counterexamples and arguing that the case for Hume's Law is as strong as that for the platitudinous barriers. -/- The first two parts of the book employ techniques from formal logic, but present them in an accessible way, suitable for any reader with some background in first-order model theory (of the kind that might be taught in a first class in logic). Gillian Russell introduces tense, modal, indexical, and deontic formal logics, but always avoids unneeded complexity. Each barrier is connected to broader philosophical topics: universality, time, necessity, context-sensitivity, and normativity. Russell brings out under-recognised connections between the domains and lays the groundwork for further work at the intersections. -/- The last part of the book transposes the formal work to informal barrier theses in the philosophy of language, in the process doing new work on the concept of logical consequence, and providing new responses to proposed informal counterexamples to Hume's Law which employ hard-to-formalise tools from natural language, such as speech acts and thick normative expressions. (shrink)

Modularity has become a central and remarkably useful concept in evolutionary developmental biology, offering an explanation of how independent, interacting units make possible developmental events and evolutionary changes. These modules exist at several different levels of organization, from genes to signal transduction pathways to cell populations. Cell populations, which are multicellular modules, provide an opportunity both to clarify our notion of modularity and to reexamine such central concepts as cell-to-cell communication. Rosine Chandebois’s work on “cell sociology” is reframed in the (...) language of modularity in order to show how groups of cells maintain their collective identity during development and how signaling information from the group’s environment is received by the constituent cells. In a “test case” for our account of multicellular modules, we consider the vertebrate neural crest, a migratory cell population made up of several subpopulations. The neural crest proves yet again to be a complex case, showing the importance of taking into account both developmental and evolutionary transformations of multicellular modules. (shrink)

Publics are key stakeholders in population genomic screening and their perspectives on ethical considerations are relevant to programme design and policy making. Using semi-structured interviews, we explored social views and attitudes towards possible future provision of personalised genomic risk information to populations to inform prevention and/or early detection of relevant conditions. Participants were members of the public who had received information on their personal genomic risk of melanoma as part of a research project. The focus of the analysis presented here (...) is participants’ views regarding ethical considerations relevant to population genomic screening more generally. Data were analysed thematically and four key themes related to ethical considerations were identified: personal responsibility for health: ‘forewarned is forearmed’; perceptions of, and responses to, genetic fatalism; implications for parenting and reproduction; divided views on choosing to receive genomic risk information. Ethical considerations underlying these themes include the valorisation of information and choice, paternalism, non-directiveness and increasing responsibilisation of individuals in health and healthcare. These findings arguably indicate a thin public conceptualisation of population genomic testing, which draws heavily on how these themes tend to be described in existing social discourses. Findings suggest that further public engagement is required to increase complexity of debate, to consider the appropriate place of individual and social interests in population genomic testing. Further discernment of relevant ethical approaches, drawing on ethical frameworks from both public health and clinical settings, will also assist in determining the appropriate implementation of population genomic screening for complex conditions. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Series Editors' PrefaceAcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsHow Things Are Elsewhere; W. Schwarz Information Change and First-Order Dynamic Logic; B.Kooi Interpreting and Applying Proof Theories for Modal Logic; F.Poggiolesi & G.Restall The Logic(s) of Modal Knowledge; D.Cohnitz On Probabilistically Closed Languages; H.Leitgeb Dogmatism, Probability and Logical Uncertainty; B.Weatherson & D.Jehle Skepticism about Reasoning; S.Roush, K.Allen & I.HerbertLessons in Philosophy of Logic from Medieval Obligations; C.D.Novaes How to Rule Out Things with Words: Strong Paraconsistency and the Algebra of Exclusion; (...) F.Berto Lessons from the Logic of Demonstratives; G.RussellThe Multitude View on Logic; M.Eklund Index. (shrink)

Approximately 400,000 people die outside US hospitals or chronic care facilities each year. While there has been some recent movement towards initiating procedures for prehospital Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders, the most common situation in the US is that emergency medical systems (EMS) personnel are not authorized to pronounce patients dead, but are required to attempt resuscitation with all of the modalities at their disposal in virtually all patients. It is unfair and probably unrealistic for EMS personnel to have to (...) make a determination of the validity of a non-standard prehospital DNR order (for example, a living will or a durable power of attorney for health care). Existing prehospital DNR protocols range from being very restrictive in the scope of patients allowed to participate and in their implementation, to those that are more liberal. Potential benefits of prehospital DNR orders include freeing up vital personnel and material for use by those who would more fully benefit, and alleviating the enormous emotional strain on patients, families, EMS personnel, and hospital medical staffs involved in unwanted resuscitations that only prolong the dying process. Given this, prehospital DNR orders present several legal and moral problems. These include proper patient identification, the nature of the document itself, precautions incorporated into a DNR system to prevent misuse, potential liability for EMS and hospital personnel, and potential errors in implementation. Functioning prehospital DNR systems need to include: 1) specific legislation detailing the circumstances in which such a document could be used, the wording of such a document, and protection from liability for those implementing the document's directives; 2) having the currently valid document immediately available to the EMS personnel or base station doctors; and 3) acceptable means of identifying the patient. Relatively few US jurisdictions as yet have a prehospital DNR order system, although it is an idea whose time is overdue. Society's imperative to use available technology has pushed us into a situation where a technique to save those with a potential to continue a meaningful and wanted existence is being used indiscriminately to prolong the agony of death. (shrink)

The question of the esthetic conceptions of medieval Europe is most complex. The brilliant flourishing of classical esthetics in Europe was followed by a profound crisis of the spirit, deepened by the dominance of Christian dogmatism. However, this did not at all mean that esthetics had died. In Catholic Western Europe, in Orthodox Byzantium, the South Slavic countries and Rus', everywhere in fact, during the medieval period, the development of esthetic views, ideas, and theories went on. We sense in what (...) took place echoes of classical antiquity, Christian theological strains, and also new and original ideas. (shrink)

Two strains of interventionist responses to the causal exclusion argument are reviewed and critically assessed. On the one hand, one can argue that manipulating supervenient mental states is an effective strategy for manipulating the subvenient physical states, and hence should count as genuine causes to the subvenient physical states. But unless the supervenient and subvenient states manifest some difference in their manipulability conditions, there is no reason to treat them as distinct, which in turn goes against the basic assumption of (...) nonreductive physicalism. On the other hand, one can preserve the distinction between the two by introducing asymmetric manipulability conditions that the supervenience thesis entails. But this response can be used to argue that mental causes never have physical effects. However, this argumentation can also be used to show that mental causes can have mental effects. (shrink)

Each year, infection with Human Papillomavirus (HPV) leads to millions of abnormal Pap smears and thousands of cases of cervical cancer in the US. Throughout the developing world, where Pap smears are less common, HPV is a leading cause of cancer death among women. So when the international pharmaceutical giant Merck developed a vaccine that could prevent infection with several key strains of HPV, the public health community was anxious to celebrate a major advance. But then marketing and lobbying got (...) in the way. Merck chose to pursue an aggressive lobbying campaign, trying to make its new vaccine mandatory for young girls. The campaign stoked public mistrust about how vaccines come to be mandated, and now it's not just Merck's public image that has taken a hit. The public health community has also been affected. What is the lesson to be learned from this story? Public health communication relies on public trust. (shrink)

This well-translated and slightly revised edition of El Hombre en la Encrucijada approaches the problem of social crisis and creative integration of conflicting strains into higher "forms of material and spiritual life" with Spanish intimacy and terseness and with wide erudition in unusual combination with a sense of reality. Part II treats the modern period as a series of crises, roughly describable as the inception, spread, and ultimate failure of secular, scientific intellectualism. This work combines the usual "cultural heritage" and (...) "crisis" themes with striking success.--L. K. B. (shrink)

Many older people need external support for their daily living. A large minority of older adults with low or modest pension incomes face financial strains from the high cost of illness, and many older people in urban areas live in social isolation. Indeed, population aging has become a policy topic of concern. The policy debate since the end of the twentieth century about the future of public pensions and health and long‐term care programs has increasingly framed the growing numbers of (...) older people in alarmist terms. Unfounded claims about the unaffordability and unsustainability of social policies supporting older people have become common currency, often disguised as concerns about intergenerational justice. Such claims and concerns hinder clear thinking about proper social and fiscal policies, housing, health care, and labor markets to safeguard the well‐being of older people in aging societies. (shrink)