BackgroundThe Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines describe modular standards that journals can adopt to promote open science. The TOP Factor is a metric to describe the extent to which journals have adopted the TOP Guidelines in their policies. Systematic methods and rating instruments are needed to calculate the TOP Factor. Moreover, implementation of these open science policies depends on journal procedures and practices, for which TOP provides no standards or rating instruments.MethodsWe describe a process for assessing journal policies, procedures, and (...) practices according to the TOP Guidelines. We developed this process as part of the Transparency of Research Underpinning Social Intervention Tiers Initiative to advance open science in the social intervention research ecosystem. We also provide new instruments for rating journal instructions to authors, manuscript submission systems, and published articles according to standards in the TOP Guidelines. In addition, we describe how to determine the TOP Factor score for a journal, calculate reliability of journal ratings, and assess coherence among a journal’s policies, procedures, and practices. As a demonstration of this process, we describe a protocol for studying approximately 345 influential journals that have published research used to inform evidence-based policy.DiscussionThe TRUST Process includes systematic methods and rating instruments for assessing and facilitating implementation of the TOP Guidelines by journals across disciplines. Our study of journals publishing influential social intervention research will provide a comprehensive account of whether these journals have policies, procedures, and practices that are consistent with standards for open science and thereby facilitate the publication of trustworthy findings to inform evidence-based policy. Through this demonstration, we expect to identify ways to refine the TOP Guidelines and the TOP Factor. Refinements could include: improving templates for adoption in journal instructions to authors, manuscript submission systems, and published articles; revising explanatory guidance intended to enhance the use, understanding, and dissemination of the TOP Guidelines; and clarifying the distinctions among different levels of implementation.Research materials are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/txyr3/. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Scheeben's Place in Nineteenth-Century Catholic Theology and the Question of His Theological MethodEvan S. KoopMatthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–1888) is enjoying a moment in English-speaking Catholic theological circles. In recent years his thought has attracted increasing interest from scholars who view him as an important forerunner to some of the central currents of Catholic theology in the twentieth century,1 a trend that promises only to accelerate with the recent (...) publication of the initial volumes of the first complete translation of his monumental Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik into English.2 The much-debated question of Scheeben's proper place in the history of Catholic theology in the nineteenth century therefore, has gained a new relevance. While the present study of course, cannot and does not claim to bring this dispute to a definitive resolution, nevertheless it is hoped that it may at least help to clarify some common misunderstandings that can arise from hasty generalizations, and offer a few insights—which are not in fact new, but which are too often ignored by English-speaking scholars today—into the way in which the thought of the Jesuit theologians of the so-called "Roman School" may have served to influence Scheeben's unique theological method.In the past, numerous attempts have been made to situate Scheeben's thought within a particular theological school, and members of rival schools, in turn, have sought to claim him (or indeed repudiate him) as one of their [End Page 471] own.3 Amid the flood of divergent assessments of Scheeben's theological affinities, there at least exists some scholarly consensus about his greatness as a theologian. In 1935, during the centenary celebrations of Scheeben's birth, Pope Pius XI lauded him as a "man of genius" and proposed his thought to the students of the Germanicum as a model of the proper unity of theology's ascetical and dogmatic elements.4 In a Festschrift dedicated to Scheeben's theology published in the same year, Martin Grabmann judged that Scheeben was "the greatest dogmatic theologian of the nineteenth century,"5 and Carl Feckes, Scheeben's successor at the Cologne seminary, named him "the greatest Mariologist of our time."6 On the eve of the Second Vatican Council, no less an authority than Hans Urs von Balthasar could proclaim that Scheeben was "the greatest German theologian to-date [1961] since the time of Romanticism."7Nearly all, likewise, acknowledge the great difficulty of comprehending Scheeben's theology: even a German theologian of the stature of Joseph Ratzinger laments that Scheeben "has not made it easy, either as a professor for his hearers or as a writer for his readers. His language is rigorous, marked by the laborious travail of thought." The fact that he draws abundantly from such sources as Aquinas and the Greek Fathers "lends to his work [End Page 472] breadth and depth, but does not necessarily facilitate easy access."8 Similarly, the ultramontane Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, in his preface to an English abridgment of Scheeben's Dogmatik, warned that Scheeben's greatest work "requires not only reading but study; and study with patient care and conscientious desire to understand."9 Perhaps it is for this reason that it has become almost proverbial to observe that Scheeben's works are much praised, but seldom read.10Far less agreement, however, exists when it comes to the question of what kind of theologian Scheeben was, or to what theological school he belonged. Was he, asks the great Scheeben scholar Eugen Paul, "the prototype of those theologians who represent (if not establish) the infamous 'two-storey theory [Stockwerkstheorie] with respect to nature and grace—or does he rather belong to those who insist precisely on the transcendental unity of nature and grace?"11 Is Scheeben, in other words, a Neo-Scholastic, even "the most precious flower ever granted to the spring of Neo-Scholasticism,"12 as he was called in the first major study of his theology produced in the twentieth century? Or is he, instead, to be classed with the theologians of the Tübingen School who, under the influence of Romantic Idealism, sought to renew Catholic theology through... (shrink)

? We gratefully acknowledge the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson, which provided a grant for the support of this work. E.T. is also supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences. 1 See David Woodruff Smith.

Blaming (construed broadly to include both blaming-attitudes and blaming-actions) is a puzzling phenomenon. Even when we grant that someone is blameworthy, we can still sensibly wonder whether we ought to blame him. We sometimes choose to forgive and show mercy, even when it is not asked for. We are naturally led to wonder why we shouldn’t always do this. Wouldn’t it be a better to wholly reject the punitive practices of blame, especially in light of their often undesirable effects, (...) and embrace an ethic of unrelenting forgiveness and mercy? In this paper I seek to address these questions by offering an account of blame that provides a rationale for thinking that to wholly forswear blaming blameworthy agents would be deeply mistaken. This is because, as I will argue, blaming is a way of valuing, it is “a mode of valuation.” I will argue that among the minimal standards of respect generated by valuable objects, notably persons, is the requirement to redress disvalue with blame. It is not just that blame is something additional we are required to do in properly valuing, but rather blame is part of what that it is to properly value. Blaming, given the existence of blameworthy agents, is mode of valuation required by the standards of minimal respect. To forswear blame would be to fail value what we ought to value. (shrink)

Conditional analyses of ability have been nearly entirely abandoned by philosophers of action as woefully inadequate attempts of analyzing the concept of ability. Recently, however, Vihvelin (2004) and Fara (2008) have appealed to the similarity between dispositions and abilities, as well as recent advances in the metaphysics of dispositions, in order to construct putatively superior conditional analyses of ability. Vihvelin and Fara claim that their revised conditional analyses of ability enable them to show that Frankfurt-style cases fail to sever the (...) connection between freedom and responsibility, and that compatibilism about free will and determinism is true. I argue, however, that even granting the truth of their dispositional analyses, they cannot achieve these aims. Vihvelin and Fara’s fundamental error lies in their failing to appreciate the complex nature of free will and moral responsibility—specifically that agents’ freedom and responsibility depend not only on their abilities, but also their opportunities. (shrink)

The Generality Constraint is a condition discussed by Gareth Evans that is meant to distinguish candidate subjects into those who have conscious thought of the type needed for a neo-Fregean conception of an objective world and those who are not subjects of that type. I argue that it implicitly applies to free-ranging creatures in a world of objects that they perceive and on which they act. This is quite unlike the behaviour exhibited by pigeons who attempt to maximise rewards (...) in a limited operant response situation where those rewards are indexed to particular numbers of key pecks as the ability needed to master that task is not the kind of thing Evans is interested in and it can be explained much more parsimoniously. (shrink)

A Decent Proposal: Ethical Review of Clinical Research Donald Evans and Martyn Evans Centre for Philosophy and Health Care University of Wales Swansea, UK The investigation and development of modern medicines and medical technology can create numerous ethical dilemmas both for clinical researchers and research ethics committees. A Decent Proposal: Ethical Review of Clinical Research seeks to facilitate and encourage good clinical research by exploring the concerns, responsibilities, general issues and particular pitfalls associated with ethical aspects of research. (...) It provides practical guidelines for researchers on how to improve the quality of research design, while for those appointed to scrutinise research proposals it offers advice on how to apply consistent, careful and critical reasoning to the process of assessing ethical standards. As such, it will provide invaluable assistance to clinical researchers and ethics committees alike in understanding the moral challenges posed by modern health care. (shrink)

Human communities teem with a variety of social norms. In order to change unjust and harmful social norms, it is crucial to identify the psychological processes that give rise to them. Most researchers take it for granted that social norms are uniquely human. By contrast, we approach this matter from a comparative perspective, leveraging recent research on animal social behaviour. While there is currently only suggestive evidence for norms in nonhuman communities, we argue that human social norms are likely produced (...) by a wide range of mechanisms, many of which we share with nonhuman animals. Approaching this variability from a comparative perspective can help norm researchers expand and reframe the range of hypotheses they test when attempting to understand the causes of socially normative behaviours in humans. First, we diagnose some of the theoretical obstacles to developing a comparative science of social norms, and offer a few basic constructs and distinctions to help norm researchers overcome these obstacles. Then we develop a six-dimensional model of the psychological and social factors that contribute to variability in both human and potential nonhuman norms. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’. (shrink)

One of the earliest issues in cognitive ethology concerned the meaning of animal signals. In the 1970s and 1980s this debate was most active with respect to the question of whether animal alarm calls convey information about the emotional states of animals or whether they “refer” directly to predators in the environment (Seyfarth, Cheney, & Marler 1980; see Radick 2007 for a historical account), but other areas, such as vocalizations about food and social contact, were also widely discussed. In the (...) 1990s, ethologists largely came to a consensus that such calls were “functionally referential” (Evans & Marler 1995) even if they did not satisfy all the semantic requirements imposed by philosophers of language. More recently, though, it has been argued that ethologists should eschew the concept of reference and return to a focus on the affective aspects of animal communication (Rendall & Owren 2002). We propose to take a new look at this debate in the light of recent developments in the philosophy of language under the heading of “Neo-Expressivism” (Bar-On 2004). This view provides two different senses.. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

One concern bothering ancient and medieval philosophers is the logical worry discussed in Aristotle's De Interpretatione 9, that if future contingent propositions are true, then they are settled in a way that is incompatible with freedom. Another is if we grant God foreknowledge of future contingent events then God's foreknowledge will determine those events in a way precluding freedom. ;I begin by discussing the standard compatibilist solution to these problems as represented in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and then examine (...) theories that allegedly deviate from the Boethian solution. Boethius's solution to these separate problems involves showing that both problems operate on an ambiguity in the scope of the modal operator 'necessarily' present in the articulation of the problem. Once the ambiguity is removed we see that both disambiguations fail to offer a sound argument against the compatibility of free action with either God's omniscience or future contingent proposition's being true. The only difference between the solutions is that before executing the scope distinction strategy in the theological problem, Boethius reminds us that God knows future contingents rather than foreknowing them, since God is timeless. ;The rest of my discussion examines positions that allegedly deviate from the Boethian solution: positions held by Peter de Rivo, William Ockham and Plotinus. I argue that Ockham doesn't in fact deviate from the Boethian solution to the theological problem as is commonly held. Instead of offering a compatibilist position where God's omniscience includes foreknowledge, Ockham denies that God foreknows the future advocating instead a more sophisticated Boethian position. The other two philosophers, Rivo and Plotinus, deviate from Boethius, but unfortunately neither position appears philosophically plausible. Rivo's incompatibilist solution to the logical problem is inconsistent with his retention of the Boethian solution to the theological problem and is probably implausible on its own. Plotinus's compatibilist account fails not because it claims that necessity and freedom are compatible, but because the account of moral responsibility Plotinus offers to justify the compatibility fails. (shrink)

The UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC) introduced a specific policy and procedure for inquiring into allegations of scientific misconduct in December 1997; previously cases had been considered under normal disciplinary procedures. The policy formally covers staff employed in MRC units, but those in receipt of MRC grants in universities and elsewhere are expected to operate under similar policies. The MRC’s approach is stepwise: preliminary action; assessment to establish prima facie evidence of misconduct; formal investigation; sanctions; and appeal. Strict time limits (...) apply at all stages. The procedure will be evaluated after two years. The indications so far are that the procedure is robust, and its clarity and transparency have been an asset to all parties. The MRC is also convinced that it is equally important to achieve a working culture that fosters integrity. Thus education and training in good research practices are fundamental to the prevention of research misconduct. (shrink)

At no point in recorded history has there been an absence of intense, and heated, discussion about the subject of how to conduct relations between women and men. This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to these omnipresent issues and debates, mapping the present and future of thinking about feminist theory. The chapters gathered here present the state of the art in scholarship in the field, covering: epistemology and marginality; literary, visual and cultural representations; sexuality; macro and microeconomics of gender; conflict (...) and peace. The most important consensus in this volume is that a central organizing tenet of feminism is its willingness to examine the ways in which gender and relations between women and men have been (and are) organized. The authors bring a shared commitment to the critical appraisal of gender relations, as well as a recognition that to think 'theoretically' is not to detach concerns from lived experience but to extend the possibilities of understanding. With this focus on theory and theorizing about the world in which we live, this Handbook asks us, across all disciplines and situations, to abandon our taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and interrogate both the origin and the implications of our ideas about gender relations and feminism."--Publisher description. (shrink)

In this paper, I reinterpret Kant’s Transcendental Analytic as a description of a cognitive architecture. I describe a computer implementation of this architecture, and show how it has been applied to two unsupervised learning tasks. The resulting program is very data efficient, able to learn from a tiny handful of examples. I show how the program achieves data-efficiency: the constraints described in the Analytic of Principles are reinterpreted as strong prior knowledge, constraining the set of possible solutions.

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

Critically engages the work of the philosopher Don Ihde.

Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory is a wide-ranging but accessible introduction that illuminates the field of theory through a variety of useful and relevant examples. Covering all key theories and theorists, this book looks at the relation of theory to form, discourses, subjectivity, media and networks, and environments. Organized thematically, Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory illuminates the field by focusing on the concepts and methodologies of key thinkers, while also providing historical introductions that contextualize the latest (...) developments with regard to forms; discourses; subjectivities and embodiments; media, networks, and machines; and animals, affects, objects, and environments. Each chapter includes examples from a canonical novel, a contemporary text, and a new media artefact, while textboxes regularly introduce additional emerging or overlooked theorists of interest. An ideal guide for undergraduates studying literary theory, this book will give readers the background they need to continue their own fruitful explorations of this vibrant field of study. (shrink)

It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

Finding Oz tells the remarkable story behind one of the world’s most enduring and best-loved books. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum’s fantastical parable of the American Dream. Before becoming an impresario of children’s adventure tales, the J. K. Rowling of his age, Baum failed at a series of careers and nearly lost his soul before setting out on (...) a journey of discovery that would lead to the Land of Oz. Drawing on original research, Evan Schwartz debunks popular misconceptions and shows how the people, places, and events in Baum’s life gave birth to his unforgettable images and characters, from the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to the dual view of witches that reflected the life of Baum’s mother-in-law, the radical women’s rights leader Matilda Joslyn Gage. A narrative that sweeps across late-nineteenth-century America, Finding Oz ultimately reveals how failure and heartbreak can sometimes lead to redemption and bliss, and how one individual can ignite the imagination of the entire world. (shrink)

The science of genetics is undergoing a paradigm shift. Recent discoveries, including the activity of retrotransposons, the extent of copy number variations, somatic and chromosomal mosaicism, and the nature of the epigenome as a regulator of DNA expressivity, are challenging a series of dogmas concerning the nature of the genome and the relationship between genotype and phenotype. According to three widely held dogmas, DNA is the unchanging template of heredity, is identical in all the cells and tissues of the body, (...) and is the sole agent of inheritance. Rather than being an unchanging template, DNA appears subject to a good deal of environmentally induced change. Instead of identical DNA in all the cells of the body, somatic mosaicism appears to be the normal human condition. And DNA can no longer be considered the sole agent of inheritance. We now know that the epigenome, which regulates gene expressivity, can be inherited via the germline. These developments are particularly significant for behavior genetics for at least three reasons: First, epigenetic regulation, DNA variability, and somatic mosaicism appear to be particularly prevalent in the human brain and probably are involved in much of human behavior; second, they have important implications for the validity of heritability and gene association studies, the methodologies that largely define the discipline of behavior genetics; and third, they appear to play a critical role in development during the perinatal period and, in particular, in enabling phenotypic plasticity in offspring. I examine one of the central claims to emerge from the use of heritability studies in the behavioral sciences, the principle of minimal shared maternal effects, in light of the growing awareness that the maternal perinatal environment is a critical venue for the exercise of adaptive phenotypic plasticity. This consideration has important implications for both developmental and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

In both Metaphysics Γ 4 and 5 Aristotle argues that Protagoras is committed to the view that all contradictions are true. Yet Aristotle’s arguments are not transparent, and later, in Γ 6, he provides Protagoras with a way to escape contradictions. In this paper I try to understand Aristotle’s arguments. After examining a number of possible solutions, I conclude that the best way of explaining them is to (a) recognize that Aristotle is discussing a number of Protagorean opponents, and (b) (...) import another of Protagoras’ views, namely the claim that there are always two logoi opposed to one another. (shrink)

• An adequate conceptual framework is still needed to account for phenomena that (i) have a first-person, subjective-experiential or phenomenal character; (ii) are (usually) reportable and describable (in humans); and (iii) are neurobiologically realized.2 • The conscious subject plays an unavoidable epistemological role in characterizing the explanadum of consciousness through first-person descriptive reports. The experimentalist is then able to link first-person data and third-person data. Yet the generation of first-person data raises difficult epistemological issues about the relation of second-order awareness (...) or meta-awareness to first-order experience (e.g. (shrink)

This paper discusses two broadly logical issues related to Protagoras’ measure doctrine (M) and the self-refutation argument (SRA). First, I argue that the relevant interpretation of (M) has it that every individual human being determines all her own truths, including the truth of (M) itself. I then turn to what I take to be the most important move in the SRA: that Protagoras recognises not only that his opponents disagree with him about the truth of (M), but also that they (...) hold that (M) is false simpliciter. By recognising that his opponents do not make the relativising concession he makes for them, he is forced to accept that (M) is false. I go on to argue that several other defenders of the SRA end up with a regress which is difficult to end and might not favour anti-Protagoreans. On my reading, by recognising what his opponents believe, Protagoras is barred from adding qualifiers, and the possible regress doesn’t get off the ground. I conclude with brief discussions of how Protagoras might try to avoid the result of the SRA and the argument’s role in this part of the Theaetetus. (shrink)

The first edition of The Mind and its Discontents was a powerful analysis of how, as a society, we view mental illness. In the ten years since the first edition, there has been growing interest in the philosophy of psychiatry, and a new edition of this text is more timely and important than ever. -/- In The Mind and its Discontents, Grant Gillett argues that an understanding of mental illness requires more than just a study of biological models of (...) mental processes and pathologies. As intensely social animals, he argues, we need to look for the causes of human mental disorders in our interactions with others; in social rule-following and its role in the organization of mental content; in the power relations embedded within social structures and cultural norms; in the way that our mental life is inscribed by a cumulative life of encounters with others. Drawing upon work from within the philosophy of mind, epistemology, post-modern continental philosophy, and philosophy of language, he tries to elucidate the nature of psychiatric phenomena involving disorders of thought, perception, emotion, moral sense, and action. Within this framework, a series of chapters analyse important psychiatric disorders such as depression, attention deficiency, autism, schizophrenia, and anorexia. Along the way, Gillett explores the nature of memory and identity; of hysteria and what constitutes rational behaviour; and of what causes us to label someone a psychopath or deviant. -/- Updated, available in paperback, and more accessible than before, the new edition of this fascinating book will provide readers with important insights into the causes and nature of psychosis. In addition, Gillett's arguments have considerable implications for the way in which we understand and treat people suffering from psychiatric disorders. The Mind and its Discontents will be read by researchers and postgraduate students in a range of academic areas, including psychiatry, bioethics, philosophy of mind, social theory, and clinical psychology. It will also be of considerable interest to practising psychiatrists. (shrink)

C. Stephen Evans provides a clear, readable introduction to Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) as a philosopher and thinker. His book is organised around Kierkegaard's concept of the three 'stages' or 'spheres' of human existence, which provide both a developmental account of the human self and an understanding of three rival views of human life and its meaning. Evans also discusses such important Kierkegaardian concepts as 'indirect communication', 'truth as subjectivity', and the Incarnation understood as 'the Absolute Paradox'. Although his (...) discussion emphasises the importance of Christianity for understanding Kierkgaard, it shows him to be a writer of great interest to a secular as well as a religious audience. Evans' book brings Kierkegaard into conversation with western philosophers past and present, presenting him as one who gives powerful answers to the questions which philosophers ask. (shrink)

Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that the inegalitarian invocation of reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker's contribution depends on what others only (...) together do. When workers only together make another more productive, that is not reflected in the sum of their own contributions. Thus reward according to contribution recognizes individual accomplishments without recognizing their dependence on collectives, dependence that is, in complex economies, ubiquitous. (shrink)

The purpose of medical humanities is to improve the delivery of effective health care through a better understanding of disease in society, and in the individual. The interfaces between the science of medicine and the arts, philosophy, sociology and law interpret causes and effects of disease. The field of medical ethics is the most prominent offspring of this wider debate, yet the context of disease in the life of the individual and of society is profound and far-reaching. The influences of (...) medicine on the humanities and vice versa are all around, yet only recently have they been recognised in the wider world of health care. How can you encapsulate the essence of medical humanities and teach it to health professionals? Medical Humanities is designed to fill the need for a clear, well illustrated text that both provides the principles for the individual reader, and encourages discussion. The issues are explored in four main sections. Based on a highly successful seminar, and with contributions from leading writers, thinkers, and teachers, this book provides a comprehensive and authoritative reference for what is becoming a professional requirement in medicine. It will be invaluable for clinicians and students alike. (shrink)

Universities and other research institutions are increasingly providing additional training in research integrity to improve the quality and reliability of research. Various training courses have been developed, with diverse learning goals and content. Despite the importance of training that focuses on moral character and professional virtues, there remains a lack of training that adopts a virtue ethics approach. To address this, we, a European Commission-funded consortium, have designed a train-the-trainer programme for research integrity. The programme is based on (1) virtue (...) ethics, (2) the ethos of science, (3) learning by doing and (4) learner-centred teaching. The blended learning programme combines e-learning modules with participatory group sessions. Trainers are taught how to guide researchers through a series of structured exercises for fostering reflection on scientific virtues, and how to promote understanding and application of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. Trainers are provided with adaptable tools and resources that can be used and combined in different ways. The programme implementation began in Spring 2020 and 470 trainers have participated to date. When trainers were asked to grade – between 0 (very bad) and 10 (excellent) – the e-learning modules and the participatory exercises, 60% scored a grade 8 or higher (median = 8, IQR = 2) for the e-learning modules, whereas 80% scored a grade 8 or higher (median = 9, IQR = 1) for the participatory exercises. A majority felt that the training helped them as a trainer to learn about ways to organise and teach a research integrity course (82%) and would recommend the interactive exercises to others (92%). Trainers have educated over 3300 researchers in Europe using our virtue-based approach. The VIRT2UE train-the-trainer programme fosters research integrity by providing trainers with exercises and tools which enable them to stimulate the development of good researchers across Europe. (shrink)

Low-level dishonesty is rife everywhere, in the form of exaggeration, selective use of facts, economy with the truth, careful drafting - from Trump and the Brexit debate to companies that tell us 'your call is important to us'. How did we get to a place where bullshit is not just rife but apparently so effective that it's become the communications strategy of our times? This brilliantly insightful book steps inside the panoply of deception employed in all walks of life and (...) assesses how it has come to this. It sets out the surprising logic which explains why bullshit is both pervasive and persistent. Why are company annual reports often nonsense? Why should you not trust estate agents? And above all, why has political campaigning become the art of stretching the truth? Drawing on behavioural science, economics, psychology and of course his knowledge of the media, Evan ends by providing readers with a tool-kit to handle the kinds of deceptions we encounter every day, and charts a route through the muddy waters of the post-truth age." -- Publisher's website. (shrink)

Ethnic cleansing and other methods of political and social exclusion continue to thrive in our globalized world, complicating the idea that unity and diversity can exist in the same society. When we emphasize unity, we sacrifice heterogeneity, yet when we stress diversity, we create a plurality of individuals connected only by tenuous circumstance. As long as we remain tethered to these binaries, as long as we are unable to imagine the sort of society we want in an age of diversity, (...) we cannot achieve an enduring solution to conflicts that continue unabated despite our increasing proximity to one another. By envisioning the public as a multivoiced body, Fred Evans offers a solution to the dilemma of diversity. The multivoiced body is both one and many: heterogeneous voices that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. By focusing on this traditionally undervalued or overlooked notion of voice, Evans shows how we can valorize simultaneously the solidarity, diversity, and richness of society. Moreover, recognition of society as a multivoiced body helps resists the pervasive countertendency to raise a chosen discourse to the level of "one true God," "pure race," or some other "oracle" that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. To support these views, Evans taps the major figures and themes of analytic and continental philosophy as well as modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and feminist thought. He also turns to sources outside of philosophy to address the implications of his views for justice, citizenship, democracy, and collective as well as individual rights. Through the seemingly simple conceit of a multivoiced body, Evans straddles both philosophy and political practice, confronting issues of subjectivity, language, communication, and identity. For anyone interested in moving toward a just society and politics, _The Multivoiced Body_ offers an innovative approach to the problems of human diversity and ethical plurality. (shrink)

The validity and utility of the proximate-ultimate distinction in biology have recently been under debate. Opponents of the distinction argue that it rules out individual-level organismic processes from evolutionary explanations, thereby leading to an unfounded separation between organismic causation and evolutionary causation. Proponents of the proximate-ultimate distinction, on the other hand, argue that it serves an important epistemological role in forming different kinds of explanation-seeking questions in biology. In this paper we offer an interpretation the proximate-ultimate distinction not only as (...) a means of forming explanation-seeking questions, but also as a distinction that can help highlight the way in which individual-level organismic processes can be evolutionary causes. We do this by interpreting the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes as a distinction between structuring and triggering causes. (shrink)

In the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre’s notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, I argue (...) for an alternative model of authenticity in which we take claims about the relative authenticity of country music to be evidence of ‘country’ being a dual character concept in the same way that it has been suggested of punk rock and hip-hop. Authentic country music is country music that embodies the core value commitments of the genre. These values form the basis of country artists’ and audiences’ practical identities. Part of country music’s aesthetic practice is that audiences reconnect with, reify, and revise this common practical identity through identification with artists and works that manifest these values. We should then think of authenticity discourse within country music as a kind of game within the genre’s practice of shaping and maintaining this practical identity. (shrink)

The British biologist, philosopher, and psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan is widely regarded as one of the founders of comparative psychology. He is especially well known for his eponymous canon, which aimed to provide a rule for the interpretation of mind from behavior. Emphasizing the importance of the context in which Morgan was working—one in which casual observations of animal behavior could be found in Nature magazine every week and psychology itself was fighting for scientific legitimacy—I provide an account of Morgan’s (...) vision for the comparative psychologist qua professional psychologist. To this end, I explore the important connection between Morgan and the evolutionary theorist, philosopher, and psychologist Herbert Spencer. It is from Spencer, I contend, that Morgan inherited a number of his key epistemological and methodological concerns about the nascent science of comparative psychology. This extends all the way to the canon, which only works as intended when paired with a Spencerian understanding of mental evolution as a progressive linear sequence. Far from being an incidental residue of a pre-Darwinian time, hierarchy was intentionally built into the very core of Morgan’s scientific comparative psychology. (shrink)

‘Virtue signaling’ is the practice of using moral talk in order to enhance one’s moral reputation. Many find this kind of behavior irritating. However, some philosophers have gone further, arguing that virtue signaling actively undermines the proper functioning of public moral discourse and impedes moral progress. Against this view, I argue that widespread virtue signaling is not a social ill, and that it can actually serve as an invaluable instrument for moral change, especially in cases where moral argument alone does (...) not suffice. Specifically, virtue signaling can change the broader public’s social expectations, which can in turn motivate the adoption of new, positive social norms. I also argue that the reputation-seeking motives underlying virtue signaling impose important constraints on virtue signalers’ behavior, which serve to keep the worst excesses of virtue signaling in check. (shrink)

How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled (...) from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards “factive” forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation. (shrink)

Ethnic cleansing and other methods of political and social exclusion continue to thrive in our globalized world, complicating the idea that unity and diversity can exist in the same society. When we emphasize unity, we sacrifice heterogeneity, yet when we stress diversity, we create a plurality of individuals connected only by tenuous circumstance. As long as we remain tethered to these binaries, as long as we are unable to imagine the sort of society we want in an age of diversity, (...) we cannot achieve an enduring solution to conflicts that continue unabated despite our increasing proximity to one another. By envisioning the public as a multivoiced body, Fred Evans offers a solution to the dilemma of diversity. The multivoiced body is both one and many: heterogeneous voices that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. By focusing on this traditionally undervalued or overlooked notion of voice, Evans shows how we can valorize simultaneously the solidarity, diversity, and richness of society. Moreover, recognition of society as a multivoiced body helps resists the pervasive countertendency to raise a chosen discourse to the level of "one true God," "pure race," or some other "oracle" that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. To support these views, Evans taps the major figures and themes of analytic and continental philosophy as well as modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and feminist thought. He also turns to sources outside of philosophy to address the implications of his views for justice, citizenship, democracy, and collective as well as individual rights. Through the seemingly simple conceit of a multivoiced body, Evans straddles both philosophy and political practice, confronting issues of subjectivity, language, communication, and identity. For anyone interested in moving toward a just society and politics, _The Multivoiced Body_ offers an innovative approach to the problems of human diversity and ethical plurality. (shrink)

Both mindreading and stereotyping are forms of social cognition that play a pervasive role in our everyday lives, yet too little attention has been paid to the question of how these two processes are related. This paper offers a theory of the influence of stereotyping on mental-state attribution that draws on hierarchical predictive coding accounts of action prediction. It is argued that the key to understanding the relation between stereotyping and mindreading lies in the fact that stereotypes centrally involve character-trait (...) attributions, which play a systematic role in the action–prediction hierarchy. On this view, when we apply a stereotype to an individual, we rapidly attribute to her a cluster of generic character traits on the basis of her perceived social group membership. These traits are then used to make inferences about that individual’s likely beliefs and desires, which in turn inform inferences about her behavior. (shrink)

A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of the mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we (...) project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate--either in the waking state or in a lucid dream--we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness its dissolution with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives. (shrink)

For several decades, international law has recognized certain norms such as the prohibitions against genocide, slavery, and military aggression as "jus cogens"- peremptory law which supersedes conflicting international treaties and customs. Despite widespread acceptance of the jus cogens concept, legal theorists continue to debate whether peremptory norms derive their legal authority from state consent, natural law, or the demands of international public order. Anxiety over peremptory norms' legal basis has frustrated efforts to clarify the scope and content of jus cogens, (...) as well as placing peremptory norms on a collision course with inherited notions of state sovereignty. Drawing on Immanuel Kant 's conception of fiduciary relations, this Article develops a new theory of jus cogens based on the idea that states are fiduciaries of their people. According to the fiduciary theory, peremptory norms do not stand in opposition to state sovereignty; rather, they are constitutive of state sovereign authority because all states owe their subjects a fiduciary obligation to comply with such norms. The fiduciary model of the state resolves the longstanding tension in international legal theory between peremptory norms and state sovereignty and points to discrete formal and substantive criteria for identifying peremptory norms. (shrink)