The mental health of young people is a growing public health concern. With socio-emotional difficulties in youth often resulting in psychiatric disorders later in life and most with mental health conditions rather stabilizing in time, it is essential to support healthy socio-emotional development. With a comprehensive definition of mental health, since emotion regulation plays a critical role in prevention, it becomes imperative to better understand how children effectively manage their emotions from an early age. Determining effective use of ER skills (...) relies on adequate measurements. Typical methods of data collection in children present consistent shortcomings. This review addresses research findings considering the suitability of the late positive potential measured through electroencephalogram as a neural indicator of ER in children and youth. There is growing evidence, as reported in this review, that indicates that the late positive potential may be a reliable neural indicator of children's cognitive reappraisal abilities more specifically. Results generally suggest that the late positive potential amplitudes are sensitive to directed reappraisal in children. However, given the scant research, questions remain regarding developmental trends, methodology, interindividual variability, reappraisal of various stimuli, and how the late positive potential may relate to more traditional measures of ER. Directions for future research are provided, which are expected to address unanswered research questions and fill literature gaps. Taken together, the findings reviewed indicate that the late positive potential is generally sensitive to directed cognitive reappraisal in children and that there is promise of establishing this neural marker as an indicator of ER. (shrink)

Nurses have moral obligations incurred by membership in the profession to participate knowingly in health policy advocacy. Many barriers have historically hindered nurses from realizing their potential to advance health policy. The contemporary political context sets additional challenges to policy work due to polarization and conflict. Nursing education can help nurses recognize their role in advancing health through political advocacy in a manner that is consistent with disciplinary knowledge and ethical responsibilities. In this paper, the authors describe an exemplar of (...) Elizabeth Barrett's “Power as Knowing Participation in Change” theory as a disciplinary lens within a doctoral nursing health policy course. Barrett (radically) emphasizes “power as freedom” instead of “power as control.” This approach is congruent with nursing disciplinary values and enhances awareness of personal freedom and building collaborative relationships in the policy process. The theory was used in concert with other traditional policy content and frameworks from nursing and other disciplines. We discuss the role of nursing ethics viewed as professional responsibility for policy action, an overview of Barrett's theory, and the design of the course. Four student reflections on how the course influenced their thinking about policy advocacy are included. While not specific to policymaking, Barrett's theory provides a disciplinary grounding to increase students' awareness of freedom and choices in political advocacy participation. Our experience suggests that Barrett's work can be fruitful for enhancing nurses' awareness of choices to participate in change across settings. (shrink)

Weighing complex sets of evidence (i.e., from multiple disciplines and often divergent in implications) is increasingly central to properly informed decision-making. Determining “where the weight of evidence lies” is essential both for making maximal use of available evidence and figuring out what to make of such evidence. Weighing evidence in this sense requires an approach that can handle a wide range of evidential sources (completeness), that can combine the evidence with rigor, and that can do so in a way other (...) experts can assess and critique (transparency). But the democratic context in need of weight-of-evidence analysis also places additional constraints on the process, including communicability of the process to the general public, the need for an approach that can be used across a broad range of contexts (scope), and timeliness of process (practicality). I will compare qualitative and quantitative approaches with respect to both traditional epistemic criteria and criteria that arise from the democratic context, and argue that a qualitative explanatory approach can best meet the criteria and elucidate how to utilize the other approaches. This should not be surprising, as the approach I argue for is the one that most closely tracks general scientific reasoning. (shrink)

This paper presents a new logical analysis of quantity comparatives (i.e. More linguists than philosophers came to the party.) within the Delineation Semantics approach to gradability and comparison (McConnell-Ginet in Comparison constructions in English. PhD thesis, University of Rochester, Rochester, 1973; Kamp in Formal semantics of natural language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975; Klein in Linguist Philos 4:1–45, 1980) among many others. Along with the Degree Semantics framework (Cresswell in Montague grammar. Academic Press, New York, 1976; von Stechow in J (...) Semant 3:1–77, 1984; Kennedy in Projecting the adjective. PhD thesis. University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997, among many others) Delineation Semantics is one of the dominant logical frameworks for analyzing the meaning of gradable constituents of the adjectival syntactic category; however, there has been very little work done investigating the application of this framework to the analysis of gradability outside the adjectival domain. This state of affairs distinguishes the Delineation Semantics framework from its Degree Semantics counterpart, where such questions have been investigated in great deal since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, it has been observed [for example, by Doetjes (Seventeenth amsterdam colloquium. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 2011); van Rooij (The vagueness handbook. Springer, Dordrecht, 2011c)] that there is nothing inherently adjectival about the way that the interpretations of scalar predicates are calculated in Delineation Semantics, and therefore that there is enormous potential for this approach to shed light on the nature of gradability and comparison in the nominal and verbal domains. This paper is a first contribution to realizing this potential within a Mereological extension of a simple version of the DelS system. (shrink)

Damon Tweedy is a psychiatrist, lawyer, and writer. He's also Black. While in his first year as a medical student at Duke University, one of his professors approached him in the classroom and asked why the light bulb in the room hadn't been changed, as requested. Tweedy realized that his professor assumed he was a maintenance worker, not a student. Tweedy never took up this incident with the professor, nor did the professor ever apologize. Tweedy recounts that his best "revenge" (...) would be to excel in the class, which he ultimately did. At the end of the semester, upon learning that Tweedy received the second highest grade of over one hundred students, this professor invited him to work as a research assistant in his... (shrink)

I argue that the best scientific package is anti-Humean in its ontology, but Humean in its laws. This is because potencies and the best system account of laws complement each other surprisingly well. If there are potencies, then the BSA is the most plausible account of the laws of nature. Conversely, if the BSA is the correct theory of laws, then formulating the laws in terms of potencies rather than categorical properties avoids three serious objections: the mismatch objection, the impoverished (...) worlds objection, and the metaphysical 'oomph' objection. I argue that combining anti-Humean properties with Humean laws into a Potency-Best System Account of Laws is a powerful and science-friendly account---something that people on both sides should be able to appreciate. (shrink)

A revision of George Kennedy's translation of, introdution to, and commentary on Aristotle's On Rhetoric. His translation is most accurate, his general introduction is the most thorough and insightful, and his brief introductions to sections of the work, along with his explanatory footnotes, are the most useful available.

Multiple states are at risk of becoming uninhabitable due to climate change, forcing their populations to flee. While the 1951 Refugee Convention provides the gold standard of international protection, it is only applied to a limited subset of people fleeing their countries, those who suffer persecution, which most people fleeing climate change cannot establish. While many journalists and non-lawyers freely use the term “climate refugees,” governments, and courts, as well as UNHCR and many refugee experts, have excluded most climate refugees (...) from the Convention as a matter of legal interpretation. In our 2015 paper, “Unable to Return in the 1951 Refugee Convention: Stateless Refugees and Climate Change”, we sought to reopen the debate on “climate refugees” by arguing that some climate refugees qualify under the 1951 Convention as it is currently written (even if they are not persecuted): those who are stateless and are unable to return to their country of origin because climate change has rendered it uninhabitable. Our interpretation, however, has been rejected by Goodwin-Gill and McAdam (2021) and by Foster and Lambert (2019), which explicitly responds to our paper. Here, we address and respond to their arguments, and develop a new supplementary one, drawing on the principle of systemic integration, as enshrined in Article 31(3)(c) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. (shrink)

This book presents a new theory of the relationship between vagueness, context-sensitivity, gradability, and scale structure in natural language. Heather Burnett argues that it is possible to distinguish between particular subclasses of adjectival predicatesDLrelative adjectives like tall, total adjectives like dry, partial adjectives like wet, and non-scalar adjectives like hexagonalDLon the basis of how their criteria of application vary depending on the context; how they display the characteristic properties of vague language; and what the properties of their associated orders (...) are. It has been known for a long time that there exist empirical connections between context-sensitivity, vagueness, and scale structure; however, a formal system that expresses these connections had yet to be developed. This volume sets out a new logical system, called DelTCS, that brings together insights from the Delineation Semantics framework and from the Tolerant, Classical, Strict non-classical framework, to arrive at a full theory of gradability and scale structure in the adjectival domain. The analysis is further extended to examine vagueness and gradability associated with particular classes of determiner phrases, showing that the correspondences that exist between the major adjectival scale structure classes and subclasses of determiner phrases can also be captured within the DelTCS system. (shrink)

In modern zoos, enrichment programs have become a standard part of animal care routines. Although 'higher' primates usually receive complex enrichment programs, encompassing many types of enrichment, these are less common for prosimians. These animals often largely receive food-based enrichment, as was previously the case at Auckland Zoo, where the ring-tailed lemur enrichment schedule contained only three different items, all food-related. Lemurs tend to be considered less curious and quick to learn than other primates, as well as being less manually (...) dextrous, and for these reasons can be overlooked for complex enrichment. However, they have strong sensory abilities, in particular an acute sense of smell (Sauther et al 1999). This paper describes an enrichment program designed for the lemurs at Auckland Zoo with the aim of stimulating all senses. (shrink)

Functional theories posit that emotions are elicited by particular goal-related situations that represented adaptive problems and that emotions are evolved features of coordinated responses to those situations. Yet little theory or research has addressed the evolutionary aspects of these theories. We apply five criteria that can be used to judge whether features are adaptations. There is evidence that sadness, anger, and anxiety relate to unique changes in physiology, cognition, and behavior, those changes are correlated, situations that give rise to emotions (...) are consistent, and emotions are complex. To date, there is little experimental evidence regarding whether discrete emotions resolve adaptive problems and do so relatively efficiently. Evidence supporting all criteria is required to claim that discrete emotions are evolved features. (shrink)

Pretense is generally thought to constitutively involve imagination. We argue that this is a mistake. Although pretense often involves imagination, it need not; nor is it a kind of imagination. The core nature of pretense is closer to imitation than it is to imagination, and likely shares some of its motivation with the former. Three main strands of argument are presented. One is from the best explanation of cross‐cultural data. Another is from task‐analysis of instances of pretend play. And the (...) third concerns the different ways in which pretense (especially childhood pretense) and imagination impact one's evaluative/affective systems. (shrink)

Over the past four decades, the paradox of fiction has sparked considerable debate among philosophers. Unfortunately, the most promising solution to this puzzle, thought theory, currently earns its plausibility by way of intuition rather than evidence. I aim to address this by updating thought theory in light of recent empirical findings on affect. I will draw upon a wide range of scientific research—on the cognitive mechanisms driving emotion, the role of affect in counterfactual mind wandering and prospection, and the evolutionary (...) function of affect—to substantiate the claim that fictions can give rise to both real and rational emotional states. (shrink)

On average, women make up half of introductory-level philosophy courses, but only one-third of upper-division courses. We contribute to the growing literature on this problem by reporting the striking results of our study at the University of Oklahoma. We found that two attitudes are especially strong predictors of whether women are likely to continue in philosophy: feeling similar to the kinds of people who become philosophers, and enjoying philosophical puzzles and issues. In a regression analysis, they account for 63% of (...) variance. Importantly, women are significantly less likely to hold these attitudes than men. Thus, instructors who care about improving the retention of women undergraduates should find ways to improve these attitudes – for instance, by demonstrating the ways in which professional philosophers are like them. We will discuss some tentative but intuitively plausible suggestions for interventions, though further research is required to establish the effectiveness of those interventions. (shrink)

Political polarisation in the United States offers opportunities to explore how beliefs about candidates – that they could save or destroy American society – impact people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. Participants forecast their future emotional responses to the contentious 2020 U.S. presidential election, and reported their actual responses after the election outcome. Stronger beliefs about candidates were associated with forecasts of greater emotion in response to the election, but the strength of this relationship differed based on candidate preference. Trump supporters’ (...) forecast happiness more strongly related to beliefs that their candidate would save society than for Biden supporters. Biden supporters’ forecast anger and fear were more strongly related to beliefs that Trump would destroy society than vice versa. These forecasts mattered: predictions of lower happiness and greater anger if the non-preferred candidate won predicted voting, with Biden supporters voting more than Trump supporters. Generally, participants forecast more emotion than they experienced, but beliefs altered this tendency. Stronger beliefs predicted experiencing more happiness or more anger and fear about the election outcome than had been forecast. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms through which political polarisation and rhetoric can influence voting behaviour. (shrink)

Much of the discussion of Naive Realism about veridical experience has focused on a consequence of adopting it—namely, disjunctivism about perceptual experience. However, the motivations for being a Naive Realist in the first place have received relatively little attention in the literature. In this paper, I will elaborate and defend the claim that Naive Realism provides the best account of the phenomenal character of veridical experience.

Animal welfare is a concept that plays a role within both our moral deliberations and the relevant areas of science. The study of animal welfare has impacts on decisions made by legislators, producers and consumers with regards to housing and treatment of animals. Our ethical deliberations in these domains need to consider our impact on animals, and the study of animal welfare provides the information that allows us to make informed decisions. This thesis focusses on taking a philosophical perspective to (...) answer the question of how we can measure the welfare of animals. Animal welfare science is an applied area of biology, aimed at measuring animal welfare. Although philosophy of animal ethics is common, philosophy focussing on animal welfare science is rare. Despite this lack, there are definitely many ways in which philosophical methods can be used to analyse the methodologies and concepts used in this science. One of the aims of the work in this thesis is to remedy this lack of attention in animal welfare. Animal welfare science is a strong emerging discipline, but there is the need for conceptual and methodological clarity and sophistication in this science if it is to play the relevant informative role for our practical and ethical decision-making. There is thus is a strong role here for philosophical analysis for this purpose. The central aim of this thesis is to provide an account of how we can measure subjective animal welfare, addressing some of the potential problems that may arise in this particular scientific endeavour. The two questions I will be answering are: what is animal welfare, and how do we measure it? Part One of the thesis looks at the subjective concept of animal welfare and its applications. In it, I argue for a subjective welfare view - that animal welfare should be understood as the subjective experience of individuals over their lifetimes - and look at how the subjective welfare concept informs our ethical decision-making in two different cases in applied animal ethics. Part Two of the thesis looks more closely at the scientific role of welfare. Understanding welfare subjectively creates unique measurement problems, due to the necessarily private nature of mental states and here I address a few of these problems, including whether subjective experience is measurable, how we might validate indicators of hidden target variables such as welfare, how we can make welfare comparisons between individual animals and how we might compare or integrate the different types of experience that make up welfare. I end with a discussion of the implications of all these problems and solutions for the practice of welfare science, and indicate useful future directions for research. (shrink)

This paper addresses what we consider to be the most pressing challenge for the emerging science of consciousness: the measurement problem of consciousness. That is, by what methods can we determine the presence of and properties of consciousness? Most methods are currently developed through evaluation of the presence of consciousness in humans and here we argue that there are particular problems in application of these methods to nonhuman cases—what we call the indicator validity problem and the extrapolation problem. The first (...) is a problem with the application of indicators developed using the differences between conscious and unconscious processing in humans to the identification of other conscious vs. nonconscious organisms or systems. The second is a problem in extrapolating any indicators developed in humans or other organisms to artificial systems. However, while pressing ethical concerns add urgency to the attribution of consciousness and its attendant moral status to nonhuman animals and intelligent machines, we cannot wait for certainty and we advocate the use of a precautionary principle to avoid causing unintentional harm. We also intend that the considerations and limitations discussed in this paper can be used to further analyze and refine the methods of consciousness science with the hope that one day we may be able to solve the measurement problem of consciousness. (shrink)

‘Sentience’ sometimes refers to the capacity for any type of subjective experience, and sometimes to the capacity to have subjective experiences with a positive or negative valence, such as pain or pleasure. We review recent controversies regarding sentience in fish and invertebrates and consider the deep methodological challenge posed by these cases. We then present two ways of responding to the challenge. In a policy-making context, precautionary thinking can help us treat animals appropriately despite continuing uncertainty about their sentience. In (...) a scientific context, we can draw inspiration from the science of human consciousness to disentangle conscious and unconscious perception (especially vision) in animals. Developing better ways to disentangle conscious and unconscious affect is a key priority for future research. (shrink)

One of the primary concerns in animal research is ensuring the welfare of laboratory animals. Modern views on animal welfare emphasize the role of animal sentience, i.e. the capacity to experience subjective states such as pleasure or suffering, as a central component of welfare. The increasing official recognition of animal sentience has had large effects on laboratory animal research. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (Low et al., University of Cambridge, 2012) marked an official scientific recognition of the presence of sentience (...) in mammals, birds, and cephalopods. Animal sentience has furthermore been recognized in legislation in the European Union, UK, New Zealand and parts of Australia, with discussions underway in other parts of the world to follow suit. In this paper, we analyze this shift towards recognition of sentience in the regulation and practice in the treatment of laboratory animals and its effects on animal welfare and use. (shrink)

Douglas proposes a new ideal in which values serve an essential function throughout scientific inquiry, but where the role values play is constrained at key points, protecting the integrity and objectivity of science.

What is a virtue, and how are virtues different from vices? Do people with virtues lead better lives than the rest of us? Do they know more? Can we acquire virtues if so, how? In this lively and engaging introduction to this core topic, Heather Battaly argues that there is more than one kind of virtue. Some virtues make the world a better place, or help us to attain knowledge. Other virtues are dependent upon good intentions like caring about (...) other people or about truth. Virtue is an original approach to the topic, which carefully situates the fields of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology within a general theory of virtue. It argues that there are good reasons to acquire moral and intellectual virtues virtuous people often attain greater knowledge and lead better lives. As well as approaching virtue in a novel and illuminating way, Battaly ably guides the reader through the dense literature surrounding the topic, deftly moving from important specific and technical points to more general issues and questions. The final chapter proposes strategies for helping university students acquire intellectual virtues. Battaly’s insights are complemented by entertaining examples from popular culture, literature, and film, really bringing this topic to life for readers. Virtue is the ideal introduction to the topic. It will be an equally vital resource for students who are encountering the topic for the first time, and for scholars who are deeply engaged in virtue theory. (shrink)

The NHS differs from a private business in not aiming at profits and in being obliged to provide only the single product of health care. How radically does this affect the requirement to be “business‐like” and adopt business values? Dr Draper is Lecturer in Biomedical Ethics at The Medical School, The University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT. She wishes to thank Tom Sorell for his comments on the first draft of this article.

Although epistemic values have become widely accepted as part of scientific reasoning, non-epistemic values have been largely relegated to the "external" parts of science (the selection of hypotheses, restrictions on methodologies, and the use of scientific technologies). I argue that because of inductive risk, or the risk of error, non-epistemic values are required in science wherever non-epistemic consequences of error should be considered. I use examples from dioxin studies to illustrate how non-epistemic consequences of error can and should be considered (...) in the internal stages of science: choice of methodology, characterization of data, and interpretation of results. (shrink)

For Humeans, many facts—even ones intuitively “about” particular, localized macroscopic parts of the world—turn out to depend on surprisingly global fundamental bases. We investigate some counterintuitive consequences of this picture. Many counterfactuals whose antecedents describe intuitively localized, non-actual states of affairs nevertheless end up involving wide-ranging implications for the global, embedding Humean mosaic. The case of self-undermining chances is a familiar example of this. We examine that example in detail and argue that popular existing strategies such as “holding the laws (...) fixed as laws” or “holding the laws fixed as true” are of no help. Interestingly, we show how a new proposal that draws on the resources of the Mentaculus can yield the right results—but only on the assumption that the Humean can make cross-world identifications. We go on to argue that the Humean cannot make such identifications. We conclude that the root of this trouble is deeper, and its reach broader, than the familiar cases suggest. We think it is very much an open question whether the Humean has sufficient resources to properly conceptualize macroscopic objects or to analyze these “local” counterfactuals. (shrink)

Over the past decade, feminist philosophers have gone a long way toward identifying and explaining the phenomenon that has come to be known as epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice is injustice occurring within the domain of knowledge (e.g., knowledge production and transmission), which typically impacts structurally marginalized social groups. In this paper, we argue that, as they currently work, algorithms on social media exacerbate the problem of epistemic injustice and related problems of social distrust. In other words, we argue that algorithms (...) on social media recreate and reify the conditions that lead to some groups being systematically denied the full status of knowers, thereby corrupting the epistemic terrain and, with it, systems of social trust and cooperation. We argue that algorithms do this in two ways—namely, via what we are calling algorithmic targeting and algorithmic sorting. (shrink)

In the first section of this paper, after briefly arguing for the assumption that experiential content is propositional, I’ll distinguish three interpretations of the claim that experience has content (the Mild, Medium, and Spicy Content Views). In the second section, I’ll flesh out Naïve Realism in greater detail, and I’ll reconstruct what I take to be the main argument for its incompatibility with the Content Views. The third section will be devoted to evaluation of existing arguments for the Mild Content (...) View (the arguments from accuracy and appearing), and the development of what I take to be a stronger argument (the argument from belief generation). In the final section, I’ll identify a flaw in the argument for the incompatibility of Naïve Realism with the Content Views, which opens the door to a reconciliation. (shrink)

With increasing attention given to wild animal welfare and ethics, it has become common to depict animals in the wild as existing in a state dominated by suffering. This assumption is now taken on board by many and frames much of the current discussion; but needs a more critical assessment, both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we challenge the primary lines of evidence employed in support of wild animal suffering, to provide an alternative picture in which wild animals may (...) often have lives that are far more positive than is commonly assumed. Nevertheless, while it is useful to have an alternative model to challenge unexamined assumptions, our real emphasis in this paper is the need for the development of effective methods for applying animal welfare science in the wild, including new means of data collection, the ability to determine the extent and scope of welfare challenges and opportunities, and their effects on welfare. Until such methods are developed, discussions of wild animal welfare cannot go beyond trading of intuitions, which as we show here can just as easily go in either direction. (shrink)

The performance of natural behavior is commonly used as a criterion in the determination of animal welfare. This is still true, despite many authors having demonstrated that it is not a necessary component of welfare –some natural behaviors may decrease welfare, while some unnatural behaviors increase it. Here I analyze why this idea persists, and what effects it may have. I argue that the disagreement underlying this debate on natural behavior is not one about which conditions affect welfare, but a (...) deeper conceptual disagreement about what the state of welfare actually consists of. Those advocating natural behavior typically take a “teleological” view of welfare, in which naturalness is fundamental to welfare, while opponents to the criterion usually take a “subjective” welfare concept, in which welfare consists of the subjective experience of life by the animal. I argue that as natural functioning is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding welfare, we should move away from the natural behavior criterion to an alternative such as behavioral preferences or enjoyment. This will have effects in the way we understand and measure welfare, and particularly in how we provide for the welfare of animals in a captive setting. (shrink)

In this essay, we discuss Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka’s The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul from an interdisciplinary perspective. Constituting perhaps the longest treatise on the evolution of consciousness, Ginsburg and Jablonka unite their expertise in neuroscience and biology to develop a beautifully Darwinian account of the dawning of subjective experience. Though it would be impossible to cover all its content in a short book review, here we provide a critical evaluation of their two key ideas—the role of Unlimited (...) Associative Learning in the evolution of, and detection of, consciousness and a metaphysical claim about consciousness as a mode of being—in a manner that will hopefully overcome some of the initial resistance of potential readers to tackle a book of this length. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1974, studies the similarities between Rousseau's thought and that of the Stoics, examining Rousseau's ideas on man, society, the state and government. It makes close reference to Rousseau's writings, and to the works of Seneca and other Stoics, presenting an opportunity to really come to grips with a complex and often contradictory mind.

The diverse array of plants at Kew is a haven for wildlife throughout the year. In spring, enchanting wildlfowl babies appear; summer flowers attract a host of insect pollinators; come autumn, parakeets and squirrels raid chestnuts, while in winter swans court – this is Heather Angel’s Wild Kew. In all, a stunning array of photographs and advice, the result of devoting a year to capturing Kew’s wildlife.

Three experiments introduced a recognition memory paradigm designed to investigate reported subjective awareness during retrieval. At study, in Experiments 1A and 2, words were either generated or read , while modality of presentation was manipulated in Experiment 1B. Word pairs were presented during test trials, and participants indicated if they contained an old word by responding “remember”, “know” or “new” in Experiments 1A and 1B, and by responding “strong no”, “weak no”, “weak yes”, or “strong yes” in Experiment 2. Participants (...) were then required to decide which of the 2 words was old. We demonstrated that the proportion measures used in the Remember Know paradigm substantially underestimated the influence of generation on familiarity resulting in an artificial dissociation between indices of knowing and remembering . We also found a qualitatively different pattern of forced-choice recognition performance as a function of claimed awareness. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, empirical researchers have become increasingly interested in explaining the formation of “basic” aesthetic judgments, i.e. simple judgments of sensory preferability and the pleasure that seems to accompany them. To that end, Reber et al. have recently defended a “processing-fluency” view, which identifies aesthetic pleasure with one’s ability to easily process an object’s perceptual properties (e.g. Reber 2012 ). While the processing-fluency theory is certainly an improvement over its competitors, it is currently vulnerable to several serious (...) criticisms. In what follows, I aim to provide a more holistic, explanatorily robust, model of the processing-fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure by incorporating what the view neglects: the crucial role of perceptual disfluency, interest, and the underlying values that drive aesthetic appraisal. (shrink)

Katz (2022) provides a range of arguments drawn from the environmental philosophy literature to criticize the conceptualisation and practice of de-extinction. The discussion is almost completely de...

The practice of ‘management euthanasia’, in which zoos kill otherwise healthy surplus animals, is a controversial one. The debate over the permissibility of the practice tends to divide along two different views in animal ethics—animal rights and animal welfare. Traditionally, those arguments against the practice have come from the animal rights camp, who see it as a violation of the rights of the animal involved. Arguments in favour come from the animal welfare perspective, who argue that as the animal does (...) not suffer, there is no harm in the practice and it is justified by its potential benefits. Here, I argue that an expansion of the welfare view, encompassing longevity and opportunities for positive welfare, give stronger considerations against management euthanasia, which then require greater benefits to justify its use. (shrink)

In §50 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein wrote the sentence, “There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.” Although some interpreters have claimed that Wittgenstein’s statement is mistaken, while others have proposed various explanations showing that this must be correct, none have questioned the fact that he intended to assert that it is impossible to describe the standard (...) meter as being a meter long. Given that Wittgenstein introduces this sentence as analogous to the claim that “existence cannot be attributed to an element,” and that the preceding passages discuss a language-game the simples of which can be described by their own names, there is good reason to think that Wittgenstein did not intend to assert this infamous sentence. (shrink)

The performance of natural behavior is commonly used as a criterion in the determination of animal welfare. This is still true, despite many authors having demonstrated that it is not a necessary component of welfare – some natural behaviors may decrease welfare, while some unnatural behaviors increase it. Here I analyze why this idea persists, and what effects it may have. I argue that the disagreement underlying this debate on natural behavior is not one about which conditions affect welfare, but (...) a deeper conceptual disagreement about what the state of welfare actually consists of. Those advocating natural behavior typically take a “teleological” view of welfare, in which naturalness is fundamental to welfare, while opponents to the criterion usually take a “subjective” welfare concept, in which welfare consists of the subjective experience of life by the animal. I argue that as natural functioning is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding welfare, we should move away from the natural behavior criterion to an alternative such as behavioral preferences or enjoyment. This will have effects in the way we understand and measure welfare, and particularly in how we provide for the welfare of animals in a captive setting. (shrink)