In a modern pluralist society, the idea of liberal legitimacy as proposed by John Rawls offers a promising foundation for the further historic advancement of democracy. However, liberal legitimacy still seems to lack one key element—a unique type of respect at its foundations—without which such democratic advancement may not be achieved. Nor, on closer inspection, could the idea of liberal legitimacy succeed without this particular type of respect. When further refined at its foundation, arguably liberal legitimacy could open doors to (...) previously unattainable improvements in democracy and legitimacy. (shrink)

In deep disagreements local disagreements are intertwined with more general basic disagreements about the relevant evidence, standards of argument or proper methods of inquiry in that domain. The paper provides a more specific conception of deep disagreement along these lines and argues that while we should generally conciliate in cases of disagreement, this is not so in deep disagreements. The paper offers a general view of disagreement, holding roughly that one should moderate one’s credence towards uncertainty in so far as (...) disagreement with others provides undefeated higher order evidence that one might have made a mistake in one’s appreciation of the first order evidence. When applying this view to deep disagreement we get that in cases of deep disagreement higher order evidence from disagreement is rebutted or undercut by the nature of the disagreement. So, in cases of deep disagreement one should not moderate one’s credence. I finally argue that this gives a better general view of deep disagreement than views appealing to epistemic peers, personal information or independence. (shrink)

1. Fairness is about the just distribution of society's resources, and in ML, the main resource being distributed is model performance, e.g. the translation quality produced by machine translation...

We sometimes disagree not only about facts, but also about how best to acquire evidence or justified beliefs within the domain of facts that we disagree about. And sometimes we have no dispute-independent ways of settling what the best ways of acquiring evidence in these domains are. Following Michael Lynch, I call this phenomenon deep disagreement. In the paper, I outline various forms of deep disagreement, following but also in certain respects revising and expanding Lynch’s exposition in (2010, 2012). As (...) is well known, for the externalist about knowledge and epistemic justification deep disagreements may be nothing more than an unfortunate failure of communication. Yet, though he grants this, Lynch argues that deep disagreement points to a sort of practical problem. I agree. In my paper I propose a revised account of the sort of practical problem that deep disagreement may pose. In short, my claim is that deep disagreement may be a problem due to the role that shared factual beliefs may have in common decision-making. I discuss and assess various reactions to the problem of deep disagreement, including the one proposed by Lynch. I argue that none of the solutions discussed in the paper are satisfactory. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

In an influential article, Simon C. May forcefully argued that, properly understood, there can never be principled reasons for moral compromise. While there may be pragmatic reasons for compromising that involve, for instance, concern for political expediency or for stability, there are properly speaking no principled reasons to compromise. My aim in the article is to show how principled moral compromise in the context of moral disagreements over policy options is possible. I argue that when we disagree, principled reasons favoring (...) compromises or compromising can assume a more significant part of what makes a position all things considered best, and in this way disagreement can ground moral compromise. (shrink)

Les lectures plotinienne et proclusienne de Métaphysique Λ ne se résolvent pas dans ces résultats doctrinaux que sont la hiérarchisation de l’Intellect et de l’Un-Bien et l’harmonisation des causalités efficiente et finale. Pour les saisir tant dans leur différence que dans celle qui les oppose toutes deux aux lectures concordistes, il faut déplacer l’analyse du plan des doctrines à celui des concepts. Plus précisément, il faut demander comment Plotin et Proclus intègrent le concept qui, en Métaphysique Λ, condense la charge (...) polémique portée par Aristote contre Platon, à savoir le concept d’energeia. Ce dernier engage en effet une conception radicalement antiplatonicienne du principe premier, dont on montre qu’elle s’articule en quatre critiques fondamentales. On analyse dès lors les stratégies de lecture de Λ mises en oeuvre par Plotin et Proclus de façon à évaluer les angles de contreattaque qu’elles déterminent. Plutôt qu’à une harmonisation ou à une simple hiérarchisation, on a affaire, dans les deux cas quoique sous des modalités différentes, à une intégration dialectique qui en passe par la neutralisation de la charge polémique du concept d’energeia ainsi que par sa réélaboration, elle-même solidaire de modèles causaux distincts tant de celui de Platon que de celui d’Aristote. (shrink)

Suppose we have a persistent disagreement about a particular set of policy options, not because of an underlying moral disagreement, or a mere conflict of interest, but rather because we disagree about a crucial non-normative factual assumption underlying the justification of the policy choices. The main question in the paper is what political legitimacy requires in such cases, or indeed whether there are defensible answers to that question. The problem of political legitimacy in fact-dependent policy disagreements has received almost no (...) attention in political philosophy, which has focused mostly on value disagreements and proposed theories of legitimate coercive legislation in valuedependent disagreements. The paper presents an argument showing that under certain plausible assumptions regarding legitimacy, there are serious difficulties in identifying legitimate choices in fact-dependent policy disagreements. This may be unsurprising to political philosophers preoccupied with value-based disagreements, perhaps because it has been assumed that legitimacy-related concerns are irrelevant to fact-dependent policy disagreements. The paper argues that this response is premature. If we should care about legitimacy et al.l, then it is by no means clear why we should ignore issues of legitimacy in policy-disputes that depend on factual disagreements. The paper ends by defining a set of possibilities that merit further exploration in search of a theory of legitimacy in fact-dependent policy disagreements. (shrink)

The lifetime equality view has recently been met with the objection that it does not rule out simultaneous inequality: two persons may lead equally good lives on the whole and yet there may at any time be great differences in their level of well-being. And simultaneous inequality, it is held, ought to be a concern of egalitarians. The paper discusses this and related objections to the lifetime equality view. It is argued that rather than leading to a revision of the (...) lifetime equality view, these objections, if taken seriously, should make us account for our egalitarian concerns in terms of the priority view rather than the equality view. The priority view claims that there is a greater moral value to benefiting the worse off. Several versions of the priority view are also distinguished. (shrink)

This paper sketches a general account of how to respond in an epistemically rational way to moral disagreement. Roughly, the account states that when two parties, A and B, disagree as to whether p, A says p while B says not-p, this is higher-order evidence that A has made a cognitive error on the first-order level of reasoning in coming to believe that p. If such higher-order evidence is not defeated, then one rationally ought to reduce one’s confidence with respect (...) to the proposition in question. We term this the higher-order evidence account, and present it as a superior to what we might call standard conciliationism, which holds that when agents A and B disagree about p, and are epistemic peers, they should both suspend judgement about p or adjust their confidence towards the mean of A and B’s prior credences in p. Many have suspected that standard conciliationism is implausible and may have skeptical implications. After presenting the HOE account, we put it to work by applying it to a range of cases of moral disagreement, including those that have feature in recent debates assuming standard conciliationism. We show that the HOE account support reasonable, non-skeptical verdicts in a range of cases. Note that this is a paper on moral disagreement, not on the HOE account, thus the account is merely stated here, while defended more fully elsewhere. (shrink)

This book grew out of an international symposium, organized in September 1986 by the Austrian Cultural Institute in Warsaw in cooperation with the Polish Philosophical Society. The topic was: The Vienna Circle and the Lvov-Warsaw School. Since the two phil osophical trends existed in roughly the same time and were close ly related, it was one of the purposes of the symposium to investigate both similarities and thp differences. Some thirty people took part in the symposium, nearly twenty contributions were (...) presented and extensively discussed. The sym posium owed much to the excellent organization and warm hospital ity shown by Dr Georg Jankovic, the Director of the Austrian In stitute. As the person in charge of the scientific programme of the symposium, I take pleasure to acknowledge this debt. It so happened that a month later another symposium of a similar character was held. It took place in the University of Manchester, on the occasion of the centenary of the births of Stanislaw Lesniewski, Tadeusz Kotarbiflski and Wladyslaw Tatarkie wicz. Some papers read at the Manchester symposium form a part of the present volume. It was not possible, for technical reasons (the time factor was one of them), to include in this book all the material from the two symposia. Certain contributions have appeared elsewhere (for instance, K. Szaniawski's 'Ajdukiewicz on Non-Deductive Inference' was published in Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, Vol. 23). On the other hand, certain papers have been written special ly for this volume. (shrink)

We all agree that democratic decision-making requires a factual input, and most of us assume that when the pertinent facts are not in plain view they should be furnished by well-functioning scientific institutions. But how should liberal democracy respond when apparently sincere, rational and well-informed citizens object to coercive legislation because it is based on what they consider a misguided trust in certain parts of science? Cases are familiar, the most prominent concerning climate science and evolution, but one may also (...) count GMO-skepticism and vaccine-skepticism, and there are plenty of others. The paper defends what I, borrowing an expression from Badiola, call Science as Public Reason, asserting roughly that some policy-relevant factual proposition P is part of public reason if and only if there is consensus about P among scientific experts in the relevant well-functioning scientific institutions. I defend this view against the controversiality objection claiming that scientific findings cannot in this general way pass as public reason as they are sometimes controversial among reasonable citizens. My preferred line of defense is what I call Dogmatism about Science as Public Reason, which roughly amounts to insisting on Science as Public Reason on the ground that it is a philosophically well-motivated view, while conceding that it may not be acceptable to all minimally rational and well-informed individuals. (shrink)

Recently Robert B. Talisse has put forth a socio-epistemic justification of liberal democracy that he believes qualifies as a public justification in that it purportedly can be endorsed by all reasonable individuals. In avoiding narrow restraints on reasonableness, Talisse argues that he has in fact proposed a justification that crosses the boundaries of a wide range of religious, philosophical and moral worldviews and in this way the justification is sufficiently pluralistic to overcome the challenges of reasonable pluralism familiar from Rawls. (...) The fascinating argument that Talisse furthers is that when cognitively functional individuals reflect on some of their most basic epistemic commitments they will come to see that, in virtue of these commitments, they are also committed to endorsing key liberal democratic institutions. We argue that the socio-epistemic justification can be reasonably rejected on its own terms and thus fails as a public justification approach. This point is made by illustrating the significance of deep epistemic disagreements in liberal democracies. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to propose a way in which believing on trust can ground doxastic justification and knowledge. My focus will be the notion of trust that plays the role depicted by such cases as concerned Hardwig (J Philos 82:335–49, 1985; J Philos 88:693–708, 1991) in his early papers, papers that are often referenced in recent debates in social epistemology. My primary aim is not exegetical, but since it sometimes not so clear what Hardwig’s claims are, I (...) offer some remarks of interpretation that might be of interest. The main purpose of the paper, however, is this: following various cues in Hardwig’s writing, I specify certain epistemic properties of agents in social systems, such that, roughly speaking, for agents to know (or be justified in believing) what the ‘system knows’, social relations of epistemic trust between agents in the system are necessary. I will suggest that we can view this social form of epistemic trust as non-inferential dispositions to believe what some individual or other source of information asserts or transmits. When this disposition is discriminating and defeater-sensitive, it can ground knowledge and justification. Or, more cautiously, we should be sympathetic to this view if we are inclined to accept the core insight of process reliabilism. Finally, I will offer some remarks about how epistemic trust and epistemic reasons may relate on this picture. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to state a version of epistemic expressivism regarding knowledge, and to suggest how this expressivism about knowledge explains the value of knowledge. The paper considers how an account of the value of knowledge based on expressivism about knowledge responds to the Meno Problem, the Swamping Problem, and a variety of other questions that pertains to the value of knowledge, and the role of knowledge in our cognitive ecology.

As part of a more general project which consists in identifying the process by which the modern ontology of power and action came to replace the Aristotelian ontology of in-potency and act, this article questions some fundamental features of Aquinas’ use and reworking of the Aristotelian concepts of dunamis and energeia. First, I ask, how Aquinas can characterise God as being pure act and omnipotent at the same time given that for Aristotle pure act radically excludes all potency. It appears (...) that the Thomistic act not only admits potency-as-power, but also signifies the full power of being so that we can detect in Aquinas the conjunction in the first being - of power with being itself Second, I show how the symmetrical reinterpretation of the Aristotelian concept of in-potency comes to be modified by means of the concept - inherited from Neo-Platonism - of epitedeiotes. Thus understood as receptive capacity, in-potency no longer signifies the principle within each substance of its own proper and immanent act but rather its dependence on the first act, the primary being. In the end, the concept of potency is redistributed by Aquinas between the Creator’s full power of being, and the creature’s mere capacity for being. (shrink)

Interroger la diversité des lectures antiques du Parménide pour dégager l’unité et la singularité du néoplatonisme, telle est l’ambition, pleinement tenue, du beau livre de Frédéric Fauquier. Celui-ci se donne comme une passionnante enquête méta-exégétique, qui ne se contente pas de retracer l’histoire des interprétations mais en dégage les stratégies et la visée. « Dès son origine, écrit F. Fauquier, le néoplatonisme est tradition, puisqu’il projette son origine dans l’œuvre de Platon » (p....

Genebanking, the process of preserving genetic resources, is a central practice in the modern management of crop genetics, especially for the species used for food and agriculture. Closely interrelated networks of local, national and global actors are responsible for ex situ conservation. They all seek to make plant genetic resources accessible for all and now face new challenges arising from digitisation. Plant sciences are entering the postgenomic era, moving fast from initially providing a single reference genome for each species (genomics), (...) to harnessing the extent of diversity within crop species (pangenomics) and among their relatives (referred to as postgenomics). This paper describes the extent to which ex situ collections have already undergone a digital shift, or are planning to do so, and the potential impact of this postgenomic-induced dematerialisation on the global governance of plant genetic resources. In turn, digitising material (seed) collection changes the relationship between genebanks and genomic databases. Comprehensive genomic characterisation of genebank accessions is ongoing, and I argue here that these efforts may provide a unique opportunity for genebanks to further embrace the moral, ethical and ultimately political principles on which they were built. Repurposing genebanks as decentralised digital biocentres could help relocate capabilities and stewardship over genetic resources. Empowering local farmers by providing access, promoting the use and unlocking benefits from state-of-the-art tools of modern plant breeding may allow bridging the breeding divide. However, to accomplish such a paradigm shift, genebanks require a strong political mandate that must primarily originate from the access and benefit-sharing framework. Only so may the global challenges associated with the loss of biodiversity and food insecurity be addressed. (shrink)

« Notre monde recèle autant de possibilités immenses que de gigantesques échecs. »La gauche détient les clefs pour redonner un avenir à la France et à l’Europe. Plus de solidarité, plus d’égalité, plus de règles, plus de respect de l’autre et le retour du sens de l’intérêt général face à l’argent roi sont les talismans du progrès retrouvé. Le combat politique avec..

Fluid-phase endocytosis (pinocytosis) kinetics were studied inDictyostelium discoideum amoebae from the axenic strain Ax-2 that exhibits high rates of fluid-phase endocytosis when cultured in liquid nutrient media. Fluorescein-labelled dextran (FITC-dextran) was used as a marker in continuous uptake- and in pulse-chase exocytosis experiments. In the latter case, efflux of the marker was monitored on cells loaded for short periods of time and resuspended in marker-free medium. A multicompartmental model was developed which describes satisfactorily fluid-phase endocytosis kinetics. In particular, it accounts (...) correctly for the extended latency period before exocytosis in pulse-chase experiments and it suggests the existence of some sorts of maturation stages in the pathway. (shrink)

À partir d’une étude qualitative comparée en France et au Québec, nous montrons dans cet article que la phase d’intégration des nouvelles recrues aides-soignantes dans les organisations gériatriques françaises et québécoises est une phase complexe d’expérimentation du métier, où elles intègrent des normes collectives de rythmes de travail. Le collectif de travail, par la voix d’une « ancienne », juge de la capacité des nouvelles recrues à respecter ces rythmes et transmet des stratégies de régulation créées localement et indispensables pour (...) répondre aux prescriptions contradictoires. La situation actuelle d’intensification du travail vécue dans les organisations gériatriques françaises et québécoises conduit néanmoins à une fragilisation dangereuse des collectifs, voire à une individualisation du rapport aux enjeux organisationnels. Une telle individualisation peut conduire les nouvelles recrues à subir une souffrance éthique consécutive au fait d’accomplir des actes moralement condamnables pour parvenir à respecter les normes temporelles. (shrink)

This paper explores in detail an argument for epistemic expressivism, what we call the Argument from Motivation. While the Argument from Motivation has sometimes been anticipated, it has never been set out in detail. The argument has three premises, roughly, that certain judgments expressed in attributions of knowledge are intrinsically motivating in a distinct way (P1); that motivation for action requires desire-like states or conative attitudes (HTM); and that the semantic content of knowledge attributions cannot be specified without reference to (...) the intrinsically motivating judgments that such attributions express (P2). We argue that these premises entail a version of ecumenical expressivism. Since the argument from motivation has not been explicitly stated before, there is no current discussion of the argument. In this paper we therefore consider and reject various objections that one might propose to the argument, including some that stem from the idea that knowledge is factive, or that knowledge involves evidence that rules out relevant alternatives. Other objections to (P1) specifically might be derived from cases of apparent lack of epistemic motivation considered in in Kvanvig (The value of knowledge and the pursuit of understanding, 2003) and Brown (Nous 42(2):167–189, 2008), as well as from general forms of externalism about epistemic motivation. We consider these and find them wanting. Finally, the paper offers some critical remarks about the prospect of denying (P2). (shrink)

Plotinus' formulation of the problem of the individual should not be reduced to the question of whether or not one can accept Forms of Individuals. First, if Plotinus does indeed posit an intelligible foundation of individuality, there are no grounds to identify this foundation with a Form: it must rather be considered a logos. Second, we must, in addition to this intelligible "principle of distinction", allow for a sensible "principle of individuation": the living body. Finally, we have to distinguish a (...) third level: that of the hêmeis, the individual as a person, capable of freedom and consciousness. This latter's compatibility with the other two seems problematic, so that the real difficulty may lie in this tension, in Plotinus' thought, between an ontological and an ethical concept of the individual. (shrink)

ABSTRACT For a distribution of health care resources to be fair, it should consider the consequences for the whole lives of the affected persons and not just how badly off they are at the present moment. Since, other things being equal, a person is worse off if he dies young than if he dies old, it is fair to give scarce vital health care resources to young rather than to old persons. In the paper this ageist view is restated and (...) defended against a number of objections raised by John Harris. According to Harris' so‐called anti‐ageist argument the only relevant consideration in the distribution of vital health care resources is people's desire to go on living. On reflection, this is highly counterintuitive. Instead, it is argued that both present desires to go on living and possible future happiness should weigh together with considerations of fairness. Both fairness and possible future happiness will in most cases speak in favour of saving the young before the old. A number of other problems for the ageist view are discussed, and solutions are suggested. (shrink)

It seems obvious that informational privacy has an epistemological component; privacy or lack of privacy concerns certain kinds of epistemic relations between a cogniser and sensitive pieces of information. One striking feature of the fairly substantial philosophical literature on informational privacy is that the nature of this epistemological component of privacy is only sparsely discussed. The main aim of this paper is to shed some light on the epistemological component of informational privacy.

Epistemic expressivism is the view that epistemic appraisals are basically non-factual valuations. In this paper I consider recent objections pressed by Terrence Cuneo, Michael Lynch and Jonathan Kvanvig to the effect that whatever the problems of expressivism in general, epistemic expressivism faces certain fatal objections due to the fact that the view is applied to the epistemic domain. The most important of these objections state, roughly, that because of the very content of the doctrine, epistemic expressivism cannot be coherently asserted (...) or argued for. Thus, epistemic expressivism is, as I shall say, dialectically incoherent. Another way to put the objection is this: there is no cogent perspective in which epistemic expressivism can be asserted or argued for. Since these arguments all trade on the idea of a perspective in which epistemic expressivism is to be asserted, I shall, following Terence Cuneo's terminology, refer to the arguments as the perspective objections (Cuneo 2007, 170). I argue that the perspective objections fail. Whatever serious objections there might be to epistemic expressivism, the charge that the view is dialectically incoherent is not one of them. (shrink)