In this paper, we present several extensions of epistemic logic with update operators modelling public information change. Next to the well-known public announcement operators, we also study public substitution operators. We prove many of the results regarding expressivity and completeness using so-called reduction axioms. We develop a general method for using reduction axioms and apply it to the logics at hand.

The body of the law is an ambiguous phrase. Conventionally, it designates the law as a determinate corpus; legal codes, statutes, and the rulings of common law. But it can also refer to the subjected body that is produced by and is part of the law. This subjected body is necessary for the law's existence. Thinking Through the Body of the Law reconceives the role of the body in the founding, maintaining, and regulation of our legal systems and social order (...) and elaborates on its implications for issues of legal responsibility and justice. Taking into account and sometimes challenging the tenets of critical legal theory, critical race theory, and feminist jurisprudence, these essays examine the body and the law as they relate to surrogacy, the Holocaust, land-rights for Aboriginals, murder, the media and insanity, taxation, genetic engineering, and sexy dressing and sexual harassment. (shrink)

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going (...) against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism. (shrink)

This is a stellar collection. The pieces are diversified, not a commemorative gesture but a critical engagement.

The ninth edition of Media Ethics: Issues and Cases has been updated to reflect the most pressing ethical issues in media. Featuring 25 new cases on hot topic issues from fake news to drones and a new chapter on social justice, this authoritative case book gives students the tools to make ethical decisions in an increasingly complex environment.

This paper propounds a new reading of Berkeley's account of the activity of finite spirits. Against existing interpretations, the paper argues that Berkeley does not hold that we causally contribute to the movement of our bodies. In contrast, our volitions to move our bodies are but occasions for God to cause their movement. In answer to the question of wherein then consists our activity, the paper proposes that our activity consists in the dual powers to produce (1) our volitions ? (...) the acts of willing ? and (2) our ideas of imagination. (shrink)

In order to involve children in the decision-making process about participation in medical research it is widely recommended that the child’s assent be sought in addition to parental consent. However, the concept of assent is fraught with difficulties, resulting in confusion among researchers and ethics committees alike.

To such sanguine expectations, Pheng Cheah responds deftly with a sobering account of how the "inhuman" imperatives of capitalism and technology are ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Of Being-Two: IntroductionPheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grosz (bio)The decade or so spanning the later 1970s to the mid-1980s witnessed the growing importance of “sexual difference” in Anglo-American academic discourse in the humanities and the “soft” social sciences. Both as an interpretive principle in textual criticism and literary theory and as a critical framework for the analysis of social and political structures and cultural formations, sexual difference provided (...) a fertile conceptual ground from which the disinterested universalism claimed by patriarchal and phallocentric knowledges could be put into question. However, in the past decade, the primacy of sexual difference as a critical principle has itself been called into question for eliding other collective forms of difference such as race, class, and sexuality.In a sense, this fracturing or fissuring of the conceptual ground of feminist theory can be seen as a logical outcome of the concept of “difference” itself, which endlessly proliferates into a multiplicity of sometimes conflictual forms. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that the fissuring of “sexual difference” within academic discourse also reflects and expresses (albeit a little belatedly) broader sociological and political events: the rise in the 1970s of what the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has described as new antisystemic movements or “new social movements.”By the 1970s one began to speak in the plural of the “new social movements.” The shift from the grammatical singular to the plural provides a crucial clue to the nature of the process. For the “movement,” if it was ever organizationally singular, soon became multiple, if not necessarily fractionated. That is to say, there emerged a whole series of movements, each organized around a specific theme or focus—movements of “ethnic minorities” or “immigrants,” womens’ movements, ecology movements, antiwar movements, gay and lesbian movements, movements of the handicapped and of the aged (or pensioners).... The key theme of the new movements in the West was the forgotten people—the ethnic underclasses, the women, the gays, the aged, et cetera.[41–42]Due caution should, of course, be exercised concerning the many mediations between theory and practice. Nevertheless, this connection between the fissuring of sexual difference in academic theoretical critique and the pluralized nature of the new social movements that emerged in the 1970s necessarily raises the question of whether the contemporary political world has become too complex for sexual difference to serve as a primary critical-analytical and practical principle. Put another way, does sexual difference have continuing pertinence as an effective mechanism and/or ideal horizon for ethical and political transformation? What political future(s), if any, does sexual difference have?As editors of this special issue of diacritics, we have chosen to address these questions about the political future of sexual difference through a critical consideration of the work of one of the most intriguing and original of the present generation of European philosophers, Luce Irigaray. The theoretical question of sexual difference is [End Page 3] indissociable from Irigaray’s writing. The initial posing of the question of sexual difference in the Anglo-American academy coincided with, and was given added impetus by, the translation of Irigaray’s early works into English as part of the corpus of writings that became known as “French feminism.” 1 But what makes it especially apposite to center a special issue on the political future of sexual difference around Irigaray is her continuing insistence on the fundamental nature and, indeed, the infrastructural status of sexual difference to human existence as a whole. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, originally published in 1984, Irigaray suggests that sexual difference is the fundamental ethical question of the contemporary era:Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age. According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our “salvation” if we thought it through. But, whether I turn to philosophy, to science, or to religion, I find this underlying issue still cries out in vain for our attention.[ESD 5]In subsequent, more politically oriented texts, Irigaray has not only reaffirmed this initial suggestion. She has made the... (shrink)

Community engagement is increasingly promoted as a marker of good, ethical practice in the context of international collaborative research in low-income countries. There is, however, no widely agreed definition of community engagement or of approaches adopted. Justifications given for its use also vary. Community engagement is, for example, variously seen to be of value in: the development of more effective and appropriate consent processes; improved understanding of the aims and forms of research; higher recruitment rates; the identification of important ethical (...) issues; the building of better relationships between the community and researchers; the obtaining of community permission to approach potential research participants; and, the provision of better health care. Despite these diverse and potentially competing claims made for the importance of community engagement, there is very little published evidence on effective models of engagement or their evaluation. (shrink)

Ostensibly a discussion of the nature of justice, The Republic presents Plato's vision of the ideal state, covering a wide range of topics: social, educational, psychological, moral, and philosophical. It also includes some of Plato's most important writing on the nature of reality and the theory of the "forms." Translated with an Introduction by Desmond Lee.

Bartky draws on the experience of daily life to unmask the many disguises by which intimations of inferiority are visited upon women. She critiques both the male bias of current theory and the debilitating dominion held by notions of "proper femininity" over women and their bodies in patriarchal culture.

Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a (...) degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)

In this paper I combine the dynamic epistemic logic ofGerbrandy (1999) with the probabilistic logic of Fagin and Halpern (1994). The resultis a new probabilistic dynamic epistemic logic, a logic for reasoning aboutprobability, information, and information change that takes higher orderinformation into account. Probabilistic epistemic models are defined, and away to build them for applications is given. Semantics and a proof systemis presented and a number of examples are discussed, including the MontyHall Dilemma.

Two groups of agents, G1 and G2, face a *moral conflict* if G1 has a moral obligation and G2 has a moral obligation, such that these obligations cannot both be fulfilled. We study moral conflicts using a multi-agent deontic logic devised to represent reasoning about sentences like "In the interest of group F of agents, group G of agents ought to see to it that phi". We provide a formal language and a consequentialist semantics. An illustration of our semantics with (...) an analysis of the Prisoner’s Dilemma follows. Next, necessary and sufficient conditions are given for (1) the possibility that a single group of agents faces a moral conflict, for (2) the possibility that two groups of agents face a moral conflict within a single moral code, and for (3) the possibility that two groups of agents face a moral conflict. (shrink)

Taking our inspiration from modal correspondence theory, we present the idea of correspondence analysis for many-valued logics. As a benchmark case, we study truth-functional extensions of the Logic of Paradox (LP). First, we characterize each of the possible truth table entries for unary and binary operators that could be added to LP by an inference scheme. Second, we define a class of natural deduction systems on the basis of these characterizing inference schemes and a natural deduction system for LP. Third, (...) we show that each of the resulting natural deduction systems is sound and complete with respect to its particular semantics. (shrink)

Tao has been built into the foundation of East Asian culture for millennia, and many books have been written to explain it. But Tao cannot fully be explained in words; it can only felt and experienced. Tao is something you live, day by day, moment by moment. Its the omnipresent oneness beyond ephemeral phenomena that expresses itself in everything.

We present Arrow Update Logic, a theory of epistemic access elimination that can be used to reason about multi-agent belief change. While the belief-changing of Arrow Update Logic can be transformed into equivalent belief-changing from the popular Dynamic Epistemic Logic approach, we prove that arrow updates are sometimes exponentially more succinct than action models. Further, since many examples of belief change are naturally thought of from Arrow Update Logicrelativized” common knowledge familiar from the Dynamic Epistemic Logic literature.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Of Being-Two: IntroductionPheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grosz (bio)The decade or so spanning the later 1970s to the mid-1980s witnessed the growing importance of “sexual difference” in Anglo-American academic discourse in the humanities and the “soft” social sciences. Both as an interpretive principle in textual criticism and literary theory and as a critical framework for the analysis of social and political structures and cultural formations, sexual difference provided (...) a fertile conceptual ground from which the disinterested universalism claimed by patriarchal and phallocentric knowledges could be put into question. However, in the past decade, the primacy of sexual difference as a critical principle has itself been called into question for eliding other collective forms of difference such as race, class, and sexuality.In a sense, this fracturing or fissuring of the conceptual ground of feminist theory can be seen as a logical outcome of the concept of “difference” itself, which endlessly proliferates into a multiplicity of sometimes conflictual forms. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that the fissuring of “sexual difference” within academic discourse also reflects and expresses (albeit a little belatedly) broader sociological and political events: the rise in the 1970s of what the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has described as new antisystemic movements or “new social movements.”By the 1970s one began to speak in the plural of the “new social movements.” The shift from the grammatical singular to the plural provides a crucial clue to the nature of the process. For the “movement,” if it was ever organizationally singular, soon became multiple, if not necessarily fractionated. That is to say, there emerged a whole series of movements, each organized around a specific theme or focus—movements of “ethnic minorities” or “immigrants,” womens’ movements, ecology movements, antiwar movements, gay and lesbian movements, movements of the handicapped and of the aged (or pensioners).... The key theme of the new movements in the West was the forgotten people—the ethnic underclasses, the women, the gays, the aged, et cetera.[41–42]Due caution should, of course, be exercised concerning the many mediations between theory and practice. Nevertheless, this connection between the fissuring of sexual difference in academic theoretical critique and the pluralized nature of the new social movements that emerged in the 1970s necessarily raises the question of whether the contemporary political world has become too complex for sexual difference to serve as a primary critical-analytical and practical principle. Put another way, does sexual difference have continuing pertinence as an effective mechanism and/or ideal horizon for ethical and political transformation? What political future(s), if any, does sexual difference have?As editors of this special issue of diacritics, we have chosen to address these questions about the political future of sexual difference through a critical consideration of the work of one of the most intriguing and original of the present generation of European philosophers, Luce Irigaray. The theoretical question of sexual difference is [End Page 3] indissociable from Irigaray’s writing. The initial posing of the question of sexual difference in the Anglo-American academy coincided with, and was given added impetus by, the translation of Irigaray’s early works into English as part of the corpus of writings that became known as “French feminism.” 1 But what makes it especially apposite to center a special issue on the political future of sexual difference around Irigaray is her continuing insistence on the fundamental nature and, indeed, the infrastructural status of sexual difference to human existence as a whole. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, originally published in 1984, Irigaray suggests that sexual difference is the fundamental ethical question of the contemporary era:Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age. According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our “salvation” if we thought it through. But, whether I turn to philosophy, to science, or to religion, I find this underlying issue still cries out in vain for our attention.[ESD 5]In subsequent, more politically oriented texts, Irigaray has not only reaffirmed this initial suggestion. She has made the... (shrink)

In modernity, the concept of cosmopolitanism has changed from an intellectual ethos to a vision of an institutionally embedded global political consciousness. The central problem that troubles cosmopolitanism from its moment of inception in 18th-century philosophy to the globalized present is whether we live in a world that is interconnected enough to generate institutions that have a global regulatory reach and a global form of solidarity that can influence their functioning. Examination of Kant's pre-nationalist cosmopolitanism, Marx's postnationalist cosmopolitanism, and decolonizing (...) socialist nationalism indicates the normative attraction of the nation as a mode of solidarity. Contemporary arguments about new cosmopolitanisms focusing on the rise of transnational networks of global cities, postnational social formations created by migrant and diasporic flows and Habermas's recent revival of Kant's project of cosmopolitan democracy have likewise failed to address the persistence of nationalism as a normative force within the field of uneven globalization. (shrink)

Research funders, regulatory agencies, and journals are increasingly expecting that individual-level data from health research will be shared. Broad consent to such sharing is considered appropriate, feasible and acceptable in low- and middle-income settings, but to date limited empirical research has been conducted to inform the design of such processes. We examined stakeholder perspectives about how best to seek broad consent to sharing data from the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, which implemented a data sharing policy and broad consent (...) to data sharing in January 2016. Between February and August 2017 qualitative data were collected at two sites, Bangkok and the Thai-Myanmar border town of Mae Sot. We conducted eighteen semi-structured interviews. We also conducted four focus group discussions with a total of nineteen people. Descriptive and thematic coding informed analysis of aspects of data sharing that are considered most important to inform participants about, and the best ways to explain complex and abstract topics relating to data sharing. The findings demonstrated that clinical trial participants prioritise information about the potential benefits and harms of data sharing. Stakeholders made multiple suggestions for clarifying information provided about data sharing on such topics. There was significant variation amongst stakeholders’ perspectives about how much information should be provided about data sharing, and it was clear that effective information provision should be responsive to the study, the study population, the individual research participant and the research context. Effectively communicating about data sharing with research participants is challenging in practice, highlighting the importance of robust and effective data sharing governance in this context. Broad consent should incorporate effective and efficient explanations of data sharing to promote informed decision-making, without impeding research participants’ understandings of key aspects of the research from which data will be shared. Further work is required to refine both the development of core information about data sharing to be provided to all research participants, and appropriate solutions for context specific-challenges arising when explaining data sharing. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Derrida's suggestion in several texts that, while a classic dialectical materialism partakes of logocentrism, other sorts of nondialectical materialism would be possible. The nondialectical materialisms that emerge from the work of Derrida and that of Gilles Deleuze resist or evade the teleology of the dialectic in different ways. Because Derrida understands material force as the reference to the impossible other and Deleuze views materiality in terms of impersonal and preindividual forces, materiality, even if it (...) is not unfigurable as such, is not easily instantiated by concrete figures that are recognizable by political discourse. (shrink)

Since January 2016, the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit has trialled a data-sharing policy where requests to access research datasets are processed through a Data Access Committee. In this paper, we share our experiences establishing data management systems and data-sharing infrastructure including a data-sharing policy, data access committee and related procedures. We identified a number of practical and ethical challenges including requests for datasets collected without specific or broad consent to data sharing and requests from pharmaceutical companies for data (...) to support drug registration applications. We also encountered significant resource constraints which required the development of appropriate human resources and infrastructure. We suggest a research agenda to promote responsible and equitable data sharing while safeguarding the rights and interests of research participants and researchers. (shrink)

Community engagement is increasingly recognized as a critical element of medical research, recommended by ethicists, required by research funders and advocated in ethics guidelines. The benefits of community engagement are often stressed in instrumental terms, particularly with regard to promoting recruitment and retention in studies. Less emphasis has been placed on the value of community engagement with regard to ethical good practice, with goals often implied rather than clearly articulated. This article outlines explicitly how community engagement can contribute to ethical (...) global health research by complementing existing established requirements such as informed consent and independent ethics review. The overarching and interlinked areas are respecting individuals, communities and stakeholders; building trust and social relationships; determining appropriate benefits; minimizing risks, burdens and exploitation; supporting the consent process; understanding vulnerabilities and researcher obligations; gaining permissions, approvals and building legitimacy and achieving recruitment and retention targets. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

This paper examines the idea of "objective phenomenology," or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are (...) objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. (shrink)

Current dynamic epistemic logics often become cumbersome and opaque when common knowledge is added. In this paper we propose new versions that extend the underlying static epistemic language in such a way that dynamic completeness proofs can be obtained by perspicuous reduction axioms.

Every truth-functional three-valued propositional logic can be conservatively translated into the modal logic S5. We prove this claim constructively in two steps. First, we define a Translation Manual that converts any propositional formula of any three-valued logic into a modal formula. Second, we show that for every S5-model there is an equivalent three-valued valuation and vice versa. In general, our Translation Manual gives rise to translations that are exponentially longer than their originals. This fact raises the question whether there are (...) three-valued logics for which there is a shorter translation into S5. The answer is affirmative: we present an elegant linear translation of the Logic of Paradox and of Strong Three-valued Logic into S5. (shrink)

Tim French, Wiebe van der Hoek, Petar Iliev and Barteld Kooi. Succinctness of Epistemic Languages. In: T. Walsh (editor). Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11), pp. 881-886, AAAI Press, Menlo Park.

The normativity of so-called “coherence” or “structural” requirements of rationality has been hotly debated in recent years. However, relatively little has been said about the nature of structural rationality, or what makes a set of attitudes structurally irrational, if structural rationality is not ultimately a matter of responding correctly to reasons. This paper develops a novel account of incoherence (or structural irrationality), critically examining Alex Worsnip’s recent account. It first argues that Worsnip’s account both over-generates and under-generates incoherent patterns of (...) attitudes, and then proposes an alternative that both avoids these problems and captures a crucial insight behind Worsnip’s account. According to this account, a set of attitudes is incoherent just in case having all of the attitudes in that set is incompatible with reacting to a question in a way that one is, in virtue of having the attitudes, committed to. (shrink)

In an information state where various agents have both factual knowledge and knowledge about each other, announcements can be made that change the state of information. Such informative announcements can have the curious property that they become false because they are announced. The most typical example of that is 'fact p is true and you don't know that', after which you know that p, which entails the negation of the announcement formula. The announcement of such a formula in a given (...) information state is called an unsuccessful update. A successful formula is a formula that always becomes common knowledge after being announced. Analysis of information systems and 'philosophical puzzles' reveals a growing number of dynamic phenomena that can be described or explained by unsuccessful updates. This increases our understanding of such philosophical problems. We also investigate the syntactic characterization of the successful formulas. (shrink)

Current dynamic-epistemic logics model different types of information change in multi-agent scenarios. We generalize these logics to a probabilistic setting, obtaining a calculus for multi-agent update with three natural slots: prior probability on states, occurrence probabilities in the relevant process taking place, and observation probabilities of events. To match this update mechanism, we present a complete dynamic logic of information change with a probabilistic character. The completeness proof follows a compositional methodology that applies to a much larger class of dynamic-probabilistic (...) logics as well. Finally, we discuss how our basic update rule can be parameterized for different update policies, or learning methods. (shrink)

The use of placebos in randomised controlled trials is a subject of considerable ethical debate. In this paper we present a set of considerations to evaluate the ethics of placebo controlled trials that includes: social value of the study; need for a randomised controlled trial and placebo; standards of care; risks of harm due to administration of placebo and the harm benefit balance; clinical equipoise; and double standards. We illustrate the application of these considerations using a case study of a (...) large ongoing multicentre, placebo-controlled, double-blinded, randomised trial to determine primaquine anti-relapse efficacy in vivax malaria. There is an urgent need for primaquine anti-relapse studies in order to rationalise the management of a potentially fatal disease. An ethical justification for the use of the placebo arm is provided on the grounds that the actual current applied standard of care in most endemic places does not include primaquine. It has also been argued that there is clinical equipoise among the primaquine study arms and that the risk of harms of being in the placebo arm is the risk of having relapse, which is no more than not being included in the trial, and that there are no double standards. Based on our set of considerations, we conclude that a placebo arm is not only justified but imperative in this study. We propose that similar considerations should be prospectively applied to other placebo controlled trials and observational control arms where no treatment is offered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 3-18 [Access article in PDF] Grounds of Comparison Pheng Cheah Reflection is born of the comparison of ideas, and it is their variety that leads us to compare them. Whoever sees only a single object has no occasion to make comparisons. Whoever sees only a small number and always the same ones from childhood on still does not compare them, because the habit of seeing (...) them deprives him of the attention required to examine them: but as a new object strikes us, we want to know it, we look for relations between it and the objects we do know; this is how we learn to observe what we see before us, and how what is foreign to us leads us to examine what touches us.Apply these ideas to the first men, you will see the reason for their barbarism. Never having seen anything other than what was around them, they did not know even it; they did not know themselves. They had the idea of a Father, a son, a brother, but not of man. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of LanguagesIn recent years, the comparative study of cultural formations has undergone critical reinvigoration. The quasi-exponential globalization of all aspects of human existence, which has brought territorially divided or geographically bounded units such as states, national economies, and cultures into an unprecedented and jarring proximity to one another, is, no doubt, an important material condition of possibility of this heightened interest in the cultural branch of comparative studies. For comparison is today no longer a matter of intentional choice. The gradual defamiliarization of our daily lives by globalizing processes has made comparison an inevitable and even unconscious perspective.Indeed, the grounds of comparison have changed. Comparative work is generally understood as a mode of analysis that begins from one given national or cultural case of a subject of legitimate interest, X, which is the basis for forming a provisional hypothesis or working idea about this subject that serves as the tertium comparationis. One then proceeds to examine a range of other cases of X. Discovered similarities confirm or amplify the various essential features of X that were initially posited, and recognized differences serve to modify our working idea about X. A ground of comparison is therefore both the empirical or objective basis from which comparison begins as well as the interest or principle of reason that motivates each particular activity of comparison.In the past, the grounds of comparison were undeniably Eurocentric. Not only was the material starting point of comparison always from Europe or the North Atlantic; comparison also had a teleological aim. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the interests of comparison in canonical texts such as Hegel's Aesthetics; his Lectures on the Philosophy of History; and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion; or Max Weber's sociology of world religions served to affirm a certain idea of Europe as a world historical model. For Hegel and Weber, other cases merely provided the mise-en-scène for the appearance and Bildung of this idealized, universalized figure of Europe. Today, in the humanities [End Page 3] and interpretive social sciences, this old framework for comparison has been challenged by critiques of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, by postcolonial studies, and also from the more parochial perspective of multiculturalism. One can no longer nonchalantly or dogmatically start a comparative endeavor from Europe or the North Atlantic. But the problem goes deeper. Many theorists and some funding bodies, including the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) of the USA, have recently suggested that post-Cold War transnationalism has rendered obsolete the traditionally bounded areas of area studies. If this is so, the claim to begin from any area outside the North Atlantic has also become problematic. In other words, if comparison has always presupposed geographical or cultural areas that are a priori distinct and to be compared, how must the grounds of comparison be reenvisioned?The work of Benedict Anderson stands in an oblique relation to such recent trends in humanistic studies. Although Anderson is an area specialist, a Southeast Asianist trained in political studies, his... (shrink)

David Lewis—famously—never tasted vegemite. Did he have any knowledge of what it's like to taste vegemite? Most say 'no'; I say 'yes'. I argue that knowledge of what it’s like varies along a spectrum from more exact to more approximate, and that phenomenal concepts vary along a spectrum in how precisely they characterize what it’s like to undergo their target experiences. This degreed picture contrasts with the standard all-or-nothing picture, where phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge lack any such degreed structure. (...) I motivate the degreed picture by appeal to (1) limits in epistemic abilities such as recognition, imagination, and inference, and (2) the semantics of ‘knows what it’s like’ expressions. I argue that approximate phenomenal knowledge cannot be explained merely via determinable or vague phenomenal concepts. I develop a framework for systematizing approximate knowledge of phenomenal character. And I explain how my view challenges some standard assumptions about the acquisition conditions, requirements for mastery, and referential mechanisms of phenomenal concepts. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Derrida's suggestion in several texts that, while a classic dialectical materialism partakes of logocentrism, other sorts of nondialectical materialism would be possible. The nondialectical materialisms that emerge from the work of Derrida and that of Gilles Deleuze resist or evade the teleology of the dialectic in different ways. Because Derrida understands material force as the reference to the impossible other and Deleuze views materiality in terms of impersonal and preindividual forces, materiality, even if it (...) is not unfigurable as such, is not easily instantiated by concrete figures that are recognizable by political discourse. (shrink)

After explaining the well-known two-envelope paradox by indicating the fallacy involved, we consider the two-envelope problem of evaluating the factual information provided to us in the form of the value contained by the envelope chosen first. We try to provide a synthesis of contributions from economy, psychology, logic, probability theory (in the form of Bayesian statistics), mathematical statistics (in the form of a decision-theoretic approach) and game theory. We conclude that the two-envelope problem does not allow a satisfactory solution. An (...) interpretation is made for statistical science at large. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MatteringPheng Cheah (bio)Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.Elizabeth Grosz. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.Any cursory survey of contemporary cultural-political theory and criticism will indicate that the related concepts of “nature” and “the given” are not highly valued terms. The reason for this disdain and even moral disapprobation of naturalistic accounts of human existence is (...) supposed to be self-evident: simply put, in a post-Newtonian age, nature refers to the totality of objects governed by immutable causal laws. If human existence was merely natural or given, then we would never be able to alter the conditions that bring about human oppression. Antinaturalism in contemporary theory, however, betrays a deep fear in its repetitive tirades against the natural. For if it is so obviously precritical to treat human existence as given, then why does antinaturalism need to be articulated again and again? This obsessive pushing away of nature may well constitute an acknowledgement-in-disavowal that humans may be natural creatures after all. Furthermore, as a theoretical position, antinaturalism itself is produced by the polemical energy that strives to keep nature at bay, in quarantine from the sphere of human life. Consequently, antinaturalism works with a conventional philosophical definition of nature which it may do well to question. We may therefore be justified in claiming that, far from being tired superstitions that savvy discourse analysts and cultural constructionists can leave behind, the concepts of “nature” and “the given” are, in fact, neuralgic points, the contested sites around which any theory of political transformation is organized.In its conventional usage, nature is opposed to a whole host of other terms: history, culture, law, production, and so forth. The slipperiness of nature, however, is seen in the fact that the relation between nature and its others defies characterization as a simple relation of exteriority between two ontologically distinct terms. For instance, the relation of nature to history can be posed not only in terms of the modification of nature by historical agency but also from within the realm of historical agency insofar as the constraints of structure or construction on transformative rational agency seem to replicate the limitations or weightiness of nature. Feminism is an exemplary site for rehearsing this fundamental questioning of the distinction between nature and its others because it must refute biologistic and naturalistic justifications for the oppression of women even as it must affirm women’s bodily specificity as the minimal consensual stuff which grounds feminist practice. As Zillah Eisenstein astutely observes in spite of her own intellectual allegiances, “if the body is already engendered in this way, how can we claim our bodies without reproducing the inequities of the gender-system?... [S]o we become involved in explicating patriarchal relations without knowing where patriarchy begins and ends in the definition of a woman’s or a mother’s body. What aspect of the body constitutes a woman’s potential capacities, and what part articulates her oppression?” [73, 75]. [End Page 108] Philosophically speaking, the giving of body or matter—what I propose to call “mattering”—may be the process where history and nature become uncannily indistinguishable in a manner that is both enabling and disabling for political transformation, its condition of (im)possibility.Thus far, the productive unease in feminist theory occasioned by the body as the ambivalent ground of both oppression and emancipatory transformation has resulted in debates over the sex/gender distinction and the question of essentialism/antiessentialism. 1 Discussion has, however, primarily centered on the strategic deployment of the body as a political resource. Two recent books—Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter and Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies—stand out because they promise to raise discussion to a level where political issues concerning the body can be reevaluated through a rigorous rethinking of the relation between nature and its others: culture, history, and society. The authors of these books share the distinctive aim of articulating a feminist theory that is centered on a philosophical exploration of the status of the body. Both Grosz and Butler are trained in Continental philosophy, where the secondary status of... (shrink)