The Division of Investigative Oversight within the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) is responsible for conducting oversight review of institutional inquiries and investigations of possible research misconduct. It is also responsible for determining whether Public Health Service findings of research misconduct are warranted. Although ORI findings rely primarily on the scope and quality of the institution’s analyses and determinations, ORI often has been able to strengthen the original findings by employing a variety of analytical methods, often computer based. Although (...) ORI does not conduct inquiries or investigations, it has broad authority to provide assistance to institutions at all stages of their reviews of allegations. This assistance can range from providing advice on best practices, to legal assistance, to suggestions for how best to investigate specific allegations. When asked, ORI can also conduct certain forensic analyses, such as a statistical examination of questioned digits or a simple examination of a questioned figure in Photoshop. ORI will not provide opinions or render judgment on such analyses while the institution is still conducting its investigation. Such analyses can be done without knowing much else about the case. (shrink)

This book analyzes for the first time in English the ethical theory that underpins Qur’anic legislation by providing a classification of specific verses in which Islam’s holy book discusses moral issues. The principal purpose of this book is to demonstrate the ways in which the Qur’an theoretically and practically provides the moral code to which Muslims around the world adhere. The author divides his analysis into a survey of Qur’anic attitudes towards the basic ethical issues of obligation and responsibility, issues (...) of moral psychology such as motivation and intention, as well as matters of social ethics such as the function of law in society. He then explores the meanings of individual morality, morality within the family and civil society, and the relationship of morality to the idea of the state. (shrink)

The expertise defense is the best-known response by armchair philosophers to the challenge posed by experimental philosophers regarding the trustworthiness of intuitions. In a series of recent experiments, Experimental philosophers have recently focused on professional philosophers, claiming that, contrary to what the expertise defense assumes, philosophers’ intuitions are no less susceptible to the influence of irrelevant factors (the direct strategy). Additionally, drawing from literature on expertise, they contend that, unlike other domains of expertise, practice does not improve philosophers’ intuitions (the (...) indirect strategy). In this paper, adopting a skill-based perspective on expertise, my primary objective is to defend the expertise defense against both direct and indirect strategies. Based on the skill-based account, I present three arguments against the direct strategy by challenging its power, scope and methodology. Furthermore, borrowing empirical findings from recent literature on expertise, I argue against the indirect strategy that four skills that constitute philosophical expertise regarding thought experiments can be improved through various forms of practice, including deliberate practice. However, my moderate defense departs from typical versions of the expertise defense since I argue that while recent experiments by experimental philosophers cannot undermine the expertise defense, they provide valuable insights into philosophical expertise. (shrink)

In this paper, I plan to show that the use of a specific population concept—Millstein’s Causal Interactionist Population Concept (CIPC)—has interesting and counter-intuitive ramifications for discussions of the reality of biological race in human beings. These peculiar ramifications apply to human beings writ large and to individuals. While this in and of itself may not be problematic, I plan to show that the ramifications that follow from applying Millstein’s CIPC to human beings complicates specific biological racial realist accounts—naïve or otherwise. (...) I conclude with the notion that even if biological races do exist—by fulfilling all of the criteria needed for Millstein’s population concept (which, given particular worries raised by Gannett (Synthese 177:363–385, 2010), and Winther and Kaplan (Theoria 60:54–80, 2013) may not)—the lower-bound limit for the scope of biological racial realism is at the level of populations, and as such they cannot say anything about whether or not individual organisms themselves have races. (shrink)

This text explores how human beings construe experience: experience as a resource, as a potential for understanding, representing and acting on reality.

Recognized in his day as a man of letters equaling Rousseau and Voltaire in France and rivaling Samuel Johnson, David Hume passed from favor in the Victorian age--his work, it seemed, did not pursue Truth but rather indulged in popularization. Although Hume is once more considered as one of the greatest British philosophers, scholars now tend to focus on his thought rather than his writing. To round out our understanding of Hume, M. A. Box in this book charts the interrelated (...) development of Hume's literary ambitions, theories of style, and compositional practice from his Treatise in 1739 through the Enquiries. In so doing, Box makes the case for Hume's career-long concern with the presentational modes of reaching an audience for his philosophical writings. Hume reacted to the popular failure of his masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature, Box suggests, by self-consciously exploring strategies in his subsequent works for agreeably bringing his readership to participate in the act of philosophizing. Combining a sensitive grasp of the ways Restoration period and eighteenth-century writers conceived the relations between rhetoric and philosophy with sound readings of particular texts, Box shows how Hume's literary concerns went beyond matters of style to involve persona, structure, and doctrine. While this book helps explain long-standing ambiguities surrounding Hume, especially by pointing out the tension between his created persona and his own voice, it also serves as an excellent introduction to his philosophy. (shrink)

Metabolism is a criterion of life. Three senses are distinguished. The weakest allows strong A-Life: virtual creatures having physical existence in computer electronics, but not bodies, are classes as 'alive'. The second excludes strong A-Life but allows that some non-biochemical A-Life robots could be classed as alive. The third, which stresses the body's self-production by energy budgeting and self-equilibrating energy exchanges of some (necessary) complexity, excludes both strong A-Life and living non-biochemical robots.

The study presents the broad outlines for a relationalist interpretation of the Indian epistemological doctrine svataḥ prāmāṇya. Due to the inadequacy of the main western interpretations thereof, the paper’s approach can be considered an inference to the best explanation. Its main part is devoted to the typologization of various epistemological doctrines based on the svataḥ prāmāṇya principle in terms of strong and weak disjunctivism. Three paradigm cases of strong disjunctivism and a special variety of weak disjunctivism have thus been identified (...) in Indian epistemology, which allowed to draw a conclusion that strong disjunctivism constituted one of its general paradigms. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1974, scholars throughout the humanities have adopted G M A Grube's masterful translation of the Republic as the edition of choice for their study and teaching of Plato's most influential work. In this brilliant revision, C D C Reeve furthers Grube's success both in preserving the subtlety of Plato's philosophical argument and in rendering the dialogue in lively, fluent English, that remains faithful to the original Greek. This revision includes a new introduction, index, and bibliography by (...) Reeve. (shrink)

M A B Degenhardt; Sartre, Imagination and Education1, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 9, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 72–92, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.

Is there an effect of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity? Are depressed individuals biased to interpret ambiguous information in a negative manner? We used a cross-modal semantic priming task to look for evidence of a negative interpretative bias. Participants listened to ambiguous prime sentences (e.g., Joan was stunned by her final exam mark) and made lexical decisions to target words presented immediately after the sentence offset or after a delay of 1000 ms or 2000 ms. For the semantically (...) related targets, the target was negatively related (distress), positively related (success), or neutrally related (grades) to the ambiguous prime. The experiment was conducted with and without a negative mood induction. The expectation was that depressed participants would be more likely to consider the negative interpretations of the ambiguous primes and would therefore experience larger priming effects for negatively related targets. Although there were large priming effects for all semantically related targets, there was no evidence of a negative interpretative bias. (shrink)