Some of the dialogue in the Star Wars films has become deservedly iconic, instantly recognizable even to people unfamiliar with the series. Several human characters speak two or more languages. This chapter examines whether Chewbacca's noises work like a language. It considers a typical exchange between Chewbacca and Han Solo. The conclusion that these noises are not real language is so obvious as to be unnecessary: Chewbacca does not speak. The Star Wars films and Expanded Universe materials teem with processes, (...) objects, and entities that are unique to their fictional setting, are without counterparts in real life, and would need to be learned by someone encountering them for the first time. Conversely, if more and more people do start to use a word in a new way, eventually the newer usage will become its accepted meaning, either coexisting with an older meaning or superseding it. (shrink)

In this paper I return to Hubert Dreyfus’ old but influential critique of artificial intelligence, redirecting it towards contemporary predictive processing models of the mind (PP). I focus on Dreyfus’ arguments about the “frame problem” for artificial cognitive systems, and his contrasting account of embodied human skills and expertise. The frame problem presents as a prima facie problem for practical work in AI and robotics, but also for computational views of the mind in general, including for PP. Indeed, some of (...) the issues it presents seem more acute for PP, insofar as it seeks to unify all cognition and intelligence, and aims to do so without admitting any cognitive processes or mechanisms outside of the scope of the theory. I contend, however, that there is an unresolved problem for PP concerning whether it can both explain all cognition and intelligent behavior as minimizing prediction error with just the core formal elements of the PP toolbox, and also adequately comprehend (or explain away) some of the apparent cognitive differences between biological and prediction-based artificial intelligence, notably in regard to establishing relevance and flexible context-switching, precisely the features of interest to Dreyfus’ work on embodied indexicality, habits/skills, and abductive inference. I address several influential philosophical versions of PP, including the work of Jakob Hohwy and Andy Clark, as well as more enactive-oriented interpretations of active inference coming from a broadly Fristonian perspective. (shrink)

Adequate epistemic justification is best conceived as the appearance, over time, of knowledge to the subject. ‘Appearance’ is intended literally, not as a synonym for belief. It is argued through consideration of examples that this account gets the extension of ‘adequately justified belief’ at least roughly correct. A more theoretical reason is then offered to regard justification as the appearance of knowledge: If we have a knowledge norm for assertion, we do our best to comply with this norm when we (...) express as assertions only beliefs that appear to us to be knowledge. If we are doing our best, there is little point in further sanctions. So a norm of knowledge for assertion would lead to a secondary norm of justified belief as the appearance of knowledge, marking a point at which our assertions may be corrected but should not be blamed. (shrink)

Objection to Quine's argument for the inscrutability of reference. The proxy functions don't preserve the relations to experience, contrary to Quine's claims.

While there is a steadily growing literature on epistemic injustice in healthcare, there are few discussions of the role that biomedical technologies play in harming patients in their capacity as knowers. Through an analysis of newborn and pediatric genetic and genomic sequencing technologies (GSTs), I argue that biomedical technologies can lead to epistemic injustice through two primary pathways: epistemic capture and value partitioning. I close by discussing the larger ethical and political context of critical analyses of GSTs and their broader (...) implications for just and equitable healthcare delivery. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In 2010,Business Ethics Quarterlypublished ten articles that considered the potential contributions to business ethics research arising from recent scholarship in a variety of philosophical and social scientific fields (strategic management, political philosophy, restorative justice, international business, legal studies, ethical theory, ethical leadership studies, organization theory, marketing, and corporate governance and finance). Here we offer short responses to those articles by members ofBusiness Ethics Quarterly’s editorial board and editorial team.

This book presents an innovative analysis of the role of imagination as a central concept in both literary and art criticism. Dee Reynolds brings this approach to bear on works by Rimbaud, Mallarme;, Kandinsky, and Mondrian. It allows her to redefine the relationship between Symbolism and abstract art, and to contribute new methodological perspectives to comparative studies of poetry and painting. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a crucial period in the emergence of new modes of representation, (...) and is currently at the forefront of critical enquiry. This is the first book to examine Symbolism and abstraction in this way, and the first to treat these poets and painters together. It is an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship in art history, literary history, and comparative aesthetics. (shrink)

Disentangling Privacy and Intimacy: Intimate Citizenship, Private Boundaries and Public Transgressions Recent theorisations of transformations of intimacy—like Ken Plummer's (2003) Intimate Citizenship project—concentrate on social and cultural transformations that erode the containment of intimacy within the private sphere. They have less to say about the character of and oppositions to that erosion, and specifically how far the idea of the private stands in opposition to intimacy transgressing into the public. In this essay, the private is explored through its constitutive features—liberal (...) codifications of rights, liberty and property, medico-moral discourses and conservative values and legal and political regulation—to give a more political and critical reading. This reading suggests that an explicit disentangling of the private and the intimate is necessary if tendencies toward public and emancipated intimacies are to become meaningful transformations, and this involves a dissembling of and critical engagement with the powerful historically entrenched idea of privacy in western societies. (shrink)

The familiar Cartesian sceptical arguments all involve an explanation of our experiences. An account of the persuasive power of the sceptical arguments should explain why this is so. This supports a diagnosis of the error in Cartesian sceptical arguments according to which they mislead us into regarding our perceptual beliefs as if they were justified as inferences to the best explanation. I argue that they have instead a perceptual justification that does not involve inference to the best explanation and that (...) should not be put in doubt by the sceptical hypotheses. (shrink)

Promoting patient autonomy has become a key imperative in health service encounters. We will examine the potential negative effects of over-promoting patient autonomy and consider the impact on patient access, their experience and the provision of equitable services by focusing on an extreme manifestation of this trend, i.e. calls for patient involvement in health care decision making to be mandatory. Advocates of mandatory autonomy hold that patients have a duty to themselves, to society and to the medical system to make (...) decisions on their health care independently. Models of mandatory autonomy may be contrasted to those of optional autonomy that seek to ascertain patients’ decisional preferences and to understand wider limitations on their freedom to choose. Where choice as decisional responsibility becomes mandatory it ceases to promote agency and where autonomous choice is understood as an individualistic practice it will contribute to the cultural dominance of Western values. Moreover, taking a view that principlist ethics needs to take account of the social and cultural contexts of individual lives, we argue that if mandatory autonomy were to be over-emphasised as part of an ongoing move towards patient choice in UK National Health Service (NHS), educated and affluent people would be more able to exercise choices at the expense of people who are experienced in asserting preferences and who have the resources to make use of choices. We will argue that the promotion of autonomy needs to be tempered by steps to enable less powerful social, cultural and economic groups to contribute to decision making and to support individuals who may feel abandoned by having decisional responsibility transferred to them. Until constraints on individual choice can be understood and addressed, we advocate the model of optional autonomy used in shared decision making and make recommendations for practice, policy, education and research. (shrink)

"The book as a whole seeks to reinvigorate an academic discipline (philosophy of religion) which has fallen on hard times, and to do so by building a bridge between philosophy and empirical-historical studies of religion. The topic is both significant and timely. Too long the empiricists have been inadequately sophisticated philosophically and too long the philosophers have ignored historical data both in its breadth and depth. In not only calling for bridges between these disciplines, but actually building some, the work (...) makes a significant contribution to both." -- Alan Miller "This book is useful because it provides some insights both into the ways scholars think about various aspects of religious behavior, and also information about important features of such behavior. Both myth and philosophy are topics of great significance, and have been discussed by many philosophers and historians of religions and some anthropologists. An interesting set of questions about the nature of religion, and nature of philosophy and their relationships (and also about the nature of myth and its relationship to philosophy) is emerging at the forefront of academic discussions in departments of religion, departments of philosophy, and departments of anthropology. It contains some well-written and conceptually interesting essays." -- E. Thomas Lawson. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea that Deleuze’s oeuvre is best understood as a philosophy of the wound, synonymous with a philosophy of the event. Although this wound/scar typology may appear to be a metaphorical conceit, the motif of the wound recurs frequently and perhaps even symptomatically in many of Deleuze’s texts, particularly where he is attempting to delineate some of the most important differences (transcendental, temporal, and ethical) between himself and his phenomenological predecessors. I raise some some potential problems for (...) this trajectory, most of which revolve around Deleuze's use of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

En Écosse (xvie-xxe siècle) Siân Reynolds Comment se fait-il qu’en Écosse, contrairement aux coutumes de l’Angleterre, une femme mariée ait pu garder son nom de naissance/de jeune fille (maiden name ou birth name) après le mariage? C’est au moment où je co-dirigeais le Dictionnaire biographique des femmes écossaises (première édition 2005) que j’ai constaté qu’en Écosse, par le passé, et jusqu’à une époque relativement récente, les femmes étaient souvent connues par leur propre nom de fami...

Phenomenological critique attempts to retrieve the lived experience of a human community alienated from its truthful condition and immersed in historical crises brought by processes of objectification and estrangement. This introductory article challenges two methodological assumptions that are largely shared in North American Critical Phenomenology: the definition of phenomenology as a first person approach of experience and the rejection of transcendental eidetics. While reflecting on the importance of otherness and community for phenomenology’s critical orientation, we reconsider the importance of eidetics (...) from the standpoint of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, highlighting its historical and contingent character. Contrary to the received view of Husserl’s classical phenomenology as an idealistic and rigid undertaking, we show that his genetic phenomenology is interested in the material formation of meaning (Sinnbildung), offering resources for a phenomenological approach to a materialist social theory. Keywords: critical phenomenology, critical theory, genetic phenomenology, community, normativity. (shrink)

Some proponents of higher education English as a medium of instruction have suggested listening to English lectures provides students the opportunity to incidentally acquire unknown words. A case study was designed to examine this assumption. First, the lexical profiles of 27 Introduction to English Language Teaching first-year undergraduate course lectures were computed to determine how many words students need to know for comprehension. Then an incoming year-1 undergraduate student with an English vocabulary size of 7,500 word families and mastery of (...) the most frequent 3,000 word families listened to these lectures across 13.5 weeks with the purpose of measuring incidental acquisition gains of three aspects of word knowledge for ten targeted words. Lastly, the student’s perceptions about listening to EMI lectures and potentials for this listening inducing incidental acquisition of word knowledge were gathered through a semi-structured interview. The lexical profiling of the entire corpus showed students need knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 English word families plus proper nouns and marginal words for 98% lexical coverage; however, some lectures present students with a more substantial lexical burden than the lectures overall. The student made the most gains in receptive meaning, followed by receptive form, and finally productive meaning. Content analysis of the interview transcript found seven themes representing the student’s perception about listening to EMI lectures and their potential for inducing incidental vocabulary acquisition. While the student found listening to the EMI lectures challenging, he perceived the process as useful in preparing for university studies and a career as a secondary English teacher. The student perceived attention, topic, existing vocabulary knowledge, lecturer’s native language, and lack of interaction with the lecturer to have moderated incidental learning of vocabulary through listening to English lectures. These results indicate a need to confirm whether incoming students’ vocabulary knowledge meet the lexical demands of the EMI lectures given in the Macau context. Furthermore, pedagogical training on teacher talk strategies and orientation training for incoming students should both be provided to ensure students are receiving high quality instruction. (shrink)

This book contains programmatic essays that focus on broad-ranging proposals for re-envisioning a discipline of comparative philosophy of religions. It also contains a number of case studies focussing on the interpretation of particular religio-historical data from comparatively oriented philosophical perspectives.

In this paper we shall introduce a simple temporal logic suitable for reasoning about the temporal aspects of parallel universes, parallel processes, distributed systems, or multiple agents. We will use a variant of the mosaic method to prove decidability of this logic. We also show that the logic does not have the finite model property. This shows that the mosaic method is sometimes a stronger way of establishing decidability.

IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE TO ASSUME that Hegel's comments about the law of identity form a consistent package. On the one hand, Hegel admits that the law of identity, which he expresses in words as.

This paper argues that epistemic errors rooted in group- or identity- based biases, especially those pertaining to disability, are undertheorized in the literature on medical error. After sketching dominant taxonomies of medical error, we turn to the field of social epistemology to understand the role that epistemic schemas play in contributing to medical errors that disproportionately affect patients from marginalized social groups. We examine the effects of this unequal distribution through a detailed case study of ableism. There are four primary (...) mechanisms through which the epistemic schema of ableism distorts communication between nondisabled physicians and disabled patients: testimonial injustice, epistemic overconfidence, epistemic erasure, and epistemic derailing. Measures against epistemic injustices in general and against schema-based medical errors in particular are ultimately issues of justice that must be better addressed at all levels of health care practice. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Integrating research on empowering leadership with the literature on power in social psychology, we examine how empowering leaders affect the propensity of followers to engage in deviance. Across a multi-source, multi-wave field study and a controlled laboratory experiment, we find that, compared to the followers of less-empowering leaders, the followers of more empowering leaders feel subjectively more powerful and engage in more deviant behaviors. Moreover, we find that the propensity of empowered followers to engage in more deviance depends on their (...) prosocial attributes. Specifically, empowered followers engage in the highest levels of deviance when they have a weak moral identity and a strong desire for dominance. We further find that empowering leadership does not increase follower deviance when followers either have a strong moral identity or a weak desire for dominance. In sum, although past research suggests that empowering leadership may facilitate productivity and employee engagement, our work demonstrates that it can also cultivate harmful effects, such as increased deviance among certain types of followers. We discuss our theoretical contributions as well as practical implications for practicing empowering leadership. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are arguably the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Their work not only reshaped the philosophical landscape, but also left its mark on other disciplines, including political science, theology, anthropology, ecology, mathematics, cultural studies, literary theory, and architecture. Both sought to challenge the assumptions governing the traditions they inherited, to question the very terms in which philosophy’s problems had been posed, and to open up new avenues of thought for thinkers of all stripes. (...) And despite considerable differences in style and in the traditions they inherited, the similarities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger are striking. Comparative work of these thinkers has only increased in recent decades, but no collection has yet explored the various ways in which Wittgenstein and Heidegger can be drawn into dialogue. As such, these essays stage genuine dialogues, with aspects of Wittgenstein’s elucidations answering or problematizing aspects of Heidegger’s, and vice versa. The result is a broad-ranging collection of essays that provides a series of openings and provocations that will serve as a reference point for future work that draws on the writings of these two philosophers. (shrink)

The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodied turn. Surveying this research provides an opportunity to (...) rethink the relationship between embodiment and genetics, and we argue that the balance of current epigenetic research favours the extension of an enactivist approach to mind and life, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition associated with Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler, which is more substrate neutral. (shrink)

Since children are considered incapable ofgiving informed consent to participate inresearch, regulations require that bothparental permission and the assent of thepotential child subject be obtained. Assent andpermission are uniquely bound together, eachserving a different purpose. Parentalpermission protects the child from assumingunreasonable risks. Assent demonstrates respectfor the child and his developing autonomy. Inorder to give meaningful assent, the child mustunderstand that procedures will be performed,voluntarily choose to undergo the procedures,and communicate this choice. Understanding theelements of informed consent has been theparadigm for (...) assessing capacity to give assent.This method leaves the youngest, leastcognitively mature children vulnerable towaiver of assent and forced researchparticipation. Voluntariness can also becompromised by the influence of authorityfigures who can exert undue influence andcoerce children to participate in research. This paper discusses factors that may influencethe decision to give assent/permission,potential parent-child conflict in theassent/permission process and how it isresolved, and potential parental undueinfluence on research participation. Theseissues are illustrated with quotations drawnfrom a larger qualitative study of parentalpermission and child assent (data notpresented). We suggest a developmentalapproach, viewing assent as a continuum rangingfrom mere affirmation in the youngest childrento the equivalent of the informed consentprocess in the mature adolescent. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to trace an entanglement of an event documented in my PhD research which contests dominant modes of enquiry. It is experimental research which resists the human subject as the most important aspect of research, the only one with agency or intentionality. In particular, I analyse the process of the making of the circle, and how integral it is in contributing to building the Community of Enquiry, the pedagogy of Philosophy with Children. I offer a critical (...) posthuman analysis which engages with the material-discursive entanglements of the making of the circle. I move beyond the linguistic turn by paying attention to the intra-actions in between human and more-than-human, place, the circle and the chairs. I show how the mainly authoritarian adult-child relationships prevalent in most South African schools, can be disrupted through this pedagogical approach. This research takes place with a group of Grade 2 learners in a government school in South Africa. (shrink)

Reynold Jones; An Aspect of Moral Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 63–71, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-97.

Reynold Jones; A Reply to Kieran Egan, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 195–198, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1.

When a debate is misplaced, new problems are cast in the distorting language of the settled problems of the past while, at the same time, the participants in the debate are assimilated into communities of thought with which they have little in common. The result is that their work, and our response to it, is distorted. This article contends that the polemical debate between James Gustafson (and his followers) and Stanley Hauerwas (and his followers) is just such a misplaced debate. (...) In fact, both can be shown to be Troeltschian historicists, and it is only when this commonality is recognized that their very real and deep differences can be rightly appreciated as emblematic of the true sources of disagreement at the growing edge of the discipline. (shrink)

We theorize that victim anonymity is an important factor in ethical decision making, such that actors engage in more self-interested and unethical behaviors toward anonymous victims than they do toward identifiable victims. Three experiments provided empirical support for this argument. In Study 1, participants withheld more life-saving products from anonymous than from identifiable victims. In Study 2, participants allocated a sum of payment more unfairly when interacting with an anonymous than with an identifiable partner. Finally, in Study 3, participants cheated (...) more from an anonymous than from an identifiable person. Anticipated guilt fully mediated these effects in all three studies. Taken together, our research suggests that anonymous victims may be more likely to incur unethical treatment, which could explain many unethical business behaviors. (shrink)

This article describes some of the main arguments for the existence of other minds, and intersubjectivity more generally, that depend upon a transcendental justification. This means that our focus will be largely on ‘continental’ philosophy, not only because of the abiding interest in this tradition in thematising intersubjectivity, but also because transcendental reasoning is close to ubiquitous in continental philosophy. Neither point holds for analytic philosophy. As such, this essay will introduce some of the important contributions of Edmund Husserl, Martin (...) Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Karl-Otto Apel, all of whom use transcendental reasoning as a key part of their analyses of intersubjectivity, and we also consider the work of Peter Strawson who does likewise in the analytic tradition. (shrink)

Introductory and advanced textbooks in bioethics focus almost entirely on issues that disproportionately affect disabled people and that centrally deal with becoming or being disabled. However, such textbooks typically omit critical philosophical reflection on disability, lack engagement with decades of empirical and theoretical scholarship spanning the social sciences and humanities in the multidisciplinary field of disability studies, and avoid serious consideration of the history of disability activism in shaping social, legal, political, and medical understandings of disability over the last fifty (...) years. For example, longstanding discussions on topics such as euthanasia, physician aid-in-dying, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, prenatal testing, selective abortion, enhancement, patient autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and health care rationing all tend to be premised on shared and implicit assumptions regarding disability, especially in relation to quality of life, yet with too little recognition of the way that “disability” is itself a topic of substantial research and scholarly disagreement across multiple fields. This is not merely a concern for academic and medical education; as an applied field tied to one of the largest economic sectors of most industrialized nations, bioethics has a direct impact on healthcare education, practice, policy, and, thereby, the health outcomes of existing and future populations. It is in light of these pressing issues that the Disability Bioethics Reader is the first reader to introduce students to core bioethical issues and concepts through the lens of critical disability studies and philosophy of disability. The Disability Bioethics Reader will include over thirty-five chapters covering key areas such as: critical histories and state-of-the-field analyses of modern medicine, bioethics, disability studies, and philosophy of medicine; methods in bioethics; concerns at the edge- and end-of-life; enhancement; disability, quality of life, and well-being; prenatal testing and abortion; invisible disabilities; chronic illness; healthcare justice; genetics and genomics; intellectual disability and neurodiversity; ethics and diagnosis; and epistemic injustice in healthcare. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to trace some entanglements of an event documented in my PhD research, which contests dominant modes of enquiry. This research takes place with a group of Grade 2 learners in a government school in Cape Town, South Africa. It is experimental research which resists the human subject as the most important aspect of research, the only one with agency or intentionality. In particular, the analysis focuses on the process of the making of the circle, and (...) how integral it is in contributing to building the Community of Enquiry, the pedagogy of Philosophy with Children. A critical posthuman analysis is offered which engages with the material-discursive entanglements of the making of the circle. Also, how this making of a circle can be a democratising practice, by including in the concept of democracy, the more-than-human. The analysis also focuses on the placing of the chairs by the children, as a deliberate pedagogical practice, and how this works to disrupt the adult /child binary. There is a move beyond the linguistic turn by paying attention to not only the discursive in the transcriptions but also the intra-actions in between human and more-than-human, the circle, the chairs and the materiality of place. (shrink)

In this paper, we highlight some problems for accounts of disability and enhancement that have not been sufficiently addressed in the literature. The reason, we contend, is that contemporary debates that seek to define, characterise or explain the normative valence of disability and enhancement do not pay sufficient attention to a wide range of cases, and the transition between one state and another. In section one, we provide seven cases that might count as disability or enhancement. We explain why each (...) case might count, and on what basis, and why it is been neglected. Each case is explained as a transition in what we call capacity space. We then argue that no definition of disability or enhancement addresses all of these cases, except for strict welfarist accounts of disability that do not rely on a depiction of any particular capacity. We argue further, however, that this is a serious deficiency of welfarist conceptions of disability. We then address objections to our account. (shrink)