Subjective probabilities play a significant role in the assessment of evidence: in other words, our background knowledge, or pre-trial beliefs, cannot be set aside when new evidence is being evaluated. Focusing on homeopathy, this paper investigates the nature of pre-trial beliefs in clinical trials. It asks whether pre-trial beliefs of the sort normally held only by those who are sympathetic to homeopathy can legitimately be disregarded in those trials. The paper addresses several surprisingly unsuccessful attempts to provide (...) a satisfactory justification for ignoring the pre-trial beliefs of the homeopathic community. The ensuing diagnosis of the difficulties here emphasizes that the reason the arguments for choosing the pre-trial beliefs of the conventional community seem insufficient is not the arguments per se. It is rather that there is no cogent argument for choosing the conventional stance which would at the same time rationally persuade a member of the homeopathic community. The paper concludes that, once we understand that this is the predicament, there is no genuine reason to doubt the reasoning that leads us to reject the pre-trial beliefs of the homeopathic community. (shrink)

Did you know that insects could be tried for criminal acts in pre-industrial Europe, that the dead could be executed, that statues could be subjected to public humiliation, or that it was widely accepted that corpses could return to life? What made reasonable, educated men and women behave in ways that seem utterly nonsensical to us today? Strange Histories presents for the first time a serious account of some of the most extraordinary occurrences of European history. Throughout the ages, people (...) have held ideas and events have taken place which have baffled later societies. Religious disbelievers were thought deserving of death, insects were occasionally excommunicated, studying the biology of angels was a legitimate activity, and the pursuit of personal happiness was considered rather misguided as a life strategy. Using case studies from the Middle Ages and the early modern period with some from the more recent past, this book provides fascinating insights into the world-view through the ages, and shows how such goings-on fitted in quite naturally with the "common sense" of the time. Explanations of these phenomena, riveting and ultimately rational, encourage further reflection on what really shapes our beliefs. In the light of history, can we be sure of the validity of our own ideas? How many of our own beliefs might no longer "make sense" a few centuries from now? (shrink)

In the opening of the article, the author briefly assesses the existing legal regulations of criminal procedure in the Czech Republic adopted as far back as in 1961. He points out to specific imperfections, which justify the need for their recodification. The mainstay of the article is devoted to the very pre-trial proceedings, i.e. checking and investigation. The existing legal regulations are analysed, and selected application problems are mentioned in relation to the recodification under preparation.

The pre-trial detention of individuals charged with crimes is viewed by many legal scholars as problematic. Standard arguments against it are that it constitutes legal punishment of individuals not yet convicted of crimes, violates the presumption of innocence, and rests on dubious predictions of future crime. I defend modified and restrained forms of pre-trial detention. I argue that pre-trial detention could be made very different than imprisonment, should be governed by strict criteria, and is warranted, when the (...) evidence of danger is convincing. I contend that the presumption of innocence does not preclude us from doing many other things to criminal suspects and defendants that imply their guilt. Finally, I dispute arguments designed to show that pre-trial detention can be justified to prevent absconding or interferences with the course of justice, but not to prevent other, and sometimes much more serious, offenses. (shrink)

The process of territorial planning is complicated, because there are different and even opposite interest of persons related with particular territory. Administrative legal regulation of territorial planning in Lithuania underlies emergence of a legal conflict, namely the administrative litigation. Investigation of the administrative dispute applying the pre-litigation procedure allows the parties thereof to save both money and time. This article presents the problematic aspects of the pre-trial investigation of the administrative disputes arising in the area of territorial planning. The (...) article is composed of an introduction, three parts and conclusions. In the first part the characteristics of the disputes arising in the area of territorial planning, the preconditions of origin, and the demand for the pre-trial investigation thereof are analyzed. Legal regulation of pre-trial investigation out-of-court of the disputes arising in the area of territorial planning is revealed in the second part. In the third part key provisions of the reform of the pre-trial investigation out-of-court of the disputes arising in the area of territorial planning are discussed. (shrink)

Existing justifications for exclusionary rules and stays of proceedings in response to pre-trial wrongdoing by police officers and prosecutors are often thought to be counter-productive or disproportionate in their consequences. This article begins to explore whether the concept of standing to blame can provide a fresh justification for such responses. It focuses on a vice related to standing—hypocrisy—and a related vice concerning inconsistent blame. It takes seriously the point that criminal justice agencies, although all part of the State, are (...) in real terms separated from each other, and analyses the so-called separation thesis (or theses). It concludes that hypocrisy and inconsistent blame arguments could plausibly justify exclusion and stays only in relation to lower-level offending, and even there only indirectly. This is in the sense that exclusion and stays are expressions of judicial frustration with other bodies for their failure to take pre-trial wrongdoing seriously. (shrink)

Fluctuations in attentional state and their relation to goal neglect were examined in the current study. Participants performed a variant of the Stroop task in which attentional state ratings were given prior to each trial. It was found that pre-trial attentional state ratings predicted subsequent trial performance, such that when participants rated their current attentional state as highly focused on the current task, performance tended to be high compared to when participants reported their current attentional state as (...) being unfocused on the current task. This effect was larger for incongruent than congruent trials leading to differences in the magnitude of the Stroop effect as a function of pre-trial attentional state. Furthermore, variability in attentional state was correlated with overall levels of performance, and when attentional state was covaried out, the Stroop effect was greatly reduced. These results suggest a link between fluctuations in pre-trial attentional state and goal neglect. (shrink)

The lie detector test has long been treated with suspicion by the law. Recently, several authors have called this suspicion into question. They argue that the lie detector test may have considerable forensic benefits, particularly if we move past the classic, false-positive prone, autonomic nervous system-based (ANS-based) control question test, to the more reliable, brain-based, concealed information test. These authors typically rely on a “comparative advantage” argument to make their case. According to this argument, we should not be so suspicious (...) of lie detection evidence if it has comparative advantages over the epistemic methods currently utilised by the legal system. In this article, I add to this growing support by making a novel comparative advantage argument in favour of brain-based lie detection evidence. The argument focuses on the P300 concealed information test (P300 CIT), which has several unique properties, and on the effect it may have on pre-trial bargaining in criminal cases rather than in-court evidence. The thesis is that P300 CIT could allow for innocent defendants to credibly signal their innocence to investigators and prosecutors during pre-trial bargaining more effectively than current proposed methods for doing the same thing. I defend this argument from a number of objections, and suggest that it opens up an interesting avenue in the ongoing debate about the merits of this technology. Although the argument is presented with the criminal law in mind, it could form part of a more general cumulative case in favour of this technology. (shrink)

Homeopathy is controversial and hotly debated. The conclusions of systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials of homeopathy vary from ‘comparable to conventional medicine’ to ‘no evidence of effects beyond placebo’. It is claimed that homeopathy conflicts with scientific laws and that homoeopaths reject the naturalistic outlook, but no evidence has been cited. We are homeopathic physicians and researchers who do not reject the scientific outlook; we believe that examination of the prior beliefs underlying this enduring stand-off can advance the debate. (...) We show that interpretations of the same set of evidence—for homeopathy and for conventional medicine—can diverge. Prior disbelief in homeopathy is rooted in the perceived implausibility of any conceivable mechanism of action. Using the ‘crossword analogy’, we demonstrate that plausibility bias impedes assessment of the clinical evidence. Sweeping statements about the scientific impossibility of homeopathy are themselves unscientific: scientific statements must be precise and testable. There is growing evidence that homeopathic preparations can exert biological effects; due consideration of such research would reduce the influence of prior beliefs on the assessment of systematic review evidence. (shrink)

Homeopathy is controversial and hotly debated. The conclusions of systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials of homeopathy vary from ‘comparable to conventional medicine’ to ‘no evidence of effects beyond placebo’. It is claimed that homeopathy conflicts with scientific laws and that homoeopaths reject the naturalistic outlook, but no evidence has been cited. We are homeopathic physicians and researchers who do not reject the scientific outlook; we believe that examination of the prior beliefs underlying this enduring stand-off can advance the debate. (...) We show that interpretations of the same set of evidence—for homeopathy and for conventional medicine—can diverge. Prior disbelief in homeopathy is rooted in the perceived implausibility of any conceivable mechanism of action. Using the ‘crossword analogy’, we demonstrate that plausibility bias impedes assessment of the clinical evidence. Sweeping statements about the scientific impossibility of homeopathy are themselves unscientific: scientific statements must be precise and testable. There is growing evidence that homeopathic preparations can exert biological effects; due consideration of such research would reduce the influence of prior beliefs on the assessment of systematic review evidence. (shrink)

Much attention has been paid recently to the role of anomalous experiences in the aetiology of certain types of psychopathology, e.g. in the formation of delusions. We examine, instead, the top-down influence of pre-existing beliefs and affective factors in shaping an individual’s characterisation of anomalous sensory experiences. Specifically we investigated the effects of paranormal beliefs and alexithymia in determining the intensity and quality of an altered state of consciousness . Fifty five participants took part in a sweat lodge ceremony, a (...) traditional shamanic ritual which was unfamiliar to them. Participants reported significant alterations in their state of consciousness, quantified using the ‘APZ’ questionnaire, a standardized measure of ASC experience. Participants endorsing paranormal beliefs compatible with shamanic mythology, and those showing difficulty identifying feelings scored higher on positive dimensions of ASC experience. Our findings demonstrate that variation in an individual’s characterisation of anomalous experiences is nuanced by pre-existing beliefs and affective factors. (shrink)

In his 1963 article, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”1 Edmund Gettier devised a pair of counterexamples designed to illustrate that knowledge cannot be adequately defined as justified true belief. The basic idea behind both of his counterexamples is that one can be justified in believing a falsehood P from which one deduces a truth Q, in which case one has a justified true belief in Q but does not know Q. Gettier’s article inspired numerous other counterexamples, and (...) the search was on for a fourth condition of knowledge, one that could be added to justification, truth, and belief to produce an adequate analysis of knowledge. (shrink)

Clinical research employing the randomized clinical trial has, traditionally, been understood to pose an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, each patient ought to get the treatment that best meets her needs, as judged by the patient in consultation with her doctor. On the other hand, the method most helpful to advancing our understanding about what treatments are indeed best able to meet patient needs is the randomized trial, which necessitates that each patient's care is decided not by (...) physician judgment or patient choice but instead by random assignment. The tension can be described as a conflict between the interests of individual patients who are sick today, and the interests of the group of people who will become sick in the future and would benefit from advances in medical understanding. How one ought to balance these important and often competing interests is an important ethical question that resists easy resolution. (shrink)

Clinical research employing the randomized clinical trial has, traditionally, been understood to pose an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, each patient ought to get the treatment that best meets her needs, as judged by the patient in consultation with her doctor. On the other hand, the method most helpful to advancing our understanding about what treatments are indeed best able to meet patient needs is the randomized trial, which necessitates that each patient's care is decided not by (...) physician judgment or patient choice but instead by random assignment. The tension can be described as a conflict between the interests of individual patients who are sick today, and the interests of the group of people who will become sick in the future and would benefit from advances in medical understanding. How one ought to balance these important and often competing interests is an important ethical question that resists easy resolution. (shrink)

In criminal trials with a jury, judges have many opportunities to engage in adjudicative fact-finding before the jury retires. English law has no conceptual framework for examining this judicial fact-finding which encompasses two categories of collateral fact (preliminary and underlying fact) and foreign law. A third category of collateral fact (conditional fact) is decided by the jury. The article examines the nature of judicial fact-finding and the history and rationale for this allocation of fact-finding responsibility between judge and jury.

This chapter contains section titled: An Unfortunate Assumption Sosa on Knowledge and Justification The Distinctness of Justification and Knowledge.

This article deals with political socialization and political participation, in the context of visiting phenomenon, in Turkey. We took the Ali Baba Tomb in central Sivas and Celtek Baba Tomb in Celtek village as the sample of our study. In the study, political socialization and participation was seen as a dialectical process between individual and society. Visiting phenomenon embodying a rich historical, religious and cultural accumulation is important in that it defines the religious tendency of huge masses. As a matter (...) of fact, they have realized their potitical socialization in a pretty much authentic culture with different interests, duties, roles and positions. At the same time, they have shown their political participation with reference to the religious world of meaning. -/- SUMMARY In the contrast to the secular paradigm, religion continues to keep its reciprocal relations with the whole social system without giving an opportunity to any speculation. Religion and politics are two important fields in which this living relationship is stood for institutional structures. This article focuses on political socialization and political participation in Turkey by taking into consideration the phenomenon of visiting. The question of how the visiting phenomenon provided an input to the political system in terms of political socialization and political participation constitutes the problem of the research. Ali Baba Tomb in the center of Sivas province and Celtek Baba Tomb situated in central Celtek Village were selected as samples for the study. The political socialization and participation were talked with 33 visitors who had been selected randomly from different days between September and December 2015 and were tried to understand the data obtained by semi-standardized interview form. It has been examined in terms of its historical development and orientation of relationship between the visiting phenomenon in the research and the political system. For this reason, the basic methodological acceptance of the research has been to understand and interpret political socialization and participation in its specific environment. In this framework, firstly, the socialization of the sample in the context of family, school, mass communication and social environment was evaluated. Later, it has been tried to understand the religiousness in the context of the visiting through the same group. Their political participation has also been resolved according to the classification of Milbrath and Goel’s hierarchical political participation level through the field of political socialization and religiousness. Finally, this research, which is considered as a singular case study, has been subjected to a systematic and phenomenological analysis according to gender, age, education and belief variables on the basis of data obtained through problem-centered interviewing and participatory observation. The visiting in a phenomenological sense involves a trip and travel made with certain requests to the people who are believed to have been buried in places such as tombs, attributed to certain spiritual powers and virtues. The visiting phenomenon in the field of research had brought a rich historical and cultural content, exceeding a simple grave visit. Today, in the religious and traditional meaning world the traumas caused by the modernization and other socio-psychological thrillers have brought a different interest in Turkish society than ever before. The visiting phenomenon has created a continuity with a perception of sanctity and understanding which were shaped by an interaction with many different cultures, pre-Islamic beliefs and eventually mystical and charismatic personalities. However, the visiting phenomenon according to the severity of the individual and social crises experienced in the modern period has also revealed some variations that included popular patterns in both structural and practical contexts. Thus, the visiting phenomenon today is seen in a change by creating new universes appropriate to tradition in different social categories. In the modern era the influence of this change on the political culture is evident. This effect is generally related to the social structure of Turkish society and manifests itself as a closing within the sense of protection of the world of meaning. The visiting phenomenon, which has a special place in the religious life of very large masses in Turkey, has created a peculiar structure of political socialization and political participation around a profound historical accumulation. The participants have realized their political socialization in a unique cultural environment. This culture was formed in the context of family, school, mass communication and social environment. The dramatic situations that have taken place in the process have brought the important socialization problems in this environment. The community associations, the system of obsolete values, the distorted hierarchical relationships and the insecure environments created no longer lead to the searching for meaning by them. These people, who express themselves not like politics (27 people) at last, instead of expressing politics themselves with ideological concepts like ideological rightist, leftist, Islamist, communities people (ʾumma), Kemalist (5 people), but rather Turkish, Muslim, homeland, nation, human and righteousness as the concepts and words to prefer to identify. This should be a socialization that they carry out by transferring the objective world they created outwardly around a set of meanings to their subjective consciousness again. It should be a socialization again that they carry out by transferring the objective world they created outwardly around a set of meanings to their subjective consciousness. The visitors have carried out a political participation with the accumulation created by this field of political socialization. They saw themselves as often religious and the visiting activity as a sign of religiosity. As a result, the visiting a tomb could have been a simple manifestation of inner happiness and ease in a happy moment or an entertainment as much as it was in distress in this environment. The mystical attitude which is far from the world that many poor people built around the visit has caused them to put reserves in the political institution that represents a secular field. As a matter of fact, the visitors often characterize the world with the terms like empty, lie, trial, and so on. Politics, on the other hand, had been seen as a relationship of interest, cheating and lying. It has been understood that it provides a political input in the framework that Milbrath and Goel conceptualize as audience actions when we look at the political participation of the visiting phenomenon in the Sivas universe. According to this visit, in the sample of the phenomenon 29 people of the participants said that they are not open to the politics while 4 of them said that they are open to the politics. However, given that voting attitudes in the elections, only 2 of the participants did not see this very important; others (31 people) regard voting as a responsibility in the name of country, nation, country or even religion. From time to time, those who say either that they have started to the political discussions or that they have participated in political debates (11 people of them) are less than those who have never attended this kind of debates (22 people). In this sample, the number of people trying to persuade a person to vote for a particular party is 6; the number of people carrying a rosette of a party or hanging the symbols of the party to the house, to the car, was only 4 among those participants. Visiting people usually provide the political socializations in a fatalistic and restrictive environment. Their political participation is also in accord with the symbolic world of this hierarchical structure in which life is defined by certain rules. Therefore, they had produced an unquestionability of the authority as it is in family as well as political institutions. The politics is frightening for them; it is not interested in them and they should be away from it. (shrink)

Hitherto, the contribution of philosophers to Neuroscience and Education has tended to be less than enthusiastic, though there are some notable exceptions. Meanwhile, the pervasive influence of neuromyths on education policy, curriculum design and pedagogy in schools is well documented. Indeed, philosophers have sometimes used the prevalence of neuromyths in education to bolster their opposition to neuroscience in teacher education courses. By contrast, this article views the presence of neuromyths in education as a call for remedial action, including philosophical action. (...) The empirical basis of this article is a survey, conducted over a period of three years, involving a total of 1144 first-year pre-service student teachers, which revealed alarming levels of belief in five common neuromyths related to children and learning. This study also attempted to probe the origins of these mistaken beliefs and why they gain traction. The findings suggest an urgent need in teacher education to address the problem of neuromyths, not simply because they are mistaken, they often misdirect valuable resources and mislabel children. The article calls for a compulsory unit on neuroscience and education in all courses of teacher education. Moreover, teaching neuroscience in education cannot be left to specialist neuroscientists, philosophers must be involved. (shrink)

My aim is to suggest that there is a case for using a randomised consent design in some neonatal trials. As an example I use the trials of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) in neonates suffering pulmonary hypertension. In some trials the process of obtaining consent has the potential to harm the subject, for example, by disappointing those who end in the control group and by creating additional anxiety at times of acute illness. An example of such were the trials of (...) extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) in neonates suffering pulmonary hypertension. Pre-randomised consent could avoid or lessen these harms. However, a number of ethical objections are made to these research designs. They involve denial of information, using people, denial of choice, and "overselling" of allocated treatment. Furthermore, they are the wrong response; better communication might be the answer, for example. I argue that these objections are not completely persuasive. However, they are enough to suggest caution in the use of such designs. (shrink)

Background Conducting clinical trials with pre-term or sick infants is important if care for this population is to be underpinned by sound evidence. Yet, approaching the parents of these infants at such a difficult time raises challenges to obtaining valid informed consent for such research. In this study, we asked, What light does the analytical literature cast on an ethically defensible approach to obtaining informed consent in perinatal clinical trials? -/- Methods In a systematic search, we identified 30 studies. We (...) began our analysis by applying philosophical frameworks, which were then refined as concepts emerged from the analytical studies, to present a coherent picture of a broad literature. -/- Results Between them, the studies addressed four themes. The first three were the ethical basis for parental informed consent for neonatal and/or perinatal research, the validity of parental consent in this context, and the range of possible options in methods for gaining consent. The last was the issue of risk and the possibility of a double-standard or asymmetry in the current approaches to the requirement for consent for research and consent for clinical treatment. -/- Conclusions In addressing these issues, the analysed studies showed that, whilst there are a variety of possible defences for seeking parental ‘consent’ to neonatal and/or perinatal clinical trials, these are all consistent with the strongly and widely held view that it is important that parents do give (or decline) consent for such research. So far as the method of obtaining consent is concerned, none of the existing consent processes reviewed by the research is satisfactory, and there are philosophical reasons for supposing that at least some parents will fail to give valid consent in a neonatal context. Furthermore, in giving parental ‘consent’ in a perinatal context, parents are authorising infant participation, not giving ‘proxy consent’. Finally, there are reasons for giving weight to both parental ‘consent’ and the infant’s best interests in both research and clinical treatment. However, there are also reasons to treat these factors differently in the two contexts, and this may be partly due to the differing relevance of risk in each case. A significant gap is the lack of any detailed discussion of a process of emergency and/or urgent ‘assent’, in which parents assent or refuse their baby’s participation as best they can during the emergency and later give full consent to continuing participation and follow-up. (shrink)

Over the past decade AIDS research has turned toward the use of pharmacology in HIV prevention, including pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP): the use of HIV medication as a means of preventing HIV acquisition in those who do not have it. This paper explores the contradictory reasons offered in support of PrEP—to empower women, to provide another risk-reduction option for gay men—as the context for understanding the social meaning of the experimental trials that appear to show that PrEP works in gay men (...) and heterosexual couples but not single women. The PrEP debates reveal the different ideas about “demedicalization” in the earlier gay health and women’s health movements and highlight the relationship between health activism and critique of research ethics in the context of a global pharmaceutical market. (shrink)

In 1590, after Norway’s most famous witch trial, Anne Pedersdotter was burned alive. Resource scarcity and religious competition transformed an old superstition into a witch craze to which Anne fell victim. Her story became a play in 1908 and a film in 1943. The two adaptations attempt to give Anne’s persecution more modern explanations. In the play Anne Pedersdotter, Anne has psychic powers that make her neighbors think she is a Satanic collaborator. In the film Day of Wrath, Anne (...) embodies humanistic aspirations that would have been delusional in her own era and that are perhaps also poorly adapted to human nature in general. The trial and the two fictional versions of the trial all illustrate how thought patterns that evolved for small groups of foragers can be overstimulated in post-agricultural environments. This article identifies cognitive dispositions that, in periods of crisis, can trigger persecution of outsiders, discusses how those universal mechanisms man­ifest themselves in different cultural contexts, and examines the historically specific beliefs and values that animate the two fictional versions of Anne’s story. The article concludes with reflections on how the evolved cognitive mechanisms that led to beliefs in witchcraft often manifest themselves, in the present, as conspiracy beliefs directed at minorities. (shrink)

Teacher beliefs are a pivotal psychological quality for sustainable teacher development. Previous studies have mainly focused on the beliefs of English-as-a-second/foreign-language teachers, while little attention has been paid to those of Chinese-as-an-additional-language teachers. Particularly, there is a paucity of effort made to develop and validate instrument for measuring pre-service CAL teacher beliefs. Therefore, to further quantify the beliefs of CAL teachers is increasingly called for as an essential means to help teachers sensitize their beliefs system and promote teacher development as (...) a sustainable goal. To be specific, the present study aims to construct a scale for gauging beliefs of pre-service CAL teachers. It firstly conceptualizes the dimensions of pre-service CAL teacher beliefs by means of semantic analysis with ROST CM6, and then cross-validates the reliability and validity of the scale with psychometric methods. Two independent samples composed of 221 and 222 pre-service CAL teachers participated in a questionnaire survey. The two samples were utilized for later Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis, respectively. The two data sets have satisfactory psychometric results, all confirming that the scale subsumes three factors: Beliefs about Chinese Language Teaching, Beliefs about Chinese Language, and Beliefs about Chinese Language Learners. The scale validated in the present study contributes to research on pre-service CAL teacher beliefs, and provides implications for sustainable pre-service CAL teacher training. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problems of justifying and explaining beliefs about facts in the context of civil trials. The first section contains some remarks about the nature of adjudicative fact-finding and highlights the communicative features of deciding about facts in judicial context. In Sect. 2, some difficulties and the incompleteness presented by Bayesian and coherentist frameworks, which are taken as methods suitable to solve the above-mentioned problems, are pointed out. In the third section, the purely epistemic approach to the justification (...) and the explanation of beliefs about facts is abandoned and focus is given to the dialectical nature of civil procedure, where the parties and, particularly, the judge have to make their reasoning clear enough to allow a fruitful and efficient debate about facts. For this purpose, a communication/argumentation system is put forward, consisting of fourteen intertwined rules of discourse. The system embodies the fundamental epistemic principle according to which belief is updated given new evidence, is tailored for abductive inferences and is structured on fundamental concepts of civil procedural law. The fourth section presents an empirical application of the system to a real case. (shrink)

When an agent undergoes fission, how should the beliefs of the fission results relate to the pre-fission beliefs? This question is important for the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, but it is of independent philosophical interest. Among other things, fission scenarios demonstrate that ‘self-locating’ information can affect the probability of uncentred propositions even if an agent has no essentially self-locating uncertainty. I present a general update rule for centred beliefs that gives sensible verdicts in cases of fission, without relying on (...) controversial metaphysical or linguistic assumptions. The rule is supported by the same considerations that support standard conditioning in the traditional framework of uncentred propositions. (shrink)

Background In the EU, clinical assessors, rapporteurs and the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use are obliged to assess the ethical aspects of a clinical development program and include major ethical flaws in the marketing authorization deliberation processes. To this date, we know very little about the manner that these regulators put this obligation into action. In this paper, we intend to look into the manner and the extent that ethical issues discovered during inspection have reached the deliberation processes. (...) Methods To gather data, we used the Dutch Medicines Evaluation Board database and first searched for the inspections, and their accompanying site inspection reports and integrated inspection reports, related to central marketing authorization applications of drugs submitted to the European Medicines Agency from 2011 to 2015. We then extracted inspection findings that were purely of ethical nature, i.e., those that did not affect the benefit/risk balance of the study. Only findings graded at least major by the inspectorate were included. Lastly, to identify how many of the ethically relevant findings reach the application deliberation processes, we extracted the relevant joint response assessment reports and reviewed the sections that discussed inspection findings. Results From 2011 to 2015, there were 390 processed applications, of which 65 had inspection reports and integrated inspection reports accessible via the database of the Dutch Medicines Evaluation Board. Of the 65, we found ERFs in 37. The majority of the ERFs were graded as major and half of the time it was informed-consent related. A third of these findings were related to research ethics committee processes and requirements. Of the 37 inspections with ERFs, 30 were endorsed in the integrated inspection reports as generally GCP compliant. Day 150 joint response assessment reports and Day 180 list of outstanding issues were reviewed for all 37 inspections, and none of the ERFs were carried over in any of the assessment reports or list of outstanding issues. Conclusion None of the ethically relevant findings, all of which were graded as major or critical in integrated inspection reports, were explicitly carried over to the joint assessment reports. This calls for more transparency in EMA application deliberations on how ERFs are considered, if at all, in the decision-making processes. (shrink)

This paper addresses the selective mechanisms by which criminal proceedings produce strong arguments. It does so by focusing on the failing of argument themes (topoi) in the course of criminal proceedings, rather than on their career. In a further step, the notion of failing is bound to learning: different forms of failing point at different ways and places of learning. The study is comparative, relating cases from four different legal regimes (England, USA, Italy and Germany) that are taken from four (...) extensive ethnographic studies in defense lawyer’s firms. We will track down the failures of topoi at three different stages (pre-trial, trial, and deliberation) in our different legal regimes. Failing occurs in all proceedings in various modes and at different stages. We argue that those modes as well as the different stages at which they occur point at the spots in the respective procedures that allow for learning about the inherent conceptions of “good reasons.”. (shrink)

The “pre-intentional” is a proposed category of mental states that conditions a subject’s experience of what is possible for them by, for example, modifying the motivational efficacy or experienced quality of intentional states, like beliefs or desires, without necessarily modifying their propositional content. Matthew Ratcliffe, who has coined the term, identifies the pre-intentional with existential feelings, senses of possibility like “feeling alive” or “feeling deadened,” and argues that these feelings are conditions of the possibility of the scope and valence of (...) intentional states. Jussi Saarinen questions if existential feelings should be understood as consciously occurring episodes or background affective styles, which has implications for the problem of “bi-directionality”: how or if intentional states might affect the pre-intentional. I first argue that answering Saarinen requires, contra Ratcliffe, the introduction of a feeling-disposition distinction: existential feelings are not pre-intentional structures but ways of becoming aware of the “existential dispositions” that are pre-intentional structures. I then propose a new definition of the pre-intentional: existential dispositions are a category of states that are introspectively opaque and so ambiguous between being an intentional state, like a “quasi-belief,” or non-intentional state, like a reflex. This allows for a novel account of what I, following Saarinen’s terminology, call indirect bi-directionality, and thus of indirectly induced existential change, which Ratcliffe only understands as spontaneous. To clarify how intentional states may influence the pre-intentional also clarifies how change in, say, beliefs about what one’s experiences of depression signify may induce existential change that alleviates the suffering of these experiences. (shrink)

This review discusses the thesis advanced by Sarah Summers in her recent book. In particular it examines the three radical claims that structure her argument. First, that the commonly used analytical distinction between adversarial and inquisitorial traditions in criminal procedure should be abandoned. Secondly, that since the Continental reforms of the 19th century, criminal procedure can best be understood in terms of a single European procedural tradition. Thirdly, that the European Court of Human Rights has misconstrued the logic of that (...) single European procedural tradition by failing to understand that it involves the rejection of a ‘determinative’ pre-trial phase. Each of Summers’ three arguments is subjected to critical analysis and ultimately rejected as innovative and stimulating but flawed. (shrink)

According to the JUSTIFIED FAIR COINS principle, if I know that a coin is fair, and I lack justification for believing that it won’t be flipped, then I lack justification for believing that it won’t land tails. What this principle says, in effect, is that the only way to have justification for believing that a fair coin won’t land tails, is by having justification for believing that it won’t be flipped at all. Although this seems a plausible and innocuous principle, (...) in a recent paper Dorr, Goodman and Hawthorne use it in devising an intriguing puzzle which places all justified beliefs about the future in jeopardy. They point out, further, that one very widespread theory of justification predicts that JUSTIFIED FAIR COINS is false, giving us additional reason to reject it. In this paper, I will attempt to turn this dialectic around. I will argue that JUSTIFIED FAIR COINS does not inevitably lead to scepticism about the future, and the fact that it is incompatible with a widespread theory of justifi... (shrink)

Mary Winsor (2003) argues against the received view that pre-Darwinian taxonomy was characterized mainly by essentialism. She argues, instead, that the methods of pre-Darwinian taxonomists, in spite of whatever their beliefs, were that of clusterists, so that the received view, propagated mainly by certain modern biologists and philosophers of biology, should at last be put to rest as a myth. I argue that shes right when it comes to higher taxa, but wrong when it comes the most important category of (...) all, the species category. (shrink)