Courts reviewing gun laws that burden Second Amendment rights ask how effectively the laws serve public safety — yet typically discuss public safety narrowly, without considering the many dimensions of that interest gun laws serve. “Public safety” is a social good: it includes the public's interest in physical safety as a good in itself, and as a foundation for community and for the exercise of constitutional liberties. Gun laws protect bodies from bullets — and Americans' freedom and confidence to participate (...) in every domain of our shared life, whether to attend school, to shop, to listen to a concert, to gather for prayer, or to assemble in peaceable debate. Courts must enforce the Second Amendment in ways that respect the public health and constitutional reasons a democracy seeks to protect public safety. Lawyers and citizen advocates can help, by creating a richer record of their reasons in seeking to enact laws regulating guns.This inquiry is urgent at a time when the Supreme Court's new conservative majority may expand restrictions on gun laws beyond the right to keep arms for self-defense in the home first recognized inDistrict of Columbia v. Hellerin 2008. (shrink)

This chapter analyses competing claims on dignity in constitutional judgments about abortion that impose on government a constitutional duty to protect unborn life. Over decades of debate, courts deciding abortion cases have adopted different approaches to reconciling commitments to dignity as liberty, dignity as equality, and dignity as life. Courts vary over time and across borders in the ways they require respect for dignity in the regulation of abortion, as the essay shows by comparing leading German abortion judgments and cases (...) of several other jurisdictions. This analysis suggests that evolving conceptions of women as deliberative agents play a role in the abortion case law, even in jurisdictions that constitutionalize a duty to protect unborn life. Attention to the ways law coordinates competing claims on dignity in the abortion cases offers a fascinating window on the roles dignity can play in mediating conflict within a constitutional community. (shrink)

We examine when and how police officers may avoid costly errors under stress by leveraging theoretical and empirical work on the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat. According to the BPS model, in motivated performance contexts (e.g., test taking, athletics), the evaluation of situational and task demands in relation to one’s perceived resources available to cope with those demands engenders distinct patterns of peripheral physiological responding. Individuals experience more challenge-like states in which blood circulates more efficiently in the periphery (...) when they evaluate their coping resources as meeting or exceeding the task demands. Conversely, individuals experience more threat-like states in which blood circulates less efficiently in the periphery when they view the situation or task demands as exceeding their coping resources. Patterns of response consistent with challenge and threat states have been shown to predict important performance and decision-making outcomes in stressful contexts, and repeated experiences of threat-like patterns of physiological activity are thought to have detrimental effects on long-term cardiovascular health. To date, however, research has not used the biopsychosocial model to understand police decision-making under stress. Here, we review relevant empirical work from the perspective of the BPS model concerning how minority status and power can shape challenge and threat responding and contribute to decision making under stress. We then detail a research agenda aimed at improving the translational value of research being conducted within the BPS model for understanding complex performance and decision making in the real world, including among law enforcement personnel. (shrink)

This paper presents and applies a conceptual framework to address human vulnerability to climate change. Drawing upon social risk management and asset-based approaches, the conceptual framework provides a unifying lens to examine links between risks, adaptation, and vulnerability. The result is an integrated approach to increase the capacity of society to manage climate risks with a view to reduce the vulnerability of households and maintain or increase the opportunities for sustainable development. We identify 'no-regrets' adaptation interventions, meaning actions that generate (...) net social benefits under all future scenarios of climate change and impacts. We also make the case for greater external support for community-based adaptation, discuss the role of social protection, and propose a research agenda. (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

Law plays a critical role in all stages of a public health emergency, providing an infrastructure for planning, response, and recovery efforts. A growing body of research has underscored the potential for certain types of state laws, such as those granting liability protections to responders, to influence the public health workforce's participation in emergency responses. It is therefore especially important to focus on particular state-level laws that may be associated with individuals' increased or decreased willingness to respond. We conducted a (...) systematic identification and analysis of specific state emergency preparedness laws that may affect individuals' willingness to respond and offer recommendations for policymakers seeking to promote more effective responses to public health emergencies. (shrink)

Law plays a critical role in all stages of a public health emergency, including planning, response, and recovery. Public health emergencies introduce health concerns at the population level through, for example, the emergence of a novel infectious disease. In the United States, at the federal, state, and local levels, laws provide an infrastructure for public health emergency preparedness and response efforts: they grant the government the ability to officially declare an emergency, authorize responders to act, and facilitate interjurisdictional coordination. Law (...) is perhaps most visible during an emergency when the president or a state's governor issues a disaster declaration establishing the temporal and geographic parameters for the response and making financial and other resources available. This legal authority has increasingly been used during the last decade. (shrink)

I discuss the roles of journalism in aspirational democracies, and argue that they generate set of pressures on attention that apply to people by virtue of the type of society they live in. These pressures, I argue, generate a problem of democratic attention: for journalism to play its roles in democracy, the attentional demands must be met, but there are numerous obstacles to meeting them. I propose a principle of salience to guide the selection and framing of news stories that (...) I argue may help address the puzzle: the public-as-protagonist principle. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, I consider an argument of Harvey Siegel's according to which there can be no hypothetical normativity anywhere unless there is categorical normativity in epistemology. The argument fails because it falsely assumes people must be bound by epistemic norms in order to have justified beliefs.

In discussions of perception and its relation to knowledge, it is common to distinguish what one comes to believe on the basis of perception from the distinctively perceptual basis of one's belief. The distinction can be drawn in terms of propositional contents: there are the contents that a perceiver comes to believe on the basis of her perception, on the one hand; and there are the contents properly attributed to perception itself, on the other. Consider the content.

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then (...) introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision. (shrink)

Siegel and Byrne debate whether perceptual experiences present rich properties or exclusively thin properties.

In this paper I offer a theory of what makes certain influences on visual experiences by prior mental states (including desires, beliefs, moods, and fears) reduce the justificatory force of those experiences. The main idea is that experiences, like beliefs, can have rationally assessable etiologies, and when those etiologies are irrational, the experiences are epistemically downgraded.

There is an important division in the human mind between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Susanna Siegel argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what we perceive.

I argue that there are phenomenological constraints on what it is to see an object, and that these are overlooked by some theories that offer allegedly sufficient causal and counterfactual conditions on object-seeing.

Can perceptual experiences be states of uncertainty? We might expect them to be, if the perceptual processes from which they're generated, as well as the behaviors they help produce, take account of probabilistic information. Yet it has long been presumed that perceptual experiences purport to tell us about our environment, without hedging or qualifying. Against this long-standing view, I argue that perceptual experiences may well occasionally be states of uncertainty, but that they are never probabilistically structured. I criticize a powerful (...) line of reasoning that we should expect perceptual experience to be probabilistic, given their interfaces with unconscious probabilistic information, with behavior responsive to it, and with credences. (shrink)

chapter on perception and bias including implicit bias.

Since disjunctivists when talking about perception deny that hallucinations and veridical perceptions have a common fundamental nature, they need some other way to account for the fact that these kinds of experiences can ‘seem the same’ from the inside. A natural response is to give a purely epistemic account of hallucination, according to which there is nothing more to hallucinations than their indiscriminability from veridical perceptions. This chapter argues that the epistemic conception of hallucination falters in its treatment of cognitively (...) unsophisticated creatures, and that it cannot respect all the facts about what we can know on the basis of introspection. (shrink)

We offer a framework for assessing what the structure of episodic memory might be, if one accepts the Buddhist denial of persisting selves. This paper is a response to Jonardon Ganeri's paper "Mental time travel and attention", which explores Buddhaghosa's ideas about memory. (It will eventually be published with a reply by Ganeri).

My contribution to the first round of a tetralog with Bill Brewer, Anil Gupta, and John McDowell. Each of us has written a response to the writings of the other three philosophers on the topic "Empirical Reason". My initial contribution focuses on what we know a priori about perception. In the second round, we will each respond to the each writer's first-round contributions.

Natalia Reva's interview with Amina Khelufi, devoted to the status of the oral history of philosophy, modern research in this field and prospects for its development. This interview is an Appendix to Natalia Reva's article published in this issue of Sententiae.

In the current research, using methods of oral history of philosophy, oral communication (in particular, interviews) is considered only as a technical phase in preparing the final text. The author claims that the primary audio or video recordings of such an interview, an "oral draft," should be considered independent material. After all, the written text does not reflect the interlocutors' intonations; comparing the source material and the final text may become important for future researchers. After the transcribed and agreed text (...) of the interview took its final shape, it should be analyzed by the interlocutors and supplemented with a commentary. This commentary aims to (1) clarify vague points of the text and (2) record the further opinions of the interviewer and interviewee. Therefore, the purpose of an interview that uses an oral history of philosophy should be an audio/video recording, a final text, and a commentary. (shrink)

This paper considers the use of outcome measures in the British National Health Service (NHS). Measuring outcomes is a major conceptual and practical problem. Many different measures are currently available yet no consensus has been reached on which should be preferred over others, or about which should take priority when they conflict. Some currently used measures are described, the relationship between these measures and the measured activities are discussed, and fundamental problems with both the measures and their use are revealed. (...) It is shown that however assiduous the search, the ‘perfect’ outcome measure will always remain elusive. (shrink)

Entry in Routledge handbook of skill and expertise. Discusses social perception, perceptual expertise, knowing what things look like, and a bit about about aesthetics at the end.

A summary of The Rationality of Perception, and my replies to symposium papers on it by Andy Clark and Christopher Peacocke.

This chapter argues, using the method of phenomenal contrast, that causation is represented in visual experience. The conclusion is contrasted with the conclusions drawn by Michotte in his book The Perception of Causation.

This is a critical piece on *The Character of Consciousness* by David Chalmers. It focuses on Chalmers's two-stage view of perceptual content and the epistemology of perceptual belief that flows from this theory, and criticizes his theories of Edenic concepts, perceptual acquaintance, and perceptual belief.

Швидкий технологічний прогрес спричинив зрушення інтересів науковців з усього світу в бік когнітивної науки та інформатики, що, безперечно, вплинуло на формування нового типу мислення. Логіка, як наука про специфічний логічний тип людського мислення, не може залишитися осторонь. У статі проаналізовано методологічні засади когнітивістики та дуальність самої науки логіки, які відкривають перспективи їх співпраці. Для цього автор робить історико-методологічний розгляд обох дисциплін. Доводиться, що, з одного боку, формальна логіка багато вкладає в розвиток штучних формалізованих мов, які активно застосовуються для програмування Штучного (...) Інтелекту, а з іншого – неформальна логіка, як і когнітивістика, займається вивченням природньої мови, що дає їй можливість наблизитися до реального людського мислення. Показано, в який спосіб логіка, застосувавши для вивчення реального процесу мислення людей методологічну базу когнітивістики, може розширити межі своїх досліджень з теоретичного поля до практично-експериментального. (shrink)

The author stands that thinking by analogy is a natural instrument human have because of the mirror neurons in our brain. However, is it that infallible to rely on? How can we be sure that our hidden biases will not harm our reflections? Implicit Association Bias (IAB), for instance, is a powerful intruder that affects our understanding, actions, and decisions on the unconscious level by cherishing the stereotypes based on specific characteristics such as ethnicity, sex, race, and so on. To (...) check if there is a correlation between the IAB effect and the people’s capacity to reason logically, the author had created an online-survey. The focus was on analogical reasoning and IAB tests concerning the question of gender equality in science and everyday life and age prejudices. (shrink)

"The Uneasy Heirs of Acquaintance" is my first-round contribution to a 4-way exchange with Bill Brewer, Anil Gupta, and John McDowell. In the first round, each of us writes a commentary on the other three, and in the second round we reply to each other's first-round contributions. This is my second-round contribution.

In this paper I argue that certain type of first-personal causal property, efficacy, is represented in perceptual experience.

This essay focuses on the repeated rhetorical moves through which the third wave autobiographical subject seeks to be real and to speak as part of a collective voice from the next feminist generation. Given that postmodernist, postructuralist, and multiculturalist critiques have shaped the form and the content of third wave expressions of the personal, the study is ultimately concerned with the possibilities and limitations of such theoretical analysis for a third wave of feminist praxis.