The Efficient Market Hypothesis often seems to suggest only that most people cannot outguess the financial markets. But the originator of the hypothesis, Eugene Fama, made the stronger claim that people cannot outguess the financial markets because financial-market prices are correct: They incorporate all known information accurately. This view omits the role that human traders’ interpretations of information must play if the information is to prompt them to buy or sell. Buyers and sellers disagree about the meaning of current information, (...) so at least half of them must be wrong. Bringing in many more (but equally fallible) people to predict the future does not somehow make their (collective) answer “right.” This is a logical disproof of the Fama hypothesis, but the inherently speculative nature of financial markets makes its empirical falsification (or verification) ambiguous if not impossible. The hypothesis must therefore be considered an unscientific article of faith. (shrink)

The Efficient Market Hypothesis often seems to suggest only that most people cannot outguess the financial markets. But the originator of the hypothesis, Eugene Fama, made the stronger claim that people cannot outguess the financial markets because financial-market prices are correct: They incorporate all known information accurately. This view omits the role that human traders’ interpretations of information must play if the information is to prompt them to buy or sell. Buyers and sellers disagree about the meaning of current information, (...) so at least half of them must be wrong. Bringing in many more (but equally fallible) people to predict the future does not somehow make their (collective) answer “right.” This is a logical disproof of the Fama hypothesis, but the inherently speculative nature of financial markets makes its empirical falsification (or verification) ambiguous if not impossible. The hypothesis must therefore be considered an unscientific article of faith. (shrink)

This essay offers a defense of ‘intellectual authority’, primarily by pointing out the untoward implications of its conceptual opposite, ‘institutional authority’, in a wide variety of contexts. An opening discussion explores conditions for the possibility of intellectual authority in legal, humanistic, and aesthetic disciplines. Social science literature documenting and describing the biasing influence of institutional authority is then canvassed and analyzed in some detail. A final section assays the theoretical significance of various efforts to eliminate non‐intellectual bias and influence, with (...) special reference to the example of “blind reviewing’ of scholarly manuscripts. (shrink)

What does mean in constitutional First Amendment law and in ordinary language and the philosophy of language? Under what circumstances does intentional action count as speech? Can communication be unintentional? And what follows (in law) from the fact that almost any action can be made expressive?

Religious and Ethical Perspectives on Global Migration examines the complicated social ethics of migration in today's world. Editors Elizabeth W. Collier and Charles R. Strain bring the perspectives of an international group of scholars toward a theory of justice and ethical understanding for the nearly two hundred million migrants who have left their homes seeking asylum from political persecution, greater freedom and safety, economic opportunity, or reunion with family members.

This previously-unpublished essay by the late Charles W. Mills (1951–2021) seeks to demonstrate the racially-structured character of the universe created by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Written long before the popular film series, the essay critically examines Tolkien's novels and comments on the nature of fictional creation. Mills argues that Tolkien designs a racial hierarchy in the novels that recapitulates the central racist myth of European thought.

In few cases among modern religious ethicists are the contemporary issues concerning the problem of norms and of criteria more intriguingly brought to the fore than in the ethics of Martin Buber.

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience.

In this article the author responds to the mini-symposium on his work provided by Kathryn Gines and Shannon Sullivan, both of whom focus on the issue of intersectionality. Gines's article looks at the treatment of race and gender in one of the chapters in Mills's book with Carole Pateman, Contract and Domination. Her major criticism centers on what she sees as Mills's failure to recognize nonwhite men's patriarchal domination of nonwhite women. However, the present article claims that this criticism is (...) simply a misreading of what Mills says in the chapter. Sullivan's article reviews the various stages in Mills's career path, with special attention to race and class. Her major criticism is that while nominally conceding intersectionality, Mills still holds on to the assumption that different variables can be discretely singled out. In reply, this article argues that a recognition of intersectionality need not commit one to rejecting claims about the possible differential causal and explanatory significance of the intersecting variables. (shrink)

Academic medical ethics must be a bulwark against a disturbing trend toward post-truth cultures. Activism of course has its place in massive cultural debates like abortion. The fact that so many people care so deeply about these debates is part of what makes them so important. But especially when coming from clinicians, academics, and others to whom we entrust the care of our public discourse, interventions into the debates must be disciplined by a thoroughgoing commitment to engage with the available (...) data to back up the central claims even when those claims seem like common sense—perhaps especially when they seem like common sense. (shrink)

Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 60-70.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This essay tries to develop a “black radical Kantianism”—that is, a Kantianism informed by the black experience in modernity. After looking briefly at socialist and feminist appropriations of Kant, I argue that an analogous black radical appropriation should draw on the distinctive social ontology and view of the state associated with the black radical tradition. In ethics, this would mean working with a (color-conscious rather than colorblind) social ontology of white persons and black sub-persons and then asking what respect for (...) oneself and others would require under those circumstances. In political philosophy, it would mean framing the state as a Rassenstaat (a racial state) and then asking what measures of corrective justice would be necessary to bring about the ideal Rechtsstaat. (shrink)

‘Racial justice’ is a term widely used in everyday discourse, but little explored in philosophy. In this essay, I look at racial justice as a concept, trying to bring out its complexities, and urging a greater engagement by mainstream political philosophers with the issues that it raises. After comparing it to other varieties of group justice and injustice, I periodize racial injustice, relate it to European expansionism and argue that a modified Rawlsianism relying on a different version of the thought (...) experiment could come up with suitable principles of corrective racial justice. (shrink)

Abstract:Therapeutic misconception (TM)—when clinical research participants fail to adequately grasp the difference between participating in a clinical trial and receiving ordinary clinical care—has long been recognized as a significant problem in consent to clinical trials. We suggest that TM does not primarily reflect inadequate disclosure or participants’ incompetence. Instead, TM arises from divergent primary cognitive frames. The researchers’ frame places the clinical trial in the context of scientific designs for assessing intervention efficacy. In contrast, most participants have a cognitive frame (...) that is personal and focused primarily on their medical problems. To illustrate this, we draw on interview material from both clinical researchers and participants in clinical trials. We suggest that reducing TM requires encouraging subjects to adjust their frame, not just add information to their existing frame. What is necessary is ascientific reframingof participation in a clinical trial. (shrink)

Foundations of the theory of signs.--Signs, language, and behavior.--Five semiotical studies.

The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions (...) to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 56, Issue 4, Page 1008-1026, December 2021.

ABSTRACT The publication of George Yancy's latest book, Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher (2020), provides a welcome opportunity to reflect not just on the book itself but on ‘Black’ public philosophy and how it should be conceptualised. In the first part of the essay, I look at public philosophy as a recent self‐conscious exercise in the profession and then – citing Critical Theory's coinage from decades ago of the idea of a ‘counterpublic’ – raise the (...) question of whether the concept of a ‘Black counterpublic philosophy’ might not be a better designation. The second part defends this claim by enumerating some of the key obstacles facing Black philosophers in the field: a minuscule population, a stigmatising identity shaped by the legacy of racial slavery in modernity, the denial of a recognised philosophical tradition, and a racial research focus at odds with the discipline's self‐conception as removed from the corporeal. Finally, the third part situates Yancy's work and achievement against this background, while warning (as illustrated by the virulent backlash he has encountered) of the dangers of such an enterprise. (shrink)

Voluntariness of consent to research has not been sufficiently explored through empirical research. The aims of this study were to develop a more comprehensive approach to assessing voluntariness and to generate preliminary data on the extent and correlates of limitations on voluntariness. We developed a questionnaire to evaluate subjects’ reported motivations and constraints on voluntariness. 88 subjects in five different areas of clinical research—substance abuse, cancer, HIV, interventional cardiology, and depression—were assessed. Subjects reported a variety of motivations for participation. Offers (...) of financial incentives were common but not influential, pressures from others were rare, and no threats were reported. However, certain financial incentives and—paradoxically—altruistic motivations led some subjects to feel more constrained. Consistent with previous studies, no one pattern of motivation was common to all research subjects. There was little evidence of constrained voluntariness, but some suggestion of areas of concern. Voluntariness appears to be susceptible to systematic empirical investigation. (shrink)

The new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on the Use of a Single Institutional Review Board (sIRB) for Multi-Site Research was adopted primarily to simplify and speed the review of complex multisite clinical trials. However, speeding review requires overcoming a number of obstacles. Perhaps the most substantial obstacle is the time and effort needed to develop reliance agreements among the participating sites. We conducted 102 semistructured interviews with sIRB personnel, including directors, chairs, reviewers, and staff, from 20 IRBs that (...) acted as sIRBs for multisite research, including 6 commercial/independent sIRBs, and 10 university-based academic and 4 federal sIRBs. Almost without exception, the interviewees agreed that reliance agreements were complex, difficult to develop, and time-consuming. A major problem for relying sites was that different agreements specified different responsibilities for the relying sites. Attitudes differed about whether these problems will be resolved as IRB staff and managers become more experienced with sIRBs. However it is clear that the process of developing reliance agreements must be simplified. Federal assistance in standardizing at least some sections of reliance agreements might reduce the difficulties involved. (shrink)

Drawing on the legacy of prominent pragmatic philosophers and political economists—C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons—Charles W. Anderson creatively brings pragmatism and liberalism together, striving to temper the excesses of both and to fashion a broader vision of the proper domain of political reason.

After a brief summary of the 17 essays in Sally Haslanger’s (2012) collection, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, I raise questions in two areas, the defense of constructionism and the definition of gender and race in terms of social oppression. I cite Robin Andreasen’s and Philip Kitcher’s essays arguing (in different ways) that races are both biologically real and socially constructed, and also Joshua Glasgow’s claim that constructionist arguments ultimately fail. I then cite Jennifer Saul’s critique that “oppression” (...) definitions of gender and race run into problematic counterexamples, and add some other points arising from the different histories of gender and racial categories and realities. As someone sympathetic to constructionism myself, my aim is not a critique of Haslanger but rather an inquiry as to how she thinks (we) constructionists should answer such challenges. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in HistoryCharles W. J. WithersI. IntroductionA few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits—and consequences—of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not been before), the (...) advert proclaimed "Geography is History." What the advert signalled to as the "end" of geography in the sense of the social gradients associated with space and distance is what is known, variously, as "time-space convergence" and "time-space distanciation."1 The terms embrace not just the "collapse" of geographical space given technical advances (in travel time and in communications—consequences of what Castells calls "the information age" and "the network society"2), but also the idea that the modern world has become [End Page 637] more homogenized. One place is now much the same as another. Further, given the likelihood of such technical and cultural changes continuing into the future, geographical distinctiveness, evident in the particularity of place, would be a thing of the past: geography would indeed be history. There is, of course, much evidence to the contrary: that, in the face of "globalisation," questions of locality, sense of place and of identity in place matter now more than ever. Even, then, as Francis Fukuyama cautioned against the "death" of liberal democratic politics as The End of History,3 geography—that is, geography understood as questions to do with place, and questions to do with where you are in the world as part of questions about how you are and who you are in the world—has had considerably heightened significance and for some places and people more than others.4These notions of place—as a particular location, and the character or sense of place—are only part of the meanings associated with place in geographical and in historical work. Like space, its regular epistemic dancing partner in geographical ubiquity and metaphysical imprecision, place is a widespread yet complex term. What follows is historiographical in focus and, of necessity, partial in range. I offer a historiographical survey of the term place, principally but not alone within recent work in geography. In more detail, and with reference to one of the strong senses in which place is used, namely that of locale, "the local," or localness, I trace here the connections between place, space, and the idea of the local as evident in recent work in history and in geography, especially within the history and the geography of science. Particular attention is paid in this context to the distinctive features of what we may think of as the "spatial turn" in the history of science by looking at the idea of place and space in recent work in Enlightenment studies. My argument is three-fold. Notions of place and space, much debated by geographers, have been as central a concern for intellectual historians and historians of science as for philosophers and others, but they have been differently expressed. There is, I shall argue, value in looking at these different views in order to understand that whilst place is a commonplace term it is not agreed upon: working with imprecision has been both opportunity and restriction. In relation to work within the history of science and in Enlightenment studies, consideration of the so-called "spatial turn," of place [End Page 638] as social practice and of placing as a process in accounting for the uneven movement of ideas over space and time may help provide some precision and strengthen connections between geography and history.II. Place (In Geography): A Partial HistoriographyPlace is one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography. It is also one of the most problematic.5 Place, or small-scale regional space, features as a subdivision within the Classical tripartite division of cosmography (the earth in relation to other planetary bodies), geography (the earth as a whole) and chorography (parts of the earth or regional geography). So, too, does the distinction between chorography and chronology as... (shrink)

Institutional Review Boards are mandated to carry out the requirements of the Common Rule, and it is widely agreed that they are appropriate and necessary mechanisms to ensure the ethical conduct of human research. In this paper, we suggest that the changes proposed in ANPRM, although generally helpful, fail to take into consideration how IRBs actually review applications and therefore do not adequately address some of the problems that may be leading to ineffective human subject protection.

The federal Common Rule, which governs the conduct of research with human subjects, specifies the criteria and procedures by which Institutional Review Boards should review such research. Although there is wide agreement that IRBs, or Research Ethics Committees as they are called in most of the world, are essential to assuring that human subjects research meets common standards of ethics, IRBs have always come under considerable criticism. Some have critiqued IRBs for using important resources inefficiently, including the large amount of (...) time researchers put into submitting applications, modifications, and reports and delaying the start of data collection within the limited time that grants and contracts provide. Others have critiqued the inconsistency of review of multi-site projects. (shrink)

For several decades, Dr. Morris has worked primarily with twoproblems: the development of a general theory of signs, and thedevelopment of a general theory of value. He approached both problemsin terms of George Mead's theory of action or behavior. This bookbrings together these two lines of development. For several decades, Dr. Morris has worked primarily with two problems: the development of a general theory of signs, and the development of a general theory of value. He approached both problems in terms (...) of George Mead's theory of action or behavior. This book brings together these two lines of development. In many languages there is a term like the English "meaning" which has two poles: that which something signifies and the value or significance of what is signified. The nature of signification and significance, as well as their relations within human behavior, is the subject matter of this book. This book is addressed to philosophers and to students of the behavioral sciences, but it will also appeal to anyone seriously interested in the study of human communication. (shrink)