For many years now a “principle of uncertainty” has played a major role in all discussion of the problem of scientific law as description of nature. That this principle had its origin in the efforts of science to describe nature is entirely appropriate; that it has had so immediate an effect on philosophic thought is inevitable.It is also inevitable that questions should be raised concerning the meaning of certainty and its reference to descriptive law. Such questions are bound to occur (...) to one who is concerned about the kinds of law in terms of which nature might be described. If these kinds can be considered to be two, one “mechanical,” the other “statistical,” it appears to be an easy step from the assertion of a principle of uncertainty which requires that the description of elemental processes and facts of nature be statistical—in terms of probabilities, that is—to a further assertion that after all a strictly mechanical description of nature is impossible, since the observational data which constitute its material are approximate and probable, and because the laws which provide the formal element of that description can never be more than approximately or probably true. It is concluded, then, that no element of certainty attaches to the so-called mechanical laws, any more than to others that are avowedly statistical. When a prediction is based on either sort of law, it is taken to be a prediction that an event will probablyoccur. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, Indigenous communities have successfully campaigned for greater inclusion in decision-making processes that directly affect their lands and livelihoods. As a result, two important participatory rights for Indigenous peoples have now been widely recognized: the right to consultation and the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). Although these participatory rights are meant to empower the speech of these communities—to give them a proper say in the decisions that most affect them—we argue that the way (...) these rights have been implemented and interpreted sometimes has the opposite effect, of denying them a say or ‘silencing’ them. In support of this conclusion we draw on feminist speech act theory to identify practices of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary group silencing that arise in the context of consultation with Indigenous communities. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore what gives collective testimony its epistemic credentials, through a critical discussion of three competing accounts of the epistemology of collective testimony. According to the first view, collective testimony inherits its epistemic credentials from the beliefs the testimony expresses— where this can be seen either as the beliefs of all or some of the group’s members, or as the beliefs of group itself. The second view denies any necessary connection to belief, claiming instead that the epistemic (...) credentials of collective testimony derive from the reliability or truth-conduciveness of the statement that expresses the testimony. Finally, the third view claims that the epistemic credentials of collective testimony derive from the fact that it involves undertaking a collective commitment to trustworthiness, which makes the group susceptible to rebuke and blame if its testimony is not trustworthy. I argue that this last account holds the most promise for preserving what is distinctive about testimonial knowledge while still underwriting a robust epistemology of collective testimony. (shrink)

According Philip Pettit, suitably organised groups not only possess ‘minds of their own’ but can also ‘make up their minds’ and 'speak for themselves'--where these two capacities enable them to perform as conversable subjects or 'persons'. In this paper I critically examine Pettit's case for group personhood. My first step is to reconstruct his account, explaining first how he understands the two capacities he considers central to personhood – the capacity to ‘make up one’s mind’, and the capacity to ‘speak (...) for oneself’ – before showing how he thinks these can be manifested in groups. With Pettit’s account duly reconstructed, I then turn to criticism, arguing that Pettit’s construal of making up one’s mind does not do proper justice to our first-personal self-understanding, nor to our characteristic interpersonal forms of engagement. This leads me, finally, to consider an alternative construal of ‘making up one’s mind’ and ‘speaking for oneself’ that is associated with the work of Richard Moran and whichargue, could usefully be exteextended to groups. (shrink)

Recent feminist philosophy of language has highlighted the ways that the speech of women can be unjustly impeded, because of the way their gender affects the uptake their speech receives. In this chapter, I explore how similar processes can undermine the speech of a different sort of speaker: Indigenous communities. This involves focusing on Indigeneity rather than gender as the salient social identity, and looking at the ways that group speech, rather than only individual speech, can be unjustly impeded. To (...) do this, I make use of the notion of ‘discursive injustice’ that has been developed by Quill Kukla, and, with reference to three case studies, show how discursive injustice can effectively derail the speech of Indigenous communities. (shrink)

Feminists have long hoped to intervene in the practice of war. Many have thought of war as a masculine endeavor which endangers women in distinctive ways and reflects and contributes to men's violence against women in civil society. Some have also believed that women have distinct capacities for making peace. In recent decades, feminists have elaborated these insights, offering a more precise understanding of war's masculinity, war's victimization of women and feminine peacefulness. Despite the vitalizing presence of many military feminists, (...) the cumulative effect of feminist intervention has been to question the practice of warmaking itself and to challenge the cultures which prepare, justify, and suffer from war. (shrink)

This is a selective reading of Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. My aim is twofold: to continue Love Labor's focus on dependency work and relations, adding certain distinctions and questions of my own; and to recognize the conjunction of three perspectives-theoretical, social/political, and personal-that strengthen this focus. I scant particulars of argument and ignore certain issues in the hope of providing a vivid outline of the rewards and demands of dependency as Eva Kittay envisions them.

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic (...) women's "motherwork.". (shrink)

In this paper I critically discuss Miranda Fricker’s ‘trust-based’ view of collective testimony—that is, testimony that comes from a group speaker. At the heart of Fricker’s account is the idea that testimony involves an ‘interpersonal deal of trust’, to which the speaker contributes a commitment to ‘second-personal epistemic trustworthiness’. Appropriating Margaret Gilbert’s concept of joint commitment, Fricker suggests that groups too can make such commitments, and hence that they, like individuals, can ‘enter into the second-personal relations of trust that characterise (...) testimony’ (Fricker 2012: 272). I argue that this choice to appropriate Gilbert’s concept of joint commitment betrays a deep problem in Fricker’s account—a misconstrual of both the object and the subject(s) of the commitment a speaker makes in testifying. After developing this criticism, I outline an alternative way of construing the speaker’s commitment, which can be applied to both collective and individual testimony. (shrink)

The rise of networked social movements contesting neo-liberal globalization and protesting the summits of global finance and governance organizations has posed an analytical challenge to social movement theorists and called into question the applicability to this global milieu of the familiar concepts and heuristics utilized in social movement studies. In this article, we argue that the self-defining alter-globalization movement(s) might instead be engaged with as an expression and effect of global complexity, and we draw upon a ‘minor’ literature in social (...) movement studies that includes Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze and Alberto Melucci to illustrate our claims. This article uses a Deleuzian reading of complexity to describe the phase space of the ‘movement of movements’, and its perturbation of global civil society through the iteration of sense-making processes (reflexive framing) and the exploration of singularities inhering in social movement ‘plateaux’. Those transnational gatherings, protests and social forums facilitated by computer-mediated communications and the advent of unprecedented mobility which constitute a ‘shadow realm’ that remains largely invisible to political exchange theories operating within the conceptual confines of the nation-state. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in AestheticsDabney TownsendValues of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics, by Paul Guyer; 359 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, $75.00, $27.99 paper.This volume collects thirteen essays that range over topics from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. The earliest was published in 1986, the last in 2004, and three appear here for the first time. They are grouped topically by period—"I. Mostly (...) before Kant; II. Mostly Kant; III. Mostly After Kant"—rather than chronologically. While this order is useful, it introduces some dislocation if one approaches the book as a whole since the last essay in the book is the first chronologically, and part of the interest of the book lies in the changes in Paul Guyer's positions over time that are reflected in his careful reconsideration of topics that he has dealt with more extensively in his volumes on Kant's [End Page 422] philosophy. As one of the most important contemporary interpreters of Kant's aesthetics, those reconsiderations are well worth attending to.The focus of all of the essays is clearly on Kant's aesthetics. That perspective is clear even when Guyer is discussing the history of aesthetics prior to Kant. As he notes, "this history of the first decades of modern aesthetics has obviously been written with an eye to Kant" ("Origins of Modern Aesthetics: 1711–1735," pp. 32–33). It continues in the discussions of recent aesthetics. For example, Guyer concludes that "the effect that is intended on the revised Beardsleyan definition [of art] is in the tradition of the Kantian concept of the free play of imagination and understanding" ("From Jupiter's Eagle to Warhol's Boxes," p. 313). Danto and Mothersill are also, it is argued, in the Kantian tradition.There are, of course, some problems with this perspective, especially with regard to the pre-Kantian history of aesthetics. For example, Guyer finds Kant's distinction between pure beauty and apprehended beauty reflected in an earlier distinction between beauty of form and beauty of interest or utility. He writes: "The foundation of this theory [Hume's theory of beauty in the Treatise and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals] is the division of beauty into two classes, the first that of pleasurable sentiment caused by an immediate response—that is, a response not mediated by the intervention of imagination or judgment—to the form or other perceptual qualities of an object, and the second that of pleasurable sentiment, which arises only when the perception of the form of an object is supplemented by a concept or concepts brought to bear on it by imagination or judgment." ("The Standard of Taste and the 'Most ardent Desire of Society,'" p. 46). What Guyer identifies as a distinction between kinds of beauty is for Hume a distinction between sources of ideas, however. The second kind of beauty requires reflection and the combination of other ideas. For Hume, there are not two kinds of beauty but two ways that the ideas of beauty, which is just a form of pleasure, are sorted. Reservations about Guyer's perspective on the earlier history of aesthetics do not detract from the interest of his analysis, however, which is always careful and detailed.The central eight essays labeled "Mostly Kant" trace themes that Guyer has treated in much greater detail in his earlier books. Two central themes are especially prominent throughout these essays. First, Guyer views Kant's theory of beauty as the harmony of the imagination and the understanding: "The concept of the free yet harmonious play between the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding is the central concept in Kant's explanation of the experience of beauty and the analysis of the judgment of taste" ("The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited," p. 77). He refers back to essentially this formulation throughout the subsequent essays. Much of the interest of these essays lies in the way Guyer explicates and defends this central thesis against alternative readings of Kant and objections that it is inconsistent with the freedom from concepts and the purity of beauty that Kant claims.Second, Guyer reads Kant's aesthetics as... (shrink)