In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains (...) one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political. (shrink)

A. W. F. Edwards famously named “Lewontin’s fallacy” after Richard Lewontin, the geneticist who showed that most human genetic diversity can be found within any given racialized group. “Lewontin’s fallacy” is the assumption that uncorrelated genetic data would be sufficient to classify genotypes into conventional “racial” groups. In this chapter, I argue that Lewontin does not commit the fallacy named after him, and that it is not a genuine fallacy. Furthermore, I argue that when Edwards assumes that stable classification is (...) all it takes to vindicate racial naturalism, he commits a fallacy of his own: Edwards’ fallacy. The ability to create a classificatory system, and then reliably sort things within that system, is not enough to make that system scientifically respectable. I show that Edwards’ fallacy is rife in debates about the existence of human biological races. (shrink)

RésuméL'ouvrage de Sophia Moreau, Faces of Inequality, adopte une méthodologie philosophique provocatrice. Moreau puise dans les expériences des victimes de discrimination et à même les contours fondamentaux du droit à la non-discrimination afin d’élaborer sa théorie de la discrimination répréhensible. Cependant, si nous prenons au sérieux les enseignements des études féministes et critiques de la « race », une tension émerge au sein de la dyade méthodologique de Moreau : si les lois contre la discrimination sont souvent elles-mêmes source d'hostilité (...) et d'invalidation pour les victimes de discrimination, comment ces expériences et ces lois peuvent-elles toutes deux faire autorité pour déterminer la nature de la discrimination répréhensible? Cet article explore cette tension à l’œuvre dans Faces of Inequality à la lumière de la théorie de la « conscience multiple » de Mari Matsuda. (shrink)

The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11th March 2020, recognising that the underlying SARS-CoV-2 has caused the greatest global crisis since World War II. In this chapter, we present a framework to evaluate whether and to what extent the use of digital systems that track and/or trace potentially infected individuals is not only legal but also ethical.

O povo Kaingang é o mais populoso do Sul do Brasil e está entre os mais numerosos povos indígenas do país. Neste trabalho faz-se uma relação entre as informações encontradas na literatura e a atualidade na Terra Indígena Kaingang em relação ao conhecimento que possuem sobre o uso de plantas para a cura de doenças e como interpretam a ação da erva no organismo. Para isto, realizou-se uma pesquisa de campo em uma Terra Indígena Kaingang no Paraná, cujo entrevistas forneceram (...) confirmações históricas em relação aos etnoconhecimentos da etnia, da evolução dos aspectos químicos e das atitudes perante a química e os remédios de origem farmacêutica e natural. (shrink)

Assertion is a fundamental feature of language. This volume will be the place to look for anyone interested in current work on the topic.

Introduction : reading Nietzsche skeptically -- Nietzsche and the Pyrrhonian tradition -- Skepticism in Nietzsche's early work : the case of "on truth and lie" -- The question of Nietzsche's "naturalism" -- Perspectivism and Ephexis in interpretation -- Skepticism and health -- Skepticism as immoralism.

Support for the biological concept of race declined slowly but steadily during the second half of the twentieth century. However, debate about the validity of the race concept has recently been reignited. Genetic-clustering studies have shown that despite the small proportion of genetic variation separating continental populations, it is possible to assign some individuals to their continents of origin, based on genetic data alone. Race naturalists have interpreted these studies as empirically confirming the existence of human subspecies, and by extension (...) biological races. However, the new racial naturalism is not convincing. The continental clusters appealed to by race naturalists are arbitrary and superficial groupings, which should not be elevated to subspecies status. Moreover, the criteria applied to humans are not consistent with those used to define subspecies in nonhuman animals, and no rationale has been given for this differential treatment. (shrink)

This paper defends the concept of racialization against its critics. As the concept has become increasingly popular, questions about its meaning and value have been raised, and a backlash against its use has occurred. I argue that when “racialization” is properly understood, criticisms of the concept are unsuccessful. I defend a definition of racialization and identify its companion concept, “racialized group.” Racialization is often used as a synonym for “racial formation.” I argue that this is a mistake. Racial formation theory (...) is committed to racial ontology, but racialization is best understood as the process through which racialized – rather than racial – groups are formed. “Racialization” plays a unique role in the conceptual landscape, and it is a key concept for race eliminativists and anti-realists about race. (shrink)

How should physical entities be characterized? Physicalists, who have most to do with the notion, usually characterize the physical by reference to two components: 1. The physical entities are the entities treated by fundamental physics with the proviso that 2. Physical entities are not fundamentally mental (that is, do not individually possess or bestow mentality) Here I explore the extent to which the appeals to fundamental physics and to the NFM (“no fundamental mentality”) constraint are appropriate for characterizing the physical, (...) especially for purposes of formulating physicalism. Ultimately, I motivate and defend a version of an account incorporating both components: The physics-based NFM account: An entity existing at a world w is physical iff (i) it is treated, approximately accurately, by current or future (in the limit of inquiry, ideal) versions of fundamental physics at w, and (ii) it is not fundamentally mental (that is, does not individually either possess or bestow mentality). (shrink)

A persuasive monograph that answers the keyepistemological arguments against anti-individualism in thephilosophy of mind.

Research groups around the world are currently busy trying to invent new life in the laboratory, looking for extraterrestrial life, or making machines increasingly more life-like. In the case of astrobiology, any newly discovered life would likely be very old, but when discovered it would be new to us. In the case of synthetic organic life or life-like machines, humans will have invented life that did not exist before. Together, these endeavors amount to what we call the emerging plurality of (...) lives because we see a future where we are surrounded by, and interact with, life of many different origins, as well as entities that we have not traditionally seen as being alive. In the future these entities will likely possess properties that we so far have only associated with living beings, thereby transcending and perhaps blurring the borders between life and non-life. (shrink)

In this paper I defend anti-realism about race and a new theory of racialization. I argue that there are no races, only racialized groups. Many social constructionists about race have adopted racial formation theory to explain how ‘races’ are formed. However, anti-realists about race cannot adopt racial formation theory, because it assumes the reality of race. I introduce interactive constructionism about racialized groups as a theory of racialization for anti-realists about race. Interactive constructionism moves the discussion away from the dichotomous (...) (social vs. biological) metaphysics that has marred this debate, and posits that racialized groups are the joint products of a broad range of non-racial factors, which interact. (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions are a central topic of research in both philosophy and science. In this collection of new essays on knowledge ascriptions, world class philosophers offer novel approaches to this long standing topic.

In this paper I defend the metaphysics of race as a valuable philosophical project against deflationism about race. The deflationists argue that metaphysical debate about the reality of race amounts to a non-substantive verbal dispute that diverts attention from ethical and practical issues to do with ‘race.’ In response, I show that the deflationists mischaracterize the field and fail to capture what most metaphysicians of race actually do in their work, which is almost always pluralist and very often normative and (...) explicitly political. Even if debates about the reality of race turn out to be verbal disputes, they are substantive, and worth having. (shrink)

When I see a tree through my window, that particular worldly tree is said to be ‘in’, ‘on’, or ‘before’ my mind. My ordinary visual link to it is ‘intentional’. How similar to this link are the links between me and particular worldly trees when I see them in photographs, or in paintings? Are they, in some important sense, links of the same kind? Or are they links of importantly different kinds? Or, as a third possibility, are they at once (...) links of the same important kind and also links of importantly different sub-kinds within that kind? This paper takes up these taxonomical questions. After fleshing out (a bit) the characterisation of these different subject-object links, I explain and expand upon an approach to answering the taxonomical questions originally set out by Kendall Walton. I then follow this approach a certain distance, connecting it with the question of how to mark the boundary between perception and cognition. My investigations support the conclusion that the three types of links just described are not importantly different in kind. (shrink)

Quayshawn Spencer (2014) misunderstands my treatment of racial naturalism. I argued that racial naturalism must entail a strong claim, such as “races are subspecies”, if it is to be a substantive position that contrasts with anti-realism about biological race. My recognition that not all race naturalists make such a strong claim is evident throughout the article Spencer reviews (Hochman, 2013a). Spencer seems to agree with me that there are no human subspecies, and he endorses a weaker form of racial (...) naturalism. However, he supports his preferred version of ‘racial naturalism’ with arguments that are not well described as ‘naturalistic’. I argue that Spencer offers us an unnaturalised racial naturalism. (shrink)

The three target articles constitute a powerful and persuasive call for actively anti-racist bioethics and biomedicine. All three articles reject race as a biological category. Nevertheless, they share a common commitment to racial classification. At one point, Ruqaiijah Yearby writes that “social race, like biological race, is an illusion created to establish racial hierarchy,” but mostly she writes about “races” as though they were not an illusion, but a reality. In this commentary I critique the racial realism of the target (...) articles. I argue that the biomedical fight against racism is best served by a form of anti-realist reconstructionism about race, which says that there are no races, only racialized groups—groups misunderstood to be races. Note that I do not defend the color blindness that Clarence H. Braddock (2020) persuasively rejects. Because of the role of skin color in racialization and racism, color blindness is a misguided goal. One can reject color blindness, though, without accepting racial realism... (shrink)

The biological race debate is at an impasse. Issues surrounding hereditarianism aside, there is little empirical disagreement left between race naturalists and anti-realists about biological race. The disagreement is now primarily semantic. This would seem to uniquely qualify philosophers to contribute to the biological race debate. However, philosophers of race are reluctant to focus on semantics, largely because of their worries about the ‘flight to reference’. In this paper, I show how philosophers can contribute to the debate without taking the (...) flight to reference. Drawing on the theory of reference literature and the history of meaning change in science, I develop some criteria for dealing with cases where there is uncertainty about reference. I then apply these criteria to the biological race debate. All of the criteria I develop for eliminating putative kinds are met in the case of ‘race’ as understood by twentieth century geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and his contemporary proponents, suggesting that we should eliminate it from our biological ontology. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance refers to a perceived inability or unwillingness to enter into fictional worlds that portray deviant moralities (Gendler, 2000): we can all easily imagine that dragons exist, but many people feel incapable of imagining fictional worlds in which morality works differently. Although this phenomenon has received much attention from philosophers, no one has attempted to operationalize the construct in a self-report scale. In Study 1, we developed the Imaginative Resistance Scale (IRS), investigated its relationship to theoretically related constructs, and (...) confirmed its structure and reliability (rα = 0.92) in a large sample. In Study 2, we asked participants to rate scenarios expected to provoke imaginative resistance and predicted these ratings from the IRS and its validity measures. IRS scores accounted for variability in ease of imagining these scenarios over and above gender, political orientation, and three related measures. The results are discussed in terms of theories of imaginative resistance and directions for future research. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work in formal pragmatic theory, this paper shows that the manipulation of discourse structure—in particular, by way of shifting the Question Under Discussion mid-discourse—can constitute an act of epistemic injustice. I argue that the “All Lives Matter” response to the “Black Lives Matter” slogan is one such case; this response shifts the Question Under Discussion governing the overarching discourse from Do Black lives matter? to Which lives matter? This manipulation of the discourse structure systematically obscures the intended (...) meaning of “Black lives matter” and disincentivizes future utterances of it. (shrink)

This chapter presents an overview of the contributions to the section on Experimental Mathematics by focusing in particular on how they characterize the phenomenon of “experimental mathematics” and its origins. The second part presents two case studies illustrating how experimental mathematics is understood in contemporary analysis. The third section offers a systematic presentation of the contributions to the section.

We introduce the concept of assertion, survey existing views about it, and detail the contents of the remainder of the book.

Shadow of the Other is a discussion of how the individual has two sorts of relationships with an "other"--other individuals. The first regards the other as a s work apart is her brilliant utilization of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing tensions: masculinity and femininity, subjectivity and objectivity, passivity and activity, love and aggression, fantasy and reality, modernism and postmodernism, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective. Benjamin s work apart is her brilliant utilization (...) of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing other as a mental repository fo unwanted characteristics cast from the self. Jessica benjamin shows the implications of this dual relationship for male/female hierarchy and offers a possibility for balancing the two. This book continues the author's well-known explorations of the themes of intersubjectivity and gender, taking up issues at the forefront of contemporary debates in feminist theory and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social (...) constructionism has always had its critics. Sesardic (2010) has compiled these criticisms into one of the strongest defences of racial naturalism in recent times. In this paper I argue that Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism: a weak version and a strong version. As I shall argue, the strong version is not supported by the relevant science. The weak version, on the other hand, does not contrast properly with what social constructionists think about ‘race’. By leaning on this weak view Sesardic’s racial naturalism intermittently gains an appearance of plausibility, but this view is too weak to revive racial naturalism. As Sesardic demonstrates, there are new arguments for racial naturalism post-Human Genome Diversity Project. The positive message behind my critique is how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era. (shrink)

Developmental systems theory (DST) is a wholeheartedly epigenetic approach to development, inheritance and evolution. The developmental system of an organism is the entire matrix of resources that are needed to reproduce the life cycle. The range of developmental resources that are properly described as being inherited, and which are subject to natural selection, is far wider than has traditionally been allowed. Evolution acts on this extended set of developmental resources. From a developmental systems perspective, development does not proceed according to (...) a preformed plan; what is inherited is much more than DNA; and evolution is change not only in gene frequencies, but in entire developmental systems. (shrink)

Fallibilists claim that one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Jessica Brown offers a compelling defence of this view against infallibilists, who claim that it is contradictory to claim to know and yet to admit the possibility of error.

Neven Sesardic has recently defended his arguments in favour of racial naturalism—the view that race is a valid biological category—in response to my criticism of his work. While Sesardic claims that a strong version of racial naturalism can survive critique, he has in fact weakened his position considerably. He concedes that conventional racial taxonomy is arbitrary and he no longer identifies ‘races’ as human subspecies. Sesardic now relies almost entirely on Theodosius Dobzhansky’s notion of race-as-population. This weak approach to ‘race’—according (...) to which all genetic difference between populations is ‘racial’ and ‘the races’ are simply the populations we choose to call races—survived its early critiques. As it is being mobilised to support racial naturalism once more, we need to continue the debate about whether we should weaken the concept of race to mean ‘population’, or abandon it as a failed biological category. I argue that Sesardic’s case for racial naturalism is only supported by his continued mischaracterisation of anti-realism about biological race and his appeal to Dobzhansky’s authority. Rather than deflating the meaning of ‘race’, it should be eliminated from our biological ontology. (shrink)

Increased technological and pharmacological interventions in patient care when patient outcomes are uncertain have been linked to the escalation in moral and ethical dilemmas experienced by health care providers in acute care settings. Health care research has shown that facilities that are able to attract and retain nursing staff in a competitive environment and provide high quality care have the capacity for nurses to process and resolve moral and ethical dilemmas. This article reports on the findings of a systematic review (...) of the empirical literature (1980 — February 2007) on the effects of unresolved moral distress and poor ethical climate on nurse turnover. Articles were sought to answer the review question: Does unresolved moral distress and a poor organizational ethical climate increase nurse turnover? Nine articles met the criteria of the review process. Although the prevailing sentiment was that poor ethical climate and moral distress caused staff turnover, definitive answers to the review question remain elusive because there are limited data that confidently support this statement. (shrink)

As belief in the reality of race as a biological category among U.S. anthropologists has fallen, belief in the reality of race as a social category has risen in its place. The view that race simply does not exist—that it is a myth—is treated with suspicion. While racial classification is linked to many of the worst evils of recent history, it is now widely believed to be necessary to fight back against racism. In this article, I argue that race is (...) indeed a biological fiction, but I critique the claim that race is socially real. I defend a form of anti‐realist reconstructionism about race, which says that there are no races, only racialized groups—groups mistakenly believed to be races. I argue that this is the most attractive position about race from a metaphysical perspective, and that it is also the position most conductive to public understanding and social justice. (shrink)

The Sleeping Beauty problem has spawned a debate between “Thirders” and “Halfers” who draw conflicting conclusions about Sleeping Beauty’s credence that a coin lands Heads. Our analysis is based on a probability model for what Sleeping Beauty knows at each time during the Experiment. We show that conflicting conclusions result from different modeling assumptions that each group makes. Our analysis uses a standard “Bayesian” account of rational belief with conditioning. No special handling is used for self-locating beliefs or centered propositions. (...) We also explore what fair prices Sleeping Beauty computes for gambles that she might be offered during the Experiment. (shrink)

The practical criteria by which developmental biologists choose their model systems have evolutionary correlates. The result is a sample that is not merely small, but biased in particular ways, for example towards species with rapid, highly canalized development. These biases influence both data collection and interpretation, and our views of how development works and which aspects of it are important.

In my Racialization: A Defense of the Concept, I argue that ‘race’ fails as an analytic category and that we should think in terms of ‘racialization’ and ‘racialized groups’ instead (Hochman 2019c). I define these concepts and defend them against a range of criticisms. In Rethinking Racialization: The Analytical Limits of Racialization, Deniz Uyan critiques my “theory of racialization” (Uyan 2021). However, I do not defend a theory of racialization; I defend the concept of racialization. I argue that racialization (...) is a useful idea, but I do not advance a theory to explain or predict the phenomena it describes. While Uyan’s critique therefore misses its mark, it raises important questions about the explanatory scope of the racialization concept. Ironically, I may be even more skeptical of the prospects of any general theory of racialization than Uyan. I argue that while we ought to develop theories to explain particular instances of racialization, we should not develop a general theory of racialization, because it is simply too varied in the agents that drive it, their intents, the mechanisms through which it operates, and the outcomes it produces. While hope for any general theory of racialisation should be abandoned, I argue that the racialisation concept is still extremely useful. It offers a necessary alternative to race realist concepts, allowing us to point to the wide-ranging effects of belief in race without falsely implying that race itself is real. Uyan does not focus on my arguments against racial realism. However, the theoretical failures and normative risks of racial realism motivate my defense of the racialization concept. In this paper, I reiterate my arguments against racial realism and offer further defense of the concepts of ‘racialization’ and ‘racialized group’. (shrink)

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s :741–742, 1960; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such a debate has primarily focused on principles—the (...) ‘what’ of AI ethics —rather than on practices, the ‘how.’ Awareness of the potential issues is increasing at a fast rate, but the AI community’s ability to take action to mitigate the associated risks is still at its infancy. Our intention in presenting this research is to contribute to closing the gap between principles and practices by constructing a typology that may help practically-minded developers apply ethics at each stage of the Machine Learning development pipeline, and to signal to researchers where further work is needed. The focus is exclusively on Machine Learning, but it is hoped that the results of this research may be easily applicable to other branches of AI. The article outlines the research method for creating this typology, the initial findings, and provides a summary of future research needs. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWith over 560 citations reported on Google Scholar by April 2018, a publication by Juslin and Gabrielsson presented evidence supporting performers’ abilities to communicate, with hig...

In 1990 Robert Lickliter and Thomas Berry identified the phylogeny fallacy, an empirically untenable dichotomy between proximate and evolutionary causation, which locates proximate causes in the decoding of ‘ genetic programs’, and evolutionary causes in the historical events that shaped these programs. More recently, Lickliter and Hunter Honeycutt argued that Evolutionary Psychologists commit this fallacy, and they proposed an alternative research program for evolutionary psychology. For these authors the phylogeny fallacy is the proximate/evolutionary distinction itself, which they argue constitutes a (...) misunderstanding of development, and its role in the evolutionary process. In this article I argue that the phylogeny fallacy should be relocated to an error of reasoning that this causal framework sustains: the conflation of proximate and evolutionary explanation. Having identified this empirically neutral form of the phylogeny fallacy, I identify its mirror image, the ontogeny fallacy. Through the lens of these fallacies I attempt to solve several outstanding problems in the debate that ensued from Lickliter and Honeycutt’s provocative article. (shrink)