From its earliest beginnings, the women’s movement has evolved into a complex enterprise combining social, political, economic and academic organizations around the globe. The move into the academic scene (women’s studies, gender studies, etc.), in the past forty or so years, has given rise to debate about the purpose of feminism: what is feminism’s raison d’etre ? Should feminism primarily be an advocate for political and social change, as it was in its early days, or should it focus on theoretical (...) questions about women and their place in the world? The debate asks about method: what is the best way forward? How should we proceed? In response, my article explores Bernard Lonergan’s idea of Functional Specialization as a method that offers the potential to unify the global enterprise of feminism with the concrete and practical intent of improving women’s rights around the globe. (shrink)

Go to John Cantwell’s response to the original paper from here › Go to Grazia Ietto-Gillies’ original paper from here ›.

In this paper, we analyze two key claims offered by recruitment AI companies in relation to the development and deployment of AI-powered HR tools: (1) recruitment AI can objectively assess candidates by removing gender and race from their systems, and (2) this removal of gender and race will make recruitment fairer, help customers attain their DEI goals, and lay the foundations for a truly meritocratic culture to thrive within an organization. We argue that these claims are misleading for four reasons: (...) First, attempts to “strip” gender and race from AI systems often misunderstand what gender and race are, casting them as isolatable attributes rather than broader systems of power. Second, the attempted outsourcing of “diversity work” to AI-powered hiring tools may unintentionally entrench cultures of inequality and discrimination by failing to address the systemic problems within organizations. Third, AI hiring tools’ supposedly neutral assessment of candidates’ traits belie the power relationship between the observer and the observed. Specifically, the racialized history of character analysis and its associated processes of classification and categorization play into longer histories of taxonomical sorting and reflect the current demands and desires of the job market, even when not explicitly conducted along the lines of gender and race. Fourth, recruitment AI tools help produce the “ideal candidate” that they supposedly identify through by constructing associations between words and people’s bodies. From these four conclusions outlined above, we offer three key recommendations to AI HR firms, their customers, and policy makers going forward. (shrink)

This paper has three main goals. First, to motivate a puzzle about how ignorance-expressing terms like maybe and if interact: they iterate, and when they do they exhibit scopelessness. Second, to argue that there is an ambiguity in our theoretical toolbox, and that exposing that opens the door to a solution to the puzzle. And third, to explore the reach of that solution. Along the way, the paper highlights a number of pleasing properties of two elegant semantic theories, explores some (...) meta-theoretic properties of dynamic notions of meaning, dips its toe into some hazardous waters, and offers characterization theorems for the space of meanings an indicative conditional can have. (shrink)

Let’s suppose that the Axial Period is a time in history that is a transition between the first time of the temporal subject and the second time of the temporal subject; that it is the second stage of meaning: a troubled time between a first stage of meaning, characterized by a spontaneously operative consciousness in ‘early’ culture, and a third stage of meaning constituted by at least a dominant authority of a luminous control of meaning and an explicit metaphysics in (...) a ‘later’ global culture. What this statement means we have now to uncover. (shrink)

A 365 million year‐old trilobite moult‐carcass assemblage was described by Błażejowski et al. (2015) as the oldest direct evidence of moulting in the arthropod fossil record. Unfortunately, their suppositions are insufficiently supported by the data provided. Instead, the morphology, configuration and preservational context of the highly fossiliferous locality (Kowala Quarry, Poland) suggest that the specimen consists of two overlapping, queued carcasses. The wider fossil record of moulting actually extends back 520 million years, providing an unparalleled opportunity to study behaviour, ecology (...) and development in early animals. Taking cues from modern analogues, it is possible to quantify precise details about moulting behaviour to determine broad‐scale evolutionary trends, ontogenetic sequences and morphological selection pressures. In this review, we argue that this rich source of data has been underused in evolutionary studies, though has great potential for investigating the life history and evolution of arthropods in deep time. (shrink)

Understanding Animal Abuse and How to Intervene with Children and Young People offers a positive, compassion-based and trauma-informed approach to understanding and intervening in animal abuse. It provides an accessible cross-disciplinary synthesis of current international evidence on animal abuse, and a toolkit for professionals working with people and/or animals to help them understand, prevent, and intervene in cases of animal abuse. With contributions from experts in the field, this essential text offers ten user-friendly chapters with questions for reflection and key (...) summary points. It offers a definition of animal abuse, synthesises the latest research on children, young people and animal abuse, and explores the link between animal abuse and other forms of abuse, and legal perspectives on animal abuse. The second half of the book presents a practical toolkit for professionals, offering guidance and strategies for prevention of and intervention in cases of animal abuse. It provides multidisciplinary perspectives on interventions; from teachers' and social workers roles in detection and intervention of childhood animal abuse, to the roles of enforcement agencies and veterinarians in legal cases of adult animal abuse. Together with a final chapter proposing new directions for research, policy, and practice, this guide is for all who work with children, young people and/or animals, including psychologists, social workers, veterinarians, education professionals, and animal welfare educators. It is also key reading for those involved in legal and policy issues relating to animal welfare. (shrink)

Responsibility has become a central concept in AI ethics; however, little research has been conducted into practitioners’ personal understandings of responsibility in the context of AI, including how responsibility should be defined and who is responsible when something goes wrong. In this article, we present findings from a 2020–2021 data set of interviews with AI practitioners and tech workers at a single multinational technology company and interpret them through the lens of feminist political thought. We reimagine responsibility in the context (...) of AI development and deployment as the product of work cultures that enable tech workers to be responsive and answerable for their products over the long and short term. From our interviews, we identify three key pain points in understanding the distribution of responsibility between actors and developing responsible design and deployment practices: (1) unstable business ecosystems and AI lifecycles, which require an approach to responsibility that accounts for the dynamic nature of these systems; (2) the issue of incentivizing engineers to take responsibility for the mundane maintenance practices essential to the functioning of AI systems and (3) the need to overcome individual and structural barriers to taking ownership over AI products and their effects. From these findings, we make three recommendations based on feminist theory: (1) organisations should move from a static model of responsibility to a dynamic and ethically motivated response-ability; (2) companies need to revalue care and maintenance practices; and (3) firms must move away from individualistic ideas of responsibility towards fostering wider cultures of responsibility. (shrink)

The paper begins with an exposition of Aristotle’s own philosophy of mathematics. It is claimed that this is based on two postulates. The first is the embodiment postulate, which states that mathematical objects exist not in a separate world, but embodied in the material world. The second is that infinity is always potential and never actual. It is argued that Aristotle’s philosophy gave an adequate account of ancient Greek mathematics; but that his second postulate does not apply to modern mathematics, (...) which assumes the existence of the actual infinite. However, it is claimed that the embodiment postulate does still hold in contemporary mathematics, and this is argued in detail by considering the natural numbers and the sets of ZFC. (shrink)

This paper argues for a claim made by Maria Carla Galavotti that the use of indeterministic causality involves one in Simpson's paradox. It is shown specifically that a consideration of Hesslow's well-known counter-example leads to Simpson's paradox.

In this article I examine an important episode in the growth of ‘mindfulness’ as a biomedical modality in Britain: the formation and establishment of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) by John Teasdale and his colleagues Mark Williams and Zindel Segal. My study, focusing on Teasdale’s contribution, combines ethnographic, oral historical and archival research to understand how mindfulness was disseminated or, to use a term sometimes used by mindfulness practitioners themselves, ‘transmitted’. Drawing on theoretical support from Max Weber, Michel Foucault and Gilles (...) Deleuze, I argue that transmission had a very specific form within the Buddhistic milieu that Teasdale occupied and within which he developed MBCT. To ‘transmit’ mindfulness was to transmit an experiential essence; a type of subjectivity that was seen as perennial, universal and radically distinct from its historical context. In tracing the recurring metaphysical, metaphorical and visual tropes of mindfulness and its transmission, I attempt to understand how Teasdale was embedded in both local and global networks of discourse and practice, and how his life and work contributed and depended upon an assemblage whose elements (institutional, technical, conceptual, textual) straddled empiricist psychology and religious mysticism. I also examine how authority, experience and knowledge were closely interwoven in the birth of British mindfulness, coming together to form an affectively compelling ‘diagram’ that shaped the way mindfulness was practiced and disseminated. In doing so, I aim to open up the possibility of studying the history of the human sciences from a new perspective: one which places an emphasis on the emotional impetus generated by metaphysical assumptions. (shrink)

Obligation describing language is hooked up with preference, a relation of what-is-better-than-what. But ordinary situations underdetermine such relations of what-is-better-than-what. Even so, there are plainly true sentences describing our obligations in those situations. This mismatch is trouble-making and getting out of the trouble requires either giving up the easy link between “ought” and preference or re-thinking the kind of things preferences can be.

The Twentieth Century has seen a dramatic rise in the use of probability and statistics in almost all fields of research. This has stimulated many new philosophical ideas on probability. _Philosophical Theories of Probability_ is the first book to present a clear, comprehensive and systematic account of these various theories and to explain how they relate to one another. Gillies also offers a distinctive version of the propensity theory of probability, and the intersubjective interpretation, which develops the subjective theory.

Teaching children to ask and answer questions is critically important if they are to learn to talk and reason effectively together, particularly during inquiry-based science where they are required to investigate topics, consider alternative propositions and hypotheses, and problem-solve together to propose answers, explanations, and prediction to problems at hand. This study involved 108 students (53 boys and 55 girls) from seven, Year 7 teachers’ classrooms in five primary schools in Brisbane, Australia. Teachers were randomly allocated by school to one (...) of two conditions: the metacognitive questioning condition (Trained condition) or the prescriptive questioning condition (Untrained condition). Data on students’ discourse and reasoning and problem-solving (RP-S) were collected across Times 1 and 2. The results showed that while there were significant differences in the discourse categories of the students in the two conditions at Time 1, the only significant difference was in questioning behaviour at Time 2 with the students in the trained condition continuing to ask more questions than their untrained peers. Given that these students had been taught to specifically ask ‘thinking’ questions that probed and interrogated information, these results are not surprising. A follow-up examination of students’ discourse during their small group discussions illustrated how these students interacted with each other to probe and interrogate information by providing explanations and reasons to make their thinking explicit and by using analogies to verbally represent concepts they were trying to express. Results on the follow-up reasoning and problem-solving (RP-S) tasks indicated that students in the Trained and Untrained conditions improved their scores from Time 1 to Time 2 although the change was not significantly different between conditions. (shrink)

This is a handbook article about indicative conditionals.

Teaching students to ask and answer questions is critically important if they are to engage in reasoned argumentation, problem-solving, and learning. This study involved 35 groups of grade 6 children from 18 classrooms in three conditions (cognitive questioning condition, community of inquiry condition, and the comparison condition) who were videotaped as they worked on specific inquiry-based science tasks. The study also involved the teachers in these classrooms who were audio-taped as they interacted with the children during these tasks. The results (...) show that while there were no significant differences in the children's explanatory behaviour across the two time periods, there were significant differences in the total verbal interactions between the children in the cognitive questioning condition and their peers in the community of inquiry and comparison conditions. Furthermore, the children in the cognitive questioning condition obtained higher reasoning and problem-solving scores than peers in the other conditions. Interestingly, while there were no significant differences between the teachers’ basic and extended mediating behaviours in the three conditions at Times 1 and 2, there was a significant difference in extended mediation behaviours with the teachers demonstrating nearly three times more extended mediation to promote students’ learning at Time 2 than they did at Time 1. Teacher intervention in providing guidance in how to interact during cooperative, inquiry-based science appears to be critical to helping students engage in higher-level thinking and learning. (shrink)

The ideal moral standard for surgical informed‐consent calls upon surgeons to carry out a disclosure dialogue with patients so they have as full as possible an understanding of the procedure before they sign the informed‐consent form. This study is the first to empirically explore patient preferences regarding disclosure dialogue. Twelve Israelis who underwent life‐saving surgeries participated in a narrative study. Three themes emerged from the analysis: objectification of patients, anxiety provoking processes and information, and lack of information that was essential (...) for patients. Findings contribute to existing debates among surgeons regarding the scope and importance of some disclosure components. Analysis led to our formulation of an augmented subjective model of information disclosure that participants prefer, which extends beyond the immediate present of the surgery to the period after discharge, and until return to routine. Surgeons should be aware of patient preferences in disclosure, and gaps between perceptions of surgeons, and preferences and needs of patients. (shrink)

In "*Must* ...stay ...strong!" (von Fintel & Gillies 2010) we set out to slay a dragon, or rather what we called The Mantra: that epistemic *must* has a modal force weaker than expected from standard modal logic, that it doesn't entail its prejacent, and that the best explanation for the evidential feel of *must* is a pragmatic explanation. We argued that all three sub-mantras are wrong and offered an explanation according to which *must* is strong, entailing, and the felt indirectness (...) is the product of an evidential presupposition carried by epistemic modals. Mantras being what they are, it is no surprise that each of the sub-mantras have been given new defenses. Here we offer them new problems and update our picture, concluding that *must* is (still) strong. (shrink)

The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance. Far from ending the dream of a total archive, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. As a political (...) tool, the total archive encompasses population statistics, gross domestic product, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. Questions of the total archive engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social structures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the temporalities implied by such projects? This introduction and the articles that follow describe and place in historical context a series of concrete instances of totality. Our analysis is arranged according to four central themes: the relationship between the Archive (singular) and archives (plural); the image of the archive and the aesthetics of totality; pathologies of accumulation; and the specific historical trajectory of the total archive in the 19th and 20th centuries. (shrink)

This is a note from an AMC session on Jeff Horty's (2012) book *Reasons as Defaults*.

This paper begins by developing a causal theory of mechanisms in medicine, and illustrates the theory with the example of the mechanism of the disease anthrax as elucidated by Koch. The causal approach to mechanisms is then compared to the Machamer, Darden, Craver approach. At first sight the two approaches appear to be very different, but it is argued that the divergence is less than it initially seems. There are some differences, however, and it is argued that, where these differences (...) occur, the causal approach to mechanisms is superior. (shrink)

Background There is little dispute that the ideal moral standard for surgical informed consent calls for surgeons to carry out a disclosure dialogue with patients before they sign the informed consent form. This narrative study is the first to link patient experiences regarding the disclosure dialogue with patient-surgeon trust, central to effective recuperation and higher adherence. Methods Informants were 12 Israelis, aged 29–81, who underwent life-saving surgeries. A snowball sampling was used to locate participants in their initial recovery process upon (...) discharge. Results Our empirical evidence indicates an infringement of patients’ right to receive an adequate disclosure dialogue that respects their autonomy. More than half of the participants signed the informed consent form with no disclosure dialogue, and thus felt anxious, deceived and lost their trust in surgeons. Surgeons nullified the meaning of informed consent rather than promoted participants’ moral agency and dignity. Discussion Similarity among jarring experiences of participants led us to contend that the conduct of nullifying surgical informed consent does not stem solely from constraints of time and resources, but may reflect an underlying paradox preserving this conduct and leading to objectification of patients and persisting in paternalism. We propose a multi-phase data-driven model for informed consent that attends to patients needs and facilitates patient trust in surgeons. Conclusions Patient experiences attest to the infringement of a patient’s right to respect for autonomy. In order to meet the prima facie right of respect for autonomy, moral agency and dignity, physicians ought to respect patient’s needs. It is now time to renew efforts to avoid negligent disclosure and implement a patient-centered model of informed consent. (shrink)

This is a handbook article about conditionals.

The last couple of decades has brought a renewed interest in American conservatism among historians. Yet most recent studies have focused on the emergence of neoconservatism after World War II and virtually no recent scholarly work has pursued the history of conservatism before the 1920s. Both Richard Hofstadter and Clinton Rossiter agreed that the late nineteenth century was an important watershed in the evolution of American conservative thought. Hofstadter argued that the new laissez-faire conservatism that became dominant during the Gilded (...) Age was remarkable in that “it lacked many of the signal characteristics of conservatism as it is usually found.” Yet some conservatives refused to accept key features of what Clinton Rossiter once branded this new “contradictory conservatism.” This essay focuses mostly on Protestant clerical intellectuals who dissented from the new orthodoxy and attempted to preserve older conservative principles. Against the laissez-faire conservatives' hyperindividualism, these dissenting conservatives stressed an organic view of the social order and the importance of mediating institutions such as family and church. To the others' secularism, they offered a social theory suffused with evangelical Protestantism. This analysis highlights where these dissidents differed from their fellow conservatives and seeks also to elucidate their alternative conservative vision of the American republic. Such a study serves to clarify just how profound an ideological shift occurred among conservatives during the Gilded Age and illuminates some of the persistent tensions within American conservatism still evident today. (shrink)

The paper briefly summarises the historical evolution of transnational corporations and their activities. It then introduces the major theories developed to explain the TNC. There is an attempt to place the theories historically, within the context of the socio-economic … More ›.

Commentator: Mark Purvis Commentator: Sheena McMain Commentator: Clare Connolly Commentator: Maggie Eisner Commentator: Shirley Brierley Commentator: Becky Ship.