There is an inextricable link between cultural and clinical safety. In Australia high‐profile Aboriginal deaths in custody, publicised institutional racism in health services and the international Black Lives Matter movement have cemented momentum to ensure culturally safe care. However, racism within health professionals and health professional students remains a barrier to increasing the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health professionals. The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Strategy's objective to ‘eliminate racism from the (...) health system’, and the recent adoption of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples led cultural safety definition, has instigated systems level reflections on decolonising practice. This article explores cultural safety as the conceptual antithesis to racism, examining its origins, and contemporary evolution led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia, including its development in curriculum innovation. The application of cultural safety is explored using in‐depth reflection, and the crucial development of integrating critical consciousness theory, as a precursor to culturally safe practice, is discussed. Novel approaches to university curriculum development are needed to facilitate culturally safe and decolonised learning and working environments, including the key considerations of non‐Indigenous allyship and collaborative curriculum innovations and initiatives. (shrink)

Citizen science models of public participation in scientific research represent a growing area of opportunity for health and biomedical research, as well as new impetus for more collaborative forms of engagement in large-scale research. However, this also surfaces a variety of ethical issues that both fall outside of and build upon the standard human subjects concerns in bioethics. This article provides background on citizen science, examples of current projects in the field, and discussion of established and emerging ethical issues for (...) citizen science in health and biomedical research. (shrink)

Name any valued human trait—intelligence, wit, charm, grace, strength—and you will find an inexhaustible variety and complexity in its expression among individuals. Yet we insist that such diversity does not provide grounds for differential treatment at the most basic level. Whatever merit, blame, praise, love, or hate we receive as beings with a particular past and a particular constitution, we are always and everywhere due equal respect merely as persons. -/- But why? Most who attempt to answer this question appeal (...) to the idea that all human beings possess an intrinsic dignity and worth—grounded in our capacities, for example, to reason, reflect, or love—that raises us up in the order of nature. Andrea Sangiovanni rejects this predominant view and offers a radical alternative. -/- To understand our commitment to basic equality, Humanity without Dignity argues that we must begin with a consideration not of equality but of inequality. Rather than search for a chimerical value-bestowing capacity possessed to an equal extent by each one of us, we ought to ask: Why and when is it wrong to treat others as inferior? Sangiovanni comes to the conclusion that our commitment to moral equality is best explained by a rejection of cruelty rather than a celebration of rational capacity. He traces the impact of this fundamental shift for our understanding of human rights and the norms of anti-discrimination that underlie it. (shrink)

Simondon adopts some concepts of social psychology as ‘in group’ and ‘out group’, namely from Kurt Lewin and Gordon Allport, that allow him to describe the fundamental processes shaping the domain of collective individuation, and to challenge Bergson’s distinction between a ‘closed’ community and an ‘open’ society. Reconstructing Simondon’s sources is necessary to understand how he tries to provide an analysis of the social system without presupposing a given anthropology, but rather exploring different perspectives on the human/nature threshold through the (...) concept of transindividual. In his study of the social system Simondon progressively gives conceptual shape to the processes he calls transindividual thanks to the ontogenetic analysis of the phenomena of belief, work and language. In all these domains, a ‘basic community’ emerges just over the threshold of the biological group, where the structural ambivalence of all collective processes as simultaneously closed and open becomes clear. That is why Simondon does not present the concept of the transindividual as a solution to the epistemological problem of psychic and collective individuation, but rather as the ‘field’ in which a whole series of social, biological and technical dimensions can be made converge towards a science of anthropogenic processes. (shrink)

Andrea Falcon's work is guided by the exegetical ideal of recreating the mind of Aristotle and his distinctive conception of the theoretical enterprise. In this concise exploration of the significance of the celestial world for Aristotle's science of nature, Falcon investigates the source of discontinuity between celestial and sublunary natures and argues that the conviction that the natural world exhibits unity without uniformity is the ultimate reason for Aristotle's claim that the heavens are made of a special body, unique (...) to them. This book presents Aristotle as a totally engaged, systematic investigator whose ultimate concern was to integrate his distinct investigations into a coherent interpretation of the world we live in, all the while mindful of human limitations to what can be known. Falcon reads in Aristotle the ambition of an extraordinarily curious mind and the confidence that that ambition has been largely fulfilled. (shrink)

Human extinction is something generally deemed as undesirable, although some scholars view it as a potential solution to the problems of the Earth since it would reduce the moral evil and the suffering that are brought about by humans. We contend that humans collectively have absolute intrinsic value as sentient, conscious and rational entities, and we should preserve them from extinction. However, severe threats, such as climate change and incurable viruses, might push humanity to the brink of extinction. Should that (...) occur, it might be useful to envision a successor to humans able to preserve and hand down its value. One option would be to resort to humanoid robots that reproduce our salient characteristics by imitation, thanks to AI powered by machine learning. However, the question would arise of how to select the characteristics needed for our successors to thrive. This could prove to be particularly challenging. A way out might come from an algorithm entrusted with this choice. In fact, an algorithmic selection both at the social and at the individual level could be a preferred choice than other traditional ways of making decisions. In this sense, reflecting on human extinction helps us to identify solutions that are also suitable for the problems we face today. (shrink)

The sense of agency is the experience of being the origin of a sensory consequence. This study investigates whether contextual beliefs modulate low-level sensorimotor processes which contribute to the emergence of the sense of agency. We looked at the influence of causal beliefs on ‘intentional binding’, a phenomenon which accompanies self-agency. Participants judged the onset-time of either an action or a sound which followed the action. They were induced to believe that the tone was either triggered by themselves or by (...) somebody else, although, in reality, the sound was always triggered by the participants. We found that intentional binding was stronger when participants believed that they triggered the tone, compared to when they believed that another person triggered the tone. These results suggest that high-level contextual information influences sensorimotor processes responsible for generating intentional binding. (shrink)

Anecdotal evidence has long lamented the status of social studies in elementary classrooms as observed by preservice teachers. As standardized testing has risen for mathematics and language arts, social studies has been pushed aside. In the aftermath of accountability legislation such as No Child Left Behind, research indicates that social studies is less visible in elementary classrooms due to an instructional focus on tested content areas (e.g. math, language arts, reading). In this study, approximately 90 elementary preservice teachers enrolled in (...) a social studies methods course responded to a survey and indicated the frequency and quality of lessons they observed over the course of a single semester. Findings report that preservice elementary teachers witnessed few, if any, lessons in social studies in the elementary classroom. Implications for teacher education are discussed. (shrink)

Organoids are three-dimensional biological structures grown in vitro from different kinds of stem cells that self-organise mimicking real organs with organ-specific cell types. Recently, researchers have managed to produce human organoids which have structural and functional properties very similar to those of different organs, such as the retina, the intestines, the kidneys, the pancreas, the liver and the inner ear. Organoids are considered a great resource for biomedical research, as they allow for a detailed study of the development and pathologies (...) of human cells; they also make it possible to test new molecules on human tissue. Furthermore, organoids have helped research take a step forward in the field of personalised medicine and transplants. However, some ethical issues have arisen concerning the origin of the cells that are used to produce organoids and their properties. In particular, there are new, relevant and so-far overlooked ethical questions concerning cerebral organoids. Scientists have created so-called mini-brains as developed as a few-months-old fetus, albeit smaller and with many structural and functional differences. However, cerebral organoids exhibit neural connections and electrical activity, raising the question whether they are or will one day be somewhat sentient. In principle, this can be measured with some techniques that are already available, which are used for brain-injured non-communicating patients. If brain organoids were to show a glimpse of sensibility, an ethical discussion on their use in clinical research and practice would be necessary. (shrink)

Current debates on collective intentionality focus on the cognitive capacities, attitudes, and mental states that enable individuals to take part in joint actions. It is typically assumed that collective intentionality is a capacity which is added to other, pre-existing, capacities of an individual and is exercised in cooperative activities like carrying a table or painting a house together. We call this the additive account because it portrays collective intentionality as a capacity that an individual possesses in addition to her capacity (...) for individual intentionality. We offer an alternative view according to which the primary entity to which collective intentionality has to be ascribed is not the human individual, but a “form of life.” As a feature of a form of life, collective intentionality is something more than the specific capacity exercised by an individual when she cooperates with others. Collective intentionality transforms all the capacities of the bearers of this specific form of life. We thus call our proposal the transformative account of collective intentionality. (shrink)

This book develops the view that meaningful work is central in human flourishing. The author defends a pluralistic account of what makes work meaningful, arguing that work can be meaningful in virtue of developing capabilities, supporting virtues, providing a purpose, or integrating elements of a worker's life.

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

An influential tradition holds that thoughts are public: different thinkers share many of their thoughts, and the same applies to a single subject at different times. This ‘publicity principle’ has recently come under attack. Arguments by Mark Crimmins, Richard Heck and Brian Loar seem to show that publicity is inconsistent with the widely accepted principle that someone who is ignorant or mistaken about certain identity facts will have distinct thoughts about the relevant object—for instance, the astronomer who does not know (...) that Hesperus is Phosphorus will have two distinct thoughts Hesperus is bright and Phosphorus is bright. In this paper, I argue that publicity can be defended if we adopt a relational account on which thoughts are individuated by their mutual relations. I then go on to develop a specific relational theory—the ‘linking account’—and contrast it with other relational views. (shrink)

To date, business ethicists, corporate social responsibility scholars as well as management theorists have been slow to provide a comprehensive and critical scrutiny of the Living Wage concept. The aim of this article, therefore, is to conceptualize the living wage in its philosophical as well as practical dimensions in order to open up the ethical implications of its introduction and implementation by companies. We set out the legal, socio-institutional and economic contexts for the debates around the LW and review arguments (...) for, and against, it. Key philosophical arguments from the perspectives of sustainability, capability and externality are invoked and discussed in order to demonstrate the issues and challenges involved for companies, state and civil society actors. Relevant examples from the private sector are examined to demonstrate some of the practical issues involved when the LW is introduced by employers. The article also recommends avenues for a research agenda into the LW for business ethicists, CSR and management researchers in contexts such as the UK, where a voluntary, rather than mandatory, approach to the implementation of the LW is adopted. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking book, Andrea R. English challenges common assumptions by arguing that discontinuous experiences, such as uncertainty and struggle, are essential to the learning process. To make this argument, Dr. English draws from the works of two seminal thinkers in philosophy of education - nineteenth-century German philosopher J. F. Herbart and American Pragmatist John Dewey. English's analysis considers Herbart's influence on Dewey, inverting the accepted interpretation of Dewey's thought as a dramatic break from modern European understandings of education.

The paper defends a naturalistic version of modal actualism according to which what is metaphysically possible is determined by dispositions found in the actual world. We argue that there is just one world – this one – and that all genuine possibilities are grounded in the dispositions exemplified in it. This is the case whether or not those dispositions are manifested. As long as the possibility is one that would obtain were the relevant disposition manifested, it is a genuine possibility. (...) Furthermore, by starting from actual dispositional properties and branching out, we are able to countenance possibilities quite far removed from any state of affairs that happens to obtain, while still providing a natural and actual grounding of possibility. Stressing the importance of ontological considerations in any theory of possibility, it is argued that the account of possibility in terms of dispositional properties provides a more palatable ontology than those of its competitors. Coming at it from the other direction, the dispositional account of possibility also provides motivation for taking an ontology of dispositions more seriously. (shrink)

This paper reviews the uneven history of the relationship between Anthropology and Cognitive Science over the past 30 years, from its promising beginnings, followed by a period of disaffection, on up to the current context, which may lay the groundwork for reconsidering what Anthropology and (the rest of) Cognitive Science have to offer each other. We think that this history has important lessons to teach and has implications for contemporary efforts to restore Anthropology to its proper place within Cognitive Science. (...) The recent upsurge of interest in the ways that thought may shape and be shaped by action, gesture, cultural experience, and language sets the stage for, but so far has not fully accomplished, the inclusion of Anthropology as an equal partner. (shrink)

Specific studies of the “situated ethics” of international surrogacy that address the structural conditions and local moral economies that sustain the trade are needed. In this essay, I describe the intimate industry of surrogacy in Thailand, exploring the local moral economy in which surrogacy is described as a form of Buddhist merit making and an opportunity to provide for one’s own children. This offers a further example of how other ethical values beyond the strictly economic are negotiated in commercial surrogacy (...) relationships. Situated ethics allow us to locate and understand the tensions, competing logics, and contradictions within ethical practices. (shrink)

A long-standing puzzle for moral philosophers and psychologists alike is the concept of psychopathy, a personality disorder marked by tendencies to defy moral norms despite cognitive knowledge about right and wrong. Previously, discussions of the moral deficits of psychopathy have focused on willingness to harm and cheat others as well as reasoning about rule-based transgressions. Yet recent research in moral psychology has begun to more clearly define the domains of morality, en- compassing issues of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and spiritual (...) purity. Clinical descriptions and theories of psychopathy suggest that deficits may exist primarily in the areas of harm and fairness, although quantitative evidence is scarce. Within a broad sample of participants, we found that scores on a measure of psychopathy predicted sharply lower scores on the harm and fairness subscales of a measure of moral concern, but showed no relationship with authority, and very small relationships with ingroup and purity. On a measure of willingness to violate moral standards for money, psychopathy scores predicted greater willingness to violate moral concerns of any type. Results are further explored via potential mediators and analyses of the two factors of psychopathy. (shrink)

A study of a group of elementary school students learning to control a computer‐implemented Newtonian object reveals a surprisingly uniform and detailed collection of strategies, at the core of which is a robust “Aristotelian” expectation that things should move in the direction they are last pushed. A protocol of an undergraduate dealing with the same situation shows a large overlap with the set of strategies used by the elementary school children and thus a marked lack of influence of classroom physics (...) training on this student's naive physics. The data from these two studies are pooled and elaborated into a “genetic task analysis” of how one might come to understand Newtonian dynamics as a more or less natural evolution from the naive state. (shrink)

Several attempts have been made previously to provide a biological grounding for cognitive architectures by relating their components to the computations of specific brain circuits. Often, the architecture's action selection system is identified with the basal ganglia. However, this identification overlooks one of the most important features of the basal ganglia—the existence of a direct and an indirect pathway that compete against each other. This characteristic has important consequences in decision-making tasks, which are brought to light by Parkinson's disease as (...) well as genetic differences in dopamine receptors. This paper shows that a standard model of action selection in a cognitive architecture cannot replicate any of these findings, details an alternative solution that reconciles action selection in the architecture with the physiology of the basal ganglia, and extends the domain of application of cognitive architectures. The implication of this solution for other architectures and existing models are discussed. (shrink)

Non‐invasive brain stimulation is used to modulate brain excitation and inhibition and to improve cognitive functioning. The effectiveness of the enhancement due to transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is still controversial, but the technique seems to have large potential for improvement and more specific applications. In particular, it has recently been used by athletes, both beginners and professionals. This paper analyses the ethical issues related to tDCS enhancement, which depend on its specific features: ease of use, immediate effect, non‐detectability and (...) great variability of effects. If tDCS were to become widespread, there could be some potential side effects, especially the rise of inequality in many selective competitive contexts. I discuss two possible scenarios to counter this effect: that of prohibition and that of compensation, each supported by reasons and arguments that seem plausible and worthy of consideration. In conclusion, I show why I think the scenario of compensation is the preferable one. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically discuss Riggle’s definition of street art. I argue that his definition has important limitations, and is therefore unsuccessful. I show that his view obscures a defining feature of street art, that is, its subversive power. As a significant consequence of ignoring that essential aspect, Riggle is incapable of fully understanding how street art transforms public space by turning one corner of the city at the time into contested ground. I also suggest that, when appreciating street (...) art's subversiveness, its challenge against the Modern separation of art and life appears more radical than Riggle foresees. (shrink)

Famously, both Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan opposed description theories and insisted on the role of history in determining the reference of a proper name token. No wonder, then, that their views on proper names have often been assimilated. By focusing on reference borrowing—an alleged phenomenon that Kripke takes to be fundamental—we argue that they should not be. In particular, we claim that according to Donnellan a proper name token never borrows its reference from preceding tokens which it is historically (...) connected to. On the contrary, its reference is always fixed anew on who or what the speaker has in mind when he or she produces it. In fact, what is important to realize is that Donnellan and Kripke took two different histories to be relevant: that of the proper name token produced by the speaker , and that of the cognitive status of the speaker when he or she produces it . We end by suggesting that this difference between Kripke’s and Donnellan’s accounts of proper names rests on a more general difference in their approach to language. (shrink)

A growing number of consumer technology companies are aiming to convince older people that humanoid robots make helpful tools to support aging-in-place. As hybrid devices, socially assistive robots (SARs) are situated between health monitoring tools, familiar digital assistants, security aids, and more advanced AI-powered devices. Consequently, they implicate older people’s privacy in complex ways. Such devices are marketed to perform functions common to smart speakers (e.g., Amazon Echo) and smart home platforms (e.g., Google Home), while other functions are more specific (...) to older people, including health and safety monitoring and serving as companions to mitigate loneliness. Privacy is a key value central to debates about the ethics of using SARs in aged care, yet there has been very little interchange between these debates and the robust theoretical discussion in the legal literature about the future of privacy and AI governance. Drawing on two qualitative studies of older people’s views on consumer SARs, the paper contributes novel findings about older people’s thinking on privacy and data governance at the intersection of their experiences with present day digital technologies and projections for future AI systems, and places their views in dialogue with debates about the future of privacy protection and AI governance. (shrink)

Several scholars have recognized the limitations of theories of moral reasoning in explaining moral behavior. They have argued that moral behavior may also be influenced by moral identity, or how central morality is to one’s sense of self. This idea has been supported by findings that people who exemplify moral behavior tend to place more importance on moral traits when defining their self-concepts (Colby & Damon, 1995). This paper takes the next step of examining individual variation in a construct highly (...) associated with immoral behavior — psychopathy. In Study 1, we test the hypothesis that individuals with a greater degree of psychopathic traits have a weaker moral identity. Within a large online sample, we found that individuals who scored higher on a measure of psychopathic traits were less likely to base their self-concepts on moral traits. In Study 2, we test whether this reduced sense of moral identity can be attributed to differences in moral judgment, which is another factor that could influence immoral behavior. Our results indicated that the reduced sense of moral identity among more psychopathic individuals was independent of variation in moral judgment. These results suggest that individuals with psychopathic traits may display immoral behavior partially because they do not construe their personal identities in moral terms. (shrink)

This paper claims that there is no such thing as the correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and semantics. The first part of the paper outlines the thesis that a unique notion of logical form fulfils both roles, and argues that the alleged best candidate for making it true is unsuited for one of the two roles. (...) The second part spells out a considerably different notion which is free from that problem, although it does not fit the other role. As it will be suggested, each of the two notions suits at most one role, so the uniqueness thesis is ungrounded. (shrink)

In terms of ethical implications, Boers, van Delden and Bredenoord have made an interesting step forward with their model of organoids as hybrids, which seeks to find a balance between subject-like value and object-like value. Their framework aims to introduce effective procedures not to exploit donors and to increase their engagement, but it does not seem to take sufficient account of how organoids are used and how donors and society as a whole may want to act about such uses. I (...) will concentrate my remarks on three points that I consider relevant. The first comment concerns the so-called mini-brains. The second one is related to the issue of consent and long-term ‘control’ over the organic material granted by donors. The last comment focuses on ‘genetic minorities’. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to question the nature of the socio-anthropological approach in Lefort’s thought. The author explores the complex relationship between Lefort and the Durkheimian French school of sociology in four stages: in the first, he shows Lefort as a sociologist ‘worthy of its name’ or, in other words, a sociologist interested in questioning the ‘institution of the social’. In the second, he focuses on the disturbing elements that Lefort introduces: the political and the division into the (...) French sociological approach. In the third stage, he focuses his attention on the sociological approach in Lefort’s way of thinking about democratic society. Finally, he concludes by referring to Lefort’s apparent opposition between philosophy and social sciences – and the errors that this may have engendered – in order to demonstrate the continuity of Lefort’s sociological approach. (shrink)

It is often contended that certain enhancement technologies are acceptable, because they simply update traditional ways of pursuing the improvement of human capacities. This is not true with reference to moral bioenhancement, because of the radical difference between traditional and biotechnological ways of producing moral progress. These latter risk having serious negative effects on our moral agency, by causing a substantial loss of freedom and capacity of authentic moral behaviour, by affecting our moral identity and by imposing a standard conception (...) of moral personality. (shrink)

Increasing evidence from psychology and neuroscience suggests that emotion plays an important and sometimes critical role in moral judgment and moral behavior. At the same time, there is increasing psychological and neuroscientific evidence that brain regions critical in emotional and moral capacity are impaired in psychopaths. We ask how the criminal law should accommodate these two streams of research, in light of a new normative and legal account of the criminal responsibility of psychopaths.

This paper investigates the logic of Ockhamism, a view according to which future contingents are either true or false. Several attempts have been made to give rigorous shape to this view by defining a suitable formal semantics, but arguably none of them is fully satisfactory. The paper draws attention to some problems that beset such attempts, and suggests that these problems are different symptoms of the same initial confusion, in that they stem from the unjustified assumption that the actual course (...) of events must be represented in the semantics as a distinguished history, the Thin Red Line. (shrink)

This paper employs some outcomes (for the most part due to David Lewis) of the contemporary debate on the metaphysics of dispositions to evaluate those dispositional analyses of meaning that make use of the concept of a disposition in ideal conditions. The first section of the paper explains why one may find appealing the notion of an ideal-condition dispositional analysis of meaning and argues that Saul Kripke’s well-known argument against such analyses is wanting. The second section focuses on Lewis’ work (...) in the metaphysics of dispositions in order to call attention to some intuitions about the nature of dispositions that we all seem to share. In particular, I stress the role of what I call "Actuality Constraint". The third section of the paper maintains that the Actuality Constraint can be used to show that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by "+" do not exist (in so doing, I develop a suggestion put forward by Paul Boghossian). This immediately implies that ideal-condition dispositional analyses of meaning cannot work. The last section discusses a possible objection to my argument. The point of the objection is that the argument depends on an illicit assumption. I show (1) that, in fact, the assumption in question is far from illicit and (2) that even without this assumption it is possible to argue that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by "+" do not exist. (shrink)

Collective impact cases are situations where people collectively bring about a morally significant outcome by each acting in a certain way, and yet each individual action seems to make no, or almost no difference to the outcome. Intuitively, the beneficial or harmful outcomes give individuals moral reason to act (or refrain from acting) in collective impact situations. However, if the individual action does not make a difference to the outcome, it is not clear what those moral reasons are. The problem (...) of collective impact is the challenge of identifying such moral reasons. Julia Nefsky has presented an account of how an individual action can help without making a difference – call it the Helping Account – that claims to provide a general solution to the problem of collective impact while avoiding problems faced by previously suggested solutions. I present an internal critique of Nefsky’s work. First, I argue that, based on the problems that Nefsky has raised against previously suggested solutions, three success conditions for a general solution to the problem of collective impact can be formulated: The Weightiness condition, the Generalizability condition, and the Connectedness condition. Second, I argue that the Helping Account fails to satisfy the three success conditions, thereby failing, by Nefsky’s own standards, to provide a general solution to the problem. (shrink)

In her book Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights, Diana Meyers offers a careful analysis of victims' stories as a narrative genre, and she argues that stories in this genre function as a call to care: they both depict a moral void and issue a moral demand, thereby fostering the development of a culture of human rights. This article, while finding Meyers's articulation of this idea compelling, questions Meyers's account of how victims' stories do their moral work. Whereas (...) Meyers argues that victims' stories are complete narratives, characterized by a distinctive form of closure, it suggests that the moral power of victims' stories may lie in part in their open-endedness or lack of closure. In telling their stories, victims engage their audiences in a new moral relationship and implicitly give them a role to play in bringing about the moral closure they seek. (shrink)

Among the various motivations that may lead to the idea that truth is relative in some non-conventional sense, one is that the idea helps explain how there can be ‘‘ faultless disagreements’’, that is, situations in which a person A judges that p, a person B judges that not-p, but neither A nor B is at fault. The line of argument goes as follows. It seems that there are faultless disagreements. For example, A and B may disagree on culinary matters (...) without either A or B being at fault. But standard semantics has no room for such a case, so there is something wrong with standard semantics. The best way to amend it is to add a new parameter that is relevant to the truth or falsity of what A and B judge, presumably, something related to personal taste. The aim of the paper is to show that this line of argument is flawed. It is true that standard semantics has no room for faultless disagreements. But there is nothing wrong with this, for it should not be assumed that such disagreements exist. (shrink)

The question is discussed how noise gained a functional meaning in the context of biology. According to the common view, noise is considered a disturbance or perturbation. I analyze how this understanding changed and what kind of developments during the last 10 years contributed to the emergence of a new understanding of noise. Results gained during a field study in a synthetic biology laboratory show that the emergence of this new research discipline—its highly interdisciplinary character, its new technologies and novel (...) modeling strategies—provided essential impulses, which led to the observed change in the concept of noise. The laboratory study is combined with a historical analysis, which explores the general question as to how concepts travel between disciplines and, specifically, how noise was transferred from engineering and physics into biology. In the past, scientists, such as Lotka and Goodwin, tried to introduce a statistical mechanics into biology and discussed the problem of “unfitting” concepts. The change in the meaning of the concept can be interpreted as a way of making it fit to the novel context in which it is applied. (shrink)

This paper argues that most of the alleged straight solutions to the sceptical paradox which Kripke ascribed to Wittgenstein can be regarded as the first horn of a dilemma whose second horn is the paradox itself. The dilemma is proved to be a by‐product of a foundationalist assumption on the notion of justification, as applied to linguistic behaviour. It is maintained that the assumption is unnecessary and that the dilemma is therefore spurious. To this end, an alternative conception of the (...) justification of linguistic behaviour is outlined, a conception that vindicates some of the insights behind Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical solution of the paradox. This alternative conception is defended against two objections (both familiar from McDowell's works): (1) that it would imply that for the linguistic community there is no authority, no standard to meet and, therefore, no possibility of error and (2) that it would lead to a kind of idealism. (shrink)

The paper discusses Saul Kripke's Normativity Argument against semantic dispositionalism: it criticizes the orthodox interpretation of the argument, defends an alternative reading and argues that, contrary to what Kripke himself seems to have been thinking, the real point of the Normativity Argument is not that meaning is normative. According to the orthodox interpretation, the argument can be summarized as follows: (1) it is constitutive of the concept of meaning that its instances imply an ought, but (2) it is not constitutive (...) of the concept of a disposition that dispositions imply an ought, hence (3) no dispositional analysis of meaning can work. According to my alternative reading, the point of the argument is another one, namely that while (1) dispositionalism is committed to the thesis that speakers have non-inferential knowledge of their unmanifested linguistic dispositions, (2) speakers, as a matter of fact, do not have such a knowledge. A point that is in principle independent from the issue of the normativity of meaning. (shrink)