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)

Andrea Wiggins and John Wilbanks offer a rich and nuanced description of citizen science, which they define as “a range of participatory models for involving non-professionals as collaborators in s...

Andrea Wiggins and John Wilbanks’ article (2019) presents us with a welcome overview of the neglected, novel ethical issues raised by the advent of citizen science in health and biomedical contexts. This contribution takes a rather different approach, focusing on a very specific (yet also overlooked) problem in this context - the ethical implications of self-administered genetic testing. This problem, however, is particularly illustrative of the “ethics gap” between traditional medical settings and new public-driven scientific practices, emphasized by (...) Wiggins and Wilbanks in their more wide-ranging treatment. (shrink)

In their target article, “The Rise of Citizen Science in Health and Biomedical Research,” Andrea Wiggins and John Wilbanks (2019) summarize some of the emerging ethical issues related to citizen sc...

A collection of 14 essays honoring the life and work of Oxford philosopher Wiggins touching on topics from ancient philosophy to ethics, metaphysics and the theory of meaning. The contributing scholars debate many of the seminal issues of Wiggins' work, including the determinancy of distinctness, relative identity, naturalism in ethics, logic and truth in moral judgments, and the practical wisdom of Aristotle. The collection uniquely features replies by Wiggins to each of the papers. Annotation copyright by Book (...) News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Reseña de la obra de Rodolfo Gutiérrez y Andrea Mosquera. Devenires de un acontecimiento. Mayo del 68 cincuenta años después. Madrid: Cenaltes Ediciones, 2020.

[R. M. Sainsbury] Evans argued that most ordinary proper names were Russellian: to suppose that they have no bearer is to suppose that they have no meaning. The first part of this paper addresses Evans's arguments, and finds them wanting. Evans also claimed that the logical form of some negative existential sentences involves 'really' (e.g. 'Hamlet didn't really exist'). One might be tempted by the view, even if one did not accept its Russellian motivation. However, I suggest that Evans gives (...) no adequate account of 'really', and I point to unclarities in Wiggins's similar, but distinct, attempt to use 'really' in the logical form of true negative existentials. /// [David Wiggins] Evans was not wrong (I maintain) to say that the senses of genuine proper names invoke and require objects. Names in fiction or hypothesis mimic such names. Pace Evans, Sainsbury and free logicians, proper names are scopeless. (Evans's 'Julius' is not a name.) Names create a presumption of existential generalization. In sentences such as 'Vulcan does not really exist', that presumption is bracketed. The sentence specifies by reference to story or report a concept identical with Vulcan and declares it be really uninstantiated. (The sentence, which partakes of play, is a kind of palimpsest.) It is explained why this second level view of 'exists' is to be preferred. (shrink)

Wiggins’ (2012) argument against propositional accounts of knowing how is based on a development of some considerations taken from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle argued that the knowledge needed for participation in an ethos cannot be codified in propositional form so as to let it be imparted to someone who did not already have it. This is because any putative codification would be incomplete, and require that knowledge in order to extend it to novel cases. On a reasonable interpretation of (...) his argument, Wiggins claims that the same goes for practical knowledge in general, and that this shows that a propositional view of knowing how is incorrect. This paper shows that this argument is unsound. (shrink)

In the context of discussing the purported divide between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ political philosophy, Chin and Thomassen diagnose a tendency to unreflectively take the divide’s existe...

Book review of: David Wiggins, Continuants: Their Activity, Their Being and Their Identity. Twelve Essays.

This paper is a critique of David Wiggins's treatment of essentialism in his book Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Blackwell 1967). I argue in detail that he has not provided an adequate account either of the concept of a sortal term or of the concept of a substance-concept, even though both concepts play important roles in his case for essentialism. I also discuss Wiggins's views on how substance-concepts are related to judgments of identity through time.

This short essay offers a commentary on Chapter 11 of David Wiggins’,Ethics(2006). The essay asks how we should interpret Wiggins’ defense of ethical ‘objectivity’ given his subjectivist metaethics. An interpretation is drawn from Sharon Street's work on metaethical constructivism, of which Wiggins’ view is taken to be one variety.

1. There is a tendency nowadays for linguists, philosophers and other theorists of language, to dismiss the notion of an object like the English language or the Polish language as simply mythological or mythopoeic—as of no interest to any serious science of language. Some theorists even appear to deny that there are such things as languages . ‘This notion [of a public language] is unknown to empirical inquiry and raises what seem to be irresolvable problems’, Chomsky said in a lecture (...) he gave recently in London. (shrink)

Critical study of David Wiggins's Sameness and Substance (1980).

My first encounter with David Wiggins’ thought occurred a few weeks before I took my undergraduate final examinations in Oxford in 1971. In Blackwell's Bookshop I came across a slim blue volume Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity. I purchased it and read it cover-to-cover the same day. It was immediately clear that this was contemporary writing in a different league from anything I had previously read on the topic.

If the theory advanced below is correct, then what is the difference (I know she [Philippa Foot]] will ask) between the moral must/must not and the must/must not of etiquette or the clubhouse? Looking forward to the conclusion I shall reach, let me reply, roughly and readily, that the difference will reside not in anything formal but in the depth, spread, and felt authority of the attachments to which the moral must/must not appeals-and categorically appeals.