“There’s no disputing about taste.” That’s got a nice ring to it, but it’s not quite the ring of truth. While there’s definitely something right about the aphorism – there’s a reason why it is, after all, an aphorism, and why its utterance tends to produce so much nodding of heads and muttering of “just so” and “yes, quite” – it’s surprisingly difficult to put one’s finger on just what the truth in the neighborhood is, exactly. One thing that’s pretty (...) clear is that what’s right about the aphorism, that there’s no disputing about taste, isn’t that there’s no disputing about taste. There’s heaps of disputing about taste. People engage in disputes about which movies, music, paintings, literature, meals, furniture, architectural styles, etc. are good, beautiful, tasty, fun, elegant, ugly, disgusting, etc. all the time. This is obvious to anyone who has watched dueling-movie-critics shows, read theater reviews, or negotiated with a group or partner about which movie or restaurant to go to, or which sofa or painting to put in the living room. It takes great care and good aim to fling a brick without hitting somebody who’s engaged in a dispute about taste. (shrink)

Among the cognitive capacities of evolved creatures is the capacity to represent. Theories in cognitive neuroscience typically explain our manifest representational capacities by positing internal representations, but there is little agreement about how these representations function, especially with the relatively recent proliferation of connectionist, dynamical, embodied, and enactive approaches to cognition. In this talk I sketch an account of the nature and function of representation in cognitive neuroscience that couples a realist construal of representational vehicles with a pragmatic account of (...) mental content. I call the resulting package a deflationary account of mental representation and I argue that it avoids the problems that afflict competing accounts. (shrink)

Problems about the accidental properties of properties motivate us--force us, I think--not to identify properties with the sets of their instances. If we identify them instead with functions from worlds to extensions, we get a theory of properties that is neutral with respect to disputes over counterpart theory, and we avoid a problem for Lewis's theory of events. Similar problems about the temporary properties of properties motivate us--though this time they probably don't force us--to give up this theory as well, (...) and to identify properties with functions from world, time pairs to extensions. Again, the replacement theory is neutral with respect to a metaphysical dispute that the old theory (arguably) forces us to take a stand on--the dispute over whether objects have temporal parts. It also allows us to give a smoother semantics for predication, to better accommodate our intuitions about which objects temporary properties are properties of, and to make temporally self-locating beliefs genuinely self -locating. (shrink)

Review text: "Überzeugend ist A. Meyer vor allem in der souveränen kritischen Übersicht des Forschungsstandes, in der stringenten, die unterschiedlichen historiographischen Modelle voneinander abgrenzenden Systematisierung der Ergebnisse sowie in der Konsequenz bei der Durchführung ihres Anliegens."Mario Marino in: Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 4/2009.

Responsible research and innovation has come to represent a change in the relationship between science, technology and society. With origins in the democratisation of science, and the inclusion of ethical and societal aspects in research and development activities, RRI offers a means of integrating society and the research and innovation communities. In this article, we frame RRI activities through the lens of layers of science and technology governance as a means of characterising the context in which the RRI activity is (...) positioned and the goal of those actors promoting the RRI activities in shaping overall governance patterns. RRI began to emerge during a time of considerable deliberation about the societal and governance challenges around nanotechnology, in which stakeholders were looking for new ways of integrating notions of responsibility in nanotechnology research and development. For this reason, this article focuses on nanotechnology as the site for exploring the evolution and growth of RRI. (shrink)

It is becoming more common that the decision-makers in private and public institutions are predictive algorithmic systems, not humans. This article argues that relying on algorithmic systems is procedurally unjust in contexts involving background conditions of structural injustice. Under such nonideal conditions, algorithmic systems, if left to their own devices, cannot meet a necessary condition of procedural justice, because they fail to provide a sufficiently nuanced model of which cases count as relevantly similar. Resolving this problem requires deliberative capacities uniquely (...) available to human agents. After exploring the limitations of existing formal algorithmic fairness strategies, the article argues that procedural justice requires that human agents relying wholly or in part on algorithmic systems proceed with caution: by avoiding doxastic negligence about algorithmic outputs, by exercising deliberative capacities when making similarity judgments, and by suspending belief and gathering additional information in light of higher-order uncertainty. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously compares units of language to games, but his pupil Rush Rhees finds that analogy limiting. Unlike uses of language, says Rhees, games are not part of a larger whole and do not have a point, which means that games, unlike language, cannot lead to growth in understanding. Treating language like a game, according to Rhees, is characteristic of sophistry. But this paper claims that sophistry is not like playing a game but like playing the spoilsport. Wittgenstein’s fluid (...) understanding of the distinction between games and non-game play allows his conception of language-games to avoid the charge of sophistry. (shrink)

In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that results as part of a social process that systematically (...) gives rise to racial injustice, and is an active player in the process. I argue that, because of its greater power and flexibility, the Structuralist View better explains the patterns of ignorance that we observe, better illuminates the connection to white racial domination, and is overall better suited to the project of ameliorating racial injustice. As such, the Structuralist View should be preferred. (shrink)

Issues of responsibility in the world of nanotechnology are becoming explicit with the emergence of a discourse on ‘responsible development’ of nanoscience and nanotechnologies. Much of this discourse centres on the ambivalences of nanotechnology and of promising technology in general. Actors must find means of dealing with these ambivalences. Actors’ actions and responses to ambivalence are shaped by their position and context, along with strategic games they are involved in, together with other actors. A number of interviews were conducted with (...) industrial actors with the aim of uncovering their ethical stances towards responsible development of nanotechnology. The data shows that standard repertoires of justification of nanotechnological development were used. Thus, the industrial actors fell back on their position and associated responsibilities. Such responses reinforce a division of moral labour in which industrial actors and scientists can focus on the progress of science and technology, while other actors, such as NGOs, are expected to take care of broader considerations, such as ethical and social issues. (shrink)

"Huizenga examines the Greco-Roman moral-philosophical 'curriculum' for women by comparing these two epistolary collections. The analysis is organized around four elements: textual resources, teachers and learners, instructional strategies, and subject matter. Huizenga shows that the author of the Pastorals has adopted nearly all of the 'pagan' aspects of this curriculum, but has supplemented these with theological justifications drawn from Pauline literature and traditions"--Publisher description.

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V References.

Cognitive approaches contribute to our understanding of delusions by providing an explanatory framework that extends beyond the personal level to the sub personal level of information-processing systems. According to one influential cognitive approach, two factors are required to account for the content of a delusion, its initial adoption as a belief, and its persistence. This chapter reviews Bayesian developments of the two-factor framework.

In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that (1) results as part of a social process that (...) systematically gives rise to racial injustice, and (2) is an active player in the process. I argue that, because of its greater power and flexibility, the Structuralist View better explains the patterns of ignorance that we observe, better illuminates the connection to white racial domination, and is overall better suited to the project of ameliorating racial injustice. As such, the Structuralist View should be preferred. (shrink)

We argue for an imaginative analog of desire from premises about imaginative engagement with fiction. There's a bit about the paradox of fiction, too.

The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (...) (Knobe & Yalcin 2014; Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers’ truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this ‘QUD effect’ is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism. (shrink)

Professor Schellenberg thinks that recent progress in our moral thinking about what counts as a good person and what counts as morally permissible action strengthen the case for atheism. Moral evolution ought to lead to religious evolution. We don’t think the maneuver works. Despite being a clear and accessible piece of philosophy that makes some important contributions to the literature, the central move of the book falls short. In that sense, Progressive Atheism makes little progress. Our review offers a synopsis (...) and an appraisal of the project. (shrink)

Ausgehend von den Rändern der gegenwärtigen literarischen Praxis wirft Annette Gilberts komparatistische Studie neues Licht auf eine zentrale Kategorie der Literatur(wissenschaft): das Werk als pragmatische Instanz literarischer Kommunikation. Unter Anwendung eines erweiterten Literaturbegriffs werden avantgardistische und experimentelle Positionen im Grenzbereich von Literatur und Kunst seit den 1950er Jahren gesichtet, die eine starke Reflexion ihres eigenen Werkseins erkennen lassen. Entsprechende Versuchsanordnungen - etwa von Elfriede Jelinek, Timm Ulrichs, Sherrie Levine, Elaine Sturtevant, Marcel Broodthaers - werden als substantieller Beitrag zur literaturtheoretischen (...) Grundlagenforschung gelesen. Zugleich werden Traditionslinien zu historischen Vorgängern wie Stéphane Mallarmé und Jorge Luis Borges sowie Parallelen zu ähnlichen Tendenzen und Problemstellungen in der bildenden Kunst aufgezeigt. (shrink)

Pourquoi l'histoire et la mémoire sont-ils des outils pour penser la démocratie? Face aux crimes contre l'humanité plus que jamais d'actualité, se dessine une responsabilité commune essentielle : celle de cultiver, transmettre l'histoire et en tirer les enseignements. Retraçant sa propre histoire et celle de sa famille, Annette Wieviorka, disposant des témoignages de ses parents, d'archives mais aussi de ses propres souvenirs, dessine d'un même geste les contours d'une biographie collective de ce monde qui a connu l'impensable Shoah. Le (...) souvenir des millions de victimes, cette conscience du temps qui passe, ce sentiment d'appartenir à la dernière génération à pouvoir restituer la mémoire se révèlent vivaces et fondateurs. Surtout, Annette Wieviorka montre que le vrai danger pour la démocratie est dans l'oubli de l'histoire, la grande et celle familiale, quand s'imposent la haine de l'Autre, l'antisémitisme et les extrémismes en tous genres."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The influence of liberal political ideology on nursing sciencePrevious notions of science as impartial and value-neutral have been refuted by contemporary views of science as influenced by social, political and ideological values. By locating nursing science in the dominant political ideology of liberalism, the author examines how nursing knowledge is influenced by liberal philosophical assumptions. The central tenets of liberal political philosophy — individualism, egalitarianism, freedom, tolerance, neutrality, and a free-market economy — are primarily manifested in relation to: (i) the (...) individualistic focus of our science; (ii) our view of society as essentially egalitarian and equitable; (iii) our preference for politically neutral knowledge development, and (iv) an economy of knowledge development that supports rather than challenges the status quo. I argue that exposing, rather than ignoring, the liberal ideological values inherent in nursing science will render these assumptions open to debate, stimulate ongoing development of critically oriented knowledge, and increase our capacity to influence the social, political and economic determinants of health. (shrink)

The democratic boundary problem raises the question of who has democratic participation rights in a given polity and why. One possible solution to this problem is the all-affected principle, according to which a polity ought to enfranchise all persons whose interests are affected by the polity’s decisions in a morally significant way. While AAP offers a plausible principle of democratic enfranchisement, its supporters have so far not paid sufficient attention to economic participation rights. I argue that if one commits oneself (...) to AAP, one must also commit oneself to the view that political participation rights are not necessarily the only, and not necessarily the best, way to protect morally weighty interests. I also argue that economic participation rights raise important worries about democratic accountability, which is why their exercise must be constrained by a number of moral duties. (shrink)

This book focuses on the history and theories relating to case study methodology. It also examines the implications of utilizing case studies in university settings and explores how case studies prepare professionals for real-life career-related scenarios.

Investigating experimental and avant-garde works of art as literature, Gilbert probes what art can't see about the literary and what literature has overlooked in the arts.

Both local and global issues are typically dealt with in the Social Studies curriculum, or in curriculum areas with other names but similar intents. In the literature about Social Studies the imagination has played little role, and consequently it hardly appears in texts designed to help teachers plan and implement Social Studies lessons. What is true of Social Studies is also largely reflected in general texts concerning planning teaching. Clearly many theorists and practitioners are concerned to engage students’ imaginations in (...) learning, even though they use terms other than ‘imagination’ in doing so. This article suggests that a more explicit attention to imagination can make our efforts to engage students in learning more effective. We provide, first, a working definition of imagination, then show how students’ imaginations can be characterized in terms of the ‘cognitive toolkits’ they bring to learning. We look at such ‘cognitive tools’ as stories, images, humor, binary oppositions, a sense of mystery and how these can be used to engage students’ imaginations in learning Social Studies and other content from kindergarten to about grade four. We then consider ‘cognitive tools’ commonly deployed by students from about grade four to grade nine, including a sense of reality, the extremes of experience and limits of reality, and associating with the heroic. We also provide examples of how using such tools could influence planning and teaching Social Studies topics. (shrink)

Verschwindet die Religiosität in der Moderne oder ist im Gegenteil eine Rückkehr der Religionen zu verzeichnen? Das Handbuch beleuchtet die Dialektik von Säkularisierung und Revitalisierung der Religionen aus philosophischer, soziologischer und religionswissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Vorgestellt werden grundlegende Konzepte, z. B. von Durkheim, Weber, Habermas, Blumenberg und Luhmann. Der zweite Teil untersucht Begriffe wie das Böse, das Heilige, Pluralismus etc. in ihrer Bedeutung im Kontext der Säkularisierung. Abschließend geht es um Konflikte wie Glauben und Wissen, Religion und Menschenrechte oder Säkularisierung und die (...) Weltreligionen. (shrink)

Disagreement persists about when, if at all, disenfranchisement is a fitting response to criminal wrongdoing of type X. Positive retributivists endorse a permissive view of fittingness: on this view, disenfranchising a remarkably wide range of morally serious criminal wrongdoers is justified. But defining fittingness in the context of criminal disenfranchisement in such broad terms is implausible, since many crimes sanctioned via disenfranchisement have little to do with democratic participation in the first place: the link between the nature of a criminal (...) act X (the ‘desert basis’) and a fitting sanction Y is insufficiently direct in such cases. I define a new, much narrower account of the kind of criminal wrongdoing which is a more plausible desert basis for disenfranchisement: ‘political wrongdoing’, such as electioneering, corruption, or conspiracy with foreign powers. I conclude that widespread blanket and post-incarceration disenfranchisement policies are overinclusive, because they disenfranchise persons guilty of serious, but non-political, criminal wrongdoing. While such overinclusiveness is objectionable in any context, it is particularly objectionable in circumstances in which it has additional large-scale collateral consequences, for instance by perpetuating existing structures of racial injustice. At the same time, current policies are underinclusive, thus hindering the aim of holding political wrongdoers accountable. (shrink)

We describe the growth of interest in the ethics of research with human participants based on articles abstracted in Psychological Abstracts and PsycLZT. Interest was low and variable until 1974, after which there was a marked increase in the number of articles published. We explain this emergence of ethical interest in terms of the social climate of concern for human rights in the 1960s and 1970s, the 1973 revision of the American Psychological Association's ethical principles, and the development of federal (...) regulation of research with human participants. (shrink)

We discuss the variety of sorts of sympathy Hume recognizes, the extent to which he thinks our sympathy with others’ feelings depends on inferences from the other’s expression, and from her perceived situation, and consider also whether he later changed his views about the nature and role of sympathy, in particular its role in morals.

Cultural safety is a relatively new concept that has emerged in the New Zealand nursing context and is being taken up in various ways in Canadian health care discourses. Our research team has been exploring the relevance of cultural safety in the Canadian context, most recently in relation to a knowledge-translation study conducted with nurses practising in a large tertiary hospital. We were drawn to using cultural safety because we conceptualized it as being compatible with critical theoretical perspectives that foster (...) a focus on power imbalances and inequitable social relationships in health care; the interrelated problems of culturalism and racialization; and a commitment to social justice as central to the social mandate of nursing. Engaging in this knowledge-translation study has provided new perspectives on the complexities, ambiguities and tensions that need to be considered when using the concept of cultural safety to draw attention to racialization, culturalism, and health and health care inequities. The philosophic analysis discussed in this paper represents an epistemological grounding for the concept of cultural safety that links directly to particular moral ends with social justice implications. Although cultural safety is a concept that we have firmly positioned within the paradigm of critical inquiry, ambiguities associated with the notions of 'culture', 'safety', and 'cultural safety' need to be anticipated and addressed if they are to be effectively used to draw attention to critical social justice issues in practice settings. Using cultural safety in practice settings to draw attention to and prompt critical reflection on politicized knowledge, therefore, brings an added layer of complexity. To address these complexities, we propose that what may be required to effectively use cultural safety in the knowledge-translation process is a 'social justice curriculum for practice' that would foster a philosophical stance of critical inquiry at both the individual and institutional levels. (shrink)

You’re imagining, in the course of a different game of make-believe, that you’re a bank robber. You don’t believe that you’re a bank robber. You are moved to point your finger, gun-wise, at the person pretending to be the bank teller and say, “Stick ‘em up! This is a robbery!”.

Nurse practitioners (NPs) are increasingly called on to provide high‐quality health‐care particularly for people who face significant barriers to accessing services. Although discourses of social justice have become relatively common in nursing and health services literature, critical analyses of how NP roles articulate with social justice issues have received less attention. In this study, we examine the role of NPs from a critical social justice perspective. A critical social justice lens raises morally significant questions, for example, why certain individuals and (...) groups bear a disproportionate burden of illness and suffering; what social conditions contribute to disparities in health and social status; and what social mandate NPs ought to develop in response to these realities. In our analysis, we draw on lessons learned from the initial Canadian experience with the introduction of NPs in the 1970s to consider the renewed and burgeoning interest in NPs in Canada, Australia and elsewhere. As we argue, a critical social justice perspective (in addition to the biomedical foci of NP practice) will be essential to sustaining long‐term, socially responsive NP roles and achieving greater equity in health and health‐care. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie aktuellen Entwicklungen und Anforderungen in der pflegeberuflichen Bildung, das Ausbildungsziel im Pflegeberufegesetz vom 17. Juli 2017 und die Explikationen in der dazugehörigen Ausbildungs- und Prüfungsverordnung für die Pflegeberufe fordern eine stärkere Ausrichtung auf die Entwicklung ethischer Kompetenzen explizit ein. Bislang liegen tendenziell übergreifende Definitionen und Darlegungen zu ethischen Kompetenzen in der Pflege vor, deren Verdienst es ist, das Spezifische der Pflegeethik zu konturieren und erstmals ethische Kompetenzen für das Feld zu konkretisieren. In methodischer und didaktischer Hinsicht ist indes eine (...) spezifische Differenzierung gemäß unterschiedlicher Bildungsniveaus relevant. Lehrende werden ihre Lehre nicht mehr nur im Sinne einer allgemeinen Förderung ethischer Kompetenz entwickeln können, sondern müssen dabei den jeweiligen Verantwortungsbereich und das angezielte Qualifikationsniveau der Lernenden berücksichtigen. Ziel der Darlegungen ist es, konkrete Kompetenzniveaus für die Anbahnung professionsethischer Kompetenzen zu operationalisieren, die einerseits die Anforderungen aus dem zukünftigen Pflegeberufegesetz aufgreifen und andererseits anstehende curriculare Entwicklungsprozesse unterstützen. (shrink)

Norman Daniels’ theory of justice and health faces a serious practical problem: his theory can ground the special moral importance of health and allows distinguishing just from unjust health inequalities, but it provides little practical guidance for allocating resources when they are especially scarce. Daniels’ solution to this problem is a fair process that he specifies as "accountability for reasonableness". Daniels claims that accountability for reasonableness makes limit-setting decisions in healthcare not only legitimate, but also fair. This paper assesses the (...) latter claim. Does accountability for reasonableness result in fair limit-setting decisions? It is argued that the answer to this question is not a clear yes. Daniels is remarkably unclear about the criterion of fairness that accountability for reasonableness satisfies. The paper discusses different options for resolving this lack of clarity and examines how they apply to Daniels’ accountability for reasonableness framework. It is concluded, first, that accountability for reasonableness is not a paradigm case of any of the classic notions of procedural justice; second, that what might be called "constrained pure procedural justice" best reflects how accountability for reasonableness results in fair limit-setting decisions; and third, that the procedural conditions of accountability for reasonableness must be further specified and amended to better achieve a fair process, and hence fair limit-setting decisions. (shrink)

In epistemology and philosophy of science, there has been substantial debate about truth’s relation to understanding. “Non-factivists” hold that radical departures from the truth are not always barriers to understanding; “quasi-factivists” demur. The most discussed example concerns scientists’ use of idealizations in certain derivations of the ideal gas law from statistical mechanics. Yet, these discussions have suffered from confusions about the relevant science, as well as conceptual confusions. Addressing this example, we shall argue that the ideal gas law is best (...) interpreted as favoring non-factivism about understanding, but only after delving a bit deeper into the statistical mechanics that has informed these arguments and stating more precisely what non-factivism entails. Along the way, we indicate where earlier discussions have gone astray, and highlight how a naturalistic approach furnishes more nuanced normative theses about the interaction of rationality, understanding, and epistemic value. (shrink)