This anthology focuses on “practical” forms and expressions of knowledge, like thinking through artistic media or by crafting things out of materials. The ten chapters follow and review various tracks in conceptions of contemporary knowledge, exploring human knowledge and experience from the perspective of human activities or practices, professional, artistic, domestic, or whatever. A guiding idea is that human knowledge seldom, perhaps never, fits into the traditional dualism between thinking and doing. -/- The chapters are written by philosophers and musicians (...) – some with a double experience as artists and theoreticians. The themes are philosophical, but above all, they touch on questions that are essential for how we understand ourselves as thinking and playing bodies, indeed as parts of nature. The book does not propose one single “theory of knowledge” but steps towards a more diverse and open attitude to the meaning of knowledge. -/- We hope that the texts will be of interest and useful in both disciplinebased and professional education: in philosophy, art schools, tea cher education, and in other programmes where tacit and practical knowledge are essential for the (future) practitioners. It is possible to independently read, and profit from, most of the chapters. (shrink)

In recent years, several formalisms for program construction have appeared. One such formalism is the type theory developed by Per Martin-L f. Well suited as a theory for program construction, it makes possible the expression of both specifications and programs within the same formalism. Furthermore, the proof rules can be used to derive a correct program from a specification as well as to verify that a given program has a certain property. This book contains a thorough introduction to type theory, (...) with information on polymorphic sets, subsets, monomorphic sets, and a full set of helpful examples. (shrink)

Enormous gaps between HIV burden and health care availability in low-income countries raise severe ethical problems. This article analyzes four HIV-priority dilemmas with interest across contexts and health systems. We explore principled distributive conflicts and use the Atkinson index to make explicit trade-offs between health maximization and equality in health. We find that societies need a relatively low aversion to inequality to favor treatment for children, even with large weights assigned to extending the lives of adults: higher inequality aversion is (...) needed to share resources equally between high-cost and low-cost treatment; higher inequality aversion is needed to favor treatment rather than prevention, and the highest inequality aversion is needed to favor sharing treatment between urban and rural regions rather than urban provision of treatment. This type of ethical sensitivity analysis may clarify the ethics of health policy choice. (shrink)

The counterfactual comparative account of harm has counterintuitive implications in cases involving overdetermination and preemption. A popular strategy for dealing with these problems appeals to plural harm—several events being jointly harmful. Björn Petersson criticizes this strategy on the grounds that it conflicts with a strong intuition that helps to motivate the counterfactual comparative account, namely, that harming someone essentially involves making a difference for the worse for her. In this paper, I argue that Petersson’s argument is unconvincing.

Overall assessments and balancing of interests -- Multi-criteria analysis -- Intuition -- Legal examples of decision-making with SAW -- Decision-making under uncertainty -- Evidentiary aspects.

This book is a philosophical analysis of knowledge in practices, focused on knowing how, tacit knowledge and expert knowledge. Knowing in action is argued to be more basic than propositional or theoretical knowledge. The analytical framework is pragmatist, with references to William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

A so called “weak value” of an observable in quantum mechanics (QM) may be obtained in a weak measurement + post-selection procedure on the QM system under study. Applied to number operators, it has been invoked in revisiting some QM paradoxes (e.g., the so called Three-Box Paradox and Hardy’s Paradox). This requires the weak value to be interpreted as a bona fide property of the system considered, a par with entities like operator mean values and eigenvalues. I question such an (...) interpretation; it has no support in the basic axioms of quantum mechanics and it leads to unreasonable results in concrete situations. (shrink)

Harm-reduction approaches are used to reduce the burden of risky human behaviour without necessarily aiming to stop the behaviour. We discuss what an introduction of harm reduction for doping in sports would mean in parallel with a relaxation of the antidoping rule. We analyse what is ethically at stake in the following five levels: (1) What would it mean for the athlete (the self)? (2) How would it impact other athletes (the other)? (3) How would it affect the phenomenon of (...) sport as a game and its fair play basis (the play)? (4) What would be the consequences for the spectator and the role of sports in society (the display)? and (5) What would it mean for what some consider as essential to being human (humanity)? For each level, we present arguments for and against doping and then discuss what a harm-reduction approach, within a dynamic regime of a partially relaxed antidoping rule, could imply. We find that a harm-reduction approach is morally defensible and potentially provides a viable escape out of the impasse resulting from the impossibility of attaining the eradication of doping. The following question remains to be answered: Would a more relaxed position, when combined with harm-reduction measures, indeed have less negative consequences for society than today9s all-out antidoping efforts that aim for abstinence? We provide an outline of an alternative policy, allowing a cautious step-wise change to answer this question and then discuss the ethical aspects of such a policy change. (shrink)

In this article I argue for an empiricist view on laws. Some laws are fundamental in the sense that they are the result of inductive generalisations of observed regularities and at the same time in their formulation contain a new theoretical predicate. The inductive generalisations simul- taneously function as implicit definitions of these new predicates. Other laws are either explicit definitions or consequences of other previously established laws. I discuss the laws of classical mechanics, relativity theory and electromagnetism in detail. (...) Laws are necessary, whereas acciden- tal generalisations are not. But necessity here is not a modal concept, but rather interpreted as short for the semantic predicate “... is necessarily true”. Thus no modal logic is needed. The neces- sity attributed to law sentences is in turn interpreted as “necessary condition for the rest of the the- ory”, which is true since fundamental laws are implicit definitions of theoretical predicates use in the theory. (shrink)

Newtonian mechanics has a container conception of space. Space is regarded as an empty receptacle in which all material bodies exist. For a long time, most defenders of this view claimed that it must be mind-dependent. Anton Marty is the first modern philosopher to argue both that physical space is mind-independent and that it has the features characteristic of Newtonian physical space. Moreover, he works out a number of metaphysical implications of this view. Therefore, Marty ought to be given a (...) prominent place in the history of conceptions of space. As shown by Graham Nerlich, a container conception can be defended even after the twentieth-century revolutions in physics. By bringing Marty and Nerlich together, the paper claims that a container conception of space/space-time should even today be taken seriously in the philosophy of physics. (shrink)

One of the claims sometimes advanced in favour of anti-doping is that allowing doping would lead to a uniform increase in performance in comparison to no doping. The idea is that if all athletes wo...

Electromagnetism is usually understood as a theory describing how charged particles and eletromagnetic fields interact. In this paper I argue that a double ontology comprising both particles and fields is problematic. Either we should think of electromagnetism as a theory about charged particles directly interacting with each other, or as theory of fields whose local interactions are manifested as field quanta, called "particles." From a purely theoretical point of view the choice between a particle and a field interpretation does not (...) matter much when it concerns classical electromagnetism; both interpretations are possible and, as shown by Quine, there is a general method for translating a theory about one kind of objects into a theory assuming another kind of objects, provided these theories are empirically equivalent. From an empiricist point of view, however, the particle interpretation is the choice, since some particles are directly observable. Testable predictions of electromagnetism are predictions of the motion of charged bodies, in theory represented as particles, so this must be the empiricists' choice of ontology. In quantum electrodynamics one is however forced to chose a field ontology, since a particle ontology for this theory is impossible. So called "quantum particles" are field quanta, which cannot be treated as individuals making up a domain of quantification. There is thus a tension regarding ontology between classical and quantum electrodynamics. But this tension is nothing else than the much debated measurement problem of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

We have argued that the counterfactual comparative account of harm and benefit (CCA) violates the plausible adequacy condition that an act that would harm an agent cannot leave her much better off than an alternative act that would benefit her. In a recent paper in this journal, however, Neil Feit objects that our argument presupposes questionable counterfactual backtracking. He also argues that CCA proponents can justifiably reject the condition by invoking so-called plural harm and benefit. In this reply, we argue (...) that Feit’s lines of criticism are both unsuccessful. (shrink)

In this paper, we put forward two novel arguments against the counterfactual comparative account (CCA) of harm and benefit. In both arguments, the central theme is that CCA conflicts with plausible judgements about benefit and prudence.

Inductive thinking is a universal human habit; we generalise from our experiences the best we can. The induction problem is to identify which observed regularities provide reasonable justification for inductive conclusions. In the natural sciences, we can often use strict laws in making successful inferences about unobserved states of affairs. In the social sciences, by contrast, we have no strict laws, only regularities which most often are conditioned on ceteris paribus clauses. This makes it much more difficult to make reliable (...) inferences in the social sciences. In particular, we want knowledge about general causal relations in order to be able to determine what to do in order to achieve a certain state of affairs. Knowledge about causal relations that are also valid in the future requires experiments or so called ‘natural experiments’. Only knowledge derived from such experiences enable us to draw reasonably reliable inferences about how to act in order to achieve our goals. (shrink)

Everyday resistance is about the many ways people undermine power and domination through their routine and everyday actions. Unlike open rebellions or demonstrations, it is typically hidden, not politically articulated, and often ingenious. But because of its disguised nature, it is often poorly understood as a form of politics and its potential underestimated. Conceptualizing Everyday Resistance presents an analytical framework and theoretical tools to understand the entanglements of everyday power and resistance. These are applied to diverse empirical cases including queer (...) relationships in the context of heteronormativity, Palestinian daily life under military occupation, workplace behaviors under office surveillance, and the tactics of fat acceptance bloggers facing the War against obesity. Johansson and Vinthagen argue that everyday resistance is best understood by accounting for different repertoires of tactics, relations between actors, and struggles around constructions of time and space. Through a critical dialogue with the work of James C. Scott, Michel de Certeau, and Asef Bayat, they aim to reconstruct the field of resistance studies, expanding what counts as resistance and building systematic analysis. Conceptualizing Everyday Resistance offers researchers and students from different theoretical and empirical backgrounds, an essential overview of the field and a creative framework that illuminates the potential of all people to transform society. (shrink)

This study was directed towards personality-related, value system and sociodemographic variables of nursing students in a situation of change, using a longitudinal perspective to measure their improvement in principle-based moral judgement (Kohlberg; Rest) as possible predictors of stress. Three subgroups of students were included from the commencement of the first three-year academic nursing programme in 1993. The students came from the colleges of health at Jönköping, Växjö and Kristianstad in the south of Sweden. A principal component factor analysis (varimax) was (...) performed using data obtained from the students in the spring of 1994 (n = 122) and in the spring of 1996 (n = 112). There were 23 variables, of which two were sociodemographic, eight represented self-image, six were self-values, six were interpersonal values, and one was principle-based moral judgement. The analysis of data from students in the first year of a three-year programme demonstrated eight factors that explained 68.8% of the variance. The most important factors were: (1) ascendant decisive disorderly sociability and nonpractical mindedness (18.1% of the variance); (2) original vigour person-related trust (13.3% of the variance); (3) orderly nonvigour achievement (8.9% of the variance) and (4) independent leadership (7.9% of the variance). (The term ‘ascendancy’ refers to self-confidence, and ‘vigour’ denotes responding well to challenges and coping with stress.) The analysis in 1996 demonstrated nine factors, of which the most important were: (1) ascendant original sociability with decisive nonconformist leadership (18.2% of the variance); (2) cautious person-related responsibility (12.6% of the variance); (3) orderly nonvariety achievement (8.4% of the variance); and (4) nonsupportive benevolent conformity (7.2% of the variance). A comparison of the two most prominent factors in 1994 and 1996 showed the process of change to be stronger for 18.2% and weaker for 30% of the variance. Principle-based moral judgement was measured in March 1994 and in May 1996, using the Swedish version of the Defining Issues Test and Index P. The result was that Index P for the students at Jönköping changed significantly (paired samples t-test) between 1994 and 1996 (p = 0.028), but that for the Växjö and Kristianstad students did not. The mean of Index P was 44.3% at Växjö, which was greater than the international average for college students (42.3%); it differed significantly in the spring of 1996 (independent samples t-test), but not in 1994, from the students at Jönköping (p = 0.032) and Kristianstad (p = 0.025). Index P was very heterogeneous for the group of students at Växjö, with the result that the paired samples t-test reached a value close to significance only. (shrink)

Quantum mechanical weak values of projection operators have been used to answer which-way questions, e.g. to trace which arms in a multiple Mach–Zehnder setup a particle may have traversed from a given initial to a prescribed final state. I show that this procedure might lead to logical inconsistencies in the sense that different methods used to answer composite questions, like “Has the particle traversed the way X or the way Y?”, may result in different answers depending on which methods are (...) used to find the answer. I illustrate the problem by considering some examples: the “quantum pigeonhole” framework of Aharonov et al., the three-box problem, and Hardy’s paradox. To prepare the ground for my main conclusion on the incompatibility in certain cases of weak values and logic, I study the corresponding situation for strong/projective measurements. In this case, no logical inconsistencies occur provided one is always careful in specifying exactly to which ensemble or sample space one refers. My results cast doubts on the utility of quantum weak values in treating cases like the examples mentioned. (shrink)

From good intentions to real life: introducing crisis resolution teams in Norway In Norway, as in most western countries, the adult services for people experiencing mental health problems have gone through major changes over the last decades. A report submitted to the Norwegian Parliament in 1997 summarized several areas of improvement in the provision of mental health‐care to its population, and led to the introduction of a national mental health programme in 1998 for its implementation to be completed by 2008. (...) The most significant recent development in Norway is ‘Crisis Resolution/Home Treatment’ (CRHT) teams that provide an alternative to acute hospital care services. The major aim of this study is to explore an emerging form of community mental health‐care, and present a framework for establishment and examination of CRHT teams applying the user perspectives. An illustration of user experiences in an already established CRHT team provides a background for understanding implications of this form of service in relation to service users’ needs in acute crises. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Takacs and Bourrat (Biol Philos 37:12, 2022) examine the use of geometric mean reproductive output as a measure of biological fitness. We welcome Takacs and Bourrat’s scrutiny of a fitness definition that some philosophers have adopted uncritically. We also welcome Takacs and Bourrat’s attempt to marry the philosophical literature on fitness with the biological literature on mathematical measures of fitness. However, some of the main claims made by Takacs and Bourrat are not correct, while others are (...) correct but not for the reasons they give. (shrink)

Attributions of what we shall call normative responsibilities play a central role in everyday moral thinking. It is commonly thought, for example, that parents are responsible for the wellbeing of their children, and that this has important normative consequences. Depending on context, it might mean that parents are morally required to bring their children to the doctor, feed them well, attend to their emotional needs, or to see to it that someone else does. Similarly, it is sometimes argued that countries (...) that emit most greenhouse gases are responsible for preventing catastrophic climate change. This responsibility might imply that these countries are morally required to take necessary steps individually and jointly to come to an agreement on and implement a workable plan, and to avoid steps that worsen the situation. More trivially, the grading of your student’s essays might be your responsibility, as might making sure there is wine at tomorrow’s picnic, and you might thus be required to see to it that essays are competently graded and suitable wine brought to the picnic. -/- Though attributions of normative responsibilities are legion, such responsibilities have received surprisingly little philosophical attention compared to its normative relatives, obligations and reasons, and compared to retrospective responsibility. This chapter hopes to improve on this situation by taking on two main tasks. The first, attempted in section 1, is to spell out the general structure of normative responsibility, in particular the relation between normative responsibilities and corresponding obligations and demands. We suggest that normative responsibilities are constituted by normative requirements that the responsible agents care appropriately about how well things go in certain regards, and that obligations generally can be seen as straightforward upshots of requirements to care. -/- The second task, taken on in section 2, is to provide an overview of prominent sources of normative responsibility and its distribution among agents. Why would the children’s wellbeing be the parents’ responsibility? Why not the neighbor’s, or the state’s, or everyone’s? Here we discuss a range of possible sources, including agents’ abilities, costs involved in taking on the responsibility in question, retrospective responsibility for the situation, promises or contracts, and certain social relationships. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Suppose that, for every possible event and person who would exist whether or not the event were to occur, there is a well-being level that the person would occupy if the event were to occur, and a well-being level that the person would occupy if the event were not to occur. Do facts about such connections between events and well-being levels always suffice to determine whether an event would harm or benefit a person? Many seemingly attractive accounts of harm (...) and benefit entail an affirmative answer to this question, including the widely held Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA). In this paper, however, we argue that all such accounts will be unsuccessful. (shrink)

Is science in the midst of a crisis of replicability and false discoveries? In a recent article, Alexander Bird offers an explanation for the apparent lack of replicability in the biomedical sciences. Bird argues that the surprise at the failure to replicate biomedical research is a result of the fallacy of neglecting the base rate. The base-rate fallacy arises in situations in which one ignores the base rate—or prior probability—of an event when assessing the probability of this event in the (...) light of some observed evidence. By extension, the replication crisis would result from ignoring the low prior probability of biomedical hypotheses. In this paper, my response to Bird’s claim is twofold. First, I show that the argument according to which the replication crisis is due to the low prior of biomedical hypotheses is incomplete. Second, I claim that a simple base-rate fallacy model does not account for some important methodological insights that have emerged in discussions of the replication crisis. (shrink)

In this paper, some conceptual issues are addressed in order to make sense of what string theory is supposed to tell us about spacetime. The dualities in string theory are used as a starting point for our argumentation. We explore the consequences of a standard view towards these dualities, namely that the dual descriptions represent the same physical situation. Given this view, one has to understand string theory in a manner such that what counts as physical spacetime is based only (...) on the shared physical content—or common core—of the dual descriptions. In general such a spatiotemporal picture does not have to agree with, or be similar to, any of the ones suggested by naïve readings of the dual descriptions. However, in certain regimes or limits, one or the other of the initial dual descriptions may give a good effective description of physical spacetime. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present a normative theory of the goals of medicine (a theory that tells us in what respects medicine should benefit the patient) that is both comprehensive and unified. A review of the relevant literature suggests that there are at least seven plausible goals that are irreducible to each other, namely to promote functioning, to maintain or restore normal structure and function, to promote quality of life, to save and prolong life, to help the (...) patient to cope well with her condition, to improve the external conditions under which people live, and to promote the growth and development of children. However, it seems that all these goals need to be qualified in different ways, e.g. it does not seem reasonable to improve physiological function or functional ability unless this is expected to have positive effects on quality of life and/or length of life, or to improve the quality of life in any respect, or by any means. These qualifications all suggest that the proposed goals are, as goals, conceptually, and not just causally, related to one another, and that they should therefore not be regarded in isolation. Instead, we should think of the medical enterprise as having a multidimensional goal structure rather than a single goal. In order to depict clearly how the different goals are related to one another, a multidimensional model is constructed. (shrink)

Se trata de un articulo que me lo he bajado de la página de Mplus. En realidad es un DRAFT en lugar de un artículo (no lo puedo citar). Explica cómo realizar análisis Bayesianos y cuándo es conveniente utilizarlos. Es una técnica que se emplea al par del Bootstrapping (aunque su base sea diferente). Pero es interesante porque está disponible en análisis multinivel y puede ser útil cuando los parámetros no son normales y o la muestra es pequeña (el ejemplo (...) multinivel que muestra tiene sólamente 10 clusters a nivel between). (shrink)

SummaryCertain problems in Quine's philosophy of language are discussed. The first issue is his theory of how an observation sentence is understood. This is part of the more general problem of constructing a theory for how any single cognitive sentence is grasped. Quine's thesis of the inscrutability of reference, according to which it is senseless to ask what the referent of a term is, is our second subject. The content and truth of this thesis is discussed. In this context three (...) rather precise versions of the thesis are presented. The third issue to be treated is the relationship between the inscrutability thesis and theories of observation sentence understanding. The main conclusion of the paper is that the inscrutability thesis can hardly be true. (shrink)

Ockham’s razor is the idea that simpler hypotheses are to be preferred over more complex ones. In the context of medical diagnosis, this is taken to mean that when a patient has multiple symptoms, a single diagnosis should be sought that accounts for all the clinical features, rather than attributing a different diagnosis to each. This paper examines whether diagnostic parsimony can be justified by reference to probability theory. I argue that while attempts to offer universal justifications of diagnostic parsimony (...) fail, a more constrained use of this diagnostic principle can be supported. (shrink)