As a philosopher interested in biomedical ethics, I find recent advances in genetic technologies both fascinating and frightening. Future technologies for genetic therapies and elimination of clearly deleterious genes offer us the ability to get rid of the cause of much human suffering, seemingly at its physiological root. But memories of past eugenics programs gone horribly awry must make cautious our initial optimism for these generally well-intentioned programs. Most often the scientist proceeds in research with the best of intentions, but (...) that does not make all scientific investigation worth pursuing. (shrink)

Family members can provide crucial support to individuals participating in clinical trials. In research on the “newest frontier” of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS)—the use of DBS for psychiatric conditions—family member support is frequently listed as a criterion for trial enrollment. Despite the significance of family members, qualitative ethics research on DBS for psychiatric conditions has focused almost exclusively on the perspectives and experiences of DBS recipients. This qualitative study is one of the first to include both DBS recipients and their (...) family members as interview participants. Using dyadic thematic analysis—an approach that takes both the individuals and the relationship as units of analyses—this study analyzes the complex ways in which family relationships can affect DBS trial participation, and how DBS trial participation in turn influences family relationships. Based on these findings, we propose ways to improve study designs to better take family relationships into account, and better support family members in taking on the complex, essential roles that they play in DBS trials for psychiatric conditions. (shrink)

Carl Craver investigates what we are doing when we sue neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain.

Carl F. Craver investigates what we are doing when we use neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain. When does an explanation succeed and when does it fail? Craver offers explicit standards for successful explanation of the workings of the brain, on the basis of a systematic view about what neuroscientific explanations are.

One of the most significant political philosophers of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt is a deeply controversial figure who has been labeled both Nazi sympathizer and modern-day Thomas Hobbes. First published in 1938, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes used the Enlightenment philosopher’s enduring symbol of the protective Leviathan to address the nature of modern statehood. A work that predicted the demise of the Third Reich and that still holds relevance in today’s security-obsessed society, this volume (...) will be essential reading for students and scholars of political science. “Carl Schmitt is surely the most controversial German political and legal philosopher of this century. . . . We deal with Schmitt, against all odds, because history stubbornly persists in proving many of his tenets right.”— Perspectives on Political Science “[A] significant contribution. . . . The relation between Hobbes and Schmitt is one of the most important questions surrounding Schmitt: it includes a distinct, though occasionally vacillating, personal identification as well as an association of ideas.”— Telos. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against one variety of contextualism about aesthetic predicates such as “beautiful.” Contextualist analyses of these and other predicates have been subject to several challenges surrounding disagreement. Focusing on one kind of contextualism— individualized indexical contextualism —I unpack these various challenges and consider the responses available to the contextualist. The three responses I consider are as follows: giving an alternative analysis of the concept of disagreement ; claiming that speakers suffer from semantic blindness; and claiming that (...) attributions of beauty carry presuppositions of commonality. I will argue that none of the available strategies gives a response which both satisfactorily explains all of the disagreement -data and is plausible independent of significant evidence in favor of contextualism. I conclude that individualized indexical contextualism about the aesthetic is untenable, although this does not rule out alternative contextualist approaches to the aesthetic. (shrink)

Traces the development of the integral and the differential calculus and related theories since ancient times.

In this article, we explore how deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices designed to “close the loop”—to automatically adjust stimulation levels based on computational algorithms—may risk taking the individual agent “out of the loop” of control in areas where (at least apparent) conscious control is a hallmark of our agency. This is of particular concern in the area of psychiatric disorders, where closed-loop DBS is attracting increasing attention as a therapy. Using a relational model of identity and agency, we consider whether (...) DBS designed for psychiatric regulation may require special attention to agency. To do this, we draw on philosophical work on relational identity and agency, connecting it with reports from people using first-generation DBS devices for depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We suggest a way to extend a notion of relational agency to encompass neural devices. (shrink)

This collection of articles and associated discussion papers focuses on a problem that has attracted increasing attention from linguists and psychologists throughout the world during the past several years. Reduced to essentials, the problem is that of discovering the character of the mental capacities that make it possible for human beings to attain knowledge of their language on the basis of fragmentary and haphazard early linguistic experience. A fundamental assumption running through all of these contributions is that people possess strong (...) innate predispositions that are critical for success in this task. (shrink)

Under what conditions are people responsible for their choices and the outcomes of those choices? How could such conditions be fostered by liberal societies? Should what people are due as a matter of justice depend on what they are responsible for? For example, how far should healthcare provision depend on patients' past choices? What values would be realized and which hampered by making justice sensitive to responsibility? Would it give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equality? The (...) explosion of philosophical interest in such questions has been fuelled by increased focus on individual responsibility in political debates. Political philosophers, especially egalitarians, have responded to such developments by attempting to map out the proper place for responsibility in theories of justice. This book both reflects on these recent developments in normative political theory and moves the debate forwards. (shrink)

According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...) explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena. (shrink)

Advancements in novel neurotechnologies, such as brain computer interfaces and neuromodulatory devices such as deep brain stimulators, will have profound implications for society and human rights. While these technologies are improving the diagnosis and treatment of mental and neurological diseases, they can also alter individual agency and estrange those using neurotechnologies from their sense of self, challenging basic notions of what it means to be human. As an international coalition of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners, we examine these challenges and make (...) recommendations to mitigate negative consequences that could arise from the unregulated development or application of novel neurotechnologies. We explore potential ethical challenges in four key areas: identity and agency, privacy, bias, and enhancement. To address them, we propose democratic and inclusive summits to establish globally-coordinated ethical and societal guidelines for neurotechnology development and application, new measures, including “Neurorights,” for data privacy, security, and consent to empower neurotechnology users’ control over their data, new methods of identifying and preventing bias, and the adoption of public guidelines for safe and equitable distribution of neurotechnological devices. (shrink)

Agency is talked about by many as something that people living with dementia lose, once they've lost much else—autonomy, identity, and privacy, among other things. While the language of loss may capture some of what transpires in dementia, it can obscure how people living with dementia and their loved ones share agency through sharing capacities for memory, language, and decision‐making. We suggest that one consequence of adopting a framework of loss is that it makes the default response to changes in (...) agency the substitution of a family member's agency for the purported lost agency of someone living with dementia. We argue for an alternative framework in which sharing agency is recognized as a central feature of living with dementia. Building on the work of relational theorists, we argue for the value of thinking about agency in dementia as fundamentally shared, and explore potential implications for treatment, caregiver support, and building dementia‐friendly environments. (shrink)

Separation-based accounts of privacy define privacy as being left alone and unaccessed. Pyrrho et al. propose a more control-based account where privacy is about having the age...

Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks (...) at the book’s continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment. “Will remain a classic—a beautifully finished literary product.”—Charles A. Beard, _American Historical Review_ “_The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers _remains_ _one of the most distinctive American contributions to the historical literature on the Enlightenment.... [It] is likely to beguile and provoke readers for a long time to come.”—Johnson Kent Wright, from the foreword. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of how democratic governance is possible. It analyses democracy as a laminated system consisting of three interdependent levels – the political/institutional, the socia...

Implantable neurotechnology devices such as Brain Computer Interfaces and Deep Brain Stimulators are an increasing part of treating or exploring potential treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders. While only a few devices are approved, many promising prospects for future devices are under investigation. The decision to participate in a clinical trial can be challenging, given a variety of risks to be taken into consideration. During the consent process, prospective participants might lack the language to consider those risks, feel unprepared, or (...) simply not know what questions to ask. One tool to help empower participants to play a more active role during the consent process is a Question Prompt List. QPLs are communication tools that can prompt participants and patients to articulate potential concerns. They offer a structured list of disease, treatment, or research intervention-specific questions that research participants can use as support for question asking. While QPLs have been studied as tools for improving the consent process during cancer treatment, in this paper, we suggest they would be helpful in neurotechnology research, and offer an example of a QPL as a template for an informed consent tool in neurotechnology device trials. (shrink)

We argue that intelligible appeals to interlevel causes (top-down and bottom-up) can be understood, without remainder, as appeals to mechanistically mediated effects. Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of causal and constitutive relations, where the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. The idea of causation would have to stretch to the breaking point to accommodate interlevel causes. The notion of a mechanistically mediated effect is preferable because it can do all of the required work without appealing to mysterious interlevel causes. When interlevel (...) causes can be translated into mechanistically mediated effects, the posited relationship is intelligible and should raise no special philosophical objections. When they cannot, they are suspect. (shrink)

Not all models are explanatory. Some models are data summaries. Some models sketch explanations but leave crucial details unspecified or hidden behind filler terms. Some models are used to conjecture a how-possibly explanation without regard to whether it is a how-actually explanation. I use the Hodgkin and Huxley model of the action potential to illustrate these ways that models can be useful without explaining. I then use the subsequent development of the explanation of the action potential to show what is (...) required of an adequate mechanistic model. Mechanistic models are explanatory. (shrink)

Some philosophers writing on the possibility of faultless disagreement have argued that the only way to account for the intuition that there could be disagreements which are faultless in every sense is to accept a relativistic semantics. In this article we demonstrate that this view is mistaken by constructing an absolutist semantics for a particular domain – aesthetic discourse – which allows for the possibility of genuinely faultless disagreements. We argue that this position is an improvement over previous absolutist responses (...) to the relativist's challenge and that it presents an independently plausible account of the semantics of aesthetic discourse. (shrink)

Many areas of science develop by discovering mechanisms and role functions. Cummins' (1975) analysis of role functions-according to which an item's role function is a capacity of that item that appears in an analytic explanation of the capacity of some containing system-captures one important sense of "function" in the biological sciences and elsewhere. Here I synthesize Cummins' account with recent work on mechanisms and causal/mechanical explanation. The synthesis produces an analysis of specifically mechanistic role functions, one that uses the characteristic (...) active, spatial, temporal, and hierarchical organization of mechanisms to add precision and content to Cummins' original suggestion. This synthesis also shows why the discovery of role functions is a scientific achievement. Discovering a role function (i) contributes to the interlevel integration of multilevel mechanisms, and (ii) provides a unique, contextual variety of causal/mechanical explanation. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of why democracy is desirable in terms of a relational theory of democracy. The theory draws on concepts from Aristotelian, critical realist, and psychoanalytic th...

It is common to defend the Homeostatic Property Cluster ( HPC ) view as a third way between conventionalism and essentialism about natural kinds ( Boyd , 1989, 1991, 1997, 1999; Griffiths , 1997, 1999; Keil , 2003; Kornblith , 1993; Wilson , 1999, 2005; Wilson , Barker , & Brigandt , forthcoming ). According to the HPC view, property clusters are not merely conventionally clustered together; the co-occurrence of properties in the cluster is sustained by a similarity generating ( (...) or homeostatic ) mechanism . I argue that conventional elements are involved partly but ineliminably in deciding which mechanisms define kinds , for deciding when two mechanisms are mechanisms of the same type, and for deciding where one particular mechanism ends and another begins. This intrusion of conventional perspective into the idea of a mechanism raises doubts as to whether the HPC view is sufficiently free of conventional elements to serve as an objective arbiter in scientific disputes about what the kinds of the special sciences should be. (shrink)

Brain-computer Interface (BCI) research is rapidly expanding, and it engages domains of human experience that many find central to our current understanding of ourselves. Ethical principles or guidelines can provide researchers with tools to engage in ethical reflection and to address practical problems in research. Though researchers have called for clearer ethical principles or guidelines, there is little existing data on what form these should take. We developed a prospective set of ethical principles for BCI research with specific guidelines and (...) shared them, via a survey, to participants at the 6th International BCI Meeting at the Asilomar Conference Center in 2016. Respondents were broadly supportive of principles of Care for Subjects, Modesty, Participation, Inclusivity, Relationality, Justice, and Social Impact. Principles more traditionally aligned with responsible conduct of research showed higher levels of endorsement. Researcher support for specific principle-based ethical guidelines varied with respect to stringency of researcher obligations. (shrink)

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ Uber Den Psychologischen Ursprung Der Raumvorstellung Carl Stumpf S. Hirzel, 1873 Space perception. (shrink)

Arguments from disagreement often take centre stage in debates between competing semantic theories. This paper explores the theoretical basis for arguments from disagreement and, in so doing, proposes methodological principles which allow us to distinguish between legitimate arguments from disagreement and dialectically ineffective arguments from disagreement. In the light of these principles, I evaluate Cappelen and Hawthorne's [2009] argument from disagreement against relativism, and show that it fails to undermine relativism since it is dialectically ineffective. Nevertheless, I argue that an (...) alternative challenge to relativism based on disagreement is available. More generally, I argue that semantic theory is not answerable to data stemming from ‘loaded’ philosophical principles regarding the nature of disagreement. Rather, semantic theorists will exhaust their dialectical responsibilities regarding disagreement if they can demonstrate consistency with a minimal account of the concept. (shrink)

The fundamental tenet of modern empiricism is the view that all non-analytic knowledge is based on experience. Let us call this thesis the principle of empiricism. [1] Contemporary logical empiricism has added [2] to it the maxim that a sentence makes a cognitively meaningful assertion, and thus can be said to be either true or false, only if it is either (1) analytic or self-contradictory or (2) capable, at least in principle, of experiential test. According to this so-called empiricist criterion (...) of cognitive meaning, or of cognitive significance, many of the formulations of traditional metaphysics and large parts of epistemology are devoid of cognitive significance--however rich some of them may be in non-cognitive import by virtue of their emotive appeal or the moral inspiration they offer. Similarly certain doctrines which have been, at one time or another, formulated within empirical science or its border disciplines are so contrived as to be incapable of test by any conceivable evidence; they are therefore qualified as pseudo- [p. 42:] hypotheses, which assert nothing, and which therefore have no explanatory or predictive force whatever. This verdict applies, for example, to the neo-vitalist speculations about entelechies or vital forces, and to the "telefinalist hypothesis" propounded by Lecomte du Noüy. (shrink)

Do we need a right to mental privacy? In an era of increasing sophistication in recording, interpreting, and directly intervening on our neural activity – not to mention efforts at combining neural...

In the United States, health disparities have been framed by categories of race. Racial health disparities have been documented for cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and numerous other diseases and measures of health status. Although such disparities can be read as symptoms of disparities in healthcare access, pervasive social and economic inequities, and discrimination, some have suggested that the disparities might be due, at least in part, to biological differences based on race. Or, to be more precise, if race itself (...) has no determined biological meaning, race may nonetheless be a proxy that collects a group of individuals who share certain physiological or genotypic features that affect health. (shrink)

A world awash in little understood chemicals tragically harms adults and children alike. Laws keep health agencies in the dark about toxicants, slow, well motivated research hampers protections, and strenuous vested opposition exacerbates the harm. How science is used in the tort law can facilitate or frustrate redress of harm. This book recommends better approaches.

Scientific indigenous psychologies have been developed mostly in non‐western countries. Indigenous psychologies, seeing mainstream psychology as too western in its cultural foundation, are based on the culture of the society being investigated. In this article I critique the concept of culture used by representative researchers of indigenous psychologies in the English‐language literature and contrast it to current concepts of culture in the social sciences. Furthermore, I argue that the concept of culture used in this literature has implications for the cultural (...) contents that are identified as the culture of a specific society. I also suggest that the political dimensions of what contents of culture are associated with a specific society are not given sufficient attention in this literature. Finally, alternative approaches to culture for the indigenous psychologies are discussed. (shrink)

Biologists rely heavily on the language of information, coding, and transmission that is commonplace in the field of information theory developed by Claude Shannon, but there is open debate about whether such language is anything more than facile metaphor. Philosophers of biology have argued that when biologists talk about information in genes and in evolution, they are not talking about the sort of information that Shannon’s theory addresses. First, philosophers have suggested that Shannon’s theory is only useful for developing a (...) shallow notion of correlation, the so-called causal sense of information. Second, they typically argue that in genetics and evolutionary biology, information language is used in a semantic sense, whereas semantics are deliberately omitted from Shannon’s theory. Neither critique is well-founded. Here we propose an alternative to the causal and semantic senses of information: a transmission sense of information, in which an object X conveys information if the function of X is to reduce, by virtue of its sequence properties, uncertainty on the part of an agent who observes X. The transmission sense not only captures much of what biologists intend when they talk about information in genes, but also brings Shannon’s theory back to the fore. By taking the viewpoint of a communications engineer and focusing on the decision problem of how information is to be packaged for transport, this approach resolves several problems that have plagued the information concept in biology, and highlights a number of important features of the way that information is encoded, stored, and transmitted as genetic sequence. (shrink)

In this book, Carl Cranor utilizes material from ethics, philosophy of law, epidemiology, tort law, regulatory law, and risk assessment to argue that the evidentiary standards for science used in the law to control toxics ought to be ...

We argue that in implanted neurotechnology research, participants and researchers experience what Henry Richardson has called “moral entanglement.” Participants partially entrust researchers with access to their brains and thus to information that would otherwise be private, leading to created intimacies and special obligations of beneficence for researchers and research funding agencies. One of these obligations, we argue, is about continued access to beneficial technology once a trial ends. We make the case for moral entanglement in this context through exploration of (...) participants’ vulnerability, uncompensated risks and burdens, depth of relationship with the research team, and dependence on researchers in implanted neurotechnology trials. (shrink)

This book offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current ecological crisis via the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on Marxist concepts to confirm humanity's centrality in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers including Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Theodor Adorno are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism (...) and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural. (shrink)