La justicia interamericana de derechos humanos es un fenómeno de transnacional influencia sobre los ordenamientos jurídicos de los Estados nacionales. La creciente interacción de la Corte Interamericana con los jueces nacionales y su labor como intérprete de la Convención Americana de Derechos Humanos (CADH) ha promovido un excesivo optimismo que resulta necesario revisar críticamente en aras de una mejor comprensión de la justicia transnacional en derechos humanos. Para cumplir este cometido, el presente documento presentará las discusiones doctrinales sobre justicia, validez (...) y eficacia de la CADH a través del alcance, límites e impacto del ejercicio judicial Interamericano. (shrink)

David Papineau’s _The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience_ is deep, insightful, refreshingly brisk, and very readable. In it, Papineau argues that sensory experiences are intrinsic and non-relational states of subjects; that they do not essentially involve relations to worldly facts, properties, or other items (though they do happen to correlate with worldly items); and that they do not have truth conditions simply in virtue of their conscious (i.e., phenomenal) features. I am in enthusiastic agreement with the picture as described so far. (...) But Papineau also argues that sensory experiences are in no interesting sense essentially representational and that what is responsible for their truth conditions is their correlations with the environment. Here, I disagree. Indeed, I think Papineau does not follow his arguments to their proper conclusions. For if sensory experiences are intrinsic, non-relational, and only contingently correlated with worldly conditions (as Papineau and I agree they are), then the phenomenal features of sensory states are representational in an important sense: they constitute what we think, perceptually experience, or otherwise entertain, making up how things seem to us from a first-person perspective. Because of this, the truth conditions of perceptual experiences cannot be entirely independent of their phenomenal features. They cannot merely be a matter of environmental correlations. If we follow Papineau’s arguments to their proper conclusions, we end up with a view much closer to a version of representationalism that Papineau dismisses, a view he calls “pure phenomenal intentionalism”. (shrink)

Moods and emotions are sometimes thought to be counterexamples to intentionalism, the view that a mental state's phenomenal features are exhausted by its representational features. The problem is that moods and emotions are accompanied by phenomenal experiences that do not seem to be adequately accounted for by any of their plausibly represented contents. This paper develops and defends an intentionalist view of the phenomenal character of moods and emotions on which emotions and some moods represent intentional objects as having sui (...) generis affective properties, which happen to be uninstantiated, and at least some moods represent affective properties not bound to any objects. (shrink)

This paper compares tracking and phenomenal intentionality theories of intentionality with respect to the issue of naturalism. Tracking theories explicitly aim to naturalize intentionality, while phenomenal intentionality theories generally do not. It might seem that considerations of naturalism count in favor of tracking theories. We survey key considerations relevant to this claim, including some motivations for and objections to the two kinds of theories. We conclude by suggesting that naturalistic considerations may in fact support phenomenal intentionality theories over tracking theories.

Science is the study of our world, as it is in its messy reality. Nonetheless, science requires idealization to function—if we are to attempt to understand the world, we have to find ways to reduce its complexity. Idealization and the Aims of Science shows just how crucial idealization is to science and why it matters. Beginning with the acknowledgment of our status as limited human agents trying to make sense of an exceedingly complex world, Angela Potochnik moves on to (...) explain how science aims to depict and make use of causal patterns—a project that makes essential use of idealization. She offers case studies from a number of branches of science to demonstrate the ubiquity of idealization, shows how causal patterns are used to develop scientific explanations, and describes how the necessarily imperfect connection between science and truth leads to researchers’ values influencing their findings. The resulting book is a tour de force, a synthesis of the study of idealization that also offers countless new insights and avenues for future exploration. (shrink)

Levels of organization and their use in science have received increased philosophical attention of late, including challenges to the well-foundedness or widespread usefulness of levels concepts. One kind of response to these challenges has been to advocate a more precise and specific levels concept that is coherent and useful. Another kind of response has been to argue that the levels concept should be taken as a heuristic, to embrace its ambiguity and the possibility of exceptions as acceptable consequences of its (...) usefulness. In this chapter, I suggest that each of these strategies faces its own attendant downsides, and that pursuit of both strategies (by different thinkers) compounds the difficulties. That both kinds of approaches are advocated is, I think, illustrative of the problems plaguing the concept of levels of organization. I end by suggesting that the invocation of levels may mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them, so our use of the levels concept should be updated accordingly. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, the dominant approach to explaining intentionality has been a naturalistic approach, one appealing only to non-mental ingredients condoned by the natural sciences. Karen Neander’s A Mark of the Mental (2017) is the latest installment in the naturalist project, proposing a detailed and systematic theory of intentionality that combines aspects of several naturalistic approaches, invoking causal relations, teleological functions, and relations of second-order similarity. In this paper, we consider the case of perceptual representations of colors, which (...) is a challenging case for Neander’s theory. This case will brings out a general methodological concern with Neander’s and other naturalistic theories: these theories generally rest on the assumption that the mental intentionality we are acquainted with in everyday life—the phenomenon exhibited by desires for cups of coffee, perceptual experiences of dogs playing in yards, and thoughts about the weather—is the very same kind of phenomenon that cognitive science studies under labels such as “mental representation” and, in some cases, “information processing.” This assumption is dubious, as the case of Neander’s theory illustrates. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are two distinct kinds of senses, immediate senses and reflective senses. Immediate senses are what we are immediately aware of when we are in an intentional mental state, while reflective senses are what we understand of an intentional mental state's (putative) referent upon reflection. I suggest an account of immediate and reflective senses that is based on the phenomenal intentionality theory, a theory of intentionality in terms of phenomenal consciousness. My focus is on the immediate (...) and reflective senses of thoughts and the concepts they involve, but it also applies to other mental instances of intentionality. (shrink)

Do the meanings of the innumerable fetish-signs appearing in recent artworks depend on the senders' intentions? Is the meaning of postfeminist glamour the celebration of femininity that its practitioners tout to counter ersatz macho posturing? To fully examine and clarify these and other issues involving gender, postcolonial, and artistic otherness, this book argues for a more adequate view of performativity than presently available from speech-act theory and certain strains of linguistic pragmatics. In drawing simultaneously on Charles Sander Peirce’s pragmatic analysis (...) of signs, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic inquiry, and radical feminist thought, the concern of Beyond Fetishism is with the ethical and aesthetic import of the psychopragmatics resulting from this intermingling. (shrink)

Debate about cognitive science explanations has been formulated in terms of identifying the proper level(s) of explanation. Views range from reductionist, favoring only neuroscience explanations, to mechanist, favoring the integration of multiple levels, to pluralist, favoring the preservation of even the most general, high-level explanations, such as those provided by embodied or dynamical approaches. In this paper, we challenge this framing. We suggest that these are not different levels of explanation at all but, rather, different styles of explanation that capture (...) different, cross-cutting patterns in cognitive phenomena. Which pattern is explanatory depends on both the cognitive phenomenon under investigation and the research interests occasioning the explanation. This reframing changes how we should answer the basic questions of which cognitive science approaches explain and how these explanations relate to one another. On this view, we should expect different approaches to offer independent explanations in terms of their different focal patterns and the value of those explanations to partly derive from the broad patterns they feature. (shrink)

Propositionalism is the view that all intentional states are propositional states, which are states with a propositional content, while objectualism is the view that at least some intentional states are objectual states, which are states with objectual contents, such as objects, properties, and kinds. This paper argues that there are two distinct ways of understanding propositionalism and objectualism: (1) as views about the deep nature of the contents of intentional states, and (2) as views about the superficial character of the (...) contents of intentional states. I argue that we should understand the views in the second way. I also argue that the propositionalism debate is fairly independent from debates over the deep nature of intentionality, and that this has implications for arguments for propositionalism and objectualism from claims about the nature of intentional content. I close with a short discussion of how related points apply to the debate over singular content. (shrink)

The most pressing worry for panpsychism is arguably the combination problem, the problem of intelligibly explaining how the experiences of microphysical entities combine to form the experiences of macrophysical entities such as ourselves. This chapter argues that the combination problem is similar in kind to other problems of mental combination that are problems for everyone: the problem of phenomenal unity, the problem of mental structure, and the problem of new quality spaces. The ubiquity of combination problems suggests the ignorance hypothesis, (...) the hypothesis that we are ignorant of certain key facts about mental combination, which allows the panpsychist to avoid certain objections based on the combination problem. (shrink)

Whether or not quantum physics can account for molecular structure is a matter of considerable controversy. Three of the problems raised in this regard are the problems of molecular structure. We argue that these problems are just special cases of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics: insofar as the measurement problem is solved, the problems of molecular structure are resolved as well. In addition, we explore one consequence of our argument: that claims about the reduction or emergence of molecular structure (...) cannot be settled independently of the choice of a particular resolution to the measurement problem. Specifically, we consider how three standard putative solutions to the measurement problem inform our under- standing of a molecule in isolation, as well as of chemistry’s relation to quantum physics. (shrink)

This chapter argues that olfactory experiences represent either everyday objects or ad hoc olfactory objects as having primitive olfactory properties, which happen to be uninstantiated. On this picture, olfactory experiences reliably misrepresent: they falsely represent everyday objects or ad hoc objects as having properties they do not have, and they misrepresent in the same way on multiple occasions. One might worry that this view is incompatible with the plausible claim that olfactory experiences at least sometimes justify true beliefs about the (...) world. This chapter argues that there is no such incompatibility. Since olfactory experiences reliably misrepresent, they can lead to true and justified beliefs about putatively smelly objects. (shrink)

Alternative food networks are exemplified by organic, fair trade and local foods, and promote forms of food provisioning that are ‘corrective’ to conventional agriculture and food systems. Despite enthusiasm for AFNs, scholars have increasingly interrogated whether inequalities are perpetuated by AFNs. Reproduction of gender inequality in AFNs, particularly at the level of consumption, has often been left empirically unexamined, however. This is problematic given that women continue to be predominantly responsible for food provisioning in the US, and that this responsibility (...) can lead to negative physical, psychological and social outcomes. Using quantitative methods and data from the 2012 Ohio Survey of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Issues, this paper examines the extent to which gender inequality in the division of labor is reproduced in AFNs by focusing on the potential persistence of gender inequality in food provisioning among AFN participants. Findings suggest that among AFN participants, particularly those utilizing local food systems, women, compared to men, remain predominantly responsible for food provisioning, spend more time in food provisioning, and engage in more food provisioning from scratch. This research confirms that food provisioning remains a gendered act amongst AFN participants, calling attention to the persistence of gender inequality in AFNs. The paper concludes by suggesting that AFNs are positioned as a place to create change, albeit small scale, in the gendered division of household labor in the US, and provides some practical suggestions for how this might occur. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently argued that we should interpret the debate over moral responsibility as a debate over the conditions under which it would be “fair” to blame a person for her attitudes or conduct. What is distinctive about these accounts is that they begin with the stance of the moral judge, rather than that of the agent who is judged, and make attributions of responsibility dependent upon whether it would be fair or appropriate for a moral judge (...) to react to the agent in various (negative) ways. This is problematic, I argue, because our intuitions about whether and when it would be fair to react negatively to another are sensitive to a host of considerations that appear to have little or nothing to do with an agent’s responsibility or culpability for her attitudes or behavior. If this is correct, then theories which make attributions of responsibility dependent upon the appropriateness of our reactions as moral judges will turn out to be fundamentally misguided. (shrink)

El presente artículo es un estudio comparativo donde se argumenta la relación disonante entre las obras de Schmitt y Benjamin sobre la estética barroca. Se defiende que la diferencia entre ambos consiste en su concepción de lo político. Para Benjamin, son dos los aspectos fundamentales del Trauerspiel alemán: 1) la diferencia entre drama barroco y tragedia clásica y 2) el recurso a la alegoría como técnica de expresión. Schmitt, por su parte, encuentra lo singular del drama barroco en la irrupción (...) del tiempo histórico-político dentro de la forma estética. Para el crítico berlinés, lo alegórico debe estudiarse desde la filosofía de la historia, mientras que para Schmitt lo decisivo es lo político, ejecutado a través de la soberanía y la decisión. Tal es la línea argumental del presente estudio. This paper is a comparative study about the Works of Benjamin and Schmitt on the baroque art. It argues that the specific difference between them most be found in their concept of the political. For Benjamin there is a difference between tragedy and drama, the german Trauerspiel it is an allegorical approach to thingsand history. Schmitt argues that the singularity of baroque drama is the irruption of time in the plastic form. These are the points that the paper proposes. (shrink)

According to Lynne Rudder Baker’s Practical Realism, we know that we have beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes independent of any scientific investigation. Propositional attitudes are an indispensable part of our everyday conception of the world and not in need of scientific validation. This paper asks what is the nature of the attitudes such that we may know them so well from a commonsense perspective. I argue for a self-ascriptivist view, on which we have propositional attitudes in virtue of ascribing (...) them to ourselves. On this view, propositional attitudes are derived representational states, deriving their contents and their attitude types from our self-ascriptions. (shrink)

Jonathan Schaffer has provided three putative counterexamples to the transitivity of grounding, and has argued that a contrastive treatment of grounding is able to provide a resolution to them, which in turn provides some motivation for accepting such a treatment. In this article, I argue that one of these cases can easily be turned into a putative counterexample to a principle which Schaffer calls differential transitivity. Since Schaffer's proposed resolution rests on this principle, this presents a dilemma for the contrastivist: (...) either he dismisses the third case, which weakens the motivation for accepting his treatment of grounding, or else he accepts it, in which case he is faced with a counterexample to a principle that his proposed resolution to the original cases depends on. In the remainder of the article, I argue that the prima facie most promising strategy the contrastivist could take, which is to place some restriction on which contrastive facts are admissible so as to rule out the purported counterexample to differential transitivity, faces some important difficulties. Although these difficulties are not insurmountable, they do pose a substantial challenge for the contrastivist. (shrink)

According to the cohabitation account, all the persons that result from a fission event cohabit the same body prior to fission. This article concerns a problem for this account. Suppose Manuel and Jimena are suffering from an equally painful migraine. Unlike Jimena, however, Manuel will undergo fission. Assuming you have a spare painkiller, whom should you give it to? Intuitively, you have no more reason to give it to one or the other. The problem is that the cohabitation account suggests (...) otherwise. According to the account, there are two persons cohabiting Manuel’s body, in which case you should arguably give them the pill, since doing so alleviates the pain of more beings. One response argues that the two persons cohabiting Manuel’s body share one pain. Thus, giving them the pill alleviates no more pain than giving it to Jimena, and therefore you have no more reason to do one or the other. The goal of this article is to show that this response fails. (shrink)

Kris McDaniel has recently defended a criterion for being an ontological pluralist that classifies the quantifier variantist as one. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. There is an important difference between the two views, which is sometimes obscured by a common view in the metaphysics of fundamentality. According to the simple analysis, a language is ideal—it allows for a maximally metaphysically perspicuous description of reality—just in case all its primitives are perfectly natural. I argue that this (...) analysis struggles to distinguish quantifier variance from ontological pluralism, and then I discuss various accounts that can do better. I then propose a criterion for being an ontological pluralist that does not misclassify the quantifier variantist. Finally, I discuss some additional advantages of my proposal. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt has recently become fashionable among those who write on questions of moral responsibility to distinguish two different concepts, or senses, of moral responsibility via the labels ‘responsibility as attributability’ and ‘responsibility as accountability’. Gary Watson was perhaps the first to introduce this distinction in his influential 1996 article ‘Two Faces of Responsibility’ , but it has since been taken up by many other philosophers. My aim in this study is to raise some questions and doubts about this distinction and (...) to argue that it has led to confusion rather than clarification in debates over moral responsibility. In place of the attributability/accountability distinction, I propose that there is a single concept of moral responsibility underlying our actual moral practices. This core notion of moral responsibility, which I call ‘responsibility as answerability’, is well positioned to explain thos.. (shrink)

Using data collected at two phases, this study examines why and how ethical leadership behavior influences employees’ evaluations of organization-focused justice, i.e., procedural justice and distributive justice. By proposing ethical leaders as moral agents of the organization, we build up the linkage between ethical leadership behavior and the above two types of organization-focused justice. We further suggest trust in organization as a key mediating mechanism in the linkage. Our findings indicate that ethical leadership behavior engenders employees’ trust in their employing (...) organization, which in turn promotes their justice perceptions toward the organization. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and some directions for future research are suggested. (shrink)

Philosophers traditionally recognize two main features of mental states: intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. To a first approximation, intentionality is the aboutness of mental states, and phenomenal consciousness is the felt, experiential, qualitative, or "what it's like" aspect of mental states. In the past few decades, these features have been widely assumed to be distinct and independent. But several philosophers have recently challenged this assumption, arguing that intentionality and consciousness are importantly related. This article overviews the key views on the relationship (...) between consciousness and intentionality and describes our favored view, which is a version of the phenomenal intentionality theory, roughly the view that the most fundamental kind of intentionality arises from phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers have begun to question the commonly held view that choice or voluntary control is a precondition of moral responsibility. According to these philosophers, what really matters in determining a person’s responsibility for some thing is whether that thing can be seen as indicative or expressive of her judgments, values, or normative commitments. Such accounts might therefore be understood as updated versions of what Susan Wolf has called “real self views,” insofar as they attempt to ground (...) an agent’s responsibility for her actions and attitudes in the fact (when it is a fact) that they express who she is as a moral agent. As such, they seem to be open to some of the same objections Wolf originally raised to such accounts, and in particular to the objection that they cannot license the sorts of robust moral assessments involved in our current practices of moral responsibility. My aim in this paper is to try to respond to this challenge, by clarifying the kind of robust moral assessments I take to be licensed by (at least some) non-volitional accounts of responsibility and by explaining why these assessments do not in general require the agent to have voluntary control over everything for which she is held responsible. I also argue that the limited applicability of the distinction between “bad agents” and “blameworthy agents” on these accounts is in fact a mark in their favor. (shrink)

International research, sponsored by for-profit companies, is regularly criticised as unethical on the grounds that it exploits research subjects in developing countries. Many commentators agree that exploitation occurs when the benefits of cooperative activity are unfairly distributed between the parties. To determine whether international research is exploitative we therefore need an account of fair distribution. Procedural accounts of fair bargaining have been popular solutions to this problem, but I argue that they are insufficient to protect against exploitation. I argue instead (...) that a maximin principle of fair distribution provides a more compelling normative account of fairness in relationships characterised by extreme vulnerability and inequality of bargaining potential between the parties. A global tax on international research would provide a mechanism for implementing the maximin account of fair benefits. This model has the capacity to ensure fair benefits and thereby prevent exploitation in international research. (shrink)

The predominant view is that a study using health data is observational research and should require individual consent unless it can be shown that gaining consent is impractical. But recent arguments have been made that citizens have an ethical obligation to share their health information for research purposes. In our view, this obligation is sufficient ground to expand the circumstances where secondary use research with identifiable health information is permitted without explicit subject consent. As such, for some studies the Institutional (...) Review Board/Research Ethics Committee review process should not assess the practicality of gaining consent for data use. Instead the review process should focus on assessing the public good of the research, public engagement and transparency. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se efectúa un acercamiento a la narrativa cubana del período decimonónico por medio del diseño de sus personajes femeninos. Se atiende a las particularidades de la caracterización prosopográfica y etopéyica de la imago mujer, y se realiza una tentativa de tipologización, de acuerdo con los diversos matices conformadores de nuestros modelos femeninos ficcionales. En este propósito se privilegian aquellas obras y autores más importantes del período. In this paper, an approach to the Cuban narrative of nineteenth-century (...) period is carried out through the design of their female characters. The paper discusses the particularities of an ethopoeic characterization of imago women. It also attempts to realize a tentative typologization, based on the various nuances of forming our fictional female models. For this purpose, the works and major authors of the period are discussed. (shrink)

The concept of ‘ownership’ is increasingly central to debates, in the media, health policy and bioethics, about the appropriate management of clinical data. I argue that the language of ownership acts as a metaphor and reflects multiple concerns about current data use and the disenfranchisement of citizens and collectives in the existing data ecosystem. But exactly which core interests and concerns ownership claims allude to remains opaque. Too often, we jump straight from ‘ownership’ to ‘private property’ and conclude ‘the data (...) belongs to the patient’. I will argue here that private property is only one type of relevant relationship between people, communities and data. There are several reasons to doubt that conceptualising data as private property presents a compelling response to concerns about clinical data ownership. In particular I argue that clinical data are co-constructed, so a property account would fail to confer exclusive rights to the patient. A non-property account of ownership acknowledges that the data are ‘about the patient’, and therefore the patient has relevant interests, without jumping to the conclusion that the data ‘belongs to the patient’. On this broader account of ownership, the relevant harm is the severing of the connection between the patient and their data, and the solution is to re-engage and re-connect patients to the data research enterprise. (shrink)

There is increasing attention to the centrality of idealization in science. One common view is that models and other idealized representations are important to science, but that they fall short in one or more ways. On this view, there must be an intermediary step between idealized representation and the traditional aims of science, including truth, explanation, and prediction. Here I develop an alternative interpretation of the relationship between idealized representation and the aims of science. In my view, continuing, widespread idealization (...) calls into question the idea that science aims for truth. I argue that understanding must replace truth as the ultimate epistemic aim of science. Additionally, science has a wide variety aims, epistemic and non-epistemic, and these aims motivate different kinds of scientific products. Finally, I show how these diverse aims---all rather distant from truth---result in the expanded influence of social values on science. (shrink)

The concept of hierarchical organization is commonplace in science. Subatomic particles compose atoms, which compose molecules; cells compose tissues, which compose organs, which compose organisms; etc. Hierarchical organization is particularly prominent in ecology, a field of research explicitly arranged around levels of ecological organization. The concept of levels of organization is also central to a variety of debates in philosophy of science. Yet many difficulties plague the concept of discrete hierarchical levels. In this paper, we show how these difficulties undermine (...) various implications ascribed to hierarchical organization, and we suggest the concept of scale as a promising alternative to levels. Investigating causal processes at different scales offers a way to retain a notion of quasi-levels that avoids the difficulties inherent in the classic concept of hierarchical levels of organization. Throughout, our focus is on ecology, but the results generalize to other invocations of hierarchy in science and philosophy of science. (shrink)