This paper offers an alternate explanation of cases from the doxastic wronging literature. These cases violate what I call the degree of inquiry right—a novel account of zetetic obligations to inquire when interests are at stake. The degree of inquiry right is a moral right against other epistemic agents to inquire to a certain threshold when a belief undermines one’s interests. Thus, the agents are sometimes obligated to leave inquiry open. I argue that we have relevant interests in reputation, relationships, (...) and the well-being of our social groups. These interests generate obligations against others to “do their homework” before closing inquiry. This alternate account makes better sense of puzzles that accounts of doxastic wronging fall prey to. (shrink)

Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs as well. (...) Two facets of love ground what I call the false belief requirement , or the demand to form false beliefs when it is for the good of the beloved: the demand to love for the right reasons and the demand to refrain from doxastic wronging. Since truth is indispensable to epistemic rationality, the requirement to believe falsely, consequently, undermines truth norms. I demonstrate that, when the false belief requirement obtains, there is an irreconcilable conflict between love and truth norms of epistemic rationality: we must forsake one, at least at the time, for the other. (shrink)

Lacey J. Davidson (2023) raises several insightful objections to the group partiality account of wokeness. The paper aims to move the discussion forward by either responding to or developing Davidson’s objections. My goal is not to show that the partiality account is foolproof but to think about the direction of future discussion—future critique, modification, and response. Davidson thinks that the partiality account of wokeness does not sufficiently define wokeness, as the paper sets out to do. Davidson also alleges that the (...) account appropriates the term from minority communities. (shrink)

Retributive theories of punishment argue that punishing a criminal for a crime she committed is sufficient reason for a justified and morally permissible punishment. But what about when the state gets lucky in its decision to punish? I argue that retributive theories of punishment are subject to “Gettier” style cases from epistemology. Such cases demonstrate that the state needs more than to just get lucky, and as these retributive theories of punishment stand, there is no anti-luck condition. I’ll argue that (...) Gettier-style cases demonstrate an impermissible instance of punishment, even though they meet the conditions of retributive theories of punishment. Retributive theories are, therefore, too weak. The safety condition from epistemology provides the anti-luck condition needed for permissible punishment. I argue that two forms of retributivism, rights-forfeiture and what I call standard retributivism, are both subject to Gettier-style cases. Unlike the literature on standards of proof, this paper argues that safety is a condition on punishment itself, i.e., in all nearby possible worlds, the accuser must correctly accuse the convicted for the crime they actually committed. (shrink)

Consider a terrible situation that too many women find themselves in: 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales alone every year. Many of these women do not bring their cases to trial. There are multiple reasons that they might not want to testify in the courts. The incredibly low conviction rate is one. Another reason, however, might be that these women do not want the fact that they were raped to become the most salient thing about them. More specifically, (...) they do not want it to be the thing that others attend to the most—that others find most noticeable and memorable. In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘harmful salience perspectives’ to help to explain this and related phenomena. This refers either to attention on things that should not be salient, or not enough attention on things that deserve to be made salient. Following ideas within the feminist literature on objectification, I argue that we can be harmed when aspects of our identity that do not reflect our personhood—our agency, rationality, personality, and so on—are more prominent in the minds of others than aspects that do reflect our personhood. Crucially, these ways of attending do not need to implicate false beliefs and harmful ideologies to be harmful, but can be harmful in their own right. (shrink)

This essay will address a general philosophical concern about autonomy, namely, that a conception of autonomy focused on freedom of the will alone is inadequate, once we consider the effects of oppressive forms of socialization on individuals’ formation of choices. In response to this problem, I will present a brief overview of Diana Meyers’s account of autonomy as relational and practical. On this view, autonomy consists in a set of socially acquired practical competencies in self-discovery, self-definition, self-knowledge, and self-direction. This (...) account provides a distinction between choices that express unreflectively internalized social norms and those that are the result of a critical ‘self-reading’. I conclude that this practical conception of autonomy makes much higher demands upon nurses (and patients) than has previously been thought. In fact, if nurses are to be expected to genuinely promote autonomy, they are going to need specific training in counselling-type communication skills. (shrink)

One theme in complaints from those with marginalized social identities is that they are seen primarily in terms of that identity. Some Black artists, for instance, complain about being seen as Black first and artists second. These individuals can be understood as objecting to a particularly subtle form of morally problematic attention: “relative attentional surplus on the wrong property.” This attentional surplus can coexist with another type of common problematic attention affecting these groups, including attentional deficits; marginalized individuals and groups (...) themselves are routinely insufficiently attended to in virtue of the surplus attention given to their social identity properties. (shrink)

Bernard of Clairvaux observed that some goals can corrupt the activity of learning. Bernard’s claim is not only correct and important, but can be applied more widely to purposive activity in general. The exploration of his claim makes possible a consideration of the question, ‘How might different motivations affect, and indeed corrupt, the way in which we teach and learn?’ Although, pace Bernard, learning for learning’s sake does not corrupt the activity of learning, it may, however, as Aquinas’s account of (...) curiositas is used to show, corrupt the character of the scholar. In order to protect scholarship against such corruption we need to be wary in particular of the temptation to excessive specialisation. Finally, the question is raised of what it might mean to ‘refer’ or ‘order’ study to God, and in particular in what way one might characterise the relation between attending to study and attending to God. (shrink)

The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce’s work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce’s theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of (...) visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce’s theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice’s philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science. (shrink)

The distinction between essential versus accidental properties has been characterized in various ways, but it is currently most commonly understood in modal terms: an essential property of an object is a property that it must have, while an accidental property of an object is one that it happens to have but that it could lack. Let’s call this the basic modal characterization, where a modal characterization of a notion is one that explains the notion in terms of necessity/possibility. In the (...) characterization just given of the distinction between essential and accidental properties, the use of the word “must” reflects the fact that necessity is invoked, while the use of the word “could” reflects that possibility is invoked. The notions of necessity and possibility are interdefinable: to say that something is necessary is to say that its negation is not possible; to say that something is possible is to say that its negation is not necessary; to say that an object must have a certain property is to say that it could not lack it; and to say that an object could have a certain property is to say that it is not the case that it must lack it. (shrink)

What is the spirit that animates collective action? What is the ethos of democracy? _Worldly Ethics _offers a powerful and original response to these questions, arguing that associative democratic politics, in which citizens join together and struggle to shape shared conditions, requires a world-centered ethos. This distinctive ethos, Ella Myers shows, involves care for "worldly things," which are the common and contentious objects of concern around which democratic actors mobilize. In articulating the meaning of worldly ethics, she reveals the (...) limits of previous modes of ethics, including Michel Foucault's therapeutic model, based on a "care of the self," and Emmanuel Levinas's charitable model, based on care for the Other. Myers contends that these approaches occlude the worldly character of political life and are therefore unlikely to inspire and support collective democratic activity. The alternative ethics she proposes is informed by Hannah Arendt's notion of _amor mundi_, or love of the world, and it focuses on the ways democratic actors align around issues, goals, or things in the world, practicing collaborative care for them. Myers sees worldly ethics as a resource that can inspire and motivate ordinary citizens to participate in democratic politics, and the book highlights civic organizations that already embody its principles. (shrink)

Mineral waters were a delicate and unstable product whose value as a remedy increased in early modern France. If it was once the prised luxury of the nobility travelling to the spa, the eighteenth century slowly watched it turned into a commodity. The waters became widely available in bottles and were sold in bureaus of distribution. Despite the logistical challenges of selecting and carrying the waters to their new urban public, many different springs made their way into most of France’s (...) cities. This took place under the watch and regulation of a uniquely dedicated institution, the Société de Médecine. This Société eventually settled its authority over the management of mineral waters, thanks to the backing of state power, the influence of the Academy and the newly recognized authority of chemists as analysts of waters. The purpose of this paper is to bring to light this overlooked institution and its essential role in the administration of mineral waters. Though it never eradicated fraud or succeeded in creating a full scientific and economic monopoly, it greatly broadened the budding trade of bottled water in France and gave a powerful incentive for chemists to better their mastering of the particularly challenging analysis of water. (shrink)

Whenever we communicate, we inevitably have to say one thing before another. This means introducing particularly subtle patterns of salience into our language. In this paper, I introduce ‘order-based salience patterns’, referring to the ordering of syntactic contents where that ordering, pretheoretically, does not appear to be of consequence. For instance, if one is to describe a colourful scarf, it wouldn’t seem to matter if one were to say it is ‘orange and blue’ or ‘blue and orange’. Despite their apparent (...) triviality, I argue that order-based salience patterns tend to make the content positioned first more salient – in the sense of attention-grabbing – in a way that can have surprising normative implications. Giving relative salience to gender differences over similarities, for instance, can result in the activation of cognitively accessible beliefs about gender differences. Where those beliefs are epistemically and/or ethically flawed, we can critique the salience pattern that led to them, providing an instrumental way of evaluating those patterns. I suggest that order-based salience patterns can also be evaluated on constitutive grounds; talking about gender differences before similarities might constitute a subtle form of bias. Finally, I reflect on how the apparent triviality of order-based salience patterns in language gives them an insidious strength. (shrink)

Sometimes, a form of discrimination is hard to register, understand, and articulate. A rich precedent demonstrates how victim testimonies have been key in uncovering such “hidden” forms of discrimination, from sexual harassment to microaggressions. I reflect on how this plausibly goes too for “attentional discrimination”, referring to cases where the more meaningful attributes of one social group are made salient in attention in contrast to the less meaningful attributes of another. Victim testimonies understandably dominate the “context-of-discovery” stage of research into (...) these initially opaque forms of discrimination; a victim’s encounter with the gap between their experience and dominant conceptual frameworks for understanding it is what provides an initial foothold for analysis to begin. Some object, however, to this methodology continuing to dominate the later “context-of-justification” stage, where the hypothesis is rigorously challenged. I argue that this objection underestimates not just how other methodologies are more likely to inherit the various mechanisms of invisibility hiding the discrimination in question, but also how victim testimonies are distinctively well-suited to recognize and challenge those mechanisms. Victim testimonies, then, ought to continue playing a dominant role into these later stages of research regarding hidden forms of discrimination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minutes of the Annual General Meeting 2023Cornelis de Waal, Editor-in-Chief, Richard Kenneth Atkins, André De Tienne, Director and General Editor, and Elizabeth Cooke[as approved on January 17, 2024]The Annual General Meeting of the Charles S. Peirce Society was held in conjunction with the Eastern Division Meeting of the APA on January 5, 2023, at the Sheraton Le Centre, Montréal, Quebec. Rosa Maria Mayorga chaired the meeting and called (...) it to order at 12:38 p.m.1. Moment of SilenceThe annual meeting began with a moment of silence in memory of Peirce scholars who passed away in the last year.2. Approval of Minutes of the 2022 MeetingMinutes of the 2022 Annual General Meeting had been posted online. Copies were also distributed at the annual meeting. Rosa Maria Mayorga asked for a motion to approve the minutes. James Liszka so moved and Fabienne Forster seconded. The minutes were approved unanimously.3. Report from the Executive CommitteeRichard Kenneth Atkins submitted the following report.The Executive Committee Meeting was held virtually via email. All members of the Executive Committee were contacted and responded regarding the agenda and items.Agenda Items(A) Non-profit Status Update:On December 5, 2022, we received notification from the IRS that we have been legally approved as a public non-profit foundation.(B) Funding for Scholarship:Every year, we set aside a certain amount of funding for scholarship, usually 2/3rds of the year's income. This includes the $1,000 set aside for the Peirce Essay prize. Atkins reported that the income this past year was $6,597.06. 2/3rds of that is $4,400. Atkins requested that that amount of money be set aside for funding for scholarship, with which the committee unanimously agreed.(C) Next Year's AGM:Atkins proposed that we continue to hold our annual conference in conjunction with the E-APA in New York, NY, especially as this keeps us in line with the calendar year which is also our fiscal year as a nonprofit. The committee unanimously agreed. [End Page 118](D) Any Other Business:Cornelis de Waal suggested that we add to the agenda for the annual business meeting a moment of silence to commemorate Peirce scholars who passed this year. The Executive Committee unanimously agreed.4. Report from the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce SocietyCornelis de Waal submitted the following report on behalf of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Richard Kenneth Atkins read the report on his behalf.During the 2022 calendar year we produced four issues of the Transactions. We encountered some problems with the first issue, because the printer suffered a ransomware attack. This apparently wreaked havoc with their system and caused significant delay in the completion of the issue.Likely due to the (after) effects of the pandemic, quality submissions to the journal were down significantly, both in the Peirce segment and in the non-Peirce segment of the journal. In addition, there was a significant drop in book reviews. The latter led to the resignation of our long-term book review editor, Henrik Rydenfelt. For the last two months I have been taking over for him, and I'm first-hand experiencing some of the challenges, even including publishers simply not following through on requests for books. We did, though, publish a book symposium on James Liszka's Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences, and we have another book symposium forthcoming on Chris Voparil's Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. Besides a number of excellent papers on Peirce, we published some very nice papers in American philosophy. The latter include an extensive portrait of Edwin Bissell Holt, a discussion of the use of the term pragmatism in 18th century Germany, the first English translation of two texts by Wilhelm Jerusalem, as well as work on George Santayana, Jonathan Edwards, and Emily Dickinson.With Henrik gone, the editorial team is now down to Robert Lane and me (hopefully briefly returning to the traditional Robin-Hare setup). I'll be attending the upcoming SAAP meeting in Denver, and Bob is planning to attend as well... (shrink)

Learning to adapt to the new set of conditions that confound behavioral standards was made possible by the pandemic-driven change in the school system. Due to these conditions and the COVID-19 pandemic, students may experience behaviors like social media addiction and social anxiety that may affect their well-being or happiness. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effects of social media addiction and social anxiety on the happiness of tertiary students amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was conducted on 316 (...) first-year college students utilizing Google forms to disseminate questionnaires. After utilizing Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, Social Anxiety Scale, and Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, it was found that social media addiction (β = -0.30, p<.00) and social anxiety (β = -0.003, p<.00) has a significant negative effect on happiness. Therefore, the study recommended and designed a student wellness program that provides a range of recreational, healthimproving, self-esteem-boosting, and relationship-strengthening activities for students in order to mitigate the negative effects of problematic social media usage and social anxiety that negatively effect their happiness. (shrink)

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a (...) racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it. (shrink)

In the philosophy of language and epistemology, debates often centre on what content a person is communicating, or representing in their mind. How that content is organised, along dimensions of salience, has received relatively little attention. I argue that salience matters. Mere change of salience patterns, without change of content, can have dramatic implications, both epistemic and moral. Imagine two newspaper articles that offer the same information about a subject, but differ in terms of what they headline. These articles can (...) be said to adopt different linguistic salience perspectives. Making different things salient in language is a way of making different things salient in an audience’s mind: it is a way of encouraging the audience to adopt a particular cognitive salience perspective. Building on Elisabeth Camp’s work on perspectives, and Sebastian Watzl’s work on attention, I suggest that one has a certain cognitive salience perspective in virtue of better noticing, remembering, and finding cognitively accessible certain contents over others. Drawing on psychological research into cognitive biases and framing effects, I argue that that simply making some content salient in the mind, perhaps through first making it salient in language, can be sufficient to activate substantive cultural beliefs or ideologies associated with that content. Where those beliefs and ideologies have epistemic and moral problems, we have grounds for criticising the salience perspective that causally produced them. Besides this instrumental harm, I also suggest that certain salience perspectives can themselves constitute harm. I draw on feminist work on objectification to argue that making the wrong thing salient about a person can constitute a way of dehumanising them. A great many factors, from physical and psychological violence, to false beliefs and credibility deficits, have already been identified as potentially harming an individual or group. What is distinctive about this argument, then, is the idea that, sometimes, mere patterns of salience can be damaging in and of themselves. (shrink)

We read with interest Dominic Wilkinson’s article “Frailty Triage: Is Rationing Intensive Medical Treatment on the Grounds of Frailty Ethical?” on the utility of the Clinical Frailty Score in...

Recent scandals allegedly linked to CEO compensation have brought executive compensation and perquisites to the forefront of debate about constraining executive compensation and reforming the associated corporate governance structure. We briefly describe the structure of executive compensation, and the agency theory framework that has commonly been used to conceptualize executives acting on behalf of shareholders. We detail some criticisms of executive compensation and associated ethical issues, and then discuss what previous research suggests are likely intended and unintended consequences of some (...) widely proposed executive compensation reforms. We explicitly discuss the following recommendations for reform: require greater independence of compensation committees, require executives to hold equity in the corporation, require greater disclosure of executive compensation, increase institutional investor involvement in corporate governance (including executive compensation), and require firms to expense stock options on their income statements. We provide a brief summary discussion of ethical issues related to executive compensation, and describe possible future research. (shrink)

Written between 1985 and 2005, the twelve essays in this collection include some of Shohat's best known pieces as well as one new essay.

Charles Sanders Peirce is generally regarded as the founder of pragmatism, and one of the greatest ever American philosophers. Peirce is also widely known for his work on truth, his foundational work in mathematical logic, and an influential theory of signs, or semiotics. Albert Atkin introduces the full spectrum of Peirce’s thought for those coming to his work for the first time. The book begins with an overview of Peirce’s life and work, considering his early and long-standing interest in logic (...) and science, and highlighting important views on the structure of philosophical thought. Atkin then explains Peirce’s accounts of pragmatism and truth examining important later developments to these theories. He then introduces Peirce’s full accounts of semiotics, examines his foundational work on formal and graphical logic, and introduces Peirce’s account of metaphysics, the least understood aspect of his philosophy. The final chapter considers Peirce’s legacy and influence on the thought of philosophers such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty, as well as highlighting areas where Peirce’s ideas could still provide important insights for contemporary philosophers. Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary, this invaluable introduction and guide to Peirce’s philosophy is essential reading for those new to his work. (shrink)

The question 'Why should I obey the law?' introduces a contemporary puzzle that is as old as philosophy itself. The puzzle is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the idea that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number (...) of learned voices has expressed doubt that there is any such duty, at least as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

Purpose Online violence has been rampant in the past decade, intensifying the victims’ suffering owing to its rapid dissemination to vast audiences. This study aims to focus on online gender-based violence directed against young Bedouin women who have left their male-dominated home territory for academic studies. This study examined how the backlash against these students, intended to stop changes in traditional gender roles, is reflected in offensive TikTok videos. Design/methodology/approach This research is based on a qualitative-thematic analysis of 77 questionnaires (...) and 30 semistructured in-depth interviews with first-year female Bedouin students aged 18–21 years. Findings The backlash was widespread, with young Bedouin men using offensive videos as “proof” that women have violated codes of honor and morality. The videos exhibited four types of gender-based violence: claims of immoral behavior, aggressive captions that take the footage out of context, allegations of immodest clothing and digital photo editing that produced fabricated results. Examining participants' reactions to the videos, this study revealed two patterns of response: passive acceptance of the situation and an active approach that included reaching out to powerful Bedouin men for solutions. Originality/value This research enriches the literature on online gender-based violence, particularly against women in traditional societies, and suggests practical steps: developing online media literacy in traditional societies, adopting a proactive approach and nurturing social self-competence in women who have been victims of online gender-based violence. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Rancière’s political thought is the object of growing fascination, particularly as a lens through which to interpret contemporary political protests, yet his conception of axiomatic equality remains unexamined. This article investigates Rancière’s account of equality as a ‘presupposition’, showing that an axiom of equality guides momentary acts of resistance, but also serves as a ‘necessary and sufficient condition’ of all societies, however hierarchical. Although this account holds some appeal, I argue that it restricts equality to two, not especially satisfying possibilities: (...) a temporary revelation or a hidden secret. This rendering of axiomatic equality is symptomatic of Rancière’s general hostility toward institutional politics. Because Rancière tends to depict ‘institutions’ per se as oppressive, equality is positioned ‘outside’ the socio-political order – as its fleeting interruption or disavowed condition of possibility. I argue, on the contrary, that a radically egalitarian politics today should affirm a practice-centered project of institution-building. (shrink)

Current theory-of-mind research faces the challenge of reconciling two sets of seemingly incompatible findings: Whereas children come to solve explicit verbal false belief tasks from around 4years of age, recent studies with various less explicit measures such as looking time, anticipatory looking, and spontaneous behavior suggest that even infants can succeed on some FB tasks. In response to this tension, two-systems theories propose to distinguish between an early-developing system, tracking simple forms of mental states, and a later-developing system, based on (...) fully developed concepts of belief and other propositional attitudes. One prediction of such theories is that the early-developing system has signature limits concerning aspectuality. We tested this prediction in two experiments. The first experiment showed that 2- and 3-year-olds take into account a protagonist's true or false belief about the location of an object in their active helping behavior. In contrast, toddlers' helping behavior did not differentiate between true and false belief conditions when the protagonist's belief essentially involved aspectuality. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with a more stringent method designed to rule out more parsimonious explanations. Taken together, the current findings are compatible with the possibility that early theory-of-mind reasoning is subject to signature limits as predicted by the two-systems account. (shrink)