A careful reading of the Gorgias along with related dialogues, such as the Apology, the Theaetetus, and other texts, shows that agonism is indispensable to the critique of prevailing opinions, to the transformation of the interlocutor through shame-inducing elenchos, and to philosophy as an ongoing, lifelong ‘training’ (askêsis) of oneself in relation to others. In this way, following Plato’s texts in understanding philosophy as agôn involves rethinking philosophy as an engaged contestation of one’s peers and the received opinions that are (...) part of our relatedness to one another, as well as rethinking agôn as involving not just verbal combativeness, but also—in line with its root-meaning—as a matter of being gathered together in community through discourse (logos). (shrink)

An incisive exploration of the way Greek myths empower us to defeat tyranny. As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian tragedies exposed the tyrannical potential (...) of individuals and groups large and small. These stories identified abuses of power as self-defeating. They initiated and fostered a movement away from despotism and toward broader forms of political participation. Following her highly praised book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, the classicist Emily Katz Anhalt retells tales from key ancient Greek texts and proceeds to interpret the important message they hold for us today. As she reveals, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and Sophocles's Antigone encourage us—as they encouraged the ancient Greeks—to take responsibility for our own choices and their consequences. These stories emphasize the responsibilities that come with power (any power, whether derived from birth, wealth, personal talents, or numerical advantage), reminding us that the powerful and the powerless alike have obligations to each other. They assist us in restraining destructive passions and balancing tribal allegiances with civic responsibilities. They empower us to resist the tyrannical impulses not only of others but also in ourselves. In an era of political polarization, Embattled demonstrates that if we seek to eradicate tyranny in all its toxic forms, ancient Greek epics and tragedies can point the way. (shrink)

About half of the undergraduate and roughly 40 percent of graduate degree recipients in science and engineering are women. As increasing numbers of these women pursue research careers in science, many who choose to have children discover the unique difficulties of balancing a professional life in these highly competitive (and often male-dominated) fields with the demands of motherhood. Although this issue directly affects the career advancement of women scientists, it is rarely discussed as a professional concern, leaving individuals to face (...) the dilemma on their own. To address this obvious but unacknowledged crisis—the elephant in the laboratory, according to one scientist—Emily Monosson, an independent toxicologist, has brought together 34 women scientists from overlapping generations and several fields of research—including physics, chemistry, geography, paleontology, and ecology, among others—to share their experiences. From women who began their careers in the 1970s and brought their newborns to work, breastfeeding them under ponchos, to graduate students today, the authors of the candid essays written for this groundbreaking volume reveal a range of career choices: the authors work part-time and full-time; they opt out and then opt back in; they become entrepreneurs and job share; they teach high school and have achieved tenure. The personal stories that comprise Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory not only show the many ways in which women can successfully combine motherhood and a career in science but also address and redefine what it means to be a successful scientist. These valuable narratives encourage institutions of higher education and scientific research to accommodate the needs of scientists who decide to have children. (shrink)

Play is a vital component of the social life and well-being of both children and adults. This book examines the concept of play and considers a variety of the related philosophical issues. It also includes meta-analyses from a range of philosophers and theorists, as well as an exploration of some key applied ethical considerations. The main objective of The Philosophy of Play is to provide a richer understanding of the concept and nature of play and its relation to human life (...) and values, and to build disciplinary and paradigmatic bridges between scholars of philosophy and scholars of play. Including specific chapters dedicated to children and play, and exploring the work of key thinkers such as Plato, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Deleuze and Nietzsche, this book is invaluable reading for any advanced student, researcher or practitioner with an interest in education, playwork, leisure studies, applied ethics or the philosophy of sport. (shrink)

Substructural fuzzy logics are substructural logics that are complete with respect to algebras whose lattice reduct is the real unit interval [0.1]. In this paper, we introduce Uninorm logic UL as Multiplicative additive intuitionistic linear logic MAILL extended with the prelinearity axiom ((A → B) ∧ t) ∨ ((B → A) ∧ t). Axiomatic extensions of UL include known fuzzy logics such as Monoidal t-norm logic MTL and Gödel logic G, and new weakening-free logics. Algebraic semantics for these logics are (...) provided by subvarieties of (representable) pointed bounded commutative residuated lattices. Gentzen systems admitting cut-elimination are given in the framework of hypersequents. Completeness with respect to algebras with lattice reduct [0, 1] is established for UL and several extensions using a two-part strategy. First, completeness is proved for the logic extended with Takeuti and Titani's density rule. A syntactic elimination of the rule is then given using a hypersequent calculus. As an algebraic corollary, it follows that certain varieties of residuated lattices are generated by their members with lattice reduct [0, 1]. (shrink)

There are growing discontinuities between the research practices of data science and established tools of research ethics regulation. Some of the core commitments of existing research ethics regulations, such as the distinction between research and practice, cannot be cleanly exported from biomedical research to data science research. Such discontinuities have led some data science practitioners and researchers to move toward rejecting ethics regulations outright. These shifts occur at the same time as a proposal for major revisions to the Common Rule—the (...) primary regulation governing human-subjects research in the USA—is under consideration for the first time in decades. We contextualize these revisions in long-running complaints about regulation of social science research and argue data science should be understood as continuous with social sciences in this regard. The proposed regulations are more flexible and scalable to the methods of non-biomedical research, yet problematically largely exclude data science methods from human-subjects regulation, particularly uses of public datasets. The ethical frameworks for Big Data research are highly contested and in flux, and the potential harms of data science research are unpredictable. We examine several contentious cases of research harms in data science, including the 2014 Facebook emotional contagion study and the 2016 use of geographical data techniques to identify the pseudonymous artist Banksy. To address disputes about application of human-subjects research ethics in data science, critical data studies should offer a historically nuanced theory of “data subjectivity” responsive to the epistemic methods, harms and benefits of data science and commerce. (shrink)

_Philosophers consider race and racism from the perspective of lived, bodily experience._.

Research on the specific features of daydreaming compared with mind-wandering and night dreaming is a neglected topic in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive neuroscience of spontaneous thought. The extant research either conflates daydreaming with mind-wandering (whether understood as task-unrelated thought, unguided attention, or disunified thought), characterizes daydreaming as opposed to mind-wandering (Dorsch, 2015), or takes daydreaming to encompass any and all “imagined events” (Newby-Clark & Thavendran, 2018). These dueling definitions obstruct future research on spontaneous thought, and are insufficiently (...) precise to guide empirical studies. They also fail to illuminate the phenomenal core of daydreaming, namely, its dreamlike qualities. Although daydreaming is related to both mind-wandering and narrative imagination, it is not reducible to either. We argue that daydreams are experiences of spontaneous, immersive imagination in the waking state. The main task of our investigation is to distinguish daydreaming, conceptually and phenomenologically, from mind-wandering, on the one hand, and night dreaming, on the other. Although daydream experiences can vary widely, we distinguish prototypical experiences of daydreaming from adjacent imaginative activity, including fleeting imagery and “focused daydreaming,” or crafted visualization. We consider our phenomenological analysis as preparatory work for conceptually distinguishing different spontaneous and imaginative states so that they can be investigated accordingly with questionnaires and qualitative methods. We argue that precision about the phenomenal character of daydreaming can guide neurophenomenological investigations, help delimit studies on individual variance in daydreaming features, and identify differences among daydreaming, mind-wandering, and night dreaming conceptually and phenomenologically, and possibly eventually in terms of neural correlates. (shrink)

Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones was an English logician and contemporary of Bertrand Russell, as well as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. In this book, originally published in 1911, she argues for the existence of another fundamental law of thought to join the Law of Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle: the Law of Significant Assertion. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in logic or in Jones' work.

Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept--assemblages--and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists--and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated. The ultimate aim is to reassert (...) an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasise the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artefacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology's seeming-seamless epistemological objects"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

According to the Nomological Argument, observed regularities in nature are best explained by an appeal to a supernatural being. A successful explanation must avoid two perils. Some explanations provide too little structure, predicting a universe without regularities. Others provide too much structure, thereby precluding an explanation of certain types of lawlike regularities featured in modern scientific theories. We argue that an explanation based in the creative, intentional action of a supernatural being avoids these two perils whereas leading competitors do not. (...) Although our argument falls short of a full defense, it does suggest that the Nomological Argument is worthy of philosophical attention. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of BeliefRobert MetcalfFor the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief. Eugene Garver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. pp. 264. $55.00, hardcover; $22.50, paperback.Professor Garver's book, For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief, is a provocative and illuminating study of practical reasoning, and one that develops (...) many of the ideas found in his magisterial study, Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The previous book concluded by arguing that Aristotle's Rhetoric is philosophically more interesting today than it was in Aristotle's time, in part because for us there is no polis to which the argumentative facility of rhetoric would be subordinate (1994, 233ff.). This idea is echoed in the present book when Garver writes: "The more we take disagreement to be a permanent part of the situation of practical reasoning, and not something soon to be overcome by appropriate theory or universal enlightenment, the more rhetorical facility becomes a central part [End Page 95] of practical reason" (2004, 175). It is, indeed, a fascinating feature of For the Sake of Argument that it defends the autonomy and integrity of practical reason through Aristotle's insights on the various connections between argument, persuasion, and ethos (153), and illustrates these through examples such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, and subsequent Supreme Court decisions.The book is divided into eight chapters, and, as Garver explains, these represent four pairs of essays in which a more concrete or "applied" chapter is followed by a chapter that draws generalizations from the examples of the prior chapter. Among the themes most prominent in the book are the connection between reason and character, on which Garver writes, "Practical reason has its own integrity when who we are and how we think are intimately connected" (2); the compatibility, within practical reason, of truth and one's own interest; the "ampliative" nature of practical reason, such that the implications of one's beliefs can lead to discoveries unanticipated at the beginning; the connection between the ethos of a leader and the ethos of a community; and the underappreciated power of epideictic rhetoric "to affirm values and articulate new vocabularies" (178). In addressing such broad themes, Garver's attention to concrete examples, like Brown v. Board of Education, is thoroughly instructive. The Brown decision, he argues, is "an epideictic declaration that equality and antidiscrimination are fundamental American Constitutional values" (73). Brown clearly demonstrates the ampliative nature of practical reason in that the conclusion it reaches is stronger than the premises from which it begins (i.e., the Fourteenth Amendment); moreover, it generates what Garver calls an "ethical surplus" that allows for unanticipated implications that are stronger still, such as the later Court decision striking down antimiscegenation laws (71–73). This "increase" in strength in proceeding from premises to conclusion is "impossible under a purely deductive conception of rationality," Garver writes (73), yet it is well explained by his Aristotle-inspired account of practical reasoning.Surely some readers will recoil from Garver's more provocative claims, such as that "we decide... to be convinced and choose to find a line of reasoning compelling" (119), offered within a discussion of the responsibility we bear in ethical argumentation. However, the issue that is more problematic, to my mind, concerns Garver's treatment of Plato. This may seem odd, given that Plato only appears as a foil in the book—but the problem is that it is merely a caricature of Plato that Garver allows to act as [End Page 96] a foil. Garver argues against "the Platonic program which will save reason by removing it from human contamination" (3) and "the Platonic hope of replacing ethical reasoning by the certainties of science" (5). He sides with Aristotle's idea that we can aim at effectiveness and at rightness together (48, 200) over against the allegedly Platonic idea that we must choose between truth and our own interest, reason and emotion, and so forth, or else... (shrink)

Exploring the intimate tie between body movement and space and time, Lee begins with the position that body movement generates space and time and explores the ethical implications of this responsibility for the situations one’s body movements generate. Whiteness theory has come to recognize the ethical responsibility for situations not of one’s own making and hence accountability for the results of more than one’s immediate personal conscious decisions. Because of our specific history, whites have developed a particular embodiment and body (...) movement that generates places that can only be characterized as more comfortable and more enabling to whites. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of emotion focuses on challenging dualistic conceptualizations. Three of the most obvious dualisms are the following: 1. emotion opposes reason; 2. emotion is subjective, while reason is objective; 3. emotion lies internal to the subject, while reason is external. With challenges to these dualisms, one of the more interesting questions that has surfaced is the idea of emotional appropriateness in a particular context. Here, consider a widely held belief in the United States associates racialized groups (...) with specific emotions—most notably African American women with anger. Clearly these emotional attributions are essentialistic--and hence racist. But this response is too easy. The acknowledgement that emotion lies both internally in the subject and externally in the world opens the possibility of attributing an emotional temperament to a population group. Yet if an identity group has an emotional temperament, can they be accountable for emotionally appropriate behavior? (shrink)

We argued in a recent issue of this journal that if abortion is restricted,1 then there are parallel obligations for parents to donate body parts to their children. The strength of this obligation to donate is proportional to the strength of the abortion restrictions. If abortion is never permissible, then a parent must always donate any organ if they are a match. If abortion is sometimes permissible and sometimes not, then organ donation is sometimes obligatory and sometimes not. Our argument (...) was based on the following ideas: (a) that a fetus has full moral status, (b) that parents have special obligations to their offspring, fetus or not, and (c) that this special obligation is to protect them. The result is the conclusion that abortion restrictivists cannot also consistently deny that organ donation should be compulsory. (shrink)

Dreamland of humanists -- Culture, commerce, and the city -- Warburg's Renaissance and the things in between -- University as "gateway to the world" -- Warburg, Cassirer, and the conditions of reason -- Socrates in Hamburg? Panofsky and the economics of scholarship -- Iconology and the Hamburg school -- Private Jews, public Germans -- Cassirer's cosmopolitan nationalism -- The enlightened rector and the politics of enlightenment -- The Hamburg America line: exiles as exports -- Epilogue: Nachleben of an idea.

In Living for Pleasure, philosopher Emily Austin offers a lively, jargon-free tour of Epicurean strategies for diminishing anxiety, achieving satisfaction, and relishing joys.

In this thoughtful and provocative work, scholar Emily Herman explores the ideas of two of the most important philosophers of the 20th century and their relevance to Christian thought. From the concept of time to the nature of human existence, this book offers important insights into some of the most pressing questions of our time. 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 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. 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)

Current UK legislation is impacting upon the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of medical record-based research aimed at benefiting the NHS and the public heath. Whereas previous commentators have focused on the Data Protection Act 1998, the Health and Social Care Act 2001 is the key legislation for public health researchers wishing to access medical records without written consent. The Act requires researchers to apply to the Patient Information Advisory Group for permission to access medical records without written permission. We present a (...) case study of the work required to obtain the necessary permissions from PIAG in order to conduct a large scale public health research project. In our experience it took eight months to receive permission to access basic identifying information on individuals registered at general practices, and a decision on whether we could access clinical information in medical records without consent took 18 months. Such delays pose near insurmountable difficulties to grant funded research, and in our case £560 000 of public and charitable money was spent on research staff while a large part of their work was prohibited until the third year of a three year grant. We conclude by arguing that many of the current problems could be avoided by returning PIAG’s responsibilities to research ethics committees, and by allowing “opt-out” consent for many public health research projects. (shrink)

The laws of nature have come a long way since the time of Newton: quantum mechanics and relativity have given us good reasons to take seriously the possibility of laws which may be non-local, atemporal, ‘all-at-once,’ retrocausal, or in some other way not well-suited to the standard dynamical time evolution paradigm. Laws of this kind can be accommodated within a Humean approach to lawhood, but many extant non-Humean approaches face significant challenges when we try to apply them to laws outside (...) the time evolution picture. Thus for proponents of non-Humean approaches to lawhood there is a clear need for a novel non-Humean account which is capable of accommodating these sorts of laws. In this paper we propose such an account, characterizing lawhood in terms of constraints, which are understood as a form of modal structure. We demonstrate that our proposed realist account can indeed accommodate a large variety of laws outside the time evolution paradigm, and describe some possible applications to important philosophical problems. (shrink)

Dementia patients in the moderate-late stage of the disease can, and often do, express different preferences than they did at the onset of their condition. The received view in the philosophical literature argues that advance directives which prioritize the patient’s preferences at onset ought to be given decisive moral weight in medical decision-making. Clinical practice, on the other hand, favors giving moral weight to the preferences expressed by dementia patients after onset. The purpose of this article is to show that (...) the received view in the philosophical literature is inadequate and is out of touch with real clinical practice. I argue that having dementia is a cognitive transformative experience and that preference changes which result from this are legitimate and ought to be given moral weight in medical decision-making. This argument ought to encourage us to reduce our confidence in the moral weight of advance directives for dementia patients. (shrink)

Concepts like testimonial injustice (Fricker, 2007) and testimonial violence (Dotson, 2011) articulate that marginalized epistemic agents are unjustly undermined as testifiers when dominant agents cannot or will not hear, understand, or believe their testimony. This paper turns attention away from these constraints on uptake, and towards pragmatic, social, and political constraints on how dominant audiences receive and react to testimony. I argue that these constraints can also be sources of testimonial injustice and epistemic violence. Specifically, I explore a kind of (...) injustice that I call testimonial withdrawal, which occurs when a would-be speaker chooses to remain silent because they know or reasonably expect that there is pragmatic risk associated with speaking, given their unjust marginalization. I argue that this unjustly undermines epistemic agency, and that expanding Fricker and Dotson’s umbrella concepts to accommodate this idea results in a better understanding of the moral and epistemic contours of both testimonial withdrawal and these broader categories. (shrink)

The concept of self-gaslighting has recently become prevalent in popular discourse but has yet to be subjected to detailed philosophical analysis. In this paper, I examine one context in which self-gaslighting is often discussed: situations in which someone has experienced trauma. I argue that the phenomenon currently described as self-gaslighting fails to display core features of manipulative gaslighting and that therefore we should seek other conceptual resources for understanding such cases. I suggest that self-gaslighting, at least in some paradigmatic cases, (...) amounts to either extremely successful interpersonal gaslighting or to internalized oppression. Utilizing these concepts instead of self-gaslighting avoids conceptual difficulties and also has a significant practical payoff. By moving away from the language of self-gaslighting we can move away from feelings of self-blame that so often accompany trauma. (shrink)

Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such research and the relationship of pervasive data research to corporate datafication and surveillance. We suggest a way forward by (...) drawing from the history of a different methodological approach in which researchers have struggled with trustworthy practice: ethnography. To grapple with the colonial legacy of their methods, ethnographers have developed analytic lenses and researcher practices that foreground relations of awareness and power. These lenses are inspiring but also challenging for pervasive data research, given the flattening of contexts inherent in digital data collection. We propose ways that pervasive data researchers can incorporate reflection on awareness and power within their research to support the development of trustworthy data science. (shrink)

Relational quantum mechanics (RQM) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics based on the idea that quantum states do not describe an absolute property of a system but rather a relationship between systems. There have recently been some criticisms of RQM pertaining to issues around intersubjectivity. In this article, we show how RQM can address these criticisms by adding a new postulate which requires that all of the information possessed by a certain observer is stored in physical variables of that observer (...) and thus is accessible by measurement to other observers. This makes it possible for observers to reach intersubjective agreement about quantum events that have occurred in the past. We suggest a possible ontology for a version of RQM employing this postulate; this ontology upholds the principle that quantum states are always relational, but it also postulates a set of quantum events that are not strictly relational. We show that the new postulate helps address the preferred basis problem in RQM. (shrink)

This article examines the explicit and implicit corporate social responsibility (CSR) framework and its implications for leadership style, in a major banking institution. Evidence for existence of the framework's key concepts in relation to leadership styles was explored through the self-reported sensemaking of leaders charged with CSR programme introduction. Qualitative data analysis indicated that explicit CSR is linked to an autocratic leadership style, whereas implicit CSR is more closely aligned with emergent and authentic styles. Although our results reinforced key aspects (...) of the explicit and implicit CSR framework, they demonstrated conflicting systems of both CSR and leadership within our case organisation and highlighted the difficulty in categorising such a complex concept as CSR according to specific frameworks. Overall, our data suggest that the leadership styles, needed to successfully implement explicit and implicit CSR programmes, are in conflict. Given our finding that these CSR systems can coincide within one organisation, we suggest that the debating style of transformational leadership may be the required linchpin. (shrink)

International law codifies the principle of non-combatant immunity, which traces its origins to a religiously supported moral imperative. The principle of non-combatant immunity has evolved to become a crucial underpinning of just war theory. Western societal norms have complicated our understanding and application of the principle of non-combatant immunity by depicting combatancy in terms of innocence and guilt: those viewed as innocent deserve legal protection. Child soldiers and female suicide bombers exemplify today's complex and expanding parameters of combat. Consequently, in (...) practice, authorities in conflict zones cannot rely on existing legal distinctions; instead, they are forced to make subjective judgements when deciding whom to protect. This article calls for a critical evaluation of: existing legal definitions concerning non-combatants; how conceptions of combatancy are applied in protective policy and humanitarian evacuation; and the resulting consequences and policy implications. (shrink)

These and other related concerns are crucial in this volume's lively debate over the nature of the missing cognitive link, and whether gorillas, chimps, or...

Experiments are commonly thought to have epistemic privilege over simulations. Two ideas underpin this belief: first, experiments generate greater inferential power than simulations, and second, simulations cannot surprise us the way experiments can. In this article I argue that neither of these claims is true of experiments versus simulations in general. We should give up the common practice of resting in-principle judgments about the epistemic value of cases of scientific inquiry on whether we classify those cases as experiments or simulations, (...) per se. To the extent that either methodology puts researchers in a privileged epistemic position, this is context sensitive. (shrink)

Any successful interpretation of quantum mechanics must explain how our empirical evidence allows us to come to know about quantum mechanics. In this article, we argue that this vital criterion is not met by the class of ‘orthodox interpretations,’ which includes QBism, neo-Copenhagen interpretations, and some versions of relational quantum mechanics. We demonstrate that intersubjectivity fails in radical ways in these approaches, and we explain why intersubjectivity matters for empirical confirmation. We take a detailed look at the way in which (...) belief-updating might work in the kind of universe postulated by an orthodox interpretation, and argue that observers in such a universe are unable to escape their own perspective in order to learn about the structure of the set of perspectives that is supposed to make up reality according to these interpretations. We also argue that in some versions of these interpretations it is not even possible to use one’s own relative frequencies for empirical confirmation. Ultimately we conclude that it cannot be rational to believe these sorts of interpretations unless they are supplemented with some observer-independent structure which underwrites intersubjective agreement in at least certain sorts of cases. (shrink)

There has long been a curious fascination with eyes and mirrors as evident throughout art, film, and literature. From fantastical characters who shoot lasers from their eyes to those whose memories are altered visually, the way in which a story portrays the function of the eyes demonstrates the way the storyteller imagines the character's relationship to the world. Is the character powerful or powerless? Does she impact her world or is she impacted by that world? The storyteller's portrayal of vision (...) answers those questions and reveals deeper assumptions about the individual and her ability to move within and to know her world. While eyes are associated with interacting with this world, mirrors are distinctly associated with interacting with some other world. Mirrors function as portals to other worlds, windows that glimpse an alternate reality, or harmful traps that hide sinister intentions. How an author portrays eyes reveals how she understands the world, while how she portrays mirrors reveals how she imagines the unknown. (shrink)