Seite dualität: Anarchismus 121. Konsequenzen der individualitätszerstörenden Gleichheitstheorie: Stellung der Frau 123; unhistorische Denkweise 123; ...

How to handle orphan drugs for rare diseases is a pressing problem in current health-care. Due to the group size of patients affecting the cost of treatment, they risk being disadvantaged in relation to existing cost-effectiveness thresholds. In an article by Niklas Juth it has been argued that it is irrelevant to take indirectly operative factors like group size into account since such a compensation would risk discounting the use of cost, a relevant factor, altogether. In this article we analyze (...) Juth’s argument and observe that we already do compensate for indirectly operative factors, both outside and within cost-effectiveness evaluations, for formal equality reasons. Based on this we argue that we have reason to set cost-effectiveness thresholds to integrate equity concerns also including formal equality considerations. We find no reason not to compensate for group size to the extent we already compensate for other factors. Moreover, groups size implying a systematic disadvantage also on a global scale, i.e. taking different aspects of the health condition of patients suffering from rare diseases into account, will provide strong reason for why group size is indeed relevant to compensate for. (shrink)

A measure of coherence is said to be truth conducive if and only if a higher degree of coherence (as measured) results in a higher likelihood of truth. Recent impossibility results strongly indicate that there are no (non-trivial) probabilistic coherence measures that are truth conducive. Indeed, this holds even if truth conduciveness is understood in a weak ceteris paribus sense (Bovens & Hartmann, 2003, Bayesian epistemology. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Olsson, 2005, Against coherence: Truth probability and justification. Oxford: (...) Oxford University Press). This raises the problem of how coherence could nonetheless be an epistemically important property. Our proposal is that coherence may be linked in a certain way to reliability. We define a measure of coherence to be reliability conducive if and only if a higher degree of coherence (as measured) results in a higher probability that the information sources are reliable. Restricting ourselves to the most basic case, we investigate which coherence measures in the literature are reliability conducive. It turns out that, while a number of measures fail to be reliability conducive, except possibly in a trivial and uninteresting sense, Shogenji’s measure and several measures generated by Douven and Meijs’s recipe are notable exceptions to this rule. (shrink)

The coronavirus pandemic made the biopolitics of infection control the core object of states around the world. Globally, states governed spheres usually free of state control, implementing various restrictions, closing down society in the process. This is possible due to the state's capacities to act through and over society, grounded in the state's powers. I argue that while the pandemic has led to useful and interesting state-centric Foucauldian literature on the politics of COVID-19, this literature has not fully taken the (...) theoretical lessons of the pandemic into account. Explicating these lessons, I discuss how the pandemic invites us to reconsider the Foucauldian approach to the state. The purpose of this article is to combine the Foucauldian theory of power with a Weberian state theory based on Michael Mann's work on the state and the sources of power, so to lay the foundations for a Weberian-Foucauldian theory of the state. (shrink)

The paper extends previous accounts of informational privacy as a contextual notion. Where previous accounts have focused on interpretations of the privacy context itself as being contextual and open for negotiation and interpretation, this paper extends those analyses and shows that personal information itself is in fact best understood as contextual and situational—and as such open for interpretation. The paper reviews the notion of information as it has been applied in informational privacy and philosophy of information, and suggests that personal (...) information ought to be regarded as communicative acts. The paper suggests a reconceptualization of informational privacy from having its focus on controlling, limiting, and restricting access to material carriers of information to a focus on a regulation of the use, analysis, and interpretation of personal information. (shrink)

Fake news can originate from an ordinary person carelessly posting what turns out to be false information or from the intentional actions of fake news factory workers, but broadly speaking it can also originate from scientific fraud. In the latter case, the article can be retracted upon discovery of the fraud. A case study shows, however, that such fake science can be visible in Google even after the article was retracted, in fact more visible than the retraction notice. We hypothesize (...) that the reason for this lies in the popularity-based logic governing Google, in particular its foundational PageRank algorithm, in conjunction with a psychological law which we refer to as the “law of retraction”: a retraction notice is typically taken to be less interesting and therefore less popular with internet users than the original content retracted. We conduct an empirical study drawing on records of articles retracted due to fraud in the Retraction Watch public database. The study tests the extent to which such retracted scientific articles are still highly ranked in Google –and more so than information about the retraction. We find, among other things, that both Google Search and Google Scholar more often than not ranked a link to the original article higher than a link indicating that the article has been retracted. Surprisingly, Google Scholar did not perform better in this regard than Google Search.We also found cases in which Google did not track the retraction of an article on the first result page at all. We conclude that both Google Search and Google Scholar run the risk of disseminating fake science through their ranking algorithms. (shrink)

Daniel Hausman’s book ‘Valuing Health’ is a valuable contribution to our understanding of QALYs and DALYs and to moving health economics to adopting a broader perspective than that taken in conventional cost-effectiveness analysis. Hausman’s attempt at constructing a public value table for health states without having recourse to data from population preferences studies is also a fascinating read. But I have serious concerns about his resulting table. Hausman’s views on which dimensions of health a benevolent liberal state should care about (...) are essentially not different from what has long been emphasized in health economists’ work on valuations of health outcomes. His table would have been helpful as a sketch if it was the first attempt in health economics to quantify numerically the societal value of different types and degrees of health improvement. But research in the field has gone far beyond that. Multi-attribute utility instruments with much more accurate health classification systems than Hausman’s sketch are now at hand. Available also are models of societal valuations of QALYs that are broadly consistent with general population values, incorporate wider concerns than Hausman’s table does and do not have the questionable numerical properties that characterize Hausman’s sketch. (shrink)

While there has been significant philosophical debate on whether nonlinguistic animals can possess conceptual capabilities, less time has been devoted to considering 'talking' animals, such as parrots. When they are discussed, their capabilities are often downplayed as mere mimicry. The most explicit philosophical example of this can be seen in Brandom's frequent comparisons of parrots and thermostats. Brandom argues that because parrots (like thermostats) cannot grasp the implicit inferential connections between concepts, their vocal articulations do not actually have any conceptual (...) content. In contrast, I argue that Pepperberg's work with Alex (and other African grey parrots) provides evidence that the vocal articulations of at least some parrots have conceptual content. Using Frege's insight that numbers assert something about a concept, I argue that Alex's ability to answer the question "How many?" depended upon a prior grasp of conceptual content. Developing this claim, I argue that Alex's arithmetical abilities show that he was capable of using numbers as both concepts and objects. Frege's theoretical insight and Pepperberg's empirical work provide reason to reconsider the capabilities of parrots, as well as what sorts of tasks provide evidence for conceptual content. (shrink)

The ethics of hope has often been understood as a conflict between duties: do not lie versus do not destroy hope. However, such a way of framing the ethics of hope may easily place healthcare professionals at the side of realism and patients at the side of hope. That leaves unexamined relational dimensions of hope. The objective of this study was to describe a relational ethics of hope based on the perspectives of palliative care patients, their family members and their (...) healthcare professionals. A qualitative longitudinal method based on narrative theories was used. Semi-structured interviews on hope were conducted with twenty-nine palliative care patients, nineteen friends or family members, and fifty-two healthcare professionals, which were recorded and transcribed. Data on hope were thematically analyzed. The researchers wrote memos and did member checking with participants. When participants spoke about hope, they referred to power and empowerment, like the powerful bonding of hope between patients and physicians. They also associated hope with the loss of hope and suffering. Several participating healthcare professionals tried to balance both sides, which involved acknowledgment of hope and suffering. Hope and power were reflected in the ethical concept of empowerment, whereas suffering and the loss of hope were reflected in the ethical concept of compassion. Empowerment and compassion can be balanced in solicitude. In conclusion, a relational ethics of hope requires solicitude, in which healthcare professionals are able to weigh empowerment and compassion within particular relationships. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editor's NoteErik DoxtaderThe freedom of conversation is being lost. … Warmth is ebbing from things.—Walter Benjamin, One-way StreetInsufficient data for a meaningful answer.—Multivac (Isaac Asimov, The Last Question)This issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric, a somewhat rare double-issue, features significant and inspiring work that moves in a variety of directions and proceeds in a number of idioms, while also responding directly and indirectly to a complex exigence, though perhaps in (...) a less familiar sense of the term, as what Giorgio Agamben calls a "messianic modality" that "coincides with the possibility of philosophy itself"—exigency as the expression of what remains unforgettable in the midst of all that is no longer remembered for the sake of history's progress. Appearing between contingency and necessity, exigency is not then a problem to be re-solved but the opening of a question; or more precisely, the epideictic expression of question-ability, the beginning of inquiry into what calls forth and perhaps even demands its possibility, for now. On what grounds do old questions stand? Through what power and by what happenstance are new questions found and formed? And when—in what kinds of moments do questions appear? With what force do they arrive? At what cost? What questions inflict violence? What violence thwarts a question? What do we (not) ask? How does the (un)questionable give way? Can multiple disciplines ever pose let alone inquire into the same question? What are the (de)constitutive elements of a good question? What does a good question do? Has pious genealogy corrupted the question? Does the discovery of a question remain one of the last "secrets," the unhinged authentic insight about which little can or should be said? A century ago, announcing the launch of Angelus Novus, Benjamin reflected on the moment and contended that the "vocation of a journal is to proclaim the spirit of its age." Such a task, in his view, demanded a strict "relevance to the present" even over "unity or clarity" and required exposing the "talented fakes" and resisting "the sterile pageant of new and fashionable events" that obscure how "impossible it is in our age to give a voice to [End Page 213] any communality [Gemeinsamkeit]." It is a tall and certainly debatable order, one that Benjamin himself was unable to realize—Angelus never got off the ground. But perhaps the underlying insight remains, the basic importance of holding space for work that discerns and expresses the potential of question-ability. This potential may well be the spirit-breath of an age. And, for now, here and now, it may well be a pressing question—on the shore of Ontario's Crawford Lake, waiting for official word that the Holocene has ended; in a largely unacknowledged transition, seemingly out of the pandemic's worst, ramping back up to speed, and yet deeply uncertain about the next normal; in the midst of the two "wars" (a term to which all participating parties will not agree) that make the front page (or the top of the feed) and the many that do not, the grotesque surfeit of increasingly automatic-droning violence unfolding on the grounds of sanctified rage that makes it difficult to ask let alone grasp what violence is; at the gates of the university, where so much inquiry is supplanted with so many strategic plans, and academic freedom is slowly juridified to the advantage of legislatures eager to rewrite the mission; and, in the midst of the noisy quietude that thwarts so many of the small inquiries into well-being that weave the fabric of public life. It's been a pleasure to work with all of those who have contributed to this issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric. Indeed, the pages that follow radiate with curiosity and insight. Together, they are an expression of inquiry in which question-ability remains unforgettable and there remains a moment to ask—after the question. [End Page 214]Copyright © 2024 The Pennsylvania State University... (shrink)

Isaac Levi has explored the principles of American pragmatism in greater depth and more consistency than others before him. The result is a sophisticated and powerful philosophical system whose key elements stand in stark opposition not only to mainstream epistemology, but also to the positions of other contemporary authors writing in the same pragmatist tradition. The essays in this volume, written by some of philosophy's finest scholars, contribute substantially to the understanding and appraisal of Levi's work. Included in this volume (...) are Levi's extensive and provocative replies to his critics, which offer access to his thinking on a wide range of topics. The introduction provides a concise, systematic presentation of the cornerstone of Levi's pragmatism. Suitable for students and scholars who are interested in American pragmatism in general and Isaac Levi's work in particular, this book is an ideal companion to Levi's own writings. (shrink)

An important question about eye-movement behavior is when the decision is made to terminate a fixation and program the following saccade. Different approaches have found converging evidence in favor of a mixed-control account, in which there is some overlap between processing information at fixation and planning the following saccade. We examined one interesting instance of mixed control in visual search: lag-2 revisits, during which observers fixate a stimulus, move to a different stimulus, and then revisit the first stimulus on the (...) next fixation. Results show that the probability of lag-2 revisits occurring increased with the number of target-similar stimuli, and revisits were preceded by a brief fixation on the intervening distractor stimulus. We developed the Efficient Visual Sampling computational model to simulate our findings and to provide insight into mixed control of fixations and the perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes that produce lag-2 revisits. (shrink)

The main issue in the epistemology of peer disagreement is whether known disagreement among those who are in symmetrical epistemic positions undermines the rationality of their maintaining their respective views. Douven and Kelp have argued convincingly that this problem is best understood as being about how to respond to peer disagreement repeatedly over time, and that this diachronic issue can be best approached through computer simulation. However, Douven and Kelp’s favored simulation framework cannot naturally handle Christensen’s famous Mental Math example. (...) As a remedy, I introduce an alternative simulation framework, Laputa, inspired by Alvin Goldman’s seminal work on veritistic social epistemology. I show that Christensen’s conciliatory response, reasonably reconstructed and supplemented, gives rise to an increase in epistemic value only if the peers continue to recheck their mental math; else the peers might as well be steadfast. On a meta-level, the study illustrates the power of Goldman’s approach when combined with simulation techniques for handling the computational issues involved. (shrink)

The main issue in the epistemology of peer disagreement is whether known disagreement among those who are in symmetrical epistemic positions undermines the rationality of their maintaining their respective views. Douven and Kelp have argued convincingly that this problem is best understood as being about how to respond to peer disagreement repeatedly over time, and that this diachronic issue can be best approached through computer simulation. However, Douven and Kelp’s favored simulation framework cannot naturally handle Christensen’s famous Mental Math example. (...) As a remedy, I introduce an alternative simulation framework, Laputa, inspired by Alvin Goldman’s seminal work on veritistic social epistemology. I show that Christensen’s conciliatory response, reasonably reconstructed and supplemented, gives rise to an increase in epistemic value only if the peers continue to recheck their mental math; else the peers might as well be steadfast. On a meta-level, the study illustrates the power of Goldman’s approach when combined with simulation techniques for handling the computational issues involved. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is a debate between Pascal Engel and Richard Rorty documented in the book What’s the Use of Truth? Both Engel and Rorty problematize the natural suggestion that attaining truth is a goal of our inquiries. Where Rorty thinks this means that truth is not something we should aim for at all over and beyond justification, Engel maintains that truth still plays a distinct role in our intellectual and daily lives. Thus, the debate between Engel and (...) Rorty ends in a standoff. In the present paper, I question the claim that truth is not a goal of inquiry. I do so from the point of view of a systematic and general theory of rational goal-setting which has its roots in management science. I argue, in this connection, that Rorty’s central claim rests on a principle of goal-setting rationality that is generally invalid. The bottom line is that the goal of truth, like other visionary goals, is likely to have the positive effect of increasing motivation and effort, and this may offset the drawbacks which Rorty, rightly, calls attention to. In largely following Rorty in this regard, Engel is making one concession too much to his opponent. (shrink)

In identifying himself with language, the speaking man places his own muteness outside of himself, as already and not yet human. There is, perhaps, something barbarous in the assumption of the word. In the ontological equation that aligns the speaking being with the human being there may abide a gesture that can be neither heard nor interpreted. With the logos that we inherit “by nature” and then “by right,” according to Agamben, the cut between the human and the animal is (...) made without a sound and undertaken in the name of excising that silence in which it is possible to ask after the ethical violence that attends the constitution of “humanity’s” language and the promise of language’s .. (shrink)

The lost opportunity is overwhelming, an exigence in the full sense—a recollection of that which can only remain forgotten. In the midst of the storm, what to do now? If this is the question with which Walter Benjamin began, in a poem published in 1910 under the pseudonym "Ardor," it is one over which he kept a solemn vigil, rarely letting it slip from view, even as the border closed in the months not long after he rendered Klee's 1920 painting, (...) Angelus Novus, into the emblem of a critique that seeks the "shard of weak messianic power" that comes to recognizability only in a history "filled full by now-time [Jetztzeit]" (2011, 22-23; 2003, 395). A hope then, a feeling that even as the storm from paradise blows .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:For Today, There Will Be a Speech (and a Song) TomorrowErik DoxtaderFor we see that things that are going to be take their start from deliberating and from acting, and equally that there is in general a possibility of being and not being in things that are not always actual. In them, both are open, both being and not being, and so also both becoming and not becoming. And (...) plenty of things are obviously like this.—Aristotle, De Interpretatione, IX*Wish again, four times again Four wishes deep into the well There's a price to pay for a wish to come true Trade a small piece of your life Roots in soil, uprooting the soil Mountain high, high mountain. The wish is only to speak a kind—Bob Mould, “Wishing Well”This is the time Because there is no time—Lou Reed, “There Is No Time” [End Page 311]The potential of rhetorical culture abides. In the subtle last lines of Norms of Rhetorical Culture, Tom Farrell imbued this potential with the aura of a (double) wish: when read with a forgiving spirit, the value of the “classical rhetorical tradition” appears in its capacity to “restore the power and resilience of the wish in the thought and expression of our civic life” (1993, 320). From within the history of our (not) being together, there are rhetorical goods to (be)come.Wishes must be made. Today, if it is not to betray the fact that a “rhetorical culture is something that must be cultivated,” our inheritance of rhetoric's potential is not a matter of fate. Far from given, although perhaps a gift that speaks volumes about our humanity, its appearance hinges on a choice to “uncover and engender new sources of creative reason” and to do so together, with an appreciation that this shared work is “unmistakably of ethical, aesthetic, and normative significance” (Farrell 1993, 11, 3). Confronted with such a task, as Farrell stressed again and again, “The question is how? How are we to find and develop the capacities that warrant and establish rhetorical study?” (1993, 65). And, from a theoretical and practical perspective, how can we struggle meaningfully with “our own nature as rhetorical creatures: an undiminished capacity to engage limitation through imagination, to find moral content in the experience of the other as audience, and wisdom through the collective production and enactment of logos ” (Farrell 1990, 83)? The rhetorical impulse coincides with the exigency of human experience that remains forgotten and yet unforgettable.1Knocking on modernity's door, Tom Farrell was deeply concerned with rhetoric's manifold potential. Over the course of a prolific career, he pursued the matter with passion, rigor, and integrity. He asked his colleagues, his students, and indeed his discipline to question conventional wisdom about the terms and power of rhetorical theory; interested in both everyday and extraordinary rhetorical practices, Farrell's criticism helped a field to see why its work counted as a vocation at the same time that he reached over the academy's walls in order to suggest that so-called mere rhetoric was quite a bit more complicated and much more important than perhaps some cared to admit. That his vision was compelling is evidenced not least by the numerous awards that he received for his work and the ways in which it continues to inform and shape critical thinking about the art of rhetoric.Just over two years after Tom's unfortunate and tremendously saddening death, this issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric pays tribute to his ground breaking work. Yet, as Farrell himself suspected, the risk that unbridled praise is the short road to bad infinity's silence brings the need for something more. Today, a consideration of his thought and writing demands a space [End Page 312] for critical reflection with practical significance, a forum—in Farrell's sense of the term—that affords an opportunity to ask both whether and how we might understand, extend, and indeed challenge Farrell's contention that rhetoric is the “collaborative manner of engaging others through discourse so that contingencies may be resolved, judgments rendered, action produced” (1990, 83). To these ends, this issue of the... (shrink)

ἔστω δὴ ἡ ῥητορικὴ δύναμις περὶ ἕκαστον τοῦ θεωρῆσαι τὸ ἐνδεχόμενον πιθανόν.(Estō dē hē rhētorikē dunamis peri hekaston tou theōrēsai to endekhomenon pithanon.)Let us define rhetoric to be "A faculty of considering all the possible means of persuasion on every subject."Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever.Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.Let rhetoric be [defined (...) as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion.The question of rhetoric's potential continues to provoke. What appears in Aristotle's attempt to name .. (shrink)

"Examines Thomas Farrell's provocative defense of rhetoric and argues for the contemporary importance of rhetorical theory and practice"--Provided by publisher.

Bayesian epistemology provides a formal framework within which concepts in traditional epistemology, in particular concepts relating to the justification of our beliefs, can be given precise definitions in terms of probability. The Bayesian approach has contributed clarity and precision to a number of traditional issues. A salient example is the recent embedding of the so-called coherentist theory of epistemic justification in a Bayesian framework shedding light on the relation between coherence and truth as well as on the concept of coherence (...) itself. Starting with the early work of Condorcet, the calculus of probability has proved to be a useful tool in the study of social aspects of knowledge as it is pursued in social epistemology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Frankfurt's Meno Challenge Reliabilist Solutions Frankfurt's Puzzle about Bullshit A Social Epistemology Perspective References.

Perhaps the most fundamental question of epistemology asks on what grounds our knowledge of the world ultimately rests. The traditional Cartesian answer is that it rests on indubitable facts arrived at through rational insight or introspection. Coherentists reject this answer, claiming instead that knowledge arises from relations of coherence or mutual support: if our beliefs cohere, we can be sure that they are mostly true. The first part of this Element introduces the reader to the main ideas and problems of (...) coherentism. The next part describes the 'probabilistic turn', leading up to recent demonstrations that coherence fails to be conducive to truth. The final part reassesses the current debate about the proper definition of coherence from the standpoint of Rudolf Carnap's methodology of explication. The upshot is a tentative and qualified defence of one of the early coherence measures. (shrink)