Spiders’ nests, birds’ wings, airplanes, and scientific theories are all instances of adaptations. Instructionist theories implies that adaptive novelties are imposed directly on an entity by the environment while selectionist theories explains adaptive novelties to be the product of mechanisms including trial and error . This article argues that adaptive novelties are the result of selectionist mechanisms while instructionist production of adaptive novelties is impossible due to the second law of thermodynamics. Even long-term preservation of adaptive information is dependent on (...) selectionist mechanisms. These findings have important implications for both human and societal development because of the prevalence of instructionist theories. (shrink)

This volume argues that theistic philosophy should be seen not as an “armchair” enterprise but rather as a critical endeavor to bring philosophy of religion into close contact with emerging sciences of religion. This text engages with the rationality of religious belief by investigating central problems and arguments in philosophy of religion from the perspective of new naturalistic research. A central question the book analyzes is whether findings in cognitive science of religion falsify or undermine religious ideas and beliefs. With (...) regard to CSR, this volume offers a sustained and critical investigation of the neutrality and positive-relevance view, before offering a re-appraisal of the conflict view. The text argues that when scrutinizing these views, much more attention must be paid to specific normative premises that allow empirical findings to have epistemic relevance. A novel feature is the theoretical application of analytical epistemology in virtue-epistemology to the central question of whether CSR undermines, supports, or is neutral with respect to religious belief. This book appeals to upper-level students and researchers in the field. (shrink)

Reformed epistemology involves a view of knowledge of God which Kelly James Clark and Justin Barrett have brought cognitive science to bear on. They argue that the cognitive science of religio...

This book is a collection of articles about communication and ethics in the field of medicine and health care. Common to all the articles is that they are not directly based on empirical investigations. The discussions refer to research, but this is research that has already been carried out and documented in existing literature. In this sense the articles belong to what is often called applied philosophy. All the articles address communicative and ethical challenges in patient interaction on the basis (...) of assumptions in modern moral philosophy and philosophy of language. There is a great need for literature that deals more comprehensively with the themes in this book than many introductory books do. It is particularly difficult to find suitable reading material that can be used in teaching at graduate and master levels. This book is designed to meet this need. It is suitable for use in all higher-level courses where the aim is to give students a theoretical understanding of ethical dilemmas and communicative challenges in health care. (shrink)

The paper explores consequences of applying the view that illness is negative first‐person experience in caring practice. The main reason this is an important issue is that it is empirically documented that patients conceive of illness in different ways. Communicating about illness in caring practice can therefore involve difficulties. I argue that many of these difficulties can be avoided if nurses focus directly on the extension of the concept of illness – patients’ experiences like the state of being in pain (...) – and not on how this extension is represented as (the intension) illness. This argument is compatible with different views on the nurse–patient relationship as a communicative process. All it requires is the acceptance of minimal assumptions about concepts and concept possession. The argument has a descriptive and a normative dimension. It is descriptive in the sense that it seeks to use concepts from philosophy of mind to explain how many nurses succeed in talking about illness without applying the concept of illness. It is normative in the sense that it provides a philosophical justification for this practice. (shrink)

A central claim often made to debunk religious beliefs is that they would be formed regardless of whether they are true or false. One way to support this claim is to apply findings from the cognitive science of religion. However, this use of science in an argument against religious beliefs has been strongly criticized. This article is about weaknesses in that criticism. I consider two arguments. Firstly, the critic of debunking can argue that the debunker makes empirically dubious claims about (...) the origin of religious beliefs. I argue that the debunker can avoid this problem because the controversial empirical claims are not necessary. General naturalistic assumptions about the origin of religion also create worries that support the central debunking claim. The second criticism focuses on the highly general nature of the claims or assumptions debunkers make about the origin of religious beliefs. Critics maintain that such claims or assumptions, even if true, fail to affect the specific religious beliefs you or I form. I respond, arguing that this criticism fails to engage with the most prominent version of debunking, which aims at classes of beliefs. Furthermore, by making a detour through a related discussion in metaethics, I show how this version of the debunking argument can be extended in such a fashion that it applies to a given individual who forms a religious belief. (shrink)

In recent philosophy of mind a non-holistic view on concept possession, originally developed by Tyler Burge, has emerged as an alternative to holistic analyses of language mastery. The article discusses the implications of this view for analyses of communication in doctor—patient-interaction. The central question Burge's theory gives an answer to is this: to what extent must a doctor and a patient understand a medical term in the same way in order to communicate in the sense that they express the same (...) concept by the term? Many empirical studies have shown that patients do not, typically, understand medical terms in the same way as doctors they encounter. Holistic approaches therefore imply that doctors and patients seldom communicate. Burge's position, on the other hand, implies that it is sufficient that patients have a minimal understanding. In an important range of cases doctors can make sure that patients have a minimal understanding by being explicit about common dictionary definitions of the terms in question. (shrink)

Apparently, the social situation in which Luke's community lived was that of an urban setting in the Eastern Mediterranean. This situation was shaped by the honor and patronage culture of the Hellenistic city. At the heart of the Lukan community's ethos lay its common meals. The purpose of these meals was dual: On the one hand, they forged a common identity for a socially and ethnically diverse group of Christians; on the other hand, they functioned as a criticism of urban (...) culture. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe early Chinese idea of non-action refers not to spontaneity, as has been argued, but to a relation between agency and spontaneity. Non-action needs to be seen in connection with the idea...

Meditation has flourished in different parts of the world ever since the foundations of the great civilizations were laid. It played a vital role in the formation of Asian cultures that trace much of their heritage to ancient India and China. This volume brings together for the first time studies of the major traditions of Asian meditation as well as material on scientific approaches to meditation. It delves deeply into the individual traditions while viewing each of them from a global (...) perspective, examining both historical and generic connections between meditative practices from numerous historical periods and different parts of the Eurasian continent. It seeks to identify the cultural and historical peculiarities of Asian schools of meditation while recognizing basic features of meditative practice across cultures, thereby taking the first step toward a framework for the comparative study of meditation. The book, accessibly written by scholars from several fields, opens with chapters that discuss the definition and classification of meditation. These are followed by contributions on Yoga and Tantra, which are often subsumed under the broad label of Hinduism; Jainism and Sikhism, Indian traditions not usually associated with meditation; Buddhist approaches found in Southeast Asia, Tibet, and China; and the indigenous Chinese traditions, Daoism and Neo-Confucianism. The final chapter explores recent scientific interest in meditation, which, despite its Western orientation, remains almost exclusively concerned with practices of Asian origin. Until a few years ago a major obstacle to the study of specific meditation practices within the traditions explored here was a widespread scholarly orientation that prioritized doctrinal issues and sociocultural contexts over actual practice. The contributors seek to counter this bias and supplement concerns over doctrine and context with the historical study of meditative practice. Asian Traditions of Meditation will appeal broadly to readers interested in meditation, mindfulness, and spirituality and those in the emerging field of contemplative education, as well as students and scholars of Asian and religious studies. (shrink)

Meditation has flourished in different parts of the world ever since the foundations of the great civilizations were laid. It played a vital role in the formation of Asian cultures that trace much of their heritage to ancient India and China. This volume brings together for the first time studies of the major traditions of Asian meditation as well as material on scientific approaches to meditation. It delves deeply into the individual traditions while viewing each of them from a global (...) perspective, examining both historical and generic connections between meditative practices from numerous historical periods and different parts of the Eurasian continent. It seeks to identify the cultural and historical peculiarities of Asian schools of meditation while recognizing basic features of meditative practice across cultures, thereby taking the first step toward a framework for the comparative study of meditation. The book, accessibly written by scholars from several fields, opens with chapters that discuss the definition and classification of meditation. These are followed by contributions on Yoga and Tantra, which are often subsumed under the broad label of Hinduism; Jainism and Sikhism, Indian traditions not usually associated with meditation; Buddhist approaches found in Southeast Asia, Tibet, and China; and the indigenous Chinese traditions, Daoism and Neo-Confucianism. The final chapter explores recent scientific interest in meditation, which, despite its Western orientation, remains almost exclusively concerned with practices of Asian origin. Until a few years ago a major obstacle to the study of specific meditation practices within the traditions explored here was a widespread scholarly orientation that prioritized doctrinal issues and sociocultural contexts over actual practice. The contributors seek to counter this bias and supplement concerns over doctrine and context with the historical study of meditative practice. Asian Traditions of Meditation will appeal broadly to readers interested in meditation, mindfulness, and spirituality and those in the emerging field of contemplative education, as well as students and scholars of Asian and religious studies. (shrink)

It is a fundamental assumption in nursing theory that it is important for nurses to understand how patients think about themselves and the contexts they are in. According to modern theories of hermeneutics, a nurse and a patient must share the same concepts in order to communicate beliefs with the same content. But nurses and patients seldom understand medical concepts in exactly the same way, so how can this communicative aim be achieved in interaction involving medical concepts? The article uses (...) a theory of concepts from recent cognitive science and philosophy of mind to argue that nurses and patients can share medical concepts despite the diversity of understanding. According to this theory, two persons who understand medical language in different ways will nevertheless possess the same medical concepts if they agree about the normative standards for the applications of the concepts. This entails that nurses and patients normally share medical concepts even though patients’ conceptions of disease and illness are formed in idiosyncratic ways by their social and cultural contexts. Several practical implications of this argument are discussed and linked to case studies. One especially important point is that nurses should seek to make patients feel comfortable with deferring to a medical understanding. In many cases, an adequate understanding of patients presupposes that nurses manage to do this. Another implication is that deference‐willingness to normative meaning is not equivalent to the actual application of concepts. Deference‐willingness should rather be thought of as a pre‐communicative attitude that it is possible for patients who are not fully able to communicate to possess. What is important is that nurses and patients have the intention of conforming to the same meaning. (shrink)

In this paper we try, by drawing on some insights from practical knowledge, to bridge a gap between common conceptions of teaching on the one hand, and of learning on the other. In Western traditions of educational thought and discourse, practical knowledge—i.e. the dynamics of thinking, speaking, acting, and personal writing—is frequently separated from disciplinary knowledge: i.e. the knowledge of academic disciplines. But this separation often fails to recognize an inherent dialectic in teaching and learning. Through fresh explorations of human (...) capacities to act and think, to speak and write, we try to illuminate different aspects of a teacher’s identity, including the teacher’s individuality and the teacher as an agent of an educational institution. The teacher has to present and represent knowledge in education, both as an agent of an institution and as a person. By examining the disclosure and transformation of the self in light of understandings of identity as sameness, or as selfhood, we hope to draw some productive conclusions about the teacher’s self-understanding as the source for personal learning in education. We aim to explore the importance of transformation of the teachers’ self for the quality of learning relationships between the teacher and the always Other student. (shrink)

Why focus on reading? Reading is one important human activity that is threatened by the knowledge economy in education. In this perspective, good reading tends to be fast reading. The objective for teachers is then to test pupils' reading skills according to how fast they read. In opposition to this, we think that good reading is a slow activity. A good text asks for a reading and a re-reading, again and again, because reading gives rise to thinking. Thus, you can (...) interpret our writing as a political act. We want to participate in education in a way that opposes the force of a knowledge economy. The aim of this article is to argue why prospective teachers have to train their capability [Ricoeur (2005. The Course of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) refers to four basic capabilities. He distinguishes between: the capability to speak, the capability to act, the capability to tell, and a fourth capability called imputation. Reading in this respect is subordinate to these basic capabilities] to read and, based on this, why we insist on this being a matter of necessity in order to develop reading as a reflexive activity, through what we have called ?slow reading? (this expression is meant to oppose the instrumentalization of reading toward a skill characterized as fast extractions of information, for instance, as measured in various tests). This represents one part of the argument that we are going to elaborate. The other part of the argument is related more specifically to the place of reading in the training of teachers, more precisely asking where this ?place? is. This has led us to ask the following question: Where are teachers' understandings challenged in teacher training? As our argument is laid out, we say that the place of reading is where teachers' understandings are challenged. This entails that this ?place,? this somewhere, is not a permanent ?dwelling?; it is rather something which has to be created (repeatedly) in a dynamic relationship between reader (teacher) and text. (shrink)

This article explores what ancient Chinese philosophies can teach us about understanding emotions and relating to them. It posits that emotions are fundamental and connected to everything in the universe, that much of their value lies in their sincerity, that they need to be cultivated to avoid excess and imbalance, and that, like everything else, they are permeated by a cosmic force that is at once transcendent and immanent.

This article explores what ancient Chinese philosophies can teach us about understanding emotions and relating to them. It posits that emotions are fundamental and connected to everything in the universe, that much of their value lies in their sincerity, that they need to be cultivated to avoid excess and imbalance, and that, like everything else, they are permeated by a cosmic force that is at once transcendent and immanent.

The increasing focus on disability rights—as found, for instance, in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities —challenges philosophical imaginaries. This article broadens the philosophical imaginary of freedom by exploring the relation of dependence, independence, and interdependence in the lives of people with disabilities. It argues that traditional concepts of freedom are rather insensitive to difference within humanity, and that the lives of people with severe disabilities challenge philosophers to argue and conceptualize freedom not only as independence (...) and interdependence but also as dependence. After tracing this need through a Hegelian understanding, via Julia Kristeva's work on disability, and finally the CRPD, it concludes that a unified solution might not be possible. Hence, it argues that disability issues necessitate philosophical modesty. (shrink)

Theoretical models for patient-physician communication in clinical practice are frequently described in the literature. Respecting patient autonomy is an ethical problem the physician faces in a medical emergency situation. No theoretical physician-patient model seems to be ideal for solving the communication problem in clinical practice. Theoretical models can at best give guidance to behavior and judgement in emergency situations. In this article the premises of autonomous treatment decisions are discussed. Based on a case-report we discuss different genuine efforts the physician (...) can do to uncover treatment refusal and respect patient autonomy in an emergency situation. Autonomy requires competence and in emergency medicine time does not allow intimate exploration of patient competence and reasons for treatment refusal. We find that the physician must base her decision on a firm theoretical base combined with a practical and realistic view of the patient's situation on a case to case basis. (shrink)

Ecologically responsible policies are concerned only in part with pollution and resource depletion. There are deeper concerns which touch upon principles of diversity, complexity, autonomy, decentralization, symbiosis, egalitarianism, and classlessness.

Within philosophy of medicine it has been a widespread view that there are important theoretical and practical reasons for clarifying the nature of basic health concepts like disease, illness and sickness. Many theorists have attempted to give definitions that can function as general standards, but as more and more definitions have been rejected as inadequate, pessimism about the possibility of formulating plausible definitions has become increasingly widespread. However, the belief that no definitions will succeed since no definitions have succeeded is (...) an inductive objection, open to realist responses. The article argues that an influential argument from philosophy of language constitutes a more fundamental objection. I use disease as an example and show that this argument implies that if a common understanding of disease can be analysed into a definition, then this is a non-trivial definition. But any non-trivial analysis must be viciously circular: the analysis must presuppose that disease can be defined, but this is what the analysis is supposed to yield as a result. This means, the article concludes, that disease and other controversial health concepts do not have analyses grounded in a common language. Stipulative and contextual definitions can have local significance, but the normative roles of such definitions are at the same time limited. (shrink)

Tyler Burge has argued that an incorrect understanding of a word can be sufficient for possessing the concept the word literally expresses. His well-known 'arthritis' case involves a patient who understands 'arthritis' incorrectly, but who nevertheless, according to Burge, possesses the concept arthritis. Critics of Burge have objected that there is an alternative concept that best matches the patient's understanding and that this, therefore, is the patient's concept. The paper first argues that Burge's response to this objection is unconvincing. A (...) better response is then developed. It is argued that there is no alternative concept that matches the incorrect understanding, since the patient thinks he has a partial understanding. This, together with points about ordinary psychological explanation and modes of presentations of concepts, establish that it is impossible to undermine Burge's social externalism by appealing to the idea that an alternative concept matches the incorrect understanding. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam’s influential analysis of the ‘division of linguistic labour’ has a striking application in the area of doctor–patient interaction: patients typically think of themselves as consumers of technical medical terms in the sense that they normally defer to health professionals’ explanations of meaning. It is at the same time well documented that patients tend to think they are entitled to understand lay health terms like ‘sickness’ and ‘illness’ in ways that do not necessarily correspond to health professionals’ understanding. Drawing (...) on recent philosophical theories of concept possession, the article argues that this disparity between medical and lay vocabulary implies that it is, in an important range of cases, easier for doctors to create a communicative platform of shared concepts by using and explaining special medical expressions than by using common lay expressions. This conclusion is contrasted with the view that doctors and patients typically understand each other when they use lay vocabulary. Obviously, use of expressions like ‘sickness’ or ‘illness’ does not necessarily lead to poor communication, but it is important that doctors have an awareness of how patients interpret such terms. (shrink)

BackgroundThis case report discusses an ethical communication dilemma in prehospital patient interaction, involving a patient who was about to board a plane at a busy airport. The article argues that the situation raised dilemmas about communication, patient autonomy and paternalism. Paramedics should be able to find good solutions to these dilemmas, but they have not received much attention in the literature on prehospital ambulance work.Case presentationThe patient had chest pains that were consistent with serious heart disease, but she wanted to (...) catch her plane and was unwilling to let paramedics assess her heart activity by means of an electrocardiogram (ECG). The paramedics had to decide, there and then, whether the patient’s refusal to submit to an ECG should be respected, or whether they should set the patient’s expressed wishes aside by exercising verbal power and persuasive communication techniques. The paramedics chose to do the latter. It later turned out that the patient was grateful that the paramedics had been very direct, almost brutal, in their communication. When the patient regained her autonomy, she saw clearly that taking time to obtain and monitor an ECG was the best option for her.ConclusionLooking forward in time might be a good professional strategy for deciding whether ethical paternalism in communication is justified. If there is good reason to believe that patients who later regain their autonomy will agree that paternalistic verbal actions were in their best interests, and if acting in accordance with patients’ preferences can have severe negative health consequences for them, then paramedics have good reason to believe that ethical paternalism is justified. (shrink)

A fundamental aim in caring practice is to understand patients' experiences of ill‐health. These experiences have a qualitative content and cannot, unlike thoughts and beliefs with conceptual content, directly be expressed in words. Nurses therefore face a variety of interpretive challenges when they aim to understand patients' subjective perspectives on disease and illness. The article argues that theories on social simulation can shed light on how nurses manage to meet these challenges. The core assumption of social simulationism is that we (...) do not understand other people by forming mental representations of how they think, but by putting ourselves in their situation in a more imaginative way. According to simulationism, any attempt to understand a patient's behavior is made on the basis of simulating what it is like to be that patient in the given context. The article argues that this approach to social interpretation can clarify how nurses manage to achieve aims of patient understanding, even when they have limited time to communicate and incomplete knowledge of patients' perspectives. Furthermore, simulation theory provides a normative framework for interpretation, in the sense that its theoretical assumptions constitute ideals for how nurses should seek to understand patients' experiences of illness. (shrink)

A central premise in Tyler Burge's argument for social externalism says that an incomplete understanding can be sufficient for concept possession. Burge claims that this premise is grounded in ordinary practices of giving psychological explanations. On the basis of an extended version of Burge's 'arthritis' case Donald Davidson has argued that this claim is false. The paper argues that Davidson's argument is unconvincing. A closer analysis of Davidson's extended 'arthritis' case shows that the belief ascriptions Davidson focuses on actually support (...) social externalism. (shrink)

Tyler Burge has in many writings distinguished between mental content externalism based on incorrect understanding and mental content externalism based on partial but not incorrect understanding. Both and have far-reaching implications for analyses of communication and concept possession in various expert-layperson relations, but Burge and his critics have mainly focused on . This article first argues that escapes the most influential objection to . I then raise an objection against Burge’s argument for . The objection focuses on Burge’s claim that (...) a person with a partial understanding of a term in our community expresses our standard concept because he is willing to defer to our standard understanding, while his “Putnamian” twin in a counterfactual community does not. The problem with Burge’s argument for this claim is that he does not consider the possibility that the person in our community and the twin would defer to the same understanding if they were presented with the same alternatives. Drawing from widespread dispositional assumptions about meaning, I argue that Burge must accept that they express the same concept if they would defer to the same understanding. The article closes with an examination on various ways the externalist may attempt to avoid this problem and concludes that none of them succeeds. (shrink)

It has been a fundamental assumption in management theory that communication is a key condition for successful management. This assumption has been linked to Habermas’ model of communicative rationality, but it is very difficult for managers to implement this model in real-life leadership relations. The reason is that practical obstacles, resource limitations and knowledge gaps make it impossible to achieve Habermas’ ideal aim of ‘shared horizons’. The article argues that it is possible for managers to meet fundamental communication conditions in (...) employee interaction and other forms of leadership relations if the holistic concept of a shared horizon is replaced with an idea of contextual agreement. Within this alternative conceptual framework, a key strategic aim for managers is to communicate as well as realistically possible how organisational strategies and action-guiding principles are justified. This presupposes that managers are able to uncover ‘hidden’ language meaning and transcend contextual power relations. Within a speech act theory of meaning, the article articulates three basic communication conditions that can function as conceptual tools for achieving these communicative aims. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam's influential analysis of the 'division of linguistic labour' has a striking application in the area of doctor-patient interaction: patients typically think of themselves as consumers of technical medical terms in the sense that they normally defer to health professionals' explanations of meaning. It is at the same time well documented that patients tend to think they are entitled to understand lay health terms like 'sickness' and 'illness' in ways that do not necessarily correspond to health professionals' understanding. Drawing (...) on recent philosophical theories of concept possession, the article argues that this disparity between medical and lay vocabulary implies that it is, in an important range of cases, easier for doctors to create a communicative platform of shared concepts by using and explaining special medical expressions than by using common lay expressions. This conclusion is contrasted with the view that doctors and patients typically understand each other when they use lay vocabulary. Obviously, use of expressions like 'sickness' or 'illness' does not necessarily lead to poor communication, but it is important that doctors have an awareness of how patients interpret such terms. (shrink)

Influential holistic analyses of patient perspectives assume that the concepts that patients associate with medical terms are formed by their total social and cultural contexts. Holistic analyses presuppose conceptual role semantics in the sense that they imply that a medical term must have the same role for a nurse and a patient in order for them to associate the same concept with the term. In recent philosophy of mind, social externalism has emerged as a non‐holistic alternative to conceptual role theories. (...) According to social externalism, a nurse and a patient express the same concept by a term if they both have a minimal or better understanding of the term. Three arguments in favour of social externalism are presented in connection with nurse–patient interaction. The first concerns successful communication, the second focuses on belief reports made by patients and the third centres on the need for including medical terms in medical discourse. Finally, the practical implications of the arguments are clarified. The most important of these is that, in cases of misunderstanding, a nurse should not conform to a patient's idiosyncratic understanding, but instead correct the mistaken applications of the term in question. (shrink)

The skeptical Dream argument appeals to the possibility of dreaming. The skeptic holds that states of being awake are subjectively indistinguishable from possible dream states and that this means that we do not know that we are awake. This, the skeptic then claims, means that we have to accept that we do not have external world knowledge.It is natural to assume that there must be a connection between the Dream argument and epistemic internalism, the view that a belief is justified (...) for a given person if and only if the person has cognitive access to all the factors that are needed for the belief to be justified. The problem, the skeptic thinks, is that in order for my belief that I am awake to be justified I have to have cognitive access to something that establishes that I am awake. But according to the skeptic, even if I am awake, this is not something I have cognitive access to. However, the more precise connections between internalism and the skeptical argument are not so clear. (shrink)

The skeptical Dream argument appeals to the possibility of dreaming. The skeptic holds that states of being awake are subjectively indistinguishable from possible dream states and that this means that we do not know that we are awake. This, the skeptic then claims, means that we have to accept that we do not have external world knowledge.It is natural to assume that there must be a connection between the Dream argument and epistemic internalism, the view that a belief is justified (...) for a given person if and only if the person has cognitive access to all the factors that are needed for the belief to be justified. The problem, the skeptic thinks, is that in order for my belief that I am awake to be justified I have to have cognitive access to something that establishes that I am awake. But according to the skeptic, even if I am awake, this is not something I have cognitive access to. However, the more precise connections between internalism and the skeptical argument are not so clear. (shrink)