The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

RésuméL'ouvrage de Sophia Moreau, Faces of Inequality, adopte une méthodologie philosophique provocatrice. Moreau puise dans les expériences des victimes de discrimination et à même les contours fondamentaux du droit à la non-discrimination afin d’élaborer sa théorie de la discrimination répréhensible. Cependant, si nous prenons au sérieux les enseignements des études féministes et critiques de la « race », une tension émerge au sein de la dyade méthodologique de Moreau : si les lois contre la discrimination sont souvent elles-mêmes source d'hostilité (...) et d'invalidation pour les victimes de discrimination, comment ces expériences et ces lois peuvent-elles toutes deux faire autorité pour déterminer la nature de la discrimination répréhensible? Cet article explore cette tension à l’œuvre dans Faces of Inequality à la lumière de la théorie de la « conscience multiple » de Mari Matsuda. (shrink)

The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11th March 2020, recognising that the underlying SARS-CoV-2 has caused the greatest global crisis since World War II. In this chapter, we present a framework to evaluate whether and to what extent the use of digital systems that track and/or trace potentially infected individuals is not only legal but also ethical.

O povo Kaingang é o mais populoso do Sul do Brasil e está entre os mais numerosos povos indígenas do país. Neste trabalho faz-se uma relação entre as informações encontradas na literatura e a atualidade na Terra Indígena Kaingang em relação ao conhecimento que possuem sobre o uso de plantas para a cura de doenças e como interpretam a ação da erva no organismo. Para isto, realizou-se uma pesquisa de campo em uma Terra Indígena Kaingang no Paraná, cujo entrevistas forneceram (...) confirmações históricas em relação aos etnoconhecimentos da etnia, da evolução dos aspectos químicos e das atitudes perante a química e os remédios de origem farmacêutica e natural. (shrink)

Assertion is a fundamental feature of language. This volume will be the place to look for anyone interested in current work on the topic.

Introduction : reading Nietzsche skeptically -- Nietzsche and the Pyrrhonian tradition -- Skepticism in Nietzsche's early work : the case of "on truth and lie" -- The question of Nietzsche's "naturalism" -- Perspectivism and Ephexis in interpretation -- Skepticism and health -- Skepticism as immoralism.

Engineering ethics is usually focused on engineers’ ethics, engineers acting as individuals. Certainly, these professionals play a central role in the matter, but engineers are not a singularity inside engineering ; they exist and operate as a part of a complex network of mutual relationships between many other people, organizations and groups. When engineering ethics and engineers’ ethics are taken as one and the same thing the paradigm of the ethical engineer which prevails is that of the heroic engineer, a (...) certain model of the ideal engineer: someone both quite individualistic and strong enough to deal with all the moral challenges that could arise. We argue that this is not the best approach, at least today in our interrelated world. We have achieved a high degree of independence from nature by means of technology. In exchange for this autonomy we have become increasingly tied up with very complex systems to which we constantly delegate new tasks and powers. Concerns about safety keep growing everywhere due to the fact that now we have a sensitive awareness of the huge amount of power we are both consuming and deploying, thus, new forms of dialogue and consensus have to be incorporated at different levels, in different forums and at different times. Within these democratic channels of participation not just the needs and interests, but also the responsibilities and mutual commitments of all parties should be taken into account. (shrink)

How should physical entities be characterized? Physicalists, who have most to do with the notion, usually characterize the physical by reference to two components: 1. The physical entities are the entities treated by fundamental physics with the proviso that 2. Physical entities are not fundamentally mental (that is, do not individually possess or bestow mentality) Here I explore the extent to which the appeals to fundamental physics and to the NFM (“no fundamental mentality”) constraint are appropriate for characterizing the physical, (...) especially for purposes of formulating physicalism. Ultimately, I motivate and defend a version of an account incorporating both components: The physics-based NFM account: An entity existing at a world w is physical iff (i) it is treated, approximately accurately, by current or future (in the limit of inquiry, ideal) versions of fundamental physics at w, and (ii) it is not fundamentally mental (that is, does not individually either possess or bestow mentality). (shrink)

A persuasive monograph that answers the keyepistemological arguments against anti-individualism in thephilosophy of mind.

Research groups around the world are currently busy trying to invent new life in the laboratory, looking for extraterrestrial life, or making machines increasingly more life-like. In the case of astrobiology, any newly discovered life would likely be very old, but when discovered it would be new to us. In the case of synthetic organic life or life-like machines, humans will have invented life that did not exist before. Together, these endeavors amount to what we call the emerging plurality of (...) lives because we see a future where we are surrounded by, and interact with, life of many different origins, as well as entities that we have not traditionally seen as being alive. In the future these entities will likely possess properties that we so far have only associated with living beings, thereby transcending and perhaps blurring the borders between life and non-life. (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions are a central topic of research in both philosophy and science. In this collection of new essays on knowledge ascriptions, world class philosophers offer novel approaches to this long standing topic.

In some developed nations, corporations are today legally regarded as “people”. But if that were literally true of the Weyland‐Yutani Corporation in the Alien franchise, the least it would deserve is a swift left‐hook to the jaw from Ripley and the few unfortunate persons who survive with her in each of the movies. The question of what constitutes good business practices is what business ethics is all about. In Alien, Carter Burke is the quintessential corporate weasel, and in many ways (...) it's almost as if Gordon Gekko was transported into science fiction. The problem of deferring accountability is unavoidable in any large company, and Weyland‐Yutani is no exception. There are two major approaches to ethics that can help us to understand the extent to which cost‐benefit reasoning is ethical. The first, defended and popularized by Immanuel Kant, is deontology. The second major approach to ethics is utilitarianism, whose most famous early proponent was John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

The notion of ‘omnipotence’ (potentia dei) runs through the history of medieval philosophy especially after the contribution of Augustine’s thought. Augustine thus traces ethical developments from the idea of God’s sovereignty to the construction of an order of things comparable with his power of creation. Augustine was the first Christian thinker to introduce and document the notion of potentia dei in an ethical context, proving at the same time that the ambivalence of God’s power results either from the activity of (...) ordering, or from the impossibility of God’s duplication, or from the incapacity to destroy the world in respect to a rational configuration of laws and events. (shrink)

Escribir sobre ética —y en particular sobre ética médica— en los tiempos que corren comporta un cierto riesgo, no sólo por la posible incompetencia del autor, sino porque éste se encuentra algo desubicado en un entorno de crisis moral propiciada por el cientifismo como nueva religión laica y la voracidad de los mercados. La preocupación de los legos por la creciente dificultad en discernir aquello que es ético o bueno de lo que no lo es constituye en la actualidad un (...) dilema universal, al menos por cuanto respecta a nuestra civilización occidental. Dicha preocupación se encuentra plasmada en decenas de textos dedicados no ya a los aspectos más abstractos o filosóficos de la ética general, sino a las “éticas particulares” aplicables a las profesiones, las empresas o al ámbito político. Así, se habla de una ética periodística, del compliance industrial, de la investigación, de la banca, de las redes de sociales y, por supuesto de la medicina. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance refers to a perceived inability or unwillingness to enter into fictional worlds that portray deviant moralities (Gendler, 2000): we can all easily imagine that dragons exist, but many people feel incapable of imagining fictional worlds in which morality works differently. Although this phenomenon has received much attention from philosophers, no one has attempted to operationalize the construct in a self-report scale. In Study 1, we developed the Imaginative Resistance Scale (IRS), investigated its relationship to theoretically related constructs, and (...) confirmed its structure and reliability (rα = 0.92) in a large sample. In Study 2, we asked participants to rate scenarios expected to provoke imaginative resistance and predicted these ratings from the IRS and its validity measures. IRS scores accounted for variability in ease of imagining these scenarios over and above gender, political orientation, and three related measures. The results are discussed in terms of theories of imaginative resistance and directions for future research. (shrink)

This chapter presents an overview of the contributions to the section on Experimental Mathematics by focusing in particular on how they characterize the phenomenon of “experimental mathematics” and its origins. The second part presents two case studies illustrating how experimental mathematics is understood in contemporary analysis. The third section offers a systematic presentation of the contributions to the section.

We introduce the concept of assertion, survey existing views about it, and detail the contents of the remainder of the book.

Shadow of the Other is a discussion of how the individual has two sorts of relationships with an "other"--other individuals. The first regards the other as a s work apart is her brilliant utilization of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing tensions: masculinity and femininity, subjectivity and objectivity, passivity and activity, love and aggression, fantasy and reality, modernism and postmodernism, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective. Benjamin s work apart is her brilliant utilization (...) of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing other as a mental repository fo unwanted characteristics cast from the self. Jessica benjamin shows the implications of this dual relationship for male/female hierarchy and offers a possibility for balancing the two. This book continues the author's well-known explorations of the themes of intersubjectivity and gender, taking up issues at the forefront of contemporary debates in feminist theory and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Imogen Dickie's book Fixing Reference promises to reframe the investigation of mental intentionality, or what makes thoughts be about particular things. Dickie focuses on beliefs, and argues that if we can show how our ordinary means of belief formation sustain a certain connection between what our beliefs are about and how they are justified, we will have explained the ability of these ordinary means of belief formation to generate beliefs that are about particular objects. A worry about Dickie's approach is (...) that the explanation it offers is circular and thus not a genuine explanation of mental aboutness. This article develops a version of that worry in detail and turns it aside. Nonetheless, I argue that the explanatory value of the account remains unclear. While it does promise a dialectical advance over traditional theorizing about aboutness, it does not reveal how our ordinary means of belief formation make beliefs be about what they are about. (shrink)

This paper explores the various ways Aristotle refers to and employs “heat and cold” in his embryology. In my view, scholars are too quick to assume that references to heat and cold are references to matter or an animal’s material nature. More commonly, I argue, Aristotle refers to heat and cold as the “tools” of soul. As I understand it, Aristotle is thinking of heat and cold in many contexts as auxiliary causes by which soul activities (primarily “concoction”) are carried (...) out. This, as I argue, is what it means to call them “tools” of soul. An upshot of this investigation is the fuller picture of Aristotle’s conception of efficient causation it provides in general, and the better understanding of the efficient causal operation of an organism’s nature or soul it provides in particular. (shrink)

Fallibilists claim that one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Jessica Brown offers a compelling defence of this view against infallibilists, who claim that it is contradictory to claim to know and yet to admit the possibility of error.

When I see a tree through my window, that particular worldly tree is said to be ‘in’, ‘on’, or ‘before’ my mind. My ordinary visual link to it is ‘intentional’. How similar to this link are the links between me and particular worldly trees when I see them in photographs, or in paintings? Are they, in some important sense, links of the same kind? Or are they links of importantly different kinds? Or, as a third possibility, are they at once (...) links of the same important kind and also links of importantly different sub-kinds within that kind? This paper takes up these taxonomical questions. After fleshing out (a bit) the characterisation of these different subject-object links, I explain and expand upon an approach to answering the taxonomical questions originally set out by Kendall Walton. I then follow this approach a certain distance, connecting it with the question of how to mark the boundary between perception and cognition. My investigations support the conclusion that the three types of links just described are not importantly different in kind. (shrink)

Increased technological and pharmacological interventions in patient care when patient outcomes are uncertain have been linked to the escalation in moral and ethical dilemmas experienced by health care providers in acute care settings. Health care research has shown that facilities that are able to attract and retain nursing staff in a competitive environment and provide high quality care have the capacity for nurses to process and resolve moral and ethical dilemmas. This article reports on the findings of a systematic review (...) of the empirical literature (1980 — February 2007) on the effects of unresolved moral distress and poor ethical climate on nurse turnover. Articles were sought to answer the review question: Does unresolved moral distress and a poor organizational ethical climate increase nurse turnover? Nine articles met the criteria of the review process. Although the prevailing sentiment was that poor ethical climate and moral distress caused staff turnover, definitive answers to the review question remain elusive because there are limited data that confidently support this statement. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant claims that genius is a talent for art, but not for science. Despite his restriction of genius to the domain of fine art, several recent interpreters have suggested that genius has a role to play in Kant’s account of cognition in general and scientific practice in particular. In this paper, I explore Kant’s reasons for excluding genius from science as well as the reasons that one might nevertheless be tempted to think that his account (...) allows room for the scientific genius. I then argue that Kant’s concerns are not only epistemic, but also moral, and together, they give us good reason for resisting the veneration of genius. (shrink)

The Sleeping Beauty problem has spawned a debate between “Thirders” and “Halfers” who draw conflicting conclusions about Sleeping Beauty’s credence that a coin lands Heads. Our analysis is based on a probability model for what Sleeping Beauty knows at each time during the Experiment. We show that conflicting conclusions result from different modeling assumptions that each group makes. Our analysis uses a standard “Bayesian” account of rational belief with conditioning. No special handling is used for self-locating beliefs or centered propositions. (...) We also explore what fair prices Sleeping Beauty computes for gambles that she might be offered during the Experiment. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work in formal pragmatic theory, this paper shows that the manipulation of discourse structure—in particular, by way of shifting the Question Under Discussion mid-discourse—can constitute an act of epistemic injustice. I argue that the “All Lives Matter” response to the “Black Lives Matter” slogan is one such case; this response shifts the Question Under Discussion governing the overarching discourse from Do Black lives matter? to Which lives matter? This manipulation of the discourse structure systematically obscures the intended (...) meaning of “Black lives matter” and disincentivizes future utterances of it. (shrink)

The practical criteria by which developmental biologists choose their model systems have evolutionary correlates. The result is a sample that is not merely small, but biased in particular ways, for example towards species with rapid, highly canalized development. These biases influence both data collection and interpretation, and our views of how development works and which aspects of it are important.

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s :741–742, 1960; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such a debate has primarily focused on principles—the (...) ‘what’ of AI ethics —rather than on practices, the ‘how.’ Awareness of the potential issues is increasing at a fast rate, but the AI community’s ability to take action to mitigate the associated risks is still at its infancy. Our intention in presenting this research is to contribute to closing the gap between principles and practices by constructing a typology that may help practically-minded developers apply ethics at each stage of the Machine Learning development pipeline, and to signal to researchers where further work is needed. The focus is exclusively on Machine Learning, but it is hoped that the results of this research may be easily applicable to other branches of AI. The article outlines the research method for creating this typology, the initial findings, and provides a summary of future research needs. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWith over 560 citations reported on Google Scholar by April 2018, a publication by Juslin and Gabrielsson presented evidence supporting performers’ abilities to communicate, with hig...

Liv är ett centralt begrepp inom många forskningsområden, exempelvis inom biologi, astrobiologi, kemi och medicin, såväl som inom juridik, teologi och filosofi. Liv är också ett centralt tema i konsten. Det behandlas och begrundas i åtskilliga konstverk, i dikt, roman och film. Hur vi skall förstå, värdera och skydda livet, är oerhört fundamentala frågor. I framtiden kommer dessa frågor att bli än svårare och om möjligt ännu viktigare. Forskargrupper från hela världen arbetar idag med att skapa liv i laboratoriet, leta (...) efter liv i rymden och förse maskiner med egenskaper som tidigare bara har varit förunnade levande varelser, och utvecklingen går fort. Det är viktigt att vi samtidigt funderar över de utmaningar som detta innebär. Det kommer att ta tid att hitta sätt att leva i en värld där liv finns i former vi idag knappt kan föreställa oss och där gränsen mellan levande varelser och maskiner blir alltmer suddig. De beslut vi fattar idag kommer också att påverka utvecklingen inom samhälle, forskning och utveckling under lång tid framöver. -/- Den här boken är ett resultat av ett tvärvetenskapligt projekt vid Pufendorfinstitutet, Lunds universitet. Tolv forskare från lika många discipliner har ingått i projektet. Syftet har varit att belysa utmaningar som följer med utomjordiskt, artificiellt och syntetiskt liv. Det tvärvetenskapliga angreppssättet har gett oss möjlighet att belysa frågorna från alla upptänkliga vinklar, men också att hitta helt nya kombinationer av metoder och synsätt. Med tanke på livets mångsidighet och stora betydelse ur så många olika perspektiv, har detta grepp varit helt nödvändigt. -/- Vår förhoppning är att boken skall inspirera till nya tankar och diskussioner om liv. Boken vänder sig både till de som redan är intresserade och de som ännu inte har börjat fundera kring de utmaningar som utomjordiskt, artificiellt och syntetiskt liv innebär. (shrink)

A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena.The Restless Clock examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals—dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us (...) through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency.The Restless Clock reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Debates about terrorism and technology often focus on the potential uses of technology by non-state terrorist actors and by states as forms of counterterrorism. Yet, little has been written about how technology shapes how we think about terrorism. In this chapter I argue that technology, and the language we use to talk about technology, constrains and shapes our understanding of the nature, scope, and impact of terrorism, particularly in relation to state terrorism. After exploring the ways in which technology shapes (...) moral thinking, I use two case studies to demonstrate how technology simultaneously hides and enables terroristic forms of state violence: police control technologies and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones. In both these cases, I argue that features of these technologies, combined with a narrative of precision and efficiency, serves to mask the terroristic nature of the violence that these practices inflict and reinforces the moral exclusion of those against whom these technologies are deployed. In conclusion, I propose that identifying acts of terrorism requires a focus on the impact of technologies of violence (whether they are “high tech” or not) on those most affected, regardless of whether users of these technologies conceive of their actions as terroristic. (shrink)