Examining variation in reasoning about sustainability between diverse populations provides unique insight into how group norms surrounding resource conservation develop. Cultural institutions, such as religious organizations and formal schools, can mobilize communities to solve collective challenges associated with resource depletion. This study examined conservation beliefs in a Western industrialized (Austin, Texas, USA) and a non‐Western, subsistence agricultural community (Tanna, Vanuatu) among children, adolescents, and adults (N = 171; n = 58 7–12‐year‐olds, n = 53 13–17‐year‐olds, and n = 60 18–68‐year‐olds). (...) Participants endorsed or rejected four types of justifications for engaging in land and animal conservation: sustainability, moral, religious, or permissible. In both populations, participants endorsed sustainability justifications most frequently. Religious justifications increased with age in Tanna and decreased with age in Austin. Tannese participants were also more likely to endorse multiple justifications for conservation than Austin participants. Data across all justification types show a main effect of age in both communities; endorsement of conservation decreased with age in Austin, but increased with age in Tanna. Across age groups, participants were more likely to endorse the conservation of animals than land in Austin, yet equally as likely to endorse the conservation of land and animals in Tanna. Overall, these results reveal similarities and differences in the beliefs that support the conservation of natural resources across populations. (shrink)

Natural and supernatural explanations are used to interpret the same events in a number of predictable and universal ways. Yet little is known about how variation in diverse cultural ecologies influences how people integrate natural and supernatural explanations. Here, we examine explanatory coexistence in three existentially arousing domains of human thought: illness, death, and human origins using qualitative data from interviews conducted in Tanna, Vanuatu. Vanuatu, a Melanesian archipelago, provides a cultural context ideal for examining variation in explanatory coexistence due (...) to the lack of industrialization and the relatively recent introduction of Christianity and Western education. We argue for the integration of interdisciplinary methodologies from cognitive science and anthropology to inform research on explanatory coexistence. (shrink)

Mounting evidence suggests that endorsement of psychological continuity and the afterlife increases with age. This developmental change raises questions about the cognitive biases, social representations, and cultural input that may support afterlife beliefs. To what extent is there similarity versus diversity across cultures in how people reason about what happens after death? The objective of this study was to compare beliefs about the continuation of biological and psychological functions after death in Tanna, Vanuatu, and the United States. Children, adolescents, and (...) adults were primed with a story that contained either natural or supernatural cues. Participants were then asked whether or not different biological and psychological processes continue to function after death. We predicted that across cultures individuals would be more likely to endorse the continuation of psychological processes over biological processes and that a theistic prime would increase continuation responses regarding both types of process. Results largely supported predictions; U.S. participants provided more continuation responses for psychological than biological processes following both the theistic and non-theistic primes. Participants in Vanuatu, however, provided more continuation responses for biological than psychological processes following the theistic prime. The data provide evidence for both cultural similarity and variability in afterlife beliefs and demonstrate that individuals use both natural and supernatural explanations to interpret the same events. (shrink)

Though assumptions about language underlie all bioethical work, the field has rarely partaken of theories of language. This article encourages a more linguistically engaged bioethics. We describe the tacit conception of language that is frequently upheld in bioethics—what we call the representational view, which sees language essentially as a means of description. We examine how this view has routed the field’s theories and interventions down certain paths. We present an alternative model of language—the pragmatic view—and explore how it expands and (...) clarifies traditional bioethical concerns. To lend concreteness, we apply the pragmatic view to a pervasive concept in bioethics and adjacent fields: decision making. We suggest that problems of the decision-making approach to bioethical issues are grounded in adherence to the representational view. Drawing on empirical work in surgery and critical care, we show how the pragmatic view productively reframes bioethical questions about how medical treatments are pursued. (shrink)

Data fraud and selective reporting both present serious threats to the credibility of science. However, there remains considerable disagreement among scientists about how best to sanction data fraud, and about the ethicality of selective reporting. The public is arguably the largest stakeholder in the reproducibility of science; research is primarily paid for with public funds, and flawed science threatens the public’s welfare. Members of the public are able to make meaningful judgments about the morality of different behaviors using moral intuitions. (...) Legal scholars emphasize that to maintain legitimacy, social control policies must be developed with some consideration given to the public’s moral intuitions. Although there is a large literature on popular attitudes toward science, there is no existing evidence about public opinion on data fraud or selective reporting. We conducted two studies—a survey experiment with a nationwide convenience sample, and a follow-up survey with a representative sample of US adults —to explore community members’ judgments about the morality of data fraud and selective reporting in science. The findings show that community members make a moral distinction between data fraud and selective reporting, but overwhelmingly judge both behaviors to be immoral and deserving of punishment. Community members believe that scientists who commit data fraud or selective reporting should be fired and banned from receiving funding. For data fraud, most Americans support criminal penalties. Results from an ordered logistic regression analysis reveal few demographic and no significant partisan differences in punitiveness toward data fraud. (shrink)

Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we propose two information-theoretic measures—ambiguity and distinctiveness—derived from a simple model of sentence processing. We test these measures on a set of puns and regular sentences and show that they correlate significantly with human (...) judgments of funniness. Moreover, within a set of puns, the distinctiveness measure distinguishes exceptionally funny puns from mediocre ones. Our work is the first, to our knowledge, to integrate a computational model of general language understanding and humor theory to quantitatively predict humor at a fine-grained level. We present it as an example of a framework for applying models of language processing to understand higher level linguistic and cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

The philosophic spectator watches from a distance as a “disinterested” and impartial member of an audience, Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy, University of Chicago Press, 1992; Kant, On history, Prentice Hall Inc, 1957). Judicial systems use many of the elements of the spectator in the concept of an eyewitness but, with increased video technology use, the courts have taken the witness a step further by hiring forensic video analysts. The analyst’s stance is rooted in objectivity, and the process of breaking (...) a video down to its component parts to examine it, but is it based on the philosophic spectator? To better understand whether the forensic video analyst has adopted the stance of the philosophic spectator, this paper examines both the analyst and spectator, and discusses the implications for how we think and administer justice. (shrink)

In this paper I do three things. First, I argue that Stephen Yablo’s influential account of mental causation is susceptible to counterexamples involving what I call disproportional mental causation. Second, I argue that similar counterexamples can be generated for any alternative account of mental causation that is like Yablo’s in that it takes mental states and their physical realizers to causally compete. Third, I show that there are alternative nonreductive approaches to mental causation which reject the idea of causal competition, (...) and which thus are able to allow for disproportional mental causation. This, I argue, is a significant advantage for such noncompetitive accounts. (shrink)

Social prescriptions are one term commonly used to describe non-pharmaceutical approaches to healthcare and are gaining popularity in the community, with evidence highlighting psychological benefits of reduced anxiety, depression and improved mood and physiological benefits of reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and reduced hypertension. The relationship between human health benefits and planetary health benefits is also noted. There are, however, numerous barriers, such as duration and frequencies to participate in activities, access, suitability, volition and a range of unpredictable variables impeding (...) a comprehensive approach to their use on a wider scale. From a multidisciplinary perspective, this commentary incorporates a salutogenic and nature-based approach to health, we also provide a range of recommendations that can be undertaken at the patient level to assist in shifting the acknowledged systemic barriers currently occurring. These include using simple language to explain the purpose of health empowerment scripts, ensuing personal commitment to a minimum timeframe, enabling ease of access, co-designing a script program, providing ongoing motivational support and incorporating mindfulness to counter unexpected disruptions. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

In a recent article Humphreys has developed an intriguing proposal for making sense of emergence. The crucial notion for this purpose is what he calls "fusion" and his paradigm for it is quantum nonseparability. In what follows, we will develop this position in more detail, and then discuss its ramifications and limitations. Its ramifications are quite radical; its limitations are substantial. An alternative approach to emergence that involves quantum physics is then proposed.

In the United States, only 6% of the 1.5 million faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions is Black. Research shows that, while many institutions tout the idea of diversity recruitment, not much progress has been made to diversify faculty ranks, especially at research-intensive institutions. We're Not Ok shares the experiences of Black faculty to take the reader on a journey, from the obstacles of landing a full-time faculty position through the unique struggles of being a Black educator at a predominantly white (...) institution, along with how these deterrents impact inclusion, retention, and mental health. The book provides practical strategies and recommendations for graduate students, faculty, staff, and administrators, along with changemakers, to make strides in diversity, equity, and inclusion. More than a presentation of statistics and anecdotes, it is the start of a dialogue with the intent of ushering actual change that can benefit Black faculty, their students, and their institutions. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating for people living with dementia (PLWD) and their caregivers. While prior research has documented these effects, it has not delved into their specific causes or how they are modified by contextual variation in caregiving circumstances.

BackgroundThe sustained rise in negative mental health reports among university students is a source of continued global concern, and investigation continues into potential contributors to this rise. This includes the increased prevalence of risky sexual behaviors. Related is the increased prevalence of pornography use. Our study sought to explore the potential relationship between compulsive use of pornography and mental health in university students.MethodsOur sample consisted of university students from Franciscan University of Steubenville, Steubenville, Ohio. An anonymous survey was sent to (...) all students at the university over the age of 18. The survey was comprised of the following: demographic questions, questions on pornography use and perception, a modified version of the Compulsive Internet Use Scale assessing various factors associated with compulsive internet pornography use, questions assessing emotional and sexual states relative to pornography use, and the 21-question version of the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale.ResultsOur results indicate that 56.6% of those surveyed reported lifetime pornography use, with a significantly higher proportion of males than females reporting such use. The majority of students reported accessing pornography through internet-related technologies. Additionally, 17.0, 20.4, and 13.5% of students reported severe or extremely severe levels of depression, anxiety and stress, respectively, with compulsive pornography use significantly affecting all three mental health parameters in both sexes. Exploratory Factor Analysis identified three factors suggesting emotional coping, dependence and preoccupation for the mCIUS items and three factors reflecting interoceptive, impotent, and extrinsic characteristics for the EmSS items. Regression analysis indicated that various demographics, items pertaining to reduced control and social impairment, and other variables pertaining to pornography use predicted mental health outcomes. Faith, morals and personal motivation were the primary variables reported to help reduce pornography use.ConclusionOur analyses indicate a significant relationship between mental health and pornography use, including behaviors reflecting behavioral addictions, highlighting the necessity for a better understanding and consideration of the potential contribution of internet pornography to negative mental health among university students. (shrink)

First—before you define the dilemma, parse out principles, or vocalize about virtues—consider what caused this case.The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged us all, but particularly caregivers and the...

The vital status of patients who are a part of controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) is widely debated in bioethical literature. Opponents to currently applied cDCD protocols argue that they violate the dead donor rule, while proponents of the protocols advocate compatibility. In this article, we argue that both parties often misinterpret the moral implications of the dead donor rule. The rule as such does not require an assessment of a donor’s vital status, we contend, but rather an assessment (...) of whether procurement of organs in cDCD cause the death of the donor or not. We then argue that commonly practiced cDCD protocols do not violate the dead donor rule, since the donation does not trigger or cause the death of the donors. (shrink)

Prior research examining mate expulsion indicates that women are more likely to expel a mate due to deficits in emotional access while men are more likely to expel a mate due to deficits in sexual access. Prior research highlights the importance of accounting for measurement limitations (e.g., the use of incremental vs. forced-choice measures) when assessing attitudes toward sexual and emotional infidelity; Wade & Brown, 2012; Sagarin et al., 2012). The present research uses conjoint analysis, a novel methodology for controlling (...) several limitations of using continuous self-report measures in mate expulsion research. Participants (N = 181; 128 women) recruited from Bucknell University and several psychology recruitment listservs in the US rated 9 profiles that varied in three potential levels of emotional and sexual accessibility. Men were more likely to want to break up with a partner due to sexual accessibility deficits, whereas women were more likely to want to break up due to emotional accessibility deficits. However, regardless of sex, emotional inaccessibility was more likely to produce mate expulsion. These findings are consistent with prior theory and highlight the need to disentangle emotional accessibility into its constituent in-pair benefits. This research also illustrates the utility of conjoint analysis as a statistical tool for studying how humans resolve trade-offs among competing outcomes during romantic decision-making. (shrink)

What is death: a process or a specific declaration? Is it a biological continuum of events or a decision based on medical, ethical, and legal criteria? In our view, it is both, and there are philos...

Here it is argued that in order for something someone “does” to count as a genuine action, the person needn’t have been able to refrain from doing it. If this is right, then two recent defenses of the principle of alternative possibilities, a version of which says that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have refrained from doing it, are unsuccessful.

The consequence argument is among the most influential arguments for the conclusion that free will and determinism are incompatible. Recently, however, it has become increasingly clear that the argument fails to establish that particular incompatibilist conclusion. Even so, a version of the argument can be formulated that supports a different incompatibilist conclusion, according to which free will is incompatible with our behavior being predetermined by factors beyond our control. This conclusion, though not equivalent to the traditional incompatibilist thesis that determinism (...) strictly precludes free will, is something many incompatibilists have had in mind all along and, indeed, is arguably the more central incompatibilist position. The consequence argument thus remains philosophically important, even if, as several of its critics have argued, it can't be used to establish the strict incompatibility of free will and determinism. (shrink)

Libertarianism about free will conjoins the thesis that free will requires indeterminism with the thesis that we have free will. Here the claim that we have experiential evidence for the libertarian position is assessed. It is argued that, on a straightforward reading, the claim is false, for our experiences as agents don't support the claim that free will requires indeterminism. However, our experiences as agents may still have a role to play in an overall case for libertarianism, insofar as they (...) give us some (defeasible) reason to think that we have free will. This latter claim is defended against a pair of objections that have been leveled against it. (shrink)

Our actions have causes, some of which are beyond our control. Of that there can be no serious doubt. Some worry that this fact undermines the commonsense view that we perform free actions for which we are morally responsible. My aim in this article is to show that such worries are unfounded and, consequently, that pure non-causal theories of free action, according to which free actions must be entirely uncaused, are false. My argument for this conclusion doesn’t presuppose the cogency (...) of existing objections to non-causal theories of free agency. (shrink)

Animal and plant species exhibit an astonishing diversity of sexual systems, including environmental and genetic determinants of sex, with the latter including genetic material in the mitochondrial genome. In several hermaphroditic plants for example, sex is determined by an interaction between mitochondrial cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) genes and nuclear restorer genes. Specifically, CMS involves aberrant mitochondrial genes that prevent pollen development and specific nuclear genes that restore it, leading to a mixture of female (male‐sterile) and hermaphroditic individuals in the population (...) (gynodioecy). Such a mitochondrial‐nuclear sex determination system is thought to be rare outside plants. Here, we present one possible case of CMS in animals. We hypothesize that the only exception to the strict maternal mtDNA inheritance in animals, the doubly uniparental inheritance (DUI) system in bivalves, might have originated as a mitochondrial‐nuclear sex‐determination system. We document and explore similarities that exist between DUI and CMS, and we propose various ways to test our hypothesis. (shrink)

The Planteome project provides a suite of reference and species-specific ontologies for plants and annotations to genes and phenotypes. Ontologies serve as common standards for semantic integration of a large and growing corpus of plant genomics, phenomics and genetics data. The reference ontologies include the Plant Ontology, Plant Trait Ontology, and the Plant Experimental Conditions Ontology developed by the Planteome project, along with the Gene Ontology, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, Phenotype and Attribute Ontology, and others. The project also provides (...) access to species-specific Crop Ontologies developed by various plant breeding and research communities from around the world. We provide integrated data on plant traits, phenotypes, and gene function and expression from 95 plant taxa, annotated with reference ontology terms. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), a person is blameworthy for what he did only if he could have avoided doing it. This principle figures importantly in disputes about the relationship between determinism, divine foreknowledge, free will and moral responsibility, and has been the subject of considerable controversy for over forty years now. Proponents of the principle have devoted a good deal of energy and ingenuity to defending it against various objections. Surprisingly, however, they have devoted comparatively little (...) effort to developing positive arguments for it, and, with few exceptions, the arguments they have proposed have received little, if any, critical attention. My dissertation is intended to help fill this gap in the literature on PAP. There are three main arguments for PAP. I critically evaluate each of these arguments, arguing that they are all unsuccessful. Where, then, does that leave PAP? I suggest that, in the absence of any further compelling arguments for or against the principle, debate over it is likely to end in dialectical stalemate. I conclude by highlighting several implications of this suggestion for recent debates about the metaphysics of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Background: Due to recent legislations on euthanasia and its current practice in the Netherlands and Belgium, issues of end-of-life medicine have become very vital in many European countries. In 2002, the Ethics Working Group of the German Association for Palliative Medicine (DGP) has conducted a survey among its physician members in order to evaluate their attitudes towards different end-of-life medical practices, such as euthanasia (EUT), physician-assisted suicide (PAS), and terminal sedation (TS). Methods: An anonymous questionnaire was sent to the 411 (...) DGP physicians, consisting of 14 multiple choice questions on positions that might be adopted in different hypothetical scenarios on situations of “intolerable suffering” in end-of-life care. For the sake of clarification, several definitions and legal judgements of different terms used in the German debate on premature termination of life were included. For statistical analysis t-tests and Pearson-correlations were used. Results: The response rate was 61% (n=251). The proportions of the respondents who were opposed to legalizing different forms of premature termination of life were: 90% opposed to EUT, 75% to PAS, 94% to PAS for psychiatric patients. Terminal sedation was accepted by 94% of the members. The main decisional bases drawn on for the answers were personal ethical values, professional experience with palliative care, knowledge of alternative approaches, knowledge of ethical guidelines and of the national legal frame. Conclusions: In sharp contrast to similar surveys conducted in other countries, only a minority of 9.6% of the DGP physicians supported the legalization of EUT. The misuse of medical knowledge for inhumane killing in the Nazi period did not play a relevant role for the respondents’ negative attitude towards EUT. Palliative care needs to be stronger established and promoted within the German health care system in order to improve the quality of end-of-life situations which subsequently is expected to lead to decreasing requests for EUT by terminally ill patients. (shrink)

If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (versus leaving one's seat tidy). (...) By these three measures, audiences in ethics sessions did not appear to behave any more courteously than did audiences in non-ethics sessions. However, audiences in environmental ethics sessions did appear to leave behind less trash. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up one of Wang Yangming’s most audacious philosophical claims, which is that an achievement that is entirely concerned with correcting one’s own inner states, called “establishing sincerity” (licheng 立誠) can help one to fully grasp (jin 盡) all ethically pertinent matters, including those that would seem to require some ability to know or track facts about the wider world (e.g., facts about people very different from ourselves, facts about the needs of plants and animals). Wang (...) makes a claim to this effect in some of his letters and recorded discussions. -/- I begin with a brief, historical reconstruction of what Wang means by “establishing sincerity” and then turn to two sets of controversies regarding his audacious claim. The first has to do with how we should understand the proposal that establishing sincerity helps or positions a person to fully grasp all ethically significant concerns. On the interpretation of Chen Lai 陳來, Wang doesn’t think that establishing sincerity is sufficient by itself to have this grasp, only that it lays a necessary psychological foundation for all attempts to do so, so that it leaves much more work to do. I largely agree with Chen’s reading but find it isn’t strong enough to capture what’s most important and controversial about Wang’s view. On my stronger reading, Wang doesn’t just think that establishing sincerity provides a necessary foundation for a complete grasp, he also thinks that it describes the most difficult and demanding step or part of the process – the other steps come much more naturally and easily. The second set of controversies has to do with whether we can preserve Wang’s core account of virtuous moral agency without his strong ethical nativism, according to which we have an inherent capacity and disposition to track what is ethically important or salient about people and things very much unlike ourselves. I consider some arguments and interpretations of Wang’s thought that might allow us to bypass his nativist presuppositions, and conclude that they do not succeed. Even if we cannot accept his ethical nativism, however, there is a range of important ethical norms for which Wang’s prescriptions are powerful and prudent. The result of this study, I hope, will be an account of Wang’s thought which better positions us to see what parts are (and are not) worth bringing to ongoing debates about the nature of ethics, moral knowledge, and moral virtue. (shrink)

Introduction 1 P. D. Magnus and Jacob Busch 1. Form-driven vs. Content-driven Arguments for Realism 8 Juha Saatsi 2. Optimism about the Pessimistic Induction 29 Sherrilyn Roush 3. Metaphysics between the Sciences and Philosophies of Science 59 Anjan Chakravartty 4. Nominalism and Inductive Generalizations 78 Jessica Pfeifer 5. Models and Scientific Representations 94 Otávio Bueno 6. The Identical Rivals Response to Underdetermination 112 Gregory Frost-Arnold and P. D. Magnus 7. Scientific Representation and the Semiotics of Pictures 131 Laura Perini (...) 8. Philosophy of the Environmental Sciences 155 Jay Odenbaugh 9. Value Judgements and the Estimation of Uncertainty in Climate Modeling 172 Justin Biddle and Eric Winsberg 10. Feminist Standpoint Empiricism: Rethinking the Terrain in Feminist Philosophy of Science 198 Kristen Intemann 11. Naturalism and the Enlightenment Ideal: Rethinking a Central Debate in the Philosophy of Social Science 226 Daniel Steel 12. New Approaches to the Division of Cognitive Labor 250 Michael Weisberg. (shrink)

At the center of the literature on conditionals lies the division between indicative and subjunctive conditionals, and Ernest Adams’ famous minimal pair: If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, someone else did. If Oswald hadn’t shot Kennedy, someone else would have. While a lot of attention is paid to figuring out what these different kinds of conditionals mean, significantly less attention has been paid to the question of why their grammatical differences give rise to their semantic differences. In this paper, I articulate (...) and defend an answer to this question that illuminates and unifies the meanings of both kinds of conditionals. The basic idea is that epistemic and metaphysical possibilities differ with respect to their interaction with time, such that there can be present epistemic possibilities with different pasts, while present metaphysical possibilities share the same past. The interpretation of conditionals is subject to a pragmatic constraint that rules out interpretations in which their consequents are directly settled by information used to build their domains. The past + future morphology on subjunctives, but not indicatives, is what allows them to receive a metaphysical interpretation in light of this pragmatic constraint. The resulting theory predicts several surprising features of indicatives and subjunctives, which I argue are correct. (shrink)

Most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God take the following form: (1) If God exists, the world would not be like this (where 'this' picks out some feature of the world like the existence of evil, etc.) (2) But the world is like this . (3) Therefore, God does not exist. Skeptical theists are theists who are skeptical of our ability to make judgments of the sort expressed by premise (1). According to skeptical theism, if there were a (...) God, it is likely that he would have reasons for acting that are beyond our ken, and thus we are not justified in making all-things-considered judgments about what the world would be like if there were a God. In particular, the fact that we don't see a good reason for X does not justify the conclusion that there is no good reason for X. 1 Thus, skeptical theism purports to undercut most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God. What follows is an account of the nature of skeptical theism, an application of skeptical theism to both the argument from evil and the argument from divine hiddenness, and a review of the cases for and against skeptical theism. (shrink)

Cet article propose d’interroger le dispositif de soins mis en place dans les hôpitaux pour accompagner le couple face à la fin de vie. Le partenaire est souvent oublié. Pourtant, il est impliqué dans les remaniements psychiques dès l’annonce de la maladie grave. À partir de cas cliniques, l’auteur montre l’importance de la créativité du psychologue pour repenser sa pratique auprès du couple. Un maillage institutionnel est nécessaire pour que le couple retrouve un accès à son intimité et à une (...) certaine symbolisation. (shrink)

In contemporary political discussions, it is depressingly common to see people criticized for expressing impure beliefs. Moreover, those who sometimes defect from their tribe are criticized for failing to be firmly enough on the side of the angels. We consider explanations for this behavior, including its relationship to moral grandstanding. We will also argue, on both moral and epistemic grounds, in favor of a norm against “blocking the exits.” We should not use social pressure to discourage people from publicly changing (...) their minds. (shrink)

According to operator theories, "if" denotes a two-place operator. According to restrictor theories, "if" doesn't contribute an operator of its own but instead merely restricts the domain of some co-occurring quantifier. The standard arguments (Lewis 1975, Kratzer 1986) for restrictor theories have it that operator theories (but not restrictor theories) struggle to predict the truth conditions of quantified conditionals like -/- (1) a. If John didn't work at home, he usually worked in his office. b. If John didn't work at (...) home, he must have worked in his office. -/- Gillies (2010) offers a context-shifty conditional operator theory that predicts the right truth conditions for epistemically modalized conditionals like (1b), thus undercutting one standard argument for restrictor theories. I explore how we might generalize Gillies' theory to adverbially quantified conditionals like (1a) and deontic conditionals, and argue that a natural generalization of Gillies' theory -- following his strategy for handling epistemically modalized conditionals -- won't work for these other conditionals because a crucial assumption that epistemic modal bases are closed (used to neutralize the epistemic quantification contributed by "if") doesn't have plausible analogs in these other domains. (shrink)

A middle fact is a true proposition about what would have happened had A been true (where A is in fact false), whose truth isn't entailed by any non-counterfactual facts. I argue that there are no middle facts; if there were, we wouldn't know them, and our ignorance of them would result in ignorance about whether regret is fitting in cases where we clearly know it is. But there's a problem. Consider an unflipped fair coin which is such that no (...) non-counterfactual fact determines that it would have landed heads had it been flipped (or tails had it been flipped). If there are no middle facts, it's not true that it would have landed heads had it been flipped nor that it would have landed tails had it been flipped. Yet each counterfactual is still possibly true for all we know. I argue that we can resolve this tension in the anti-middle fact position, further strengthening the case against middle facts. (shrink)

Students often invoke quantum mechanics in class or papers to make philosophical points. This tendency has been encouraged by pop culture influences like the film What the Bleep do We Know? There is little merit to most of these putative implications. However, it is difficult for philosophy teachers unfamiliar with quantum mechanics to handle these supposed implications in a clear and careful way. This paper is a philosophy of science version of MythBusters. We offer a brief primer on the nature (...) of quantum mechanics, enumerate nine of the most common implications associated with quantum mechanics, and finally clarify each implication with the facts. Our goal is to explain what quantum mechanics doesn’t show. (shrink)

La famille a longtemps t considre comme une unit sociale compose de trois relations simples : mari-femme, parent-enfant et matre-serviteur. Mais la fin du dix-huitime sicle, la dimension affective de la famille devient prpondrante, ce qui en exclut progressivement les serviteurs. Cette tude se penche sur le moment crucial de l'histoire des ides ou le paradigme familial est en train de changer, en s'intressant aux discours sur la famille d'une srie de penseurs issus de la tradition du droit naturel moderne (...) et des Lumires cossaises. Dans un effort constant de replacer chaque relation analyse dans le cadre de la famille, et la famille dans l'argument politique et philosophique plus gnral dfendu par ces auteurs, cette tude montre que la famille, loin d'tre une question subsidiaire, joue un role important dans la comprhension des rapports sociaux cette poque. (shrink)

John Martin Fischer has argued that Molinism does not constitute a response to the argument that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. I argue that T. Ryan Byerly’s recent work on the mechanics of foreknowledge sheds light on this issue. It shows that Fischer’s claim is ambiguous, and that it may turn out to be false on at least one reading, but only if the Molinist can explain how God knows true counterfactuals of freedom.

Does the fact that other people believe something give me a reason to believe it, too? Yes, and this epistemic fact is explained by the principle of common consent. PCC says that if S knows that others believe that P, then this fact gives S a reason to believe that P. Despite the fact that most logic texts file the appeal to the majority under the category of a fallacy, the principle of common consent is true. The principle can be (...) defended by an appeal to the interpretive dilemma, a lesson from the epistemology of disagreement, an analogy to epistemic self-trust, and an inference to the best explanation for a wide range of epistemic data. Typical objections to the principle are unpersuasive and rest on either an infallibilist epistemology or an interpretive mistake. (shrink)

We carry out most of our epistemic projects as groups. Networks of individuals work together to identify questions, accumulate evidence, and settle on answers that lie beyond the ken of individual knowers. This is particularly important for controversial issues. And when it comes to ideologically contested issues, groups that are ideologically diverse in their membership are epistemically superior to groups that are ideologically homogenous. That’s because ideologically diverse groups are better at (a) identifying a representative sample of important questions, (b) (...) developing a wider range of potential answers, and (c) evaluating the evidence for and against each option. Awareness of this point produces a competence defeater for the relevant outputs of ideologically homogenous groups: they don’t deserve the high level of trust we often grant them. That, among other things, goes a long way towards justifying the public’s decreased trust in institutions like social networks, journalism, and universities. (shrink)