The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID‐19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.

"Timed to publish in advance of the Joker sequel Joker: Folie a Deux, the volume will have at least two sections will be dedicated to chapters that take up questions raised by 2019's Joker and the Todd Phillips depiction in general. Chapters will also be sought on the many other iterations of the Joker. A number of high-profile philosophers have already written insightful pieces on Joker and the volume editors hope to solicit new essays from some of them. Joker is (...) a symbolically rich and philosophically fascinating character. With his enigmatic motivations, infectious irreverence, and almost selfless devotion to evil, Joker's psychology is a puzzle that provokes a host of philosophical questions, ranging across issues of morality, human nature, the metaphysics of freedom, the nature of evil, political and social philosophy, aesthetics, and more"--. (shrink)

Individuals frequently make use of the body and environment when engaged in a cognitive task. For example, individuals will often spontaneously physically rotate when faced with rotated objects, such as an array of words, to putatively offload the performance costs associated with stimulus rotation. We looked to further examine this idea by independently manipulating the costs associated with both word rotation and array frame rotation. Surprisingly, we found that individuals’ patterns of spontaneous physical rotations did not follow patterns of performance (...) costs or benefits associated with being physically rotated, findings difficult to reconcile with existing theories of strategy selection involving external resources. Individuals’ subjective ratings of perceived benefits, rather, provided an excellent match to the patterns of physical rotations, suggesting that the critical variable when deciding on-the-fly whether to incorporate an external resource is the participant's metacognitive beliefs regarding expected performance or the effort required for each approach. Implications for metacognition's future in theories of cognitive offloading are discussed. (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)

Through narrative reflections of Jack?s story of inclusive recreational sport, the meaning of dignity in professional practice is explored. Jack?s story is one of respect, strong humiliation and embarrassment, and vulnerability. Through the lens of relational ethics, the aggression of a stranger illustrates how the lack of mutual respect, compassion and knowledge creates experiences of indignity. Jack?s story highlights how relationships can shape, constrain and enable lives. Understanding that which constitutes a dignified recreational sport context for instructors and participants opens (...) opportunities for authentic social relationships based upon respect of oneself, as well as others to emerge. Jack?s narrative further reinforces the need to create pedagogical spaces for discussions of various forms of dignity and ethical professional practice in inclusive recreational sport contexts. (shrink)

The effects of research ethics training on medical students' attitudes about clinical research are examined. A preliminary randomized controlled trial evaluated 2 didactic approaches to ethics training compared to a no-intervention control. The participant-oriented intervention emphasized subjective experiences of research participants. The criteria-oriented intervention emphasized specific ethical criteria for analyzing protocols. Compared to controls, those in the participant-oriented intervention group exhibited greater attunement to research participants' attitudes related to altruism, trust, quality of relationships with researchers, desire for information, hopes about (...) participation and possible therapeutic misconception, importance of consent forms, and deciding quickly about participation. The participant-oriented group also agreed more strongly that seriously ill people are capable of making their own research participation decisions. The criteria-oriented intervention did not affect learners' attitudes about clinical research, ethical duties of investigators, or research participants' decision making. An empathy-focused approach affected medical students' attunement to research volunteer perspectives, preferences, and attributes, but an analytically oriented approach had no influence. These findings underscore the need to further examine the differential effects of empathy-versus analytic-focused approaches to the teaching of ethics. (shrink)

Mehr et al.'s hypothesis that the origins of music lie in credible signaling emerges here as a strong contender to explain early adaptive functions of music. Its integration with evolutionary biology and its specificity mark important contributions. However, much of the paper is dedicated to the exclusion of popular alternative hypotheses, which we argue is unjustified and premature.

Although written consent forms are standard in clinical research, there is little regulatory or empirical guidance regarding how to most effectively review consent forms with potential participants. We developed an algorithm for embedding five questions with corrective feedback while reading consent forms with potential participants, and then applied it in the context of seven clinical research studies. A substantial proportion of participants within each protocol displayed initially inadequate responses to at least one question, but after the protocol elements were explained (...) again, most people demonstrated adequate understanding of them. These data illustrate the need for more attention not just to the content of consent forms, but also to the manner in which the forms are incorporated into the consent process. Embedding explicit inquiries about key protocol elements during consent form review and giving corrective feedback appears to be a simple yet effective way to foster better understanding of disclosed information. (shrink)

The effects of research ethics training on medical students' attitudes about clinical research are examined. A preliminary randomized controlled trial evaluated 2 didactic approaches to ethics training compared to a no-intervention control. The participant-oriented intervention emphasized subjective experiences of research participants (empathy focused). The criteria-oriented intervention emphasized specific ethical criteria for analyzing protocols (analytic focused). Compared to controls, those in the participant-oriented intervention group exhibited greater attunement to research participants' attitudes related to altruism, trust, quality of relationships with researchers, desire (...) for information, hopes about participation and possible therapeutic misconception, importance of consent forms, and deciding quickly about participation. The participant-oriented group also agreed more strongly that seriously ill people are capable of making their own research participation decisions. The criteria-oriented intervention did not affect learners' attitudes about clinical research, ethical duties of investigators, or research participants' decision making. An empathy-focused approach affected medical students' attunement to research volunteer perspectives, preferences, and attributes, but an analytically oriented approach had no influence. These findings underscore the need to further examine the differential effects of empathy-versus analytic-focused approaches to the teaching of ethics. (shrink)

The decidability of the logic of pure ticket entailment means that the problem of inhabitation of simple types by combinators over the base { B, B′, I, W } is decidable too. Type-assignment systems are often formulated as natural deduction systems. However, our decision procedure for this logic, which we presented in earlier papers, relies on two sequent calculi and it does not yield directly a combinator for a theorem of ${T_\to}$. Here we describe an algorithm to extract an inhabitant (...) from a sequent calculus proof—without translating the proof into another proof system. (shrink)

In spite of a powerful tradition, more than two thousand years old, that in a valid argument the premises must be relevant to the conclusion, twentieth-century logicians neglected the concept of relevance until the publication of Volume I of this monumental work. Since that time relevance logic has achieved an important place in the field of philosophy: Volume II of Entailment brings to a conclusion a powerful and authoritative presentation of the subject by most of the top people working in (...) the area. Originally the aim of Volume II was simply to cover certain topics not treated in the first volume--quantification, for example--or to extend the coverage of certain topics, such as semantics. However, because of the technical progress that has occurred since the publication of the first volume, Volume II now includes other material. The book contains the work of Alasdair Urquhart, who has shown that the principal sentential systems of relevance logic are undecidable, and of Kit Fine, who has demonstrated that, although the first-order systems are incomplete with respect to the conjectured constant domain semantics, they are still complete with respect to a semantics based on "arbitrary objects." Also presented is important work by the other contributing authors, who are Daniel Cohen, Steven Giambrone, Dorothy L. Grover, Anil Gupta, Glen Helman, Errol P. Martin, Michael A. McRobbie, and Stuart Shapiro. Robert G. Wolf's bibliography of 3000 items is a valuable addition to the volume. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Quilty-Dunn et al. maintain that language-of-thought hypothesis (LoTH) is the best game in town. We counter that LoTH is merely one source of models – always wrong, sometimes useful. Their reasons for liking LoTH are compatible with the view that LoTH provides a sometimes pragmatically useful level of abstraction over processes and mechanisms that fail to fully live up to LoT requirements.

Proposed educational outcomes for the health humanities in medical education range from empathy to visual thinking skills to social accountability. This lack of widely agreed-upon high-level curricular goals limits humanities educators’ ability to design purposeful curricula toward clear, common ends and threatens justifications for scarce curricular time. We propose a novel approach to the hoped-for outcomes of health humanities training in medical schools, which has the potential to encompass traditional health humanities knowledge, skills, and behaviors while also being concrete and (...) measurable: humanistic practice. Humanistic practice, adapted from the concept of ethical sensitivity, is an intentional process of applying humanities knowledge and skills to a clinical scenario by 1) noticing that the scenario requires humanities knowledge or skills, 2) informing one’s clinical and interpersonal strategy and behavior with humanities knowledge or skills, 3) reflecting on the effectiveness of the strategy and behavior, and 4) reorienting to develop new approaches for future practice. The construct of humanistic practice may help address some of the foundational problems in health humanities outcomes research since it transcends the traditional diverse content domains in the health humanities, can link patient and provider experiences, and may bridge the divide among the additive, curative, and intrinsic epistemic positions of humanities to medical education. (shrink)

I explore some of the ways that assumptions about the nature of substance shape metaphysical debates about the structure of Reality. Assumptions about the priority of substance play a role in an argument for monism, are embedded in certain pluralist metaphysical treatments of laws of nature, and are central to discussions of substantivalism and relationalism. I will then argue that we should reject such assumptions and collapse the categorical distinction between substance and property.

Most theories of concepts take concepts to be structured bodies of information used in categorization and inference. This paper argues for a version of atomism, on which concepts are unstructured symbols. However, traditional Fodorian atomism is falsified by polysemy and fails to provide an account of how concepts figure in cognition. This paper argues that concepts are generative pointers, that is, unstructured symbols that point to memory locations where cognitively useful bodies of information are stored and can be deployed to (...) resolve polysemy. The notion of generative pointers allows for unresolved ambiguity in thought and provides a basis for conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Causation is at once familiar and mysterious. Neither common sense nor extensive philosophical debate has led us to anything like agreement on the correct analysis of the concept of causation, or an account of the metaphysical nature of the causal relation. Causation: A User's Guide cuts a clear path through this confusing but vital landscape. L. A. Paul and Ned Hall guide the reader through the most important philosophical treatments of causation, negotiating the terrain by taking a set of examples (...) as landmarks. They clarify the central themes of the debate about causation, and cover questions about causation involving omissions or absences, preemption and other species of redundant causation, and the possibility that causation is not transitive. Along the way, Paul and Hall examine several contemporary proposals for analyzing the nature of causation and assess their merits and overall methodological cogency.The book is designed to be of value both to trained specialists and those coming to the problem of causation for the first time. It provides the reader with a broad and sophisticated view of the metaphysics of the causal relation. (shrink)

Since the fundamental challenge that I laid at the doorstep of the pluralists was to defend, with nonderivative models, a strong notion of genic cause, it is fatal that Waters has failed to meet that challenge. Waters agrees with me that there is only a single cause operating in these models, but he argues for a notion of causal ‘parsing’ to sustain the viability of some form of pluralism. Waters and his colleagues have some very interesting and important ideas about (...) the sciences, involving pluralism and parsing or partitioning causes, but they are ideas in search of an example. He thinks he has found an example in the case of hierarchical and genic selection. I think he has not. (shrink)

The term fuzzy logic is used in this paper to describe an imprecise logical system, FL, in which the truth-values are fuzzy subsets of the unit interval with linguistic labels such as true, false, not true, very true, quite true, not very true and not very false, etc. The truth-value set, , of FL is assumed to be generated by a context-free grammar, with a semantic rule providing a means of computing the meaning of each linguistic truth-value in as a (...) fuzzy subset of [0, 1].Since is not closed under the operations of negation, conjunction, disjunction and implication, the result of an operation on truth-values in requires, in general, a linguistic approximation by a truth-value in . As a consequence, the truth tables and the rules of inference in fuzzy logic are (i) inexact and (ii) dependent on the meaning associated with the primary truth-value true as well as the modifiers very, quite, more or less, etc. (shrink)

I defend a one category ontology: an ontology that denies that we need more than one fundamental category to support the ontological structure of the world. Categorical fundamentality is understood in terms of the metaphysically prior, as that in which everything else in the world consists. One category ontologies are deeply appealing, because their ontological simplicity gives them an unmatched elegance and spareness. I’m a fan of a one category ontology that collapses the distinction between particular and property, replacing it (...) with a single fundamental category of intrinsic characters or qualities. We may describe the qualities as qualitative charactersor as modes, perhaps on the model of Aristotelian qualitative (nonsubstantial) kinds, and I will use the term “properties” interchangeably with “qualities”. The qualities are repeatable and reasonably sparse, although, as I discuss in section 2.6, there are empirical reasons that may suggest, depending on one’s preferred fundamental physical theory, that they include irreducibly intensive qualities. There are no uninstantiated qualities. I also assume that the fundamental qualitative natures are intrinsic, although physics may ultimately suggest that some of them are extrinsic. On my view, matter, concrete objects, abstract objects, and perhaps even spacetime are constructed from mereological fusions of qualities, so the world is simply a vast mixture of qualities, including polyadic properties (i.e., relations). This means that everything there is, including concrete objects like persons or stars, is a quality, a qualitative fusion, or a portion of the extended qualitative fusion that is the worldwhole. I call my view mereological bundle theory. (shrink)

The target article attempted to draw connections between broad swaths of evidence by noticing a common thread: Abstract, symbolic, compositional codes, that is, language-of-thoughts (LoTs). Commentators raised concerns about the evidence and offered fascinating extensions to areas we overlooked. Here we respond and highlight the many specific empirical questions to be answered in the next decade and beyond.

The question I want to explore is whether experience supports an antireductionist ontology of time, that is, whether we should take it to support an ontology that includes a primitive, monadic property of nowness responsible for the special feel of events in the present, and a relation of passage that events instantiate in virtue of literally passing from the future, to the present, and then into the past.

This book by leading international scholars in the fields of history, philosophy and politics restores the subject to a place at the very centre of political theory and practice.

Critics of contemporary metaphysics argue that it attempts to do the hard work of science from the ease of the armchair. Physics, not metaphysics, tells us about the fundamental facts of the world, and empirical psychology is best placed to reveal the content of our concepts about the world. Exploring and understanding the world through metaphysical reflection is obsolete. In this paper, I will show why this critique of metaphysics fails, arguing that metaphysical methods used to make claims about the (...) world are similar to scientific methods used to make claims about the world, but that the subjects of metaphysics are not the subjects of science. Those who argue that metaphysics uses a problematic methodology to make claims about subjects better covered by natural science get the situation exactly the wrong way around: metaphysics has a distinctive subject matter, not a distinctive methodology. The questions metaphysicians address are different from those of scientists, but the methods employed to develop and select theories are similar. In the first section of the paper, I will describe the sort of subject matter that metaphysics tends to engage with. In the second section of the paper, I will show how metaphysical theories are classes of models and discuss the roles of experience, common sense and thought experiments in the construction and evaluation of such models. Finally, in the last section I will discuss the way these methodological points help us to understand the metaphysical project. Getting the right account of the metaphysical method allows us to better understand the relationship between science and metaphysics, to explain why doing metaphysics successfully involves having a range of different theories, to understand the role of thought experiments involving fictional worlds, and to situate metaphysical realism in a scientifically realist context. (shrink)