In this paper, I identify a form of epistemic insensitivity that occurs when someone fails to make proper use of the epistemic tools at their disposal in order to bring their beliefs in line with epistemically relevant evidence that is available to them. I call this kind of insensitivity agential insensitivity because it stems from the epistemic behavior of an individual agent. Agential insensitivity can manifest as a failure to either attend to relevant and available evidence, or appropriately interpret evidence (...) that is attended to. The concept of agential insensitivity allows us to conceptualize the kind of not-knowing involved in forms of ignorance that are cultivated and maintained by individual agents, especially when this ignorance is enabled or encouraged by social structures. I use the skepticism about racial disparities in policing practices that is displayed by many white Americans as a lens for exploring this connection. Understanding agential insensitivity thus provides insight into both social and epistemic phenomena. (shrink)

In the last two decades few topics in philosophy of science have received as much attention as mechanistic explanation. A significant motivation for these accounts is that scientists frequently use the term “mechanism” in their explanations of biological phenomena. While scientists appeal to a variety of causal concepts in their explanations, many philosophers argue or assume that all of these concepts are well understood with the single notion of mechanism. This reveals a significant problem with mainstream mechanistic accounts– although philosophers (...) use the term “mechanism” interchangeably with other causal concepts, this is not something that scientists always do. This paper analyses two causal concepts in biology–the notions of “mechanism” and “pathway”–and how they figure in biological explanation. I argue that these concepts have unique features, that they are associated with distinct strategies of causal investigation, and that they figure in importantly different types of explanation. (shrink)

Communication and Conflict Management Training for Clinical Bioethics Committees Content Type Journal Article Pages 341-349 DOI 10.1007/s10730-009-9116-7 Authors Lauren M. Edelstein, Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Howard County General Hospital 5755 Cedar Lane Columbia MD 21044 USA Evan G. DeRenzo, Washington Hospital Center Center for Ethics 110 Irving St Washington, D.C. NW 20010 USA Elizabeth Waetzig, Change Matrix Inc. 485 Maylin St. Pasadena CA 91105 USA Craig Zelizer, Georgetown University Department of Government 3240 Prospect St. Washington, D.C. NW 20057 USA Nneka (...) O. Mokwunye, Washington Hospital Center Center for Ethics 110 Irving St Washington, D.C. NW 20010 USA Journal HEC Forum Online ISSN 1572-8498 Print ISSN 0956-2737 Journal Volume Volume 21 Journal Issue Volume 21, Number 4. (shrink)

Damon Tweedy is a psychiatrist, lawyer, and writer. He's also Black. While in his first year as a medical student at Duke University, one of his professors approached him in the classroom and asked why the light bulb in the room hadn't been changed, as requested. Tweedy realized that his professor assumed he was a maintenance worker, not a student. Tweedy never took up this incident with the professor, nor did the professor ever apologize. Tweedy recounts that his best "revenge" (...) would be to excel in the class, which he ultimately did. At the end of the semester, upon learning that Tweedy received the second highest grade of over one hundred students, this professor invited him to work as a research assistant in his... (shrink)

This paper demonstrates how the problematic kinds of epistemic power that physicians have can diminish the epistemic privilege that pregnant women have over their bodies and can put them in a state of epistemic powerlessness. This result, I argue, constitutes an epistemic injustice for many pregnant women. A reconsideration of how we understand and care for pregnant women and of the physician–patient relationship can provide us with a valuable context and starting point for helping to alleviate the knowledge/power problems that (...) are symptomatic of the current system and structure of medicine. I suggest that we can begin to confront this kind of injustice if medicine adopts a more phenomenological understanding of bodies and if physicians and patients—in this case, pregnant women—become what I call “epistemic peers.”. (shrink)

We argue that Koch’s postulates are best understood within an interventionist account of causation, in the sense described in Woodward. We show how this treatment helps to resolve interpretive puzzles associated with Koch’s work and how it clarifies the different roles the postulates play in providing useful, yet not universal criteria for disease causation. Our paper is an effort at rational reconstruction; we attempt to show how Koch’s postulates and reasoning make sense and are normatively justified within an interventionist framework (...) and more difficult to understand within alternative frameworks for thinking about causation. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore disciplinary variation in valuation practices by comparing the way research groups accumulate credibility across four epistemic cultures. Our analysis is based on case studies of four high-performing research groups representing very different epistemic cultures in humanities, social sciences, geosciences and mathematics. In each case we interviewed about ten researchers, analyzed relevant documents and observed a couple of meetings. In all four cases we found a cyclical process of accumulating credibility. At the same time, we found (...) significant differences in the manifestation of the six main resources that are part of the cycle, the mechanisms of conversion between these resources, the overall structure and the average speed of the credibility cycle. The different ways in which the groups use data and produce arguments affect the whole cycle of accumulating credibility. In some cultures, journal publications are the main source of recognition, but in others one can earn significant amounts of recognition for conference contributions or service to the academic community. Moreover, the collaboration practices in the respective fields strongly influence the connection between arguments and publications. In cultures where teams of researchers collaboratively produce arguments, it is more strongly embedded in the process of writing publications. We conclude that the credibility cycle can only be used as an analytical tool to explain the behavior of researchers or research groups when taking differences across epistemic cultures into account. (shrink)

Finding things funny is a pervasive aspect of human mental and social life, but humor has been neglected in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Recently, however, there has been a swell of interest in the topic. This essay critically introduces and evaluates contemporary developments in the field, and generates an associated list of questions that a successful theory of humor should be able to answer.

Abstract This paper examines a convergence between Heidegger's reconceptualization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and some recent work in feminist philosophy on relational autonomy. Both view the concept of autonomy to be misguided, given that our capacity to be self-directed is dependent upon our ability to enter into and sustain meaningful relationships. Both attempt to overturn the notion of a subject as an isolated, atomistic individual and to show that selfhood requires, and is based upon, one's relation to and dependence upon (...) others. The paper argues that Heidegger's notion of authentic Mitsein (being-with) rejects traditional notions of autonomy and subjectivity in favor of a relational model of selfhood. Ultimately, it provides a new point of entry into contemporary debates within feminist philosophy on Heidegger's thinking and defends Heidegger from certain feminist critiques. (shrink)

When developing computational models to analyze the tradeoffs between climate risk management strategies (i.e., mitigation, adaptation, or geoengineering), scientists make explicit and implicit decisions that are influenced by their beliefs, values and preferences. Model descriptions typically include only the explicit decisions and are silent on value judgments that may explain these decisions. Eliciting scientists’ mental models, a systematic approach to determining how they think about climate risk management, can help to gain a clearer understanding of their modeling decisions. In order (...) to identify and represent the role of values, beliefs and preferences on decisions, we used an augmented mental models research approach, namely values-informed mental models (ViMM). We conducted and qualitatively analyzed interviews with eleven climate risk management scientists. Our results suggest that these scientists use a similar decision framework to each other to think about modeling climate risk management tradeoffs, including eight specific decisions ranging from defining the model objectives to evaluating the model’s results. The influence of values on these decisions varied between our scientists and between the specific decisions. For instance, scientists invoked ethical values (e.g., concerns about human welfare) when defining objectives, but epistemic values (e.g., concerns about model consistency) were more influential when evaluating model results. ViMM can (i) enable insights that can inform the design of new computational models and (ii) make value judgments explicit and more inclusive of relevant values. This transparency can help model users to better discern the relevance of model results to their own decision framing and concerns. (shrink)

According to grounded cognition, words whose semantics contain sensory-motor features activate sensory-motor simulations, which, in turn, interact with spatial responses to produce grounded congruency effects. Growing evidence shows these congruency effects do not always occur, suggesting instead that the grounded features in a word's meaning do not become active automatically across contexts. Researchers sometimes use this as evidence that concepts are not grounded, further concluding that grounded information is peripheral to the amodal cores of concepts. We first review broad evidence (...) that words do not have conceptual cores, and that even the most salient features in a word's meaning are not activated automatically. Then, in three experiments, we provide further evidence that grounded congruency effects rely dynamically on context, with the central grounded features in a concept becoming active only when the current context makes them salient. Even when grounded features are central to a word's meaning, their activation depends on task conditions. (shrink)

This article interprets Teresa Brennan’s work on the forgetting of affect transmission in conjunction with Sylvia Wynter’s argument concerning the rise of Western Man through the dehumanization of native and African peoples. While not directly in dialogue, Wynter’s decolonial reading of Foucault’s epistemic ruptures enriches Brennan’s inquiry into this “forgetting,” given that callous, repeated acts of cruelty characteristic of Western imperialism and slavery required a denial of the capacity to sense suffering in others perceived as differently human. Supplementing Brennan with (...) Wynter, we can better describe the limits of sympathy discourses as resting on identification and perceived sameness. In turn, Brennan comes to Wynter’s defense in her call for a new science of plural cultures to redefine the human, which some have interpreted as a positivist misreading of Frantz Fanon. Brennan and Wynter alike have been criticized for their appeals to science; yet, I defend their respective proposals for social-scientific inquiry with support from Brennan’s response to the 1996 Sokal Hoax: the influence of the social on the biological body is, indeed, difficult to study, but this does not invalidate the inquiry as such. (shrink)

Two decades ago, in 1994, in the context of the 4th EU Framework Programme, ELSA was introduced as a label for developing and funding research into the ethical, legal and social aspects of emerging sciences and technologies. Currently, particularly in the context of EU funding initiatives such as Horizon2020, a new label has been forged, namely Responsible Research and Innovation. What is implied in this metonymy, this semantic shift? What is so new about RRI in comparison to ELSA? First of (...) all, for both labels, the signifier was introduced in a top-down manner, well before the concept that was signified by it had acquired a clear and stable profile. In other words, the signifier preceded the research strategies actually covered by these labels. Moreover, the newness of RRI does not reside in its interactive and anticipatory orientation, as is suggested by authors who introduced the term, but rather in its emphases on social-economic impacts. (shrink)

At the core of the sense of agency for self-produced action is the sense that I, and not some other agent, am producing and directing those actions. While there is an ever-expanding body of empirical research investigating the sense of agency for bodily action, there has, to date, been little empirical investigation of the sense of agency for thought. The present study uses the novel Mind-to-Mind paradigm, in which the agentive source of a target thought is ambiguous, to measure misattributions (...) of agency. Seventy-two percent of participants made at least one misattribution of agency during a 5-min trial. Misattributions were significantly more frequent when the target thought was an arousing negative thought as compared to a neutral control. The findings establish a novel protocol for measuring the sense of agency for thought, and suggest that both contextual factors and emotional experience play a role in its generation. (shrink)

In vitro gametogenesis (IVG) might offer numerous research and clinical benefits. Some potential clinical applications of IVG, such as allowing opposite‐sex couples experiencing infertility to have genetically related children, have attracted support. Others, such as enabling same‐sex reproduction and solo reproduction, have attracted significantly more criticism. In this paper, we examine how different ethical principles might help us to draw lines and distinguish between ethically desirable and undesirable uses of IVG. We discuss the alleged distinction between therapeutic and non‐therapeutic uses (...) of assisted reproduction in the context of IVG, and show how it is both problematic to apply in practice and theoretically dubious. We then discuss how the ethical principles of reproductive justice and beneficence apply to IVG for opposite‐sex reproduction, same‐sex reproduction, and solo reproduction. We suggest that these principles generate strong reasons for the use of IVG for opposite‐sex and same‐sex reproduction, but not for solo reproduction. (shrink)

From these elements, however, genealogy retrieves an indispensable restraint: it must record the singularity of events … in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles.In much of what has been called the “affective turn,” Michel Foucault has figured as a paranoid (...) foil where he has been mentioned at all. Both continental feminists—influenced by Gilles Deleuze’s work on Spinoza and Nietzsche—and queer theorists—for whom affect presents an alternative to the normalizing .. (shrink)

For a variety of reasons, it's difficult to determine, with any accuracy, the number of trans and gender nonbinary folks living in the United States.1 Data are difficult to obtain since neither the U.S. Census Bureau nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey people's gender identity. But even if they did, responses would likely be unreliable. Many members of these two groups are hesitant to answer such questions for fear of their safety, resulting discrimination, or because they disagree (...) on the definition of what it means to be transgender. It's also difficult to obtain accurate numbers on these groups since most medical forms still rely on a two-sex system of... (shrink)

Modern medicine is often said to have originated with nineteenth century germ theory, which attributed diseases to bacterial contagions. The success of this theory is often associated with an underlying principle referred to as the “doctrine of specific etiology”. This doctrine refers to specificity at the level of disease causation or etiology. While the importance of this doctrine is frequently emphasized in the philosophical, historical, and medical literature, these sources lack a clear account of the types of specificity that it (...) involves and why exactly they matter. This paper argues that nineteenth century germ theory involves two types of specificity at the level of etiology. One type receives significant attention in the literature, but its influence on modern medicine has been misunderstood. A second type is present in this model, but it has been completely overlooked in the extant literature. My analysis clarifies how these types of specificity led to a novel conception of etiology that continues to figure in medicine today. (shrink)

The periodic table represents and organizes all known chemical elements on the basis of their properties. While the importance of this table in chemistry is uncontroversial, the role that it plays in scientific reasoning remains heavily disputed. Many philosophers deny the explanatory role of the table and insist that it is “merely” classificatory (Shapere, in F. Suppe (Ed.) The structure of scientific theories, University of Illinois Press, Illinois, 1977; Scerri in Erkenntnis 47:229–243, 1997). In particular, it has been claimed that (...) the table does not figure in causal explanation because it “does not reveal causal structure” (Woody in Science after the practice turn in the philosophy, history, and social studies of science, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, New York, 2014). This paper provides an analysis of what it means to say that a scientific figure reveals causal structure and it argues that the modern periodic table does just this. It also clarifies why these “merely” classificatory claims have seemed so compelling–this is because these claims often focus on the earliest periodic tables, which lack the causal structure present in modern versions. (shrink)

In ‘Affectivity in Heidegger I: Moods and Emotions in Being and Time’, we explicated the crucial role that Martin Heidegger assigns to our capacity to affectively find ourselves in the world. There, our discussion was restricted to Division I of Being and Time. Specifically, we discussed how Befindlichkeit as a basic existential and moods as the ontic counterparts of Befindlichkeit make circumspective engagement with the world possible. Indeed, according to Heidegger, it is primarily through moods that the world is ‘opened (...) up’ and revealed to us as a world that is suffused with values and entities that already matter to us. In this companion essay, our aim is to expand our analysis of affectivity in the following ways: first, we revisit our discussion of Befindlichkeit in light of Heidegger's discussion of temporality in Division II of BT; second, we discuss the basic or fundamental mood of boredom and its ontological significance; we conclude by providing a brief characterization of how Heidegger's notion of mood changes in his later thinking. (shrink)

Slurring language has had a lot of recent interest, but the focus has been almost exclusively on racial slurs. Gendered pejoratives, on the other hand—terms like “slut,” “bitch,” or “sissy”—do not fit into existing accounts of slurring terms, as these accounts require the existence of neutral correlates, which, I argue, these gendered pejoratives lack. Rather than showing that these terms are not slurs, I argue that this challenges the assumption that slurs must have neutral correlates, and so that a new (...) approach to thinking about the meaning of slurring terms is required. (shrink)

A fundamental goal of research in neuroscience is to uncover the causal structure of the brain. This focus on causation makes sense, because causal information can provide explanations of brain function and identify reliable targets with which to understand cognitive function and prevent or change neurological conditions and psychiatric disorders. In this research, one of the most frequently used causal concepts is ‘mechanism’ — this is seen in the literature and language of the field, in grant and funding inquiries that (...) specify what research is supported, and in journal guidelines on which contributions are considered for publication. In these contexts, mechanisms are commonly tied to expressions of the main aims of the field and cited as the ‘fundamental’, ‘foundational’ and/or ‘basic’ unit for understanding the brain. Despite its common usage and perceived importance, mechanism is used in different ways that are rarely distinguished. Given that this concept is defined in different ways throughout the field — and that there is often no clarification of which definition is intended — there remains a marked ambiguity about the fundamental goals, orientation and principles of the field. Here we provide an overview of causation and mechanism from the perspectives of neuroscience and philosophy of science, in order to address these challenges. (shrink)

Kaplan and Craver claim that all explanations in neuroscience appeal to mechanisms. They extend this view to the use of mathematical models in neuroscience and propose a constraint such models must meet in order to be explanatory. I analyze a mathematical model used to provide explanations in dynamical systems neuroscience and indicate how this explanation cannot be accommodated by the mechanist framework. I argue that this explanation is well characterized by Batterman’s account of minimal model explanations and that it demonstrates (...) how relationships between explanatory models in neuroscience and the systems they represent is more complex than has been appreciated. (shrink)

While there is now considerable anxiety about whether the psychological theory presupposed by virtue ethics is empirically sustainable, analogous issues have received little attention in the virtue epistemology literature. This paper argues that virtue epistemology encounters challenges reminiscent of those recently encountered by virtue ethics: just as seemingly trivial variation in context provokes unsettling variation in patterns of moral behavior, trivial variation in context elicits unsettling variation in patterns of cognitive functioning. Insofar as reliability is a condition on epistemic virtue, (...) we have reason to doubt that human beings possess the cognitive materials required for epistemic virtue, and thereby reason to think that virtue epistemology is threatened by skepticism. We conclude that while virtue epistemology has resources for addressing this challenge, exploiting these resources forces tradeoffs between empirical and normative adequacy. (shrink)

As clinical trials end, little is understood about how participants exiting from clinical trials approach decisions related to the removal or post-trial use of investigational brain implants, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices. This empirical bioethics study examines how research participants experience the process of exit from research at the end of clinical trials of implanted neural devices. Using a modified grounded theory study design, we conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 16 former research participants from clinical trials of DBS (...) and responsive neurostimulation (RNS). Open-ended questions elicited motivations for joining the trial, understanding of study procedures at the time of initial informed consent, the process of exiting from research, and decisions about device removal or post-trial device use. Thematic analysis identified categories related to: limited preparedness for the end of research participation, straightforwardness of decisions to explant or keep the device, reconciling with the end of research participation, reconciling post-trial expectations, and achieving a sense of closure after exit from research. A preliminary theoretical model describes contextual factors influencing the process and experience of exit from research. Experiences of clinical trial participants should guide research practices to enhance the ethical design and conduct of clinical trials in DBS and other brain devices. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Accurate self‐administration of antiretroviral medication therapy for HIV/aids is a significant clinical and ethical concern because of its implications for individual morbidity and mortality, the health of the public, and escalating healthcare costs. However, the traditional construction of patient medication adherence is oversimplified, myopic, and ethically problematic. Adherence relies on existing social power structures and western normative assumptions about the proper roles of patients and providers, and principally focuses on patient variables, obscuring the powerful socioeconomic and institutional influences on (...) behaviour. Some professionals advocate for alternate approaches to adherence, but many of the available alternatives remain conceptually underdeveloped. Using HIV/aids as an exemplar, this paper presents medication practice as a theoretical reconstruction and explicates its conceptual and ethical evolution. We first propose that one of these alternatives, medication practice, broadens the understanding of individuals’ medication‐taking behaviour, speaks to the inherent power inequities in the patient‐provider interaction, and addresses the ethical shortcomings in the traditional construal. We then integrate medication practice with feminist thought, further validating individuals’ situated knowledge, choices, and multiple roles; more fully recognizing the individual as a multidimensional, autonomous human being; and reducing notions of obedience and deference to authority. Blame is thus extricated from the healthcare relationship, reshaping the traditionally adversarial components of the interaction, and eliminating the view of adherence as a patient problem in need of patient‐centred interventions. (shrink)

Poor Eliza -- Pax Americana : the case of Show boat -- National brands, national body : Imitation of life -- Uncle Sam needs a wife : citizenship and denegation -- Remembering love, forgetting everything else : Now, voyager -- "It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes" : femininity, formalism, and Dorothy Parker -- The compulsion to repeat femininity : Landscape for a good woman and The life and loves of a she-devil.

According to mainstream philosophical views causal explanation in biology and neuroscience is mechanistic. As the term ‘mechanism’ gets regular use in these fields it is unsurprising that philosophers consider it important to scientific explanation. What is surprising is that they consider it the only causal term of importance. This paper provides an analysis of a new causal concept—it examines the cascade concept in science and the causal structure it refers to. I argue that this concept is importantly different from the (...) notion of mechanism and that this difference matters for our understanding of causation and explanation in science. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's account of attunement [Befindlichkeit] through mood [Stimmung] is unprecedented in the history of philosophy and groundbreaking vis-à-vis contemporary accounts of emotion. On his view, moods are not mere mental states that result from, arise out of, or are caused by our situation or context. Rather, moods are fundamental modes of existence that are disclosive of the way one is or finds oneself [sich befinden] in the world. Mood is one of the basic modes through which we experience the (...) world and through which the world is made present to us. Moreover, moods are the lenses through which things, people, animals, events, and aspects in the world matter to us. In this paper, I make the case that Heidegger's insights with respect to mood can and ought to be extended beyond the narrow scope of his fundamental ontology in which they were developed. I argue that contemporary accounts of mood within psychology ought to take these Heideggerian insights seriously and use them when defining, studying, evaluating, and drawing conclusions about the nature of moods. There are three sections to my paper. In section 1, I delineate Heidegger's account of mood. In section 2, I turn to some key studies on mood in psychology, and I elaborate upon some of the main shortcomings in this literature. In section 3, I suggest how psychology might benefit from understanding and utilizing a Heideggerian-inspired phenomenology of mood. (shrink)

Individuals engage in moral cleansing, a compensatory process to reaffirm one's moral identity, when one's moral self-concept is threatened. However, too much moral cleansing can license individuals to engage in future unethical acts. This study examined the effects of incentives and consequences of one's actions on cheating behavior and moral cleansing. Results found that incentives and consequences interacted such that unethical thoughts were especially threatening, resulting in more moral cleansing, when large incentives to cheat were present and cheating explicitly harmed (...) others. Implications are discussed in terms of ethics training, using incentives as motivators, and the depersonalized norms of science. (shrink)