The acquaintance debate in aesthetics has been traditionally divided between pessimists, who argue that testimony does not provide others with aesthetic knowledge of artworks, and optimists, who hold that acquaintance with an artwork is not a necessary precondition for acquiring aesthetic knowledge. In this paper I propose a reconciliationist solution to the acquaintance debate: while aesthetic knowledge can be had via testimony, aesthetic judgment requires acquaintance with the artwork. I develop this solution by situating it within a virtue aesthetics framework (...) based on Ernest Sosa's virtue epistemology. I go on to apply the solution to the debates on moral testimony and expert testimony. An interesting variant on Gettier cases emerges: cases in which subjects have knowledge, but it has been formed by the wrong competence. (shrink)

Kendall Walton’s project in ‘Categories of Art’ (1970) is to answer two questions. First, does the history of an artwork’s production determine its aesthetic properties? Second, how – if at all – should knowledge of the history of a work’s production influence our aesthetic judgments of its properties? While his answer to the first has been clearly understood, his answer to the second less so. Contrary to how many have interpreted Walton, such knowledge is not necessary for making aesthetic judgments; (...) perceiving an artwork as belonging to a (correct) category of art requires no art-historical knowledge whatsoever. Moreover, contextualist attempts to incorporate art-historical knowledge via the mechanism of cognitive penetration are incompatible with Walton’s claim that categories of art must be perceptually distinguishable. Here I propose a way of elaborating Walton’s view that avoids this difficulty and reconciles contextualism with aesthetic perception, the view that we perceive aesthetic properties. (shrink)

Does the scope of beliefs that people can form on the basis of perception remain fixed, or can it be amplified with learning? The answer to this question is important for our understanding of why and when we ought to trust experts, and also for assessing the plausibility of epistemic foundationalism. The empirical study of perceptual expertise suggests that experts can indeed enrich their perceptual experiences through learning. Yet this does not settle the epistemic status of their beliefs. One might (...) hold that the background knowledge of experts is the cause of their enriched perceptual experience – what is known as cognitive permeation – and so their subsequent beliefs are only mediately justified because they are epistemically dependent on this background knowledge. I argue against this view. Perceptual expertise is not the result of cognitive permeation but is rather the result of perceptual learning, and perceptual learning does not involve cognition in a way that entails cognitive permeation. Perceptual expertise thus provides a means of widening the scope of the immediately justified beliefs that experts can form. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is an enduring change in the perceptual system – and our resulting perceptions – due to practice or repeated exposure to a perceptual stimulus. It is involved in the acquisition of perceptual expertise: the ability to make rapid and reliable high-level categorizations of objects unavailable to novices. Attentional weighting is one process by which perceptual learning occurs. Advancing our understanding of this process is of particular importance for understanding what is learned in perceptual learning. Attentional weighting seems to (...) favour the hypothesis that what experts learn is simply to better direct their attention to elements of the stimulus relevant to making post-perceptual categorizations. Here I argue against this hypothesis. Attentional weighting is an integral component of the process that allows experts to come to represent high-level properties in perceptual experience. (shrink)

It has recently become popular to suggest that cognition can be explained as a process of Bayesian prediction error minimization. Some advocates of this view propose that attention should be understood as the optimization of expected precisions in the prediction-error signal (Clark, 2013, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2012, 2013). This proposal successfully accounts for several attention-related phenomena. We claim that it cannot account for all of them, since there are certain forms of voluntary attention that it cannot accommodate. (...) We therefore suggest that, although the theory of Bayesian prediction error minimization introduces some powerful tools for the explanation of mental phenomena, its advocates have been wrong to claim that Bayesian prediction error minimization is ‘all the brain ever does’. (shrink)

For many philosophers, there is a tension inherent to shame as an inward-looking, yet intersubjective, emotion: that between the role of the ashamed self and the part of the shaming Other in pronouncing the judgement of shame. Simply put, the issue is this: either the perspective of the ashamed self takes precedence in autonomously choosing to feel shame, and the necessary role of the audience is overlooked, or else the view of the shaming Other prevails in heteronomously casting the shame, (...) and the ashamed individual’s agency becomes problematically understated. I argue that this debate is fundamentally misguided insofar as it assumes that shame must be exclusively contingent upon either the perspective of the self or that of the Other, when it is in fact dependent upon both at once. This is the “double movement” of shame: an appraisal of the self that is at once social and private. (shrink)

The notion that shame is a global emotion, one which takes the whole self as its focus, has long enjoyed a near consensus in both the psychological and philosophical literature. Recently, however, a number of philosophers have questioned this conventional wisdom: on their view, most everyday instances of shame are not global, but are instead limited to a specific aspect of one’s identity. I argue that this objection stems from an overemphasis on the cognitive dimension of shame. Its proponents cannot (...) make sense of global shame because they only understand the emotion in terms of an intellectual self-evaluation, where I am ashamed upon assessing myself to have disappointed a particular standard or ideal. However, when shame is understood as arising early on in life from one’s threatened connection with others, and as having affective, embodied, and unconscious aspects alongside its later cognitive ones, the intuition that it feels all-encompassing makes more sense. Our earliest experiences of shame, which are largely devoid of complex cognitive content, are global because they are experienced as casting doubt upon our lovability in general. It is only later, as cognition develops, that we learn to hang this sense of overall defectiveness, which is reawakened in subsequent shame experiences, onto specific parts of the self. While this might lead us in adulthood to intellectually understand our shame as having a local basis, such as a failed norm or ideal, its global phenomenology will remain. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with (...) tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark’s (2018) embodied inference; Seth’s (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli’s (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain ‘s cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception. (shrink)

This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total (...) benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change. (shrink)

How one should respond to shame is a moral consideration that has figured relatively little in philosophical discourse. Recent psychological insights tell us that, at its core, shame reflects an unfulfilled need for emotional connection. As such, it often results in psychological and moral damage—harm which, I argue, renders shaming practices very difficult to justify. Following this, I posit that a morally preferable response to shame is one that successfully addresses and dispels the emotion. To this end, I critique two (...) common responses to shame, compliance and anger, and then propose an alternative: the practice of emotional vulnerability. (shrink)

Attempts to engineer a generally intelligent artificial agent have yet to meet with success, largely due to the (intercontext) frame problem. Given that humans are able to solve this problem on a daily basis, one strategy for making progress in AI is to look for disanalogies between humans and computers that might account for the difference. It has become popular to appeal to the emotions as the means by which the frame problem is solved in human agents. The purpose of (...) this paper is to evaluate the tenability of this proposal, with a primary focus on Dylan Evans’ search hypothesis and Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. I will argue that while the emotions plausibly help solve the intracontext frame problem, they do not function to solve or help solve the intercontext frame problem, as they are themselves subject to contextual variability. (shrink)

How do institutions respond to expert contests over epistemologies of sex and gender? In this article, I consider how epistemological ascendancy in debates over the regulation of women athletes with high testosterone is established within a legal setting. Approaching regulation as an institutional act that defines forms of embodied difference, the legitimacy of which may be called into question, I show how sexed bodies are enacted through and as part of determinations of expertise. I focus on proceedings from 2015 when (...) the Court of Arbitration for Sport was asked to decide whether an Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand, could compete as a female athlete. Despite acknowledging that sexed bodies are unruly, the court ultimately endorsed the use of testosterone as seemingly essential to women’s athletic performance, thereby reasserting a two-category model of biological difference. The legitimacy of these regulatory efforts was established through the concurrent narrowing of expertise and the body, a process that is also revealed to be gendered. (shrink)

This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total (...) benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change. (shrink)

While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...) second strand of the puzzle arises when we widen the scope of aesthetic experience. The very same aesthetic properties that seem to require training for their perception in artworks do not appear to require training to perceive in objects of everyday aesthetic appreciation and natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that a prominent extant attempt to explain how training is compatible with aesthetic perception—cognitive permeation—is an inadequate solution. I also develop a positive view of aesthetic perception that provides a unified solution to both strands of the puzzle. (shrink)

Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scientific and methodological expertise, but also expertise gained through the experience of participating in research and/or being a recipient of research outcomes. Engagement is, by its nature, reciprocal and relational: the process of engaging research participants, patients, citizens and others brings them closer to the research but also brings the research closer (...) to them. When translating research into practice, engaging the public and other stakeholders is explicitly intended to make the outcomes of translation relevant to its constituency of users. In practice, engagement faces numerous challenges and is often time-consuming, expensive and ‘thorny’ work. We explore the epistemic and ontological considerations and implications of four common critiques of engagement methodologies that contest: representativeness, communication and articulation, impacts and outcome, and democracy. The ECOUTER methodology addresses problems of representation and epistemic foundationalism using a methodology that asks, “How could it be otherwise?” ECOUTER affords the possibility of engagement where spatial and temporal constraints are present, relying on saturation as a method of ‘keeping open’ the possible considerations that might emerge and including reflexive use of qualitative analytic methods. This paper describes the ECOUTER process, focusing on one worked example and detailing lessons learned from four other pilots. ECOUTER uses mind-mapping techniques to ‘open up’ engagement, iteratively and organically. ECOUTER aims to balance the breadth, accessibility and user-determination of the scope of engagement. An ECOUTER exercise comprises four stages: engagement and knowledge exchange; analysis of mindmap contributions; development of a conceptual schema ; and feedback, refinement and development of recommendations. ECOUTER refuses fixed truths but also refuses a fixed nature. Its promise lies in its flexibility, adaptability and openness. ECOUTER will be formed and re-formed by the needs and creativity of those who use it. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is commonly understood as conferring some benefit to the learner, such as allowing for the extraction of more information from the environment. However, perceptual learning can be biased in several different ways, some of which do not appear to provide such a benefit. Here we outline a systematic framework for thinking about bias in perceptual learning and discuss how several cases fit into this framework. We argue these biases are compatible with an understanding in which perceptual learning is (...) beneficial, but that its benefits are tied to both a person's narrow interests and the training environment or domain, and so if there are changes to either of these, then benefits can turn into liabilities, though these are often temporary. (shrink)

This article offers an account of organizational change to explain why women leaders are underrepresented compared to women athletes in many sports organizations. I distinguish between accommodation and transformation as forms of change: the former includes women without challenging binary constructions of gender, the latter transforms an organization’s gendered logic. Through a case study of the International Olympic Committee from 1967-1995, I trace how the organization came to define gender equity primarily in terms of accommodating women’s segregated athletic participation. Key (...) to this was the construction of women’s bodies as athletically able but inferior to men, an arrangement formalized in codified rules and procedures and legitimized by external stakeholders. Defined in these terms, gender equity did little to transform the organization’s binary and hierarchically gendered logic, which continued to shape the informal norms and procedures associated with the organization’s allegedly gender-neutral and meritocratic yet male-dominated leadership. I argue that the exclusion of women from ostensibly gender-integrated leadership positions allows organizations to avoid revealing gender similarity between men and women. This maintains a logic underpinned by notions of binary gender difference and masculine superiority. (shrink)

This article examines motifs of falling, recoiling, and turning across Chester Himes’ oeuvre as figurations of Black susceptibility to racial violence. These images reference and reconstruct an event from Himes’ early adulthood: his catastrophic fall down an elevator shaft. Taking a psychoanalytically oriented approach, I analyze the metonymic connections between these motifs, rather than reading them in their chronological order, using Jean Laplanche’s theory of après-coup. I argue that the recursive quality of these images in Himes’ work is not merely (...) an unconscious repetition or conscious working through of a traumatic biographical event but part of an endeavor to imagine different ways to inhabit and survive the structural trauma of Jim Crow America. (shrink)

What kind of moral principle could be sufficiently restrictive to avoid the kind of large-scale risks that have resulted in catastrophe in the past, while at the same time not be so restrictive as to halt desirable progress? Is there such a principle that is not merely a precautionary principle, but one that could be based on firm moral grounds? In this article, I set out to explore a simple idea: might it be the case that reparability could serve as (...) a moral constraint against risky policy decisions? The idea is simple, but comes in two forms. First, that it is morally wrong to impose a risk for harm that is, in principle, irreparable, such that it would bring about a permanent loss of a kind qua kind. Second, that it is morally wrong to impose a risk for a reparable (but not compensable) harm that exceeds what realistically could be repaired. I set out here to do two things. First, I describe the moral problem to be addressed for any principle-guiding decisions about risk. A central claim in this article is that risk decisions are epistemically impaired decisions, and that we must, alongside outcome uncertainty, also take both epistemic uncertainty and moral uncertainty into account. Second, I introduce the idea of reparability as a moral constraint in the form of two versions of the Reparability Principle. Such a principle, I argue, could have some interesting advantages that seem both morally intuitive and that come with some advantages against some of the epistemic challenges posed by risk impositions. (shrink)

_The Tender Bud_ is the moving story of one woman's journey through breast cancer. The woman in question happens to be a senior psychiatrist of broad learning and deep clinical insight. Madeleine Meldin weathered the crisis of breast cancer without the support of an immediate family and in the context of ongoing professional burdens. This book is the journal that she wrote for herself as an aid to coping with the personal upheaval of diagnosis, mastectomy, and the aftermath of (...) treatment. It was written while these events unfolded. With arresting candor, Meldin chronicles her emotions at each stage of her odyssey - the recurrent cycles of denial, anxiety, and despair; the conflicting feelings engendered by her physicians, surgeons, and the treatment "establishment" in general; her struggle between resignation and emergent hopefulness. Unique to Meldin's account is her ongoing juxtaposition of the different dimensions of "having cancer." Simply and gracefully, she chronicles the everyday dimension of cancer, with its obligation to proceed maturely and dispassionately with medical and surgical care, to meet one's professional responsibilities, to maintain the appearances that allow one to carry on with one's life. Meldin excels at showing how even the most mundane experiences of everyday life - conversations with friends and colleagues, the selection of clothes, a trip to the hairdresser - became saturated with her illness, with her sense of herself as a cancer patient. (shrink)

The fallacies, as traditionally conceived, are wrong ways of reasoning that nevertheless appear attractive to us. Recently, however, Woods (2013) has argued that they don’t merit such a title, and that what we take to be fallacies are instead largely virtuous forms of reasoning. This reformation of the fallacies forms part of Woods’ larger project to naturalize logic. In this paper I will look to his analysis of the argumentum ad hominem as a case study for the prospects of this (...) project. I will argue that the empirical literature on implicit bias presents a difficulty for the reformation of the ad hominem as cognitively virtuous. Cases where implicit bias influences our assessment of the truth or claim or argument are instances of ad hominem reasoning, and these qualify as fallacious on Woods’ own definition. (shrink)

Can compensation repair the moral harm of a previous wrongful act? On the one hand, some define the very function of compensation as one of restoring the moral balance. On the other hand, the dominant view on compensation is that it is insufficient to fully repair moral harm unless accompanied by an act of punishment or apology. In this paper, I seek to investigate the maximal potential of compensation. Central to my argument is a distinction between apologetic compensation and non-apologetic (...) compensation. Apologetic compensation, I argue, is an act that expresses regret and apology by means of some offer of money, goods, or services. Non-apologetic compensation is an act that seeks to restore loss or harm without expressing regret or apology. In the paper, I defend the view that acts of compensation can be apologetic and argue that such apologetic compensation is sufficient for moral repair. (shrink)

_The Tender Bud_ is the moving story of one woman's journey through breast cancer. The woman in question happens to be a senior psychiatrist of broad learning and deep clinical insight. Madeleine Meldin weathered the crisis of breast cancer without the support of an immediate family and in the context of ongoing professional burdens. This book is the journal that she wrote for herself as an aid to coping with the personal upheaval of diagnosis, mastectomy, and the aftermath of (...) treatment. It was written while these events unfolded. With arresting candor, Meldin chronicles her emotions at each stage of her odyssey - the recurrent cycles of denial, anxiety, and despair; the conflicting feelings engendered by her physicians, surgeons, and the treatment "establishment" in general; her struggle between resignation and emergent hopefulness. Unique to Meldin's account is her ongoing juxtaposition of the different dimensions of "having cancer." Simply and gracefully, she chronicles the everyday dimension of cancer, with its obligation to proceed maturely and dispassionately with medical and surgical care, to meet one's professional responsibilities, to maintain the appearances that allow one to carry on with one's life. Meldin excels at showing how even the most mundane experiences of everyday life - conversations with friends and colleagues, the selection of clothes, a trip to the hairdresser - became saturated with her illness, with her sense of herself as a cancer patient. (shrink)

In this article, our concern is to describe how body(ies) and self are performed in women’s birth narratives through the mediation of a number of significant elements, including technical devices. We will show how, in these narratives, (1) action is distributed among a series of actants, including professionals and technology; (2) that dichotomies appear which cannot be reduced to one of body/mind, but are more adequately described in terms of ‘body-in-labour’/’embodied self’, each of them being locally performed through the mediation (...) of medical practices, knowledge and technologies, the definition of these elements and of their relations being specific to each obstetrical configuration; (3) that part of professionals’ activities is devoted to the detailed management of the articulation between the body-in-labour and the embodied self, and to monitoring their joint transformations. (shrink)

This thesis is a philosophical contribution to the theories on risk communication. The topic of risk communication is approached from several different angles, but with a normative focus on equality and vulnerability. Essay I is a comment on risk perception theory and the psychometric model in particular. In risk perception research individual risk taking is described as either a result of valuing the benefits from risk taking or a failure of comprehending the severity or probability of risks. The essay argues (...) that sometimes individuals take risks simply because they are in a vulnerable position and have no other choice. Four factors are identified as crucial in risks from vulnerability: poor outset conditions, lack of reasonable options, hope and liability to disinformation. Essay II addresses the democratic approach to risk communication and the ideal of risk communication as a dialogue between more or less equal stakeholders. The Essay argues that even the more innovative and dialogue oriented approaches to risk communication are unequal. This is often blurred by the confusion between the described ideal and the description of these newer approaches. This inequality is analysed in a three-fold way: influence over the communication process; influence over and access to information; and influence over risk decisions. The Essay develops a typology of different risk communication practices and influence distributions and concludes that the form of risk communication most commonly referred in the literature is the most imbalanced kind where all three types of influence falls to the same party. Essay III explores the concept of trust, an often-mentioned objective for risk communication. The concept of trust is analyzed from previous philosophical approaches, and the idea of trust as comfortable defocusing is introduced. It is argued that not only the gains for the trustee but also the gains and risks for the truster, generally and in the case from risk communication, can be explained by this notion. It is concluded that public trust for institutions or organizations need not be framed on an individual level. Instead, the vulnerability of trusting can be counter-acted by a delegation of different stances, including both control and trust, among different individuals and institutions in society. (shrink)

Stuart Murray's 'Care and the self: biotechnology, reproduction, and the good life' utilizes Foucault's "care of the self" to examine health domains in its title. The present author discusses three important articulations of concern with the Foucauldian concepts of care of the self that are absent in the work of Murray and others: first, the voluntarism and individualism inherent in ideas about care of the self; second, the absence of the interactional and relational; and, third, the perpetuation of the interpretation (...) of Foucault's concept of governmentality, 'the conduct of conduct', as primarily coercive. (shrink)

What would political thought look like without the foundation of ethics? Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Madeleine Fagan puts forward a radical and far-reaching refusal of foundational ethics. She proposes that politics isn't built on ethics, where the two are separate things: politics and ethics are actually inseparable. The 'ethical' should not be understood as a label; it does not mean 'good' or it is not an evaluation or guide. Rather, both the (...) ethical and the political are descriptions of the context in which we find ourselves. Fagan shows us how it has become necessary to rethink the relationship between ethics and politics, based on how we practice both. In doing so, she overturns a series of common assumptions about poststructuralist ethics. It brings together an exploration of the ethical and political thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy for the first time. It provides an advanced introduction to poststructuralist ethical thought in politics and international relations. It focuses on the practical political implications of poststructuralist thought. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is variously used to provide a conceptualization of ethics from which to deduce an ethical politics, an account of the movement from ethics to politics or an exhortation to continually interrupt politics in the name of ethics. What all these approaches share is a reading of Levinas where ethics and politics are separated and ethics is prioritized. My argument in this article is that if the concept of the Third is given due weight in Levinas's work then this (...) separation and prioritization is untenable. The reading advanced foregrounds the Third and in doing so demonstrates that the unproblematized ‘ethics’ often drawn from Levinas is more complex than might initially appear. I argue that if the Third is taken seriously then Levinas's work leads to a requirement to think in terms of the ethico-political, so complicating any attempt to deduce politics from ethics which draws on this. (shrink)

This article addresses dilemmas of agency for feminism through reflections on social psychological research on the role of representations in the construction of identity by Muslim women. Engaging first with Saba Mahmood’s account of religious subjectivities in Politics of Piety, the author argues that feminist research requires a social conception of agency that addresses dialogical dynamics of representation and identity. Drawing on research concerning veiling and identity among Muslim women in the UK and Denmark, the author shows how a social (...) conception of agency may be elaborated through the analysis of how competing representations of gender are negotiated in the self–other encounter. The author argues that a dialogical approach to researching identity in context defies blunt political judgement while shedding light on the intersecting socio-cultural forces and relations of power that engage processes of resistance and re-presentation. (shrink)

[Book symposium] Are Moral Emotions Key to Informed Risk Decisions? : A Commentary on Sabine Roeser, Risk, Technology, and Moral Emotions.

This chapter addresses a general question: What is responsible risking? It explores the notion of "responsible risking" as a thick moral concept, and it argues that the notion can be given moral content that could be action-guiding and add an important tool to our moral toolbox. To impose risks responsibly, on this view, is to take on responsibility in a good way. A core part of responsible risking, this chapter argues, is some version of a Forethought Condition. Such a condition (...) requires us to not make decisions or plans such that we could not deliver on our responsibility obligations. This chapter argues that three moral obligations can be derived from descriptive notions of responsibility. They are (1) the control condition, (2) the responsibility to fix condition, and (3) the responsibility to explain condition. The idea is that in order to impose risks responsibly we ought not act in ways that undermine our ability to remain in control over the risks, undermine our ability to sort out negative outcomes by reparations or compensation, or undermine our prospects of providing an explanation for our actions that also makes sense in hindsight and to those affected. This idea is then tried out on the case of germline gene editing. It is argued that such a moral notion of responsibility is also action-guiding when we do not know for certain what is the morally right or obligatory action all-things-considered due to epistemic gaps. (shrink)

BackgroundEngagement is important within cohort studies for a number of reasons. It is argued that engaging participants within the studies they are involved in may promote their recruitment and retention within the studies. Participant input can also improve study designs, make them more acceptable for uptake by participants and aid in contextualising research communication to participants. Ultimately it is also argued that engagement needs to provide an avenue for participants to feedback to the cohort study and that this is an (...) ethical imperative. This study sought to explore the participants’ experiences and thoughts of their engagement with their birth cohort study.MethodsParticipants were recruited from the Children of the 90s (CO90s) study. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 42 participants. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, and uploaded onto Nvivo software. They were then analysed via thematic analysis with a constant comparison technique.ResultsParticipants’ experiences of their engagement with CO90s were broadly based on three aspects: communication they received from CO90s, experiences of ethical conduct from CO90s and receiving rewards from CO90s. The communication received from CO90s, ranged from newsletters explaining study findings and future studies, to more personal forms like annual greeting cards posted to each participant. Ethical conduct from CO90s mainly involved participants understanding that CO90s would keep their information confidential, that it was only involved in ‘good’ ethical research and their expectation that CO90s would always prioritise participant welfare. Some of the gifts participants said they received at CO90s included toys, shopping vouchers, results from clinical tests, and time off from school to attend data collection (Focus) days. Participants also described a temporality in their engagement with CO90s and the subsequent trust they had developed for the cohort study.ConclusionThe experiences of engagement described by participants were theorized as being based on reciprocity which was sometimes overt and other times more nuanced. We further provide empirical evidence of participants’ expectation for a reciprocal interaction with their cohort study while highlighting the trust that such an interaction fosters. Our study therefore provides key insights for other cohort studies on what participants value in their interactions with their cohort studies. (shrink)

Wayfinding is generally understood as the process of purposefully navigating to distant and non-visible destinations. Within this broad framework, uninformed searching entails finding one’s way to a target destination, in an unfamiliar environment, with no knowledge of its location. Although a variety of search strategies have been previously reported, this research was largely conducted in the laboratory or virtual environments using simplistic and often non-realistic situations, raising questions about its ecological validity. In this study, we explored how extant findings on (...) searching translate to a real-world environment, using a phenomenologically informed experiment. Our findings demonstrate a previously undescribed complex and dynamic interplay of different search strategies. Importantly, our results reveal that: (i) the presence of other people is importantly entangled with the process of searching; and (ii) people frequently probe and switch between search strategies based on local environmental characteristics. Together, our results reveal that search behaviour is critically dependent on environmental features and that searching in complex real-world settings should not be conceptualised as depending on a simple singular strategy. This raises questions about the dominance of laboratory-based experiments and their narrow cognitivist framework, highlighting the value of studying wayfinding in the real world. (shrink)

This article takes as its point of departure unexpected similarities in the ways that the experimental educator, writer and filmmaker Fernand Deligny and Jean-Luc Nancy conceptualize community. Deligny is remembered for his alternative community for non-speaking children with autism, established in the Cévennes in 1967 and founded on the absence of language and relationality as it is commonly understood. This article probes the paradox that in this community we find a rapprochement with Nancy's relational ontology. Drawing on Deligny's theoretical responses (...) to the dynamics he witnessed and the cartographical methods employed to trasce the movements of the children as they roamed, and placing these in dialogue with Nancy's texts on community through the decades, I suggest a kinship between the two thinkers which opens onto broader questions about the relationship between theories and practices of community. (shrink)