The representational theory of measurement provides a collection of results that specify the conditions under which an attribute admits of numerical representation. The original architects of the theory interpreted the formalism operationally and explicitly acknowledged that some aspects of their representations are conventional. There have been a number of recent efforts to reinterpret the formalism to arrive at a more metaphysically robust account of physical quantities. In this paper we argue that the conventional elements of the representations afforded by the (...) representational theory of measurement require careful scrutiny as one moves toward such an interpretation. To illustrate why, we show that there is a sense in which the very number system in which one represents a physical quantity such as mass or length is conventional. We argue that this result does not undermine the project of reinterpreting the representational theory of measurement for metaphysical purposes in general, but it does undermine a certain class of inferences about the nature of physical quantities that some have been tempted to draw. (shrink)

Efforts in Virginia highlight an emerging approach to improving health and well-being for the population — human-centered design intentionally focused on protecting health and improving well-being. This keynote emphasized a data-informed approach facilitated by multi-sectoral leadership that promotes alignment of community assets focused to result in system changes more likely to sustainably improve health and well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the nature of “meaning” and “meaningfulness” in the context of instrumental music education. By doing so, I propose to expand the ways in which instrumental music educators conceive their mission and the ways in which we may instill meaning in people’s lives. Traditionally, pursuits of philosophical deliberation have claimed that meaningfulness comes from either personal happiness (e.g., Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) or an impersonal sense of duty (e.g., St. Augustine, St. (...) Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant). However, philosopher Susan Wolf (2010) criticizes these positions in favor of a broader perspective, one that arises from understanding that there is a third sort of value, namely “meaningfulness.” Rightly understanding meaningfulness may help us engage more fully with a greater sense and understanding of the full potentials of eudaimonia: a life of significance and value for oneself and one’s community. Therefore, this paper links meaningfulness to a 4-E (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) account of “sense-making” in/for instrumental music education. In doing so, I discuss the aims of public-school music education; aims that engage teachers and students in meaningfulness—a meaningfulness that is ethical, embodied, enacted, and extended—in, with, and through musics and, more directly, “instrumental” music making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:My Patient, TeacherMarissa BlumI remember meeting Beatriz about 12 years ago when security was called to her office visit room by the fellow doctor-in-training who was seeing her. She was yelling loudly about her pain medications, causing a terrific commotion. I stepped in to relieve the fellow and tried to calm her down and move the visit along without anyone getting hurt or further upset. And from then on, (...) Beatriz was moved to my schedule from the fellow's for her monthly visits for her knee pain and refills of fentanyl and oxycodone. She had terrible knees and walked with a cane, almost always accompanied by her son. At one point, she came to our clinic asking to be seen but couldn't, and then fell onto her knees and rolled onto her back in the wait-room, clutching and waiving her cane, expelling expletives and railing at anyone who wanted to help but denying them that privilege. It was as though she relished exposing her pain and a lifetime of hardship for all to confront. I came down from my office to talk with her and when I couldn't convince her to get up on her own, we called EMS to assist and they took her away in an ambulance.For the first few years, I recoiled seeing her name on my schedule each month. I knew I would have to endure a barrage of labile emotions and complaints not just about her constant pain and feelings of inadequacy of her pain medications, but also about her other doctors and how they don't respond to her, or about how the rest of her family shows no care for her. Initially, these visits were hard because they were unpredictable and Beatriz also had bipolar disorder and maybe borderline personality too. I never knew which type of Beatriz I would walk in to see: Angry, tearful, lamentful, and all of those faces were difficult for me. But we met every month for years. During those visits, which almost always were attended by her son, who quietly sat by to either gently rebuff or passively agree with her, I learned so much about her and her very hard life. She was left to raise two children alone, unskilled and ill with hepatitis C, which led to liver cancer, followed later by breast cancer. She chose not to pursue additional therapy for breast cancer, expressing a fatalistic view of her life and intimating she in some way deserved the ailments that she developed. She saw me for disabling knee and hip arthritis that took away her independence and ability to scale the outdoor steps to her second-floor apartment and required the assistance of her son to dress, bathe and care for her. Beatriz never knew this, and I didn't share [End Page 18] it with her, but on one of my early morning drives into North Philadelphia, I saw her on a sun-baked unfriendly street, struggling to move around with her walker. She had many reasons to be angry, and the 30 minutes I spent with her every month became a catharsis for her to unload all that she felt.During my medical training, I encountered hundreds of patients—mostly all in the hospital setting—who might be characterized as difficult and understandably; no one who is relegated to the hospital setting, acutely or chronically ill and requiring inpatient care, could possibly be in the best mood of their lives. Somehow, it was easier for me to care for patients in these snapshot encounters that I controlled. I dictated my time in the room and didn't necessarily have to encounter the same challenging patient longitudinally, which made certain encounters much easier to bear. I realize now I wasn't fully processing the burdens carried by these patients in a way that enabled me to be a compassionate and fully present physician to them. It was an adaptation to the fast-paced life of residency, where one just has to get the job done and move on to the next task without time to process or reflect on difficult patient interactions. This is a... (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the development and use of images employed by the Dresden Royal Museum for Zoology, Anthropology and Ethnography to resolve debates about how to use visual representation as a means of making ethnographic knowledge. Through experimentation with techniques of visual representation, the founding director, A.B. Meyer, proposed a historical, non-essentialist approach to understanding racial and cultural difference. Director Meyer's approach was inspired by the new knowledge he had gained through field research in Asia-Pacific as well as (...) new forms of imaging that made highly detailed representations of objects possible. Through a combination of various techniques, he developed new visual methods that emphasized intimate familiarity with variations within any one ethnic group, from skull shape to material ornamentation, as integral to the new disciplines of physical and cultural anthropology. It is well known that photographs were a favoured form of visual documentation among the anthropological and ethnographic sciences at thefin de siècle. However, in the scholarly journals of the Dresden museum, photographs, drawings, tables and etchings were frequently displayed alongside one another. Meyer sought to train the reader's eye through organized arrangements that represented objects from multiple angles and at various levels of magnification. Focusing on chimpanzees, skulls and kettledrums from Asia-Pacific, I track the development of new modes of making and reading images, from zoology and physical anthropology to ethnography, to demonstrate how the museum visually historicized humankind. (shrink)

Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language, and analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. An ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, it also offers a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate (...) students and professional philosophers. (shrink)

Foreword to new edition / George Bennett -- Original foreword / Elizabeth Bennett -- The diaries July 23, 1949-November 7,1949 -- Additional entries November 8-22, 1949.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 105-108, Winter 2020.

This paper discusses the issue of overriding the right of individual consent to participation in cluster randomised trials (CRTs). We focus on CRTs testing the efficacy of non-pharmaceutical interventions. As an example, we consider school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Norway, a CRT was promoted as necessary for providing the best evidence to inform pandemic management policy. However, the proposal was rejected by the Norwegian Research Ethics Committee since it would violate the requirement for individual informed consent. This sparked (...) debate about whether ethics stand in the way of evidence-based health policy, since the Norwegian Research Ethics law’s strict requirements for individual consent make it practically impossible to carry out CRTs of public health interventions. We argue that, in the case of the school closure trial, the suggested CRT would not have eliminated an epistemic gap and thus would not have justified the violation of consent rights. First, we focus on the methodological challenges to estimating quantifiable effects of school closures in the specific case of an airborne infectious disease. Second, in line with Evidential Pluralism, we highlight the value of alternative lines of evidence for informing school closure policy in a pandemic. In general, we propose that a trial requiring the waiver of participants’ consent rights must be highly likely to eliminate an epistemic gap. We elaborate on the practical aspects of this criterion and discuss the potential advantages of adding it to the Ottawa Statement on the Ethical Design and Conduct of Cluster Randomized Trials. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a neo-Humean response to the problem of moral inclusion by bringing Humean moral philosophy into deep and serious dialogue with Latin American philosophy. Our argument for achieving this two-fold aim unfolds as follows. In section one, we elucidate Mia Sosa-Provencio’s conception of a mestiza ethics of care. We begin by highlighting its fundamental elements, especially its concern with what we refer to as the cultural embeddedness both of moral agents and of moral patients. We then (...) explain how this aspect of the mestiza ethic poses a distinctive challenge for Humean moral philosophy. In section two, we develop a neo-Humean response to this challenge. We begin by highlighting the strengths and limits of trying to develop a response by appealing to Hume’s conceptions of sympathy and humanity. We then present what we take to be the most plausible way for a neo-Humean conception of moral philosophy to offer a satisfactory reply to the challenge posed by the mestiza ethics of care, by appealing to two key concepts from outside the system of Hume’s moral philosophy: namely, sympathetic understanding and relational humility. (shrink)

Grossmann proposes the “fearful ape hypothesis,” suggesting that heightened fearfulness in early life is evolutionarily adaptive. We question this claim with evidence that (1) perceived fearfulness in children is associated with negative, not positive long-term outcomes; (2) caregivers are responsive to all affective behaviors, not just those perceived as fearful; and (3) caregiver responsiveness serves to reduce perceived fearfulness.

While acknowledging the psychological experience of intimacy, evolutionary theory postulates proliferation as the underlying grounds for human relationships. Intimacy, according to evolutionary theory, is merely a psychological mechanism whereby sexual selection and parental investment are facilitated. Unfortunately, the assumption of an underlying evolutionary mechanism which governs human relationships including romantic love, jealousy, and parent–child bonds is fraught with problematic consequences. Unlike the evolutionary understanding of intimacy, the philosophy of E. Levinas offers an alternative conceptualization in which human relationships themselves constitute (...) the grounds of intimacy. This alternative conceptualization escapes the problematic consequences of evolutionary theory. Intimacy from this grounding is inextricably tied to the infinite obligation we take on in relation to others. Implications of this conceptualization are explored. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In this paper I consider whether traditional behaviors of animals, like traditions of humans, are transmitted by imitation learning. Review of the literature on problem solving by captive primates, and detailed consideration of two widely cited instances of purported learning by imitation and of culture in free-living primates (sweet-potato washing by Japanese macaques and termite fishing by chimpanzees), suggests that nonhuman primates do not learn to solve problems by imitation. It may, therefore, be misleading to treat animal traditions and human (...) culture as homologous (rather than analogous) and to refer to animal traditions as cultural. (shrink)

El presente trabajo analiza la configuración de los personajes femeninos inmigrantes y transmigrantes en las obras “La han despedido de nuevo” de Claudia Hernández y La fila india de Antonio Ortuño y observa los mecanismos de adaptación, las estrategias y las dinámicas sociales de las que se basan como forma de auto protección o de cuidado mutuo. Proponemos una lectura de la representación de las mujeres migrantes como sujetos complejos, activos, dotados de agencia y transgresores como forma de contrarrestar los (...) imaginarios consolidados por narrativas anteriores en los que los sujetos femeninos no han tenido protagonismo en su representación o en su estudio. Palabras clave: Literatura salvadoreña, literatura mexicana, migración, violencia, género. (shrink)

Medical interventions are usually categorized as “invasive” when they involve piercing the skin or inserting an object into the body. Beyond this standard definition, however, there is little discussion of the concept of invasiveness in the medical literature, despite evidence that the term is used in ways that do not reflect the standard definition of medical invasiveness. We interviewed psychiatrists, patients with depression, and members of the public without depression to better understand their views on the invasiveness of several psychiatric (...) electroceutical interventions (treatments that involve electrical or magnetic stimulation of the brain) for the treatment of depression. Our study shows that people recognize several kinds of invasiveness: physical, emotional, and lifestyle. In addition, several characteristics of therapies influence how invasive they are perceived to be; these include the perceived capacity of an intervention to result in harm; how localized the effects of the intervention are; the amount of control retained by the person receiving the intervention; how permanent its effects are perceived as being; and how familiar it seemed to participants. Our findings contribute to a small literature on the concept of invasiveness, which emphasizes that categorizing an intervention as invasive, or as noninvasive, evokes a variety of other normative considerations, including the potential harm it poses and how it compares to other potential therapies. It may also draw attention away from other salient features of the intervention. (shrink)

How can we motivate ourselves to do what we think we ought? How can we deliberate about personal values and priorities? Bennett Helm argues that standard philosophical answers to these questions presuppose a sharp distinction between cognition and conation that undermines an adequate understanding of values and their connection to motivation and deliberation. Rejecting this distinction, Helm argues that emotions are fundamental to any account of value and motivation, and he develops a detailed alternative theory both of emotions, desires (...) and evaluative judgements and of their rational interconnections. The result is an innovative theory of practical rationality and of how we can control not only what we do but also what we value and who we are as persons. (shrink)

We systematically reviewed contemporary literature to create an evidence-informed framework for research studies involving children and adolescents who can assent to participate. We searched seven citation indices to locate peer-reviewed research published in English language journals between 2000 and 2012. After screening 1,231 titles and abstracts for relevance, we assessed levels of evidence, extracted information, and analysed content from 87 articles. Most articles narrowly focused on paediatric assent barriers and facilitators for decision-making about research participation. No articles provided a single, (...) comprehensive ethical framework to guide the development and review of research assent protocols. We developed a 6-step framework that provides guidance to: prepare the child for the assent process; assess the child’s readiness to engage in decision making; discuss the elements of informed consent to the greatest extent possible; seek an initial assent decision; monitor and affirm assent; and respect the child’s role as a research participant. The PAeDS-MoRe framework also supports the creation of process models that address the unique, developmental needs of paediatric sub-groups, and guides the operationalization of jurisdictional requirements for ethical research involving children who are unable to provide free, informed and ongoing consent. (shrink)

Recently there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in love, resulting in a wide variety of accounts. Central to most accounts of love is the notion of caring about your beloved for his sake. Yet such a notion needs to be carefully articulated in the context of providing an account of love, for it is clear that the kind of caring involved in love must be carefully distinguished from impersonal modes of concern for particular others for their sakes, such (...) as moral concern or concern grounded in compassion. That is, we might say, the kind of caring that is central to love must be somehow distinctly intimate. The trouble is to cash out these firm intuitions in a satisfactory way. (shrink)

There is now a general consensus amongst philosophers in the values in science literature that values necessarily play a role in core areas of scientific inquiry. We argue that attention should now be turned from debating the value-free ideal to delineating legitimate from illegitimate influences of values in science, a project we dub “The New Demarcation Problem.” First, we review past attempts to demarcate the uses of values and propose a categorization of the strategies by where they seek to draw (...) legitimacy from. Next, we propose a set of desiderata for what we take to be a satisfactory solution and present a case study where conflicting sets of values clearly impinge on science, but where the legitimacy of their influence is ambiguous. We use these desiderata and the case study to illustrate what we take to be the strengths and weaknesses of current strategies. To be clear, our goal is not to answer the question we pose, but to articulate a framework within which a solution can be judged. (shrink)

Disability is often defined as deviation from putative norms of physical, cognitive, or affective function. This definition is normatively laden, causing people with disabilities to be thought of as “different” and treated with pity. We address the predominant theme of this issue on “Disability Identity”: defining and imposing the category of “disability” and attempting to overcome it through medical intervention. The issue culminates in a call for courageous humility as the proper response to encounters with disability, providing medical professionals with (...) the disposition to resist medicine’s inherent drive to fix what is perceived to be broken—that which strays from the norm. We hope that this issue might act as a clarion call to medical professionals to reevaluate how they see and interact with “disability” as a category, and ultimately with people with disabilities, especially with respect to what may be owed to persons with disabilities from society. (shrink)

With globalisation and neoliberalism as significant phenomena impacting the function and role of higher education institutions (Barnett, 2013), the discursive practices of such institutions as mani...

Philosophers and cognitive scientists address the relationships among the senses and the connections between conscious experiences that form unified wholes. In this volume, cognitive scientists and philosophers examine two closely related aspects of mind and mental functioning: the relationships among the various senses and the links that connect different conscious experiences to form unified wholes. The contributors address a range of questions concerning how information from one sense influences the processing of information from the other senses and how unified states (...) of consciousness emerge from the bonds that tie conscious experiences together. Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness is the first book to address both of these topics, integrating scientific and philosophical concerns. A flood of recent work in both philosophy and perception science has challenged traditional conceptions of the sensory systems as operating in isolation. Contributors to the volume consider the ways in which perceptual contact with the world is or may be “multisensory,” discussing such subjects as the modeling of multisensory integration and philosophical aspects of sensory modalities. Recent years have seen a similar surge of interest in unity of consciousness. Contributors explore a range of questions on this topic, including the nature of that unity, the degree to which conscious experiences are unified, and the relationship between unified consciousness and the self. Contributors Tim Bayne, David J. Bennett, Berit Brogaard, Barry Dainton, Ophelia Deroy, Frederique de Vignemont, Marc Ernst, Richard Held, Christopher S. Hill, Geoffrey Lee, Kristan Marlow, Farid Masrour, Jennifer Matey, Casey O'Callaghan, Cesare V. Parise, Kevin Rice, Elizabeth Schechter, Pawan Sinha, Julia Trommershaeuser, Loes C. J. van Dam, Jonathan Vogel, James Van Cleve, Robert Van Gulick, Jonas Wulff. (shrink)

Abstract:This article brings together considerations from philosophical work on standpoint epistemology, feminist philosophy of science, and epistemic injustice to examine a particular problem facing contemporary psychiatry: the conflict between the conceptual resources of psychiatric medicine and alternative conceptualizations like those of the neurodiversity movement and psychiatric abolitionism. I argue that resistance to fully considering such alternative conceptualizations in processes such as the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders emerges in part from a particular form of epistemic (...) injustice (hermeneutical ignorance) leveled against a particular social group (which I call the "psychopathologized"). Further, insofar as the objectivity which psychiatry should aspire to is a kind of "social objectivity" which requires incorporation of various normative perspectives, this particular form of epistemic injustice threatens to undermine its scientific objectivity. Although many questions regarding implementation remain, this implies that psychiatry must grapple substantively with radical reconceptualizations of its domain if it is to achieve legitimate scientific objectivity. (shrink)

Among medical researchers and clinicians the dominant view is that it is unethical to deceive patients by prescribing a placebo. This opinion is formalized in a recent policy issued by the American Medical Association (AMA [Chicago, IL]). Although placebos can be shown to be always safe, often effective, and sometimes necessary, doctors are now effectively prohibited from using them in clinical practice. I argue that the deceptive administration of placebos is not subject to the same moral objections that face other (...) forms of deception in clinical practice and medical research. Although deception is normally objectionable on the grounds that it limits autonomy and breaches trust, these grounds do not apply to placebos when they are prescribed within appropriate ethical limits. Patients have reason to prefer that doctors can prescribe placebos in ethically responsible ways. Hence, the AMA has an obligation to endorse and to promote the responsible use of deceptive placebos in clinical practice. (shrink)

Industry is a major source of funding for scientific research. There is also a growing concern for how it corrupts researchers faced with conflicts of interest. As such, the debate has focused on whether researchers have maintained their integrity. In this article we draw on both the history of medicine and formal modeling to argue that given methodological diversity and a merit-based system, industry funding can bias a community without corrupting any particular individual. We close by considering a policy solution (...) that may seem to promote unbiased inquiry but that actually exacerbates the problem without additional restrictions. (shrink)

Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) identify a major benefit of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) in psychotherapy as its ability to expand access to mental healthcare for vulnerable populatio...

This article discusses the ways in which healthcare professionals can use emotion as part of developing an ethical response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Affect theory, a growing approach to inquiry in the social sciences and humanities that appraises the historical and cultural contexts of emotions as expressed through art and politics, offers a frame for clinicians and researchers to consider ethical questions that surround the reopening of the United States economy in the wake of COVID-19. This article uses affect theory (...) to describe how healthcare workers’ emotions are useful for formulating a reopening plan grounded in collective action and a duty to do no harm. (shrink)

It is often claimed that the autonomy of heroin addicts is compromised when they are choosing between taking their drug of addiction and abstaining. This is the basis of claims that they are incompetent to give consent to be prescribed heroin. We reject these claims on a number of empirical and theoretical grounds. First we argue that addicts are likely to be sober, and thus capable of rational thought, when approaching researchers to participate in research. We reject behavioural evidence purported (...) to establish that addicts lack autonomy. We present an argument that extrinsic forces must be irresistible in order to make a choice non-autonomous. We argue that heroin does not present such an irresistible force. We make a case that drug-oriented desires are strong regular appetitive desires, which do not compromise consent. Finally we argue that an addict’s apparent desire to engage in a harmful act cannot be construed as evidence of irrational or compulsive thought. On these arguments, a sober heroin addict must be considered competent, autonomous and capable of giving consent. More generally, any argument against legalisation of drugs or supporting infringement of the liberty of those desiring to take drugs of addiction must be based on considerations of harm and paternalism, and not on false claims that addicts lack freedom of the will. (shrink)

The phenomenology of emotions has traditionally been understood in terms of bodily sensations they involve. This is a mistake. We should instead understand their phenomenology in terms of their distinctively evaluative intentionality. Emotions are essentially affective modes of response to the ways our circumstances come to matter to us, and so they are ways of being pleased or pained by those circumstances. Making sense of the intentionality and phenomenology of emotions in this way requires rejecting traditional understandings of intentionality and (...) so coming to see emotions as a distinctive and irreducible class of mental states lying at the intersection of intentionality, phenomenology, and motivation. (shrink)

In this paper, we elucidate an alternative conception of the “end of human life” that Germain Grisez considers but never develops. We then defend this conception against two key objections. We conclude by explaining a few ways that this alternative conception of the “end of human life” is particularly important both theologically (e.g., for interfaith discourse) and philosophically (e.g., for understanding the traditional Christian conception of human nature and, hence, of natural law).

History of Cognitive Neuroscience documents the major neuroscientific experiments and theories over the last century and a half in the domain of cognitive neuroscience, and evaluates the cogency of the conclusions that have been drawn from them. Provides a companion work to the highly acclaimed Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience – combining scientific detail with philosophical insights Views the evolution of brain science through the lens of its principal figures and experiments Addresses philosophical criticism of Bennett and Hacker?s previous book (...) Accompanied by more than 100 illustrations. (shrink)

In recent years the social nature of scientific inquiry has generated considerable interest. We examine the effect of an epistemically impure agent on a community of honest truth seekers. Extending a formal model of network epistemology pioneered by Zollman, we conclude that an intransigently biased agent prevents the community from ever converging to the truth. We explore two solutions to this problem, including a novel procedure for endogenous network formation in which agents choose whom to trust. We contend that our (...) model nicely captures aspects of current problems in medical research and gesture at some morals for medical epistemology more generally. (shrink)