While innovation has evolved into a common concept for quite a few decades now, especially given the need for new forms of development that require technology transfer and creativity mechanisms, less so is the case of social innovation. The latter remains a rather controversial concept, caught between two extremes: some authors consider it to be useless for academic research given its vagueness, while others point to its sacrosanctity given the need for new ways of societal and political development. Knowledge-creation, idea (...) generation and openness are mechanisms that any type of innovation relies upon. However, social innovation takes these concepts one step further and seeks to become a driving force for institutional change, therefore strongly linked with how liberal democracy works. The current paper aims to look at how social innovation is linked to the participative component of liberal democracy by looking at case studies from the European Union. (shrink)

Electoral manifestos represent tools of political communication which do not only inform the electorate upon the fundamental values of a party, but which also legitimize future actions that the party might undertake once in power. The electoral manifesto of the European People’s Party, drafted before the 2009 European elections brings together the main elements which define the action plan of the party. Religious values lie at the core of the Christian-democratic ideology. But given the dynamic of politics and the sometimes (...) sudden shifts in the preferences of the electorate, manifestos can rapidly become out of touch with the needs of the voters. The current paper will analyze how much of what the EPP Manifesto contains on issues related to religiosity is truly in line with the general opinion of the Christian-democratic electorate in four European countries:Austria,Bulgaria, The Netherlands andPortugal. Moreover, using data collected through the Vote Advice Application data, the paper will also tap into the differences which still persist (or which are fading away) in the attitude of the right-wing versus the left-wing electorate on the issues related to religion. Communicating with the electorate is the main key in attracting those who share the ideas and values of a party. But what if the core ideas of a party are slowly becoming unappealing for its own electorate? (shrink)

Studies point out that populism, a concept still in dire need of clarifications, resembles more of a rhetorical strategy than a fully-fledged ideology. Actually, populism has become a concept so frequently used that its orginial meaning seems to have been lost, leaving it as an empty shell, at least from an ideological point of view. I argue that in spite of this – or rather as a means of compensation – populism uses a very robust mythological apparatus, creating narratives that (...) allow voters to easily understand its messages. The current article underlines that in an attempt to over-simplify its discourse, populism makes use of all four political myths identified by Raoul Girardet. The conspiracy myth represents the main element revolving around the populist discourse. Politicians who embrace this rhetoric denounce a secret society that is rigorously organized, the actions of which defy morality, using all means to attain political power. The other three political myths, i.e. the myth of unity, the myth of the savior and the myth of the golden age, act together only as a counterweight for the first. The paper also points out that the success of Euroscepticism lies in the fact that it represents the perfect embedding for such myths, and that the EU needs to generate its own narratives if it hopes to confront the so-called “populist temptation”. (shrink)

Review of Mihnea S. Stoica, Populismul în Europa. Dezvoltare istorică, discurs politic ş i sus ţ inători ai dreptei radicale.

When in the business of offering an account of the epistemic normativity of belief, one is faced with the following dilemma: strongly externalist norms fail to account for the intuition of justification in radical deception scenarios, while milder norms are incapable to explain what is epistemically wrong with false beliefs. This paper has two main aims; we first look at one way out of the dilemma, defended by Timothy Williamson and Clayton Littlejohn, and argue that it fails. Second, we identify (...) what we take to be the problematic assumption that underlies their account and offer an alternative way out. We put forth a knowledge-first friendly normative framework for belief which grants justification to radically deceived subjects while at the same time acknowledging that their false beliefs are not epistemically good beliefs. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSeveral philosophers have inquired into the metaphysical limits of conceptual engineering: ‘Can we engineer? And if so, to what extent?’. This paper is not concerned with answering these questions. It does concern itself, however, with the limits of conceptual engineering, albeit in a largely unexplored sense: it cares about the normative, rather than about the metaphysical limits thereof. I first defend an optimistic claim: I argue that the ameliorative project has, so far, been too modest; there is little value theoretic (...) reason to restrict the project to remedying deficient representational devices, rather than go on a more ambitious quest: conceptual improvement. That being said, I also identify a limitation to the optimistic claim: I show that the ‘should’ in ameliorative projects suffers from a ‘wrong-kind-of-reasons’ problem. Last but not least, I sketch a proposal of normative constraining meant to address both the above results. The proposal gives primacy to epistemic constraints: accordingly, a concept should be ameliorated only insofar as this does not translate into epistemic loss. (shrink)

This article argues that non-consensual vaccination is morally impermissible, for the same reasons for which sexual assault is not permissible. Likewise, mandatory vaccination is morally akin to sexual harassment, and therefore is not to be allowed.

DeRose famously argued that, given that assertability varies with practical context, we cannot combine a biconditional knowledge norm of assertion with classical invariantism. The first aim of this paper is to show that De Rose's argument is ultimately unsuccessful. Second, I develop a view, entitled Assertion Functionalism, which combines the knowledge norm with classical invariantism and at the same time offers an appealing account of the intuitive variability of proper assertion.

One popular view in recent years takes the source of testimonial entitlement to reside in the intrinsically social character of testimonial exchanges. This paper looks at two extant incarnations of this view, what we dub ‘weak’ and ‘modest’ social anti-reductionism, and questions the rationales behind their central claims. Furthermore, we put forth an alternative, strong social anti-reductionist account, and show how it does better than the competition on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

This paper puts forth a functionalist difficulty for Sally Haslanger’s proposal for engineering our concept of ‘woman.’ It is argued that the project of bringing about better political function fulfillment cannot get off the ground in virtue of epistemic failure.

This work is a manifesto for epistemic independence: the independence of good thinking from practical considerations. It presents a functionalist account of the normativity of assertion in conjunction with an integrated view of the normativity of constative speech acts.

This paper analyses the ways in which human knowledge of the golden jackal ( Canis aureus) is formed in the case of a rural community of the Romanian Danube Delta. We focus on the territory where humans and jackals overlap and, by using wildlife monitoring alongside interviews and participant observation with humans, we detail how villagers come to have a particularly negative view of this resident canid. Foregrounding the jackal's highly symbolic nature, we trace the development of the community's knowledge (...) of this animal via historical, ecological and geographical factors. Finally, we recommend ways in which our findings could be used in future management plans and draw out the implications for future rewilding practices. (shrink)

In recent literature, several authors attempt to naturalize epistemic normativity by employing an etiological account of functions. The thought is that epistemic entitlement consists in the normal functioning of our belief-acquisition systems, where the latter acquire the function to reliably deliver true beliefs through a history of biological benefit.

This paper argues that the concept of responsibility can and should ground an ethics of ecological restoration. It starts with William Jordan’s concept of restoration, namely the creation of mutually beneficial human-nature relationships. It builds a concept of responsibility using the works of Hans Jonas and Martin Drenthen, understood as a correlate of our technological capacity, as well as a relationship to the possibility of meaningfulness today and in the indefinite future. It is argued that we are responsible in a (...) deep sense for engaging in projects of restoration in order to ensure the survival of embodied meaningfulness in the world. (shrink)

Assertion is the central vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Whether knowledge is shared successfully often depends on the quality of assertions: good assertions lead to successful knowledge sharing, while bad ones don't. In Sharing Knowledge, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion investigate the relation between knowledge sharing and assertion, and develop an account of what it is to assert well. More specifically, they argue that the function of assertion is to share knowledge with others. It is this function that (...) supports a central norm of assertion according to which a good assertion is one that has the disposition to generate knowledge in others. The book uses this functionalist approach to motivate further norms of assertion on both the speaker and the hearer side and investigates ramifications of this view for other questions about assertion. (shrink)

Talk of epistemic dilemmas is old talk in epistemology. But are there such things? In this paper I argue for modest skepticism about epistemic dilemmas. In order to do that, I first point out that not all normative conflicts constitute dilemmas: more needs to be the case. Second, I look into the moral dilemmas literature for inspiration and identify a set of conditions that need to be at work for a mere normative conflict to be a genuine normative dilemma. Last, (...) I argue that, while our epistemic life is peppered with epistemic normative conflict, epistemic dilemmas are much harder to find than we thought. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel account of the nature of disinformation that challenges several widely spread theoretical assumptions, such as that disinformation is a species of information, a species of misinformation, essentially false or misleading, essentially intended/aimed/having the function of generating false beliefs in/misleading hearers. The paper defends a view of disinformation as ignorance generating content: on this account, X is disinformation in a context C iff X is a content unit communicated at C that has a disposition to generate (...) ignorance at C in normal conditions. I also offer a taxonomy of disinformation, and a view of what it is for a signal to constitute disinformation for a particular agent in a particular context. The account, if correct, carries high stakes upshots, both theoretically and practically: disinformation tracking will need to go well beyond mere fact checking. (shrink)

The etiological account of teleological function is beset by several difficulties, which I propose to solve by grafting onto the etiological theory a subordinated goal-contribution clause. This approach enables us to ascribe neither too many teleofunctions nor too few; to give a unitary, one-clause analysis that works just as well for teleological functions derived from Darwinian evolution, as for those derived from human intention; and finally, to save the etiological theory from falsification, by explaining how, in spite of appearances, the (...) theory can allow for evolutionary function loss. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of trustworthy AI. Its central idea is that whether AIs are trustworthy is a matter of whether they live up to their function-based obligations. We argue that this account serves to advance the literature in a couple of important ways. First, it serves to provide a rationale for why a range of properties that are widely assumed in the scientific literature, as well as in policy, to be required of trustworthy AI, such as safety, justice, (...) and explainability, are properties (often) instantiated by trustworthy AI. Second, we connect the discussion on trustworthy AI in policy, industry, and the sciences with the philosophical discussion of trustworthiness. We argue that extant accounts of trustworthiness in the philosophy literature cannot make proper sense of trustworthy AI and that our account compares favourably with its competitors on this front. (shrink)

At the heart of the human experience lies anxiety caused by the realization that the world is unknown, forever eluding our control. And out of this anxiety arise the master passions of ambition and envy, which we repress to mask their power over our lives. Discussion of the role of the emotions in our lives is not new, but Mihnea Moldoveanu and Nitin Nohria go much further, showing how these passions shape not only our individual lives but our social (...) and organizational culture as well.The master passions are not pretty, and so we cover them with the more socially acceptable faces of reason and morality. Moldoveanu and Nohria guide the reader in revealing the real impetus behind such actions as firing a friend, leaving a lover, or even pillaging your own people. Below the rational explanation, they show, often lies a willingness to hurt or even destroy others to fuel our own ambitions or quench the fires of envy. The authors offer intriguing thought experiments and examples from their own lives as they expose the power of the master passions. Deftly weaving ideas from psychology, sociology, literature, and philosophy with the personal, they build a strong argument that society would be much healthier if we faced the deception and self-deception that pervade our lives. (shrink)

The biomedical literature makes extensive use of the concept of a genetic program. So far, however, the nature of genetic programs has received no satisfactory elucidation from the standpoint of computer science. This unsettling omission has led to doubts about the very existence of genetic programs, on the grounds that gene regulatory networks lack a predetermined schedule of execution, which may seem to contradict the very idea of a program. I show, however, that we can make perfect sense of genetic (...) programs, if only we abandon the preconception that all computers have a von Neumann architecture. Instead, genetic programs instantiate the computational architecture of Post–Newell Production Systems. That is, genetic programs are unordered sets of conditional instructions, instructions that fire independently when their conditions are matched. For illustration I present a paradigm Production System that regulates the functioning of the well-known lac operon of E. coli. On close reflection it turns out that not only genes, but also proteins encode instructions. I propose, therefore, to rename genetic programs to biomolecular programs. Biomolecular and/or genetic programs, and the cellular computers than run them, are to be understood not as von Neumann computers, but as Post–Newell production systems. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel, functionalist, unified account of the epistemic normativity of reasoning. On this view, epistemic norms drop out of epistemic functions. I argue that practical reasoning serves a prudential function of generating prudentially permissible action, and the epistemic function of generating knowledge of what one ought to do. This picture, if right, goes a long way towards normatively divorcing action and practical reasoning. At the same time, it unifies reasoning epistemically: practical and theoretical reasoning will turn out (...) to be governed by the same epistemic norm—knowledge—in virtue of serving the same epistemic function: generating knowledge of the conclusion. (shrink)

One central debate in recent literature on epistemic normativity concerns the epistemic norm for action. This paper argues that this debate is afflicted by a category mistake: strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an epistemic norm for action. To this effect, I introduce a distinction between epistemic norms and norms with epistemic content; I argue that while it is plausible that norms of the latter type will govern action in general, epistemic norms will only govern actions characteristically associated (...) with delivering epistemic goods. (shrink)

Dobre, Mihnea and Bujor, Ioana (eds.). “Antoine Le Grand and Jacques Rohault: Le Grand and his Annotations to Rohault’s Treatise on Natural Philosophy.” Society and Politics, vol. 16/1 (31), 2022. [Open Access].

I analyze the possibility of free-will in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), arguing for their compatibility. I use as a starting point Nicolas Gisin’s “The Multiverse Pandemic” (preprint arXiv:2210.05377, 2022, after Gisin, N., “L’épidémie du multivers”, in “Le Plus Grand des Hasards”, Belin, Paris, 2010), in which he makes an interesting case that MWI is contradicted by our hard to deny free-will. The counts he raised are: (1) MWI is deterministic, forcing choices on us, (2) in MWI all our possible choices (...) happen, and (3) MWI limits creativity, because everything is entangled with everything else. I argue that each of these features of MWI is in fact compatible with more freedom than it may seem. In particular, MWI allows compatibilist free-will, but also free-will very much like the libertarian free-will defined by Chisholm. I argue that the position that alternative choices exist as possibilities does not make sense from a physical point of view, but MWI offers a physical ground for alternatives. (shrink)

In matters of personal taste, faultless disagreement occurs between people who disagree over what is tasty, fun, etc., in those cases when each of these people seems equally far from the objective truth. Faultless disagreement is often taken as evidence that truth is relative. This article aims to help us avoid the truth-relativist conclusion. The article, however, does not argue directly against relativism; instead, the article defends non-relative truth constructively, aiming to explain faultless disagreement with the resources of semantic contextualism. (...) To this end the article describes and advocates a contextualist solution inspired by supervaluationist truth-value gap approaches. The solution presented here, however, does not require truth value gaps; it preserves both logical bivalence and non-relative truth, even while it acknowledges and explains the possibility of faultless disagreement. The solution is motivated by the correlation between assertions’ being true and their being useful. This correlation, furthermore, is used not only to tell which assertions are true, but also to determine which linguistic intuitions are reliable. (shrink)

Lucrarea de față explorează receptarea cosmologiei lui René Descartes ca “fizică mozaică”. În mod tradițional, teoria lui Descartes despre formarea și structura lumii a fost citită în lumina unei explicații mecanice bazate pe teoria vârtejurilor. La un nivel mai general, problemele discutate în lucrarea de față se circumscriu unui cadru mai amplu de dezbateri, specifice cosmologiei filosofice.

“Cartesian Visual Cosmology: Ways Towards a Digital Platform” (with Ovidiu Babeș and Ioana Bujor) In Recent Advances in Digital Humanities: Romance Language Applications, Eds. Anca Dinu, Mădălina Chitez, Liviu Dinu and Mihnea Dobre. Berlin, Germany: Peter Lang, 2022.

"Jacques Rohault, Preface to the Traité de Physique. A critical edition and commentary of four early modern versions of Rohault’s preface.” (critical edition and scholarly study; co-edited with Ovidiu Babeș, Ioana Bujor, and Grigore Vida). Special issue of Society and Politics, vol. 15/1 (29), 2021. [Open Access].

Contemporary ‘Fitting Attitude’ axiological frameworks – defining value in terms of having properties that provide reasons for pro-attitudes – struggle with the so-called Wrong Kind of Reasons problem. That is, they fail to offer a coherent account as to what reasons are fitted to enter our evaluative endeavors in the first place. Furthermore, WKR opens FA to charges regarding intransitivity of value ordering. I argue that revisiting Josiah Royce’s ‘plan of life’ mediating principle offers a promising reasons’ aggregation recipe, and (...) thus safeguards the transitivity axiom under FA. (shrink)

This chapter develops a novel Neo-Moorean view. The view falls squarely within the Radical Neo-Moorean camp, in that it holds that closure holds unrestrictedly, warrant transmits through Moore’s inference, and that there is nothing wrong – epistemically or dialectically – with Moore’s argument. Nevertheless, the account is superior to extant Radical Neo-Mooreanisms in explanatory power: it explains both the precise variety of epistemic failure exhibited by the sceptic, and the intuition of reasonableness when it comes to the sceptic’s resistance to (...) Moore’s argument. It does so in terms of epistemic functions and contrary-to-duty obligations. (shrink)

Awareness of internal bodily sensations and its connection to complex socioemotional abilities like empathy has been postulated, yet the functional neural circuitry they share remains poorly understood. The present fMRI study employs independent component analysis to investigate which empathy facet shares resting-state functional connectivity and/or BOLD variability with IA. Healthy participants viewed an abstract nonsocial movie demonstrated to evoke strong rsFC in brain networks resembling rest, and resultant rsFC and rsBOLD data were correlated with self-reported empathy and IA questionnaires. We (...) demonstrate a bidirectional behavioral and neurobiological relationship between empathy and IA, depending on the type of empathy interrogated: Affective empathy and IA share both rsFC and rsBOLD, while Cognitive empathy and IA only share rsBOLD. Specifically, increased rsFC in the right inferior frontal operculum of a larger attention network was associated with increased vicarious experience but decreased awareness of inner body sensations. Furthermore, increased rsBOLD between brain regions of an interoceptive network was related to increased sensitivity to internal sensations along with decreased Affective empathy. Finally, increased rsBOLD between brain regions subserving a mentalizing network related to not only an improved ability to take someone’s perspective, but also a better sense of mind-body interconnectedness. Overall, these findings suggest that the awareness of one’s own internal body changes is related to the socioemotional ability of feeling and understanding another’s emotional state and critically, that this relationship is reflected in the brain’s resting state neuroarchitecture. Methodologically, this work highlights the importance of utilizing rsBOLD as a complementary window alongside rsFC to better understand neurological phenomena. Our results may be beneficial in aiding diagnosis in clinical populations such as autism spectrum disorder, where participants may be unable to complete tasks or questionnaires due to the severity of their symptoms. (shrink)

The theory of rational choice is one of the most recent paradigms for the study of religion that strongly argues against previously dominant approaches such as the secularization thesis. The theory relies on more or less acceptable assumptions drawn from economic models of rational behavior, and offers interesting explanations or predictions supported by an impressive amount of data. The innovative approach introduced by the advocates or rational choice is a shift in focus from the demand side to the supply side (...) of religion, emphasizing religious entre- preneurs and competing churches that act rationally in a religious market. In spite of the criticism directed to their assumption, the ambiguousness of the utility concept, the male centered perspective, or the total disregard of the influence of emotions when making decisions, the theory of rational choice remains one of the most seri- ous challenges to alternative theories of religious behaviour. (shrink)

Mihnea Dobre, Tammy Nyden. to not only notice the “anomalies,” but able to develop more useful narratives that can fully incorporate them. This work is a first step towards that end. We do not put forward an alternative narrative ourselves, but ...

In recent literature, a very popular position about the normativity of assertion claims that standards for epistemically proper assertion vary with practical context, while standards for knowledge do not. This paper shows this claim is strongly incompatible with the received value-theoretic view regarding the relationship between the axiological and the deontic: one of the two has to go.

This article develops and defends a full account of the nature and normativity of resistance to evidence, according to which resistance to evidence is an instance of input-level epistemic malfunctioning. At the core of this epistemic normative picture lies the notion of knowledge indicators, as evidential probability increasing facts that one is in a position to know; resistance to evidence is construed as a failure to uptake knowledge indicators.