In Talking about, Unnsteinsson defends an intentionalist theory of reference by arguing that confused referential intentions degrade reference. Central to this project is a “belief model” of both identity confusion and unconfused thought. By appealing to a well‐known argument from Campbell, I argue that this belief model falls short, because it fails to explain the inferential behavior it promises to explain. Campbell's argument has been central in the contemporary literature on Frege's puzzle, but Unnsteinsson's account of confusion provides an opportunity (...) for more clarity about how the argument is best interpreted, and what it shows. (shrink)

A major goal of this work is to specify some steps of the process by which participants maintain coherency in their conversations.The underlying element of the analysis is a construct called a “context space.” Roughly, a group of utterances that refers to a single issue or episode forms the basis for a context space. Superficially, a conversation is a sequence of utterances; at a deeper level it is a structured entity whose utterances can be parsed into hierarchically related context spaces.As (...) a conversation proceeds, each conversant builds a discourse model that includes the conversation's context space structure, a notion of the present discourse topic, and a list of items being focused upon. Conversational coherency depends upon a lack of conflict between the respective models of the participants. Conflicts are prevented by speakers following high level syntactic and semantic relational rules that enable listeners to identify their discourse models. These rules, given in the study, are highly integrated with the view of conversation presented here—a hierarchy of related context spaces. (shrink)

Hate speech and misinformation are rife. How to respond? Counterspeech proposals say: with more and better speech. This paper considers the treatment of counterspeech in Maxime Lepoutre’s Democratic Speech In Divided Times. Lepoutre provides a nuanced defence of counterspeech. Some counterspeech, he grants, is flawed. But, he says: counterspeech can be debugged. Once we understand why counterspeech fails – when fail it does – we can engineer more effective counterspeech strategies. Lepoutre argues that the failures of counterspeech can be theorised (...) using the ideology of salience. Negative counterspeech fails because it reinforces the salience of the very ideas or associations that it contests. His solution? Positive counterspeech – a form of counterspeech which avoids the salience trap. I argue that the salience paradigm is ill-suited to theorise the failures of counterspeech. I suggest some alternatives. Further, I show that these alternative paradigms make importantly different practical recommendations – recommendations concerning how we ought to engineer our counterspeech – from those issued by the salience paradigm. (shrink)

The so-called ‘mental files theory’ in the philosophy of mind stems from an analogy comparing object-concepts to ‘files’, and the mind to a ‘filing system’. Though this analogy appears in philosophy of mind and language from the 1970s onward, it remains unclear to many how it should be interpreted. The central commitments of the mental files theory therefore also remain unclear. Based on influential uses of the file analogy within philosophy, I elaborate three central explanatory roles for mental files. Next, (...) I outline several common criticisms of the file picture, which have been a source of resistance to the view. Finally, I outline several interpretations of the theory, thus highlighting that the best interpretation of the file-theory's central analogy remains a live issue. (shrink)

Bioethics has entered a new era: as many commentators have noted, the familiar mantra of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice has proven to be an overly simplistic framework for understanding problems that arise in modern medicine, particularly at the intersection of public policy and individual preferences. A tradition of liberal pluralism grounds respect for individual preferences and affirmation of competing conceptions of the good. But we struggle to maintain (or at times explicitly reject) this tradition in the face of individual (...) preferences that we find distasteful, suspect, or even repugnant, especially where the broader social good or respect for equality is at stake. Directed donation presents us with such a dilemma: can we uphold the right of self-determination through respect of individual preferences regarding disposition of transplantable organs while at the same time maintaining an allocation system that reflects values of equity and justice claimed to underlie the socially negotiated practice of transplantation? Or are some preferences simply to be deemed unethical and not respected, even if that leads to a reduction in the number of transplantable organs available and to an apparent disregard for the autonomous decisions of the recently deceased? (shrink)

Within the rough ground that is the field of education there is a complex web of ethical obligations: to prepare our students for their future work; to be ethical as educators in our conduct and teaching; to the ethical principles embedded in the contexts in which we work; and given the Southern context of this work, the ethical obligations we have to this land and its First Peoples. We put out a call to colleagues whose work has been concerned with (...) the pedagogies of professional ethics, the ethical burdens of institutional injustice, and the application of ethical theory to education’s applied fields. In the responses we received it can be seen that ethical concerns in education are broad ranging, covering terrain varying from the preparation of preservice teachers, ethics in higher education, early childhood and care, educational leadership, relational and communicative ethics. Perhaps it could also be argued that this paper demonstrates Gibbon’s observation that ‘Assumptions about the particularity of this time as new and ripe with opportunity to make a difference through philosophy of education are not new and there’s much to learn from the persistence of wanting to imagine that they are’. However, while the field of ethics is perennially concerned with human relations and pedagogical interventions to improve these, the responses collected here show that educational ethics is far from static. Educational ethics is a field that continues to develop in response to changing contexts. (shrink)

This paper surveys recent trends in the history of science, using quotations from works published in the last decade. It suggests that philosophers of science have not yet come to terms with those changes, indicates which might or might not lead to productive interchange, and concludes that history and philosophy of science are now further apart than at any time since the early 1960's.

It is necessary to recognize the variety of levels at which values and norms may inappropriately affect the equity of the transplantation process, including candidate selection. Using a revised, richer concept of objectivity, adopted from Longino's work in the philosophy of science and empirical studies of candidate selection, this paper examines what sort of objectivity can be obtained in the transplant candidate selection process, and the closely related question of how selection can occur in an equitable manner. This concept of (...) objectivity requires that transformative criticism occur so that (1) the conceptual and normative commitments underlying selection may be articulated and perhaps challenged, and (2) the relationship between those commitments and criteria for candidate selection may be examined and justified, or revised. Through such transformative criticism, a greater degree of objectivity may be attained, which in turn will increase the likelihood of equity. (shrink)

In ordinary conversation, speakers disagree not only about worldly facts, but also about how to use language to describe the world. For example, disagreement about whether Buffalo is in the American Midwest, whether Pluto is a planet, or whether someone has been canceled, can persist even with agreement about all the relevant facts. The speakers may still engage in “metalinguistic negotiation”—disputing what to mean by “Midwest”, “planet”, or “cancel”. I first motivate an approach to metalinguistic negotiation that generalizes a Stalnakerian (...) theory of communication by including linguistic commitments in the conversational common ground. Then, I turn to cases where the very status of a disagreement as metalinguistic or factual is unclear or contested. For example, after the publication of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, some responses claimed to identify factual errors, while others took those same “errors” to be matters of interpretation. I’ll consider how to extend our theorizing about metalinguistic negotiation to this type of (even more) “meta” disagreement, using the discussion following the 1619 Project as a case study. On my view, in most such cases, there will be a metalinguistic negotiation going on. Still, I explain several ways in which, despite a dispute being metalinguistic, the factualist side can sometimes receive important vindication. I also discuss why it can make sense for speakers to contest the status of a dispute. (shrink)

This article describes a new prenatal genetic test that is painless, early, and increasingly available. State legislatures have reacted by prohibiting abortion for reason of fetal sex or of fetal diagnosis and managing genetic counseling. This article explores these legislative responses and considers how physicians and genetic counselors currently communicate post-testing options. The article then examines the challenges ahead for genetic counseling, particularly in light of the troubling grip of abortion politics on conversations about prenatal diagnosis.

Cultural forces such as film create and reinforce rigidly-defined images of a doctor's identity for both the public and for medical students. The authoritarian and hierarchical institution of medical school also encourages students to adopt rigidly-defined professional identities. This restrictive identity helps to perpetuate the power of the patriarchy, limits uniqueness, squelches inquisitiveness, and damages one's self-confidence. This paper explores the construction of a physician's identity using cultural theorists' psychoanalytic analyses of gender and race as a framework of analysis. Cultural (...) theorists' politically-motivated work provides an excellent point of departure for destabilizing parts of the authoritarian medical hierarchy that can damage a student's professional development. Drawing on such discourse, this paper examines the processes by which a doctor's identity becomes rigidly defined and fixed by daily training. It finally proposes a way for a medical student to extrapolate himself from the current definitions of this identity and create a broader, more malleable concept of professional identity by defining himself from outside of, rather than through, difference. (shrink)

The complex regulatory framework governing the U.S. health care system can be an obstacle to programming that address health-related social needs. In particular, health care fraud and abuse law is a pernicious barrier as health care organizations may minimize or forego programming altogether out of real and perceived concern for compliance. And because health care organizations have varying resources to navigate and resolve compliance concerns, as well as different levels of risk tolerance, fears related to the legal landscape may further (...) entrench inequities in access to meaningful programs that improve health outcomes. This article uses food and nutrition programming as a case study to explore the complexities presented by this area of law and to highlight pathways forward. (shrink)

This paper’s most general aim is to illuminate the disagreement between singularists about thought (who claim there are non-descriptive thoughts about ordinary external objects), and descriptivists about thought (who claim all thought about ordinary external objects is descriptive). It does this by clarifying the common claim that singular thoughts have an anchoring role with respect to thought in general and by making two further claims: 1) some of the putative disagreements between singularists and descriptivists are illusory once properly understood, and (...) 2) singularists can more productively argue for their view by separating it from some of the framework in which it is commonly packaged. Separating the singular/descriptive thought distinction from the structured content framework, and casting the singularist’s central claim as one about the structure or form of what I will call referentially anchored thoughts, allows us to move past a common kind of impasse. (shrink)

Normative reasons for action are considerations that count in favor of actions. They are the considerations that determine what an agent should do in a given situation. If the agent acts on these considerations, they justify her action. This paper concerns accounts of normative reasons that separate the explanation of why a particular reason counts in favor of an agent’s performing some action from the content of that reason. Elements of this explanation of why the reason is a reason are (...) “background conditions” on that reason, rather than part of the reason itself. (shrink)

This chapter begins with the discussion of one of the earliest texts in the Western tradition to explore the relations between philosophy and pedagogy, Plato's Symposium. In this text, love (or more properly, eros) plays the mediating role, turning a love of wisdom into a pedagogical erotics that enables a journey of enlightenment. The author refers to the work of more recent thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Jean‐François Lyotard and Luce Irigaray. The author's suggestion is that by approaching Symposium through their (...) work, this text can yield insights that are helpful for contemplating the educational process in a more contemporary context. In Symposium, the initial expulsion of the flute‐girl is undercut by Diotima's later inclusion as an apparently privileged female voice. ‘Diotima's speech’ is intriguing for many reasons, not least because it is the only place in Plato's known oeuvre where a woman takes on the part of the philosopher. (shrink)

The only Israelis this generation of Palestinians know are soldiers and settlers. For them, Israel is no more than a subsidiary of an army that knows no limits and settlements that know no borders.Recipient of the UNESCO Guillermo Camo World Press Freedom Prize in 2003, Amira Hass is the only Jewish Israeli correspondent on Palestinian affairs to live among the people about whom she reports. The child of Holocaust survivors, Hass prefers the title "expert in Israeli occupation," and, as such, (...) is relentless in her quest for both truth and justice. (shrink)

This article investigates agency as a way of being and acting in sustainability leadership. Our primary aim is to enhance understanding of agentic strategies that facilitate transcending systemic complexities in sustainability leadership. We make a distinction in our analytical approach by drawing from Emirbayer and Mische’s conceptualisation of agency as ‘an interactive process of reflexive transformation and relational pragmatics, a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past, oriented towards the future and enacted in the present’ . We (...) add ontological sources of agency to these dynamics which interact with habit, imagination, judgement and learning in the transformation of social systems. This approach underpins our model ‘Dynamic Interactions of Agency in Leadership’ , an integrative framework for analysing agency in sustainability leadership. We examine the efficacy of our framework in higher education initiatives in which sustainability aspirations, aims and actions are envisioned, articulated and mobilised. We conclude by offering further avenues of research in sustainability leadership designed to advance this burgeoning field and contribute to bridging the gap between sustainability challenges and our abilities to solve them. (shrink)

Egypt of the Hellenistic and Roman periods remains the most thoroughly documented multilingual society in the ancient world, because of the wealth of texts preserved on papyrus in Egyptian, Greek, Latin and other languages. This makes the scarcity of interpreters in the papyrological record all the more curious. This study reviews all instances in the papyri of individuals referred to as hermēneus in Greek, or references to the process of translation/interpreting. It discusses the terminological ambiguity of hermēneus, which can also (...) mean a commercial mediator; the position of language mediators in legal cases in Egyptian, Greek and Latin; the role of gender in language mediation; and concludes with a survey of interpreting in Egyptian monastic communities in Late Antiquity. (shrink)

Hellenistic and Roman acrostich inscriptions are usually full of verbal and visual clues, which point the reader in the direction of the ‘hidden message’ contained in the vertical lines of the text. The authors of such inscriptions want their audiences to appreciate the skill that has gone into their composition. There are several complementary ways in which the presence of an acrostich might be signalled to the reader or viewer and their attention directed towards it. These include direct verbal statements, (...) or more subtle allusions, within the text of the inscription. But, even without having read its text, the viewer of an inscription containing a ‘hidden message’ is often immediately aware that some kind of wordplay is at work. Acrostichs, palindromes and various kinds of word square are all graphically striking, or their appearance may be enhanced to make them more so. Regular spacing, the repetition of the acrostich in a separate column and the use of painted or incised grids are all ways in which the layout of the text on the stone can invite the viewer to play a word game. In some cases, as I will argue in this paper, acrostich makers envisaged—even intended—the participants in this game to include the illiterate as well as the literate. (shrink)

Despite the known positive effects of acute exercise on cognition, the effects of a competitive team sport match are unknown. In a randomized crossover design, 20 female and 17 male field hockey players completed a battery of cognitive tests prior to, at half-time, and immediately following a competitive match ; with effect sizes presented as raw ES from mixed effect models. Blood samples were collected prior to and following the match and control trial, and analyzed for adrenaline, noradrenaline, brain derived (...) neurotrophic factor, cathepsin B, and cortisol. The match improved response times for a simple perception task at full-time and response times on the complex executive function task improved at half-time. Working memory declined at full-time on the match. The change in working memory was negatively correlated with increases in cortisol, as was the change in simple perception response time and the change in noradrenaline concentration. This study is the first to highlight the effects a competitive hockey match can have on cognition. These findings have implications for performance optimization, as understanding the influence on specific cognitive domains across a match allows for the investigation into strategies to improve these aspects. (shrink)

Surgical training has traditionally involved a lengthy apprenticeship to a series of master surgeons, who teach medical students and residents the techniques of surgery while allowing them to work on patients in the operating room. This article examines surgical training as a structured environment that prepares students for the embodied lessons taught by a surgeon. It argues that even the most seemingly mechanical of surgical techniques contains social lessons when taught by a surgeon within the rich environment of the operating (...) room. (shrink)

This article proposes to reconceive moral education on the model of spiritual practice. Such an education would be defined not by its content—that is, explicit instruction about moral rules or particular virtues—but rather by the form of its constituent activities. Drawing on the works of both Plato and Foucault, the article addresses questions about the epistemic complexity of virtue raised in Mark E. Jonas and Yoshiaka Nakzawa’s A Platonic Theory of Moral Education. It then goes on to suggest that the (...) form of spiritual practice is uniquely suited to the cultivation of virtue understood on their Platonic model. (shrink)

Determinations of ability/disability are rooted in coloniality, specifically in categorizations of race, gender, and animality as they bear on social formations. I elucidate this rootedness by weaving the “coloniality of ability” into María Lugones’ accounts of the coloniality of gender and the colonial-modern system as founded on the “human-nonhuman” difference. This enables me to reveal an “ability system” based on the “ability-bestiality” difference and delineate with more specificity liminal sites of oppression and resistance across the heterogeneous socialities of coloniality-modernity. From (...) the perspective of the coloniality of ability that I develop, I focus on the liminality of the white woman Victorian invalid and that of the colonized “bestial” body in order to distinguish between two forms of colonial-modern liminality—“light” and “dark.” I also draw from this discussion two forms of colonial-modern oppression—“dehumanizing” and “bestializing”—and two related modalities of anticolonial resistance—“humanizing” and “decolonial.”. (shrink)

The author explores the role of Boston in the evolution of modern photography, examining the institutions, corporations, and artists who shaped the scene in that city in the last half of the twentieth century.

Faring poorly by international standards, out-of-home childcare in Canada is often described as ‘in crisis’. This study addresses how national childcare movement actors, who are overwhelmingly women, have discursively constructed their collective identity during two contrasting political climates. Data comprise publically available media releases produced in 2005 and 2008 by the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, a national grassroots childcare social movement organization. Guided by Fairclough's overarching framework for critical discourse analysis and Koller's approach to analysing collective identity through (...) CDA, the discursive mechanisms of CCAAC movement actors have employed in relation to their collective identity construction are identified and explored. Finally, whether or not these mechanisms may have been strategic is explored. (shrink)

The period between 1780 and 1840 has long been regarded as a crucial one in the development of geology. In 1780, relatively little was known about the structures and processes of the earth in spite of the efforts of individual mining engineers and bureaucrats, mineralogists, fossil collectors and cosmogonists. By 1840, the sequence of the European rocks was well on the way to being sorted out. This laid the groundwork for the reconstruction of the history of the earth and also (...) of life on the earth. Sophisticated theories of geological causes, consistent with contemporary physics, were in hand. The appropriate methodologies for both historical and causal investigation had been much debated, and a coherent and self-conscious body of men devoted themselves almost exclusively to geology. (shrink)

The 1960s witnessed a striking change in geology. Since at least the seventeenth century, one of the central problems of the subject had been the origin of the major irregularities of the surface of the globe—continents and oceans, mountain chains and ocean islands—irregularities that were not anticipated by most physical theories. Traditionally these features had usually been explained either as residual traces of events occurring during the very early history of the globe, or as the result of vertical movements of (...) the earth’s crust, caused, for example, by changes in the heat budget. The last two decades have seen an end to all this. The vast majority of geologists now believe that these irregularities largely result from the lateral movement of thin rigid plates covering the earth, a theory now known as “plate tectonics”, but a theory which also has obvious parallels with the hypothesis of continental drift, in which it was postulated that continents can move laterally. (shrink)

The author shares her insights into the kabbalistic Judaism of her grandfather, serving up a series of inspiring stories about spiritual life.

Background Given that AI-driven decision support systems (AI-DSS) are intended to assist in medical decision making, it is essential that clinicians are willing to incorporate AI-DSS into their practice. This study takes as a case study the use of AI-driven cardiotography (CTG), a type of AI-DSS, in the context of intrapartum care. Focusing on the perspectives of obstetricians and midwives regarding the ethical and trust-related issues of incorporating AI-driven tools in their practice, this paper explores the conditions that AI-driven CTG (...) must fulfill for clinicians to feel justified in incorporating this assistive technology into their decision-making processes regarding interventions in labor. Methods This study is based on semi-structured interviews conducted online with eight obstetricians and five midwives based in England. Participants were asked about their current decision-making processes about when to intervene in labor, how AI-driven CTG might enhance or disrupt this process, and what it would take for them to trust this kind of technology. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed with thematic analysis. NVivo software was used to organize thematic codes that recurred in interviews to identify the issues that mattered most to participants. Topics and themes that were repeated across interviews were identified to form the basis of the analysis and conclusions of this paper. Results There were four major themes that emerged from our interviews with obstetricians and midwives regarding the conditions that AI-driven CTG must fulfill: (1) the importance of accurate and efficient risk assessments; (2) the capacity for personalization and individualized medicine; (3) the lack of significance regarding the type of institution that develops technology; and (4) the need for transparency in the development process. Conclusions Accuracy, efficiency, personalization abilities, transparency, and clear evidence that it can improve outcomes are conditions that clinicians deem necessary for AI-DSS to meet in order to be considered reliable and therefore worthy of being incorporated into the decision-making process. Importantly, healthcare professionals considered themselves as the epistemic authorities in the clinical context and the bearers of responsibility for delivering appropriate care. Therefore, what mattered to them was being able to evaluate the reliability of AI-DSS on their own terms, and have confidence in implementing them in their practice. (shrink)