Scientific editors’ policies, including peer review, are based mainly on tradition and belief. Do they actually achieve their desired effects, the selection of the best manuscripts and improvement of those published? Editorial decisions have important consequences—to investigators, the scientific community, and all who might benefit from correct information or be harmed by misleading research results. These decisions should be judged not just by intentions of reviewers and editors but also by the actual consequences of their actions. A small but growing (...) number of studies has put editorial policies to a strong scientific test. In a randomized, controlled trial. blinding reviewers to author and institution was usually successful and improved the quality of reviews. Two studies have shown that, contrary to conventional wisdom, reviewers early in their careers give better reviews than senior reviewers. Many studies have shown low agreement between reviewers but there is disagreement about whether this represents a failing of peer review or the expected and valuable effect of choosing reviewers with complementary expertise. In a study of whether manuscripts are improved by peer review and editing, articles published in Annals of Internal Medicine were improved in 33 of 34 dimensions of reporting quality, but published articles still had room for improvement. Because of the central place of peer review in the scientific community and the resources it requires, more studies are needed to define what it does and does not accomplish. (shrink)

Scientific editors’ policies, including peer review, are based mainly on tradition and belief. Do they actually achieve their desired effects, the selection of the best manuscripts and improvement of those published? Editorial decisions have important consequences—to investigators, the scientific community, and all who might benefit from correct information or be harmed by misleading research results. These decisions should be judged not just by intentions of reviewers and editors but also by the actual consequences of their actions. A small but growing (...) number of studies has put editorial policies to a strong scientific test. In a randomized, controlled trial. blinding reviewers to author and institution was usually successful and improved the quality of reviews. Two studies have shown that, contrary to conventional wisdom, reviewers early in their careers give better reviews than senior reviewers. Many studies have shown low agreement between reviewers but there is disagreement about whether this represents a failing of peer review or the expected and valuable effect of choosing reviewers with complementary expertise. In a study of whether manuscripts are improved by peer review and editing, articles published in Annals of Internal Medicine were improved in 33 of 34 dimensions of reporting quality, but published articles still had room for improvement. Because of the central place of peer review in the scientific community and the resources it requires, more studies are needed to define what it does and does not accomplish. (shrink)

In this book, I make use of an idea from economics to suggest how noble human tendencies might not only have survived the ruthless pressures of the material world, but actually have been nurtured by them.

How important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics (...) columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success--and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy. Frank describes how, in a world increasingly dominated by winner-take-all markets, chance opportunities and trivial initial advantages often translate into much larger ones--and enormous income differences--over time; how false beliefs about luck persist, despite compelling evidence against them; and how myths about personal success and luck shape individual and political choices in harmful ways. But, Frank argues, we could decrease the inequality driven by sheer luck by adopting simple, unintrusive policies that would free up trillions of dollars each year--more than enough to fix our crumbling infrastructure, expand healthcare coverage, fight global warming, and reduce poverty, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. If this sounds implausible, you'll be surprised to discover that the solution requires only a few, uncontroversial steps. Compellingly readable, Success and Luck shows how a more accurate understanding of the role of chance in life could lead to better, richer, and fairer economies and societies. (shrink)

According to many commentators, Davidson’s earlier work on philosophy of action and truth-theoretic semantics is the basis for his reputation, and his later forays into broader metaphysical and epistemological issues, and eventually into what became known as the triangulation argument, are much less successful. This book by two of his former students aims to change that perception. In Part One, Verheggen begins by providing an explanation and defense of the triangulation argument, then explores its implications for questions concerning semantic normativity (...) and reductionism, the social character of language and thought, and skepticism about the external world. In Part Two, Myers considers what the argument can tell us about reasons for action, and whether it can overcome skeptical worries based on claims about the nature of motivation, the sources of normativity and the demands of morality. The book reveals Davidson’s later writings to be full of innovative and important ideas that deserve much more attention than they are currently receiving. (shrink)

Tocqueville pessimistically predicted that liberty and equality would be incompatible ideas. Robert Dahl, author of the classic _A Preface to Democratic Theory,_ explores this alleged conflict, particularly in modern American society where differences in ownership and control of corporate enterprises create inequalities in resources among Americans that in turn generate inequality among them as citizens. Arguing that Americans have misconceived the relation between democracy, private property, and the economic order, the author contends that we can achieve a society of (...) real democracy and political equality without sacrificing liberty by extending democratic principles into the economic order. Although enterprise control by workers violates many conventional political and ideological assumptions of corporate capitalism as well as of state socialism. Dahl presents an empirically informed and philosophically acute defense of "workplace democracy." He argues, in the light of experiences here and abroad, that an economic system of worker-owned and worker-controlled enterprises could provide a much better foundation for democracy, political equality, and liberty than does our present system of corporate capitalism. (shrink)

A common compatibilist view says that we are free and morally responsible in virtue of the ability to respond aptly to reasons. Many hold a version of this view despite disagreement about whether free will requires the ability to do otherwise. The canonical version of this view is reductive. It reduces the pertinent ability to a set of modal properties that are more obviously compatible with determinism, like dispositions. I argue that this and any reductive view of abilities faces a (...) significant challenge: it cannot adequately explain the freedom-grounding element of this ability. The problem has the form of a dilemma. This leaves reasons-responsive compatibilists with two options: abandon theories of free will grounded in abilities or abandon reductive theories of abilities. (shrink)

(Part of a symposium on an OUP collection of Paul Russell's papers on free will and moral responsibility). Paul Russell’s The Limits of Free Will is more than the sum of its parts. Among other things, Limits offers readers a comprehensive look at Russell’s attack on the problematically idealized assumptions of the contemporary free will debate. This idealization, he argues, distorts the reality of our human predicament. Herein I pose a dilemma for Russell’s position, critical compatibilism. The dilemma illuminates the (...) tension between Russell’s critical and compatibilist commitments. The problem is not obviously insurmountable, and as a compatibilist who is sympathetic to the view, my aim is to spark further discussion. (shrink)

This comprehensive reference provides an exhaustive guide to current scholarship on the perennial problem of Free Will--perhaps the most hotly and voluminously debated of all philosophical problems. While reference is made throughout to the contributions of major thinkers of the past, the emphasis is on recent research. The essays, most of which are previously unpublished, combine the work of established scholars with younger thinkers who are beginning to make significant contributions. Taken as a whole, the Handbook provides an engaging and (...) accessible roadmap to the state of the art thinking on this enduring topic. (shrink)

Sympathy and other moral emotions described by David Hume (1740/1978) and Adam Smith (1759/1966) motivate people to incur a host of costs they could easily avoid. Such emotions pose a challenge to evolutionary biologists, who have long stressed the primacy of narrow self-interest in Darwinian selection. In earlier work, I argued (Frank, 1987, 1988) that natural selection might have favored moral sentiments because of their capacity to facilitate solutions to one-shot social dilemmas. Here, I present a capsule summary of the (...) basic argument. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s compatibilism has had considerable influence. However, as Watson has argued in “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil”, his view appears to have a disturbing consequence: extreme evil exempts an agent from moral responsibility. This is a reductio of the view. Moreover, in some cases our emotional reaction to an evildoer’s history clashes with our emotional expressions of blame. Anyone’s actions can be explained by his or her history, however, and thereby can conflict with our present blame. Additionally, we (...) too might have been evil if our history had been like the unlucky evildoer’s. Thus, our emotional responses to the evildoer compromise our standing to blame them. Since Strawson’s view demarcates moral responsibility by moral emotional responses, his view appears to be self-defeating. In this paper, I defend the Strawsonian view from the reductio and self-defeat problems. I argue that two emotions, disgust and elevation, can be moral reactive attitudes in Strawson’s sense. First, moral disgust expresses neither blame nor exemption from responsibility. Instead, moral disgust presupposes blameworthiness but is instead a distinct response to the extreme wrongdoer. Secondly, moral disgust involves self-directed attitudes that explain away our apparent lack of standing to blame the evil agent. The structure of disgust as a reactive attitude is mirrored along the positive dimension by the emotion that Haidt has called “elevation”, a feeling of moral inspiration. I conclude by defending my view from objections about the moral appropriateness of disgust. (shrink)

The paper outlines the policy context and summarizes the numerous policy issues that AD raises from the more generic to the unique. It posits that strong public fears of AD and its future prevalence projections and costs, raise increasingly difficult policy dilemmas. After reviewing the costs in human lives and money and discussing the latest U.S. policy initiatives, the paper presents two policy areas as examples the demanding policy decisions we face. The first focuses on the basic regulatory function of (...) protecting the public from those who would exploit these fears. The second centers on the well-debated issues of advance directives and euthanasia that surround AD. Although more dialogue, education and research funding are needed to best serve the interests of AD patients and families as well as society at large, this will be challenging because of the strong feelings and divisions AD engenders. (shrink)

Five symposia from the 25th annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy focus on cognitive suicide, the explanatory role of content, Cartesian error and the objectivity of perception, social content and psychological content, and belief attribution and context.

And I find myself knowing the things that I knew Which is all that you can know on this side of the blueIs there such a thing as direct, non-conceptual experience, or is all experience, by its very nature, conceptually mediated? Is some notion of non-conceptual sensory awareness required to account for our ability to represent and negotiate our physical environment, or is it merely an artifact of deep-seated but ultimately misguided Cartesian metaphysical assumptions? Perhaps conscious experience in humans is (...) inextricably tied to the representational or self-reflexive capacities of language; if so, does it necessarily follow that newborn infants and animals are not conscious? Is the very notion of non-conceptual... (shrink)

Disagreements over the meaning of the thermodynamic entropy and how it should be defined in statistical mechanics have endured for well over a century. In an earlier paper, I showed that there were at least nine essential properties of entropy that are still under dispute among experts. In this paper, I examine the consequences of differing definitions of the thermodynamic entropy of macroscopic systems.Two proposed definitions of entropy in classical statistical mechanics are (1) defining entropy on the basis of probability (...) theory (first suggested by Boltzmann in 1877), and (2) the traditional textbook definition in terms of a volume in phase space (also attributed to Boltzmann). The present paper demonstrates the consequences of each of these proposed definitions of entropy and argues in favor of a definition based on probabilities. (shrink)

In view of scholarly work that has explored the socio-psycho significance of national performativity, the body and the “other,” this article critically analyses newspaper representations of the Canadian-born British tennis player Greg Rusedski. Drawing on Lacanian interpretations of the body, it illustrates how Rusedski’s media framing centered on a particular feature of his body—his “smile.” In doing so, we detail how Rusedski’s “post-imperial” Otherness—conceived as a form of “extimacy” (extimité)—complicated any clear delineation between “us” and “them,” positing instead a dialectical (...) understanding of the splits, voids and contradictions that underscore the national “us.”. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s account of moral responsibility in “Freedom and Resentment” has been widely influential. In both that paper and in the contemporary literature, much attention has been paid to Strawson’s account of blame in terms of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation. The Strawsonian view of praise in terms of gratitude has received comparatively little attention. Some, however, have noticed something puzzling about gratitude and accountability. We typically understand accountability in terms of moral demands and expectations. Yet gratitude does not (...) express or enforce moral demands or expectations. So, how is it a way to hold an agent accountable? In a more general manner, we might ask if there is even sense to be made of the idea that agents can be accountable—i.e., “on the hook”—in a positive way. In this paper, I clarify the relationship between gratitude and moral accountability. I suggest that accountability is a matter of engaging with others in a way that is basically concerned with their feelings and attitudes rather than solely a matter of moral demands. Expressions of gratitude are a paradigmatic form of this concerned engagement. I conclude by defending my view from the objection that it leads to an overly generous conception of holding accountable and suggest in reply that moral responsibility skeptics may not help themselves to as many moral emotions as they might have thought. (shrink)

I develop an argument that key theses from Ayn Rand's ethics and political philosophy are incompatible with one another. Her ethical egoism is not compatible with her rights theory. Though Rand's version of rights theory is libertarian, the argument does not depend upon any claims peculiar to her theory, but would apply to the (in)compatibility of ethical egoism and almost any plausible rights theory.

This paper accepts as given that business students want to get ahead. It criticizes business schools for their failure to reduce the incongruence between doing what is right and doing what it takes to get ahead. Because of this failure business school graduates carry negative ideas, attitudes and behaviors vis-à-vis social responsibility from business schools into the business world. Recommendations are made for increasing the social responsibility of business schools.

Classical contact transformation theory is reconstructed from the concept of explicit rather than implicit transformation equations. This proves the existence of contact transformations from any given Hamiltonian to any prescribed Hamiltonian (with the same number of degrees of freedom).

History and Philosophy of Biology summarizes the major philosophical ideas that have attended the development of science in general and of biology in particular. The book then explores how the techniques and the concepts of the physical sciences have impacted biology. A reductionist approach to biology -- anatomy, physiology, genetics -- complements the study of evolution by natural selection and an ecological perspective. The final section of the book explores several examples of the influence of science on society, and of (...) society on science. Each of 46 chapters of History and Philosophy of Biology has been or could be the topic of a major tome. The book is unique in that it explores the web of interactions among issues of philosophy, techniques and concepts of the physical sciences, fields of biology, and the diverse relationships between society and science. The book should appeal to readers of Scientific American or the New York Review of Books even if they are not trained biologists. It is a good text, or additional reading, for an advanced undergraduate course treating history and/or philosophy of biology or of science in general. (shrink)

Rachlin's attack on the internal commitment model rests on the demonstrably false claim that self-punishment does not exist. He is correct that habits are an effective device for solving self-control problems, but his additional claim that they are the only such device makes it hard to explain how good habits develop in the first place. Someone with a self-control problem would always choose the spuriously attractive reward, which, over time, would create bad habits.

The standard event-causal theory of action says that an intentional action is caused in the right way by the right mental states. This view requires reductionism about agency. The causal role of the agent must be nothing over and above the causal contribution of the relevant mental event-causal processes. But commonsense finds this reductive solution to the “agent-mind problem”, the problem of explaining the relationship between agents and the mind, incredible. Where did the agent go? This paper suggests that this (...) challenge against event-causal reductionism is importantly related to debates about fundamentality. It also suggests that extant event-causal answers to the agent-mind problem, ones that suggest that part of an agent’s mind can stand proxy for the agent herself, fail against the challenge. It sketches an alternative reductive view that appeals to entity grounding. This view resolves the commonsense challenge and promises to be theoretically fruitful with respect to other longstanding problems with the event-casual view. The paper concludes with a burden-shifting argument against emergentist agent-causal theories and non-reductive event-causal theories of agency. (shrink)