Disney’s animated villains have recently changed to show less conventionally villainous traits: They look and express themselves more like sympathetic characters, and they are usually only outed as villains late in the plot. This shift has prompted much academic com­mentary on the psychological and cultural significance of Disney’s new villains. We add to the existing literature on Disney’s new villains in two ways. First, we analyze shifts in the vocalizations of villains between the 1990s and 2010s. Second, we integrate this (...) analysis in a biocultural account of Disney’s shifting overall representations of villains. We argue that while Disney has long employed evolutionarily explicable cues to villainy, such as a foreign accent and an unappealing exterior, the company is now reacting to challenges to norms of social representation that proscribe the linking of such overt traits with immorality. Con­sequently, recent Disney films do not employ socially stigmatizing cues. However, Disney continues to employ nonstigmatizing cues, such as evil laughter and abiding anger, because these cues foster antipathy in audiences at no sociomoral risk. (shrink)

Nurse engagement, empowerment and strong relationships among staff, residents and families, are essential to attract and retain a suitably qualified and skilled nursing workforce for safe, quality care. There is, however, limited research that explores engagement, empowerment and relational coordination in long‐term care (LTC). Nurses from an older persons’ mental health and dementia LTC unit in Australia participated in this study. Forty‐one nurses completed a survey measuring psychological empowerment, work engagement and relational coordination. Twenty‐nine nurses participated in individual interviews to (...) further explore these concepts. Although nurses reported high psychological empowerment and work engagement, their relationships with key stakeholders varied. Our findings suggest that nurses in LTC require both supports and opportunities to contribute as active members of the multiprofessional care team that includes tailored education, professional development and positive interactions within the care team. Regular support is needed to enable nurses to feel empowered, foster relationships and communication, and facilitate work engagement. Based on these findings, we suggest that it is important to find ways to ensure that all who provide care perceive that they are part of the whole care team and able to contribute to the care and well‐being of people in LTC. (shrink)

This article presents the findings of a study about the history of aversion therapy as a treatment technique in the English mental health system to convert lesbians and bisexual women into heterosexual women. We explored published psychiatric and psychological literature, as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual archives and anthologies. We identified 10 examples of young women receiving aversion therapy in England in the 1960s and 1970s. We situate our discussion within the context of post-war British and transnational medical history. (...) As a contribution to a significantly under-researched area, this article adds to a broader transnational history of the psychological treatment of marginalised sexualities and genders. As a consequence, it also contributes to LGBTQIA+ history, the history of medicine, and psychiatric survivor history. We also reflect on the ethical implications of the research for current mental health practice. (shrink)

Children dependent on life-prolonging medical technology are often subject to a constant background risk of sudden death or catastrophic complications. Such children can be cared for in hospital, in an intensive care environment with highly trained nurses and doctors able to deliver specialised, life-saving care immediately. However, remaining in hospital, when life expectancy is limited, can considered to be a harm in of itself. Discharge home offers the possibility for an improved quality of life for the child and their family (...) but comes with significant medical risks.When making decisions for children, two ethical models predominate, the promotion of the child’s best interests or the avoidance of harm. However, in some circumstances, particularly for children with life-limiting and/or life-threatening illness, all options may be associated with risk. There are no good options, only potentially harmful choices.In this paper, we explore decisions made by one family in such circumstances. We describe a model adopted from risk management programmes beyond medicine, which offers a potential framework for identifying risks to the child that are morally permissible. Some risks and harms to a child, not ordinarily permitted, may be acceptable when undertaken in the pursuit of a specified desired good, so long as they are as low as reasonably practicable. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore best practices for asynchronous discussions in graduate online bioethics education. We explain that online approaches have advantages and challenges in contrast to in-person discussions. Online challenges are lack of visual or auditory cues and technical access. Advantages include extended opportunities for specific focus, thoughtful reflection, and critical review. We found no significant review of related best practices in bioethics. Our more general literature review of graduate education and online approaches, plus experience in our own bioethics (...) graduate program, suggest provisional best practices that we detail. We reason that online graduate discussion provisionally should aim for a “community of inquiry” framework that incorporates cognitive, social, and teaching “presences,” as well as a learning presence. However, we also note unresolved concerns about whether the framework sufficiently addresses learning, is complete, and captures communicative functions. Drawing further on the literature, we also suggest best practices for instructor feedback to students about their discussion performance, including that remarks should be timely and specific. Summaries from two courses in our graduate bioethics program illustrate how we implement discussion strategies. Finally, we review assessment strategies and suggest that embedded formative assessments in discussion support and demonstrate deeper learning. Limitations in generalizability include that our review targets asynchronous and text-based online discussion, our program assessments do not necessarily detail best practices, student expectations and approaches could be rather particular to our program, and specific bioethics content in principle could alter best practices. (shrink)

Le livre de Sarah Gutsche-Miller, issu d’une thèse soutenue en 2010, explore l’histoire et l’esthétique du ballet de music-hall dans les trois principaux établissements parisiens, les Folies-Bergère, le Casino de Paris et l’Olympia, entre 1871 et 1913. D’une grande qualité, il va assurément contribuer à combler des lacunes importantes dans l’histoire de la danse et dans celle des music-halls, plus largement dans l’histoire culturelle de Paris à la fin du xixe siècle. Les études sur le music-h...

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic there was widespread concern that healthcare systems would be overwhelmed, and specifically, that there would be insufficient critical care capacity in terms of beds, ventilators or staff to care for patients. In the UK, this was avoided by a threefold approach involving widespread, rapid expansion of critical care capacity, reduction of healthcare demand from non-COVID-19 sources by temporarily pausing much of normal healthcare delivery, and by governmental and societal responses that reduced demand through national lockdown. (...) Despite high-level documents designed to help manage limited critical care capacity, none provided sufficient operational direction to enable use at the bedside in situations requiring triage. We present and describe the development of a structured process for fair allocation of critical care resources in the setting of insufficient capacity. The document combines a wide variety of factors known to impact on outcome from critical illness, integrated with broad-based clinical judgement to enable structured, explicit, transparent decision-making founded on robust ethical principles. It aims to improve communication and allocate resources fairly, while avoiding triage decisions based on a single disease, comorbidity, patient age or degree of frailty. It is designed to support and document decision-making. The document has not been needed to date, nor adopted as hospital policy. However, as the pandemic evolves, the resumption of necessary non-COVID-19 healthcare and economic activity mean capacity issues and the potential need for triage may yet return. The document is presented as a starting point for stakeholder feedback and discussion. (shrink)

The aim of the SI is to bring to the fore the places in which cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) are formed; how place shapes the dynamics of CSPs, and how CSPs shape the specific settings in which they develop. The papers demonstrate that partnerships and place are intrinsically reciprocal: the morality and materiality inherent in places repeatedly reset the reference points for partners, trigger epiphanies, shift identities, and redistribute capacities to act. Place thus becomes generative of partnerships in the most profound (...) sense: by developing an awareness of their emplacement, CSPs commit to place, and through their place-based commitments produce three intertwined modalities of place-specific ethics that bind CSPs and place: ethic of recognition, an ethic of care, and an ethic of resilience. Our authors have found vivid examples of how emplaced CSPs embody these ethics, signaling hope for the sustainability of our (always hyper-local) life-worlds. (shrink)

Benevolent intersubjectivity developed in parent–infant interactions and compassion toward friend and foe alike are non-violent interventions to group behavior in conflict. Based on a dyadic active inference framework rooted in specific parental brain mechanisms, we suggest that interventions promoting compassion and intersubjectivity can reduce stress, and that compassionate mediation may resolve conflicts.

This paper presents a feminist analysis of corporate social responsibility in a male-dominated industry within a developing country context. It seeks to raise awareness of the silencing of women’s voices in CSR reports produced by mining companies in Tanzania. Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in Africa, and women are often marginalised in employment and social policy considerations. Drawing on work by Hélène Cixous, a post-structuralist/radical feminist scholar, the paper challenges the masculinity of CSR discourses that have repeatedly masked (...) the voices and concerns of ‘other’ marginalised social groups, notably women. Using interpretative ethnographic case studies, the paper provides much-needed empirical evidence to show how gender imbalances remain prevalent in the Tanzanian mining sector. This evidence draws attention to the dynamics faced by many women working in or living around mining areas in Tanzania. The paper argues that CSR, a discourse enmeshed with the patriarchal logic of the contemporary capitalist system, is entangled with tensions, class conflicts and struggles which need to be unpacked and acknowledged. The paper considers the possibility of policy reforms in order to promote gender balance in the Tanzanian mining sector and create a platform for women’s concerns to be voiced. (shrink)

AtArgon.4.1653–88, Medea steps forward among the Argonauts and asserts that their harbourage on Crete will not be blocked by the bronze giant Talos, who stands menacingly throwing rocks at their ship. She claims that she alone can subdue him, and then steps forward and proceeds to do so. Using a sequence of ‘magical’ ritualistic acts, she causes Talos to scrape his vulnerable heel on a rock and fall down dead, as the ichor pours from his wound. This scene is the (...) last in which Medea appears in the epic, and accordingly it forms the final opportunity to bridge the gap between the Medea of theArgonauticaand the future Medea, one whose actions are already well known from such works as Pindar's fourthPythian Odeand Euripides’Medea. The importance for Apollonius to create a plausible transition between the Medea of earlier myth and the Argonautic Medea is evident. A clear-cut break from tradition would allow Medea to become an alternative Medea, perhaps akin to the alternative portrayal of Helen by Euripides; a continuation would allow corroboration with earlier sources, which would lend authority and validation to Apollonius’ version. It is now the common consensus that Apollonius tried, however successfully, to bridge the gap between a young and an adult Medea and between tradition and innovation in her character. (shrink)

By offering us a voice that is both at a distance and inside one's own head, the telephone causes interference in thinking and writing. But despite the multiple telephones that echo in and across Jacques Derrida's work, and specifically his writing to and with Hélène Cixous, it is only since Derrida's death that critical interest in the phone has fully emerged, with work by Royle (2006), Prenowitz (2008), Bennington (2013) and Turner (2014) stressing the value of staying on the line. (...) Engaging with Derrida, however, is not simply a matter of picking up the receiver. For the telephone is also, Derrida insists in H.C. for Life (2006), a ‘poetico-technical invention’, that is, the telephone is ‘thought itself’. This paper is about how the telephone ‘thinks’ Derrida, about how it remembers Derrida, and about how it offers us a line for re-imagining his voice. Bound up with the uncanny mechanisms of the telephone, it invites readers to participate in long-distance calling – listening across species, texts and worlds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal ExpressionSarah K. Burgess and Stuart J. MurrayFor More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Adriana Cavarero. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Pp. 262. $65.00, hardcover; $24.95, paperback.Adriana Cavarero's most recent book, For More than One Voice, offers the reader a critique of Western metaphysics that challenges the hegemony of speech's relation (...) to thought within politics. Revisiting Aristotle's Politics, Cavarero examines the famous definition of man as "zoon logon echon"—usually translated as "rational animal." She is critical of the tradition that renders logos here as "reason" or "rationality," modeled on the abstract and disembodied Platonic idea. Reading the Politics alongside the Poetics, she brings politics into a distinctly rhetorical sphere, and therefore figures logos as "phone semantike." In this light, man is a "speaking animal," an animal who speaks with a voice (phone) that is meaningful (semantike—an adjectival form that qualifies the voice itself). Cavarero's argument is that voice and meaning—phonic and semantic—must be sharply distinguished. The history of Western philosophy, she contends, has effaced this vital difference and focused instead on speech as a unitary phenomenon in which the vocalic and the semantic are always already joined as meaningful signification. In this way, the singularity of the vocalic itself has been elided in favor of speech that strongly privileges meaning. She therefore wishes to deliver us from language, as it were, through a recuperation of the force of the vocalic, the acoustic, the resonant and sonorous auditory quality of phone.Absent in the history of Western philosophy, this sonorous aspect of the vocalic stands as a corrective to our logocentric metaphysical tradition that singularly values the visual over the acoustic, semantic content over vocal utterances, and an abstract, anonymous "what" over a particular, embodied "who." Cavarero claims that the vocalic is an "anti-metaphysical" force that exceeds and challenges signification. In other words, the vocalic immediately communicates the uniqueness of the speaker without recourse to the signifying content of his or her speech. The voice is essentially relational—a relation that is described as "the condition of every communication.... the communicability of the communicable, or the significance of signification" (29). Indeed, for Cavarero the voice is that which "precedes, generates, and exceeds verbal communication" [End Page 166] (29–30). In this way, remarkably, Cavarero refigures the voice as a presymbolic origin that is both temporally and ontologically prior to signification, as that which is a condition of possibility for signification, and as that which is never exhausted by any signifying speech act as such.The voice is the expression of one unique, embodied individual to another. This expression, a "reciprocal invocation" founded in the sonorous, rhythmic, and resonant materiality of the voice, constitutes a "duet," a musical exchange of voices in and through which individuals mutually invoke one another. Cavarero resists inscribing such a relation within the symbolic realm; yet for her this relation is a "wordless language" that takes place in the paradigmatic scene between mother and infant. Here, in this originary scene, there is not yet the movement of language or speech as such, but the rhythm and cadence of demand and response—the voices of mother and infant that invoke one another. Drawing on Hélène Cixous's and Julia Kristeva's well-known work on the maternal chora, Cavarero demonstrates that the cadence of the "la-la melody" exchanged between mother and infant "configure[s] a reciprocal dependence" (170) that takes a structural form in the movement between demand and response.For Cavarero, the "scene of infancy" enjoys a primacy: it is both ontologically and chronologically prior to the institution of language and law. The maternal chora is figured as that which invisibly underwrites what will be understood as the law of the father—a law that is said to mark the inauguration of language. But if the law of the father is rational and semantic, the maternal should not be conceived as simply irrational and pure sound. For Cavarero, the maternal vocalic demonstrates its own reason through its rhythmic and musical resonance... (shrink)

The paper spells out agency in a manner sympathetic to the approach in Helen Steward’s A Metaphysics for Freedom ; argues that agency so construed is compatible with determinism; then argues that this is a costly victory for compatibilism.

This chapter asks what stance is morally appropriate as we consider when, whether, and how to assist persons experiencing physical, emotional, or intellectual disability. Appealing to a variety of intelligent and observant thinkers for inspiration (Ralph Barton Perry, Helen Keller, and Immanuel Kant), it argues that one important aspect of such a stance is an attitude of reciprocal beneficence. This has three central aspects: a perspective of fellowship acknowledging the disabled and the currently able as members of the community (...) of vulnerable human agents; a developed sympathy attuned to gaps in knowledge and failures of imagination and analogy; and a readiness to show gratitude or appreciation for what the currently disabled may teach about the vulnerable moral agency we share. The argument takes initial inspiration from Perry but owes most to its roots in Kantian moral and political theory. It also owes much to wise and insightful enrichments due to Keller. (shrink)

Rares sont les chercheurs qui pratiquent eux-mêmes l’art qu’ils professent. C’est le cas de Sarah Nancy, agrégée de lettres modernes, qui consacre son enseignement et ses recherches à la voix parlée et chantée tout en nourrissant son travail de la pratique du chant lyrique. L’ouvrage qu’elle vient de publier est la version remaniée de la thèse de doctorat préparée sous la direction d’Hélène Merlin-Kajman (2007) sur la naissance de l’opéra en France au tournant des xviie et xviiie siècles. Gen...

Following the tradition of feminist philosophers and scholars of science from the 1980s onward such as Evelyn Fox-Keller, Helen Longino, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and others who revealed how popular notions of masculinity and femininity infiltrated and shaped the content of scientific knowledge, Sarah S. Richardson's book Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome deserves a place on the shelf with this canonical literature. It addresses one of the most celebrated symbols of biological sex binary: (...) the X and Y chromosomes. The X and Y chromosomes, we learn, were not given the role of "sex chromosomes" upon their discovery in 1890 and 1905, respectively. Their transformation into the ultimate... (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- PART I: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND INTRODUCTION * Introduction * PART II: ANALYSIS OF LITERARY TEXTS * Pygmalion as allegory for transformational adult learning: Ovid, Shaw and Hughes * Educating Rita and Oleanna * The Winter's Tale * PART III: BIOGRAPHICAL DATA * Interview with Joe * Interview with Jane * Interview with Sarah * SECTION IV: AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL DATA * Interview with Lilian * Autobiographical Writing * Final thoughts.

After introducing some of the many issues raised by intergenerational justice, the paper will focus in particular on the motivational problem: Why should we be motivated to act in favor of others when sacrifices on our behalf are required? And more specifically, how can such sacrifices be justified when those we act for are neither born nor easily unidentifiable? While many accounts of moral motivation exist, most scholars will grant that emotional engagement is a strong motivational drive. Hence, the paper (...) will focus on such a drive. I will, first, argue that immediate emotions and empathy – understood uniquely as a form of emotional attunement – are insufficient to grant that the acts they motivate are morally acceptable. The case of future generations is a perfect example of such insufficiency. Second, I will discuss the possibility of regulated emotions and sympathy playing such a role. In fact, by regulating and educating emotions, a conscious or “rational” component is added, which could help avoid the biases and limitations immediate affective phenomena show. Such a “rational” component would also enable us to provide a criterion to distinguish cases in which emotions drive us in morally acceptable or unacceptable directions. In the second part of the paper, the sentimentalist tradition will be reconsidered, with particular attention to Adam Smith’s moral proposal – since the sympathetic engagement of an impartial spectator could be an excellent example of a regulated and educated emotional attunement of the kind required to deal with some of the many moral issues future generations raise and, in particular, with the motivational problem itself. (shrink)

Traditional philosophical discussions of knowledge have focused on the epistemic status of full beliefs. In this book, Moss argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. For instance, your .4 credence that it is raining outside can constitute knowledge, in just the same way that your full beliefs can. In addition, you can know that it might be raining, and that if it is raining then it is probably cloudy, where this knowledge is not knowledge of propositions, (...) but of probabilistic contents. -/- The notion of probabilistic content introduced in this book plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language as well. Just as tradition holds that you believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents. Accepting that we can believe, assert, and know probabilistic contents has significant consequences for many philosophical debates, including debates about the relationship between full belief and credence, the semantics of epistemic modals and conditionals, the contents of perceptual experience, peer disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, perceptual dogmatism, and transformative experience. In addition, accepting probabilistic knowledge can help us discredit negative evaluations of female speech, explain why merely statistical evidence is insufficient for legal proof, and identify epistemic norms violated by acts of racial profiling. Hence the central theses of this book not only help us better understand the nature of our own mental states, but also help us better understand the nature of our responsibilities to each other. (shrink)

The multiplicity of deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs) encoded by vertebrate genomes is partly attributable to whole genome duplication events that occurred early in chordate evolution. By surveying the literature for the largest family of DUBs (the ubiquitin-specific proteases), extensive functional redundancy for duplicated genes has been confirmed as opposed to singletons. Dramatically conflicting results have been reported for loss of function studies conducted through RNA interference as opposed to inactivating mutations, but the contradictory findings can be reconciled by a recently proposed (...) compensatory mechanism involving nonsense-mediated RNA degradation. Duplicated genes are often inactivated to become pseudogenes, and it is proposed that such is the fate of the USP15 gene of zebrafish, a commonly used model system. As it is reviewed here, these observations have implications not only for the interpretation of model system phenotypes but also for therapeutic interventions designed to target DUBs. (shrink)

Helen Longino seeks to break the current deadlock in the ongoing wars between philosophers of science and sociologists of science--academic battles founded on disagreement about the role of social forces in constructing scientific knowledge. While many philosophers of science downplay social forces, claiming that scientific knowledge is best considered as a product of cognitive processes, sociologists tend to argue that numerous noncognitive factors influence what scientists learn, how they package it, and how readily it is accepted. Underlying this disagreement, (...) however, is a common assumption that social forces are a source of bias and irrationality. Longino challenges this assumption, arguing that social interaction actually assists us in securing firm, rationally based knowledge. This important insight allows her to develop a durable and novel account of scientific knowledge that integrates the social and cognitive. Longino begins with a detailed discussion of a wide range of contemporary thinkers who write on scientific knowledge, clarifying the philosophical points at issue. She then critically analyzes the dichotomous understanding of the rational and the social that characterizes both sides of the science studies stalemate and the social account that she sees as necessary for an epistemology of science that includes the full spectrum of cognitive processes. Throughout, her account is responsive both to the normative uses of the term knowledge and to the social conditions in which scientific knowledge is produced. Building on ideas first advanced in her influential book Science as Social Knowledge, Longino brings her account into dialogue with current work in social epistemology and science studies and shows how her critical social approach can help solve a variety of stubborn problems. While the book focuses on epistemological concerns related to the sociality of inquiry, Longino also takes up its implications for scientific pluralism. The social approach, she concludes, best allows us to retain a meaningful concept of knowledge in the face of theoretical plurality and uncertainty. (shrink)

This paper develops a precise understanding of the thesis of moral encroachment, which states that the epistemic status of an opinion can depend on its moral features. In addition, I raise objections to existing accounts of moral encroachment. For instance, many accounts fail to give sufficient attention to moral encroachment on credences. Also, many accounts focus on moral features that fail to support standard analogies between pragmatic and moral encroachment. Throughout the paper, I discuss racial profiling as a case study, (...) arguing that moral encroachment can help us identify one respect in which racial profiling is epistemically problematic. (shrink)

This article examines a changing global reality that manifests itself in new forms of social activism. The struggle of the multitude challenges political representation and contemporary art seems to corroborate this observation. Becoming a form of social intervention, it turns into an active force and leaves behind the need to double action with representation, representational practices being the hallmark of classical art. A new theory of the image would have to incorporate this dynamic: it would have to treat and develop (...) the basic categories of action and relation. There are few philosophies of the act, and the existing semiotic models mostly deal with dual structures (signifier/signified; sign/meaning; image/referent, and so on). It is necessary to sketch out a dynamic theory of the image that would: (1) reveal the limitations of the concept of representation; (2) conceive of the image as a set of multiple changing relations. The image would thus be seen as a necessary part of the relations governing the world in its entirety, that is, as part of the movement of matter itself. Which is another way of saying that those relations are actualized, or expressed, in the image. (shrink)

Existing discussions of legal proof address a host of apparently disparate questions: What does it take to prove a fact beyond a reasonable doubt? Why is the reasonable doubt standard notoriously elusive, sometimes considered by courts to be impossible to define? Can the standard of proof by a preponderance of the evidence be defined in terms of probability thresholds? Why is statistical evidence often insufficient to meet the burden of proof? -/- This paper defends an account of proof that addresses (...) each of these questions. Where existing theories take a piecemeal approach to these puzzles, my theory develops an insight that unifies them—namely, the thesis that legal proof requires knowledge. Although this thesis may seem radical at first, I answer several common objections to it, and I argue that it does better than several competing accounts when it comes to making sense of our intuitions about what legal proof requires. (shrink)

This paper motivates and develops a novel semantics for several epistemic expressions, including possibility modals and indicative conditionals. The semantics I defend constitutes an alternative to standard truth conditional theories, as it assigns sets of probability spaces as sentential semantic values. I argue that what my theory lacks in conservatism is made up for by its strength. In particular, my semantics accounts for the distinctive behavior of nested epistemic modals, indicative conditionals embedded under probability operators, and instances of constructive dilemma (...) containing epistemic vocabulary. (shrink)