From fields as art history, semiotics and communication theories, a dozen researchers attempt to provide new and compelling approaches about the genesis of the images, their functions in relation to our existence and how we establish and construct our social and power relations, through the book.

Ducks lay eggs' is a true sentence, and `ducks are female' is a false one. Similarly, `mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus' is obviously true, whereas `mosquitoes don't carry the West Nile virus' is patently false. This is so despite the egg-laying ducks' being a subset of the female ones and despite the number of mosquitoes that don't carry the virus being ninety-nine times the number that do. Puzzling facts such as these have made generic sentences defy adequate semantic treatment. (...) However complex the truth conditions of generics appear to be, though, young children grasp generics more quickly and readily than seemingly simpler quantifiers such as `all' and `some'. I present an account of generics that not only illuminates the strange truth conditions of generics, but also explains how young children find them so comparatively easy to acquire. I then argue that generics give voice to our most cognitively primitive generalizations and that this hypothesis accounts for a variety of facts ranging from acquisition patterns to cross-linguistic data concerning the phonological articulation of operators. I go on to develop an account of the nature of these cognitively fundamental generalizations and argue that this account explains the strange truth-conditional behavior of generics. (shrink)

On the face of it, some of our knowledge is of moral facts (for example, that this promise should not be broken in these circumstances), and some of it is of non-moral facts (for example, that the kettle has just boiled). But, some argue, there is reason to believe that we do not, after all, know any moral facts. For example, according to J. L. Mackie, if we had moral knowledge (‘‘if we were aware of [objective values]’’), ‘‘it would have (...) to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else’’(1977,p.38).But wehavenosuchspecialfaculty.So,wehavenomoralknowledge. Following Mackie, let us distinguish two questions: Q1: Assuming that we have moral knowledge, how do we have it? Q2: Do we in fact have any moral knowledge? In response to the first question, I argue that if we have moral knowledge, we have some of it in the same way we have knowledge of our immediate environment: by perception. Many people think that this answer leads to moral skepticism, because they think that we obviously cannot have moral knowledge by perception. But I will argue that this is incorrect. The plan for the paper is as follows. In Sections 2–4, I work up to my answer to Q1 by considering rivals. In Section 5, I explain what marks my answer to Q1 as a distinctive view, and defend it. In Section 6, I briefly discuss how this answer to Q1 affects what we say in response to Q2. (shrink)

The present paper focuses on essentialism about natural kinds as a case study in order to illustrate this more general point. Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam famously argued that natural kinds have essences, which are discovered by science, and which determine the extensions of our natural kind terms and concepts. This line of thought has been enormously influential in philosophy, and is often taken to have been established beyond doubt. The argument for the conclusion, however, makes critical use of intuitions, (...) and I note that the intuitions are of the sort had by preschool children, and that they are traceable to a deep-seated cognitive outlook, which is often called “psychological essentialism.” Further, if we did not have such a cognitive outlook or implicit belief set—a belief set which is in fact in place by at least age 4—then we would not have the relevant philosophical intuitions. In light of this, I consider the question of whether natural kinds actually have scientifically discovered or discoverable essences, and whether these putative essences could determine the extensions of our terms and concepts as Kripke, Putnam, and many others have supposed. In fact, a number of philosophers of biology and chemistry have argued that biological and chemical kinds do not have such essences, yet these arguments—particularly in the case of chemistry—have not been assimilated by philosophers more generally. The reason for this poor assimilation is, I suggest, that the Kripke/Putnam view is just so intuitive. But this fact, I argue, is due to a deep-seated cognitive bias, rather than to any special insight into the nature of reality. (shrink)

Many of us take it for granted that states have a right to control the entry and settlement of non‐citizens in their territories, and hardly pause to consider or evaluate the moral justifications for immigration controls. For a long time, very few political philosophers showed a great deal of interest in the subject. However, it is now attracting much more attention in the discipline. This article aims to show that we most certainly should not take it for granted that states (...) enjoy a moral right to exclude would‐be immigrants. It is neither obvious nor uncontroversial. And if we cannot find adequate justifications for the existence of such a right, then we need to re‐evaluate the very backbone of current approaches to immigration policy. The paper begins with an overview of the existing academic debate about the extent of the right to freedom of movement. Next it introduces three arguments in support of the state’s right to exclude would‐be immigrants which draw on claims about the collective right to self‐determination. Finally it outlines three important challenges faced by these arguments in support of the state’s right to exclude. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that content externalism and privileged access are compatible, but that one can, in a sense, have privileged access to the world. The supposedly absurd conclusion should be embraced.

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the innocent Tess is the object of Alec d’Urberville’s dishonorable intentions. Alec uses every wile he can think of to seduce the poor and ignorant Tess, who works keeping hens in his mother’s house: he flatters her, he impresses her with a show of wealth, he gives help to her family to win her gratitude, and he reacts with irritation and indignation when she nonetheless continues to repulse his advances, causing her to feel shame at (...) her own ingratitude and confusion as to what is right. Tess, anchored both by her own sense of virtue and her distrust of Alec’s character, continues to hold out until one fatal night when, through Alec’s machinations, they are lost together in a wood. At Tess’s insistence Alec leaves her to scout out the path home. When he returns, he finds her asleep under a tree. Hardy does not go into detail at this critical juncture. Rather, he reflects “why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Datafication has allowed us to quantify every facet of the corona-virus pandemic. A significant quantity of data sets on infection and recovery rates, mortality, comorbidities, the intensity of symptoms, region-by-region statistics, vaccination, and virus variants, among other things, has been made publicly available. However, these data sets relentlessly reduce human beings to mere numbers and graph points. The present study employs a close reading of comic panels to demonstrate how graphic medicine uses data to critique, supplement, and expose its (...) lacunae. The article draws from graphic medical narratives and panels such as Andy Warner's "The Nib Bureau of Statistics" (2020), Sarah Firth's "State of Emergency" (2021), and Randall Munroe's "Statistics" (2020). Though data visualizations and comics are both graphical representations, their treatment of COVID-19-related issues is radically different. Graphic medicine "re-draws" data visualizations through imitation, subversion, and displacement to showcase multiple temporalities, marginal agencies, and the affective nature of human existence. Furthermore, the humanistic intervention of graphic medicine deftly reclaims individual lives and attendant stories in a world dominated by technologically mediated data. This essay does not dismiss the performative force of data; instead, it insists on humanizing and contextualizing a sensitive presentation of data to convey our entangled existence and collective states. (shrink)

I argue that it can be morally permissible to coerce people into doing what is good for their own health. I discuss recent initiatives in New York City that are designed to take away certain unhealthy options from local citizens, and argue that this does not impose on them in unjustifiable ways. Good paternalistic measures are designed to promote people's long-term goals, and to prevent them from making short-term decisions that interfere with reaching those, and New York's attempts to ban (...) the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces and the use of trans fats fall within those parameters. Given our tendency to cognitive bias, we need help in making choices that truly instantiate our values. (shrink)

This is an attack on the very notion of narrow content. In particular, I argue against two-factor theories of mental content, Chalmers's epistemic two-dimensional account of narrow content and Segal's truth-conditional account of narrow content.

In this paper, we theorize that the anticipation of guilt plays an important role in ethically questionable consumer situations. We propose an ethical decision-making framework incorporating anticipated guilt as partial mediator between consumers' ethical beliefs (anteceded by ethical ideology) and intentions. In the first study, we compared several models using structural equation modeling and found empirical support for our research model. A second experiment was set up to illustrate how these new insights may be applied to prevent consumers from taking (...) advantage of the seller. Results showed that enhancing the anticipation of guilt (by making the interpersonal consequences of the unethical act more salient) increased consumers' ethical intentions, controlling for ethical beliefs. Together these two studies might have important theoretical and managerial contributions. (shrink)

Åsa Maria Wikforss has proposed a response to Burge's thought-experiments in favour of social externalism, one which allows the individualist to maintain that narrow content is truth-conditional without being idiosyncratic. The narrow aim of this paper is to show that Wikforss' argument against social externalism fails, and hence that the individualist position she endorses is inadequate. The more general aim is to attain clarity on the social externalist thesis. Social externalism need not rest, as is typically thought, on the possibility (...) of incomplete linguistic understanding or conceptual error. I identify the unifying principle that underlies the various externalist thought-experiments. (shrink)

This book honours David Miller's remarkable contribution to political philosophy. Over the last fifty years, Miller has published an extraordinary range of work that has shaped the discipline in many different areas, including social justice, democracy, citizenship, nationality, global justice, and the history of political thought. His work is characterised by its commitment to a kind of theorising that makes sense to the people who have to put its principles into practice. This entails paying close attention to empirical evidence from (...) the social sciences, but also results in a willingness to take the everyday beliefs of lay people seriously in its theorising. The aim is the construction of a political philosophy that can be radically reformative, but that nonetheless is justifiable and realisable here and now. This book brings together a range of papers from leading political theorists concerning many different aspects of Miller's work, on topics including national responsibility and global justice, self-determination, collective responsibility, human rights, immigration, market socialism, national identity, citizenship, multiculturalism, public goods, the political thought of David Hume, and the methodology of political philosophy. It includes a chapter by Miller himself, which develops his own distinctive approach to political theorising. The volume concludes with a complete bibliography of David Miller's published work. (shrink)

In the euthanasia debate, the argument from mercy holds that if someone is in unbearable pain and is hopelessly ill or injured, then mercy dictates that inflicting death may be morally justified. One common way of setting the stage for the argument from mercy is to draw parallels between human and animal suffering, and to suggest that insofar as we are prepared to relieve an animal’s suffering by putting it out of its misery we should likewise be prepared to offer (...) the same relief to human beings. In this paper, I will argue that the use of parallels between human and animal suffering in the argument from mercy relies upon truncated views of how the concept of a human being enters our moral thought and responsiveness. In particular, the focus on the nature and extent of the empirical similarities between human beings and animals obscures the significance for our moral lives of the kind of human fellowship which is not reducible to the shared possession of empirical capacities. I will suggest that although a critical examination of the blindspots in these arguments does not license the conclusion that euthanasia for mercy’s sake is never morally permissible, it does limit the power of arguments such as those provided by Rachels and Singer to justify it. I will further suggest that examination of these blindspots helps to deepen our understanding of what is at stake in the question of euthanasia in ways that tend otherwise to remain obscured. (shrink)

This paper offers observations on people’s lived experience of the food system in Michigan during the early Covid-19 pandemic as an initial critical foray into the everyday pandemic food world. The Covid-19 crisis illuminates a myriad of adaptive food behaviors, as people struggle to address their destabilized lives, including the casual acknowledgement of the pandemic, then anxiety of the unknown, the subsequent new dependency, and the possible emergence of a new normal. The pandemic makes the injustices inherent in the food (...) system apparent across communities, demonstrating that food injustice destabilizes all members of the food system, regardless of their social location. The challenges of eating in a pandemic also reinforce the importance of building a sustainable food system; the challenges of food sovereignty and food sustainability are inextricably linked, and the pandemic lays this bare. (shrink)

The necessity of wearing masks in response to the spread of the Covid-19 took Europe and the USA by surprise. Legislation needed to be enacted to enforce the obligation on citizens not used to such practices. The authors investigate the semiotic function of masks, legislations enacted to enforce their usage in public places, and the mask-related discourse with a view to seeing how societies reacted to this imposition. A broad semiotic perspective is provided to analyze different attitudes and types of (...) MRD that have emerged in Poland, France, and the USA. (shrink)

Henri Bergson's philosophy, which Sartre studied as a student, had a profound but largely neglected influence on his thinking. In this paper I focus on the new light that recognition of this influence throws on Sartre's central argument about the relationship between negation and nothingness in his Being and Nothingness. Sartre's argument is in part a response to Bergson's dismissive, eliminativist account of nothingness in Creative Evolution (1907): the objections to the concept of nothingness with which Sartre engages are precisely (...) those raised by Bergson. Even if Sartre's account of nothingness in its entirety is found to be flawed, I argue that the points he makes specifically against Bergson are powerful. My discussion concludes with a brief examination of the wider philosophical background to Sartre's and Bergson's discussion of nothingness: here I point to some important aspects of Sartre's early philosophy, including some features of his conception of nothingness, that may testify to Bergson's positive influence on his thought. (shrink)

Therapeutic touch, a healing technique based upon the laying‐on of hands, has found wide acceptance in the nursing profession despite its lack of scientific plausibility. Its acceptance is indicative of a broad antiscientific trend in nursing. Adherents of this movement use the jargon of postmodern philosophy to justify their enthusiasm for a variety of mystically based techniques, citing such postmodern critics of science as Derrida and Michel Foucault as well as philosophical forerunners Heidegger and Husserl. Between 1997 and 1999, 94 (...) articles in nursing journals referred to postmodernism, according to a database search. This paper criticizes the postmodern movement for abandoning the biological underpinnings of nursing and for misreading philosophy in the service of an antiscientific world‐view. It is also suggested that nursing can retain its tradition of ‘caring’ without abandoning the scientific method. (shrink)

This article will briefly explore some of the ways in which the past has been used as a means to talk about psychotherapy as a practice and as a profession, its impact on individuals and society, and the ethical debates at stake. It will show how, despite the multiple and competing claims about psychotherapy’s history and its meanings, historians themselves have, to a large degree, not attended to the intellectual and cultural development of many therapeutic approaches. This absence has the (...) potential consequence of implying that therapies have emerged as value-free techniques, outside of a social, economic and political context. The relative neglect of psychotherapy, by contrast with the attention historians have paid to other professions, particularly psychiatry, has also underplayed its societal impact. This article will foreground some of the instances where psychotherapy has become an object of emerging historical interest, including the new research that forms the substance of this special issue of History of the Human Sciences. (shrink)

This volume examines the pilgrimage image in order to develop an unprecedented account of moral and aesthetic formation in Augustine's thought. In so doing, it will shed new light on enduring ethical debates regarding neighbourly love.

Traditional notions of civic education often introduce privilege and reproduce Eurocentric notions of citizenship. Proponents of cultural citizenship champion Black cultural knowledge, and critical race pedagogies to help marginalized individuals, including students of color, actualize their agentic selves. This manuscript presents three vignettes to demonstrate how teachers implemented the Black Lives Matter at School’s 13 Guiding Principles to develop Black cultural citizenship with students. Three salient aspects emerged: (1) the need for students to be active contributors in the current movement (...) for Black liberation; (2) a call to support students unlearning and relearning Black history; and (3) instruction that provides opportunities for students to recognize and challenge systems of oppression. (shrink)

This article both defines and shows the limits of settler shame for achieving decolonialized justice. It discusses the work settler shame does in “healing” the nation and delivering Canadians into a new sense of pride, thus maintaining the myth of the peacekeeping Canadian. This kind of shame does so, somewhat paradoxically, by making people feel good about feeling bad. Thus, the contiguous relationship of shame and recognition in a settler colonial context produces a form of pernicious self-recognition. Drawing on the (...) work of Sara Ahmed and Glen Coulthard, this article shows that a politics of recognition informed by settler shame has done little to actually see or hear Indigenous peoples on their own terms. Since settler shame is a self-directed emotion that seeks to be discharged through reconciliatory processes that are dependent on liberal recognition, it remains a mere optics of justice wedded to settler ignorance. The dependence on insufficient recognition renders the reconciliatory drive in Canada similarly insufficient, even harmful. Settler shame, then, is dangerous in relationship with recognition and reconciliation in Canada today, maintains settler colonialism, and forestalls Indigenous futurity and resurgence. (shrink)

Identifying the referent of novel words is a complex process that young children do with relative ease. When given multiple objects along with a novel word, children select the most novel item, sometimes retaining the word‐referent link. Prior work is inconsistent, however, on the role of object novelty. Two experiments examine 18‐month‐old children's performance on referent selection and retention with novel and known words. The results reveal a pervasive novelty bias on referent selection with both known and novel names and, (...) across individual children, a negative correlation between attention to novelty and retention of new word‐referent links. A computational model examines possible sources of the bias, suggesting novelty supports in‐the‐moment behavior but not retention. Together, results suggest that when lexical knowledge is weak, attention to novelty drives behavior, but alone does not sustain learning. Importantly, the results demonstrate that word learning may be driven, in part, by low‐level perceptual processes. (shrink)

In the United States, the steady yellow light means that a driver should either speed up or slow down. State laws written about a driver’s behavior at these yellow lights are vague and indeterminate and result in what is referred to as the dilemma zone (Hurwitz et al. in Transp Res Part F Traffic Psychol Behav 15(2): 132–143, 2012). This paper will reconsider law’s vagueness as intentional rather than problematic, insofar as cultural understandings of the yellow light lead to a (...) framework of visual jurisprudence in which drivers interact with law through legal discretion and common sense confronting a yellow light. Through a jurisprudential juxtaposition between the yellow light and red light cameras used to enforce yellow lights, the semiotics of automaticity compete with the semiotics of context-bound decision-making. (shrink)

There have always been some uninhabitable places, but in the last century human beings have produced many more of them. These anti-landscapes have proliferated to include the sandy wastes of what was once the Aral Sea, severely polluted irrigated lands, open pit mines, blighted nuclear zones, coastal areas inundated by rising seas, and many others. _The Anti-Landscape_ examines the emergence of such sites, how they have been understood, and how some of them have been recovered for habitation. The anti-landscape refers (...) both to artistic and literary representations and to specific places that no longer sustain life. This history includes T. S. Eliot’s _Wasteland_ and Cormac McCarthy’s _The Road_ as well as air pollution, recycled railway lines, photography and landfills. It links theories of aesthetics, politics, tourism, history, geography, and literature into the new synthesis of the environmental humanities. _The Anti-Landscape_ provides an interdisciplinary approach that moves beyond the false duality of nature vs. culture, and beyond diagnosis and complaint to the recuperation of damaged sites into our complex heritage. _This is the first volume in the new series _Studies in Environmental Humanities_._. (shrink)

Many if not all evidential languages have a mirative evidential: an indirect evidential that can, in some contexts, mark mirativity (the expression of speaker surprise) instead of indirect evidence. We address several questions posed by this systematic polysemy: What is the affinity between indirect evidence and speaker surprise? What conditions the two interpretations? And how do mirative evidentials relate to other mirative markers? We propose a unified analysis of mirative evidentials where indirect evidentiality and mirativity involve a common epistemic component. (...) A mirative interpretation requires a close temporal proximity between the speech event and the event of the speaker's learning the at-issue content. (shrink)

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that monkeys’ discrimination sensitivity when identifying images of animals is predicted by established measures of semantic similarity derived from human conceptual judgments. We used metrics from computer (...) vision and computational neuroscience to show that monkeys’ and humans’ performance cannot be explained by low-level visual similarity alone. The results demonstrate that at least some of the underlying structure of object representations in humans is shared with non-human primates, at an abstract level that extends beyond low-level visual similarity. Because the monkeys had no experience with the objects we tested, the results suggest that monkeys and humans share a primitive representation of object similarity that is independent of formal knowledge and cultural experience, and likely derived from common evolutionary constraints on object representation. (shrink)

This book examines, through a multi-disciplinary lens, the possibilities offered by relationships and family forms that challenge the nuclear family ideal, and some of the arguments that recommend or disqualify these as legitimate units in our societies. That children should be conceived naturally, born to and raised by their two young, heterosexual, married to each other, genetic parents; that this relationship between parents is also the ideal relationship between romantic or sexual partners; and that romance and sexual intimacy ought to (...) be at the core of our closest personal relationships - all these elements converge towards the ideal of the nuclear family. The authors consider a range of relationship and family structures that depart from this ideal: polyamory and polygamy, single and polyparenting, parenting by gay and lesbian couples, as well as families created through current and prospective modes of assisted human reproduction such as surrogate motherhood, donor insemination, and reproductive cloning. (shrink)

Most, if not all, psychologists have served as teaching or research assistants during graduate school, been instructed by teaching assistants, or both. As both faculty and students themselves, graduate assistants are faced with several dilemmas for which they typically have little preparation or guidance. These issues are explored in the context of the existing literature on multiple relationships in academic settings. Recommendations are made for graduate assistants, their faculty supervisors or mentors, and administrators to proactively address and confront these challenges (...) in a manner consistent with the profession of psychology's ethics code and to minimize the potential for harm to those we are entrusted to teach. (shrink)