Counterfactualism is a useful process for historians as a thought-experiment because it offers grounds to challenge an unfortunate contemporary historical mindset of assumed, deterministic certainty. This article suggests that the methodological value of counterfactualism may be understood in terms of the three categories of common ahistorical errors that it may help to prevent: the assumptions of indispensability, causality, and inevitability. To support this claim, I survey a series of key counterfactual works and reflections on counterfactualism, arguing that the practice of (...) counterfactualism evolved as both cause and product of an evolving popular assumption of the plasticity of history and the importance of human agency within it. For these reasons, counterfactualism is of particular importance both historically and politically. I conclude that it is time for a methodological re-assessment of the uses of such thought-experiments in history, particularly in light of counterfactualism's developmental relatedness to cultural, technological, and analytical modernity. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIlya Somin, like several other political epistemologists, effectively exposes the extent of public ignorance and the ways in which such ignorance may damage democratic outcomes. This underpins his case for a more streamlined state, leaving more to individual “foot voting”—where citizens are better incentivized to choose knowledgeably and rationally. One cannot dispute the fact of deep public ignorance. However, one can question the widespread assumption that ignorance is necessarily ethically significant, always productive of undesirable outcomes, or otherwise implicitly dangerous for (...) democracy. The sheer lack of individual efficacy in mass democracies not only incentivizes ignorance, but also creates conditions wherein such ignorance is individually harmless and unlikely in the aggregate to greatly contribute to one or another outcome. Beyond this, there may be no way to attain meaningful knowledge in the areas where democratic decision making is most fraught. Indeed, ignorance may at times lead to better outcomes than would knowledge. The seemingly unassailable status of democracy itself, and the valuable institutional stability that this status ensures, seem to be founded upon a bedrock of public ignorance as to the real nature of democracy. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the shapelessnesss hypothesis, which is often referred to and relied on by certain sorts of ethical and evaluative cognitivist, and which they use primarily in arguing against a certain, influential form of noncognitivism. I aim to (i) set out exactly what the hypothesis is; (ii) show that its original and traditional use is left wanting; and (iii) show that there is some rehabilitation on offer that might have a chance of convincing neutrals.

“Work–life balance” is a relatively modern expression. However, there is no novelty in the core concept, as resistance to excessive incompatibility between work roles and personal roles has a history that predates contemporary struggles for a decline in unnecessary work–life conflict. The authors of this manuscript aim to convey a portion of this history by instilling, from an ethics perspective, an awareness of the efforts of early labor organizations, including labor unions, and a social organization that addressed labor issues. They (...) will also communicate the resolve of key individuals, especially women, including labor leaders and activists, who contributed to labor reform and served as early proponents for WLB. In addition, implications and suggestions for practice and future inquiry will be provided. (shrink)

In this article I consider the recent revival of moral intuitionism and focus on its prospects, especially by thinking about what it means to understand a moral claim. From this I consider the implications for both generalists and particularists in normative ethical theory, or at least those who are also intuitionists. I conclude that the prospects for both theoretical families are bleak, and hence that intuitionism itself is in trouble and has some work to do.

The term “lean in” was popularized by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, via her #1 Best Seller encouraging women to defy their fears and dare to be leaders in their fields. She received criticism because although admitting to external barriers contributing to the gender gap in leadership, the scope of her book focused on the internal shortcomings of women. She asserted that women are hindered by barriers that exist within themselves, and provided practical tips, backed by research, to equip women with (...) strategies to proactively progress in the workplace instead of shying away. Sandberg is not the first to raise concern about gender inequality. Other women in history like Susan B. Anthony and Maggie Lena Walker also challenged lopsided gender roles through their words and actions. Using the critical biography methodology, this paper explores these women’s experiences, philosophies and contributions, reflects on Sandberg’s insight, and develops a framework, based on the theory of planned behavior as well as the ethical principles of utilitarianism and corporate social responsibility, that links internal factors, organizational external factors, and societal external factors to intentions to lean in and leaning in behavior. Thus, via critical biography, this paper examines both internal and external factors, showing how they are linked, and how they may impact leaning in intentions and behavior. The paper also discusses how leaning in may influence both individual and gender mobility for women, and ultimately, increased gender equality. (shrink)

We are living through a golden age of drag, with drag kings and queens prominent in our society and media. Drag seems like fun, and a talk about drag in a department seminar may seem as if philosophy is enjoying a jolly time away from more serious topics. However, drag has a serious side. Some critics have recently accused drag of inherent sexism and misogyny, and this has extra bite in an age where concerns about cultural appropriation (and other, similar (...) matters) are high. This talk will detail the challenge and argue that drag is not inherently morally objectionable. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalizing” processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate (...) controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalizing processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g. arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze-following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalizing interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct. (shrink)

In the life sciences, there is an ongoing discussion about a perceived ‘reproducibility crisis’. However, it remains unclear to which extent the perceived lack of reproducibility is the consequence of issues that can be tackled and to which extent it may be the consequence of unrealistic expectations of the technical level of reproducibility. Large-scale, multi-institutional experimental replication studies are very cost- and time-intensive. This Perspective suggests an alternative, complementary approach: meta-research using sociological and philosophical methodologies to examine researcher trust in (...) data. An improved understanding of the criteria used by researchers to judge data reliability will provide crucial, initial evidence on the actual scale of the reproducibility crisis and on measures to tackle it. (shrink)

Adult playfulness describes individual differences in framing everyday situations as personally interesting, and/or entertaining, and/or intellectually stimulating. We aimed at extending initial evidence on the interconnectedness between language use and adult playfulness by asking 264 participants to provide written descriptions of their understanding of playfulness and collected self-reports of their playfulness. We used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count methodology to quantitatively analyze the language use in these descriptions and tested the associations with individual differences in participants’ age, gender, and (...) playfulness. While higher expressions in all measures of playfulness did go along with writing more content when describing playfulness, facet-wise analyses revealed differential findings ; but the effects were small. We found that being a women and younger age were related to writing longer texts, and we discovered additional associations between certain LIWC categories and age and gender. Our study expands the knowledge about adult playfulness and its manifestations in natural language use. We embed our findings into previous research and discuss limitations and potential approaches for replication studies. (shrink)

Simon Cushing conducted the following interview with Eric Olson on 1 July 2016.

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an effective treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease. However, identifying stimulation parameters, such as contact and current amplitudes, is time-consuming based on trial and error. Directional leads add more stimulation options and render this process more challenging with a higher workload for neurologists and more discomfort for patients. In this study, a sweet spot-guided algorithm was developed that automatically suggested stimulation parameters. These suggestions were retrospectively compared to clinical monopolar reviews. A cohort of 24 Parkinson’s disease (...) patients underwent bilateral DBS implantation in the subthalamic nucleus at our center. First, the DBS’ leads were reconstructed with the open-source toolbox Lead-DBS. Second, a sweet spot for rigidity reduction was set as the desired stimulation target for programming. This sweet spot and estimations of the volume of tissue activated were used to suggest (i) the best lead level, (ii) the best contact, and (iii) the effect thresholds for full therapeutic effect for each contact. To assess these sweet spot-guided suggestions, the clinical monopolar reviews were considered as ground truth. In addition, the sweet spot-guided suggestions for best lead level and best contact were compared against reconstruction-guided suggestions, which considered the lead location with respect to the subthalamic nucleus. Finally, a graphical user interface was developed as an add-on to Lead-DBS and is publicly available. With the interface, suggestions for all contacts of a lead can be generated in a few seconds. The accuracy for suggesting the best out of four lead levels was 56%. These sweet spot-guided suggestions were not significantly better than reconstruction-guided suggestions (p = 0.3). The accuracy for suggesting the best out of eight contacts was 41%. These sweet spot-guided suggestions were significantly better than reconstruction-guided suggestions (p < 0.001). The sweet spot-guided suggestions of each contact’s effect threshold had a mean error of 1.2 mA. On an individual lead level, the suggestions can vary more with mean errors ranging from 0.3 to 4.8 mA. Further analysis is warranted to improve the sweet spot-guided suggestions and to account for more symptoms and stimulation-induced side effects. (shrink)

Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health were developed using in-depth qualitative interviews with editorial staff from nineteen genetics journals, focusing on the methodological and conceptual mechanisms required to make race/ethnicity a genetic variable. As such, these analyses explore how and why race/ethnicity comes to be used in the context of genetic research, set against the background of continuing critiques from anthropology and related human sciences that focus on the social construction, structural (...) correlates and limited genetic validity of racial/ethnic categories. The analyses demonstrate how these critiques have failed to engage geneticists, and how geneticists use a range of essentially cultural devices to protect and separate their use of race/ethnicity as a genetic construct from its use as a societal and social science resource. Given its multidisciplinary, biosocial nature and the cultural gaze of its ethnographic methodologies, anthropology is well placed to explore the cultural separation of science and society, and of natural and social science disciplines. Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore disparities in health suggest that moving beyond genetic explanations of innate difference might benefit from a more even-handed critique of how both the natural and social sciences tend to essentialize selective elements of race/ethnicity. Drawing on the example of HIV/AIDS, this paper demonstrates how public health has been undermined by the use of race/ethnicity as an analytical variable, both as a cipher for innate genetic differences in susceptibility and response to treatment, and in its use to identify at greater risk of becoming infected and infecting others. Clearly, a tendency for biological reductionism can place many biomedical issues beyond the scope of public health interventions, while socio-cultural essentialization has tended to stigmatize and the communities where these are more prevalent. (shrink)

We report the results of three experiments designed to assess the role of suppositions in human reasoning. Theories of reasoning based on formal rules propose that the ability to make suppositions is central to deductive reasoning. Our first experiment compared two types of problem that could be solved by a suppositional strategy. Our results showed no difference in difficulty between problems requiring affirmative or negative suppositions and very low logical solution rates throughout. Further analysis of the error data showed a (...) pattern of responses, which suggested that participants reason from a superficial representation of the premises in these arguments and this drives their choice of conclusion. Our second experiment employed a different set of suppositional problems but with extremely similar proofs in terms of the rules applied and number of inferential steps required. As predicted by our interpretation of reasoning strategies employed in Experiment 1, logical performance was very much higher on these problems. Our third experiment showed that problems that could be solved by constructing an initial representation of the premises were easier than problems in which this representation was not sufficient. This effect was independent of the suppositional structure of the problems. We discuss the implications of this research for theories of reasoning based on mental models and inference rules. (shrink)

We agree with Ainslie's general approach to intertemporal choices and self-control. However, we argue that a concept of “will” is superfluous in explaining tradeoffs between SS (smaller and sooner) and LL (larger and later) rewards in a framework of temporal goal setting and goal aggregation. We provide an alternative framework of reference point-dependent tradeoffs between SS and LL options.

The language of “participant-driven research,” “crowdsourcing” and “citizen science” is increasingly being used to encourage the public to become involved in research ventures as both subjects and scientists. Originally, these labels were invoked by volunteer research efforts propelled by amateurs outside of traditional research institutions and aimed at appealing to those looking for more “democratic,” “patient-centric,” or “lay” alternatives to the professional science establishment. As mainstream translational biomedical research requires increasingly larger participant pools, however, corporate, academic and governmental research programs (...) are embracing this populist rhetoric to encourage wider public participation. We examine the ethical and social implications of this recruitment strategy. We begin by surveying examples of “citizen science” outside of biomedicine, as paradigmatic of the aspirations this democratizing rhetoric was originally meant to embody. Next, we discuss the ways these aspirations become articulated in the biomedical context, with a view to drawing out the multiple and potentially conflicting meanings of “public engagement” when citizens are also the subjects of the science. We then illustrate two uses of public engagement rhetoric to gain public support for national biomedical research efforts: its post-hoc use in the “care.data” project of the National Health Service in England, and its proactive uses in the “Precision Medicine Initiative” of the United States White House. These examples will serve as the basis for a normative analysis, discussing the potential ethical and social ramifications of this rhetoric. We pay particular attention to the implications of government strategies that cultivate the idea that members of the public have a civic duty to participate in government-sponsored research initiatives. We argue that such initiatives should draw from policy frameworks that support normative analysis of the role of citizenry. And, we conclude it is imperative to make visible and clear the full spectrum of meanings of “citizen science,” the contexts in which it is used, and its demands with respect to participation, engagement, and governance. (shrink)

Avant de s'emparer de ce qu'elle sait, ou croit savoir, pour élaborer des théories, l'intelligence, lorsqu'elle s'éveille, est d'abord frappée par des évidences qui s'imposent à elle. A ce moment-là, l'intelligence est saisie, donc elle sort d'elle-même en s'ouvrant à la réalité, et elle en est consciente. Bref, elle tient une vérité. En même temps, ces lumières n'expliquent pas tout ;par conséquent, elles suscitent, tout naturellement, des questions. De là va naître ce que, à la suite de saint Thomas d'Aquin, (...) on a appelé :" la philosophie naturelle de l'esprit humain " qui, seule, peut nous délivrer, définitivement et objectivement, du relativisme et du vide, donc du désespoir. Point de départ de ces réflexions, la découverte de l'être et de sa nécessité dans l'évidence, intellectuelle qu'il y a quelque chose de bon et de beau en face de moi. A partir de là on discerne, certes, l'Erre perfection pure, mais surtout l'immatérialité de la connaissance, sans laquelle l'amour perd toute sa profondeur, et qui est le fondement de notre ressemblance à Dieu. C'est dire assez à quel point la foi suppose cette philosophie. Ces pages veulent s'adresser aux non-spécialistes, tout en essayant de répondre aux exigences de rigueur d'un esprit critique. Exercice difficile, mais à la hauteur de l'enjeu, exprimé de façon saisissante par Dimitri Karamazov :"Je suis fort peu instruit, frère, mais j'ai beaucoup songé à ces choses. Que de mystères accablent l'homme! Pénètre-les et reviens intact. ". (shrink)

In recent decades, the revival of natural law theory in modern moral philosophy has been an exciting and important development. Human Values brings together an international group of moral philosophers who in various respects share the aims and ideals of natural law ethics. In their diverse ways, these authors make distinctive and original contributions to the continuing project of developing natural law ethics as a comprehensive treatment of modern ethical theory and practice.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a defining figure of the twentieth century; a philosopher, Christian, resistance fighter, anarchist, feminist, labor activist and teacher. She was described by T. S. Eliot as "a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints," and by Albert Camus as "the only great spirit of our time." Originally published posthumously in two volumes, these newly reissued notebooks, are among the very few unedited personal writings of Weil's that still survive today. (...) Containing her thoughts on art, love, science, God and the meaning of life, they give context and meaning to Weil's famous works, revealing a unique philosophy in development and offering a rare private glimpse of her singular personality. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas has exerted a profound influence on 20th-century continental philosophy. This anthology, including Levinas's key philosophical texts over a period of more than forty years, provides an ideal introduction to his thought and offers insights into his most innovative ideas. Five of the ten essays presented here appear in English for the first time. An introduction by Adriaan Peperzak outlines Levinas's philosophical development and the basic themes of his writings. Each essay is accompanied by a brief introduction and notes. (...) This collection is an ideal text for students of philosophy concerned with understanding and assessing the work of this major philosopher. (shrink)

Après avoir fait l’état des lieux de la base de données VALIBEL en la situant dans son contexte institutionnel, nous mettons en exergue dans cet article quelques possibilités d’investigation qu’offre la base en regard de ses évolutions récentes. Une attention particulière est portée à l’outillage des corpus en termes de disfluences (avec le programme DisMo) et à l’étude du vieillissement langagier (liée au corpus Corpage). Nous concluons en montrant en quoi l’enrichissement constant de la base (en outillage et en corpus) (...) permet d’ouvrir de nouvelles pistes de recherches dans des domaines encore peu explorés en linguistique, eu égard à des problématiques sociétales majeures. (shrink)