Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of (...) prevalence levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics’ meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. (shrink)

The view that scientific reduction succeeds by establishing property identities is challenged. it is argued that, instead of identity statements making reductions successful, the fact that a reduction is successful makes the identity statements possible. the argument proceeds first by showing that an explanatory asymmetry is generated by statements expressing property identities, second by locating the source of the asymmetry in a "generative relation" that obtains between the two properties. it is then argued that reduction succeeds only (...) if the reducing theory embodies a mechanism which accounts for such a generative relation. since this view of reduction is incompatible with the traditional view, an alternate account is outlined. (shrink)

An examination of difficulties in three standard accounts of functions leads to the suggestion that sentences of the form "the function of x is to do y" are used to make a variety of different claims, all of which involve a means-end relationship and the idea of design, or use, or benefit. The analysis proposed enables us to see what is right and also wrong with accounts that analyze the meaning of function statements in terms of good consequences, goals, (...) and etiological explanation. It also enables us to show that function sentences can be used in providing various types of explanations, including, in certain cases, noncausal explanations of the presence of the item with the function. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 237-240.

One puzzling feature of talk about properties, propositions and natural numbers is that statements that are explicitly about them can be introduced apparently without change of truth conditions from statements that don't mention them at all. Thus it seems that the existence of numbers, properties and propositions can be established`from nothing'. This metaphysical puzzle is tied to a series of syntactic and semantic puzzles about the relationship between ordinary, metaphysically innocent statements and their metaphysically loaded counterparts, (...) class='Hi'>statements that explicitly mention numbers, properties and propositions, but nonetheless appear to be equivalent to the former. I argue that the standard solutions to the metaphysical puzzles make a mistaken assumption about the semantics of the loaded counterparts. Instead I propose a solution to the syntactic and semantic puzzles, and argue that this solution also gives us a new solution to the metaphysical puzzle. I argue that instead of containing more semantically singular terms that aim to refer to extra entities, the loaded counterparts are focus constructions. Their syntactic structure is in the service of presenting information with a focus, but not to refer to new entities. This will allow us to spell out Frege's metaphor of content carving. (shrink)

There is a form of argument for a certain kind of essentialist conclusion which appears not to depend upon any appeal to intuition. Identity statements involving natural kind terms are often adverted to in the literature as examples of the necessary a posteriori, and it can appear as though the essentialist is on very strong ground with respect to these claims. It is not merely that they are apt to strike one as plausible in the light of philosophical arguments (...) or modal intuitions; rather, they appear to be provable, given only fairly trivial logical principles and uncontroversial scientific truths. This paper attempts to counter the claim, made particularly convincing by the work of Saul Kripke, that this indeed the case. (shrink)

Because statements like ‘This object is soluble in aqua regia’ involve the causal modalities, we call them causal dispositional statements. Now while this involvement has long been recognized, no thorough examination of its exact nature has ever been made. One purpose of this paper is to begin such an examination. In Sec. 2 we will suggest an analysis of causal dispositional statements, and in Sec. 3 we will discuss some philosophic issues to which this analysis is relevant.

On September 30–October 2, 2005, a group of individuals drawn from civil society organizations, governments, international agencies, and academic institutions came together in Montréal, Québec, Canada, for an international workshop entitled “Human Rights and Access to Essential Medicines: The Way Forward.” At the conclusion of the workshop, we drafted the “Montréal Statement on the Human Right to Essential Medicines.” This “Statement” is reprinted at the end of this comment, which offers some background on the problem addressed at the workshop.

Many believe that, if true, reason-statements of the form ‘that X is F is a reason to φ’ describe a ‘favouring-relation’ between the fact that X is F and the act of φing. This favouring-relation has been assumed to share many features of other, more concrete relations. This combination of views leads to immediate problems. Firstly, unlike statements about many other relations, reason-statements can be true even when the relata do not exist, i.e., when the relevant facts (...) do not obtain and the relevant acts are not done. Secondly, the previous combination of views also makes it very difficult to draw the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons. I argue that we should think that the predicate ‘is a reason to’ creates non-extensional contexts in the statements in which it is used. This would both solve the previous problems and avoid the awkward consequences of the so-called slingshot argument. (shrink)

Discrepancies between the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) and the adult and pediatric diagnostic guidelines for brain death (BD) (the “Guidelines”) have motivated proposals to revise the UDDA. A revision proposed by Lewis, Bonnie and Pope (the RUDDA), has received particular attention, the three novelties of which would be: (1) to specify the Guidelines as the legally recognized “medical standard,” (2) to exclude hypothalamic function from the category of “brain function,” and (3) to authorize physicians to conduct an apnea (...) test without consent and even over a proxy’s objection. One hundred seven experts in medicine, bioethics, philosophy, and law, spanning a wide variety of perspectives, have come together in agreement that while the UDDA needs revision, the RUDDA is not the way to do it. Specifically, (1) the Guidelines have a non-negligible risk of false-positive error, (2) hypothalamic function is more relevant to the organism as a whole than any brainstem reflex, and (3) the apnea test carries a risk of precipitating BD in a non-BD patient, provides no benefit to the patient, does not reliably accomplish its intended purpose, and is not even absolutely necessary for diagnosing BD according to the internal logic of the Guidelines; it should at the very least require informed consent, as do many procedures that are much more beneficial and less risky. Finally, objections to a neurologic criterion of death are not based only on religious belief or ignorance. People have a right to not have a concept of death that experts vigorously debate imposed upon them against their judgment and conscience; any revision of the UDDA should therefore contain an opt-out clause for those who accept only a circulatory-respiratory criterion. (shrink)

I advance a pragmatic account of begging the question according to which a use of an argument begs the question just in case it is used as a statement of inference and it fails to state an inference the arguer or an addressee can perform given what they explicitly believe. Accordingly, what begs questions are uses of arguments as statements of inference, and the root cause of begging the question is an argument’s failure to state an inference performable by (...) the reasoners the arguer targets. In these ways, my account is distinguished from other pragmatic accounts. By taking the defect of a question-begging use of an argument to be its failure to state its purported inference, my account highlights in a unique way why question-begging is not an epistemic defect, and why it is not a fallacy, understood as a mistake in reasoning. These points have been made elsewhere, but I believe that their plausibility is enhanced by considering begging the question as nullifying the role of an argument as a statement of inference. Since question-begging uses of arguments fail to state their purported inferences, using an argument in a question-begging-way is not a ratiocinative mistake. This undermines accounts of begging the question that adopt an epistemic approach. (shrink)

:Empirical work has shown that patients and physicians have markedly divergent understandings of treatability statements in the context of serious illness. Patients often understand treatability statements as conveying good news for prognosis and quality of life. In contrast, physicians often do not intend treatability statements to convey improvement in prognosis or quality of life, but merely that a treatment is available. Similarly, patients often understand treatability statements as conveying encouragement to hope and pursue further treatment, though (...) this may not be intended by physicians. This radical divergence in understandings may lead to severe miscommunication. This paper seeks to better understand this divergence through linguistic theory—in particular, H.P. Grice’s notion of conversational implicature. This theoretical approach reveals three levels of meaning of treatability statements: the literal meaning, the physician’s intended meaning, and the patient’s received meaning. The divergence between the physician’s intended meaning and the patient’s received meaning can be understood to arise from the lack of shared experience between physicians and patients, and the differing assumptions that each party makes about conversations. This divergence in meaning raises new and largely unidentified challenges to informed consent and shared decision making in the context of serious illness, which indicates a need for further empirical research in this area. (shrink)

Can there be a non-reductivist, source-based explanation of the use of normative language in statements describing the law and legal situations? This problem was formulated by Joseph Raz, who also claimed to have solved it. According to his well-known doctrine of ‘detached’ statements, normative legal statements can be informatively made by speakers who merely adopt, without necessarily sharing, the point of view of someone who accepts that legal norms are justified and ought to be followed. In this (...) paper I defend two theses. I argue, first, that the notion of a detached statement cannot be made to work, and that Raz’s problem is thus not thereby solved. But the problem itself, I also suggest, is a false one. (shrink)

This study was designed to examine the prevalence of a code of ethics and to analyze its content among public relations agencies in the United States. Of the 1,562 public relations agencies reviewed, 605 (38.7%) provided an ethical statement. Among the ethical statements provided by these public relations agencies, ‹respect to clients,’ ‹service,’ ‹strategic,’ and ‹results’ were the values most frequently emphasized. On the other hand, ‹balance,’ ‹fairness,’ ‹honor,’ ‹social responsibility,’ and ‹independence’ were the least frequently mentioned in the (...) ethical codes. Also, none of the sampled agencies included any sanctions regarding enforcement of their particular codes of ethics. (shrink)

1. Object of this note . In his lively essay, “Between Analytic and Empirical,” , Mr. J. W. N. Watkins challenges the empiricist identification of synthetic statements with empirical ones by arguing that there exists an important class of statements which are synthetic, i.e. not analytically true or false, and yet not empirical. I find Mr. Watkins's arguments very stimulating, but I do not think they provide a sound basis for his contention. In the present note, I wish (...) to indicate what seem to me the principal flaws in Mr. Watkins's reasoning, and to make some additional comments on the issues raised by his discussion. (shrink)

In this position statement it is argued that educational neuroscience must necessarily be relevant to, and therefore have implications for, both educational theory and practice. Consequently, educational neuroscientific research necessarily must embrace educational research questions in its remit.

Joseph Raz has introduced an interesting class of statements —detached statements— into the philosophical lexicon. In brief, such statements are normative statements, yet the speaker does not, in so uttering them, express or convey acceptance of the point of view of the hearer to whom they are addressed. I propose to offer a novel analysis of such statements. In brief, such statements will be analysed as wide-scope normative conditionals.

In this issue of JME, Watson et al call for research evaluation of government health programmes and identify ethical guidance, including the Ottawa Statement on the ethical design and conduct of cluster randomised trials, as a hindrance. While cluster randomised trials of health programmes as a whole should be evaluated by research ethics committees, Watson et al argue that the health programme per se is not within the researcher’s control or responsibility and, thus, is out of scope for ethics review. (...) We argue that this view is wrong. The scope of research ethics review is not defined by researcher control or responsibility, but rather by the protection of research participants. And the randomised evaluation of health programmes impacts the liberty and welfare interests of participants insofar as they may be exposed to a harmful programme or denied access to a beneficial one. Further, Watson et al’s claim that ‘study programmes … would occur whether or not there were any … research activities’ is incorrect in the case of cluster randomised designs. In a cluster randomised trial, the government does not implement a programme as usual. Rather, researchers collaborate with the government to randomise clusters to intervention or control conditions in order to rigorously evaluate the programme. As a result, equipoise issues are triggered that must be addressed by the REC. (shrink)

Many journalism organizations have published codes of ethics in recent years. The Association of Newspaper Editors, for example, lists 47 different codes on its website. But an organization of health care journalists felt that none of those codes addressed the unique challenges of covering complex health care topics. The Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing public understanding of health care issues. Its mission is to improve the quality, accuracy and visibility of health (...) care reporting, writing and editing. AHCJ has written a statement of principles for its 750 members. In it, AHCJ states some of the unique challenges faced by journalists covering health care, and offers suggestions on how to face those challenges. Bioethicists are invited to comment on the statement, and to help generate continued discussion of the issues addressed therein. (shrink)

This paper is divided into four sections. -/- The first section contains an informal characterization of what may, for the purposes of this discussion, be referred to as the standard interpretation of theological statements. -/- Then, in the second section, I mention two challenges to the commonsense view that theological statements have cognitive content: the quote “falsifiability challenge” and the “ translatability challenge”. -/- Both of these challenges involve an appeal to an empiricist criterion of cognitive content, but (...) I contend that they are nonetheless very different arguments and that clarity about the fundamental issues involved in the question of theology and verificationism cannot be achieved unless these two lines are argument are carefully distinguished. -/- The third section is concerned with the question of the possibility of an empiricist criterion of cognitive significance. The underlying purpose of the discussion will be to arrive derive at an evaluation of the commonly advanced claim that verificationist objections to the meaningfulness of theological language can be refuted by simply arguing that is not possible to formulate an adequate confirmability criterion of cognitive significance. -/- I then conclude by suggesting some responses that seem more promising. (shrink)

We assume that people have a need to make statements, and construct a model in which this need is the sole determinant of voting behavior. In this model, an individual selects a ballot that makes as close a statement as possible to her ideal point, where abstaining from voting is a possible (null) statement. We show that in such a model, a political system that adopts approval voting may be expected to enjoy a significantly higher rate of participation in (...) elections than a comparable system with plurality rule. (shrink)

The use of charged-particle radiation therapy is an increasingly important development in the treatment of cancer. One of the most pressing controversies about the use of this technology is whether randomised controlled trials are required before this form of treatment can be considered to be the treatment of choice for a wide range of indications. Equipoise is the key ethical concept in determining which research studies are justified. However, there is a good deal of disagreement about how this concept is (...) best understood and applied in the specific case of CPRT. This report is a position statement on these controversies that arises out of a workshop held at Wolfson College, Oxford in August 2011. The workshop brought together international leaders in the relevant fields , including proponents on both sides of the debate, in order to make significant progress on the ethical issues associated with CPRT research. This position statement provides an ethical platform for future research and should enable further work to be done in developing international coordinated programmes of research. (shrink)

Informal statements of Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem, referred to here as Informal Second Incompleteness, are simple and dramatic. However, current versions of Formal Second Incompleteness are complicated and awkward. We present new versions of Formal Second Incompleteness that are simple, and informally imply Informal Second Incompleteness. These results rest on the isolation of simple formal properties shared by consistency statements. Here we do not address any issues concerning proofs of Second Incompleteness.

Plato's examination of False Statement is, like many of his discussions in the later dialogues, a mixture of complete lucidity with extreme obscurity. Any English student who seeks to understand it will of course turn first to Professor Cornford's translation and commentary; and if he next reads what M. Diès has to say in the Introduction to his Budé edition of the Sophist he will, I think, have sufficient acquaintance with the views of modern Platonic scholars on the subject. For (...) myself, at least, I have not gained any further understanding from other writers than these two. (shrink)

Popper's well-known demarcation criterion has often been understood to distinguish statements of empirical science according to their logical form. Implicit in this interpretation of Popper's philosophy is the belief that when the universe of discourse of the empirical scientist is infinite, empirical universal sentences are falsifiable but not verifiable, whereas the converse holds for existential sentences. A remarkable elaboration of this belief is to be found in Watkins's early work on the statements he calls “all-and-some,” such as: “For (...) every metal there is a melting point.” All-and-some statements are both universally and existentially quantified in that order. Watkins argued that AS should be regarded as both nonfalsifiable and nonverifiable, for they partake in the logical fate of both universal and existential statements. This claim is subject to the proviso that the bound variables are “uncircumscribed” ; i.e., that the universe of discourse is infinite. (shrink)

Can there be a non-reductivist, source-based explanation of the use of normative language in statements describing the law and legal situations? This problem was formulated by Joseph Raz, who also claimed to have solved it. According to his well-known doctrine of ‘detached’ statements, normative legal statements can be informatively made by speakers who merely adopt, without necessarily sharing, the point of view of someone who accepts that legal norms are justified and ought to be followed. In this (...) paper I defend two theses. I argue, first, that the notion of a detached statement cannot be made to work, and that Raz’s problem is thus not thereby solved. But the problem itself, I also suggest, is a false one. (shrink)

The rising tide of corporate scandals and audit failures has shocked the public, and the integrity of auditors is being increasingly questioned. It is crucial for auditors and regulators to understand the main causes of audit failure and devise preventive measures accordingly. This study analyzes enforcement actions issued by the China Securities Regulatory Commission against auditors in respect of fraudulent financial reporting committed by listed companies in China. We find that auditors are more likely to be sanctioned by the regulators (...) for failing to detect and report material misstatement frauds rather than disclosure frauds. Further analysis of the material misstatements indicates that auditors are more likely to be sanctioned for failing to detect and report revenue-related frauds rather than assets-related frauds. In sum, our results suggest that regulators believe auditors have the responsibility to detect and report frauds that are egregious, transaction-based, and related to accounting earnings. The results contribute to our knowledge of auditors’ responsibilities for detecting frauds as perceived by regulators. (shrink)

A deficit in the number of organs available for transplantation persists even with an increase in donation rates. One possible choice of donor for organs that appears under-referred and/or unaccepted is patients with primary brain tumours. In spite of advances in the treatment of high-grade primary central nervous system (CNS) tumours, the prognosis remains dire. A working group on organs from donors with primary CNS tumours showed that the risk of transmission is small and outweighs the benefits of waiting for (...) a normal donor, in survival and organ life-years, with caveats. This paper explores the possibility that, if information on organ donation were made available to patients and their families with knowledge of their inevitable fate, perhaps some will choose to donate. It would be explained that to achieve this, elective ventilation would be performed in their final moments. This would obviate the consent question because of an advance statement. It is accepted that these are sensitive matters and there will be logistic issues. This will need discussion with the public and other professionals, but it could increase the number of donors and can be extrapolated to encompass other primary CNS tumours. (shrink)

The new generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and especially the large language models (LLMs) of which ChatGPT is the most prominent example, have the potential to transform many aspects o...

This chapter contains sections titled: Plantinga's Responses to My Two Arguments Is Belief in God Non‐Inferentially Justified? The Argument from Evil Versus Justifications for Believing in the Existence of God Concluding Comment: Naturalism, Supernaturalism, and Theism.