This paper investigates the effectiveness of a new traceability label on consumer willingness to buy the labelled product and whether the effect is mediated by moral affective evaluations of the product. A between-subjects factorial design was used to test the effect of a new traceability label on willingness to buy a chocolate bar, while controlling for different product features and whether this effect was mediated through the consumer’s moral affective evaluations of the product. A broad sample of 1,064 ordinary Danish (...) consumers was recruited for the study from the panel of an online sample provider, age range 18–80. We found that the traceability label has a significant impact on consumer willingness to buy a chocolate bar. This impact is mediated by moral affective evaluations of the chocolate bar. Based on the dual process models of persuasion, we conclude that consumers mainly process the traceability label in a heuristic way, through a peripheral route, making a fast and frugal, affect-based judgment, rather than one based on elaborate reasoning. Being one of the first empirical studies on the impact of a traceability label on consumer willingness to buy a product, it provides valuable insights for businesses on the effects of a traceability label on consumer behaviour. In addition, it provides new insights on the process through which an ethical label influences consumer evaluations and purchase behaviour. This study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to show that an ethical label influences consumer decision-making through activating a holistic moral affective evaluation of the offering, rather than through strengthening the consumer’s knowledge base for a more qualified reasoning process. (shrink)

Originally published in 1970. This work evaluates the appeal to the sensually given which played an important role in epistemological discussions during the early 20 th Century. While many contemporary philosophers regarded this appeal as a mistake, there were still some who defended the notion of the given and even made it the foundation of their views regarding perception. The author here points to several different views concerning the nature of the sensually given and argues that the issue between them (...) is not empirical, as is naturally suggested by what he calls ‘the Naïve View’ of the dispute, but rather metaphysical, involving different theories regarding the relationship between Thought and Reality. This leads on to a discussion of the different views presently held regarding the task of the epistemologist, and to a new suggestion with regard to the relationship between common sense and the rival ontologies suggested by scientists and philosophers. In the course of the argument a variety of different topics are discussed such as the correspondence and coherence theories of truth, the differences between scientific and philosophical theories, and the relevance of scientific treatments of the subject of perception to the treatment of this topic by philosophers. (shrink)

Could it be that the Trump presidency is symptomatic of something profoundly true and constitutive as regards not only the politics but also the business and sport models of the USA? Could it be th...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE UNITY OF THE VICES JONATHAN JACOBS Oolgate University, Hamilton, New York JOHN ZEIS Oanisius Ooilege, Buffalo, New York W:E SOMETIMES describe someone 1rus "just plain,, ' ' • • 0 " ' ' • • mean, or Just plam d1shonesit, orr JUSt pJam unw." Or we say" thaJt wrus ·a just plain ·stupid thing rto do.," G~a:liizing from tlhese and lik!e descriiptions, we can ask, are there any (...) "just plain" vices? By this I mean, are :amy vices pure, 1e.g., can rthere he Cl'lllelty hut nort injustice or in!t:Jempertance, intemperance hut no!t a £ailill'e orf pmctical wisdom, cowardice but not intemperance or injustice, and so on? Is therie perhaps a unity of the vices? Is each ;a col'l'IU!ption thrat involves the coITUpiting ctontriburtion of the othe'l'IS? If there is,a, run:iity of the vicies, then 1be:inig ra vicious individual is Il!Ort siinply 1a ma!bter o:f failing :across the dimensioill of one or rrunothe.r 1 Cihaa:iae1becisltic. ]t ms tan extensi,ve diaiilure, 1a unified (:if l[JIOrt toit.al) failure, even if it is most evident 1and preVialent in one or another •specific respecit. 'f1his iis not to isay thrut.theiie is just one vice,.any moil'!e 1than '!Jo.endorse the unity of it.he virtues is to reduce tth:em to Ollle. There.are many woes OOlld many virrbues, eaiCh respeotively h!ruving to do with dillemnt 1and variously!l'le1aibed crupacirties, motives, emotions, and tiiaiits. Yet, rut least with respect to the virtues a good caise can be mrude :that they.are unified, aind thrut ·AnisbotLe was oorrreot in concluding that practical wisdom :and viWtues of cha;riacter mum occur st quite 1 s1tably, even if '1llolt happily. In any case, we ail"e in 1 to:tal ag.rteemelllt with Geach when he 1sayis 1that ithaJt "If 1a man's ha1bit of sound moml judgme1J11t is virtiiafod anyiwhere, then :it is at risk eVierywhere; but not all dangel"s issue in disa1sit1e'f!s." 3 But 1thes1e dis1as!ters arie aV1eTted r.not because of,any moml str1ength of characil:er 1 th:ait the agent 1truly ihas bUJt heca:us1 e of a me11e inc1ilJJaition tues. 'Ilhe former may he very :firm ox srtable. Mo11eover the n:aituil'ally vi11tuous rindividual may giener1a1ly no1t he oornfused or.impeded maction by "b.ar:d easies" or nnvelty. Alt times he rmay, 1and lthien me may find his re1sourroes iinoompe1be!I1t O'I.' unoel 'l:Ja1in in 1bhreir direetives. Hut the main rpo:inlt of co111iCT'last is thait mo11al virtues 11eflieot 1a 1evel of 1agency wh1oh involves undersitanding 1and self-determin1ation engiaged 1 to t:hat undersltanding, 1a 1leviel tihJait tis 1ruhsen1t foom iinc1ination-grounded action. Na,tu11a1l vri:r1tues 1a1rie ll101t to he despised, 1 and 1aclts :thait fLorw 1f110m 1tJhem 1are not w:iithout moml Wiortlh. But, using the fangiuiage of Fr1a:nk£u:rt, mom1l virtues are oha1racter]s,tios thait refiecrt second order volitions.5 The aiotis: thait flow fil1om them •are not H11e reis:ult of ways one just hrupens to be. And the undeil'-,starnding involvred in moml vrntues makes mo'ral misdireotion 1 1es;s li1"ely. Again, mnswder suoh t.lrings rus mis1applied oomprussfon, or paiti:errce, whioh can involve u1mairness 1and imprudence. P1 errharpis it.is heoausie rbhe mo:rial V1mtueis rare unified that it is 1so hard to rbe 1good. They invo1vie a complex reperrto:We of judgmenits, d1sposi!tiorrs, and moti¥es. No one of them can he oomp1ete on its own, and wie c1an't oome to have 1 tJhem simply 1hy decis1on. One oan til.'y rbo he move coumgeous bU1t caill't ibring it rubout meriely hy init1emal eommanid. Self-imposrutiion in5 In " Freedom of the Will and 'The Concept of a Person," H. Frankfurt writes, "Someone has a desire of the second order when he wants simply to have a certain desire or when he wants a certain desire to be his will. In situations of the latter kind, I shall call his second-order desires "secondorder volitions" or " volitions of the second order." Now it is having... (shrink)

An astonishing volume and diversity of evidence is available for many hypotheses in the biomedical and social sciences. Some of this evidence—usually from randomized controlled trials (RCTs)—is amalgamated by meta-analysis. Despite the ongoing debate regarding whether or not RCTs are the ‘gold-standard’ of evidence, it is usually meta-analysis which is considered the best source of evidence: meta-analysis is thought by many to be the platinum standard of evidence. However, I argue that meta-analysis falls far short of that standard. Different meta-analyses (...) of the same evidence can reach contradictory conclusions. Meta-analysis fails to provide objective grounds for intersubjective assessments of hypotheses because numerous decisions must be made when performing a meta-analysis which allow wide latitude for subjective idiosyncrasies to influence its outcome. I end by suggesting that an older tradition of evidence in medicine—the plurality of reasoning strategies appealed to by the epidemiologist Sir Bradford Hill—is a superior strategy for assessing a large volume and diversity of evidence. (shrink)

Measuring the effectiveness of medical interventions faces three epistemological challenges: the choice of good measuring instruments, the use of appropriate analytic measures, and the use of a reliable method of extrapolating measures from an experimental context to a more general context. In practice each of these challenges contributes to overestimating the effectiveness of medical interventions. These challenges suggest the need for corrective normative principles. The instruments employed in clinical research should measure patient-relevant and disease-specific parameters, and should not be sensitive (...) to parameters that are only indirectly relevant. Effectiveness always should be measured and reported in absolute terms (using measures such as 'absolute risk reduction'), and only sometimes should effectiveness also be measured and reported in relative terms (using measures such as 'relative risk reduction')-employment of relative measures promotes an informal fallacy akin to the base-rate fallacy, which can be exploited to exaggerate claims of effectiveness. Finally, extrapolating from research settings to clinical settings should more rigorously take into account possible ways in which the intervention in question can fail to be effective in a target population. (shrink)

A stereotype is a belief or claim that a group of people has a particular feature. Stereotypes are expressed by sentences that have the form of generic statements, like “Canadians are nice.” Recent work on generics lends new life to understanding generics as statements involving probabilities. I argue that generics (and thus sentences expressing stereotypes) can take one of several forms involving conditional probabilities, and these probabilities have what I call a naturalness requirement. This is the natural probability theory of (...) stereotypes. Each of the two components of the theory entails a family of fallacies that contributes to the spurious reinforcement of stereotypes: inferential slippage within and between the different generic forms, and inferential slippage from facts about frequencies of group traits to beliefs about natural propensities or dispositions of groups. Empirical research suggests that we often commit these fallacies. Moreover, this theory can referee a vitriolic debate between some psychologists, who hold that stereotypes are always false and stereotyping is always wrong, and other psychologists, who hold that stereotypes are often accurate and stereotyping is often reasonable. (shrink)

Robustness arguments hold that hypotheses are more likely to be true when they are confirmed by diverse kinds of evidence. Robustness arguments require the confirming evidence to be independent. We identify two kinds of independence appealed to in robustness arguments: ontic independence —when the multiple lines of evidence depend on different materials, assumptions, or theories—and probabilistic independence. Many assume that OI is sufficient for a robustness argument to be warranted. However, we argue that, as typically construed, OI is not a (...) sufficient independence condition for warranting robustness arguments. We show that OI evidence can collectively confirm a hypothesis to a lower degree than individual lines of evidence, contrary to the standard assumption undergirding usual robustness arguments. We employ Bayesian networks to represent the ideal empirical scenario for a robustness argument and a variety of ways in which empirical scenarios can fall short of this ideal. (shrink)

Evidence hierarchies are widely used to assess evidence in systematic reviews of medical studies. I give several arguments against the use of evidence hierarchies. The problems with evidence hierarchies are numerous, and include methodological shortcomings, philosophical problems, and formal constraints. I argue that medical science should not employ evidence hierarchies, including even the latest and most-sophisticated of such hierarchies.

The value-free ideal for science holds that values should not influence the core features of scientific reasoning. We defend the difference-to-inference model of value-permeation, which holds that value-permeation in science is problematic when values make a difference to the inferences made about a hypothesis. This view of value-permeation is superior to existing views, and it suggests a corresponding maxim—namely, that scientists should strive to eliminate differences to inference. This maxim is the basis of a novel value-free ideal for science. -/- (...) . (shrink)

A platitude that took hold with Kuhn is that there can be several equally good ways of balancing theoretical virtues for theory choice. Okasha recently modelled theory choice using technical apparatus from the domain of social choice: famously, Arrow showed that no method of social choice can jointly satisfy four desiderata, and each of the desiderata in social choice has an analogue in theory choice. Okasha suggested that one can avoid the Arrow analogue for theory choice by employing a strategy (...) used by Sen in social choice, namely, to enhance the information made available to the choice algorithms. I argue here that, despite Okasha’s claims to the contrary, the information-enhancing strategy is not compelling in the domain of theory choice. (shrink)

I defend a radical interpretation of biological populations—what I call population pluralism—which holds that there are many ways that a particular grouping of individuals can be related such that the grouping satisfies the conditions necessary for those individuals to evolve together. More constraining accounts of biological populations face empirical counter-examples and conceptual difficulties. One of the most intuitive and frequently employed conditions, causal connectivity—itself beset with numerous difficulties—is best construed by considering the relevant causal relations as ‘thick’ causal concepts. I (...) argue that the fine-grained causal relations that could constitute membership in a biological population are huge in number and many are manifested by degree, and thus we can construe population membership as being defined by massively multidimensional constructs, the differences between which are largely arbitrary. I end by showing that positions in two recent debates in theoretical biology depend on a view of biological populations at odds with the pluralism defended here. (shrink)

Formal principles governing best practices in classification and definition have for too long been neglected in the construction of biomedical ontologies, in ways which have important negative consequences for data integration and ontology alignment. We argue that the use of such principles in ontology construction can serve as a valuable tool in error-detection and also in supporting reliable manual curation. We argue also that such principles are a prerequisite for the successful application of advanced data integration techniques such as ontology-based (...) multi-database querying, automated ontology alignment and ontology-based text-mining. These theses are illustrated by means of a case study of the Gene Ontology, a project of increasing importance within the field of biomedical data integration. (shrink)

Medicalisation is a social phenomenon in which conditions that were once under legal, religious, personal or other jurisdictions are brought into the domain of medical authority. Low sexual desire in females has been medicalised, pathologised as a disease, and intervened upon with a range of pharmaceuticals. There are two polarised positions on the medicalisation of low female sexual desire: I call these the mainstream view and the critical view. I assess the central arguments for both positions. Dividing the two positions (...) are opposing models of the aetiology of low female sexual desire. I conclude by suggesting that the balance of arguments supports a modest defence of the critical view regarding the medicalisation of low female sexual desire. (shrink)

Personal authenticity is out of fashion amongst analytic philosophers. Yet, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus were clearly preoccupied by its theoretical and practical viability. In this study, Jacob Golomb illuminates the writings of these philosophers in an attempt to explain their particular ethical stance on the subject. This book will prove invaluable reading for students and teachers of philosophy, literature and education and indeed for anyone who has ever empathized with Camus's Meursault, Sartre's Matthieu or Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

Harms of medical interventions are systematically underestimated in clinical research. Numerous factors—conceptual, methodological, and social—contribute to this underestimation. I articulate the depth of such underestimation by describing these factors at the various stages of clinical research. Before any evidence is gathered, the ways harms are operationalized in clinical research contributes to their underestimation. Medical interventions are first tested in phase 1 ‘first in human’ trials, but evidence from these trials is rarely published, despite the fact that such trials provide the (...) foundation for assessing the harm profile of medical interventions. If a medical intervention is deemed safe in a phase 1 trial, it is tested in larger phase 2 and 3 clinical trials. One way to think about the problem of underestimating harms is in terms of the statistical ‘power’ of a clinical trial—the ability of a trial to detect a difference of a certain effect size between the experimental group and the control group. Power is normally thought to be pertinent to detecting benefits of medical interventions. It is important, though, to distinguish between the ability of a trial to detect benefits and the ability of a trial to detect harms. I refer to the former as power-B and the latter as power-H. I identify several factors that maximize power-B by sacrificing powerH in phase 3 clinical trials. If a medical intervention is approved for general use, it is evaluated by phase 4 post-market surveillance. Phase 4 surveillance of harms further contributes to underestimating the harm profile of medical interventions. At every stage of clinical research the hunt for harms is shrouded in secrecy, which further contributes to the underestimation of the harm profiles of medical interventions. (shrink)

Amalgamating evidence of different kinds for the same hypothesis into an overall confirmation is analogous, I argue, to amalgamating individuals’ preferences into a group preference. The latter faces well-known impossibility theorems, most famously “Arrow’s Theorem”. Once the analogy between amalgamating evidence and amalgamating preferences is tight, it is obvious that amalgamating evidence might face a theorem similar to Arrow’s. I prove that this is so, and end by discussing the plausibility of the axioms required for the theorem.

To be effective, a medical intervention must improve one's health by targeting a disease. The concept of disease, though, is controversial. Among the leading accounts of disease-naturalism, normativism, hybridism, and eliminativism-I defend a version of hybridism. A hybrid account of disease holds that for a state to be a disease that state must both (i) have a constitutive causal basis and (ii) cause harm. The dual requirement of hybridism entails that a medical intervention, to be deemed effective, must target either (...) the constitutive causal basis of a disease or the harms caused by the disease (or ideally both). This provides a theoretical underpinning to the two principle aims of medical treatment: care and cure. (shrink)

Although early-stage finance is critical to the growth of most ventures, it is even more important for social ventures as they face the challenges of balancing their social and commercial objectives. Drawing on institutional logics and signaling theory, this study uses a panel data set of 3,401 nascent social ventures to investigate the important role philanthropic grant funding plays in the organizational and financial development of social ventures. We find mixed results, with positive effects on employment and subsequent access to (...) debt finance, but no effects on revenues and access to equity. Our findings connect these theories by suggesting philanthropic grants provide social ventures with flexibility to invest in human capital without pushing them to pursue short-term financial objectives, and that receiving a philanthropic grant provides a signal that is interpreted differently by debt and equity financiers. These findings are especially relevant as funders increasingly use grants to support social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

I defend a radical interpretation of biological populations—what I call population pluralism—which holds that there are many ways that a particular grouping of individuals can be related such that the grouping satisfies the conditions necessary for those individuals to evolve together. More constraining accounts of biological populations face empirical counter-examples and conceptual difficulties. One of the most intuitive and frequently employed conditions, causal connectivity—itself beset with numerous difficulties—is best construed by considering the relevant causal relations as ‘thick’ causal concepts. I (...) argue that the fine-grained causal relations that could constitute membership in a biological population are huge in number and many are manifested by degree, and thus we can construe population membership as being defined by massively multidimensional constructs, the differences between which are largely arbitrary. I end by showing that positions in two recent debates in theoretical biology depend on a view of biological populations at odds with the pluralism defended here. 1 Introduction2 Biological Population, Broad and Narrow3 Difficulties with Narrow Biological Population Conditions3.1 Against the genealogical condition3.2 Against the conspecificity condition3.3 Against the proximity condition3.4 Against the typology condition4 Causal Connectivity5 Massively Multidimensional Population Constructs6 Population Uniqueness and Natural Selection6.1 Statisticalism and its discontents6.2 Price at what price?7 Conclusion. (shrink)

Consensus conferences are social techniques which involve bringing together a group of scientific experts, and sometimes also non-experts, in order to increase the public role in science and related policy, to amalgamate diverse and often contradictory evidence for a hypothesis of interest, and to achieve scientific consensus or at least the appearance of consensus among scientists. For consensus conferences that set out to amalgamate evidence, I propose three desiderata: Inclusivity, Constraint, and Evidential Complexity. Two examples suggest that consensus conferences can (...) readily satisfy Inclusivity and Evidential Complexity, but consensus conferences do not as easily satisfy Constraint. I end by discussing the relation between social inclusivity and the three desiderata. (shrink)

Concepts. Health ; Disease ; Death -- Models and kinds. Causation and kinds ; Holism and reductionism ; Controversial diseases -- Evidence and inference. Evidence in medicine ; Objectivity and the social structure of science ; Inference ; Effectiveness, skepticism, and alternatives ; Diagnosis and screening -- Values and policy. Psychiatry: care or control? ; Policy ; Public health.

Drug regulation is fraught with inductive risk. Regulators must make a prediction about whether or not an experimental pharmaceutical will be effective and relatively safe when used by typical patients, and such predictions are based on a complex, indeterminate, and incomplete evidential basis. Such inductive risk has important practical consequences. If regulators reject an experimental drug when it in fact has a favourable benefit/harm profile, then a valuable intervention is denied to the public and a company’s material interests are needlessly (...) thwarted. Conversely, if regulators approve an experimental drug when it in fact has an unfavourable benefit/harm profile, then resources are wasted, people are needlessly harmed, and other potentially more effective treatments are underutilized. Given that such regulatory decisions have these practical consequences, non-epistemic values about the relative importance of these consequences impact the way such regulatory decisions are made (similar to the analysis of laboratory studies on the toxic effects of dioxins presented in Douglas [2000]). To balance the competing demands of the pertinent non-epistemic values, regulators must perform what I call an “inductive risk calculus.” At least in the American context this inductive risk calculus is not well-managed. (shrink)

Critics of commodification often claim that the buying and selling of some good communicates disrespect or some other inappropriate attitude. Such semiotic critiques have been leveled against markets in sex, pornography, kidneys, surrogacy, blood, and many other things. Brennan and Jaworski (2015a) have recently argued that all such objections fail. They claim that the meaning of a market transaction is a highly contingent, socially constructed fact. If allowing a market for one of these goods can improve the supply, access or (...) quality of the good, then instead of banning the market on semiotic grounds, they urge that we should revise our semiotics. In this reply, I isolate a part of the meaning of a market transaction that is not socially constructed: our market exchanges always express preferences. I then show how cogent semiotic critiques of some markets can be constructed on the basis of this fact. (shrink)

This volume is a study of the relationship between philosophy and faith in Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. It is also the first book to examine the role of Socrates in this body of writings, illuminating the significance of Socrates for Kierkegaard's thought. Jacob Howland argues that in the Fragments, philosophy and faith are closely related passions. A careful examination of the role of Socrates demonstrates that Socratic, philosophical eros opens up a path to faith. At the same time, the (...) work of faith - which holds the self together with that which transcends it - is essentially erotic in the Socratic sense of the term. Chapters on Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus and on Plato's Apology shed light on the Socratic character of the pseudonymous author of the Fragments and the role of 'the god' in Socrates' pursuit of wisdom. Howland also analyzes the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Kierkegaard's reflections on Socrates and Christ. (shrink)

If scientists violate principles and practices of routine science to quickly develop interventions against catastrophic threats, they are engaged in what I call fast science. The magnitude, imminence, and plausibility of a threat justify engaging in and acting on fast science. Yet, that justification is incomplete. I defend two principles to assess fast science, which say: fast science should satisfy as much as possible the reliability-enhancing features of routine science, and the fast science developing an intervention against a threat should (...) not depend on the same problematic assumptions as the fast science which estimates the magnitude, imminence, and plausibility of the threat. (shrink)

Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was an Italian Jesuit and one of the first Christian missionaries to China in the modern era. He was a genuine polymath—a translator, cartographer, mathematician, astronomer, and musician. Above all, Ricci was a missionary for the gospel. As we briefly examine his 1603 seminal work, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, our hope is that we, as evangelical educators, will perceive some of the deeper principles necessary for our own missionary work among unreached people.

I defend a novel account of scientific progress centred around justification. Science progresses, on this account, where there is a change in justification. I consider three options for explicating this notion of change in justification. This account of scientific progress dispels with a condition for scientific progress that requires accumulation of truth or truthlikeness, and it emphasises the social nature of scientific justification.

Medical scientists employ ‘quality assessment tools’ (QATs) to measure the quality of evidence from clinical studies, especially randomized controlled trials (RCTs). These tools are designed to take into account various methodological details of clinical studies, including randomization, blinding, and other features of studies deemed relevant to minimizing bias and error. There are now dozens available. The various QATs on offer differ widely from each other, and second-order empirical studies show that QATs have low inter-rater reliability and low inter-tool reliability. This (...) is an instance of a more general problem I call the underdetermination of evidential significance. Disagreements about the strength of a particular piece of evidence can be due to different—but in principle equally good—weightings of the fine-grained methodological features which constitute QATs. (shrink)

There are two competing views regarding the role of mechanistic knowledge in inferences about the effectiveness of interventions. One view holds that inferences about the effectiveness of interventions should be based only on data from population-level studies (often statistical evidence from randomised trials). The other view holds that such inferences must be based in part on mechanistic evidence. The competing views are local principles of inference, the plausibility of which can be assessed by a more general normative principle of inference. (...) Bayesianism tells us to base inferences on both the ‘likelihood’ and the ‘prior’. The likelihood represents statistical evidence. One influence on the prior probability of a hypothesis like ‘d causes x’ is mechanistic knowledge of how d causes x. Thus, reasoning about such inferences by appealing to both statistical and mechanistic evidence is vindicated by our best general theory of inference. The primary contribution of this paper is to assess the merits and weaknesses of the arguments on both sides of the debate, using the Bayesian framework. This analysis lends support to those who argue that we should base our causal inferences about interventions in part on mechanistic evidence. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to describe what we see as several important new directions for philosophy of medicine. This recent work (i) takes existing discussions in important and promising new directions, (ii) identifies areas that have not received sufficient and deserved attention to date, and/or (iii) brings together philosophy of medicine with other areas of philosophy (including bioethics, philosophy of psychiatry, and social epistemology). To this end, the next part focuses on what we call the “epistemological turn” in (...) recent work in the philosophy of medicine; the third part addresses new developments in medical research that raise interesting questions for philosophy of medicine; the fourth part is a discussion of philosophical issues within the practice of diagnosis; the fifth part focuses on the recent developments in psychiatric classification and scientific and ethical issues therein, and the final part focuses on the objectivity of medical research. (shrink)

Millstein (2009) argues against conceptual pluralism with respect to the definition of “population,” and proposes her own definition of the term. I challenge both Millstein's negative arguments against conceptual pluralism and her positive proposal for a singular definition of population. The concept of population, I argue, does not refer to a natural kind; populations are constructs of biologists variably defined by contexts of inquiry.

Reasons transmit. If one has a reason to attain an end, then one has a reason to effect means for that end: reasons are transmitted from end to means. I argue that the likelihood ratio (LR) is a compelling measure of reason transmission from ends to means. The LR measure is superior to other measures, can be used to construct a condition specifying precisely when reasons transmit, and satisfies intuitions regarding end-means reason transmission in a broad array of cases.

"Jacob Howland's book is an engaging, readable, and extremely suggestive addition to the literature on Plato's magnum opus." --Ancient Philosophy.

This paper decentres the predominance of statism and deliberation in ecological democracy scholarship. We use insights from eco-anarchism and cosmopolitics to identify democratic configurations beyond capitalism and its entanglement with the nation-state. These configurations are premised on the idea that sustainability transformation not only implies a move beyond capitalism and the nation-state, but might comprise their dismantling. We propose and apply an analytical framework encompassing the dimensions actors, praxis and processes and institution(s) to contrast these three political theories and bring (...) forward a diversity of democratic praxes that revolve around the generation of autonomy and the building of multispecies political communities. Finally, we discuss transformation possibilities from within the capitalist nation-state and propose research directions for post-statist, autonomous and diverse ecological democracies. (shrink)

This article responds to one of Thaddeus Metz's criticisms of the theory that the meaning of life is to fulfil a purpose assigned by God. In particular, it addresses the argument that only an atemporal God could ground meaning but that an atemporal God could not assign a purpose. In order to do this, the article first argues that Metz's criticisms misread the relevant sense of purpose. It then argues that on a more plausible reading of 'purpose', we can see (...) that it is in fact the kind of thing that an atemporal God could assign. (shrink)

Timo Maran has defined “biosemiotic criticism” as the study of human culture with an emphasis on the recognition that all forms of life are organized by sign processes. That approach guides this investigation of the sonic devices and practices that have been used in encounters between birds and humans in agricultural spaces. “Bird-scaring” has been a long-standing component of the semiotic relationship between humans and birds in what I am calling the agricultural semiosphere. The struggle between humans and “pest” species (...) over the control of agricultural resources has spurred technological development, and an examination of the sonic tools that have been involved in bird-scaring practices, from wooden rattles to digital sound recordings, intersects with scholarship on sound technology and media studies. The field of ecoacoustics provides a conceptual framework for the sonic dynamics of the interspecies communication under examination. To the extent that the essay also explores the sign relations between humans and birds it has a place in the growing corpus of biosemiotic criticism. The historical account of bird-scaring practices is presented in three sections, demarcated by changes in technology as well as shifts in the mode of semiotic reference. Across the analysis, a historical approach to bird-scaring is interwoven with a discussion of biosemiotic and ecoacoustic themes and concepts. (shrink)