Truth depends in some sense on reality. But it is a rather delicate matter to spell this intuition out in a plausible and precise way. According to the theory of truth-making this intuition implies that either every truth or at least every truth of a certain class of truths has a so-called truth-maker, an entity whose existence accounts for truth. This book aims to provide several ways of assessing the correctness of this controversial claim. This book presents a detailed introduction (...) to the theory of truth-making, which outlines truth-maker relations, the ontological category of truth-making entities, and the scope of a truth-maker theory. The essays brought together here represent the most important articles on truth-making in the last three decades as well as new essays by leading researchers in the field of the theory of truth and of truth-making. (shrink)

Recently, some scholars have argued that testimonial injustice may not only be due to prejudice toward the speaker, but also prejudice toward the content of what the speaker says. I argue that such accounts do not merely expand our picture of epistemic injustice, but give us reason to radically revise our approach to reducing testimonial injustice. The dominant conception of this project focuses on reducing speaker prejudice. But even if one were to successfully do so, the frequency of content prejudice (...) means that one would still commit testimonial injustice in many of the same circumstances. I argue that we must reorient the project of reducing testimonial injustice toward critiquing the ideologies that produce it. I conclude with a sketch of what such a research program might look like. (shrink)

Facing the possibility of a surge of COVID-19-infected patients requiring ventilatory support in Intensive Care Units, the Singapore Hospice Council and the Chapter of Palliative Medicine Physicians forward its position on the guiding principles that ought to drive the allocation of ICU beds and its role in care of these patients and their families.

Jonathan Lowe argues that metaphysics should be restored to a central position in philosophy, as the most fundamental form of rational inquiry, whose findings underpin those of all other disciplines. He portrays metaphysics as charting the possibilities of existence, by idetifying the categories of being and the relations of ontological dependency between entities of different categories. He proceeds to set out a unified and original metaphysical system: he defends a substance ontology, according to which the existence of the world s (...) one world in time depends upon the existence of persisting things which retain their identity over time and through processes of qualitative change. And he contends that even necessary beings, such as the abstract objects of mathematics, depend ultimately for their existence upon there being a concrete world of enduring substances. Within his system of metaphysics Lowe seeks to answer many of the deepest and most challenging questions in philosophy. (shrink)

The “best interests of the patient” standard—a complex balance between the principles of beneficence and autonomy—is the driving force of ethical clinical care. Clinicians’ fear of litigation is a challenge to that ethical paradigm. But is it ever ethically appropriate for clinicians to undertake a procedure with the primary goal of protecting themselves from potential legal action? Complicating that question is the fact that tort liability is adjudicated based on what most clinicians are doing, not the scientific basis of whether (...) they should be doing it in the first place. In a court of law, clinicians are generally judged based on the “reasonably prudent” standard: what a reasonably prudent practitioner in a similar situation would do. But this legal standard can have the effect of shifting the medical standard of care—enabling a standard‐of‐care sprawl where actions undertaken for the primary purpose of avoiding liability reset the standard of care against which clinicians will be adjudicated. While this problem has been recognized in the legal literature, neither current ethical models of care nor legal theory offer workable solutions.One of the best examples of the conflict between evidence‐based medicine and common clinical practice is the use of electronic fetal monitoring. Despite strong evidence and professional guidelines that argue against the use of EFM for healthy pregnancies, the practice persists. One of the main reasons for this is often assumed to be physicians’ concerns about liability. (shrink)

The “best interests of the patient” standard—a complex balance between the principles of beneficence and autonomy—is the driving force of ethical clinical care. Clinicians’ fear of litigation is a challenge to that ethical paradigm. But is it ever ethically appropriate for clinicians to undertake a procedure with the primary goal of protecting themselves from potential legal action? Complicating that question is the fact that tort liability is adjudicated based on what most clinicians are doing, not the scientific basis of whether (...) they should be doing it in the first place. In a court of law, clinicians are generally judged based on the “reasonably prudent” standard: what a reasonably prudent practitioner in a similar situation would do. But this legal standard can have the effect of shifting the medical standard of care—enabling a standard-of-care sprawl where actions undertaken for the primary purpose of avoiding liability reset the standard of care against which clinicians will be adjudicated. While this problem has been recognized in the legal literature, neither current ethical models of care nor legal theory offer workable solutions. One of the best examples of the conflict between evidence-based medicine and common clinical practice is the use of electronic fetal monitoring. Despite strong evidence and professional guidelines that argue against the use of EFM for healthy pregnancies, the practice persists. One of the main reasons for this is often assumed to be physicians’ concerns about liability. (shrink)

To date, much of the current research has focused on examining the direct relationships between the components of the fraud triangle theory and fraud intention. However, limited empirical studies have explored the mediating effects of rationalization and opportunity. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to examine the mediating role of rationalization and opportunity on the direct relationship between pressure and fraud intention, as well as the relationship between pressure and opportunity. A sample of 166 managers participated in the (...) study, and partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to test the proposed model and hypotheses. Results showed that pressure was positively related to both rationalization and fraud intention. Moreover, the relationship between pressure and fraud intention was found to be partially mediated by both rationalization and opportunity. Similarly, rationalization was also found to partially mediate the relationship between pressure and opportunity. These findings suggest that pressure can increase fraud intention directly, as well as indirectly through rationalization and opportunity. This study contributes to the current literature by shedding light on the interplay among the three key components of the fraud triangle theory and their effects on fraud intention. The study provides valuable insights for relevant stakeholders, both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

Models of risk-taking as used in the social sciences may be improved by including concepts from life history theory, particularly environmental unpredictability and life expectancy. Community college students completed self-report questionnaires measuring these constructs along with several well-known correlates. The frequency of risk-taking was higher for those with higher future unpredictability beliefs and shorter lifespan estimates (as measured by the Future Lifespan Assessment developed for this study), and unpredictability beliefs remained significant after accounting for standard predictors, such as sex and (...) temperament. The results demonstrate the usefulness of applying concepts from life history theory to enhance our understanding of human behavior. (shrink)

Background and ObjectiveThe outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 has raised increased challenges for older adults’ personal growth in diverse cultural settings. The aim of this study was to analyze negative emotions and their role on older adults’ self-growth in Mexico, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, a cross-national qualitative research was carried out.MethodsData were collected from 338 community-dwelling participants aged 65 years and older, using a semi-structured interview protocol. Older adults were asked about negative emotions (...) that significantly contribute to their self-growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Content analysis was used to identify key themes.ResultsSeven main negative emotions significantly contributed to seven themes of self-growth, across the samples: sharing difficult experiences with others, supportive partner, spiritual practices, engagement with life, generativity, volunteering activities, and intimacy and sexual satisfaction. Sharing difficult experiences with others was most pertinent to Mexican and to Italian participants, and a supportive partner to Portuguese, and to Spanish participants.ConclusionThe findings of this study indicate that negative emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to their older adults’ self-growth. This study highlighted the cultural diversity of experiences during the pandemics and underlined the upside of negative emotions and its relation to older adults’ self-growth during this period. (shrink)

The resting-state human electroencephalogram power spectrum is dominated by alpha and theta oscillations, and also includes non-oscillatory broadband activity inversely related to frequency. Gratton proposed that alpha and theta oscillations are both related to cognitive control function, though in a complementary manner. Alpha activity is hypothesized to facilitate the maintenance of representations, such as task sets in preparation for expected task conditions. In contrast, theta activity would facilitate changes in representations, such as the updating of task sets in response to (...) unpredicted task demands. Therefore, theta should be related to reactive control, while alpha may be more relevant to proactive control. Less is known about the possible relationship between 1/f activity and cognitive control, which was analyzed here in an exploratory fashion. To investigate these hypothesized relationships, we recorded eyes-open and eyes-closed resting-state EEG from younger and older adults and subsequently tested their performance on a cued flanker task, expected to elicit both proactive and reactive control processes. Results showed that alpha power and 1/f offset were smaller in older than younger adults, whereas theta power did not show age-related reductions. Resting alpha power and 1/f offset were associated with proactive control processes, whereas theta power was related to reactive control as measured by the cued flanker task. All associations were present over and above the effect of age, suggesting that these resting-state EEG correlates could be indicative of trait-like individual differences in cognitive control performance, which may be already evident in younger adults, and are still similarly present in healthy older adults. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has witnessed an increase and amplification of anti-Asian racism and violence across the globe. Stop AAPI Hate1 in the United States and the COVID-19 Racism Incident Report2 i...

This theory accords to volitions the status of basic mental actions, maintaining that these are spontaneous exercises of the will--a "two-way" power which ...

A large proportion of nursing home residents in developed countries come from ethnic minority groups. Unmet care needs and poor quality of care for this resident population have been widely reported. This systematic review aimed to explore social conditions affecting ethnic minority residents' ability to exercise their autonomy in communication and care while in nursing homes. In total, 19 studies were included in the review. Findings revealed that ethno‐specific nursing homes create the ideal social condition for residents to express their (...) care needs and preferences in a language of choice. In nonethno‐specific nursing homes, staff cultural competence and nursing home commitment to culturally safe care are crucial social conditions that enable this group of residents to fulfil their autonomy in communicating and in participating in their care. In contrast, social conditions that undermine residents' ability to express their care needs and preferences include low levels of staff cultural awareness and cultural desire, negative attitudes towards residents and limited organisational support for staff to improve culturally responsive and culturally safe care. In conclusion, it is important to optimise the social conditions to support ethnic minority residents to communicate their care needs and preferences. (shrink)

Anticipatory looking on mindreading tasks can indicate our expectation of an agent's action. The challenge is that social situations are often more complex, involving instances where we need to track an agent's false belief to successfully identify the outcome to which an action is directed. If motor processes can guide how action goals are understood, it is conceivable— where that kind of goal ascription occurs in false-belief tasks— for motor representations to account for someone's belief-like state. Testing adults (N = (...) 42) in a real-time interactive helping scenario, we discovered that participants' early mediolateral motor activity (leftwards– rightwards leaning on balance board) foreshadowed the agent's belief-based action preparation. These results suggest fast belief-tracking can modulate motor representations generated in the course of one's interaction with an agent. While adults' leaning, and anticipatory looking, revealed the contribution of fast false-belief tracking, participants did not correct the agent's mistake in their final helping action. These discoveries suggest that adults may not necessarily use another's belief during overt social interaction or find reflecting on another's belief as being normatively relevant to one's own choice of action. Our interactive task design offers a promising way to investigate how motor and mindreading processes may be variously integrated. (shrink)

In the face of challenging circumstances, many teachers turn to spirituality for sustenance and strength. Yet spirituality’s place in education and in educators’ lives has long been a matter of confusion and contention, not least because of the ambiguity of the term in its common usage. What is its relationship to religion? And what defines it? In this article, I submit that the later work of Michel Foucault offers a helpful approach to spirituality that displaces those questions—drawing attention away from (...) beliefs and/or attitudes professed, and towards the process of practical self-transformation that subjects undertake for the sake of a truth that is actualised in the body. To be spiritual in this sense is more a matter of what one does than what one believes or who one is. To offer a sense of why it matters in the lives of educators, I draw on the experiences of a San Diego high school teacher confronting interlocking personal, professional, and political challenges as a detailed example. (shrink)

Higher education is starting to embrace its role in promoting student wellbeing and life skills, especially given the concerning levels of poor mental health and uncertainties in the future job market. Yet, many of the published studies evaluating positive educational teaching methods thus far are limited to interventions delivered to small student cohorts and/or imbedded within elective wellbeing courses, and are focussed on developed Western countries. This study addressed this gap by investigating the effectiveness of an institution-wide compulsory course informed (...) by the principles of Seligman’s Wellbeing Theory. The course was delivered at a British university in a developing country in Southeast Asia. It purposefully sought to nurture growth-oriented outcomes and was taken by an entire cohort of year one undergraduate students. We tested the effectiveness of the curriculum content and staff coaching style in achieving life skills, and evaluated how these perceptions influenced students’ subjective wellbeing. A convergent mixed-methods design was used with 350 survey respondents and 11 interviewees. Perceived life skills scores showed a 2.5% improvement at the end of the course. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling tested the predicted relationships between variables. All relationships were statistically significant, but the influence of course design and educators’ style on life skills acquisition was moderate, while the effect on subjective happiness and life satisfaction was very weak. Qualitative data indicated that while quantifiable benefits to wellbeing might not be immediate, students did anticipate longer-term benefits for happiness and life satisfaction. This finding suggests that such a novel educational approach is well-received by Asian students and may sow the seeds for future benefit by positively impacting on their skills, behaviours, attitudes, and values. To achieve optimal flourishing at university, we recommend exploring teaching practises that combine positive education with coaching psychology practises. (shrink)

Gene therapy approaches have great promise in the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders and malignant brain tumors. Neuwelt et al. review available viral-mediated gene therapy methods and their blood-brain-barrier (BBB) disruption delivery technique, briefly mentioning nonviral mediated gene therapy methods. This commentary discussed the BBB disruption delivery technique, viral and nonviral mediated gene therapy approaches to Parkinson's disease, and the potential use of antisense oligo to suppress malignant brain tumors.

'Object' and 'criterion of identity' are philosophical terms of art whose application lies at a considerable theoretical remove from the surface phenomena of everyday linguistic usage. This partly explains their highly controversial status, for their point of application lies precisely where the concerns of linguists and philosophers of language merge with those of metaphysicians. This chapter explains the possession of determinate identity‐conditions. It argues that the distinction between 'abstract' and 'concrete' objects is itself a highly controversial one, and although it (...) has indeed been argued that this distinction turns ultimately upon differences between the criteria of identity governing objects of these two broad categories. It examines the role which criteria of identity play in our talk about objects of the least controversial varieties. The chapter concerns the problem of identity over time and the paradoxes to which identity criteria often appear to give rise when time is brought into the picture. (shrink)

Few writers' unfinished works are considered among their most important, but such is the case with Merleau-Ponty's _The Visible and the Invisible_. What exists of it is a mere beginning, yet it bridged modernism and postmodernism in philosophy. Low uses material from some of Merleau-Ponty's later works as the basis for completion. Working from this material and the philosopher's own outline, Low presents how this important work would have looked had Merleau-Ponty lived to complete it.

E. J. Lowe, a prominent figure in contemporary metaphysics, sets out and defends his theory of what there is. His four-category ontology is a metaphysical system which recognizes four fundamental categories of beings: substantial and non-substantial particulars and substantial and non-substantial universals. Lowe argues that this system has an explanatory power which is unrivalled by more parsimonious theories and that this counts decisively in its favour. He shows that it provides a powerful explanatory framework for a unified account of causation, (...) dispositions, natural laws, natural necessity and many other related matters, thus constituting a full metaphysical foundation for natural science. (shrink)

Jonathan Lowe argues that metaphysics should be restored to a central position in philosophy, as the most fundamental form of inquiry, whose findings underpin those of all other disciplines. He portrays metaphysics as charting the possibilities of existence, by identifying the categories of being and the relations between them. He sets out his own original metaphysical system, within which he seeks to answer many of the deepest questions in philosophy. 'a very rich book... deserves to be read carefully by anyone (...) interested in any of the many subjects he discusses.' Katherine Hawley, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

_The Collected Works of G. Lowes Dickinson_ reissues nine titles from Dickinson's impressive oeuvre. The titles in question cover a range of topics, from Plato and the Greek view of life to civilisation and the causes of war.

Substantial change occurs when a persisting object of some kind either begins or ceases to exist. Typically, this happens when one or more persisting objects of another kind or kinds are subjected to appropriate varieties of qualitative or relational change, as when the particles composing a lump of bronze are rearranged so as to create a statue. However, such transformations also seem to result, very often, in cases of spatiotemporal coincidence, in which two numerically distinct objects of different kinds exist (...) in exactly the same place at the same time, such as a statue and a lump of bronze. Various attempts to resist this way of describing the results of such transformations are examined and found wanting and objections to the possibility of cases of spatiotemporal coincidence are rebutted. (shrink)

There is a widespread assumption that the classical work in philosophical semantics of Saul Kripke (1980) and Hilary Putnam (1975) has taught us that the essences of natural kinds of substances, such as water and gold, are discoverable only a posteriori by scientific investigation. It is such investigation, thus, that has supposedly revealed to us that it is an essential property of water that it is composed of H2O molecules. This is the way in which Scott Soames, in a recent (...) paper, makes the point in the case of water and H2O: [Here is] how a Kripkean explanation of the necessary a posteriority of [‘Water = H2O’] would go – or at any rate my version of it. The account holds that ‘water’ is a non-descriptive, directly-referential term designating a substance – where substances are taken to be physically constitutive kinds (instances of which share the same basic physical constitution). It is further assumed that a kind of this sort may have different instances in different world-states, and that if a and b are kinds with the same instances in all possible world-states, then a is b. These are clearly metaphysical assumptions, to which we add the natural corollary that for any substance, s, if, in some possible world-state, instances of s have a certain molecular structure, then instances of s have that structure in every world-state. In other words, we assume that it is an essential property of a substance that instances of it have the molecular structure they do. From this it follows that [‘Water = H2O’] is necessary if true, and that ‘H2O’– which I take to be equivalent to ‘the substance instances of which have a molecular structure with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom’– is a rigid designator. Being true, [‘Water = H2O’] is, therefore, necessary. Since knowing the proposition it expresses requires knowing of a certain substance that its instances have a particular chemical structure, [‘Water = H2O’] is knowable only a posteriori. (Soames 2007: 36). (shrink)

Hume's famous discussion of miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is curious both on account of the arguments he does deploy and on account of the arguments he does not deploy, but might have been expected to. The first and second parts of this paper will be devoted to examining, respectively, these two objects of curiosity. The second part I regard as the more important, because I shall there try to show that the fact that Hume does not deploy (...) an argument that he might have been expected to deploy in fact reflects a weakness in the view of natural laws that has come to be associated with Hume's name. I shall argue, in fact, that it is a symptom of the defectiveness of the ‘Humean’ view of natural laws that on that view it is only too easy to rule out the possibility of a miracle ever occurring. In the third part of the paper, I shall show how another view of laws can overcome this problem. (shrink)

Argues that there can be interaction without breaking physical laws: e.g. by basic psychic forces, or by varying physical constants, or especially by arranging fractal trees of physical causation leading to behavior.

We show that the theories ZF and ZFU are synonymous, answering a question of Visser.