I argue in this paper that the attempt by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire and Multitude to “theorize empire” should be read both against the backdrop of speculative philosophy of history and as a development of the conception of a “principle of intelligibility” as this is discussed in Michel Foucault’s recently published courses at the Collège de France. I also argue that Foucault’s work in these courses can be read as implicitly providing what I call “prolegomena to any (...) future speculative philosophy of history.” I define the latter as concerned with the intelligibility of the historical process considered as a whole. I further suggest, through a brief discussion of the classical figures of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, that the basic features of speculative philosophy of history concern the articulation of both the telos and dynamics of history. My claim is that Hardt and Negri provide an account of the telos and dynamics of history that respects the strictures imposed on speculative philosophy of history by Foucault’s work, and thus can be considered as providing a post-Foucauldian speculative philosophy of history. In doing so, they provide a challenge to other “theoretical” attempts to account for our changing world. (shrink)

Good historical writing not only gives us insight into the past, it also loosens the hold the present has on us and enables us to engage that present with increased critical self-awareness. By exploring the relationship between ethnicity and culture in the formation of the self-consciousness of Greeks as Greeks in the ancient world, Jonathan M. Hall enables us to grasp more coherently the dynamic and complex ways that ethnic identities are formed and the different roles such identities can (...) play in the elaboration of cultural identities. Such understanding is crucial for the world we live in because, as he notes in his opening discussion of the debates surrounding the sense of “Britishness,” “ethnic and national categorization has assumed an increasing importance” within contemporary cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Companies that are serious about corporate governance and business ethics are turning their attention to gender diversity at the most senior levels of business . Board gender diversity has been the subject of several studies carried out by international organizations such as Catalyst , the World Economic Forum , and the European Board Diversity Analysis . They all lead to reports confirming the overall relatively low proportion of women on boards and the slow pace at which more women are (...) being appointed. Furthermore, the proportion of women on corporate boards varies much across countries. Based on institutional theory, this study hypothesizes and tests whether this variation can be attributed to differences in cultural settings across countries. Our analysis of the representation of women on boards for 32 countries during 2010 reveals that two cultural characteristics are indeed associated with the observed differences. We use the cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede to measure this construct. Results show that countries which have the greatest tolerance for inequalities in the distribution of power and those that tend to value the role of men generally exhibit lower representations of women on boards. (shrink)

Semantic Minimalists make a proprietary claim to explaining the possibility of utterances sharing content across contexts. Further, they claim that an inability to explain shared content dooms varieties of Contextualism. In what follows, I argue that there are a series of barriers to explaining shared content for the Minimalist, only some of which the Contextualist also faces, including: (i) how the type-identity of utterances is established, (ii) what counts as repetition of type-identical utterances, (iii) how it can be determined whether (...) semantically minimal content has been repeated, and (iv) what the nature of such content is. (shrink)

A popular goal in psychological science is to understand human cognition and behavior in the ‘real world’. In contrast, researchers have typically conducted their research in experimental research settings, a.k.a. the ‘psychologist’s laboratory’. Critics have often questioned whether psychology’s laboratory experiments permit generalizable results. This is known as the ‘real-world or the lab’-dilemma. To bridge the gap between lab and life, the concept of ecological validity has been widely used to evaluate whether laboratory experiments resemble and (...) generalize to the ‘real world’. However, researchers seldom define what they mean with this concept, nor are there any guidelines or criteria available for evaluating a study’s ecological validity. In our view, the popular concept of ecological validity is ill-formed, lacks specificity, and falls short of adequately addressing the fundamental problem of generalizability. In order to move beyond this ‘real-world or the lab’-dilemma, we believe that researchers should be more specific about the contexts of behaviors they are interested in, instead of aiming to understand human cognition and behavior in the ‘real world’. We argue that this is a more constructive way of uncovering the context-specific and context-generic principles of human cognition and behavior. (shrink)

Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. We citizens of the rich countries are conditioned to think of this problem as an occasion for assistance. Thanks in part to the rationalizations dispensed by our economists, most of us do not realize how deeply we are implicated, through the new global economic (...) order our states have imposed, in this ongoing catastrophe. My sketch of how we are so implicated follows the argument of my book, World Poverty and Human Rights, but takes the form of a response to the books critics. (shrink)

In the real world, there can be constraints on rational decision-making: there can be limitations on what I can know and on what you can know. There can also be constraints on my ability to deliberate or on your ability to deliberate. It is useful to know what the norms of rational deliberation should be in ideal contexts, for fully informed agents, in an ideal world. But it is also useful to know what the norms of rational (...) deliberation should be in the actual world, in non-ideal contexts, for imperfectly informed agents, especially for big, life-changing decisions. That is, we want to know how to deliberate as best we can, given the real-world limitations on what we can know, and given real-world limitations on how we are able to deliberate. In this paper, our concern is with the norms of rational deliberation in certain, important, non-ideal contexts, where the reasoning occurs from the agent’s first person, subjective point of view. The norms governing the process of deliberation for real people in the sorts of non-ideal contexts we’ll consider need to reflect the way that real agents, with an incomplete grasp on the facts and an imperfect ability to deliberate, can be expected to proceed. Our central contention is that framing and exploring the deliberative process from the first person perspective allows us to uncover and explore important, real-world constraints on boundedly rational agents deliberating from the subjective perspective. (shrink)

It is increasingly recognised that evidence generated using “real-world data” is crucial for assessing the safety and effectiveness of health-related interventions. This, however, raises a number of issues, including those related to the quality of RWD, and of the scientific methods used to generate evidence from it, and the potential for those gathering and using RWD be driven by commercial, political, professional or personal self-interest. This article is an application of the framework presented in this issue of ABR. (...) Please refer to that article for more information on how this framework is to be used, including a full explanation of the key values involved and the balancing approach used in the case study at the end to demonstrate how those generating or using RWD can make use of values when deliberating about ethical issues. (shrink)

From the earliest application of modern randomized controlled trials in medical research, scientists and observers have deliberated the ethics of randomly allocating study participants to trial control arms. Adaptive RCT designs have been promoted as ethically advantageous over conventional RCTs because they reduce the allocation of subjects to what appear to be inferior treatments. Critical assessment of this claim is important, as adaptive designs are changing medical research, with the potential to significantly shift how clinical trials are conducted. Policy-makers are (...) swiftly moving to encourage greater use of adaptive designs. In 2016, the newly enacted 21st Century Cures Act instructed the Food and Drug Administration to help product sponsors incorporate adaptive methods into proposed clinical trial protocols and applications for investigational drugs and also biological products. In this article, we review the ethical justifications commonly offered for adaptive designs, explore these arguments in the context of actual trials, and contend that clinical equipoise is a useful standard for adaptive-trial ethics. We distinguish between theoretical and clinical equipoise and explain why ethical arguments related to adaptive trials tend to focus on the former. Yet we contend that theoretical equipoise can be an unreliable standard for adaptive ethics. While we contend that clinical equipoise is the most critical principle for the primary ethical concerns posed by adaptive trials, we suggest ethical approaches to deal with some additional concerns unique to adaptive designs. (shrink)

It helps ordinary citizens evaluate their options and their responsibility for global institutional factors, and it challenges social scientists to address the causes of poverty and hunger that act across borders.The present volume ...

In a recent article, Sven Nyholm argues that the use of biomedical enhancements in our romantic relationships would fail to secure the final value we attribute to love. On Nyholm's view, one thing we desire for its own sake is to be at the origin of the love others have for us. The satisfaction of this desire, he argues, is incompatible with the use of BE insofar as they are responsible for the attachment characteristic of love. In particular, the use (...) of BE in order to create and sustain the sort of attachment characteristic of love would be less desirable than the creation and sustainment of it by more ordinary means. If one needs such enhancements in order for one's love to be created or sustained, then one's love is of lesser quality than the love we want. In this reply, I raise doubts about the argument. (shrink)

I propose a new class of interpretations, real world interpretations, of the quantum theory of closed systems. These interpretations postulate a preferred factorization of Hilbert space and preferred projective measurements on one factor. They give a mathematical characterisation of the different possible worlds arising in an evolving closed quantum system, in which each possible world corresponds to a (generally mixed) evolving quantum state. In a realistic model, the states corresponding to different worlds should be expected to tend (...) towards orthogonality as different possible quasiclassical structures emerge or as measurement-like interactions produce different classical outcomes. However, as the worlds have a precise mathematical definition, real world interpretations need no definition of quasiclassicality, measurement, or other concepts whose imprecision is problematic in other interpretational approaches. It is natural to postulate that precisely one world is chosen randomly, using the natural probability distribution, as the world realised in Nature, and that this world’s mathematical characterisation is a complete description of reality. (shrink)

As a way to make medical decisions, Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) has failed. EBM's failure arises from not being founded on real-world decision-making. EBM aspires to a scientific standard for the best way to treat a disease and determine its cause, but it fails to recognise that the scientific method is inapplicable to medical and other real-world decision-making. EBM also wrongly assumes that evidence can be marshaled and applied according to an hierarchy that is determined in an (...) argument by authority to the method by which it has been obtained. If EBM had valid theoretical, practical or empirical foundations, there would be no hierarchy of evidence. In all real-world decision-making, evidence stands or falls on its inherent reliability. This has to be and can only be assessed on a case-by-case basis applying understanding and wisdom against the background of all available facts—the "factual matrix." EBM's failure is structural and was inevitable from its inception. EBM confuses the inherent reliability and probative value of evidence with the means by which it is obtained. -/- EBM is therefore an ad hoc construct and is not a valid basis for medical decision-making. This is further demonstrated by its exclusion of relevant scientific and probative real-world decision-making evidence and processes. It draws upon a narrow evidence base that is itself inherently unreliable. It fails to take adequate account of the nature of causation, the full range of evidence relevant to its determination, and differing approaches to determining cause and effect in real-world decision-making. EBM also makes a muddled attempt to emulate the scientific method and it does not acknowledge the role of experience, understanding and wisdom in making medical decisions. (shrink)

Luck egalitarians maintain that inequalities are always unjust when they are due to luck, but are not always unjust when they are due to choices for which the parties are responsible. In this paper, I argue that the two halves of this formula do not fit neatly together, and that we arrive at one version of luck egalitarianism if we begin with the notion of luck and interpret responsible choice in terms of its absence, but a very different version if (...) we begin with the notion of responsible choice and interpret luck in terms of its absence. I argue, further, that the difference between the two versions is significant because many real-world inequalities fall precisely in the gap between them, and that attempts to adjudicate between them lead quickly to hard questions about the relation between equality and responsibility. (shrink)

In Mind, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World, John Searle presents an uncompromising apologia for realism which is distinguished both by its lucidity and by its vigour. His basic strategy is to show that realists have at their disposal the resources needed to refute skeptics who allege that a mind-independent world is unknowable. In this paper, I reconstruct Searle´s principal pro-realist argument (Section 3), then argue that it is vitiated by its reliance on two unwarranted (...) assumptions (Sections 4-6). First, however, I summarize the position- “external realism”-Searle defends (Section 2). (shrink)

In Mind, Language, and Society: Philosophyin the Real World, John Searle presents an uncompromising apologia for realism which is distinguished both by its lucidity and by its vigour. His basic strategy is to show that realists have at their disposal the resources needed to refute skeptics who allege that a mind-independent world is unknowable. In this paper, I reconstruct Searle´s principal pro-realist argument, then argue that it is vitiated by its reliance on two unwarranted assumptions. First, however, (...) I summarize the position- “external realism”-Searle defends. (shrink)

Just how realistic about human nature and real possibilities must a theory of justice, or a moral theory, more generally, be? Lines have been drawn, with some holding that idealizing away from reality is indispensable and others maintaining that utopian thinking is not just useless but irrelevant. In Utopophobia David Estlund defends the value of utopian theory. At his most modest, Estlund claims that it is a legitimate approach, not ruled out of court by anti-idealists on entirely inadequate grounds—merely (...) “by assumption or definition” as he puts it. Yet he also argues against what we call real world theory, which takes account of human imperfection and feasible options. It invites complacency and undermines aspiration, he argues, and he accepts Rawls’ claim that it will of necessity be unsystematic, thanks to its realism. We accept that the utopian approach is neither useless nor irrelevant. Yet we press hard against the charges against real world theory, maintaining that, properly understood, it invites neither complacency nor aspiration and can perfectly well offer a systematic and principled account of normative concepts, including justice specifically. (shrink)

ABSTRACTInspired by the discovery of positive age trends in emotional well-being across adulthood, lifespan researchers have uncovered fascinating age differences in cognition–emotion interactions in healthy adult samples, for example in emotion processing, memory, reactivity, perception, and regulation. Taking stock of this body of research, I identify four trends and five remaining gaps in our understanding of emotional functioning in adulthood. In particular, I suggest that the field should pay stronger attention to the prediction of real-world behaviour. Using the (...) sample case of work functioning, I outline gaps in current knowledge, including the lack of data on middle-aged adults, the neglect of relevant cognitive-emotional mechanisms, and the unclear role of life experience. Filling these gaps will enable progress in research on emotional aging in and beyond the work setting and enhance its practical utility for individuals, organisations, and society. (shrink)

But the question raised repeatedly in the news media was: What difference does it make? Who cares if the Top mass is 180 GeV or 120 GeV? What possible effect could it have on the "real world" of Medicare and rock stars and ethnic cleansing and Superbowls and insider trading? In this column we will present some ideas from a colloquium given recently at the University of Washington by Dr. Robert N. Cahn of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which (...) address these questions. We'll start by considering the Standard Model of particle physics. (shrink)

This article examines the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage. It accepts the general case made by UNESCO, but urges greater attention to the ‘real-world’ knowledge of ordinary people. The paper rejects taxonomies of knowledge based on metaphysical discussions of knowing. Instead, it argues for an approach to knowledge based on the social production of ‘knowledge acts’. It concludes by asserting that support for the diversity of social enactment of knowledge could have valuable outcomes in the form of (...) new ways of understanding new and emerging technologies. (shrink)

Explanations of cognitive processes provided by traditional artificial intelligence were based on the notion of the knowledge level. This perspective has been challenged by new AI that proposes an approach based on embodied systems that interact with the real‐world. We demonstrate that these two views can be unified. Our argument is based on the assumption that knowledge level explanations can be defined in the context of Bayesian theory while the goals of new AI are captured by using a (...) well established robot based model of learning and problem solving, called Distributed Adaptive Control (DAC). In our analysis we consider random foraging and we prove that minor modifications of the DAC architecture renders a model that is equivalent to a Bayesian analysis of this task. Subsequently, we compare this enhanced, “rational,” model to its “non‐rational” predecessor and a further control condition using both simulated and real robots, in a variety of environments. Our results show that the changes made to the DAC architecture, in order to unify the perspectives of old and new AI, also lead to a significant improvement in random foraging. (shrink)

Explanations of cognitive processes provided by traditional artificial intelligence were based on the notion of the knowledge level. This perspective has been challenged by new AI that proposes an approach based on embodied systems that interact with the real‐world. We demonstrate that these two views can be unified. Our argument is based on the assumption that knowledge level explanations can be defined in the context of Bayesian theory while the goals of new AI are captured by using a (...) well established robot based model of learning and problem solving, called Distributed Adaptive Control (DAC). In our analysis we consider random foraging and we prove that minor modifications of the DAC architecture renders a model that is equivalent to a Bayesian analysis of this task. Subsequently, we compare this enhanced, “rational,” model to its “non‐rational” predecessor and a further control condition using both simulated and real robots, in a variety of environments. Our results show that the changes made to the DAC architecture, in order to unify the perspectives of old and new AI, also lead to a significant improvement in random foraging. (shrink)

In this study, Joseph McCarney aims to break away from contemporary Marxist critical attitudes to reinstate the coherence and continuity of classical Marxism. He argues that the character of traditional Marxist thought on Marxist ideology is now generally misconceived. The author claims that this misconception stems from a failure to apprehend the nature of Marx's own position and that of major figures of classical Marxism such as Engels, Lenin, and the young Lukacs.

Narrative and the real world are not mutually exclusive. Life is not a structureless sequence of events; it consists of complex structures of temporal configurations that interlock and receive their meaning from within action itself. It is also not true that life lacks a point of view which transforms events into a story by telling them. Our focus of attention is not the past but the future, because we grasp configurations extending into the future. Action involves the adoption (...) of an anticipated future-retrospective point of view on the present. The actions of life can be viewed as the process of telling ourselves stories. The retrospective view of the narrator is an extension and refinement of a viewpoint inherent in action itself. Because storytelling is a social activity, the story of one's life is told as much to others as to oneself. Social human time, like individual human time, is constructed into configured sequences. The practical first-order narrative process that constitutes a person or a community can become a second-order narrative whose subject is unchanged but whose interest is primarily cognitive or aesthetic. (shrink)

This paper explores what an experiment of consciousness might necessitate. So far, the experimental part of science is considered to be best studied under laboratory conditions in which variables are isolated and controlled in order to study certain aspects of a phenomenon. This paper will argue that certain aspects of consciousness can only be revealed under real-world conditions, for reasons having to do with fundamental ways in which meaning is generated in consciousness. Meaning will be argued to necessitate (...) genuine preconditions in order to appear, thus laboratory conditions being inadequate to study certain aspects of consciousness. We will explore telepathic experiences that I had in relations with girls and highlight the real-world conditions that were needed for such experiences to take place, and then based on such considerations, an analysis of meaning will be undertaken. (shrink)

For observers of pharmaceutical regulation and the Food and Drug Administration, these are uncertain times. Events in late 2016 raised concerns that the FDA's evidentiary standards were being weakened, compromising the agency's ability to adequately perform its regulatory and public health responsibilities. Two developments most directly contributed to these fears—the approval of eteplirsen, a treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, against the recommendations of both FDA staff and an advisory committee and the December 2016 signing of the 21st Century Cures Act, (...) which encouraged greater use by the FDA of “real-world” evidence not obtained through randomized controlled trials. The arrival of the Trump administration—with its deregulatory, industry-friendly approach—has only amplified concerns over the future of the FDA. It is too early to know whether the recent developments are truly harbingers of an FDA less likely to prevent unsafe or ineffective products from reaching the market. But elements in the two events—the role of patient narratives in deliberations regarding eteplirsen and the enthusiasm for real-world evidence in the 21st Century Cures Act—raise critical issues for the future of evidence in the FDA's work. The rigorous, inclusive approach under way to consider issues related to real-world evidence provides a model for a similarly needed inquiry regarding public participation in FDA decision-making. (shrink)

What are appropriate criteria for assessing a theory of morality? In Ideal Code, Real World, Brad Hooker begins by answering this question, and then argues for a rule-consequentialist theory. According to rule-consequentialism, acts should be assessed morally in terms of impartially justified rules, and rules are impartially justified if and only if the expected overall value of their general internalization is at least as great as for any alternative rules. In the course of developing his rule-consequentialism, Hooker discusses (...) impartiality, well-being, fairness, equality, the question of how the 'general internalization' of rules is to be interpreted by rule-consequentialism, and the main objections to rule-consequentialism. He also discusses the social contract theory of morality, act-consequentialism, and the question of which moral prohibitions and which duties to help others rule-consequentialism endorses. The last part of the book considers the implications of rule-consequentialism for some current controversies in practical ethics. (shrink)

A conference paper examining the relationship between art and what is loosely termed the “real world”.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative focuses on preventing catastrophes related to weapons of mass destruction, with a wide range of attacks including nuclear, biologic, radiologic, chemical and cyb...

Despite an abundance of academic conferences, clinical ethicists lacked a forum to share innovative practices with peers and to generate solutions to common challenges. Organizers of the first Clinical Ethics Un-Conference developed a working event centered on active participation and problem solving through peer learning, with the goal of improving realworld practice. Registrants included 95 individuals from 64 institutions. Attendees were surveyed immediately after the Un-Conference, and again eight months later. After eight months, 85 percent (n = 33/39) of the (...) survey respondents reported that they found the event “highly impactful” or “some-what impactful” to their clinical practice, and 23 attendees reported that they had implemented ideas or projects inspired by the event. Three sets of best practice guidelines and four white papers were published from the event. As the field of clinical ethics continues to advance and evolve, this working event format offers an innovative, disruptive alternative to a traditional conference format and may serve as a model for future efforts aimed at improving real-world clinical ethics practice. (shrink)

In a professional learning community, teachers are organized into teams, committed to meeting on a regular basis to study their teaching strategies and the effects of those strategies on the students in their classrooms. Whatever the organizational structure, the teams have one goal, that is to improve teaching so that student learning is improved.

Humankind is concerned with scientific enquiry because humans want to understand the milieu in which they find themselves. They want to engineer and reliably control or cooperatively modulate as much of the environment as possible to sustain, enrich, and propagate their lives. Following this path, the goal of science is to gain a reliable description of all natural phenomena so as to allow accurate prediction (within appropriate limits) of nature’s behavior as a function of an ever-changing environment. As such, science (...) is incapable of providing us with absolute truth. Rather, it provides relative knowledge, internally self-consistent knowledge, about the relationships between different phenomena and between different things. The goal of engineering, on the other hand, is to build on this fundamental understanding to generate new materials, devices, structures, attitudes, moralities, philosophies, and so on, for producing tangible order, harnessing the latent potential in nature’s phenomena and expanding human capabilities in an ever-changing environment. In this context, medicine is to human biology as engineering is to physical science. As each of us rides the “river of life,” the great consciousness adventure, we perceive events occurring around us, but more often than not, we do not perceive the total information content inherent in those events nor the true reality of those events. The latter point is so because what we take as the reality of an observation is actually a convolution between (1) what our sensory system actually senses and (2) our mindset or belief structure that filters and/or selectively amplifies segments of the basic gathered data stream. Further, only what we call the five physical senses are well-developed and integrated in our overall sensory system, so only a portion of the total available data becomes our basic internal data stream. We are thus always making personal observations through the distorting and spectrally-limited lens of our mindsets, and we have no way at present to perform a deconvolution and perceive the pure information inherent in our basic input data stream. By using designed instruments to access information patterns in nature, we gain a more objective perspective of these events. However, we must always remember that these instruments were designed on the basis of the logic of our average cognitive development and therefore probably also have only a limited access to the total information spectrum for these events occurring in nature. In particular, these instruments only respond to positive energies. Over the course of the past four to five centuries, we have learned how to conduct true scientific investigations, first under the rubric of classical mechanics and, more recently, quantum mechanics. Let us now look a little more deeply to see what this means. (shrink)

In October 2011, the “2nd European Network for Cognitive Systems, Robotics and Interaction”, EUCogII, held its meeting in Groningen on “Autonomous activity in real-world environments”, organized by Tjeerd Andringa and myself. This is a brief personal report on why we thought autonomy in real-world environments is central for cognitive systems research and what I think I learned about it. --- The theses that crystallized are that a) autonomy is a relative property and a matter of degree, (...) b) increasing autonomy of an artificial system from its makers and users is a necessary feature of increasingly intelligent systems that can deal with the real-world and c) more such autonomy means less control but at the same time improved interaction with the system. (shrink)