Escalating biodiversity loss is tied to a global colonial‐capitalist order that treats human and other‐than‐human lives as resources for extraction. Sustained by logics of separation and hierarchies of value, this order creates grave risks for planetary health. Nursing is a profession and discipline grounded in relational caring praxis and a growing commitment to decolonizing perspectives. This positions nurses to resist these logics and instead act in recognition of the critical importance of biodiversity and the interconnectedness of human and other‐than‐human communities. (...) In this discussion paper, we synthesize decolonial and ecological scholarship alongside nursing praxis. We engage five movements (Indigenous Consensus, Natural Law, Rights of Nature, Kincentric Ecology and Queer Ecology) that hold an ethics of kinship and resistance to colonial‐capitalist logics. We argue that centring biodiversity, especially in light of the current global biodiversity crisis, offers a pathway to decolonial planetary health. Drawing on this synthesis, we outline implications for nursing research, education, advocacy and policy, and practice, reorienting nursing's ethical commitments toward multispecies care and justice. This is the first nursing‐centred synthesis to integrate biodiversity care with decolonial ethics. (shrink)

The words in children's language learning environments are strongly predictive of cognitive development and school achievement. But how do we measure language environments and do so at the scale of the many words that children hear day in, day out? The quantity and quality of words in a child's input are typically measured in terms of total amount of talk and the lexical diversity in that talk. There are disagreements in the literature whether amount or diversity is the more critical (...) measure of the input. Here we analyze the properties of a large corpus of speech to children and simulate learning environments that differ in amount of talk per unit time, lexical diversity, and the contexts of talk. The central conclusion is that what researchers need to theoretically understand, measure, and change is not the total amount of words, or the diversity of words, but the function that relates total words to the diversity of words, and how that function changes across different contexts of talk. (shrink)

Actions that financially benefit one person may present risk to another person. For example, the payment incentives of portfolio managers and investors are often asymmetrical such that actions that benefit a portfolio manager can pose financial risk to clients. Despite the presence and potential harm of these asymmetries, few have addressed the question of who exploits these asymmetries and how to mitigate potential harm. Our study examined the effect of selfish personality traits (the Dark Triad) and interpersonal bonding on decision-making (...) for the self, another person, and another person with under reward asymmetry present. Results demonstrated that individuals higher in narcissism and psychopathy made risky decisions for themselves. However, when reward asymmetries were present, all three Dark Triad traits were associated with making riskier decisions for another person in order to benefit the self. There was also a significant interaction between interpersonal closeness generated through bonding and psychopathy such that bonding made the decision-making processes of those high in psychopathy less risky for others. These findings have implications for how different individuals with different relationships make self and other-based financial decisions, and how those decisions change when rewards are asymmetrical. (shrink)

Many are calling for concrete mechanisms of oversight for health research involving artificial intelligence (AI). In response, institutional review boards (IRBs) are being turned to as a familiar model of governance. Here, we examine the IRB model as a form of ethics oversight for health research that uses AI. We consider the model's origins, analyze the challenges IRBs are facing in the contexts of both industry and academia, and offer concrete recommendations for how these committees might be adapted in order (...) to provide an effective mechanism of oversight for health‐related AI research. (shrink)

Despite recognizing the importance of impact investing in combating complex societal challenges, researchers have yet to examine the capacity of the field to address systemic inequality. While impact investments are intended to benefit vulnerable stakeholders, the voices of those stakeholders are generally overlooked in the design and implementation of such investments. To resolve this oversight, we theorize how the fields’ design—through its tools, organizations, and field-level bodies—influences its capacity to address inequality by focusing on the concept of giving voice, which (...) we define as the inclusive participation of vulnerable stakeholders in decision-making processes. We build from stakeholder engagement research to show how the design of impact investing can address inequality using three illustrative cases: social impact bonds, impact investing funds, and national advisory boards. We conclude with a discussion of how the ethical decision of giving voice to vulnerable stakeholders will determine the capacity of the field to address inequality, as well as provide implications for future research and practice. (shrink)

Interest is growing in the relocalization of staple crops, including wheat, in western Washington (WWA), a nontraditional wheat-growing area. Commercial bakers are potentially important food chain intermediaries in the case of relocalized wheat production. We conducted a mail survey of commercial bakers in WWA to assess their interest in sourcing wheat/flour from WWA, identify the characteristics of bakeries most likely to purchase wheat/flour from WWA, understand the factors important to bakers in purchasing regionally produced wheat/flour, and identify perceived barriers to (...) making such purchases. Sixty-one percent of survey respondents were interested in purchasing WWA wheat/flour. Bakers who used retail strategies to market their products were more likely to be interested in WWA wheat/flour compared to those not using retail methods. Bakers’ current purchases of Washington wheat/flour were not related to their interest in purchasing WWA flour. The most important factors bakers would consider in purchasing regionally produced wheat/flour were consistency of flour quality, quality of flour, and reliability of supply. Cost was the most frequently mentioned barrier to the purchase of regionally produced wheat/flour. Our results are relevant for other areas attempting to reconnect grain producers, commercial bakers, and consumers in mutually beneficial ways. (shrink)

While research has focused on financial and social goals in impact investing, we add to the limited research that focuses on how individuals manage identity multiplicity, defined as three or more role identities. Based on our qualitative study of Christian impact investors, we develop a model of identity multiplicity work, explaining how individuals manage their multiple role identities to reduce identity tensions during the process of impact investing. We find individuals engaged in an interactive, ongoing three-step process of identity multiplicity (...) work: prioritizing one of their salient identities, managing their identity multiplicity interrelationships, and reinforcing their prioritized identity. Investors generally prioritized an identity that was neither financial nor social, but rather religious. We also find this identity work implemented through three novel mechanisms: shadowing, one identity casts a shadow over another thereby enabling the simultaneous pursuit of related goals; distinguishing, all identities are retained and at least a minimum threshold of role expectations are met; and surrendering, partial sacrificing of goals of one identity in favor of another identity based on an individual’s self-reflective importance of the role. Our findings offer new insights to multiple identities, impact investing and business ethics literatures. (shrink)

Academic incivility can create divisiveness and affect learners’ sustainability towards degree attainment. Therefore, there is a need to empirically assess learner views on what constitutes academic incivility in higher education. To fill this gap, we developed the Incivility Indicators Instrument (i3), a multifaceted scale that measures the extent to which students view cumulative behaviors and dynamics as instances of academic incivility. To examine the reliability and factor structure of the i3, we conducted a two-part study with two samples of adults (...) in the United States who were enrolled in higher education programs. In study 1 (N = 342), we conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and found the initial three-factor structure. In study 2, we administered the instrument to a validating sample (N = 510) and examined the stability of the three-factor model and scores through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). In this study, we describe the results of the study, provide implications, and discuss future directions. (shrink)

Children develop in a real, messy world in which learning unfolds through time and space shared with others. Understanding how children develop in this complex environment will require a solid, theoretically-grounded understanding of how the child and environment interact—both within and beyond the laboratory. We as researchers understand the scientific value in testing children in carefully-controlled environments, but for our findings to have any impact on children’s lives we must strive to understand how the processes we study in the lab (...) operate in the real, busy environments in which children interact with peers and adults. Categories, like children, do not exist in isolation. Consequently, category learning cannot be easily separated from the learning context—nor should it be. According to a systems perspective of cognition and development, categorization emerges as the product of multiple factors combining in time (Thelen & Smith, 1994). Here we illustrate this multicausality by considering the who, what, how, where and when of categorization. In this paper, we include many different types of behaviors under the umbrella term “categorization.” To be as inclusive as possible, we consider any case in which a participant responds to how stimuli may be grouped as evidence of category learning. This includes studies of word learning (generalizing a label from one instance to another), looking preferences (to stimuli from different familiar groups), and play (exclusively touching instances from the same category). The variety of tasks that relate to category learning exemplify the importance of this fundamental process to a broad range of behaviors outside the lab.You may notice in these examples that we have not included children’s ages because, according to a systems view, research should not be about age per se. Our goal is not to create a catalog of milestones; our goal is to understand the cognitive mechanisms driving change. Therefore, we focus on the developmental level of the child. Obviously, age must be taken into account in experimental design because age is generally (but not perfectly) correlated with developmental level (e.g., appropriate motor responses differ for a 2-year-old versus 2-month-old). Our point, however, is that we will learn more about category learning if we stop asking questions such as “how do prototype representations compare between 6 and 8 months of age?” and focus instead on the underlying learning mechanisms, e.g., “what causes prototype representations to change?”Who is Involved in Learning. In the real world children learn through play and independent exploration (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2009). However, in the lab children are seldom alone. This is important because children adjust their learning depending on who is providing information (e.g., the same or different experimenter, Goldenberg & Sandhofer, 2013; human or robot, O'Connell, Poulin-Dubois, Demke, & Guay, 2009; mom or dad, Pancsofar & Vernon-Feagans, 2006). Children are also opportunistic and will look for any signal of what the right answer is. For example, children will track who is present when they hear a new word (e.g., Akhtar, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 1996), whether the speaker has provided reliable information before (e.g., Jaswal & Neely, 2006) and whether a question is repeated (e.g., Samuel & Bryant, 1984). Thus, who is involved in learning matters both for learning in general and for category learning specifically. Moreover, who the child is also matters. For example, children with larger vocabularies more flexibly categorize the same stimuli on multiple dimensions (Ellis & Oakes, 2006; Horst et al., 2009); right-handed participants are more likely to associate “good” with right and “bad” with left (Casasanto & Henetz, 2012); and female participants learn phonologically-familiar novel words better than males (Kaushanskaya, Gross, & Buac, 2013; Kaushanskaya, Marian, & Yoo, 2011).What is Being Categorized. All categories are not created equal: categories vary in complexity and within-category similarity (Sloutsky, 2010). Where children draw boundaries between categories is influenced by category (object) properties, including distinctive features (Hammer & Diesendruck, 2005), number of common features (Horst & Twomey, 2013; Samuelson & Horst, 2007), visual cues to animacy (Jones, Smith, & Landau, 1991), the presence of category labels (Plunkett, Hu, & Cohen, 2008; Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004) and the presence of other objects (e.g., identical or non-identical exemplars Kovack-Lesh & Oakes, 2007; Oakes & Ribar, 2005). In naturalistic environments, categories are often ad hoc and flexible (Barsalou, 1983). For example, the category ‘toys to pick up before bed’ may be discussed every day, but each day it may include different items. Furthermore, the process of categorizing objects is not independent of the objects themselves: different objects may be more or less flexibly assigned to different categories depending on the context (Mareschal & Tan, 2007) and information available (Horst et al., 2009). Thus, in order to understand the process of categorization, researchers must ensure that the results they find in the lab are not too closely tied to the specific stimuli. Where Categories are Experienced and Tested. We know that environment matters because there are significant effects of household chaos (Petrill, Pike, Price, & Plomin, 2004), excessive classroom decorations (Fisher, Godwin, & Seltman, 2014) and environmental noise (for a review see, Klatte, Bergström, & Lachmann, 2013) on children’s cognition. Where a child lives impacts what social categories they learn and the category choices they make. For example, Black Xhosa children in South Africa prefer own-race faces if they live in a primarily Black township, but prefer higher-status race faces if they live in a racially diverse city (Shutts, Kinzler, Katz, Tredoux, & Spelke, 2011). Furthermore, where children live interacts with who they are: only infants from the statistically dominant race show “own-race” face preferences; infants from the minority race show no race preference (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006). In the lab, location matters both in terms of where the child is and where the stimuli are. For example, children are more likely to learn names for nonsolid substances if introduced to the gooey items in a familiar highchair context (Perry, Samuelson, & Burdinie, 2014). Children also benefit when learning and testing contexts are the same (Vlach & Sandhofer, 2011) and when stimuli locations are the stable across naming instances (Samuelson, Smith, Perry, & Spencer, 2011). How and When Category Learning is Probed. Different tasks support different types of category learning. For example, yes/no questions lead to a stronger shape bias than forced-choice questions (Samuelson, Schutte, & Horst, 2009), various types of feedback differentially affect learning categories with highly salient features versus less salient features (Hammer, Sloutsky, & Grill-Spector, 2012) and highly variable category members facilitate category name generalization (Perry, Samuelson, Malloy, & Schiffer, 2010) whereas less variable category members facilitate category name retention (Twomey, Ranson, & Horst, 2014).Categorization does not reflect static knowledge; rather, category learning unfolds over time and is a product of nested timescales. Children (and adults) are constantly learning: experimenters’ distinction between learning versus test trials is arbitrary with respect to the processes that operate within the task (McMurray, Horst, & Samuelson, 2012). That is, learning continues even on test trials—in fact, participants may not realize the shift from learning to test trials. Consequently, different behaviors are observed depending on when during the categorization process category learning is assessed (Horst, Oakes & Madole, 2005). Category learning is a product of nested timescales including (a) the current moment (e.g., how similar the stimuli are on the current trial, Horst & Twomey, 2013), (b) the “just previous” past (e.g., what happens during the intertrial interval, Kovack-Lesh & Oakes, 2007; whether stimuli on the first test trial are novel or familiar, Schöner & Thelen, 2006; and trial order effects Vlach, Sandhofer, & Kornell, 2008; Wilkinson, Ross, & Diamond, 2003) and (c) developmental history (e.g., vocabulary level, Ellis & Oakes, 2006; Horst et al., 2009; Perry & Samuelson, 2011). Because children’s behavior is never solely the product of a single timescale it is impossible to create an experiment that taps only into category learning in the moment or only knowledge children brought to the lab. Each timescales is part of the time-behavior interaction. For example, Kovack-Lesh and colleagues (2008) demonstrated that 4-month-old children’s ability to form a category of cats that excludes dogs is not due only to comparison (i.e., looking back-and-forth, in the moment) or having a pet at home (developmental history), but is due to the interaction of both factors.Unexpected influences. If researchers view categorization as static knowledge, then neither the when or how should matter. Many researchers hold this view, which purports experiments are designed to test what a child knows upon arrival at the lab: trial order and trial types are largely trivial. However, as the examples we provided collectively illustrate, the impact of seemingly “nuisance” factors are not just noise in the data; they are “unexpected influences” that change behavior in predictable ways and can provide insights into the underlying processes of learning and generalization. Small variations in what children experience during category learning can have dramatic impact on how they form categories (e.g., sequential versus simultaneous presentation, Lawson, 2014; Oakes & Ribar, 2005) and differences in testing contexts can lead to indications of what has been learned (Cohen & Marks, 2002). Thus it is vital to acknowledge the impact of such unexpected influences if we want to understand how categorization unfolds over time. Subtle experimental design decisions, such as the number of test trials to include, may not seem theoretically significant, but they can have profound effects on children’s behavior. As dozens of studies illustrate, “boring” factors like counterbalancing and stimuli choice during both learning and testing can have a profound effect on findings, including trial order (Wilkinson et al., 2003), how many targets (Axelsson & Horst, 2013) or competitors (Horst, Scott, & Pollard, 2010) are presented, or the color of the stimuli (Samuelson & Horst, 2007; Samuelson, Perry, & Warrington, 2007). For example, how broadly participants generalize a category label depends on where the exemplars are presented and if the exemplars are visible simultaneously (Spencer, Perone, Smith, & Samuelson, 2011). In particular whether more or less diverse examples occur in the first block of trials influences later generalization (see Spencer et al., 2011 supplementary materials). A result like this sheds light onto the generalization process: deciding how broadly a category should be applied depends on the timing of experience with exemplars (see Oakes & Spalding, 1997; Samuelson & Horst, 2007, for similar findings). Unexpected influences may not be of immediate theoretical interest to a given experimenter, but they are still often informative—even at times vital—to the underlying processes at work (e.g., the influence of novelty on children’s selection is informative for understanding how prior memory influences current learning). Experimental designs should manipulate these types of factors as independent variables whenever possible. We recognize this can be impractical with populations that are costly to recruit, in which case such factors may be controlled for statistically, for example with item-level analyses. Outlook. Category learning unfolds across both space and time, and small differences at one moment (e.g., shared features among the stimuli; whether exemplars are identical) can create a ripple of effects on real behavior. Behavior emerges from the combination of many factors, including those not explicitly manipulated or controlled by the experimenter. To understand what causes developmental changes in behavior, we must also acknowledge and understand the processes through which these factors (sometimes unexpectedly) influence behavior in our tasks, including at short timescales. However, just as it is important to acknowledge these unexpected influences, we must not fail to see the forest for the trees. If a behavior such as category learning can only be captured in an ideal environment under carefully-controlled conditions, how much can we generalize to the contexts in which learning typically occurs? Theoretical accounts that neglect the rich influence of context in real time are too narrow to be applied outside the lab (Simmering & Perone, 2013). What we as researchers are ultimately trying to understand is how learning occurs in a real, cluttered world across time and a variety of contexts. Consequently, a solid, theoretically-grounded understanding of cognitive development will require understanding how the child (or adult) and environment interact. Only then will our theories be both comprehensive enough and sufficiently specific to reliably predict behavior and potentially intervene to prevent adverse outcomes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I provide a précis of my book, Groups as Epistemic and Moral Agents (Oxford: 2024) before moving on to discuss the various contributions to the symposium.

Assertion is a fundamental feature of language. This volume will be the place to look for anyone interested in current work on the topic. Philosophers of language and epistemologists join forces to elucidate what kind of speech act assertion is, particularly in light of relativist views of truth, and how assertion is governed by epistemic norms.

Fallibilists claim that one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Jessica Brown offers a compelling defence of this view against infallibilists, who claim that it is contradictory to claim to know and yet to admit the possibility of error.

El desarrollo de esta tesis se localiza dentro del campo de los estudios de la memoria y la historia a partir de la reconstrucción del contexto socio-histórico en el cual se desenvuelve el grupo guerrillero colombiano Movimiento 19 de abril (M-19), desde su surgimiento hasta su disolución (1974-1990), a la luz de la articulación entre las diversas estrategias de propaganda que desplegó en los medios de comunicación y el examen de un conjunto de tópicos que evidencian el carácter populista de (...) su proyecto político. En efecto, es en el análisis de su estrategia populista donde esta tesis presenta una línea de análisis novedosa, pues no se reduce el fenómeno a la lucha armada, sino que se privilegia el estudio de sus estrategias de comunicación política, desentrañando los modos en que la organización buscaba generar consenso entre la población. (shrink)

Jessica Flanigan defends patients' rights of self-medication on the grounds that same moral reasons against medical paternalism in clinical contexts are also reasons against paternalistic pharmaceutical policies, including prohibitive approval processes and prescription requirements.

A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena.The Restless Clock examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals—dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us (...) through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency.The Restless Clock reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers commonly suppose that any fundamental entities there may be are maximally determinate. More generally, they commonly suppose that, whether or not there are fundamental entities, any determinable entities there may be are grounded in, hence less fundamental than, more determinate entities. So, for example, Armstrong takes the physical objects constituting the presumed fundamental base to be “determinate in all respects” (1961, 59), and Lewis takes the properties characterizing things “completely and without redundancy” to be “highly specific” (1986, 60). (...) Here I look at the usually cited reasons for these suppositions as directed against the case of determinable properties, in particular, and argue that none is compelling (Sections 1 to 3). The discussion in Section 3 moreover identifies positive reason for taking some determinable properties to be part of a fundamental (or relatively fundamental) base. I close (Section 4) by noting certain questions arising from the possibility of fundamental determinables, as directions for future research. (shrink)

Note: this is the first published presentation and defense of the 'proper subset strategy' for making sense of non-reductive physicalism or the associated notion of realization; this is sometimes, inaccurately, called "Shoemaker's subset strategy"; if people could either call it the 'subset strategy' or better yet, add my name to the mix I would appreciate it. Horgan claims that physicalism requires "superdupervenience" -- supervenience plus robust ontological explanation of the supervenient in terms of the base properties. I argue that Horgan's (...) account fails to rule out physically unacceptable emergence. I rather suggest that this and other unacceptable possibilities may be ruled out by requiring that each individual causal power in the set associated with a given supervenient property be numerically identical with a causal power in the set associated with its base property. I go on to show that a wide variety of physicalist accounts, both reductive and non-reductive, are implicitly or explicitly designed to meet this condition, and so are more similar than they seem. In particular, non-reductive physicalism accounts typically appeal to a relation plausibly ensuring that the powers of a higher-level property are a proper subset of those of its physical base property. (shrink)

How should physical entities be characterized? Physicalists, who have most to do with the notion, usually characterize the physical by reference to two components: 1. The physical entities are the entities treated by fundamental physics with the proviso that 2. Physical entities are not fundamentally mental (that is, do not individually possess or bestow mentality) Here I explore the extent to which the appeals to fundamental physics and to the NFM (“no fundamental mentality”) constraint are appropriate for characterizing the physical, (...) especially for purposes of formulating physicalism. Ultimately, I motivate and defend a version of an account incorporating both components: The physics-based NFM account: An entity existing at a world w is physical iff (i) it is treated, approximately accurately, by current or future (in the limit of inquiry, ideal) versions of fundamental physics at w, and (ii) it is not fundamentally mental (that is, does not individually either possess or bestow mentality). (shrink)

A persuasive monograph that answers the keyepistemological arguments against anti-individualism in thephilosophy of mind.

I argue that an adequate account of non-reductive realization must guarantee satisfaction of a certain condition on the token causal powers associated with (instances of) realized and realizing entities---namely, what I call the 'Subset Condition on Causal Powers' (first introduced in Wilson 1999). In terms of states, the condition requires that the token powers had by a realized state on a given occasion be a proper subset of the token powers had by the state that realizes it on that occasion. (...) Accounts of non-reductive realization conforming to this condition are implementing what I call 'the powers-based subset strategy'. I focus on the crucial case involving mental and brain states; the results may be generalized, as appropriate. I first situate and motivate the strategy by attention to the problem of mental causation; I make the case, in schematic terms, that implementation of the strategy makes room (contra Kim 1989, 1993, 1998, and elsewhere) for mental states to be ontologically and causally autonomous from their realizing physical states, without inducing problematic causal overdetermination, and compatible with both Physicalism and Non-reduction; and I show that several contemporary accounts of non-reductive realization (in terms of functional realization, parthood, and the determinable/determinate relation) are plausibly seen as implementing the strategy. As I also show, implementation of the powers-based strategy does not require endorsement of any particular accounts of either properties or causation---indeed, a categoricalist contingentist Humean can implement the strategy. The schematic location of the strategy in the space of available responses to the problem of mental (more generally, higher-level) causation, as well as the fact that the schema may be metaphysically instantiated, strongly suggests that the strategy is, appropriately generalized and instantiated, sufficient and moreover necessary for non-reductive realization. I go on to defend the sufficiency and necessity claims against a variety of objections, considering, along the way, how the powers-based subset strategy fares against competing accounts of purportedly non-reductive realization in terms of supervenience, token identity, and constitution. (shrink)

The physicalist thesis that all entities are nothing over and above physical entities is often interpreted as appealing to a supervenience-based account of "nothing over and aboveness”, where, schematically, the A-entities are nothing over and above the B-entities if the A-entities supervene on the B-entities. The main approaches to filling in this schema correspond to different ways of characterizing the modal strength, the supervenience base, or the supervenience connection at issue. I consider each approach in turn, and argue that the (...) resulting formulation of physicalism is compatible with physicalism’s best traditional rival: a naturalist emergentism. Others have argued that supervenience-based formulations of physicalism fail. My aim here, besides addressing the full spectrum of supervenience-based approaches, is to show how certain philosophical and scientific theses concerning naturalism, properties, and laws give us new reasons to think that supervenience-based formulations of physicalism are untenable. (shrink)

Yogācāra, one of the two principal schools of Indian Mahayana Buddhism, arose in the first or second century CE and was introduced into Tibet and China in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, where it quickly became a dominant form. Roughly comparable to phenomenology in the West (and acknowledged as an influence by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty), it rejects ontology in favor of experiential foundations and claims that knowledge is produced by individual or collective consciousness. In the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth (...) centuries, in response to the introduction of evolutionary theory and its specious corollary of Social Darwinism, Chinese Buddhists asked what kind of philosophy could both accommodate the scientific enterprise and enable a better understanding of a social dynamics that could oppose racial, class, and colonial hierarchies. They turned to yogācāra; thinkers like Lu Cheng called into question unexamined materialist and empiricist assumptions that naturalized moral/rational egoism and hierarchy. He argued that scientific and social-scientific findings could be established epistemically by intersubjective agreement, coherence, and causal efficacy. Jessica Zu recovers this influential yogācāra movement in premodern and modern China and in turn asks why it has had no purchase in the West. Part of the reason is the epistemic policing of the boundary between philosophy and religion and its colonialist privileging of Western thought-we don't speak of Kant or Hegel as "Christian" philosophers. If we expand our conceptual universe to include world philosophies, antiessentialist Chinese process thinking is a valuable resource for combating systemic oppression and fostering social justice. (shrink)

In this "for and against" book, ethicists Lori Watson and Jessica Flanigan debate the criminalization of sex work. Watson argues for a sex equality approach to prostitution in which buyers are criminalized and sellers are decriminalized, known as the Nordic Model. Flanigan argues that sex work should be fully decriminalized because decriminalization ensures respect for sex workers' and clients' rights, and is more effective than alternative policies.

Motivated by the seeming structure of the sciences, metaphysical emergence combines broadly synchronic dependence coupled with some degree of ontological and causal autonomy. Reflecting the diverse, frequently incompatible interpretations of the notions of dependence and autonomy, however, accounts of emergence diverge into a bewildering variety. Here I argue that much of this apparent diversity is superficial. I first argue, by attention to the problem of higher-level causation, that two and only two strategies for addressing this problem accommodate the genuine emergence (...) of special science entities. These strategies in turn suggest two distinct schema for metaphysical emergence---'Weak' and 'Strong' emergence, respectively. Each schema imposes a condition on the powers of entities taken to be emergent: Strong emergence requires that higher-level features have more token powers than their dependence base features, whereas Weak emergence requires that higher-level features have a proper subset of the token powers of their dependence base features. Importantly, the notion of “power” at issue here is metaphysically neutral, primarily reflecting commitment just to the plausible thesis that what causes an entity may bring about are associated with how the entity is---that is, with its features. (shrink)

Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in _The Rhythm of Thought_. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus (...) thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, _The Rhythm of Thought_ offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them. (shrink)

Shadow of the Other is a discussion of how the individual has two sorts of relationships with an "other"--other individuals. The first regards the other as a s work apart is her brilliant utilization of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing tensions: masculinity and femininity, subjectivity and objectivity, passivity and activity, love and aggression, fantasy and reality, modernism and postmodernism, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective. Benjamin s work apart is her brilliant utilization (...) of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing other as a mental repository fo unwanted characteristics cast from the self. Jessica benjamin shows the implications of this dual relationship for male/female hierarchy and offers a possibility for balancing the two. This book continues the author's well-known explorations of the themes of intersubjectivity and gender, taking up issues at the forefront of contemporary debates in feminist theory and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Vaccine refusal harms and risks harming innocent bystanders. People are not entitled to harm innocents or to impose deadly risks on others, so in these cases there is nothing to be said for the right to refuse vaccination. Compulsory vaccination is therefore justified because non-vaccination can rightly be prohibited, just as other kinds of harmful and risky conduct are rightly prohibited. I develop an analogy to random gunfire to illustrate this point. Vaccine refusal, I argue, is morally similar to firing (...) a weapon into the air and endangering innocent bystanders. By re-framing vaccine refusal as harmful and reckless conduct my aim is to shift the focus of the vaccine debate from non-vaccinators’ religious and refusal rights to everyone else’s rights against being infected with contagious illnesses. Religious freedom and rights of informed consent do not entitle non-vaccinators to harm innocent bystanders, and so coercive vaccination requirements are permissible for the sake of the potential victims of the anti-vaccine movement. (shrink)

Aristotle repeatedly claims that character-virtue “makes the goal right“, while Phronesis is responsible for working out how to achieve the goal. Many argue that these claims are misleading: it must be intellect that tells us what ends to pursue. I argue that Aristotle means just what he seems to say: despite putative textual evidence to the contrary, virtue is (a) a wholly non-intellectual state, and (b) responsible for literally supplying the contents of our goals. Furthermore, there are no good textual (...) or philosophical reasons to reject this straightforward interpretation. Contrary to widespread opinion, Aristotle does not characterize Phronesis as supplying ends. Instead, its ethical import lies wholly in its ability to “determine the mean“. Moreover, because character involves non-rational cognition of the end as good, Aristotle can restrict practical intellect to deliberation without abandoning his anti-Humean view that we desire our ends because we find them good. (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions are a central topic of research in both philosophy and science. In this collection of new essays on knowledge ascriptions, world class philosophers offer novel approaches to this long standing topic.

Contextualists such as Cohen and DeRose claim that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions vary contextually, in particular that the strength of epistemic position required for one to be truly ascribed knowledge depends on features of the attributor's context. Contextualists support their view by appeal to our intuitions about when it's correct (or incorrect) to ascribe knowledge. Someone might argue that some of these intuitions merely reflect when it is conversationally appropriate to ascribe knowledge, not when knowledge is truly ascribed, (...) and so try to accommodate these intuitions even on an invariantist view. DeRose (Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, 1998; Philosophical Review, 2002) argues that any such 'warranted assertibility manoeuvre', or 'WAM', against contextualism is unlikely to succeed. Here, I argue that his objections to a WAM against contextualism are not persuasive and offer a pragmatic account of the data about ascriptions of knowledge. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers accept Hume's Dictum, according to which there are no metaphysically necessary connections between distinct, intrinsically typed entities. Tacit in Lewis 's work is a potential motivation for HD, according to which one should accept HD as presupposed by the best account of the range of metaphysical possibilities---namely, a combinatorial account, applied to spatiotemporal fundamentalia. Here I elucidate and assess this Ludovician motivation for HD. After refining HD and surveying its key, recurrent role in Lewis ’s work, I (...) present Lewis ’s appeal to HD as providing a broadly axiomatic generating basis for the space of metaphysical modality, and canvas the prima facie advantages of the resulting combinatorial principle---HD ---as being principled, extensionally adequate and modally reductive. Most criticisms of Lewis 's combinatorialism have targeted seeming ways in which the theory overgenerates the desired space; I rather argue that HD seriously undergenerates the desired space in three different ways. For each way I argue that available means of overcoming the undergeneration either fail to close the gap, undermine the claim that HD is a principled generator of metaphysical modal space, undermine the reductive status of Lewis 's combinatorialism, or call into question the truth of HD. (shrink)

Some claim that Non- reductive Physicalism is an unstable position, on grounds that NRP either collapses into reductive physicalism, or expands into emergentism of a robust or ‘strong’ variety. I argue that this claim is unfounded, by attention to the notion of a degree of freedom—roughly, an independent parameter needed to characterize an entity as being in a state functionally relevant to its law-governed properties and behavior. I start by distinguishing three relations that may hold between the degrees of freedom (...) needed to characterize certain special science entities, and those needed to characterize their composing physical entities; these correspond to what I call ‘reductions’, ‘restrictions’, and ‘eliminations’ in degrees of freedom. I then argue that eliminations in degrees of freedom, in particular—when strictly fewer degrees of freedom are required to characterize certain special science entities than are required to characterize their composing physical entities—provide a basis for making sense of how certain special science entities can be both physically acceptable and ontologically irreducible to physical entities. (shrink)

It has become recently popular to suggest that knowledge is the epistemic norm of practical reasoning and that this provides an important constraint on the correct account of knowledge, one which favours subject-sensitive invariantism over contextualism and classic invariantism. I argue that there are putative counterexamples to both directions of the knowledge norm. Even if the knowledge norm can be defended against these counterexamples, I argue that it is a delicate issue whether it is true, one which relies on fine (...) distinctions among a variety of relevant notions of propriety which our intuitions may reflect. These notions variously apply to the agent herself, her character traits, her beliefs, her reasoning and any resultant action. Given the delicacy of these issues, I argue that the knowledge norm is not a fixed point from which to defend substantive and controversial views in epistemology. Rather, these views need to be defended on other grounds. (shrink)

Increased technological and pharmacological interventions in patient care when patient outcomes are uncertain have been linked to the escalation in moral and ethical dilemmas experienced by health care providers in acute care settings. Health care research has shown that facilities that are able to attract and retain nursing staff in a competitive environment and provide high quality care have the capacity for nurses to process and resolve moral and ethical dilemmas. This article reports on the findings of a systematic review (...) of the empirical literature (1980 — February 2007) on the effects of unresolved moral distress and poor ethical climate on nurse turnover. Articles were sought to answer the review question: Does unresolved moral distress and a poor organizational ethical climate increase nurse turnover? Nine articles met the criteria of the review process. Although the prevailing sentiment was that poor ethical climate and moral distress caused staff turnover, definitive answers to the review question remain elusive because there are limited data that confidently support this statement. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend McKinsey's argument (Analysis 1991) that Burge's antiindividualist position is incompatible with privileged access, viz. the claim that each subject can know his own thought contents just by reflection and without having undertaken an empirical investigation. I argue that Burge thinks that there are certain necessary conditions for a subject to have thoughts involving certain sorts of concepts; these conditions are appropriately different for thoughts involving natural kind concepts and thoughts involving non-natural kind concepts. I use (...) Burge's commitment to these entailments to show that his antiindividualist position is incompatible with privileged access. (shrink)

Horgan (1993) proposed that "superdupervenience" - supervenience preserving physicalistic acceptability - is a matter of robust explanation. I argued against him (1999) that (as nearly all physicalist and emergentist accounts reflect) superdupervenience is a matter of Condition on Causal Powers (CCP): every causal power bestowed by the supervenient property is identical with a causal power bestowed by its base property. Here I show that CCP is, as it stands, unsatisfactory,for on the usual understandings of causal power bestowal, it is trivially (...) satisfied or falsified. I offer a revision of CCP which incorporates the evident fact that causal powers are grounded in fundamental forces. (shrink)

The practical criteria by which developmental biologists choose their model systems have evolutionary correlates. The result is a sample that is not merely small, but biased in particular ways, for example towards species with rapid, highly canalized development. These biases influence both data collection and interpretation, and our views of how development works and which aspects of it are important.

Plato links pleasure with illusion, and this link explains his rejection of the view that all desires are rational desires for the good. The Protagoras and Gorgias show connections between pleasure and illusion; the Republic develops these into a psychological theory. One part of the soul is not only prone to illusions, but also incapable of the kind of reasoning that can dispel them. Pleasure appears good; therefore this part of the soul (the appetitive part) desires pleasures qua good but (...) ignores reasoning about what is really good. Hence the new moral psychology of the Republic: not all desires are rational, and thus virtue depends on bringing one's non-rational desires under the control of reason. (shrink)

Stanley and Williamson have defended the intellectualist thesis that knowing-how is a subspecies of knowing-that by appeal to the syntax and semantics of ascriptions of knowing-how. Critics have objected that this way of defending intellectualism places undue weight on linguistic considerations and fails to give sufficient attention to empirical considerations from the scientific study of the mind. In this paper, I examine and reject Stanley's recent attempt to answer the critics.