Law and racism are intertwined, with legal tools bearing the potential to serve as instruments of oppression or equity. This Special Issue explores this dual nature of health law, with attention to policing in the context of mental health, schools, and substance use disorders; industry and the environment in the context of food advertising, tobacco regulation, worker safety, and environmental racism; health care and research in the context of infant mortality, bias in medical applications of AI, and diverse inclusion in (...) research; and anti-racist teaching and practice in the context of building an interprofessional curriculum and medical-legal partnerships. (shrink)

Hammersley asserts that “radical” strands of ethnomethodology and constructionism in science and technology studies (STS) take an anti-representationalist approach which denies that “science produces representations referring to objects or processes that exist independently of it.” In this ‘Comment,’ I argue that ethnomethodology is distinct from both constructionist and post-constructionist research programs in STS, and that Hammersley presents a binary choice between being for or against the general proposition that scientific representations correspond to independent realities. He suggests that STS studies (...) should “suspend” the philosophical question of whether scientific representations correspond to their worldly referents. Perhaps this is good advice for proponents of STS who promote a “turn to ontology” or propose to do “empirical philosophy,” but ethnomethodologists take a deflationary approach to the topics of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Paul Feyerabend and Richard Rorty were both famously suspicious of an objective concept of truth, in part because they shared the suspicion that concepts like truth and reason were irrevocably anti-democratic. As Feyerabend saw it, an overreliance on a naive objectivist conception of truth and rationality encouraged a “tyranny of truth”, one according to which science should have an overly privileged role to play in deciding what society ought to do. Similarly, Rorty believed truth was a concept ill-suited for (...) democracy. In this paper, I offer some brief reflections on the view that political truth is ill-suited for democratic politics. I argue that Rorty and Feyerabend are right that the concepts of truth and knowledge have political meaning, and that as a result, the question of “who knows” (and who doesn't) are partly political questions. But while Feyerbеnd was right to think we cannot give priority to the epistemic over the political in democracy, neither, I conclude, should we reverse that priority. (shrink)

In this essay, I present a new argument for the impossibility of defining truth by specifying the underlying structural property all and only true propositions have in common The set of considerations I use to support this claim take as that inspiration Alston's recent argument that it is impossible to define truth epistemically—in terms of justification or warrant According to what Alston calls the “intensional argument”, epistemic definitions are inconsistent with the T schema or the principle that it is true (...) that p if, and only if, p. Since the T-schema has great intuitive appeal, this is a powerful indictment of epistemic theories. But the basic argument that Alston employs, and the constellation of considerations which prosecute that argument, work against a much broader range of views than he considers While this implies that a traditional conceptual analysts of truth may be impossible, it opens the door to a pluralist approach to truth. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which the self-responsibilized individualism underpinning contemporary concepts of the ideal European citizen, on the one hand (Frericks, 2014), and the inequalities and anti-democratic politics that characterize contemporary neoliberal capitalism, on the other, are co-constituent elements in creating an antipathy to forms of solidarity that are affective as opposed to calculative. The active citizenship framework lacks a full appreciation of the interdependency of the human condition and is antithetical to universalistic, affectively-led forms of solidarity. (...) The deep relationality that is endemic to both social production and reproduction, and that impels an affective, morally-led form of solidarity needs to be recognized academically and intellectually, and politically sustained, if we are to move beyond a narrow, calculative, self-interested vision of solidarity in Europe. (shrink)

This article reads the photo album, The ‘Life and Times’ of an American Called Pauli Murray as an archive of anti-lynching pasts and futures. While scholarly discourses have leveraged Murray’s archive for evidence of her ‘true’ gender and sexual orientation, this article uses the reading practice of ‘accompaniment’ to reframe investigations of Murray’s identity into thinking with and learning from the strategies she archived in the album for living in atmospheres of antiblackness. Working with Christina Sharpe’s (2016) concept (...) of ‘weathering’, I read several photographs in Murray’s album as burgeoning ecologies of repair in relation to visual technologies of racial capture, particularly that of lynching photography. Reading passages in which Murray talks about lynching and race as atmospheric from Proud Shoes (1999 [1956]) and Song in a Weary Throat (1987) alongside The ‘Life and Times’, I read Murray’s portraits as rupturing white property relations through turning lynching photography’s scripts inside out. (shrink)

This essay investigates the influence of the films of David Lynch on David Foster Wallace’s major novel Infinite Jest. It is organized in two sections. Section one illustrates Wallace’s views on what real art should be, as they are expressed in his two famous “manifestos,” and proceeds to read the essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head” in relation to the manifestos in order to demonstrate that Lynch’s influence on Wallace’s thought has not yet been fully grasped. Section two delves into (...) Infinite Jest to examine textual proof of the Wallace-Lynch connection, both in content and form. Content-wise, convergences are proven to permeate both authors’ interest in theories of consciousness, typified in themes such as: psychoanalysis, especially the Oedipus Complex; self-deception; the Sartrean “look;” the corporeal subject and the phenomenological distinction between objective body and lived body. Form-wise, the following narrative items are mapped: Lynch’s surrealism, recognizable in paradigmatic scenes from Infinite Jest; the character-idea, as both authors embody abstract ideas in characters; and a formal commitment to “an anti-teleological spirit.” Finally, the analysis takes into consideration Lynch’s films produced prior or during the writing of Infinite Jest, and exclusively those Wallace expressed direct admiration for, namely: Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and Lost Highway (1997). (shrink)

Not too long after photography’s grand debut in 1839, physician and inventor Oliver Wendell Holmes described the new technology as a “mirror with a memory.” What might this phrase mean for the question of African Americans and their relationship to the vicissitudes of photography and the vagaries of memory in particular? Through readings of works of art and social activism that make use of lynching photographs, this essay considers ways in which photography has functioned as a technology of memory (...) for African Americans, what the essay calls critical black memory, and proffers a mode of historical interpretation that both plays upon and questions photography’s documentary capacity.The essay makes two claims specifically. First, the mechanical reproduction of lynching by way of the photograph has been central to the recounting and reconstitution of black political cultures throughout the Jim Crow and post-Civil Rights era. From the usage of lynching photography in pamphlets by early twentieth-century anti-lynching activists, to posters created by mid-century civil rights organizations, to their deployment in contemporary art and popular culture, this archive has been a constitutive element of black visuality more broadly. Second, African American engagements with photography as a “site of memory” suggest a mode of historical interpretation in which African Americans simultaneously critique the “truth-claims” of photography while they mobilize the medium’s documentary capacity to intervene in the classification and subjugation of black life. (shrink)

This article explores how racist propaganda works in visual communication and how such propaganda can be resisted. The article analyzes how photography has created new possibilities for the insidious dissemination of racist messages and discusses ways of resisting these visually transmitted propagandistic messages. The two sections of the article focus on examples of racist propaganda in visual culture: in section 1, the focus is on the propagandistic use of photography in the early twentieth century by the pro‐lynching movement; and (...) in section 2, the focus is on racist subtexts in communication that is both visual and verbal in mass media in recent decades. In both sections, the paper discusses how to neutralize and counter propaganda in visual culture by means of what the author terms “epistemic activism,” which consists in practices of interrogation and resistance that unmask, disrupt, and uproot biases and insensitivity. The article discusses different instances of epistemic activism that make explicit and effectively criticize racist subtexts in visual communication. The instances of epistemic activism discussed include the pamphlets of the anti‐lynching movement, critiques of visual artists and scholars, and the critical responses of online activists. The article argues that epistemic activism can produce critical viewership by disrupting the passive reception of visual messages and triggering more active and critical modes of viewing images. The author concludes by emphasizing the urgent need for epistemic activism that promotes critical awareness of the subtexts embedded in visual communication and a sense of critical responsibility in the production, consumption, and recirculation of images. (shrink)

From Ansel Adams to Carleton Watkins, Diane Arbus to Weegee, Richard Avedon to James VanDerZee, American photographers have recorded their vast, multicultural nation in images that, for more than a hundred years, have come to define the USA. In Photography and the USA, Mick Gidley explores not only the medium of photography and the efforts to capture key events and moments through photographs, but also the many ways in which the medium has played a formative role in American culture. Photography (...) and the USA encompasses the major movements, figures and works that are crucial to understanding American photography, but also pays attention to more obscure aspects of photography’s history. Focusing on works that reveal many different facets of America, its landscapes and its people, Gidley explores the ambiguities of American history and culture. We encounter images that range from an anti-lynching demo in 1934 to Dorothea Lange’s poster “All races serve the crops in California;” an early photographic view of Niagara Falls against the painstaking detail of Edward Weston’s Pepper, No. 30; a fireman’s fight in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to the Ground Zero images of 2001 by Joel Meyerowitz; an 1890s “Wanted” image to Elliot Erwitt’s shot of the Nixon–Kruschchev “Kitchen Debate.” Organizing his narrative around the themes of history, technology, the document and the emblem, Mick Gidley not only presents a history of photography, but also reveals the complexities inherent in reading photographs themselves. A concise yet comprehensive overview of photography in the United States, this book is an excellent introduction to the subject for American Studies or visual arts students, or for anyone interested in US history or culture. (shrink)

Abstract:Although Angelina Weld Grimké's 1916 play, Rachel, has historically been read as a sentimental, anti-lynching drama, such classifications might limit the play's anarchic potential. Instead of viewing the characters as responding to anti-Black violence, this paper proposes reframing the play's discussion within a context of Black maternity and its necessary engagement with the Afro-pessimist concept of social death. Such reorientation suggests that Rachel works within the theater's very materiality in order to explore the effects of anti-Blackness (...) on Black life. Specifically, this paper argues that the play's performances of abiological Black maternity—and, particularly, the titular character's performances—fugitively evade the natal alienation of social death. Furthermore, such performances link past, present, and future stage productions as well as character representations, recreating kinship formations within Black social life to stage spatio-temporal disruptions on the equation of Blackness as social death. In this way, Rachel offers modern scholars an understanding of how older works might yet be read in light of the more recent theoretical work of radical Black feminist and Afro-pessimist scholars. (shrink)

Abstract:Untranslatability and resistance are terms that have a longstanding place in psychoanalytic theory and philosophies of law. But how might these terms labor differently whence their conditions rest on the founding conditions of antiblackness that position blackness as a type of permanent errancy? Pursuing the question on the untranslatability of blackness, antiblackness, and the resistances therein and thereof, the article adumbrates on the strange and estranged forty-year gap between the anti-lynching legislation’s enactment and its first court hearing (1969) (...) as well as its second court hearing (1999)—cases which have translated the statute’s original legislative intent from anti-lynching to “self-lynching.” As the article considers the untranslatability of blackness in the various registers of “resistance” in law, representation, and the psychic economies of antiblackness, it also reflects on how the transience of such translation casts an impossible “self” via a mode of lynching in the juridical imaginary—a type of foreclosure that precedes and operates beyond the orders of de jure and de facto law. (shrink)

Jesus Christ may be regarded as the chief spirit of agitation and innovation. He himself declared, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.” One cannot delve seriously into the centuries of activism and scholarship against racism, Jim Crowism, and the terrorism of lynching without encountering the legacies of Timothy Thomas Fortune and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Black scholars from the 19th century to the present have been inspired by the sociological and economic works of Fortune and Wells. Scholars (...) of American philosophy, however, continue to ignore their writings, their theoretical contributions and their ethical aspirations, preferring instead the insipid declarations of white turn of the century.. (shrink)

The most remarkable aspect of Einstein’s 1946 address at Lincoln University is that it has vanished from Einstein’s recorded history. Its disappearance into a historical black hole symbolizes what seems to happen in the creation of a cultural icon. It is but one of many political statements by Einstein to have met such a fate, though his civil rights activism is most glaringly missing. One explanation for this historical amnesia is that those who shape our official memories felt that Einstein’s (...) “controversial” friends like Paul Robeson and activities like co‐chairing the anti‐lynching crusade might tarnish Einstein as an icon. That icon, sanctified by Time magazine when it dubbed Einstein “Person of the Century” at the end of 1999, is a myth, albeit a marvelous one. Yet it is not so much the motive for the omission but the consequence of it that should concern us. Americans and the millions of Einstein fans around the world are left unaware that he was an outspoken, passionate, committed antiracist. (shrink)

The black women's club movement is frequently seen as definitive of "first-wave" African American feminism. However, this six-volume collection from the History of Feminism series draws together key documents that show the varied political work African American feminists were undertaking well before the turn into the 20th century. African American Feminisms brings together writings that document distinctly African American feminist organizing from as early as the late 1820s through female benevolent and literary societies, as well as writings that document African (...) American feminist participation in black political concerns such as emigration and colonization, discrimination in public transportation, and anti-lynching. African American women also negotiated competing demands within interracial reform movements like abolition, woman's rights, temperance and suffrage, as well as within organizations like the black church, making documents that offer insight into those unique demands key to understanding black feminist arguments and rhetoric. Pursuing a varied feminist rhetoric that ranged from advocating domestic and maternal feminism to defending black womanhood, African American feminists focused on larger social reforms as well as agitating for material changes in the lives of African American women and girls. African American feminists were also keenly attuned to opening useful venues to black feminist voices, from the pulpit to the press, and urged the women that followed them to continue this work. This collection, which includes a variety of genres from the spiritual autobiography to the platform speech and the pamphlet, goes beyond the more common focus on the "greats" of black feminism to include lesser known black feminists and some unidentified women who contributed to black feminist debate on a variety of topics. _African American Feminisms, _edited and with an introduction by Teresa Zackodnik, is destined to be welcomed by those interested in women's studies, feminism, and African American history as an invaluable reference resource. (shrink)

Introduction: why did philosophy go to the movies? -- The analytic-cognitivist turn. The empire strikes back: critiques of "grand theory" -- The rules of the game: new ontologies of film -- Adaptation: philosophical approaches to narrative -- From cognitivism to film-philosophy. A.I.: cognitivism goes to the movies -- Bande à part: Deleuze and Cavell as film-philosophers -- Scenes from a marriage: film as philosophy -- Cinematic thinking. Hollywood in trouble: David Lynch's Inland empire -- "Chaos reigns": anti-cognitivism in Lars (...) von trier's Antichrist -- Song of the earth: cinematic romanticism in Malick's The new world -- Coda: "the six most beautiful minutes in the history of cinema". (shrink)

Inspired by Card's focus on atrocities, I reflect on attitudes and behaviors that buttress and support evil. Surely, the frequent anti-Semitic sermons in German churches helped to form and later to support the views of both Nazis and those who accepted and cooperated with them. Similarly, lynching, rape, and abuse occur within societies whose structures and laws reflect dominant, generally “genteel” racism and sexism and, in turn, help create perpetrators and at least somewhat sympathetic onlookers.

This essay provides a critical analysis of early-20th-century American postcards, focusing on the portrayal of black and white children as an aesthetic tool of white supremacy and pedophilic racist pleasures. These representations not only reflected but also perpetuated colonial ideologies and racial stereotypes, directly influencing educational practices and policies, and contributing to a social environment where discrimination and sexualization of children was normalized. The article begins with the contrast in the depiction of white and black children, revealing a pattern in (...) which white children were often fetishized as embodiments of innocence and purity, while black children were subjected to pornified portrayals that reinforced negative stereotypes and sought to ensure the continued intergenerational subjugation of African Americans in the afterlife of slavery. A significant aspect of this analysis delves into the role of the zealous purity crusader Anthony Comstock in shaping societal views on childhood innocence and obscenity during the Progressive Era. As a U.S. postal inspector, Comstock wielded influence over public discourse and policy, particularly through his campaigns against the distribution of what he considered morally objectionable representations. This examination extends to the racial implications of Comstock’s adult-centric actions, exploring how they contributed to the differential treatment of black and white children in both media representations and broader societal contexts. The article argues that these images were not merely passive reflections of societal beliefs; rather, they were active tools used to shape and influence the educational and socialization processes of children, and they contributed to the perpetuation of Jim Crow violence, which was manifested through the sexual assault, castration, and lynching of black youth. Furthermore, this essay examines the broader socio-historical context in which racist and pedophilic images were produced and circulated. These postcards are still trafficked today under the false designation of ‘Black Memorabilia,’ reaching significant prices as vintage collector’s items, but the article reframes them as a genre of child pornography. This perspective critically challenges prevailing narratives that may sanitize or downplay the exploitative and violent nature of these images. This essay urges a reconsideration of these consumer items’ historical significance as instruments intricately complicit in sustaining colonial structures and ideologies surrounding childhood innocence in North America. Within this analytical framework, the dehumanization of black children through pedophilic pornography reflects a long heritage of anti-child violence in Western traditions and the colonial strategy of exploiting children of color as a lucrative mechanism for profit and libidinal pleasure. (shrink)

American media is very quick to ask victims of anti-Black violence if they forgive their victimizers. The media’s nearly reflexive framing is a symptom of the broader, cultural demand that Black victims grant forgiveness for racist violence. Reading Juliet Hooker and Myisha Cherry, this paper links the current preponderance of such demand for forgiveness to a demand for apology in America’s lynching tradition. Drawing from Sonya Renee Taylor, Ida B. Wells, and Frederick Douglass, I give a history to (...) both kinds of normative demands and show how, though they appear as seem­ing contraries, demands for forgiveness and apology function together as methods of anti-Black violence. I then draw from work in transformative justice to differentiate the perspectives of asking, giving, and demanding forgiveness. When understood through the perspective of victims, a certain kind of embodied forgiveness can have liberatory potential. However, observers’ demands for forgiveness too often function as a method of racial oppression. (shrink)

Truth pluralists say that the nature of truth varies between domains of discourse: while ordinary descriptive claims or those of the hard sciences might be true in virtue of corresponding to reality, those concerning ethics, mathematics, institutions might be true in some non-representational or “anti-realist” sense. Despite pluralism attracting increasing amounts of attention, the motivations for the view remain underdeveloped. This paper investigates whether pluralism is well-motivated on ontological grounds: that is, on the basis that different discourses are concerned (...) with different kinds of entities. Arguments that draw on six different ontological contrasts are examined: concrete versus abstract entities; mind-independent versus mind-dependent entities; sparse versus merely abundant properties; objective versus projected entities; natural versus non-natural entities; and ontological pluralism. I argue that the additional premises needed to move from such contrasts to truth pluralism are either implausible or unmotivated, often doing little more than to bifurcate the nature of truth when a more theoretically conservative option is available. If there is a compelling motivation for pluralism, I suggest, it’s likely to lie elsewhere. (shrink)

Functionalists about truth employ Ramsification to produce an implicit definition of the theoretical term _true_, but doing so requires determining that the theory introducing that term is itself true. A variety of putative dissolutions to this problem of epistemic circularity are shown to be unsatisfactory. One solution is offered on functionalists' behalf, though it has the upshot that they must tread on their anti-pluralist commitments.

When payment is offered for controlled human infection model research, ethical concerns may be heightened due to unfamiliarity with this study design as well as perceptions—and misperceptions—regarding risk. Against this backdrop, we commend Grimwade et al 1 for their careful handling of the relevant issues, coupling empirical and conceptual approaches. We agree with foundational elements of the authors’ analysis, including the acceptability of payment for research risk.1 However, in our view, it is preferable to treat payment for risk as a (...) discretionary incentive to achieve adequate recruitment and retention, rather than compensation owed as a matter of fairness. Grimwade et al 1 note that although their ‘Payment for Risk Model’ was ‘created specifically in the context of CHIM research, it has the potential to inform payment in other areas of medical research.’ We agree and would go further: we do not need a special payment framework for CHIMs because there is nothing so novel about them compared with other types of research as to demand a distinct approach. Any successful payment framework must address the following ethical issues: preserving informed consent ; treating participants fairly ; encouraging adequate recruitment and retention; avoiding deception by participants; and preserving public trust.2 Some of these issues may have particular salience in the context of CHIMs, but this study design does not demand consideration of entirely distinct ethical factors when evaluating offers of payment.2 We also agree with Grimwade et al 1 about several other key points.2 Given the burdens involved and …. (shrink)

In this engaging and spirited text, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. He explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is.

William James once said that truth is “the good in the way of belief.” This has the ring of, well, truth. While it may appear as if James’ claim is straightforwardly true, I think that there are at least three different dimensions along which truth can be normatively related to belief. In this paper, I explore these different dimensions of truth’s value, considering both how they differ and how they relate. As we will see, our understanding of these different dimensions (...) of truth’s value can impact our understanding of its nature. I argue that a fuller understanding of the connections between truth’s normative dimensions pushes us in a decidedly pragmatist and pluralist direction—something of which I believe James would approve. (shrink)

After witnessing extraordinary scientific and regulatory efforts to speed development of and access to new COVID-19 interventions, patients facing other serious diseases have begun to ask “where’s...

The revised Common Rule includes a new option for the conduct of secondary research with identifiable data and biospecimens: regulatory broad consent. Motivated by concerns regarding autonomy and trust in the research enterprise, regulators had initially proposed broad consent in a manner that would have rendered it the exclusive approach to secondary research with all biospecimens, regardless of identifiability. Based on public comments from both researchers and patients concerned that this approach would hinder important medical advances, however, regulators decided to (...) largely preserve the status quo approach to secondary research with biospecimens and data. The Final Rule therefore allows such research to proceed without specific informed consent in a number of circumstances, but it also offers regulatory broad consent as a new, optional pathway for secondary research with identifiable data and biospecimens. In this article, we describe the parameters of regulatory broad consent under the new rule, explain why researchers and research institutions are unlikely to utilize it, outline recommendations for regulatory broad consent issued by the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections, and sketch an empirical research agenda for the sorts of questions about regulatory broad consent that remain to be answered as the research community embarks on Final Rule implementation. (shrink)

Democracies, Dewey and others have argued, are ideally spaces of reasons – they allow for an exchange of reasons both practical and epistemic by those willing to engage in that discourse. That requires that citizens have convictions they believe in, but it also requires that they be willing to listen to each other. This paper examines how a particular psychological attitude, “epistemic arrogance,” can undermine the achievement of these goals. The paper presents an analysis of this attitude and then examines (...) four arguments for how its adoption – especially by the powerful – undermines the ideal of democracy as a space of reasons. (shrink)

Minimalists generally see themselves as engaged in a descriptive project. They maintain that they can explain everything we want to say about truth without appealing to anything other than the T-schema, i.e., the idea that the proposition that p is true iff p. I argue that despite recent claims to the contrary, minimalists cannot explain one important belief many people have about truth, namely, that truth is good. If that is so, then minimalism, and possibly deflationism as a whole, must (...) be rejected or recast as a profoundly revisionary project. (shrink)

This book analyzes the support that should be given to minority views, reconsidering classic debates in Science and Technology Studies and examining numerous case studies.

Posterior parietal cortex has traditionally been considered to be a sensory association area in which higher-order processing and intermodal integration of incoming sensory information occurs. In this paper, evidence from clinical reports and from lesion and behavioral-electrophysiological experiments using monkeys is reviewed and discussed in relation to the overall functional organization of posterior parietal association cortex, and particularly with respect to a proposed posterior parietal mechanism concerned with the initiation and control of certain classes of eye and limb movements. Preliminary (...) data from studies of the effects of posterior parietal lesions on oculomotor control in monkeys are reported.The behavioral effects of lesions of posterior parietal cortex in monkeys have been found to be similar to those which follow analogous damage of the minor hemisphere in humans, while behavioral-electrophysiological experiments have disclosed classes of neurons in this area which have functional properties closely related to the behavioral acts that are disrupted by lesions of the area. On the basis of current data from these areas of study, it is proposed that the sensory association model of posterior parietal function is inadequate to account for the complexities of the present evidence. Instead, it now appears that many diverse neural mechanisms are locatedin partin parietal cortex, that some of these mechanisms are involved in sensory processing and perceptual functions, but that others participate in motor control, and that still others are involved in attentional, motivational, or emotional processes. It is further proposed that the elementary units of these various neural mechanisms are distributed within posterior parietal cortex according to the columnar hypothesis of Mountcastle. (shrink)

According to alethic functionalism, truth is a higher-order multiply realizable property of propositions. After briefly presenting the views main principles and motivations, I defend alethic functionalism from recent criticisms raised against it by Cory Wright. Wright argues that alethic functionalism will collapse either into deflationism or into a view that takes true as simply ambiguous. I reject both claims.

Are most people sincere when they share misinformation and conspiracies online? This question, while natural and important, is difficult to answer for obvious reasons. But it also applies poorly to one of the main vehicles for misinformation—memes. And it can be ambiguous; as a result, we should be mindful of two distinctions. First, a distinction between belief and a related propositional attitude, commitment. And second, the distinction between the propositional content of an attitude and what I will call its political (...) meaning. I will suggest that these distinctions not only can help us understand how we communicate online, but they also suggest a lesson about what we should be focusing on when fighting misinformation. (shrink)

Steve Fuller has replied to my critique of his endorsement of a post-truth epistemology. I trace the divergence in our approach to social epistemology by examining our distinct responses to the principle of symmetry in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Fuller has extended the concept of symmetry and challenged the field to embrace a post-truth condition that flattens the difference between experts and the public. By contrast, I have criticized the concept of symmetry for policing the field to rule ideology (...) critique out of court. I argue that a focus on post-truth populism obscures the role of counter-elites and ideologies that restrict political choice. A better way to promote democracy would be to support minority positions within science that promise to open up suppressed political possibilities and to seek the coordinated use of different disciplines to address significant public problems. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise two questions about epistemic commitments, and thus, indirectly, about our epistemic agency. Can we rationally defend such commitments when challenged to do so? And if so, how?

The view that CSR performance can be improved most effectively through external pressures is shown to be invalid for most firms. In exploring why this is the case, the authors demonstrate that most small and medium enterprises are not exposed to the same pressures as large firms, and that this undermines many of the assumptions that underpin the externally driven business case (EDBC) for voluntary CSR practices. The analysis does this by looking at the external drivers of one of the (...) components of CSR; namely, the environmental behaviour of firms. This shows that the strength of the EDBC is largely determined by five factors. Importantly, the analysis provides the basis for the claim that -- and helps to explain why -- the EDBC for voluntary environmental behaviour is likely to remain a weak form of pressure for many small firms. (shrink)

To prepare for potential human infection challenge studies involving SARS-CoV-2, we convened a multidisciplinary working group to address ethical questions regarding whether and how much SAR...

Background Meaningfully evaluating the quality of institutional review boards (IRBs) and human research protection programs (HRPPs) is a long-recognized challenge. To be accredited by the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP), organizations must demonstrate that they measure and improve HRPP “quality, effectiveness, and efficiency” (QEE). We sought to learn how AAHRPP-accredited organizations interpret and satisfy this standard, in order to assess strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in current approaches and to inform recommendations for improvement.Methods We conducted 3 (...) small-group interviews with a total of 19 participant representatives of accredited organizations at the 2019 AAHRPP annual meeting. Participants were eligible if they had familiarity with their organization’s approach to satisfying the relevant QEE standard.Results Participants reported lacking clear definitions for HRPP quality or effectiveness but described various approaches to assessing QEE, typically focused on turnaround time, compliance, and researcher satisfaction. Evaluation of IRB members was described as relatively superficial and information regarding research subject experience was not reported as central to QEE assessment, although participants described several efforts to improve consideration of patient, subject, and community perspectives in IRB review. Participants also described efforts to educate and build relationships with key stakeholders as important features of a high-quality HRPP. While generally satisfied with their approaches, participants expressed concern about resource and time constraints that pushed them to be reactive and automatic about QEE, rather than proactive and critical.Conclusions The relevant AAHRPP accreditation standard may obscure critical gaps in defining and measuring QEE elements. We recommend that AAHRPP: (1) offer a definition of QEE or require accredited organizations to provide their own, to help clarify the rationale and goals behind assessment and improvement efforts, and (2) require accredited organizations to establish QEE objectives and measures focused on participant outcomes and deliberative quality during protocol review. (shrink)