The Institute on Religion in the Age of Science (IRAS) asked Ted Peters, an eminent theologian and bioethicist who was at the forefront of the cloning and stem cell debates in the past few decades, and myself, a molecular biologist, to invite scholars from various fields to brainstorm the religious and ethical implications of the CRISPR revolution. We invited keynote speakers, whose talks will be covered here, as well as other speakers and poster presentations. The conference also hosted question and (...) answer sessions, chaplain sessions, and discussions throughout the week at the beautiful Star Island in the summer of 2019. The purpose of this paper is to highlight and sample the discussions and presentations from that conference. I will organize them into three broad topics: CRISPR in science, ethics, and religion. For readers unfamiliar with CRISPR technology, this overview can also serve as an introduction to the field, and a stepping stone for future ideas for CRISPR discussions. (shrink)

Stephen Stich and Shaun Nichols advance the debate over folk psychology with their vivid depiction of the contest between the simulation theory and the theory-theory (Stich & Nichols, this issue). At least two aspects of their presentation I find highly congenial. First, they give a generally fair characterization of the simulation theory, in some respects even improving its formulation. Though I have a few minor quarrels with their formulation, it is mostly quite faithful to the version which I have found (...) attractive (Goldman, 1989).Second, I concur with Stich and Nichols in their assertion that the theory-theory and the simulation theory are the only two games in town. Where I disagree, of course, is in Stich and Nichols’s contention that their arguments so dim the prospects of the simulation theory that it should no longer be taken seriously. On the contrary, I shall maintain, the simulation theory remains a very plausible contender, and should receive careful and respectful consideration in the continuing investigation. (shrink)

One of the most fruitful interdisciplinary boundaries in contemporary scholarship is that between philosophy and cognitive science. Now that solid empirical results about the activities of the human mind are available, it is no longer necessary for philosophers to practice armchair psychology. In this short, accessible, and entertaining book, Alvin Goldman presents a masterly survey of recent work in cognitive science that has particular relevance to philosophy. Besides providing a valuable review of the most suggestive work in cognitive and (...) social psychology, Goldman demonstrates conclusively that the best work in philosophy in a surprising number of different fields―including philosophy of science, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics as well as philosophy of mind―must take into account empirical breakthroughs in psychology. One of those rare texts that will also be useful for professionals, Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science is appropriate for students in a wide range of philosophy courses. It will also interest researchers and students in psychology who are intrigued by the wider theoretical implications of their work. (shrink)

In this book, the contributors examine how various religious traditions engage with transhumanism and its vision for the future.

Mula sa iisang lahi ang Pilipinas at Malaysia sang-ayon sa pag-aaral na may kinalaman sa paksaing Austronesyo. May mahabang kasaysayan ng ugnayan ang dalawang bansang ito, di lámang sa ekonomikong aspekto, kundi lalo’t higit sa kultural na batayan, at isa na rito ang paggamit ng mga simbolo sa pagbabatik/pagtatatu na nakaugat pa sa relihiyon ng pag-aanito sa mundong Austronesyo. Bagamat naging parehong kolonya ang dalawang bansa ng mga Kanluranin na nagpalawak di lámang ng kapangyarihan kundi maging ng merkado, hindi tuluyang (...) naalis/nakalimutan ang kalinangang nakaugat sa mga bansang ito. Sa kasalukuyan, nagpapatúloy pa rin ang iláng tradisyonal na pang-araw-araw na búhay ng ilang bahagi ng mga bansang ito gaya ng pagbabatik. Nariyan pa rin ang pagpupukpok o tapping process sa pagbabatik na sa kasalukuyan ay dinarayo pa sa kabundukan ng Cordillera ng mga tagasiyudad upang makapagpatatu kay Whang Od. Gayundin, mayroon pa ring kahalintulad na ganitong paraan ng pagbabatik sa Malaysia, sa kaso halimbawa ng mga Iban, Kayan at Dayak. Hindi kataka-taka sa kasalukuyan na kahit nariyan pa rin ang tradisyonal na paraan ng pagbabatik, naghahalinhinan ang tradisyonal at modernong pagbabatik sa mga bansang ito na ang pinakanag-uugnay ay ang mga simbolismong nakaugat sa kanilang malalim na kasaysayan. (shrink)

People are minded creatures; we have thoughts, feelings and emotions. More intriguingly, we grasp our own mental states, and conduct the business of ascribing them to ourselves and others without instruction in formal psychology. How do we do this? And what are the dimensions of our grasp of the mental realm? In this book, Alvin I. Goldman explores these questions with the tools of philosophy, developmental psychology, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He refines an approach called simulation theory, which (...) starts from the familiar idea that we understand others by putting ourselves in their mental shoes. Can this intuitive idea be rendered precise in a philosophically respectable manner, without allowing simulation to collapse into theorizing? Given a suitable definition, do empirical results support the notion that minds literally create surrogates of other peoples mental states in the process of mindreading? Goldman amasses a surprising array of evidence from psychology and neuroscience that supports this hypothesis. (shrink)

Against the traditional view, Alvin Goldman argues that logic, probability theory, and linguistic analysis cannot by themselves delineate principles of rationality or justified belief. The mind's operations must be taken into account.

Knowledge in a Social World offers a philosophy for the information age. Alvin Goldman explores new frontiers by creating a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Against the tides of postmodernism and social constructionism Goldman defends the integrity of truth and shows how to promote it by well-designed forms of social interaction. From science to education, from law to democracy, he shows why and how public institutions should seek knowledge-enhancing practices. The result is (...) a bold, timely, and systematic treatment of the philosophical foundations of an information society. (shrink)

The modern ethical framework demands informed consent for research participation that includes disclosure of material information, as well as alternatives. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic (COVID-19) results in illness that often involves rapid deterioration. Despite the urgent need to find therapy, obtaining informed consent for COVID-19 research is needed. The current pandemic presents three types of challenges for investigators faced with obtaining informed consent for research participation: (1) uncertainty over key information to informed consent, (2) time (...) and pressure constraints, and (3) obligations regarding disclosure of new alternative therapies and re-consent. To mitigate consenting challenges, primary investigators need to work together to jointly promote urgent care and research into COVID-19. Actions they can take include (1) prior plan addressing ways to incorporate clinical research into clinical practice in emergency, (2) consider patients vulnerable with early deliberation on the consent process, (3) seek Legally Authorized Representatives (LARs), (4) create a collaborative research teams, (5) aim to consent once, despite evolving information during the pandemic, and (6) aim to match patients to a trial that will most benefit them. The COVID-19 pandemic both exacerbates existing challenges and raises unique obstacles for consent that require forethought and mindfulness to overcome. While research teams and clinician-investigators will need to be sensitive to their own contexts and adapt solutions accordingly, they can meet the challenge of obtaining genuinely informed consent during the current pandemic. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is strict about the limits of self-knowledge: our inner sense gives us only appearances, never the reality, of ourselves. Kant may seem to begin his inquiries with an uncritical conception of cognitive limits, but in Kant and the Subject of Critique, Avery Goldman argues that, even for Kant, a reflective act must take place before any judgment occurs. Building on Kant’s metaphysics, which uses the soul, the world, and God as regulative principles, Goldman demonstrates how Kant (...) can open doors to reflection, analysis, language, sensibility, and understanding. By establishing a regulative self, Goldman offers a way to bring unity to the subject through Kant’s seemingly circular reasoning, allowing for critique and, ultimately, knowledge. (shrink)

Epistemology has historically focused on individual inquirers conducting their private intellectual affairs independently of one another. As a descriptive matter, however, what people believe and know is largely a function of their community and culture, narrowly or broadly construed. Most of what we believe is influenced, directly or indirectly, by the utterances and writings of others. So social epistemology deserves at least equal standing alongside the individual sector of epistemology.

This chapter argues that empirical findings in cognitive science can play a significant evidential role in an optimal methodology for metaphysics. It does not propose any radical metaphysical methodology or any wholesale replacement of traditional methods. Rather, it offers a supplement to traditional methods. The chapter proposes a general template for metaphysical methodology under which cognitive scientific considerations might become routine or commonplace factors in realist metaphysics, not just isolated or occasional factors. This template is applied to four problems in (...) metaphysics: the passage of time, moral value, natural kinds, and theism. (shrink)

This collection of essays by Alvin Goldman explores an array of topics in the philosophy of cognitive science, ranging from embodied cognition to the metaphysics of actions and events.

To assist in the evaluation process when determining architectures for new robots and intelligent systems equipped with artificial emotions, it is beneficial to understand the systems that have been built previously. Other surveys have classified these systems on the basis of their technological features. In this survey paper, we present a classification system based on a model similar to that used in psychology and philosophy for theories of emotion. This makes possible a connection to thousands of years of discourse on (...) the topic of emotion. Five theories of emotion are described based on an emotion theory model proposed by Power and Dalgleish. The paper provides classifications using a model of 10 new questions, for 14 major research projects that describe implementations or designs for systems that use artificial emotions for either robotics or general artificial intelligence. We also analyze the trends in the usage of various theories and complexity changes over time. (shrink)

Human skin detection is an essential phase in face detection and face recognition when using color images. Skin detection is very challenging because of the differences in illumination, differences in photos taken using an assortment of cameras with their own characteristics, range of skin colors due to different ethnicities, and other variations. Numerous methods have been used for human skin color detection, including the Gaussian model, rule-based methods, and artificial neural networks. In this article, we introduce a novel technique of (...) using the neural network to enhance the capabilities of skin detection. Several different entities were used as inputs of a neural network, and the pros and cons of different color spaces are discussed. Also, a vector was used as the input to the neural network that contains information from three different color spaces. The comparison of the proposed technique with existing methods in this domain illustrates the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed approach. Tests were done on two databases, and the results show that the neural network has better precision and accuracy rate, as well as comparable recall and specificity, compared with other methods. (shrink)

In a distributed multi-agent system, an idle agent may be available to assist other agents in the system. An agent architecture called intent recognition is proposed in this article to accomplish this with minimal communication. To assist other agents in the system, an agent performing recognition observes the tasks other agents are performing. Unlike the much-studied field of plan recognition, the overall intent of an agent is recognized instead of a specific plan. The observing agent may use capabilities that it (...) has not observed. In this study, the key research question is: What are intent-recognition systems and how can these be used to have agents autonomously assist each other effectively and efficiently? A conceptual framework is proposed to address this question. An implementation of the conceptual framework is tested and evaluated. A set of metrics, including task time and number of communications, is used to compare the performance of plan recognition and intent recognition. This research shows that under certain conditions, an intent-recognition system is more efficient than a plan recognition system. (shrink)

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) has been the buzzword for genome editing in the past few years, especially with the birth of Lulu and Nana, twin girls who were genetically edited using the CRISPR/Cas system. To discuss this, a group of scientists, theologians, and ethicists gathered at the 2019 Institute on Religion in the Age of Science (IRAS) conference to discuss the implications of CRISPR gene editing. It became quickly apparent through our discussions that this CRISPR revolution will (...) impact not only human medicine, but any application that involves DNA in every organism from bacteria to plants and animals. Moreover, there are multiple stakeholders in this technology—not only the scientific community, but also the business, legal, and religious communities, to name a few. As a scientist myself, I am providing a brief overview of the scientific hopes and concerns about this powerful technology. (shrink)

In this article I defend John Dewey's use of the concept of "culture" in light of his anthropological sources and suggest that this cultural turn has much to teach contemporary scholars. Contrary to critics, I argue that Dewey's reconstructive aims are indeed well served by "culture" as a term for the complex set of symbolic and material resources shaping habit. Common misreadings of Dewey could be avoided by a better understanding of this anthropological appropriation; moreover, Dewey's emphasis on culture should (...) caution neuropragmatists against reductively scientistic models of human experience. I conclude, finally, with a call for democratic theorists today to engage with Dewey's later, anthropologically-informed writings. (shrink)

Originally published in 1988, this book discusses if moral knowledge exists, and if so, if it is similar to other forms of knowledge. This book approaches the issues from both historical and contemporary perspectives and in order to determine whether there is a real property of rightness, looks to the ethical theories of Hobbes, Hume and Kant. This historical analysis leads to a systematic comparison of three theories of the nature of ethics: realism, emotivism and coherentism. The nature of coherence (...) is explained using legal reasoning as a model. Moral reasoning is compared and contrasted with reasoning both in science and law, showing how ethics differs from science and empirical disciplines. (shrink)

According to Selim Berker the prevalence of consequentialism in contemporary epistemology rivals its prevalence in contemporary ethics. Similarly, and more to the point, Berker finds epistemic consequentialism, epitomized by process reliabilism, to be as misguided and problematic as ethical consequentialism. This paper shows how Berker misconstrues process reliabilism and fails to pinpoint any new or substantial defects in it.

Epistemology has had a strongly individualist orientation, at least since Descartes. Knowledge, for Descartes, starts with the fact of one’s own thinking and with oneself as subject of that thinking. Whatever else can be known, it must be known by inference from one’s own mental contents. Achieving such knowledge is an individual, rather than a collective, enterprise. Descartes’s successors largely followed this lead, so the history of epistemology, down to our own time, has been a predominantly individualist affair.

Rules proliferate; some are kept with a bureaucratic stringency bordering on the absurd, while others are manipulated and ignored in ways that injure our sense of justice. Under what conditions should we make exceptions to rules, and when should they be followed despite particular circumstances? The two dominant models in the literature on rules are the particularist account and that which sees the application of rules as normative. Taking a position that falls between these two extremes, Alan Goldman provides (...) a systematic framework to clarify when we need to follow rules in our moral, legal and prudential decisions, and when we ought not to do so. The book distinguishes among various types of rules; it illuminates concepts such as integrity, self-interest and self-deception; and finally, it provides an account of ordinary moral reasoning without rules. This book will be of great interest to advanced students and professionals working in philosophy, law, decision theory and the social sciences. (shrink)

This paper presents a partial analysis of perceptual knowledge, an analysis that will, I hope, lay a foundation for a general theory of knowing. Like an earlier theory I proposed, the envisaged theory would seek to explicate the concept of knowledge by reference to the causal processes that produce (or sustain) belief. Unlike the earlier theory, however, it would abandon the requirement that a knower's belief that p be causally connected with the fact, or state of affairs, that p.

Life's Values offers new analyses of the nature of pleasure, happiness, well-being, and meaning in life. Recognizing how individuals have different priorities, Goldman explains what is of ultimate value in our lives and argues that making our desires rational - relevantly informed of what it's like to satisfy them - maximizes well-being.

Collaboration among nurses and other healthcare professionals is needed for effective hospital discharge planning. However, interprofessional interactions and practices related to discharge vary within and across hospitals. These interactions are influenced by the ways in which healthcare professionals’ roles are being shaped by hospital discharge priorities. This study explored the experience of bedside nurses’ interprofessional collaboration in relation to discharge in a general medicine unit. An ethnographic approach was employed to obtain an in‐depth insight into the perceptions and practices of (...) nurses and other healthcare professionals regarding collaborative practices around discharge. Sixty‐five hours of observations was undertaken, and 23 interviews were conducted with nurses and other healthcare professionals. According to our results, bedside nurses had limited engagement in interprofessional collaboration and discharge planning. This was apparent by bedside nurses’ absence from morning rounds, one‐way flow of information from rounds to the bedside nurses following rounds, and limited opportunities for interaction with other healthcare professionals and decision‐making during the day. The disconnection, disempowerment and devaluing of bedside nurses in patient discharge planning has implications for quality of care and nursing work. Study findings are positioned within previous work on nurse–physician interactions and the current context of nursing care. (shrink)

Despite judging the central controversial thesis of this book false and arguments for it ultimately unconvincing, I highly recommend the book for its many philosophical virtues, prominent among them being breadth and clarity.1 1 Sullivan addresses all the major issues surrounding various time biases that decision-makers exhibit. Writing on topics that can often become overly technical, she spells her arguments out in the clearest prose, making the book ideal as an introduction to this interesting subdivision of practical reason, but also, (...) since packed with arguments, many original, and defending a counterintuitive if recently popular thesis, making this must reading for those familiar with its topics. (shrink)