An essay to develop some of Wittgenstein's remarks about the notion of 'criteria' and to give the concept clarity even at the expense of some features Wittgenstein claimed for it. This effort was made because of the important role 'criteria' plays in Wittgenstein's discussions of feelings and mental states, and it is hoped that a defense of 'criteria' will make those discussions more coherent. An attempt is made to relate this notion of 'criteria' to the definition and expression of mental (...) states, following some of Wittgenstein's suggestions, and to rebut skepticism about other minds. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2014, given by Elizabeth Anderson, an American philosopher.

Current work on hooking up—or casual sexual activity on college campuses—takes an individualistic, “battle of the sexes” approach and underestimates the importance of college as a classed location. The authors employ an interactional, intersectional approach using longitudinal ethnographic and interview data on a group of college women’s sexual and romantic careers. They find that heterosexual college women contend with public gender beliefs about women’s sexuality that reinforce male dominance across both hookups and committed relationships. The four-year university, however, also reflects (...) a privileged path to adulthood. The authors show that it is characterized by a classed self-development imperative that discourages relationships but makes hooking up appealing. Experiences of this structural conflict vary. More privileged women struggle to meet gender and class guidelines for sexual behavior, placing them in double binds. Less privileged women find the class beliefs of the university foreign and hostile to their sexual and romantic logics. (shrink)

Communication, when defined as an act intended to affect the psychological state of another individual, demands the use of inference. Either the signaler, the recipient, or both must make leaps of understanding which surpass the semantic information available and draw from pragmatic clues to fully imbue and interpret meaning. While research into human communication and the evolution of language has long been comfortable with mentalistic interpretations of communicative exchanges, including rich attributions of mental state, research into animal communication has balked (...) at theoretical models which describe mentalized cognitive mechanisms. We submit a new theoretical perspective on animal communication: the model of inferential communication. For use when existing proximate models of animal communication are not sufficient to fully explain the complex, flexible, and intentional communication documented in certain species, specifically non-human primates, we present our model as a bridge between shallower, less cognitive descriptions of communicative behavior and the perhaps otherwise inaccessible mentalistic interpretations of communication found in theoretical considerations of human language. Inferential communication is a framework that builds on existing evidence of referentiality, intentionality, and social inference in primates. It allows that they might be capable of applying social inferences to a communicative setting, which could explain some of the cognitive processes that enable the complexity and flexibility of primate communication systems. While historical models of animal communication focus on the means-ends process of behavior and apparent cognitive outcomes, inferential communication invites consideration of the mentalistic processes that must underlie those outcomes. We propose a mentalized approach to questions, investigations, and interpretations of non-human primate communication. We include an overview of both ultimate and proximate models of animal communication, which contextualize the role and utility of our inferential communication model, and provide a detailed breakdown of the possible levels of cognitive complexity which could be investigated using this framework. Finally, we present some possible applications of inferential communication in the field of non-human primate communication and highlight the role it could play in advancing progress toward an increasingly precise understanding of the cognitive capabilities of our closest living relatives. (shrink)

Are Detroit ruin tours a form of morally permissible cultural tourism, or do these tours amount to a form of exploitation? To answer this question I compare Detroit ruin tours with ‘slum tours’ – guided tours of slums in the world's major cities. I argue that exploitation of the sort we find in slum tourism also exists, to a lesser extent, in Detroit ruin tours. To show this I detail two different accounts of exploitation and argue that Ruth Sample's account (...) best captures what is most morally problematic with slum tours and ruin tours. I then identify the similarities and differences between slum tours and ruin tours, and provide suggestions for how ruin tours could be retooled to avoid some of the worries of exploitation. Finally, I suggest that with the proper framing Detroiters could embrace photographic tours as a new form of cultural tourism. (shrink)

This volume is part two of a two-volume set. It may be purchased separately or in conjunction with volume one. Vol. II: From the St. Louis Hegelians through C. I. Lewis. and G. H. Mead.

BackgroundUse of routinely collected patient data for research and service planning is an explicit policy of the UK National Health Service and UK government. Much clinical information is recorded in free-text letters, reports and notes. These text data are generally lost to research, due to the increased privacy risk compared with structured data. We conducted a citizens’ jury which asked members of the public whether their medical free-text data should be shared for research for public benefit, to inform an ethical (...) policy.MethodsEighteen citizens took part over 3 days. Jurors heard a range of expert presentations as well as arguments for and against sharing free text, and then questioned presenters and deliberated together. They answered a questionnaire on whether and how free text should be shared for research, gave reasons for and against sharing and suggestions for alleviating their concerns.ResultsJurors were in favour of sharing medical data and agreed this would benefit health research, but were more cautious about sharing free-text than structured data. They preferred processing of free text where a computer extracted information at scale. Their concerns were lack of transparency in uses of data, and privacy risks. They suggested keeping patients informed about uses of their data, and giving clear pathways to opt out of data sharing.ConclusionsInformed citizens suggested a transparent culture of research for the public benefit, and continuous improvement of technology to protect patient privacy, to mitigate their concerns regarding privacy risks of using patient text data. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This thesis undertakes two interrelated projects. The first is to give an account of the epistemology of testimony. However, as is argued, this cannot be done properly except as an application of a general philosophical account of knowledge. For this reason a partial sketch of such a general account is offered, as a necessary part of the completion of the first project. A complementary second project is also adopted. (...) This is the development of a distinctive account of knowledge as justified belief which provides a philosophical defence for the justification requirements on belief of common sense. ;The main distinctive feature of the account of knowledge proposed is the general type of justifications for belief which are argued to be adequate. These are the types of justifications which are commonly given in everyday life. Thus it is a 'common sense' justification theory, in this sense. ;It is so also in a second sense: the process of certifying these everyday justifications as adequate is made using the postulates of the 'commonsense' background metaphysic or conception of the world which all human subjects share. The central epistemological theses a partial defence of which is offered are that firstly, justifications for belief which are 'commonsense' in the first sense are so also in the second sense; secondly, that such justifications for a subject's beliefs are both adequate, and typically available to him. Thus the thesis argues for the view that knowledge, conceived as justified belief, is Attainable and indeed Abundant. ;Specific accounts are offered of the justifications of this general type which are associated with seeing and testimony. These two ways of acquiring beliefs are compared, and disanalogies are found between them which are argued to show a disanalogy in their epistemology. (shrink)

This paper considers and criticizes Brentano's contention of the identity in kind between wül and emotion.

On Friday 17 August 2012, members of the feminist collective Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail after their staging of a musical protest in a Russian Orthodox church. This article analyses Western news media responses to the Pussy Riot affair. It first examines how the event has resonated across various news media, activist, and social media networks. Focusing on the phrase, ‘We are all Pussy Riot’, which became a Twitter hashtag following the incarceration of Pussy Riot members, (...) I argue that narratives of feminist return (Hemmings, 2011) and of US exceptionalism have shaped the eventfulness of the Pussy Riot affair in the West. While not dismissing the activism of Pussy Riot, this article asserts that the discourses of transnational solidarity and feminist renewal that the arrests engendered rely on the perceived whiteness and non-Western identities of the members who were incarcerated. (shrink)

Hearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for "the disappeared" in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Goulart in Brazil, the Peace Commission in Uruguay, the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, a Truth Commission in Peru. As societies struggle to come to terms with the past and with the vexing questions posed by ineradicable memories, this wise book offers (...) guidance. Combining a concrete sense of present urgency and a theoretical understanding of social, political, and historical realities, State Repression and the Labors of Memory fashions tools for thinking about and analyzing the presences, silences, and meanings of the past. With unflappable good judgment and fairness, Elizabeth Jelin clarifies the often muddled debates about the nature of memory, the politics of struggles over memories of historical injustice, the relation of historiography to memory, the issue of truth in testimony and traumatic remembrance, the role of women in Latin American attempts to cope with the legacies of military dictatorships, and problems of second-generation memory and its transmission and appropriation. Jelin's work engages European and North American theory in its exploration of the various ways in which conflicts over memory shape individual and collective identities, as well as social and political cleavages. In doing so, her book exposes the enduring consequences of repression for social processes in Latin America, and at the same time enriches our general understanding of the fundamentally conflicted and contingent nature of memory. A timely exploration of the nature ofmemory and its political uses. (shrink)

This article will examine the phase of Nishida’s thought in which he turns to the historical world and present the benefits of this turn to his overall philosophical project. In “The Philosophy of History in the ‘Later’ Nishida,” Woo-Sung Huh claims that Nishida Kitaro’s attempt to integrate history into his earlier writings on self-consciousness is a “wrong turn.” I will demonstrate how Huh’s criticism of Nishida’s writings on history stems from Huh’s own ontological assumption that consciousness and the historical world (...) occupy distinct realms. Leveling this criticism against Nishida causes the reader to miss Nishida’s greatest insight, namely that there is no such distinction; there is only one reality of consciousness and materiality. Nishida’s emphasis on the historical world makes his earlier claim that consciousness is inseparable from things more robust. I will argue that by expanding his earlier focus on consciousness to include the formative power of created physical objects and human bodies on consciousness, Nishida’s philosophy is actually strengthened. (shrink)

When future generations come to analyze and survey twentieth-century philosophy as a whole, Bertrand Russell’s logic and theory of knowledge is assured a place of prime importance. Yet until this book was first published in 1969 no comprehensive treatment of his epistemology had appeared. Commentators on twentieth-century philosophy at the time assumed that Russell’s important contributions to the theory of knowledge were made before 1921. This book challenges that assumption and draws attention to features of Russell’s later work which were (...) overlooked. The analysis starts with Russell’s earliest views and moves from book to book and article to article through his enormous span of writing on the problems and theory of knowledge. The changes in ideas as he developed the theory are traced, and the study culminates in a statement of his latest views. His work is seen in a continuity in which the changes were part of the development of his mature thought, and the total evaluation and interpretation clarify many of the common misunderstandings of his philosophy. This is naturally of interest to all philosophers, and for students this is the answer to inevitable questions on the nature of Russell’s ideas and their evolution. (shrink)

John Rawls pinpoints stability as the driving force behind many of the changes to justice as fairness from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism. Current debates about Rawlsian stability have centered on the possibility of maintaining one’s allegiance to the principles of justice while largely ignoring how citizens acquire a sense of justice. However, evaluating the account of stability in political liberalism requires attention to the impact of reasonable pluralism on both of these issues. I will argue that the (...) first question of Rawlsian stability – how a child acquires a sense of justice – remains unanswered in Political Liberalism. This fact has been overlooked by Rawls, his defenders, and his critics. The failure to attend to the ways reasonable pluralism undermines Rawls’s own story about a child’s moral development ultimately threatens Rawls’s account of stability in political liberalism – or so I will argue. Despite all of the changes Rawls makes to justice as fairness in order to resolve the stability challenge, Political Liberalism fails to deliver the robust stability Rawls seeks. (shrink)

Because men are overrepresented within positions of power, men are perceived as the default in academia. Androcentric bias emerges whereby research by men and/or dominated by men is perceived as higher quality and gains more attention. We examined if these androcentric biases materialize within fields that study bias. How do individuals in close contact with psychology view psychology research outlets with titles including the words women, gender, sex, or feminism or contain the words men or masculinity versus psychology journals that (...) publish other-specialized research, and do these perceptions differ in the general public? While the men-related journal was less meritorious than its other-specialty journal, evidence emerged supporting androcentric bias such that the men-related journal was more favorable than the other sex/gender-related journals. Further, undergraduate men taking psychology classes rated sex/gender-related versus other-specialty journals as less favorable, were less likely to recommend subscription, and rated the journals as lower quality. Low endorsement of feminist ideology was associated with less support for sex/gender-related journals versus matched other-specialty journals. Decreased subscription recommendations for sex/gender-related journals were mediated by decreased favorability and quality beliefs, especially for men and those low in feminist ideology. However, we found possible androcentric-interest within the public sphere. The public reach of articles published in sex/gender-related was greater than other-specialty journals. The consequences of these differential perceptions for students versus the public and the impact on women’s advancement in social science and psychological science are discussed. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has developed a novel argument against moral intuitionism. I suggest a defense on behalf of the intuitionist against Sinnott-Armstrong’s objections. Rather than focus on the main premises of his argument, I instead examine the way in which Sinnott-Armstrong construes the intuitionistic position. I claim that Sinnott-Armstrong’s understanding of intuitionism is mistaken. In particular, I argue that Sinnott-Armstrong mischaracterizes non-inferentiality as it figures in intuitionism. To the extent that Sinnott-Armstrong’s account of intuitionism has (...) been adopted by others uncritically, intuitionists have cause for concern. I develop an alternative, and more accurate, reading of what is non-inferential about intuitionistic moral knowledge. In light of this alternative reading, certain elements of Sinnott-Armstrong’s case against intuitionism are significantly weakened. But perhaps more importantly, this paper helps clarify what circumspect intuitionists mean when they claim that some moral knowledge is non-inferential. (shrink)

If you are told or otherwise believe an either—or proposition, the question may easily arise what makes it true. ‘The potato crop in Ruritania was halved by blight in 1928’ — ‘Well then, either the expected, planned-for crop was in excess of the people's needs, or there was a shortage of potatoes that year, or a lot were imported …’. That seems a fair deduction, and we may ask which was true. If only one was, then we'd say it made (...) the disjunction true. If all were, then all of them did. (shrink)

Although it is widely held that we do not owe basic respect to nonhuman animals, a close examination of why we owe this respect to human beings leads to the conclusion that we owe it to nonhuman animals as well. While Kant’s basic notion of respect for persons is intuitively plausible, Kant’s two arguments for why respect is owed to human beings ultimately fail, and a reconsideration of which feature of human beings actually grounds the respect that humans are owed (...) is called for. Ultimately, it is not the robust rational autonomy that Kant suggests, but rather the basic subjectivity that underlies it (being the subject-of-a-life). Since this subjectivity is shared by nonhuman animals, they are owed respect as well. (shrink)

The paper examines a dichotomy between special access accounts of authoritative self‐knowledge and constitutive accounts that treat such authority as a feature of the ‘grammar’ of self‐ascriptions, and concludes that it is a false one. Firstly, special access theories are shown to include not just Cartesian views but also a number of different kinds of accounts of the nature of mental states and our self‐knowledge of them. One group comprises functionalist accounts—special access theories, which involve non‐Cartesian conceptions of the individuation (...) of conditions of mental states, and need make no play with any form of ‘inner perception’. Secondly, it is argued that there is space for intermediate theories according to which ‘grammar’ and empirical regularities collaborate inextricably to hold our actual mental state concepts together, and play a joint role in explaining the reliability of our basic self‐ascriptions of mental states. Finally, it is shown that all viable concepts of mental states, which can be competently self‐ascribed in a non‐inferential way, must be multi‐criterial concepts and not wholly fixed by ‘grammar’. (shrink)

. The time of violence: Deconstruction and value. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 190-205.

In a controlled laboratory experiment, we found evidence for our predictions that participants who received fair distributive treatment were more likely to lie to give a supervisor a good performance evaluation than those treated unfairly, and those who received unfair distributive treatment were more likely to steal money from a supervisor than those treated fairly. We further proposed that the presence of an ethical code of conduct would moderate these relationships such that when the code was present these relationships would (...) be weaker than when the code was absent, but we failed to find support for these moderating effects. Our findings suggest that the relationship between distributive justice and unethical behavior is likely more complex than previously considered. Both researchers and managers may benefit from a broader understanding of the factors that motivate and inhibit unethical behaviors intended to benefit and harm supervisors and/or organizations. (shrink)

This paper provides a sketch of an agent-centered way of understanding and answering the question, “What’s wrong with that?” On this view, what lies at the bottom of judgments of wrongness is a bad attitude; when someone does something wrong, she does something that expresses a bad, or inappropriate, attitude . In order to motivate this account, a general Kantian agent-centered ethics is discussed, as well as Michael Slote’s agent-based ethics, in light of analysis of the grounding role of attitudes (...) in the evaluation of two core cases. In light of these discussions, it is argued that there are advantages to preserving the grounding of the appropriateness of attitudes in facts about their objects , while cutting such an agent-centered ethics away from a Kantian grounding. (shrink)

This article reports on qualitative research conducted in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, among researchers and gate-keepers of health facilities in the province. Results suggest disparate but not irreconcilable perceptions of the social value of research in provincial health facilities. This study found that researchers tended to emphasize the contribution of research to the generation of knowledge and to the health of future patients while gate-keepers of health facilities tended to emphasize its contribution to the healthcare system and to current patients. Furthermore, (...) relations between research stakeholders were perceived to be somewhat fragile, making it difficult for stakeholders to achieve consensus about the social value of research, as well as on ways to maximize value. Interventions to negotiate a shared perspective on the social value of research would appear to be warranted, and the findings of this study suggest some focus areas for such intervention. (shrink)

The nature–nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be postponed (i.e., what can we do to avoid bad outcomes and insure better ones?), a state of emergency that sometimes tempts scholars to stake out claims they cannot defend. (...) Second, the controversy persists because we lack a precise, testable theory of the process by which genes and the environment interact. In the absence of a better theory, innateness is often confused with (1) domain specificity (outcome X is so peculiar that it must be innate), (2) species specificity (we are the only species who do X, so X must lie in the human genome), (3) localization (outcome X is mediated by a particular part of the brain, so X must be innate), and (4) learnability (we cannot figure out how X could be learned, so X must be innate). We believe that an explicit, plausible theory of interaction is now around the corner, and that many of the classic maneuvers to defend or attack innateness will soon disappear. In the interim, some serious errors can be avoided if we keep these confounded issues apart. That is the major goal of this chapter: not to attack innateness but to clarify what claims about innateness are (and are not) about. (shrink)

This paper examines discourses of stakeholders regarding global climate change to assess whether and how they construct industrial animal agriculture as posing a risk. The analysis assesses whether these discourses have shifted since the release of Livestock’s Long Shadow, a report by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which indicated that the industrial animal agriculture sector as a whole contributes more to global climate change than the transportation sector. Using Ulrich Beck’s theorizing of the “risk society,” this paper examines (...) how various animal rights and welfare groups, environmental organizations, meat industry stakeholders, governmental agencies, and newspapers in Canada, the United States, and internationally investigate and construct industrial animal agriculture as a risk, if at all, and how their respective discourses conflict. The findings indicate that while some stakeholders acknowledge industrial animal agriculture’s contribution to global climate change, for the most part the problematization of animal agriculture has not increased since the release of Livestock’s Long Shadow, and the animal agriculture industry has seemingly not lost its power to “rationalize risk.”. (shrink)

This paper examines trust as a fundamental aspect of fiduciary relationships in education. The specific relationship under examination is that of academic employee and university employer. Both have the value of trust assigned to them as an implicit part of their social and professional contract. The setting is Australia, but the principles apply to any democratic jurisdiction and educational level or location, where fiduciary principles are a pre-condition for healthy and trustworthy working relationships. The paper firstly discusses the meaning and (...) application of ‘trust’ and ‘fiduciary’, and considers the codes that regulate fiduciary relationships in education. It then asks what happens if and when the fiduciary duties and obligations are not upheld, advancing that question through an employment law case against an Australian university, for alleged breach of the Fair Work Act. The analysis shows what may be the outcome when fiduciary trust between employee and employer is breached, how it may happen, and the consequences of this. The aim of the paper is to throw light on the value of trust for robust working relationships in academic life. Ultimately, the paper shows that trust is axiomatic to a working system of justice in a healthy educational workplace. (shrink)

Feminist Time Against Nation Time offers a series of essays that explore the complex and oftentimes contradictory relationship between feminism and nationalism through a problematization of contemporality. The collection pursues the following questions: how do the specific temporalities of nationalism and war limit and delimit public spaces in which dissent might happen; and how might we account for the often contradictory and ambiguous relationship of "feminism" and "nationalism" through an exploration of the problem of time?