An increasing number of philosophers argue that indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) in the sense that indeterminacy has its source in the world itself (rather than how the world is represented or known). The standard arguments for metaphysical indeterminacy are centered around the sorites paradox. In this essay, I present a novel argument for metaphysical indeterminacy. I argue that metaphysical indeterminacy follows from the existence of constitutive social construction; there is indeterminacy in the social world because there is indeterminacy in (...) how the social world is constructed. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, I will argue, (...) the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief, we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief. (shrink)

It is here argued that functionalist constraints on psychology do not preclude the applicability of classic forms of reduction and, therefore, do not support claims to a principled, or de jure, autonomy of psychology. In Part I, after isolating one minimal restriction any functionalist theory must impose on its categories, it is shown that any functionalism imposing an additional constraint of de facto autonomy must also be committed to a pure functionalist--that is, a computationalist--model for psychology. Using an extended parallel (...) to the reduction of Mendelian to molecular genetics, it is shown in Parts II and III that, contrary to the claims of Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, there is no inconsistency between computational models and classical reductionism: neither plurality of physical realization nor plurality of function are inconsistent with reductionism as defended by Ernest Nagel. Employing the results of Part I, the conclusions of Parts II and III are generalized in Part IV to cover any version of functionalism whatsoever; thus, functionalism and reductionism are shown to be consistent. It is urged in conclusion that although a de facto form of autonomy is defensible, there are sound methodological grounds for unconditionally rejecting any principled version of the autonomy of psychology. (shrink)

We investigated the coupling between a speaker's and a listener's eye movements. Some participants talked extemporaneously about a television show whose cast members they were viewing on a screen in front of them. Later, other participants listened to these monologues while viewing the same screen. Eye movements were recorded for all speakers and listeners. According to cross‐recurrence analysis, a listener's eye movements most closely matched a speaker's eye movements at a delay of 2 sec. Indeed, the more closely a listener's (...) eye movements were coupled with a speaker's, the better the listener did on a comprehension test. In a second experiment, low‐level visual cues were used to manipulate the listeners' eye movements, and these, in turn, influenced their latencies to comprehension questions. Just as eye movements reflect the mental state of an individual, the coupling between a speaker's and a listener's eye movements reflects the success of their communication. (shrink)

Regulation must target the financial sector, which often funds and profits from environmentally unsustainable development. In an era of global financial markets, the financial sector has a crucial impact on the state of the environment. The long-standing movement for ethically and socially responsible investment (SRI) has recently begun to advocate environmental standards for financiers. While this movement is gaining more adherents, it has increasingly justified responsible financing as a path to be prosperous, rather than virtuous. This trend partly owes to (...) how financial institutions view their legal responsibilities. The business case motivations that now predominantly drive SRI are not sufficient to make the financial sector a means to sustainable development. Some modest legal reforms to improve the quality and extent of SRI have yet to make a tangible difference. A more ambitious strategy to promote SRI for environmental sustainability is possible, based on reforming the fiduciary duties of financial institutions. Such duties, tied to concrete performance standards, could make financiers invest in more ethically responsible ways. Other collateral reforms to financial markets, including improved corporate environmental reporting, are required to promote sustainability. (shrink)

In this article I analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in Australia. I argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm Australians of colour through these utterances. These complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). Further, I argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the complainants misrecognize themselves (...) in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. Such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of Australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity.Bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. I argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream Australians”can do their part in bringing about a just society. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy of science has led to improvements in the practices and products of scientific knowledge-making, and in this way it exemplifies socially relevant philosophy of science. It has also yielded important insights and original research questions for philosophy. Feminist scholarship on science thus presents a worthy thought-model for considering how we might build a more socially relevant philosophy of science—the question posed by the editors of this special issue. In this analysis of the history, contributions, and challenges faced by (...) feminist philosophy of science, I argue that engaged case study work and interdisciplinarity have been central to the success of feminist philosophy of science in producing socially relevant scholarship, and that its future lies in the continued development of robust and dynamic philosophical frameworks for modeling social values in science. Feminist philosophers of science, however, have often encountered marginalization and persistent misunderstandings, challenges that must be addressed within the institutional and intellectual culture of American philosophy. (shrink)

The term “principle of sufficient reason” (PSR) was coined by Leibniz, and he is often regarded as its paradigmatic proponent. But as Leibniz himself often insisted, he was by no means the first philosopher to appeal to the idea that everything must have a reason. Histories of the principle attribute versions of it to various ancient authors. A few of these studies include—or at least do not exclude—medieval philosophers; one finds the PSR in Abelard, another finds it in Aquinas. And (...) while Leibniz retains pride of place in these histories, Spinoza is sometimes said to precede him “in appreciating the importance of the Principle and placing it at the center of his philosophical system.” In this paper, the author argues that the same should be said of the Islamic philosopher Avicenna. Writing 600 years before his early modern counterparts, Avicenna routinely and consistently appeals to the PSR in generating his metaphysical system. The paper aims first to establish that Avicenna deserves a position of prominence in histories of the PSR, and then to consider how he addresses certain challenges to the PSR, especially the threat posed by necessitarianism. (shrink)

: This essay explores some themes in use of a relativized Kantian a priori in the work of Thomas Kuhn and Michael Friedman. It teases out some shared and some divergent beliefs and attitudes in these two philosophers by comparing their characteristic questions and problems to the questions and problems that seem most appropriately to attend to an adequate understanding of games and their histories. It argues for a way forward within a relativized Kantian framework that is suggested but not (...) argued for in Friedman (2001): philosophers of science should move from a concern with unreason as meaninglessness to a concern with unreason as argumentative coercion. It ends with a few suggestions regarding a place for philosophy in the history of reason. (shrink)

Can SRI be a means to make investors both virtuous and prosperous? This paper argues that there can be significant tensions between these goals, and that SRI (and indeed all investment) should not allow the pursuit of maximizing investment returns to prevail over an ethical agenda of promoting social and economic justice and environmental protection. The discourse on SRI has changed dramatically in recent years to the point where its capacity to promote social emancipation, sustainable development and other ethical goals (...) is in jeopardy. Historically, SRI was a boutique sector of the market dominated by religious-based investors who sought to invest in accordance with the tenets of their faith. From the early 1970s, the aspirations of the SRI movement morphed significantly in the context of the divestment campaign against South Africa's apartheid regime. No longer were social investors satisfied with just avoiding profit from immoral activities; instead, they also sought to change the behavior of others. Business case SRI is a problematic SRI benchmark for several reasons: often there is a countervailing business case for financing irresponsible activities, given the failure of markets to capture all social and environmental externalities; secondly, even if investors care about such concerns, there may be no means of financially quantifying their significance for investment purposes; and, thirdly, even if such factors can be financially quantified, they may be deemed to be such long-term financial costs or benefits that they become discounted and ignored. The ethics case for SRI and ethical business practices more generally takes the view that both investors and the companies they fund have ethical responsibilities that trump the pursuit of profit maximization. Ethical investment should be grounded on this foundation. However, it may not be enough. To keep ethical investment ethical will likely require institutionalizing new norms and governance standards, in such domains as reforming fiduciary duties and the internal governance of financial organizations. SRI's own codes of conduct including the UNPRI have yet to demonstrate the robustness to move the financial community beyond business as usual. (shrink)

We offer a systematic examination of propensity interpretations of fitness, which emphasizes the role that fitness plays in evolutionary theory and takes seriously the probabilistic character of evolutionary change. We distinguish questions of the probabilistic character of fitness from the particular interpretations of probability which could be incorporated. The roles of selection and drift in evolutionary models support the view that fitness must be understood within a probabilistic framework, and the specific character of organism/environment interactions supports the conclusion that fitness (...) must be understood as a propensity rather than as a limiting frequency. (shrink)

This book provides a philosophical examination of the extent to which legalizing same-sex marriage can contribute to ending the discrimination and social stigma faced by LGBT men and women in the Western world.

A lucid introduction to the "existential phenomenology" of Martin Heidegger, particularly as developed in his major work, Being and Time, this work focuses on how Heidegger's ideas bear on the central problem in epistemology--that of how we can have objective knowledge. The author constructs fresh arguments clarifying Heidegger's contribution to the theory of knowledge, and shows why Heidegger deemed misguided the search for knowledge of the way things are in themselves.

The mutual influence of science and values in biology is exhibited in several cases from the biological literature. It is argued in a number of cases, from R. A. Fisher's argument for the optimality of a 50:50 sex ratio to A. Jensen's defense of a genetic basis for intelligence, and including work on the evolution of sexual dimorphism and muted aggression, that the credence accorded the views is disproportionate with their theoretical and empirical warrant. It is, furthermore, suggested that the (...) proper explanation for the attraction and persistence of such views lies in their conformity with ideological norms. There is thus an important, if circumscribed, role for ideological critique in the evaluation of scientific theories; in particular, it lies in the explanation of the acceptance and persistence of scientific views, given independent grounds for questioning their justifiability. (shrink)

It is often claimed that epistemological thought divides around the issue of the place of experience in knowledge: While empiricists argue that experience is the only legitimate source of knowledge, rationalists find other such sources. The trouble with such accounts is not that they are wrong, but that they are incomplete. On occasion, epistemological differences run deeper, raising the very notion of experience as an issue for epistemology. This paper looks at two epistemological debates which concerned not simply the place (...) of experience in knowledge but also the appropriate account of experience itself. The first episode is the rise of Marburg Neo-Kantianism in the 1870s – in particular the seminal work of Hermann Cohen in his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871). Cohen's principal point was that Kant's significance as an epistemologist was in providing a new theory of experience, one that tied experience to exact science and led to a new stress on the formal conditions of exact knowledge. The second episode is Carnap's rejection of epistemology in the 1930s in favour of a program of the logic of science. My focus in each case will be the interplay between an epistemology focused on exact science as the locus of knowledge and a concomitant call for logical methods in epistemology. (shrink)

This essay provides an assessment of the development of educational studies as a field of enquiry in the United Kingdom since 1940. The narrative embraces the UK as a whole but also offers an account of distinctive aspects of the evolution of the field in each constituent country over three broad periods: 1940-1959; 1960-1982; and 1983 to the present.

The distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification, this distinction dear to the projects of logical empiricism, was, as is well known, introduced in precisely those terms by Hans Reichenbach in his Experience and Prediction (Reichenbach 1938). Thus, while the idea behind the distinction has a long history before Reichenbach, this text from 1938 plays a salient role in how the distinction became canonical in the work of philosophers of science in the mid twentieth century. The new contextualist history (...) of philosophy that has arisen in recent years invites us into an investigation of the nuances of philosophical distinctions and their roles in shaping the development of disciplines. Logical empiricism played a key role in the historical development of philosophy of science and this contextualist history has revealed a much richer set of projects in logical empiricism than the potted histories had allowed. Many stories have been told about the contexts of justification and discovery; few of those stories have paid more than passing attention to the larger projects in epistemology and meta-epistemology that Reichenbach was pursuing when he drew the distinction. This brief essay will seek partially to rectify that lack in, I hope, a somewhat surprising way. I shall stress the connection between this canonical distinction and some other epistemological and social terms that loom large in Reichenbach’s text, arguing that the social relevance of scientific philosophy for Reichenbach cannot be set aside in understanding his use of the DJ distinction. My point is, therefore, historical and reflexive. If we attend to the larger significance of the project in scientific philosophy that Reichenbach was advancing, we can see more clearly why the DJ distinction was introduced and rethink the significance of questioning the distinction. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The World as Becoming How Time Arises for Organisms Human Time Eternal Return Conclusion on Realism and Idealism.

How should interaction between the senses affect thought about them? I try to capture some ways in which non sense-specific perception might be thought to make it impossible or pointless or explanatorily idle to distinguish between senses. This task is complicated by there being more than one view of the nature of the senses, and more than one kind of non sense-specific perception. I argue, in particular, that provided we are willing to forgo certain assumptions about, for instance, the relationship (...) between modes or kinds of experience, and about how one should count perceptual experiences at a time, at least one way of thinking about the senses survives the occurrence of various kinds of non sense-specific perception relatively unscathed. (shrink)

Evolutionary models can explain the dynamics of populations, how genetic, genotypic, or phenotypic frequencies change with time. Models incorporating chance, or drift, predict specific patterns of change. These are illustrated using classic work on blood types by Cavalli-Sforza and his collaborators in the Parma Valley of Italy, in which the theoretically predicted patterns are exhibited in human populations. These data and the models display properties of ensembles of populations. The explanatory problem needs to be understood in terms of how likely (...) an observed change, in either a population or an ensemble, would be under drift alone; this is fundamentally a matter of chance. Understood in this way, issues of drift and chance undercut most recent philosophical, but not biological, discussions of the role of "genetic drift.". (shrink)

Incidental perceptual memory tests reveal priming when words are generated orally from a semantic cue at study, and this priming could reflect contamination by voluntary retrieval. We tested this hypothesis using a generate condition and two read conditions that differed in depth of processing (read-phonemic vs read-semantic). An intentional word-stem completion test showed an advantage for the read-semantic over the generate condition and an advantage for the generate over the read-phonemic condition, and completion times were longer than in a control (...) test, prior to which there was no study phase. An incidental word-stem completion test showed equivalent priming for the read-semantic and read-phonemic study conditions, despite considerable power, and completion times were no longer than control, indicating that retrieval was involuntary, and insensitive to prior conceptual processing. The generate condition produced less priming than the read conditions, but significant priming nonetheless. The results show that priming from generating can be involuntary and suggest that lexical processes are responsible. They are also the first results conjointly showing a crossed double dissociation, a single dissociation, and a parallel effect across memory tests with identical physical retrieval cues. (shrink)

The tendency among working journalists to view ethics negatively, and ethical decision making as an attempt to inhibit their work by post facto sniping, is in part attributable to the way ethics is still taught in some undergraduate journalism programs - as a compendium of what journalists should not do. By adopting an approach that helps students and working journalists recognize ethics as affirmative, systematic, integrative, and definitive, ethics teachers can help foster a conception of ethics as positive, helpful, and (...) fundamental to the duty to inform. (shrink)

This essay examines the perspective from which Bas van Fraassen, in his book, The Empirical Stance, explains the project of empiricism. I argue that this perspective is a robustly transcendental perspective, which suggests that the tradition of empiricism lacks the resources to explain itself. I offer an alternative history of epistemic voluntarism in twentieth-century philosophy to the history van Fraassen himself provides, one that finds the novelty in van Fraassen's own views to be precisely his reintroduction of the knowing mind (...) into the tradition of analytic philosophy of science. (shrink)

The concept of cultural safety offers a unique approach to nursing practice, based on recognition of the power differentials inherent in any interaction. It is from within the context of nursing in Aoteaoroa/New Zealand (A/NZ) that the concept developed and was subsequently integrated into nursing education. Cultural safety is based within a framework of biculturalism, and is congruent with the tenets of the nation's founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi. Clarification of the concept is offered, together with a review of (...) the historical shift in nursing attitudes that has led to the emergence of ‘cultural safety’ as a viable and valued component of nursing practice.The argument is made that cultural safety has allowed for a more reflective, critical understanding of the actions of nursing to develop. This includes recognition that nurses’ attitudes and values have inevitably been influenced by social and political forces, and as such are in part reflective of those within the wider community. Comparison between the support given by nurses in the early 1900s to the theory of eugenics and the current acceptance of cultural safety is used to highlight this point. An examination of the literature identifies that ideological and conceptual changes have occurred in the approach of A/NZ nurses to issues with cultural implications for practice. A review of background factors relating to Maori health status and the Treaty of Waitangi is presented as a necessary context to the overall discussion.The discussion concludes with an acknowledgement that while the rhetoric of cultural safety is now part of nursing culture in New Zealand, there is no firm evidence to evaluate its impact in practice. Issues identified as impacting on the ability to assess/research a concept, such as cultural safety, are discussed. For cultural safety to become recognised as a credible (and indispensable) tool, it is necessary to further examine the ‘end-point’ or ‘outcomes’ of the process. (shrink)

Biological understanding of human cognitive functions is incomplete because of failure to understand the evolution of complex functions and organisms in general. Here, that failure is attributed to an aspect of the standard neo-Darwinian synthesis, namely commitment to evolution by natural selection of genetic programs in stable environments, a position that cannot easily explain the evolution of complexity. When we turn to consider more realistic, highly changeable environments, however, another possibility becomes clearer. An alternative to genetic programs—dubbed “biogrammars”—is proposed here (...) to deal with complex, changing environments and explain evolving complexity from pre-genetic life to human socio-cognitive functions. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The received view of the anti-metaphysics of Camap's Aufbau finds that it rests exclusively on verificationism. Alberto Coffa has recently put forward an interpretation of the antimetaphysical stance that claims that Camap was confusedly moving from ontological to semantical ideahsm. After raising objections to both of these views another interpretation is put forward. The crucial aspect of Camap's rejection of metaphysics rests on his reinterpretation of epistemology as the logic of objective knowledge. This leads to a rejection of metaphysics inasmuch (...) as the peculiar status of logic as the framework constitutive of the possibility of rational inquiry means that it neither needs nor allows of completion or interpretation by traditional metaphysics. This view of Camap's is compared to the views of the Marburg and Southwest NeoKantians. (shrink)

A generic grounding claim is a grounding claim that isn’t about any particular entity or fact. For example, consider the claim: an act is right in virtue of maximizing happiness. One natural idea is that generic grounding claims state mere regularities of ground. So if an act is right in virtue of maximizing happiness, then every possible right act is right in virtue of maximizing happiness. The generic claim generalizes over particular grounding relations. In this essay, I argue that this (...) simple story is wrong. Generic grounding claims are not merely quantificational; rather, they express real definitions, where real definitions are (in part) claims about essence. My view has two major upshots: ('i') it makes better sense of debates where generic grounding claims are at issue (like debates about moral laws); ('ii') it clarifies the distinction between reductive and non-reductive metaphysical theories. (shrink)

This comment on the case presented in ‘Cholera and Nothing More’ argues that the physicians at this public-health centre did not have an ordinary clinician's obligations to promote the health of the people who came to them for care, as they were instead set up to serve a laudable and urgent public-health goal, namely, controlling a cholera outbreak. It argues that, nonetheless, these physicians did have some limited moral duties to care for other diseases they encountered—some ancillary-care duties—arising from their (...) voluntarily entering into a kind of intimate relationship with the patients they took in, one in which those patients effectively waive certain rights to bodily and medical privacy. (shrink)