BackgroundEthics review is the process of assessing the ethics of research involving humans. The Ethics Review Committee (ERC) is the key oversight mechanism designated to ensure ethics review. Whether or not this governance mechanism is still fit for purpose in the data-driven research context remains a debated issue among research ethics experts.Main textIn this article, we seek to address this issue in a twofold manner. First, we review the strengths and weaknesses of ERCs in ensuring ethical oversight. Second, we map (...) these strengths and weaknesses onto specific challenges raised by big data research. We distinguish two categories of potential weakness. The first category concerns persistent weaknesses, i.e., those which are not specific to big data research, but may be exacerbated by it. The second category concerns novel weaknesses, i.e., those which are created by and inherent to big data projects. Within this second category, we further distinguish between purview weaknesses related to the ERC’s scope (e.g., how big data projects may evade ERC review) and functional weaknesses, related to the ERC’s way of operating. Based on this analysis, we propose reforms aimed at improving the oversight capacity of ERCs in the era of big data science.ConclusionsWe believe the oversight mechanism could benefit from these reforms because they will help to overcome data-intensive research challenges and consequently benefit research at large. (shrink)

The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. The article starts by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. It is argued that the growth imperative of capitalist economies, as well as other particular characteristics detailed below, are the main drivers of the ecological crisis and exacerbated trends already underway. Further, the planetary boundaries framework can support interpretations that do not solely emphasize technocratic operational approaches and costs, (...) but also assume that these alone can be the solution. (shrink)

The notion of societal boundaries aims to enhance the debate on planetary boundaries. The focus is on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controversial process – based on normative judgments, ethical concerns, and socio-political struggles – it has the potential to offer guidelines for a just, social-ecological transformation.

The book, written in a clear, engaging style, contains four chapters.

I would like to discuss the claim that the resources of plural reference and plural quantification are sufficient for the purpose of paraphrasing all ordinary statements apparently concerned with composite material objects into plural statements concerned exclusively with simples.

This paper takes a close look at the thought that mereological relations on material objects mirror, and are mirrored by, parallel mereological relations on their exact locations. This hypothesis is made more precise by means of a battery of principles from which more substantive consequences are derived. Mereological harmony turns out to entail, for example, that atomistic space is an inhospitable environment for material gunk or that Whiteheadian space is not a hospitable environment for unextended material atoms.

Ethical issues at the workplace have once again become topical and important due to considerable adverse publicity surrounding reports of unethical business practices by corporate managers. Accordingly, this paper re-visits the question of whether gender, age and work experience do have an effect on ethical judgement, using 655 business students as respondents. This is necessary as business students are likely to become managers during their career and will face complex ethical concerns and dilemmas in their daily, routine affairs. The findings (...) currently demonstrate that females are more ethically aware than their male counterparts – that is, there are differences between males and females regarding ethical judgement. There is also evidence to suggest that age is a factor that does impact on ethical judgement. However, we also found evidence to suggest that in some cases, the age factor does not necessarily have a significant impact on ethical awareness. The results further indicate that there is a difference in ethical judgement related to work experience. However, at the same time, in one question there is no evidence to suggest the claim that work experience does impact significantly on ethical judgement. Overall, it appears that ethical awareness does increase alongside work experience. (shrink)

Identity is a modally inflexible relation: two objects are necessarily identical or necessarily distinct. However, identity is not alone in this respect. We will look at the relation that one object bears to some objects if and only if it is one of them. In particular, we will consider the credentials of the thesis that no matter what some objects are, an object is necessarily one of them or necessarily not one of them.

Do mereological fusions have their parts necessarily? None of the axioms of non-modal formulations of classical mereology appear to speak directly to this question. And yet a great many philosophers who take the part-whole relation to be governed by classical mereology seem to assume that they do. In addition to this, many philosophers who make allowance for the part-whole relation to obtain merely contingently between a part and a mereological fusion tend to depart from non-modal formulations of classical mereology at (...) least when it comes to the axiom of Unique Fusion, which states that no two different mereological fusions ever fuse exactly the same objects. This is no coincidence. There are reasons of principle why one’s adherence to classical mereology should exert some pull towards the view that mereological fusions have their parts necessarily. There is, however, no direct route from the combination of classical mereology and propositional modal logic to the hypothesis that the part-whole relation obtains necessarily between a part and a mereological fusion. In order to bridge between a modal formulation of classical mereology and the hypothesis that fusions have their parts necessarily, one needs to strengthen the axiom of Unrestricted Fusion in a way that is agreeable to many philosophers on both sides of the debate. (shrink)

Several philosophers have argued recently that semantic properties do play a causal role. 1 It is our view that none of these arguments are satisfactory. Our aim is to reveal some of the deficiencies of these arguments, and to reassess the question in our own way. In section 1, we shall explain in more detail what is involved in the pretheoretical idea of a causally efficacious property and so provide a fuller sense of the issue. In section 2 we shall (...) discuss Fodor's and Kim's arguments that the semantic properties of mental events are causally efficacious. Their tactic is to articulate sufficient conditions for the causal efficacy of a property, and then apply these conditions to the psychological properties under consideration. We shall show that both formulations are inadequate. However, each account can remedy some of the defects of the other. We shall argue that by putting the two together, and modifying this combined account in certain ways, we can arrive at something that might just pass as a general sufficient condition for causal efficacy. We believe that the question of causal efficacy of content is best approached as a question in the philosophy of science. If one wants to know whether a given species of property is efficacious, the most productive strategy is to find a science that investigates the properties and examine the role they are assigned. In keeping with this attitude we shall restrict our discussion to the notion of content deployed within cognitive science. In section 3 we examine the role of content in cognitive science and discuss whether this role suits content to the conditions on efficacy articulated in section two. Our conclusion will be conditional and hedged: on certain views of cognitive science, content will meet the sufficient condition for efficacy. If other views are correct, the question remains open. (shrink)

Monogamy in Western countries has recently undergone criticisms, because it is perceived as an oppressive institution, adjacent to reactionary cultural values. In this article, I argue that monogamy is in fact a force of social progress and women’s empowerment. I point out that, given our natural tendencies, the most likely alternative to monogamy is polygyny. By its very nature, polygyny faces a numerical difficulty, to the extent that (given the equitable male to female ratio) when one man engages in romantic (...) or sexual relationships with multiple female partners, inequality and social conflict ensues. I present historical and sociological data that sustains the argument that polygyny is associated with greater inequality, violence, poverty and women’s vulnerability. Nevertheless, while monogamy can be considered a force of social progress, I argue that the State is not morally entitled to prosecute non-monogamous lifestyles, but there may still be non-coercive ways to promote monogamy. (shrink)

According to Frank Jackson’s famous knowledge argument, Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist raised in a black and white room and bestowed with complete physical knowledge, cannot know certain truths about phenomenal experience. This claim about knowledge, in turn, implies that physicalism is false. I argue that the knowledge argument founders on a dilemma. Either (i) Mary cannot know the relevant experiential truths because of trivial obstacles that have no bearing on the truth of physicalism or (ii) once the obstacles have been (...) removed, Mary can know the relevant truths. If we give Mary the epistemological capabilities necessary to draw metaphysical conclusions about physicalism, she will, while trapped in the black and white room, be able to know every truth about phenomenal experience. (shrink)

Hubert Dreyfus has defended a novel view of agency, most notably in his debate with John McDowell. Dreyfus argues that expert actions are primarily unreflective and do not involve conceptual activity. In unreflective action, embodied know-how plays the role reflection and conceptuality play in the actions of novices. Dreyfus employs two arguments to support his conclusion: the argument from speed and the phenomenological argument. I argue that Dreyfus's argumentative strategies are not successful, since he relies on a dubious assumption about (...) concepts and reflection. I suggest that Dreyfus is committed to a minimal view of conceptuality in action. (shrink)

Sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of culture, social judgment, and social movements. This paper draws out lessons of recent work from sociological theory, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of knowledge and thought, and develops implications of these lessons for cultural and cognitive sociology. Knowledge ought to be conceived of as fundamentally embodied, because sensory information is a fundamental component of experience as it (...) is stored in long-term memory, and because bodily responses and intuitions often precede reflexive or strategic thought. I argue that the challenge of embodied knowledge for cultural sociology is threefold: to develop cultural theories of motivation; to specify the ways in which the body structures discourses endogenously; and to specify how embodied motivations and embodied discourses interact. (shrink)

In this paper I set out what I call a ‘conquest’ conception of Hume's experimental science of man. It is notable, I claim, that Hume regards what he calls the ‘capital’ of the sciences – ‘the science of MAN’ – as occupied territory, and that he views his ‘direct’ method of approach upon the science of human nature as a ‘conquest’. I expand upon such statements by leveraging the comparison that Hume draws between experimental moral philosophy and the experimental tradition (...) in natural philosophy inaugurated by Francis Bacon. Overall, I suggest that Hume's decision to ground his science of human nature upon experience and observation is as much about overthrowing the epistemic authority of speculative dogmas as it is about establishing a secure foundation for his system of the sciences, and I contend that Hume's application of his hypotheses to animals is central to this conception of his philosophical project in the Treatise. (shrink)

This volume translates Castoriadis's dialogues on politics, ethics, culture, and aesthetics with important intellectual figures including Francisco Varela, Octavio Paz, and others.

Neste artigo, apresentamos parte de um estudo realizado em um grupo aberto do Facebook de negacionistas das vacinas. Com referenciais teóricos pautados na Teoria AtorRede (ANT) e nos estudos de Bruno Latour, Anne-Marie Mol e John Law, tivemos o objetivo de mapear os processos de atuação e de construção de realidades de um grupo de negacionistas da vacina. Além da ANT, nossas orientações metodológicas estiveram pautadas também na Análise de Rede Social (ARS). Assim, investigamos posts e o conteúdo dos comentários (...) produzidos por membros da comunidade entre os meses de março e abril de 2021. Nossos resultados indicam que os participantes dessa comunidade antivacina produzem realidades em que se observam movimentos de ataque e de defesa contra a ciência. Diante disso, sugerimos que também nos posicionemos diante desta guerra em prol da defesa da ciência, dos cientistas, do conhecimento científico, assim como da democracia e da composição de um bom mundo comum. (shrink)

This paper presents a Lewis-Skyrms signaling game that can exhibit a type of compositionality novel to the signaling game literature. The structure of the signaling game is motivated by an analogy to the alarm calls of putty-nosed monkeys (Cercopithecus nictitans). Putty-nosed monkeys display a compositional system of alarm calls with a semantics that is sensitive to the ordering of terms. This sensitivity to the ordering of terms has not been previously modeled with a Lewis-Skyrms signaling game literature. Signaling games are (...) valued for showing how communicative systems can arise with minimal learning tools. Simulation results show that basic (Roth-Erev) reinforcement learning is sufficient for the acquisition of a compositional signaling system sensitive to the ordering of terms. (shrink)

One of the characteristics of conceptual history as developed by Reinhart Koselleck is its relation with social history. This connection refers to a constitutive dichotomy of conceptual history between reality and language. In this article, I argue that in Koselleck's works, the meanings of conceptual history/social history and reality/language dichotomies are not evident, and I propose to explore them through an analysis of his methodological texts on historical writing from the 1980s. Furthermore, I suggest that these dichotomies function as a (...) limit for thinking about the problem of the symbolic, which I seek to account for by drawing on Claude Lefort's notion of the political and an examination of the concept of Jewish people. (shrink)

No decorrer do debate sobre o realismo científico, alguns antirrealistas, tal como Leo Tolstói e Larry Laudan, criaram um desafio cético para os realistas, questionando, com base na história da ciência, a crença realista de continuidade entre as teorias do passado, atuais e futuras. Stathis Psillos ofereceu uma réplica que ficou conhecida como realismo seletivo ou divide et impera, alegando que, através de um minucioso exame, podemos encontrar elementos teóricos de continuidade entre teorias passadas e atuais, assegurando, por analogia, que (...) as teorias futuras também possuirão elementos de continuidade com as atuais. A estratégia de Psillos, se bem empregada, pode evidenciar que a leitura realista de história da ciência também possui suas virtudes e deve ser considerada. Todavia, no presente artigo, argumentamos que mesmo que o realismo seletivo de Psillos se mostre aplicável, ele deve ser considerado como uma crítica a concepções descontinuístas em história da ciência e não necessariamente ao antirrealismo científico em geral, posto que o empirismo construtivo de Bas van Fraassen, por exemplo, admite a continuidade teórica na ciência. (shrink)

We argue that not all cases of before-effect involve causation and ask how to demarcate cases of before-effect in which the events that follow exert causal influence over the before-effect from cases in which they do not.

Many authors have argued that all studies of socially specific modalities of human action and experience depend on some form of “philosophical anthropology”, i.e. on a set of general assumptions about what human beings are like, assumptions without which the very diagnoses of the cultural and historical variability of concrete agents' practices would become impossible. Bourdieu was sensitive to that argument and, especially in the later phase of his career, attempted to make explicit how his historical-sociological investigations presupposed and, at (...) the same time, contributed to the elaboration of an “idea of the human being”. The article reconstructs Bourdieu's philosophical anthropology, starting with his genetic sociology of symbolic power, conceived as a form of critical theory, and concluding with an account of the conditio humana in which recognition appears as both the fundamental existential goal through which human agents strive to confer meaning on their lives and the source of the endless symbolic competition that keeps society moving. The agonistic vision of the social universe that grounds his sociological studies returns in his philosophical anthropology under the guise of a singular synthesis between Durkheim's thesis that “Society is God” and Sartre's idea that “hell is other people”. (shrink)

La presente reseña de Escritores viajeros. El nomadismo como poética destaca el valor de la fórmula homo viator como columna interpretativa con la que Asunción Rangel analiza la obra de cuatro poetas hispanoamericanos.

Este artigo se propõe a mostrar a centralidade que a questão do sofrimento adquire nas filosofias de Arthur Schopenhauer e Theodor Adorno. O ponto de partida é um recorte preciso na obra de ambos os autores visando a uma reconstrução breve da metafísica de Schopenhauer, com ênfase na concepção de Vontade, desenvolvida em O mundo como vontade e como representação, de 1818, e a uma apresentação dos conceitos principais que compõem a concepção de dialética negativa, exposta por Adorno na obra (...) homônima de 1966. Por fim, defendo a tese de que, de um lado, Adorno se aproxima de Schopenhauer ao conceder uma centralidade à questão sofrimento e, mais especificamente, a um sofrimento corporal ou físico. Por outro lado, mostro que há elementos inconciliáveis entre as duas filosofias na medida em que a noção de dialética negativa pretende se afastar de toda forma de idealismo, e o sistema metafísico desenvolvido por Schopenhauer não teria sido capaz, na leitura de Adorno, de romper efetivamente com a filosofia idealista. (shrink)

Andrés de Guevara y Basoazábal (1748-1801), jesuita novohispano guanajuatense, escribió las Institutionum elementarium philosophiae, donde su autor ofrece un currículo deseable para la juventud mexicana que incluya la ciencia moderna empírica, la política virtuosa y la sabiduría humana. A través de una traducción comparativa del latín al español del proemio de la citada obra, este artículo pretende: 1) contextualizar al autor novohispano, 2) mostrar la recepción de la ciencia moderna desde los elementos aristotélicos de los que Guevara dispuso, y 3) (...) mostrar que la modernidad y la tradición aristotélica se enriquecieron mutuamente; y lo que debía de reformarse era la escolástica anquilosada. Se concluye que a través del proemio De vicissitundinibus de Guevara se evidencia la recepción mexicana de la modernidad emanada de una mentalidad aristotélica. (shrink)

El artículo esboza algunos hitos fundamentales del desarrollo de las ciencias sociales en el siglo XX que dieron cabida al interés por las vidas ordinarias, en disputa con el privilegio de atención concedido entonces a las élites y los grandes personajes, de donde se configura un marco epistemológico que acoge el estudio de los individuos y grupos sociales subordinados en la modernidad, dotado de un nuevo arsenal de métodos y técnicas basados en los testimonios orales y documentos personales. A través (...) del seguimiento de dicha ruta, condicionada por los múltiples tributos de las ciencias de la cultura, la literatura, la sistematización del pensamiento pedagógico y la variopinta experiencia histórica global, se comprenden las condiciones de emergencia del paradigma biográfico narrativo en educación. (shrink)

Can there be two things that are completely indistinguishable? This simple question has raised numerous debates throughout the history of philosophy and science. The principle of the identity of indiscernibles claims that no two things can be completely indiscernible. But this thesis has been challenged in quantum physics and continues to be a hot topic in cutting edge areas of mathematics. The question has gained a renewed interest with the possibility of harnessing indistinguishability as a resource in quantum information tasks. (...) This theme issue is devoted to understanding identity and indistinguishability in philosophy and science, gathering an interdisciplinary group of experts in the field. It will allow readers of diverse disciplines to have an updated introduction to the topic. (shrink)