Alternatives to dairy products are becoming part of mainstream food culture in Western societies amidst growing concerns for more sustainable and healthy diets, and improved animal welfare. As more citizens opt for plant-based milks, markets have responded with an abundance of alternatives to facilitate the transition. Previous systematic reviews have examined the environmental and health impacts of plant-based products compared with dairy, yet a synthesis of empirical research on the social and environmental justice impacts of dairy alternatives is lacking. This (...) systematic scoping review aims to explore the extent, range, and nature of peer-reviewed studies on dairy alternatives that address their outcomes for justice. Publications were sought through systematic search of two comprehensive electronic databases (Scopus and Web of Science) and screened by two independent reviewers following eligibility criteria. Included studies predominantly focused on consumer identities and values, and the market-led nature of dairy alternatives consumption. Gaps in the literature included impacts on nutritional equity and the innovation and adaptive capabilities of food producers and workers across geographies. We conclude that the heavy-handed regulation of dairy alternative terminology and the market-driven nature of this transition raise questions about injustices in governance and innovation in this sector. (shrink)

According to a common conception of legal proof, satisfying a legal burden requires establishing a claim to a numerical threshold. Beyond reasonable doubt, for example, is often glossed as 90% or 95% likelihood given the evidence. Preponderance of evidence is interpreted as meaning at least 50% likelihood given the evidence. In light of problems with the common conception, I propose a new ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for legal standards of proof. Relevant alternative accounts of knowledge state that a person knows a (...) proposition when their evidence rules out all relevant error possibilities. I adapt this framework to model three legal standards of proof—the preponderance of evidence, clear and convincing evidence, and beyond reasonable doubt standards. I describe virtues of this framework. I argue that, by eschewing numerical thresholds, the relevant alternatives framework avoids problems inherent to rival models. I conclude by articulating aspects of legal normativity and practice illuminated by the relevant alternatives framework. (shrink)

Despite broad agreement that the vulnerable have a claim to special protection, defining vulnerable persons or populations has proved more difficult than we would like. This is a theoretical as well as a practical problem, as it hinders both convincing justifications for this claim and the practical application of required protections. In this paper, I review consent-based, harm-based, and comprehensive definitions of vulnerability in healthcare and research with human subjects. Although current definitions are subject to critique, their underlying assumptions may (...) be complementary. I propose that we should define vulnerability in research and healthcare as an identifiably increased likelihood of incurring additional or greater wrong. In order to identify the vulnerable, as well as the type of protection that they need, this definition requires that we start from the sorts of wrongs likely to occur and from identifiable increments in the likelihood, or to the likely degree, that these wrongs will occur. It is limited but appropriately so, as it only applies to special protection, not to any protection to which we have a valid claim. Using this definition would clarify that the normative force of claims for special protection does not rest with vulnerability itself, but with pre-existing claims when these are more likely to be denied. Such a clarification could help those who carry responsibility for the protection of vulnerable populations, such as Institutional Review Boards, to define the sort of protection required in a more targeted and effective manner. (shrink)

Moral encroachment holds that the epistemic justification of a belief can be affected by moral factors. If the belief might wrong a person or group more evidence is required to justify the belief. Moral encroachment thereby opposes evidentialism, and kindred views, which holds that epistemic justification is determined solely by factors pertaining to evidence and truth. In this essay I explain how beliefs such as ‘that woman is probably an administrative assistant’—based on the evidence that most women employees at the (...) firm are administrative assistants—motivate moral encroachment. I then describe weaknesses of moral encroachment. Finally I explain how we can countenance the moral properties of such beliefs without endorsing moral encroachment, and I argue that the moral status of such beliefs cannot be evaluated independently from the understanding in which they are embedded. (shrink)

Understanding enjoys a special kind of value, one not held by lesser epistemic states such as knowledge and true belief. I explain the value of understanding via a seemingly unrelated topic, the implausibility of veritism. Veritism holds that true belief is the sole ultimate epistemic good and all other epistemic goods derive their value from the epistemic value of true belief. Veritism entails that if you have a true belief that p, you have all the epistemic good qua p. Veritism (...) is a plausible and widely held view; I argue that it is untenable. I argue that integration among beliefs possesses epistemic value independent from the good of true belief, and so has value veritism cannot account for. I argue further that this integration among beliefs comprises the distinctive epistemic value of understanding. (shrink)

The epistemology of risk examines how risks bear on epistemic properties. A common framework for examining the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support is best modelled as numerical probability given the available evidence. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. I describe three loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on a belief for action, where those consequences (...) are significant if the belief is false. The second locus concerns whether beliefs themselves—regardless of action—can be risky, costly, or harmful. The third locus concerns epistemic risks we confront as social epistemic agents. I aim to motivate the relevant alternatives framework as a fruitful approach to the epistemology of risk. I first articulate a ‘relevant alternatives’ model of the relationship between stakes, evidence, and action. I then employ the relevant alternatives framework to undermine the motivation for moral encroachment. Finally, I argue the relevant alternatives framework illuminates epistemic phenomena such as gaslighting, conspiracy theories, and crying wolf, and I draw on the framework to diagnose the undue skepticism endemic to rape accusations. (shrink)

Many theorists hold that outright verdicts based on bare statistical evidence are unwarranted. Bare statistical evidence may support high credence, on these views, but does not support outright belief or legal verdicts of culpability. The vignettes that constitute the lottery paradox and the proof paradox are marshalled to support this claim. Some theorists argue, furthermore, that examples of profiling also indicate that bare statistical evidence is insufficient for warranting outright verdicts.I examine Pritchard's and Buchak's treatments of these three kinds of (...) case. Pritchard argues that his safety condition explains the insufficiency of bare statistical evidence for outright verdicts in each of the three cases, while Buchak argues that her treatment of the distinction between credence and belief explains this. In these discussions the three kinds of cases – lottery, proof paradox, and profiling – are treated alike. The cases are taken to exhibit the same epistemic features. I identity significant overlooked epistemic differences amongst these three cases; these differences cast doubt on Pritchard's explanation of the insufficiency of bare statistical evidence for outright verdicts. Finally, I raise the question of whether we should aim for a unified explanation of the three paradoxes. (shrink)

Some expressions of English, like the demonstratives ‘this’ and ‘that’, are referentially promiscuous: distinct free occurrences of them in the same sentence can differ in content relative to the same context. One lesson of referentially promiscuous expressions is that basic logical properties like validity and logical truth obtain or fail to obtain only relative to a context. This approach to logic can be developed in just as rigorous a manner as David Kaplan’s classic logic of demonstratives. The result is a (...) logic that applies to arguments in English containing multiple occurrences of referentially promiscuous expressions. (shrink)

Conciliatory views of peer disagreement hold that when an agent encounters peer disagreement she should conciliate by adjusting her doxastic attitude towards that of her peer. In this paper I distinguish different ways conciliation can be understood and argue that the way conciliationism is typically understood violates the principle of commutativity of evidence. Commutativity of evidence holds that the order in which evidence is acquired should not influence what it is reasonable to believe based on that evidence. I argue that (...) when an agent encounters more than one peer, and applies the process of conciliation serially, the order she encounters the peers influences the resulting credence. I argue this is a problem for conciliatory views of disagreement, and suggest some responses available to advocates of conciliation. (shrink)

B C Hurst; Means, Ends, Content and Objectives in Curriculum Planning: a critique of Sockett and Hirst, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, Issue 1.

In order to perform certain actions – such as incarcerating a person or revoking parental rights – the state must establish certain facts to a particular standard of proof. These standards – such as preponderance of evidence and beyond reasonable doubt – are often interpreted as likelihoods or epistemic confidences. Many theorists construe them numerically; beyond reasonable doubt, for example, is often construed as 90 to 95% confidence in the guilt of the defendant. -/- A family of influential cases suggests (...) standards of proof should not be interpreted numerically. These ‘proof paradoxes’ illustrate that purely statistical evidence can warrant high credence in a disputed fact without satisfying the relevant legal standard. In this essay I evaluate three influential attempts to explain why merely statistical evidence cannot satisfy legal standards. (shrink)

This article studies the specific designation of morals under the conditions of a modern society. Due to the circumstances that morals are able to overcome differences between the social regulatory systems and to unite the perceptions of a regulatory framework, they have become a major contemporary metalegal regulator. Being a significant social regulator, morals also play a mediation role between law and other social regulatory systems. In this role of theirs, they make a substantial factor having an influence on building (...) and changing legal prescriptions. Morals are also studied as a variable in the conditions of a dynamically developing society and changing conditions of living. Some models of behaviours, which were considered to be against moral only several decades ago, are nowadays regarded as completely normal. (shrink)

We address the issue of the normativity of representation and how Grush might address it for emulations as constituting representations. We then proceed to several more detailed issues concerning the learning of emulations, a possible empirical counterexample to Grush's model, and the choice of Kalman filters as the form of model-based control.

Assisting suicide is legal in Switzerland if it is offered without selfish motive to a person with decision-making capacity. Although the ‘Swiss model’ for suicide assistance has been extensively described in the literature, the formally and informally protected liberties and claims of assistors and recipients of suicide assistance in Switzerland are incompletely captured in the literature. In this article, we describe the package of rights involved in the ‘Swiss model’ using the framework of Hohfeldian rights as modified by Wenar. After (...) outlining this framework, we dissect the rights involved in suicide assistance in Switzerland, and compare it with the situation in England and Germany. Based on this approach, we conclude that in Switzerland, claim rights exist for those requesting suicide assistance, and for those who are considering providing such assistance, even though no entitlements exist toward suicide assistance. We then describe the implementation of the ‘Swiss model’ and difficulties arising within it. Clarifying these issues is important to understand the Swiss situation, to evaluate what features of it may or may not be worth correcting or emulating, and to understand how it can impact requests for suicide assistance in other countries due to ‘suicide tourism’. It is also important to understand exactly what sets Switzerland apart from other countries with different legislations regarding suicide assistance. (shrink)

The teleological approach to an epistemic concept investigates it by asking questions such as ‘what is the purpose of the concept?’, ‘What role has it played in the past?’, or ‘If we imagine a society without the concept, why would they feel the need to invent it?’ The idea behind the teleological approach is that examining the function of the concept illuminates the contours of the concept itself. This approach is a relatively new development in epistemology, and as yet there (...) are few works examining it. This paper aims to fill this gap and engender further understanding of the teleological method. I first contrast the teleological method with more orthodox approaches in epistemology. I then draw a three-way taxonomy of different kinds of teleological approach and provide an example of each kind. The teleological approach is often presented as antithetical to the more orthodox approaches in epistemology, and so in competition with them. I demur. I argue that the methods can be fruitfully combined in epistemological theorising; in the final section I suggest specific ways the teleological approach can be incorporated alongside more orthodox methods in a general methodological reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

In an earlier defense of the view that the fundamental logical properties of logical truth and logical consequence obtain or fail to obtain only relative to contexts, I focused on a variation of Kaplan’s own modal logic of indexicals. In this paper, I state a semantics and sketch a system of proof for a first-order logic of demonstratives, and sketch proofs of soundness and completeness. (I omit details for readability.) That these results obtain for the first-order logic of demonstratives shows (...) that the significance of demonstratives for logic exceeds their behavior as rigid designators in counterfactual reasoning, or reasoning about alternative possibilities. Furthermore, the results in this paper help address one common objection to the view that logical truth and consequence obtain only relative to contexts. According to this objection, the view entails that logical consequence is not formal. (shrink)

Demonstratives and Indexicals In the philosophy of language, an indexical is any expression whose content varies from one context of use to another. The standard list of indexicals includes pronouns such as “I”, “you”, “he”, “she”, “it”, “this”, “that”, plus adverbs such as “now”, “then”, “today”, “yesterday”, “here”, and “actually”. Other candidates include the tenses … Continue reading Demonstratives and Indexicals →.

I motivate three claims: Firstly, attentional traits can be cognitive virtues and vices. Secondly, groups and collectives can possess attentional virtues and vices. Thirdly, attention has epistemic, moral, social, and political importance. An epistemology of attention is needed to better understand our social-epistemic landscape, including media, social media, search engines, political polarisation, and the aims of protest. I apply attentional normativity to undermine recent arguments for moral encroachment and to illuminate a distinctive epistemic value of occupying particular social positions. A (...) recurring theme is that disproportionate attention can distort, mislead, and misrepresent even when all the relevant claims are true and well supported by evidence. In the informational cacophony of the internet age, epistemology must foreground the cognitive virtues of attunement. (shrink)

In criminal trials the state must establish, to a particular standard of proof, the defendant's guilt. The most widely used and important standard of proof for criminal conviction is the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt' standard. But what legitimates this standard, rather than an alternative? One view holds the standard of proof should be determined or justified – at least in large part – by its consequences. In this spirit, Laudan uses crime statistics to estimate risks the average citizen runs of (...) being violently victimised and falsely convicted. He argues that since the former risk is higher, and the aggregate harms are worse, the standard of proof should be substantially lowered. He presents a formula for calculating the preferred standard. In this article I outline various ways Laudan's uses of crime statistics are flawed, and explain how he substantially overestimates risks of victimhood and underestimates costs of false convictions. I also explain why his formula is mistaken, and illuminate consequences Laudan neglects. I conclude that, even if consequences determine the appropriate standard of proof, Laudan's arguments fail to show the standard is too high. I conclude by suggesting that the inadequacies of Laudan's reasoning might be good news for consequence-based justifications of the standard of proof. (shrink)

The standard truth-conditional semantics for substitutional quantification, due to Saul Kripke, does not specify what proposition is expressed by sentences containing the particular substitutional quantifier. In this paper, I propose an alternative semantics for substitutional quantification that does. The key to this semantics is identifying an appropriate propositional function to serve as the content of a bound occurrence of a formula containing a free substitutional variable. I apply this semantics to traditional philosophical reasons for interest in substitutional quantification, namely, theories (...) of truth and ontological commitment. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the choice of trust conceptualisations in the context of consumer Internet of Things (IoT) can have a significant impact on the understanding and implementations of a user’s private data protection. Narrow instrumental interpretations of trust as a mere precondition for technology acceptance may obscure important moral issues such as malleability of user’s privacy decisions, and power imbalances between suppliers and consumers of technology. A shift of focus in policy proposals from trust to the trustworthiness of technology (...) can be the first step on the way to addressing these moral concerns. It is argued that complexity of IoT systems, comprised of technological artefacts and institutional data-collecting entities, warrants the moral value of distrust as a prima facie assumption for technological design and regulatory measures. Such a conceptual perspective highlights importance of technological measures that can minimise reliance on trust in consumer IoTs and regulatory measures aimed to improve transparency of IoT architectures. (shrink)

An annotated bibliography of legal epistemology.

My essay ‘Attunement: On the Cognitive Virtues of Attention’ is the lead essay in a symposium. Adam Carter and Sandy Goldberg each respond to the ‘Attunement’ essay. This is my rejoinder. -/- (i.) Carter argues that resources from virtue reliabilism can explain the source of attention normativity. He modifies this virtue reliabilist AAA-framework to apply to attentional normativity. I raise concerns about Carter’s project. I suggest that true belief and proper attentional habits are not relevantly similar. -/- (ii.) Goldberg claims (...) that social roles underwrite kinds of attentional normativity that are not well-captured by virtue theory. I critically assess this claim. (shrink)

Thought experiments as counterexamples are a familiar tool in philosophy. Frequently understanding a vignette seems to generate a challenge to a target theory. In this paper I explore the content of the judgement that we have in response to these vignettes. I first introduce several competing proposals for the content of our judgement, and explain why they are inadequate. I then advance an alternative view. I argue that when we hear vignettes we consider the normal instances of the vignette. If (...) the normal instance of the vignette exhibits a counter-instance, the vignette constitutes a challenge to the target theory. I argue that this proposal shows how responses to vignettes are an ordinary, everyday judgement, and I explain how the proposal avoids the problems generated by competing theories. Finally, I argue this ‘normalcy proposal’ most naturally accords with our understanding of the method. (shrink)

Building on recent work by Delia Graff Fara and Ora Matushansky on appellative constructions like ‘Mirka called Roger handsome’, I argue that if Millianism about proper names is true, then the quantifier ‘something’ in ‘Mirka called Roger something’ is best understood as a kind of substitutional quantifier. Any adequate semantics for such quantifiers must explain both the logical behavior of ‘Mirka called Roger something’ and the acceptability of ‘so’-anaphora in ‘Mirka called Roger something, and everyone so called is handsome’. Millianism (...) about proper names is inconsistent with such quantifiers being standard non-substitutional second-order quantifiers. But this is not the only option for Millianism: I provide two different propositional semantics for substitutional quantification, each of which is adequate in the sense above, given Millianism. One of these is based on Tobias Rosefeldt’s work on non-nominal quantification, and I identify in what way Rosefeldt’s semantics is substitutional. (shrink)

Clinical ethics support services are developing in Europe. They will be most useful if they are designed to match the ethical concerns of clinicians. We conducted a cross-sectional mailed survey on random samples of general physicians in Norway, Switzerland, Italy, and the UK, to assess their access to different types of ethics support services, and to describe what makes them more likely to have used available ethics support. Respondents reported access to formal ethics support services such as clinical ethics committees (...) (23%), consultation in individual cases (17.6%), and individual ethicists (8.8%), but also to other kinds of less formal ethics support (23.6%). Access to formal ethics support services was associated with work in urban hospitals. Informal ethics resources were more evenly distributed. Although most respondents (81%) reported that they would find help useful in facing ethical difficulties, they reported having used the available services infrequently (14%). Physicians with greater confidence in their knowledge of ethics (P = 0.001), or who had had ethics courses in medical school (P = 0.006), were more likely to have used available services. Access to help in facing ethical difficulties among general physicians in the surveyed countries is provided by a mix of official ethics support services and other resources. Developing ethics support services may benefit from integration of informal services. Development of ethics education in medical school curricula could lead to improved physicians sensititity to ethical difficulties and greater use of ethics support services. Such support services may also need to be more proactive in making their help available. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a large amount of support for the idea that causal claims can be sensitive to normative considerations. Previous work has focused on the concept of actual causation, defending the claim that whether or not some token event c is a cause of another token event e is influenced by both statistical and prescriptive norms. I focus on the policy debate surrounding alternative energies, and use the causal modelling framework to show that in this context, people’s normative (...) commitments don’t just affect the causal claims they are willing to endorse, but also their understanding of the causal structure. In the context of the alternative energy debate, normative considerations affect our understanding of the causal structure by influencing our judgements about which variables should be held fixed, and therefore which variables should be relegated to the background of a causal model. In cases of extreme disagreement, normative commitments can also affect which causal structure we think should be instantiated. Thus, focusing on a new context has revealed a previously unexplored sense in which normative factors are incorporated into causal reasoning. (shrink)

This essay is not about what love is. It is about what self-ascriptions of love do. People typically self-ascribe romantic love when a nexus of feelings, beliefs, attitudes, values, commitments, experiences, and personal histories matches their conception of romantic love. But what shapes this conception? And (how) can we adjudicate amongst conflicting conceptions? -/- Self-ascriptions of love do not merely describe the underlying nexus of attitudes and beliefs. They also change it. This essay describes how conceptions of love affect romantic (...) experience. I limn distinctions between love and obsessive infatuation and explore ways language can cultivate queer romantic preferences. Since conceptions of love are shaped, often implicitly, by terms available in one’s linguistic community, the resulting nexus of concepts and conceptions manifests linguistic luck. I suggest ways we might sculpt the language of love to better understand—and change—ourselves. Love can help us flourish and so can our “love” language. (shrink)

In the early 1960s, American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn contributed to a “crisis of rationality” with his hypothesis that science develops by means of paradigm shifts. He challenged the positivist concept of cumulative and continuous scientific progress. According to Kuhn, the relation between two succeeding scientific traditions ‘separated by a scientific revolution’ is characterized by conceptual incommensurability that constrains the interpretation of science as a cumulative, steadily progressing enterprise. Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy was heavily criticized by German-American biologist Ernst Mayr (...) as unapplicable to the history of biology. Mayr, one of the most outstanding evolutionary biologists of the 20th century and a “co-architect” of the so-called Modern Synthesis (contemporary Darwinism), published extensively on the history and philosophy of biology as he thought that theoretical biology cannot progress without proper philosophy of science. Being convinced of the progressive development of Darwinism, Mayr pointed out that Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolutions does not reflect conceptual changes in evolutionary biology. Here we summarize Mayr’s critiques of Kuhn and, based on our own research, take Mayr’s side in the controversy between two great thinkers. (shrink)

This essay is an accessible introduction to the proof paradox in legal epistemology. -/- In 1902 the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine filed an influential legal verdict. The judge claimed that in order to find a defendant culpable, the plaintiff “must adduce evidence other than a majority of chances”. The judge thereby claimed that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal proof. -/- In this essay I first motivate the claim that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal (...) proof. I then introduce and motivate a knowledge-centred explanation of this fact. The knowledge-centred explanation rests on two premises. The first is that legal proof requires knowledge of culpability. The second is that one cannot attain knowledge that p from bare statistical evidence that p. To motivate the second premise, I suggest that beliefs based on bare statistical evidence fail to be safe—they could easily be wrong—and bare statistical evidence cannot eliminate relevant alternatives. -/- I then cast doubt on the first premise; I argue that legal proof does not require knowledge. I thereby dispute the knowledge-centred explanation of the inadequacy of bare statistical evidence for legal proof. Instead of appealing to the nature of knowledge, I suggest we should seek a more direct explanation by appealing to those more foundational epistemic properties, such as safety or eliminating relevant alternatives. (shrink)

Radio Free Europe used balloons to drop leaflets in an attempt to supplement radio with printed words in the 1950s—a historical moment when closing borders, censoring the press, jamming foreign radios, tapping telephone lines, and tracking letters from abroad created an almost hermetically sealed space without many means for exchanging information across the Iron Curtain. This article traces how distorted and limited information shaped Cold War propaganda and practices of information-gathering. The article further examines unpredictable environmental factors that were transformed (...) into persuasive political rhetoric. A comparative analysis of communist media shows similarities of imagination in a visual propaganda campaign across five communist countries. Fantasies evolved into an object of public interest when propaganda strategies embraced a language of facts. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 46-47, December 2011.