The field of medical rehabilitation is relatively new.... Until recently, the ethical problems of this new field were neglected. There seemed to be more pressing concerns as rehabilitation medicine struggled to establish itself, sometimes in the face of considerable skepticism or hostility. There also seemed no pressing moral questions of the kind and intensity to be encountered, say, in high-technology acute care medicine or genetic engineering.... Those in biomedical ethics could and did easily overlook the quiet, less obtrusive issues of (...) rehabilitation.... The Hastings Center set out in 1985 to rectify that situation.... To explore the issues, the Center assembled a group of practitioners in the field, Hastings Center staff members, and individuals experienced in other areas of medical ethics.... The report that follows was written by Arthur Caplan and Daniel Callahan, assisted by Dr. Janet Haas of the Moss Rehabilitation Hospital in Philadelphia... (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Making of Rehabilitation. By Glenn Gritzer and Arnold Arluke.

In this opinionated review, I draw attention to some of the contributions reinforcement learning can make to questions in the philosophy of mind. In particular, I highlight reinforcement learning's foundational emphasis on the role of reward in agent learning, and canvass two ways in which the framework may advance our understanding of perception and motivation.

An agent exercises instrumental rationality to the degree that she adopts appropriate means to achieving her ends. Adopting appropriate means to achieving one’s ends can, in turn, involve overcoming one’s strongest desires, that is, it can involve exercising synchronic self-control. However, contra prominent approaches, I deny that synchronic self-control is possible. Specifically, I draw on computational models and empirical evidence from cognitive neuroscience to describe a naturalistic, multi-system model of the mind. On this model, synchronic self-control is impossible. Must we, (...) then, give up on a meaningful conception of instrumental rationality? No. A multi-system view still permits something like synchronic self-control: an agent can control her very strong desires. Adopting a multi-system model of the mind thus places limitations on our conceptions of instrumental rationality, without requiring that we abandon the notion altogether. (shrink)

Hohwy et al.’s (2008) model of binocular rivalry (BR) is taken as a classic illustration of predictive coding’s explanatory power. I revisit the account and show that it cannot explain the role of reward in BR. I then consider a more recent version of Bayesian model averaging, which recasts the role of reward in (BR) in terms of optimism bias. If we accept this account, however, then we must reconsider our conception of perception. On this latter view, I argue, organisms (...) engage in what amounts to policy-driven, motivated perception. (shrink)

Are slurring statements, when applied to members of the slurred group, true, false, or a little bit of both? Intuitions are mixed. And investigating more truth-value judgments is unlikely to cure the stalemate we find ourselves in. Truth-value judgments are just not up to the task. In their place, I propose we look to judgments of lying instead. This change in focus provides a new and better tool for understanding the complex semantics and pragmatics of slurs. As I argue, it (...) also suggests that slurring statements encode, conventionally implicate and presuppose the same information as statements with the slur's neutral counterpart. I then briefly apply this style of argument to the semantics and pragmatics of evaluative language more generally. (shrink)

I propose that the successes and contributions of reinforcement learning urge us to see the mind in a new light, namely, to recognise that the mind is fundamentally evaluative in nature.

This paper presents an empirical solution to the puzzle of weakness of will. Specifically, it presents a theory of action, grounded in contemporary cognitive neuroscientific accounts of decision making, that explains the phenomenon of weakness of will without resulting in a puzzle.

ArgumentSeveral recent works in sociology examine the manufacture of public identities through the notion of celebrity. This paper explores the imagery of Charles Darwin as a nineteenth-century scientific celebrity by comparing the public character deliberately manufactured by Darwin and his friends with images constructed by the public as represented here by caricatures in humorous magazines of the era. It is argued that Darwin’s outward persona drew on a subtle tension between public and private. The boundaries between public and private were (...) blurred by the ritual of Darwin “showing” himself in the flesh, either at home to visitors or, more rarely, on public occasions. The reputation for privacy and illness that he built up added materially to this public face. By contrast, caricatures tended to depict him as an ape. These apish representations played a significant role in associating Darwin, rather than any other thinker, with the notion of evolution, and in creating an alternative public persona over which he had no direct control. (shrink)

I describe a suite of reinforcement learning environments in which artificial agents learn to value and respond to moral content and contexts. I illustrate the core principles of the framework by characterizing one such environment, or “gridworld,” in which an agent learns to trade-off between monetary profit and fair dealing, as applied in a standard behavioral economic paradigm. I then highlight the core technical and philosophical advantages of the learning approach for modeling moral cognition, and for addressing the so-called value (...) alignment problem in AI. (shrink)

I argue that although in his earlier work descartes thought of the laws of motion as "eternal truths," he later came to think of them as truths whose necessity is of a different type.

Sixty-five undergraduates participating in a wide range of psychological research experiments were interviewed in depth about their research experiences and their views on the process of informed consent. Overall, 32% of research experiences were characterized positively and 41 % were characterized negatively. One major theme of the negative experiences was that experiments were perceived as too invasive, suggesting incomplete explication of negative aspects of research during the informed consent process. Informed consent experiences were viewed positively 80% of the time. However, (...) most of the participants had a limited view of the purpose of informed consent: Less than 20% viewed the process as a decision point. Results suggest a number of common pitfalls to standard informed consent practices that have not generally been recognized. Results are discussed in terms of both ethical and methodological implications. Suggestions for improving the informed consent process are also provided. (shrink)

An informed consent and voluntary assent in biomedical research with adolescents is contingent on a variety of factors, including adolescent and parent perceptions of research risk, benefit, and decision-making autonomy. Thirty-seven adolescents with asthma and their parents evaluated a high or low aversion form of a pediatric asthma research vignette and provided an enrollment decision; their perceptions of family influence over the participation decision; and evaluations of risk, aversion, benefit, and burden of study procedures. Adolescents and their parents agreed on (...) research participation decisions 74% of the time, yet both claimed ultimate responsibility for the participation decision. Both rated most study procedures as significantly more aversive than risky. Parents were more likely to rate aspects of the hypothetical study as beneficial and to provide higher risk ratings for procedures. Disagreements concerning research participation decisions and decision-making autonomy have implications for the exercise of voluntary assent in biomedical research. (shrink)

Each thinker, according to Heidegger, essentially thinks one thought. Plato thinks the idea. Descartes thinks the cogito . Spinoza thinks substance. Nietzsche thinks the will to power. If a thinker does not think a thought, then he or she is not a thinker. He or she may be a scholar or a professor, a producer or a consumer, a fan or a fake, but he or she would not be a thinker. Thus, if Heidegger is a thinker, he essentially thinks (...) one thought. What is Heidegger’s one thought? It is neither life nor death, neither me nor you. It is neither technology nor art. It is neither spirit nor language. Heidegger’s one thought is being—or more precisely, the question of the meaning of being. And what is being? Neither presence nor absence--but rather, an ambiguous uncertainty. (shrink)

Basic desert is central to the dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists over the four-case manipulation argument. I argue that there are two distinct ways of understanding the desert salient to moral responsibility; moral desert can be understood as a claim about fitting responses to an agent or as a claim about the merit of the agent. Failing to recognize this distinction has contributed to a stalemate between both sides. I suggest that recognizing these distinct approaches to moral desert will help (...) clarify a central source of disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists and assist both sides in resolving the current stalemate. (shrink)

The AGM success postulates for belief expansions and revisions have been widely criticized. This has resulted in the development of a number of non-prioritized belief change theories that violate these postulates. It is shown that we must also discard the monotony postulate for belief expansions if we abandon the success postulates. Non-prioritized belief change theories should instead fulfill a weaker postulate, which we call Conditional Monotony.

Sam Berstler has recently argued for a fairness-based moral difference between lying and misleading. According to Berstler, the liar, but not the misleader, unfairly free rides on the Lewisian conventions which ground public-language meaning. Although compelling, the pragmatic and metasemantic backdrop within which this moral reason is located allows for the generation of a vicious explanatory circle. Simply, this backdrop entails that no speaker has ever performed an assertion. As I argue, escaping the circle requires rejecting Berstler’s fairness-based reason against (...) lying. The problem is a general one: the wrong of lying cannot be founded on the goods of language. (shrink)

What is time? Neither the numbering of the motion of things nor their schema, but their way of being. In language, time shows itself as tense. But every verb has both tense and aspect. So what is aspect? Irreducible to tense, it is the way in which anything is at any time whatsoever. Thus the way things are, their being, is not merely temporal – for it is just as aspectual.

ABSTRACT With increased attention on the visual in the history of science, there is renewed interest in the role of portraiture and other forms of personal imagery in constructing scientific reputation and the circulation of scientific ideas. This essay indicates some directions in which researchers could push forward by studying the dissemination of pictures and portraits of Charles Darwin. Selected portraits are discussed, with particular attention paid to their circulation. The mode of production and original intent of these portraits is (...) briefly addressed, but the thrust of the argument is to highlight subsequent shifts in usage. While self‐fashioning is an important part of the story, it is useful also to dwell on the rise and diversification of printed media in conjunction with escalating interest in Darwin as a celebrity figure. Historicizing the variety of opportunities that people have had of “looking” at Darwin adds considerably to our understanding of scientific fame. (shrink)

The concept of struggle is essential for understanding the relationship between fate and freedom, past and present and future, individuality and community. But the words and grammar for thinking the struggle are lacking. Luckily, taking a hint from Heidegger, the language of “implication” suggests how to think struggle as justice – and thus, to speak to the question of the meaning of being, of beings such as ourselves and of our struggle to be.

This essay examines the experience of rewriting historical narratives from a world-system perspective, drawing on the author's attempt to construct an integrated image of the world economy in the thirteenth century. Searching for an intermediate epistemological path between unanchored postmodern hermeneutics and overconfident positivism, the author argues that three apparent deviations from the "ideals of positivist social science," which she ironically labels eccentricity, ideology, and idiosyncrasy, can yield significant "remakings" of world history. Eccentricity, namely, recognizing perspectives other than those that (...) conventionally view the world through the eyes of the West, can help historians to escape from ethnocentrism or Eurocentrism. Ideology, more conventionally called theory, is essential if historians are to select and integrate new material. And idiosyncrasy in the interests and backgrounds of historians can often be the source of the re-vision so essential for challenging earlier historical narratives. The author alludes to parallels with ethnographic research methods and cautions against substituting these three aids to research for rigorous attention to empirical sources and "the real world.". (shrink)

Tense is the clue to the discovery of the meaning of time. Speaking hints at thinking, and language suggests a way to conceive of philosophical concepts. Here, the universality of temporality is that out of which the grammar of tense and the concept of time first come. Temporality, however, is not simply present in tense or time. On the contrary, temporality’s way of being—like being’s—is implication: tense is implied by how the verbality of verbs can be spoken; time, by how (...) temporal beings come to presence—just as being is implied in Greek, and many other languages. But then, the habits of modern Western language and philosophy must be radically reformed in order to learn how to imply again, and to think and speak about time and being as implications. (shrink)

Our concept of politics – especially democracy – presupposes a principle of friendship, but our principle of friendship comes out of an understanding of the friend. However, from the Greeks to Derrida, such relations have been dominated by a philosophy of presence and/or absence, limiting our very idea of politics and friendship. A radical break with this tradition is only possible through an other way of speaking to, thinking about, acting toward, and being a friend, and the politics thereof. The (...) Aristotelian saying, “O friends, [there is] no friend,” provides a clue – for “being” is not there, not present in the Greek, nor absent therefrom, but just implied. Then the being of the friend, and of politics (and of being), is an implication. So, if we hope to be friends, and to be political, we must think and act and speak by implication: O friends no friend, and O democrats no democracy. (shrink)

This article turns to the relationship between style and gesture in the German-language pop novel. While unsuccessful gestures are often seen as a subversion of social conventions condensed in literary style, an author like Leif Randt consciously adjusts style and gesture to cultural expectations. Since he at the same time insulates his own writing from extra-literary appropriations of literature, style and gesture in his novels become prominent representatifs of aesthetic autonomy.

Casey, in Supernatural, alludes to one of the oldest and most resilient arguments against the existence of God, the problem of evil. This problem arises from an apparent conflict between the existence of evil and the attributes that Western theists attribute to God. Casey's challenge to the existence of God is called the logical problem of evil by philosophers. Casey's problem of evil focused on an apparent logical inconsistency between believing in a God that is all‐powerful, all‐knowing, and all‐good, while (...) at the same time believing that evil exists. The soul‐making defense doesn't appear to be enough to solve the problem for Dean. While it seems true that an all‐powerful, all‐good, all‐knowing God would have the power to create a universe with soul‐growth, containing significantly less evil and suffering than the universe of Supernatural, that's just not Dean's world. (shrink)

L’idéalisme transcendantal de type fichtéen et schellingien a été développé à partir d’un certain nombre d’apories concernant, par exemple, la « chose-en-soi », le statut du sujet entre sens interne et externe et l’intersubjectivité. Surtout la version schellingienne du transcendantalisme aboutit à une nouvelle conception de l’ontologie, « post-kan-tienne ». Mais elle est basée sur un déplacement de la problématique kantienne, entamée déjà par Fichte, qui méconnaît radicalement un aspect essentiel de la découverte kantienne, à savoir que l’entendement est fonctionnalité, (...) dans un sens analogue à l’acception promue par Leonhard Euler en mathématiques. (shrink)