Most healthcare providers work from ethical principles based on a Western model of practice that may not adhere to the cultural values intrinsic to Indigenous peoples. Breaking bad news is an important topic of ethical concern in health research. While much has been documented on BBN globally, the ethical implications of receiving bad news, from an Indigenous patient perspective in particular, is an area that requires further inquiry. This article discusses the experiences of Māori lung cancer patients and their families, (...) in order to investigate the ethical implications of receiving bad news. Data collection occurred through 23 semistructured interviews and nine focus groups with Māori lung cancer patients and their families in four districts in the Midland Region of New Zealand: Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Lakes and Tairāwhiti. The findings of this study were categorised into two key themes: communication and context. Avenues for best practice include understanding the centrality of the HCP–patient relationship and family ties in the healthcare journey, and providing patients with the full range of viable treatment options including hope, clear advice and guidance when the situation calls for it. Overall, the findings of this study hold implications for providing culturally safe and humanistic cancer care when BBN to Māori and Indigenous patients. (shrink)

Let us imagine that a man loses his keys one night and starts looking for them under the light of a street lamp. When people join him to help him search, they ask where it was that he thinks he might have let them fall; with a frustrated look on his face, he then points into the dark distance and says, by way of explanation, “I am looking under the lamppost because this is where the light is!” This story, introduced (...) by Janice Ross, provides us with a metaphorical description of an ongoing situation in arts education advocacy1: Certainly, I can only look for the arts in education where there is something about them that can be seen. Yet there may be aspects of them concealed beyond the reach of the vision.. (shrink)

This work completes Ross 's trilogy examining the inexhaustible complexity of the world and our relation to our surroundings.

Key ideas discussed in this guide include: art and aesthetics fun and free time nature and reason things, thoughts and being right This Routledge Critical ...

Legal epistemology has been an area of great philosophical growth since the turn of the century. But recently, a number of philosophers have argued the entire project is misguided, claiming that it relies on an illicit transposition of the norms of individual epistemology to the legal arena. This paper uses these objections as a foil to consider the foundations of legal epistemology, particularly as it applies to the criminal law. The aim is to clarify the fundamental commitments of legal epistemology (...) and suggest a way to vindicate it. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of explanatory constraints and their role in scientific explanation. This analysis clarifies main characteristics of explanatory constraints, ways in which they differ from “standard” explanatory factors, and the unique roles they play in scientific explanation. While current philosophical work appreciates two main types of explanatory constraints, this paper suggests a new taxonomy: law-based constraints, mathematical constraints, and causal constraints. This classification helps capture unique features of constraint types, the different roles they play in explanation, and (...) it includes causal constraints, which are often overlooked in this literature. (shrink)

Given that conspiracies exist, can we be justified in dismissing conspiracy theories without concerning ourselves with specific details? I answer this question by focusing on contrarian conspiracy theories, theories about conspiracies that conflict with testimony from reliable sources of information. For example, theories that say the CIA masterminded the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 9/11 was an inside job, or the Freemasons are secretly running the world are contrarian conspiracy theories. When someone argues for a contrarian conspiracy theory, their options (...) are to appeal to eyewitness testimony, incriminating documents, photographs, audio recordings, video recordings, allegedly scientific evidence, anomalies, or considerations of cui bono (who benefits). Most laypeople don’t know how to adequately respond to arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories, but this doesn’t mean that it’s dogmatic to reject them. I argue that many laypeople are defeasibly justified in rejecting a variety of contrarian conspiracy theories based on testimony and this justification is rarely defeated by arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories even if we don’t know how to respond to these arguments. (shrink)

Critics of mainstream economics typically rest important weight on the differences between people and the 'agents' that populate economic theory and economic models. Hollis and Nell (1975) is both representative of and ancestral to many more recent variations on the theme. Lately, the upgraded status of behavioral economics (BE) within the discipline's mainstream has encouraged a number of writers to use revolutionary rhetoric in promotion of a 'paradigm shift' that includes the rejection of 'rational economic man' (Ormerod 1994, Heilbroner and (...) Milburg 1995, Fullbrook 2003). The current leading developers of BE are generally more circumspect, claiming that their approach complements standard theory rather than promising to supplant it (Camerer and Loewenstein 2004, Angner and Loewenstein this volume). However, they generally join the more florid critics in supposing that microeconomics is bound to improve its empirical relevance to the extent that it substitutes the study of people for that of abstract economic agents. Another body of thought that promotes this view stems from Sen's (1977) attack on standard economic agents as 'rational fools', amplified in Davis's (2003) argument that since economic agents lack some essential properties of human individuals, economic theory requires fundamental reform if it is to make progress in explaining human behavior. (shrink)

Currently, the most popular views about how to update de se or self-locating beliefs entail the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem.2 Another widely held view is that an agent‘s credences should be countably additive.3 In what follows, I will argue that there is a deep tension between these two positions. For the assumptions that underlie the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem entail a more general principle, which I call the Generalized Thirder Principle, and there are situations (...) in which the latter principle and the principle of Countable Additivity cannot be jointly satisfied. The most plausible response to this tension, I argue, is to accept both of these principles, and to maintain that when an agent cannot satisfy them both, she is faced with a rational dilemma. (shrink)

What is new here is the detailed discussion of several important results in the classical foundations of mathematics and of the relation of logic to mathematics. As regards logical questions, the central thesis of Wittgenstein's later philosophy is well known, both from the earlier posthumous volume and from the writings of his many disciples. In the Investigations the thesis is applied to the "logic of our expressions" in everyday contexts; here he discusses in the same spirit the more specialized language (...) used in talking about the foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

The liberal state and the common tradition.--Fascism, communism and traditionalist reaction.--Liberty and authority.--Authority and tyranny.

The aim of this report is to consider feasible conditions under which South Africa!!" processed (e.g., canned and other packaged) fruit industry would be internationally competitive and a profitable site of investment, and therefore able to resume a pattern of growth from which it departed in the early part of the present decade. This is in service of the wider aim of identifying, in a subsequent phase of the project, appropriate industrial policy measures which Government might put in place to (...) assist the industry, in accordance with sound principles of national welfare optimization and public finance. (shrink)

The most important philosopher of science since Francis Bacon, Sir Karl Popper finally solved the puzzle of scientific method, which in practice had never seemed to conform to the principles or logic described by Bacon -- see The Great Devonian Controversy, by Martin J. S. Rudwick, for a case study of Baconian rhetoric and expectations being contradicted by actual practice and results. Instead of scientific knowledge being discovered and verified by way of inductive generalizations, leaping from perceptual data into blank (...) minds, in terms that go back to. (shrink)

The most powerful lesson learned from the 2013-2016 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was that we do not learn our lessons. A common sentiment at the time was that Ebola served as a “wake-up call”—an alarm which signalled that an outbreak of that magnitude should never have occurred and that we are ill-prepared globally to prevent and respond to them when they do. Pledges were made that we must learn from the outbreak before we were faced with another. Nearly (...) five years later the world is in the grips of a pandemic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 that causes coronavirus disease 2019. It is therefore of no surprise that we are now yet again hearing that the COVID-19 pandemic serves as the “wake-up call” we need and that there are many lessons to be learned to better prepare us for future outbreaks. Will anything be different this time around? We argue that nothing will fundamentally change unless we truly understand and appreciate the nature of the lessons we should learn from these outbreaks. Our past failures must be understood as moral failures that offer moral lessons. Unless we appreciate that we have a defect in our collective moral attitude toward remediating the conditions that precipitate the emergence of outbreaks, we will never truly learn. (shrink)

Addiction may or may not be a highly prevalent condition, but the concept of addiction is undeniably ubiquitous. From the people who cheerfully and publicly announce their addiction to coffee, or chocolate, or shopping, to those who ruefully and perhaps only in very special settings admit their addiction to alcohol or drugs, ‘‘addiction” is an oft-invoked explanatory frame for the presentation and characterization of individual behavior. Lately, it has even been applied to the behavior of super-personal entities, as in America’s (...) ‘‘addiction” to oil. Although the ubiquity of the concept is surely a sign of its usefulness, it also gives one pause; can a term of such broad application really have precise meaning (compare the word ‘‘thing”)? And if not—if there is nothing that all the ‘‘addicted” entities above have in common—then why is the concept so apparently useful, and what is it useful for? Such questions may seem tailor made for Ivory Tower semantic analysis, but in fact the matter is much more urgent than that. For we live in a world where involuntary commitments and other coercive measures are sometimes considered justified in the course of dealing with addicted persons. Why is this so? What could be wrong with addicted persons that would justify such treatment? And why is the word extended to apply to persons for whom such treatment would presumably not be justified? These are some of the several questions asked by the authors of Midbrain Mutiny, and they have not just scientific, but also political and philosophical motivations for wanting to answer them. So what is an addict? One possible definition—one that would seem to accord with the widespread use of the term—is an agent with abnormal preferences, in the sense that the addict is willing to pay far more, and to pay for far higher quantities of a good than is the average consumer. Here we should think not just of the novelist maniacally devoted to the twin pleasures of writing and alcohol, but also of the late Steve Irwin ‘‘addicted” to contact with dangerous animals, or of the infinitely more prosaic CEO who devotes all of her time to work.. (shrink)

The question is about contextual adaptation of meaning, a matter of philosophy of language, occasioned here by a disagreement among philosophers of religion about whether words, like “knows,” “wills,” “loves,” “commands,” “does,” used for common attributes of humans and the divine, and even “exists” as applied to both, mean the same or acquire divergences of meaning from the discourse contexts. I call the first group “reformers” and the other “analogists.” Analogists think the reformers are anthropomorphic, contributing to popular naive imaginings (...) about God as “a person like us,” while the reformers think the analogists are grafting Hellenic ideas onto biblical faith. That is not a new dispute, of course. But there is a separable linguistic facet of it, examined here, that has wider applications to philosophy in general. (shrink)

Explores how we might think and live in the enchantment of the secular, modern world.

In your simulation you will devise measures to try to relieve the severity of the current global recession and speed the re-emergence of global growth. Each of you will be assigned the identity of an actual person with a specific institutional role. You will be required to undertake web-based research on that person, that person’s institution, and the utility function the person would be expected to behave in accordance with, given their role.

For the book that forms the basis for your debate, you’ve either been assigned to defend the thesis of the lead article or its antithesis. The thesis and antithesis are one another’s logical opposites – their contradictions. Consult the course webpage area to read the precise proposition you’re responsible for defending.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.