Due to the ethical breaches of tobacco companies over a 50-year period, a U.S. Court ruled in United States v. Philip Morris USA, Inc. that major U.S. tobacco companies had misled consumers and the government about tobacco’s addictiveness, effects of environmental smoke, marketing targeted at adolescents, and deceptive practices related to harmfulness of smoking. We address the actions of the tobacco companies based on the consumer’s right to be informed and values for ethical corporate behavior, and we draw from psychological (...) theories and the smoking literature to develop our conceptual framework and test the effectiveness of the ensuing corrective advertising campaign mandated in the Court decision. We use a quota sample of 470 smokers and non-smoker participants in a longitudinal study to test the impact of the corrective advertising campaign on key antismoking beliefs from the campaign. Results reveal that the corrective ad campaign has not been successful in affecting smokers’ or non-smokers’ antismoking beliefs. However, differences are found between smokers’ and non-smokers’ beliefs about the adverse health effects of smoking, effects of secondhand smoke, and tobacco company deceptiveness, with these beliefs being stronger for non-smokers. Smokers’ weaker beliefs about the effects of secondhand smoke are viewed as particularly problematic, given the established health risks. We address the implications of the ethical breaches and the corrective advertising attempt to address the deception identified by the Court. (shrink)

This interview with Jeremy Waldron covers three topics. Firstly, we dealt with the methodology debate, that is, the discussion about how to proceed in analyzing the nature of law. Does the question ‘What is law?’ require a descriptive analysis of the concept of law or, rather, a normative exercise in political philosophy? Secondly, we spoke about the role of law in response to historic injustice, especially in relation to the restitution of property rights. On this topic Waldron vindicates the (...) ‘supersession-thesis’, the idea that, due to changed circumstances and the passage of time, historic injustices become superseded. The third section of the interview is devoted to Waldron’s perspective on the citation of foreign law by national judges. (shrink)

This article offers a survey of computational research on referring expressions generation (REG). It introduces the REG problem and describes early work in this area, discussing what basic assumptions lie behind it, and showing how its remit has widened in recent years. We discuss computational frameworks underlying REG, and demonstrate a recent trend that seeks to link up REG algorithms with well-established Knowledge Representation traditions. Considerable attention is given to recent efforts at evaluating REG algorithms and the lessons that they (...) allow us to learn. The article concludes with a discussion of the way forward in REG, focussing on references in larger and more realistic settings. (shrink)

Many psychological studies of categorization and reasoning use undergraduates to make claims about human conceptualization. Generalizability of findings to other populations is often assumed but rarely tested. Even when comparative studies are conducted, it may be challenging to interpret differences. As a partial remedy, in the present studies we adopt a 'triangulation strategy' to evaluate the ways expertise and culturally different belief systems can lead to different ways of conceptualizing the biological world. We use three groups (US bird experts, US (...) undergraduates, and ordinary Itza' Maya) and two sets of birds (North American and Central American). Categorization tasks show considerable similarity among the three groups' taxonomic sorts, but also systematic differences. Notably, US expert categorization is more similar to Itza' than to US novice categorization. The differences are magnified on inductive reasoning tasks where only undergraduates show patterns of judgment that are largely consistent with current models of category-based taxonomic inference. The Maya commonly employ causal and ecological reasoning rather than taxonomic reasoning. Experts use a mixture of strategies (including causal and ecological reasoning), only some of which current models explain. US and Itza' informants differed markedly when reasoning about passerines (songbirds), reflecting the somewhat different role that songbirds play in the two cultures. The results call into question the importance of similarity-based notions of typicality and central tendency in natural categorization and reasoning. These findings also show that relative expertise leads to a convergence of thought that transcends cultural boundaries and shared experiences. (shrink)

An enduring theme of Western philosophy is that we are all one another’s equals. Yet the principle of basic equality is woefully under-explored in modern moral and political philosophy. What does it mean to say we are all one another’s equals? Jeremy Waldron confronts this question fully and unflinchingly in a major new multifaceted account.

Koonin, in an article in this issue, claims that CRISPR–Cas systems are mechanisms for the inheritance of acquired adaptive characteristics, and that the operation of such systems comprises a “Lamarckian mode of evolution.” We argue that viewing the CRISPR–Cas mechanism as facilitating a form of “directed mutation” more accurately represents how the system behaves and the history of neoDarwinian thinking, and is to be preferred.

Existing accounts of the Rule of Law are inadequate and require fleshing out. The main value of the ideal of rule of law for liberal political theory lies in the notion of predictability, which is essential to individual autonomy. The author examines this connection and argues that conservative theories of rule of law claim too much. Liberal theory equates the rule of law with legality, which is only one of the elements necessary for a just social order.

Many contemporary proponents of hylomorphism endorse a version of hylomorphism according to which the form of a material object is a certain kind of complex relation or structure. Structural approaches to form, however, seem not to capture form’s traditional role as the guarantor of diachronic identity, since more “dynamically complex” material objects, such as living organisms, seem to undergo, and survive, various structural changes over the course of their existence. As a result, some contemporary hylomorphists have looked to alternative, non-structural (...) approaches to form. One of the leading non-structural approaches is the powers approach, according to which the form of a material object is a certain kind of power continuously activated in the object or in its material parts. In this paper, I begin by offering an overview and assessment of this powers approach to form. I argue that while the powers approach captures some crucial elements for understanding the nature of more dynamically complex material objects, when we press on the details of the view we find that it actually points to a related, but importantly distinct, third approach to understanding form, according to which the form of a material object is a certain kind of activity or process in which the material object or its parts are continuously engaged. I call this third approach “Hyloenergeism”. In the second half of the paper, I consider what such a view of material objects might look like and what its principal virtues might be. (shrink)

I discuss how modern cosmology illustrates under-determination of theoretical hypotheses by data, in ways that are different from most philosophical discussions. I emphasise cosmology's concern with what data could in principle be collected by a single observer ; and I give a broadly sceptical discussion of cosmology's appeal to the cosmological principle as a way of breaking the under-determination.I confine most of the discussion to the history of the observable universe from about one second after the Big Bang, as described (...) by the mainstream cosmological model: in effect, what cosmologists in the early 1970s dubbed the ‘standard model’, as elaborated since then. But in the closing Section 4, I broach some questions about times earlier than one second. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one-shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

There are all sorts of ways in which one can dirty one’s hands in politics. The classic problem is that of the political leader who finds he has to act immorally for the sake of the greater good. But some dirty-hands problems are more mundane. They arise out of the fact that one acts in politics alongside others, particularly in a democracy, and so one is not always in control of the values and principles that are being put into play. (...) This happens sometimes because of the need for compromise; or through procedures like majority decision. Some of these cases have an interesting historical dimension. They reflect the fact that politicians have to act against the background of decisions made by their predecessors. Laws routinely remain in force, for example, despite the demise of the political factions that enacted them: so a politician may have to keep faith with and faithfully administer a legal decision he condemns. I argue that this is best understood not as the balancing of disparate personal convictions, but of his having to act in the name of the whole society. The sense of “dirty hands” arises from the juxtaposition of the politician’s own convictions with the requirements of his particular role as speaking for an entity larger than himself. (shrink)

We have two aims. The main one is to expound the idea of renormalization in quantum field theory, with no technical prerequisites. Our motivation is that renormalization is undoubtedly one of the great ideas—and great successes--of twentieth-century physics. Also it has strongly influenced in diverse ways, how physicists conceive of physical theories. So it is of considerable philosophical interest. Second, we will briefly relate renormalization to Ernest Nagel's account of inter-theoretic relations, especially reduction. One theme will be a contrast between (...) two approaches to renormalization. The old approach, which prevailed from ca. 1945 to 1970, treated renormalizability as a necessary condition for being an acceptable quantum field theory. On this approach, it is a piece of great good fortune that high energy physicists can formulate renormalizable quantum field theories that are so empirically successful. But the new approach to renormalization explains why the phenomena we see, at the energies we can access in our particle accelerators, are described by a renormalizable quantum field theory. For whatever non-renormalizable interactions may occur at yet higher energies, they are insignificant at accessible energies. Thus the new approach explains why our best fundamental theories have a feature, viz. renormalizability, which the old approach treated as a selection principle for theories. That is worth saying since philosophers tend to think of scientific explanation as only explaining an individual event, or perhaps a single law, or at most deducing one theory as a special case of another. Here we see a framework in which there is a space of theories. And this framework is powerful enough to deduce that what seemed “manna from heaven” is to be expected: the good fortune is generic. We also maintain that universality, a concept stressed in renormalization theory, is essentially the familiar philosophical idea of multiple realizability; and that it causes no problems for reductions of a Nagelian kind. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to critically explore whether crowdsourced Big Data enables an inclusive humanitarian response at times of crisis. We argue that all data, including Big Data, are socially constructed artefacts that reflect the contexts and processes of their creation. To support our argument, we qualitatively analysed the process of ‘Big Data making’ that occurred by way of crowdsourcing through open data platforms, in the context of two specific humanitarian crises, namely the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and (...) the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. We show that the process of creating Big Data from local and global sources of knowledge entails the transformation of information as it moves from one distinct group of contributors to the next. The implication of this transformation is that locally based, affected people and often the original ‘crowd’ are excluded from the information flow, and from the interpretation process of crowdsourced crisis knowledge, as used by formal responding organizations, and are marginalized in their ability to benefit from Big Data in support of their own means. Our paper contributes a critical perspective to the debate on participatory Big Data, by explaining the process of in and exclusion during data making, towards more responsive humanitarian relief. (shrink)

Where does Neo-Confucianismâe"a movement that from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries profoundly influenced the way people understood the world and responded to itâe"fit into our story of Chinaâe(tm)s history? This interpretive, at times polemical, inquiry into the Neo-Confucian engagement with the literati as the social and political elite, local society, and the imperial state during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties is also a reflection on the role of the middle period in Chinaâe(tm)s history. The book argues that as (...) Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support. The later imperial order, in which the state accepted local elite leadership as necessary to its own existence, survived even after Neo-Confucianism lost its hold on the center of intellectual culture in the seventeenth century but continued as the foundation of local education. It is the contention of this book that Neo-Confucianism made that order possible. (shrink)

We draw from ego depletion and leader–member exchange theories to provide nuanced insight into why abusive supervision is indirectly associated with supervisor-directed destructive voice. A multi-wave, multi-source field study demonstrates evidence that abusive supervision has a positive conditional indirect effect on supervisor-directed destructive voice through subordinates’ relational ego depletion with their supervisors that is stronger for higher LMX differentiation contexts than lower LMX differentiation contexts. We make novel theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions by providing a parsimonious explanation for why relational (...) aspects of supervisory treatment drain subordinates’ capacities for controlling their volitional actions during interactions with their supervisors and how this relationship impacts subordinates’ supervisor-directed destructive voice. Overall, our study extends the application of ego depletion and LMX theories to the examination of abusive supervision and destructive voice in order to meaningfully inform researchers’ attempts to build cohesive streams of research in these areas and practitioners’ attempts to promote ethical workplace environments. (shrink)

A fundamental part of the process of referring to an entity is to categorise it (for instance, as the woman). Where multiple categorisations exist, this implicitly involves the adoption of a conceptual perspective. A challenge for the automatic Generation of Referring Expressions is to identify a set of referents coherently, adopting the same conceptual perspective. We describe and evaluate an algorithm to achieve this. The design of the algorithm is motivated by the results of psycholinguistic experiments.

On a traditional view, the primary role of a mathematical proof is to warrant the truth of the resulting theorem. This view fails to explain why it is very often the case that a new proof of a theorem is deemed important. Three case studies from elementary arithmetic show, informally, that there are many criteria by which ordinary proofs are valued. I argue that at least some of these criteria depend on the methods of inference the proofs employ, and that (...) standard models of formal deduction are not well-equipped to support such evaluations. I discuss a model of proof that is used in the automated deduction community, and show that this model does better in that respect. (shrink)

This essay considers the special character of mathematical reasoning, and draws on observations from interactive theorem proving and the history of mathematics to clarify the nature of formal and informal mathematical language. It proposes that we view mathematics as a system of conventions and norms that is designed to help us make sense of the world and reason efficiently. Like any designed system, it can perform well or poorly, and the philosophy of mathematics has a role to play in helping (...) us understand the general principles by which it serves its purposes well. (shrink)

This informal position paper brings together some recent developments in formal semantics and pragmatics to argue that the discipline of Game Theory is well placed to become the theoretical backbone of Natural Language Generation. To demonstrate some of the strengths and weaknesses of the Game-Theoretical approach, we focus on the utility of vague expressions. More specifically, we ask what light Game Theory can shed on the question when an NLG system should generate vague language.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies is the third entry of the Bloomsbury Research Handbook in Asian Philosophy series. Editor Sor-hoon Tan begins the Handbook with a historical journey starting from Hegel's insistence that "Chinese philosophy" is not really philosophy; through Hu Shih's and Fung Yulan's groundbreaking attempts in the early twentieth century to revise traditional Chinese thought using Western methods; and up to more current discussions on the question of whether there is such a thing as "Chinese philosophy." (...) Methodology, Tan insists, lies at the center of this debate, and being committed to the employment of sound methods can be of existential importance for the field of... (shrink)

Fogelin’s Wittgensteinian view of deep disagreement as allowing no rational resolution has been criticized from both argumentation theoretic and epistemological perspectives. These criticisms typically do not recognize how his point applies to the very argumentative resources on which they rely. Additionally, more extremely than Fogelin himself argues, the conditions of deep disagreement make each position literally unintelligible to the other, again disallowing rational resolution. In turn, however, this failure of sense is so extreme that it partly cancels its own meaning (...) as a failure of sense. Consequently, it paradoxically opens new possibilities for sense and therefore rationally unexpected resolutions. (shrink)

In this article I discuss what I am calling “ally aesthetics.” I suggest a set of necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, considerations for the creation of successful instances of ally art. Focusing on three case studies, I propose some key characteristics of ally aesthetics, such as its contextual/temporal nature and how that relates to success and the importance of understanding the place of the ally aesthetic within the larger movements they are allying with.

Is the exemplar of modern ethical theory estranged from their intimates because the motive of duty dominates their motivational psychology? While this challenge against modern ethical theory is familiar, I argue that with respect to a certain strand of Kantian ethical theory, it does not so much as make sense. I explain the content and functional role of the motive of duty in the psychology of the moral exemplar, stressing in particular how that motive shapes and informs the content of (...) others, including those characteristic of intimacy. I argue that to the extent that a subject does not integrate their motive of duty with their other motives, their moral and intimate relationships are compromised, and on the same grounds, because intimate relationships are interpersonal relationships and the motive of duty just is the motive to respect another person as a separate person. (shrink)

For all the talk there has been lately about privilege, few have commented on the moral obligations that are associated with having privilege. Those who have commented haven't gone much beyond the idea that the privileged should be conscious of their privilege, should listen to those who don't have it. Here we want to go further, and build an account of the moral obligations of those with a particular kind of privilege: race privilege. In this paper we articulate an understanding (...) of race privilege, say how a person can know when she has it, and argue that a race-privileged person has obligations to offset her privilege. We make concrete suggestions for how she can, at least approximately, do this. We use particular racial group disparities in the United States as our running example throughout the paper, although our conclusions generalize. (shrink)

This paper is about the metaphysical debate whether objects persist over time by the selfsame object existing at different times (nowadays called “endurance” by metaphysicians), or by different temporal parts, or stages, existing at different times (called “perdurance”). I aim to illuminate the debate by using some elementary kinematics and real analysis: resources which metaphysicians have, surprisingly, not availed themselves of. There are two main results, which are of interest to both endurantists and perdurantists. (1) I describe a precise formal (...) equivalence between the way that the two metaphysical positions represent the motion of the objects of classical mechanics (both point-particles and continua). (2) I make precise, and prove a result about, the idea that the persistence of objects moving in a void is to be analysed in terms of tracking the continuous curves in spacetime that connect points occupied by matter. The result is entirely elementary: it is a corollary of the Heine–Borel theorem. (shrink)

Field Life examines the practice of science in the field in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the American West between the 1860s and the 1910s, when the railroad was the dominant form of long-distance transportation. Grounded in approaches from environmental history and the history of technology, it emphasizes the material basis of scientific fieldwork, joining together the human labor that produced knowledge with the natural world in which those practices were embedded. Four distinct modes of field practice, which (...) were shared by different field science disciplines, proliferated during this period—surveys, lay networks, quarries, and stations—and this book explores the dynamics that underpinned each of them. Using two diverse case studies to animate each mode of practice, as well as the making of the field as a place for science, Field Life combines textured analysis of specific examples of field science on the ground with wider discussion of the commonalities in the practices of a diverse array of field sciences, including the earth and physical sciences, the life and agricultural sciences, and the human sciences. By situating science in its regional environmental context, Field Life analyzes the intersection between the cosmopolitan knowledge of science and the experiential knowledge of people living in the field. Examples of field science in the Plains and Rockies range widely: geological surveys and weather observing networks, quarries to uncover dinosaur fossils and archaeological remains, and branch agricultural experiment stations and mountain biological field stations. (shrink)

The theories of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker arise from an existential and psychological analysis of the death terror/anxiety deep in the unconscious of every human. Becker details how this anxiety governs the ideologies and behaviors of our species—something now confirmed by thousands of experiments performed by psychologists engaged in contemporary terror management theory (TMT). Humans manage their anxiety through what Becker terms “hero systems”—concepts, beliefs, and myths we create to give us a sense of significance and meaning during, and even (...) beyond our mortal lives. Today, many dominant economic, technological, and religious hero systems seek to confirm our significance by denying that we are—like all other species—animals who must exist in a decaying, mortal body. Becker shows how this attempt to deny our “creatureliness” (basic biological nature) causes humans to stand against the natural world we are embedded in, leading to an assault on the planet and nonhuman animals. As a result, Becker believed pacifism was the only hero system capable of keeping humankind from destroying itself and the earth. Pacifism is the precursor to the more encompassing ethical concept of “reverence for life,” advocated by Dr. Albert Schweitzer. By respecting the will-to-live in all sentient beings, reverence for life transcends concern for humans alone and extends moral and physical safeguards to life as such. Confronting the fact that humans are increasingly alienated from their commodified world and their own being, reverence for life stands as a vital solution to many of our modern problems. And following contemporary TMT research, reverencing life can also expand one’s self-esteem, which research shows lowers death anxiety, reduces aggression, and offers authentic meaning to life itself. (shrink)

We describe a formalization of asymptotic O notation using the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant.

The purpose of this paper is to think about the various methods of attempting to make money in the capital markets (“investing”). I suggest that though running a betting system on a Roulette wheel is silly, running a betting system on the capital markets may be a good idea.

This paper examines the conceptual and terminological overlap between theories and models of practical deliberation developed within the fields of Practical Reasoning (PR) and Practical Argumentation (PA). It carefully delineates the volitional, epistemic, normative, and social commitments invoked and explicates various rationales for attributing the label ‘practical’ to instances of reasoning and argumentation. Based on these analyses, the paper develops a new approach to practical deliberation called the Stakeholder Commitment Approach (SCA). By distinguishing between ‘problem holder’ and ‘problem solver’, and (...) specifying the distributions of attributable commitments among the stakeholders, the SCA introduces an extension and refinement of the grounds for assigning the label ‘practical’ that brings PR and PA closer together. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that free will requires alternative possibilities. Other philosophers deny this. There are plenty of philosophical arguments on both sides of this debate, but here I want to highlight various theological pressures that might push Christians into rejecting the principle of alternative possibilities. In this paper, I explore six cases that might push Christians in that direction: the case of divine foreknowledge, the case of prophecy, the case of the blessed in heaven, the case of Christ's human freedom, (...) the case of Mary's fiat in light of her immaculate conception, and the case of prayers for the past. As I will argue, in each of these cases, given certain other standard theological commitments, it seems that Christians are pushed to admit that the agent in question does indeed act freely but also that he or she did not possess alternative possibilities at the moment of decision. (shrink)

This article proposes the use of temporal logic for an analysis of instrumentality inspired by the work of G.H. von Wright. The first part of the article contains the philosophical foundations. We discuss von Wright’s general theory of agency and his account of instrumentality. Moreover, we propose several refinements to this framework via rigorous definitions of the core notions involved. In the second part, we develop a logical system called Temporal Logic of Action and Expectations (TLAE). The logic is inspired (...) by a fragment of propositional dynamic logic based on indeterministic time. The system is proven to be weakly complete relative to its given semantics. We then employ TLAE to formalise and analyse the instrumentality relations defined in the first part of the paper. Last, we point out philosophical implications and possible extensions of our work. (shrink)

This paper asks why information should ever be expressed vaguely, re-assessing some previously proposed answers to this question and suggesting some new ones. Particular attention is paid to the benefits that vague expressions can have in situations where agreement over the meaning of an expression cannot be taken for granted. A distinction between two different versions of the above-mentioned question is advocated. The first asks why human languages contain vague expressions, the second question asks when and why a speaker should (...) choose a vague expression when communicating with a hearer. While the former question is purely theoretical, the latter has practical implications for the computational generation of utterances in Natural Language Generation (NLG). (shrink)

In a previous paper, we have proposed assigning as the value of a physical quantity in quantum theory, a certain kind of set (a sieve) of quantities that are functions of the given quantity. The motivation was in part physical---such a valuation illuminates the Kochen-Specker theorem; and in part mathematical---the valuation arises naturally in the topos theory of presheaves. This paper discusses the conceptual aspects of this proposal. We also undertake two other tasks. First, we explain how the proposed valuations (...) could arise much more generally than just in quantum physics; in particular, they arise as naturally in classical physics. Second, we give another motivation for such valuations (that applies equally to classical and quantum physics). This arises from applying to propositions about the values of physical quantities some general axioms governing partial truth for any kind of proposition. (shrink)

Little research has considered the potential influence of distant, external pressures on the implementation of firms’ ‘green’ innovations, nor how internal firm resources might moderate this relationship. By combining institutional and resource-based theories and examining 649 firms in Australia, I find that export intensity is positively associated with green innovations. Further, as women in leadership roles increase in firms, the relationship strengthens between export intensity and green innovations. The results also suggest that greater levels of absorptive capacity among firms strengthen (...) the relationship between export intensity and green innovations. Contributions of the findings are discussed along with limitations and future research opportunities. (shrink)