Inter-limb asymmetries are associated with a higher potential risk for non-contact injuries. Differences in function or performance between the limbs might lead to imbalances and promote instability, increasing the potential risk for injuries. Consequently, an investigation of inter-limb asymmetries should be included in injury risk assessment. Furthermore, since non-contact injuries mainly occur under loaded conditions, an investigation of load-induced changes of inter-limb asymmetries can provide additional information on the athlete’s potential injury risk. Therefore, the current study aimed to investigate the (...) influence of physical load on inter-limb asymmetries in dynamic postural control, which is essential in situations with a high risk for non-contact injuries such as landing, cutting, or stopping. In total, dynamic postural control of 128 active and healthy subjects was examined. Dynamic postural control was tested with the Y-Balance Test before and after a loading protocol on a bicycle ergometer or a treadmill. The results showed no significant increase of the inter-limb asymmetries in anterior direction [F = 4.44, p = 0.04, η2p = 0.03]. Moreover, there is high variation between the subjects regarding the magnitude and the direction of the asymmetries and the changes due to load. Therefore, a more individual analysis considering the magnitude and the direction of the asymmetries is required. Thereby, considering different modifying factors, e.g., sex, injury history, and baseline level of asymmetries, can be helpful. Moreover, an analysis of the changes during load might provide further insights, reveal possible differences, and help detect the reasons and mechanisms underlying inter-limb asymmetries and asymmetrical loading. (shrink)

The metaphysical doctrine of emergence continues to exert a powerful pull on philosophers and metaphysically inclined scientists. This paper focuses on a recent account of emergence advanced by Jessica Wilson in Metaphysical Emergence, but the discussion has the broader aim of making explicit some of the underlying themes that inspire thoughts of emergence generally. These prove to be, not merely optional, but largely lacking in merit.

According to J=K, only beliefs that qualify as knowledge are epistemically justified. Traditionalists about justification have objected to this view that it predicts that radically deceived subjects do not have justified beliefs, which they take to be counter-intuitive. In response, proponents of J=K have argued that traditionalists mistake being justified with being excused in the relevant cases. To make this response work, Timothy Williamson has offered a dispositional account of excuse which has recently been challenged by Jessica Brown. She (...) has presented cases in which Williamson’s account excuses subjects believing things in an epistemically reckless fashion. To steer clear of Brown’s counterexamples, I argue for a modification of Williamson’s account that employs a more fine-grained notion of the dispositions involved. (shrink)

Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has its (...) advocates, most theorists have sought a middle way that accommodates both the common-sense view of mind and the metaphysical conviction about the physical world. This volume presents a collection of new, specially written essays by a diverse group of philosophers, each of whom is widely known for defending a particular conception of minds and their place in nature. Contributors include Robert Audi, Lynne Rudder Baker, Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Fred Dretske, Ted Honderich, Jennifer Hornsby, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ruth Garrett Millikan, H. W. Noonan, Philip Pettit, Ernest Sosa, and Robert Van Gulick. (shrink)

Emanuel Viebahn accounts for the distinction between lying and misleading in terms of what the speaker commits to, rather than in terms of what the speaker says, as on traditional accounts. Although this alternative type of account is well motivated, I argue that Viebahn does not adequately explain the commitment involved in lying. He explains the commitment in lying in terms of a responsibility to justify one's knowledge of a proposition one has communicated, which is in turn elaborated in terms (...) of being able to consistently dismiss a challenge to justify that knowledge. But whether one can consistently dismiss such a challenge, as Viebahn defines this, depends on whether one is responsible for justifying one's knowledge. Without further specification of the nature of this justificatory responsibility, it is difficult to assess whether it is one that liars have but misleaders lack. (shrink)

In recent work on truth and truthmaking, D. M. Armstrong has defended a version of 'truthmaker necessitarianism', the doctrine that truths necessitate truthmakers. Truthmaker necessitarianism, he contends, requires the postulation of 'totality facts', which serve as ingredients of truthmakers for general truths and negative truths, and propositions, which function as the fundamental truth bearers. I argue that neither totality facts nor propositions need figure in an account of truthmaking, and suggest that both are artifacts stemming, albeit in different ways, from (...) an ontologically shady 'linguisticizing' tendency to conflate features of descriptions and features of what is described. (shrink)

Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such research and the relationship of pervasive data research to corporate datafication and surveillance. We suggest a way forward by (...) drawing from the history of a different methodological approach in which researchers have struggled with trustworthy practice: ethnography. To grapple with the colonial legacy of their methods, ethnographers have developed analytic lenses and researcher practices that foreground relations of awareness and power. These lenses are inspiring but also challenging for pervasive data research, given the flattening of contexts inherent in digital data collection. We propose ways that pervasive data researchers can incorporate reflection on awareness and power within their research to support the development of trustworthy data science. (shrink)

Three matchsticks could be arranged on a table so as to form a triangle. Were you to place a lump of sugar into a cup of hot tea it would dissolve. You might never have been born. Such assertions express modal judgements and, as we suppose, truths about the universe. But if modal judgements can be true, what features of the universe make them true? Thanks largely to the efforts of David Lewis, philosophers nowadays find it natural to appeal to (...) alternative worlds to explicate modality. Something is possible if it occurs in at least one alternative world. A subjunctive conditional is true if, in the ‘nearest’ worlds in which its antecedent is true, its consequent is true. This paper includes a discussion of Lewis's ‘Humean’ ontology, the role alternative worlds play in Lewis's account of modality, and an Aristotelian alternative. (shrink)

Under resource dependence theory, firms should benefit from diverse boards of directors. Ethical arguments also highlight that boards should be as diverse as the stakeholders and communities that they serve. In an attempt to increase diversity and women’s presence on boards of directors, legislative efforts have enacted gender quotas. We examine how such efforts are perceived by U.S. market participants. We expect that when a firm operating under a quota law meets only the minimum requirement, investors will view the female (...) directors through the lens of token status theory and invest fewer resources in that firm than they will in a firm that exceeds the quota minimum or has the same composition but is not under a quota law. Through an experiment with 207 MTurk participants, we manipulated whether a firm was or was not under a quota law and whether the number of female board members was just at or exceeded the law’s minimum compliance. We find evidence that under a quota system, U.S. market participants tend to view female directors as tokens when the firm is just at the quota minimum, and these perceptions both affect their view of the firm’s prospects and negatively influence investment decisions. Importantly, however, we find that these negative effects can be offset and that resource dependence theory holds if the firm _exceeds_ the quota, signaling that the hiring of female directors is not simply compliance-dependent and subsequently leading U.S. market participants to invest more resources in the firm. (shrink)

Many if not all evidential languages have a mirative evidential: an indirect evidential that can, in some contexts, mark mirativity (the expression of speaker surprise) instead of indirect evidence. We address several questions posed by this systematic polysemy: What is the affinity between indirect evidence and speaker surprise? What conditions the two interpretations? And how do mirative evidentials relate to other mirative markers? We propose a unified analysis of mirative evidentials where indirect evidentiality and mirativity involve a common epistemic component. (...) A mirative interpretation requires a close temporal proximity between the speech event and the event of the speaker's learning the at-issue content. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that selection and drift might be distinct. This contradicts recent arguments by Brandon (forthcoming) and Matthen and Ariew (2002) that such a distinction “violates sound probabilistic thinking” (Matthen and Ariew 2002, 62). While their arguments might be valid under certain assumptions, they overlook a possible way to make sense of the distinction. Whether this distinction makes sense, I argue, depends on the source of probabilities in natural selection. In particular, if the probabilities used in (...) defining fitness values are at least partly a result of abstracting from or ignoring certain features of the environment, then selection and drift might in fact be causally distinct. (shrink)

Lies come in different sizes. There are little white lies, slight stretches, exaggerations, fibs, and whoppers. Such terms can reflect different aspects of lies, but one of these is how far a lie is from what the liar really thinks. This paper proposes that this dimension of lie-size reflects a scalar aspect of sincerity. Drawing inspiration from the study of truthlikeness, the paper elucidates this aspect of sincerity, which I call “truthful-likeness”. Truthful-likeness reflects how sincere a reply to a question (...) is, based on how close the speaker takes the reply to be to their best available one. A related measure, expected subjective truth factor, reflects how sincere a constative act that is not a reply to a question is, based on how close to being true the speaker thinks it is. (shrink)

This book gives voice to a variety of college and university workers regarding the issue of respect on campus. Authors consider issues of respect from a variety of unique perspectives to determine how they might better assess their own roles in contributing to a more respectful future.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the shift from citizen journalist to social media user by examining how ethics are addressed on social media sites compared to citizen journalism sites. Design/methodology/approach This paper applies the framework of a 2012 study of ethics on citizen journalism sites to social media sites’ guiding documents to compare how they discuss ethics and what they ask of the users, offering suggestions for how social media sites might imbue users (...) with a sense of their responsibilities and obligations. Findings The analysis finds that ethics are largely ignored on social media sites, written in legalistic language and framed in negative terms, rather than in terms of responsibilities or obligations. Originality/value When citizen journalism was subsumed by social media, much of the language – lacking as it may have been – around users’ responsibilities to each other was lost. This paper suggests social media sites should seek to raise rather than lower the barriers to entry, and imbue users with a sense of the responsibility they accept when sharing information online. (shrink)

Tables exist. You can buy tables in the local furniture mart or on the Internet; you can give your sister a table as a present; you can use a table as a weapon to fend off a prowler. The philosophical question, if there is one, is not whether tables exist but what makes it the case that tables exist.

The topic of this paper is the question of in virtue of what first-person thoughts are about what they are about. I focus on a dilemma arising from this question. On the one hand, approaches to answering this question that promise to be satisfying seem doomed to be inconsistent with the seeming truism that first-person thought is always about the thinker of the thought. But on the other hand, ensuring consistency with that truism seems doomed to make any answer to (...) the question unsatisfying. Contrary to a careful and enticing recent effort to both sharpen and escape this dilemma by Daniel Morgan, I will argue that the dilemma remains pressing both for broadly epistemic and broadly causal-acquaintance-based accounts of the aboutness of first-person thought. (shrink)

Presents profiles of such well-known authors and celebrities as Susan Sontag, Beverly Sills, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Joseph Brodsky.

Dispositions ground the of‐ness and about‐ness of thought. What a thought is about can depend on the world, but a thought's trajectory is internally fixed. ‘Swampman’ is exhibited as a counter‐example to radically externalist accounts of intentionality and Kripke's Wittgenstein's attack on dispositions as bases for rules is defused.

Universals provide an explanation of similarity: similar objects share properties. Imperfect similarity among complex properties is explained by ‘partial identity’ of their constituents. What if simple properties could be imperfectly similar? This manifest possibility suggests that even proponents of universals require brute similarities, and a principal advantage of universals over modes evaporates.

Realists take truth seriously, but what does realism require? Misguided commitment to a certain principle,, has led philosophers down the garden path. According to predicates applying truly to objects do so by virtue of naming properties possessed by those objects and by every object to which they would apply. I provide reasons to reject and thus to forego the hierarchical worldview apparently implies.

Properties are powers, but not pure powers. A world comprising objects, properties of which are exclusively dispositional, like a purely relational world, is indistinguishable from an empty world. If there are such worlds, they are bad models for ours. Powers and qualities go hand in hand.

Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument makes salient the difficulties facing attempts to reconcile determinism and agency. Others go further. Derk Pereboom, for instance, contends that science provides compelling evidence that no action is free, and Galen Strawson argues that conditions for genuinely free action are flatly unsatisfiable. Against such skepticism about free will, the paper introduces considerations in support of the idea that there are probably good reasons to think that conditions for free actions—real agency—are sometimes satisfied, that ascriptions of (...) agency are sometimes true, but that truthmakers for these ascriptions could be wholly deterministic in a way that might seem to, but does not in fact, place them at odds with the possibility of genuinely free action. (shrink)

Is a statue identical with the lump of bronze that makes it up? This question is discussed in the light of claims that statues and lumps possess distinct ‘modal properties’ and so could not be identical. Progress is possible if we replace the initial question with the question: what is the truth maker for the statement that this is a statue?

Shepard provides an account of mechanisms underlying perceptual judgment or representation. Ought we to interpret the account as revealing principles on which those mechanisms operate or merely an account of principles to which their operation apparently conforms? The difference, invisible so long as we remain at a high level of abstraction, becomes important when we begin to consider implementation. [Shepard].

The possibility of zombies is seen to depend on a substantive thesis about powers and qualities: powers and qualities are contingently related. Earlier arguments provided grounds to challenge this thesis, however, hence to shed doubt on the possibility of zombies.

This essay argues for a new, “meta,” level of integrity that is created by the context of structural injustice. The essay will draw from Margaret Walker to bring out a defining social value of integrity, namely, its ability to facilitate reliable response to harms caused by “moral luck.” The essay will then argue that, when bad luck is caused by complex social-structural function, traditional advice for maintaining one's integrity fails to provide adequate guidance; following such advice facilitates unjust social-structural function, (...) and so unreliability in response to harm. The essay will address this problem by arguing that in the context of structural injustice, a “meta-level” meaning of integrity emerges. This new meta-level of integrity, unlike the more traditional first-level integrity, does not instruct an individual to disassociate herself from structural harms; instead, it instructs an individual to manage the way in which she participates in unjust social structures. Meta-level integrity, unlike first-level integrity, does not facilitate an end to structural harm, but it does promote a reliable presence of social-justice movements within unjust structures. (shrink)