In men, high levels of endogenous testosterone (T) seem to encourage behavior intended to dominate other people. Sometimes dominant behavior is aggressive, its apparent intent being to inflict harm on another person, but often dominance is expressed nonaggressively. Sometimes dominant behavior takes the form of antisocial behavior, including rebellion against authority and law breaking. Measurement of T at a single point in time, presumably indicative of a man's basal T level, predicts many of these dominant or antisocial behaviors. T not (...) only affects behavior but also responds to it. The act of competing for dominant status affects male T levels in two ways. First, T rises in the face of a challenge, as if it were an anticipatory response to impending competition. Second, after the competition, T rises in winners and declines in losers. Thus, there is a reciprocity between T and dominance behavior, each affecting the other. We contrast a reciprocal model, in which T level is variable, acting as both a cause and effect of behavior, with a basal model, in which T level is assumed to be a persistent trait that influences behavior. An unusual data set on Air Force veterans, in which data were collected four times over a decade, enables us to compare the basal and reciprocal models as explanations for the relationship between T and divorce. We discuss sociological implications of these models. (shrink)

One reason that fake news and other objectionable views gain traction is that they often come to us in the form of testimony from those in our immediate social circles – from those we trust. A language around this phenomenon has developed which describes social epistemic structures in terms of ‘epistemic bubbles’ and ‘epistemic echo chambers’. These concepts involve the exclusion of external evidence in various ways. While these concepts help us see the ways that evidence is socially filtered, it (...) doesn’t help us understand the social functions that these structures play, which limits our ability to intervene on them. In this paper, I introduce a new concept – that of the epistemic bunker. This concept helps us better account for a central feature of the phenomenon, which is that exclusionary social epistemic structures are often constructed to offer their members safety, either actual or perceived. Recognising this allows us to develop better strategies to mitigate their negative effects. (shrink)

What is epistemic self-trust? There is a tension in the way in which prominent accounts answer this question. Many construe epistemic trust in oneself as no more than reliance on our sub-personal cognitive faculties. Yet many accounts – often the same ones – construe epistemic trust in others as a normatively laden attitude directed at persons whom we expect to care about our epistemic needs. Is epistemic self-trust really so different from epistemic trust in others? I argue that it is (...) not. We certainly do rely on our cognitive faculties to achieve epistemic ends; but I argue that we also have the normatively rich sort of epistemic trust in ourselves. Moreover, there is a theoretical need for this normatively rich notion of epistemic self-trust: positing it yields the best account of how we secure important epistemic goods, including knowledge and recognition as knowers. I argue this by giving an account of epistemic trust in others and showing that it can be generalized to epistemic trust in oneself. (shrink)

Scientific researchers welcome disagreement as a way of furthering epistemic aims. Religious communities, by contrast, tend to regard it as a potential threat to their beliefs. But I argue that religious disagreement can help achieve religious epistemic aims. I do not argue this by comparing science and religion, however. For scientific hypotheses are ideally held with a scholarly neutrality, and my aim is to persuade those who arecommittedto religious beliefs that religious disagreement can be epistemically beneficial for them too.

Resolving religious disagreements is difficult, for beliefs about religion tend to come with strong biases against other views and the people who hold them. Evidence can help, but there is no agreed-upon policy for weighting it, and moreover bias affects the content of our evidence itself. Another complicating factor is that some biases are reliable and others unreliable. What we need is an evidence-weighting policy geared toward negotiating the effects of bias. I consider three evidence-weighting policies in the philosophy of (...) religion and advocate one of them as the best for promoting the resolution of religious disagreements. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Is it good to form positive beliefs about those you have faith in, such as God or a religious community? Doxastic partialists say that it is. Some hold that it is good, from the viewpoint of faith, to form positive beliefs about the object of your faith even when your evidence favours negative ones. Others try to maintain respect for evidence by appealing to a highly permissive epistemology. I argue against both forms of doxastic partiality, on the grounds that (...) they foster an epistemically problematic noetic entrenchment. I instead defend evidentialism—the view that it is good to strive for true beliefs about the object of your faith, be they positive or negative, given relatively stringent evidential norms. I address the objection that evidentialism fosters disloyalty to the other party, not least because it risks losing your faith altogether. What emerges are not just epistemic norms for beliefs about religious matters, but an evidentialist account of what makes for good faith itself. (shrink)

Fear generalisation is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when fear that is elicited in response to a frightening stimulus spreads to similar or related stimuli. The practical harms of pathological fear generalisation related to trauma are well-documented, but little or no attention has been given so far to its epistemic harms. This paper fills this gap in the literature. It shows how the psychological phenomenon, when it becomes pathological, substantially curbs the epistemic agency of those who experience the fear that (...) generalizes, limiting their ability to respond to evidence, and substantially limiting their epistemic horizons. It is argued that when these epistemic harms are caused by wrongful actions and decisions of individuals or institutions, because the fear is elicited in response to a traumatic experience inflicted by them, the harms should be considered epistemic wrongs. The epistemic wrongs are closely akin to agential epistemic injustice, a variety of distributive epistemic injustice, and sometimes also involve epistemic exclusion. The paper thereby identifies a previously underexplored psychological mechanism that can be a vehicle through which both individuals and institutions can epistemically wrong others. The argument has implications for how both epistemic wrongs and epistemic injustice should be conceived, suggesting that both can occur without being caused by primarily epistemic flaws or errors, or a bad epistemic character. Finally, it highlights the advantage of taking a victim-centred approach to understanding epistemic harm. (shrink)

In our interactions with science, we are often vulnerable; we do not have complete control of the situation and there is a risk that we, or those we love, might be harmed. This is not an emotionall...

How should we respond to extremist views that we know are false? This paper proposes that we should be intellectually humble, but not open-minded. We should own our intellectual limitations, but be unwilling to revise our beliefs in the falsity of the extremist views. The opening section makes a case for distinguishing the concept of intellectual humility from the concept of open-mindedness, arguing that open-mindedness requires both a willingness to revise extant beliefs and other-oriented engagement, whereas intellectual humility requires neither. (...) Building on virtue-consequentialism, the second section makes a start on arguing that intellectually virtuous people of a particular sort—people with ‘effects-virtues’—would be intellectually humble, but not open-minded, in responding to extremist views they knew were false. We suggest that while intellectual humility and open-mindedness often travel together, this is a place where they come apart. (shrink)

Sometimes it is epistemically beneficial to form a belief on authority. When you do, what happens to other reasons you have for that belief? Linda Zagzebski’s total-preemption view says that these reasons are “preempted”: you still have them, but you do not use them to support your belief. I argue that this situation is problematic, because having reasons for a belief while not using them forfeits you doxastic justification. I present an alternative account of belief on authority, the proper-basing view, (...) which enables the agent to base her belief on as many reasons as she has. A salient result is that the notion of a preemptive reason, useful though it may be in accounting for acting on authority, does not have any place in an account of believing on authority or in epistemology more generally. (shrink)

This paper explores varieties of scientific structuralism. Central to our investigation is the notion of `shared structure'. We begin with a description of mathematical structuralism and use this to point out analogies and disanalogies with scientific structuralism. Our particular focus is the semantic structuralist's attempt to use the notion of shared structure to account for the theory-world connection, this use being crucially important to both the contemporary structural empiricist and realist. We show why minimal scientific structuralism is, at the very (...) least, a powerful methodological standpoint. Our investigation also makes explicit what more must be added to this minimal structuralist position in order to address the theory-world connection, namely, an account of representation. (shrink)

If you love someone, is it good to believe better of her than epistemic norms allow? The partiality view says that it is: love, on this view, issues norms of belief that clash with epistemic norms. The partiality view is supposedly supported by an analogy between beliefs and actions, by the phenomenology of love, and by the idea that love commits us to the loved one’s good character. I argue that the partiality view is false, and defend what I call (...) the epistemic view. On the epistemic view, love also issues norms of belief. But these say simply that you should adhere to epistemic norms in forming and maintaining beliefs about loved ones. I offer two arguments for the epistemic view. The first appeals to the emotional responses of love, which, when sensitive to what the loved one is really like, can make love great and be morally transformative. The second is a new argument for why caring for a loved one requires true beliefs about him. We see that there may be some boundaries, such as stuffy traditions, that love is right to defy, but that epistemic boundaries are not among them. (shrink)

We start with an observation about implicit quantifier domain restriction: certain implicit restrictions (e.g., restricting objects by location and time) appear to be more natural and widely available than others (e.g., restricting objects by color, aesthetic, or historical properties). Our aim is to explain why this is. That is, we aim to explain why some implicit domain restriction possibilities are available by default. We argue that, regardless of their other explanatory virtues, extant pragmatic and metasemantic frameworks leave this question unanswered. (...) We then motivate a partially nativist account of domain restriction that involves a minimal view of joint planning around broad shared goals about navigating and influencing our environments augmented with cognitive heuristics that facilitate these. Finally, we sketch how the view can be extended to account for the ways non-default restriction possibilities become available when conversationalists have shared idiosyncratic goals. (shrink)

Faith is often regarded as having a fraught relationship with evidence. Lara Buchak even argues that it entails foregoing evidence, at least when this evidence would influence your decision to act on the proposition in which you have faith. I present a counterexample inspired by the book of Job, in which seeking evidence for the sake of deciding whether to worship God is not only compatible with faith, but is in fact an expression of great faith. One might still think (...) that foregoing evidence may make faith more praiseworthy than otherwise. But I argue against this claim too, once more drawing on Job. A faith that expresses itself by a search for evidence can be more praiseworthy than a faith that sits passively in the face of epistemic adversity. (shrink)

Religious communities often discourage disagreement with religious authorities, on the grounds that allowing it would be epistemically detrimental. I argue that this attitude is mistaken, because any social position in a community—including religious authority—comes with epistemic advantages as well as epistemic limitations. I argue that religious communities stand to benefit epistemically by engaging in disagreement with people occupying other social positions. I focus on those at the community’s margins and argue that religious marginalization is apt to yield religiously important insights; (...) so their disagreement with religious authorities should be encouraged. (shrink)

The generation of three-dimensional cerebral organoids from human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hPSC) has facilitated the investigation of mechanisms underlying several neuropsychiatric disorders, including stress-related disorders, namely major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Generating hPSC-derived neurons, cerebral organoids, and even assembloids (or multi-organoid complexes) can facilitate research into biomarkers for stress susceptibility or resilience and may even bring about advances in personalized medicine and biomarker research for stress-related psychiatric disorders. Nevertheless, cerebral organoid research does not come without its own set (...) of ethical considerations. With increased complexity and resemblance to in vivo conditions, discussions of increased moral status for these models are ongoing, including questions about sentience, consciousness, moral status, donor protection, and chimeras. There are, however, unique ethical considerations that arise and are worth looking into in the context of research into stress and stress-related disorders using cerebral organoids. This paper provides stress research-specific ethical considerations in the context of cerebral organoid generation and use for research purposes. The use of stress research as a case study here can help inform other practices of in vitro studies using brain models with high ethical considerations. (shrink)

I argue that faith is a type of trust. It is also part of a relationship in which both parties are called on to be faithful, where faithfulness is a type of trustworthiness. What distinguishes faith relationships from trust relationships is that both parties value the faith relationship intrinsically. I discuss how faith on this account can, and cannot, be rational when it goes beyond a person’s evidence. It turns out that faith has the same rationality conditions as trust, differing (...) from it only in the cases that fix our intuitions. (shrink)

The population of women farm operators continues to increase in the U.S. That growth, however, is mediated by research showing that women in agriculture experience persistent barriers to equality with men. The Feminist Agriculture Food Theory (FAST) developed by Sach et al. (The Rise of Women Farmers and Sustainable Agriculture, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, (Sachs et al., The rise of women farmers and sustainable agriculture, University of Iowa Press, 2016) posits that in the face of these barriers, women (...) farmers in the Northeast are engaging in six strategies to increase their success. These include (1) increasing gender equality on their farms, (2) asserting an identity as a farmer, (3) gaining greater access to resources, (4) shaping new food and farming systems, (5) negotiating roles in agricultural organizations, and (6) forming women-centered farming organizations. While researchers have applied FAST to Michigan, it has not been examined at a national level. In this paper, then, we use the 2017 Census of Agriculture Data to measure how women in agriculture in the U.S. are faring on each aspect of FAST we can measure (strategies 1–5). We compare women to men farmers across these FAST strategies and across three different farm types: Non-Organic Non-Value-Added Farms, Organic Farms, and Value-Added Farms. Our findings suggest for FAST strategies 1 and 2 there is an increase in equity and ability to identify as a farmer for women on organic and value-added farms. However, our findings also suggest that for FAST strategies that require more institutional and structural resources (I.e. strategies 3–5), inequities persist across farm types. (shrink)

Wexler and Specker Sullivan (2023) reflect on the field of neuroethics by highlighting criticisms from both scholars within and outside the field. Among these criticisms, are claims that neuroethic...

Gatekeeping, or determining membership of your group, is crucial to science: the moniker ‘scientific’ is a stamp of epistemic quality or even authority. But gatekeeping in science is fraught with dangers. Gatekeepers must exclude bad science, science fraud and pseudoscience, while including the disagreeing viewpoints on which science thrives. This is a difficult tightrope, not least because gatekeeping is a human matter and can be influenced by biases such as groupthink. After spelling out these general tensions around gatekeeping in science, (...) we shed light on them with a case study from psychology. This concerns whether academic psychologists rightly or wrongly classify the applied-psychology framework of NLP (‘neuro-linguistic programming’) as unscientific and even pseudoscientific. This example of gatekeeping is particularly instructive because both the NLP community and the psychology community, we argue, make legitimate but also illegitimate moves. This case gives rise to several general insights about gatekeeping in science more generally. (shrink)

Robust technology infrastructure is needed to enable learning health care systems to improve quality, access, and cost. Such infrastructure relies on the trust and confidence of individuals to share their health data for healthcare and research. Few studies have addressed consumers’ views on electronic data sharing and fewer still have explored the dual purposes of healthcare and research together. The objective of the study is to explore factors that affect consumers’ willingness to share electronic health information for healthcare and research. (...) This study involved a random-digit dial telephone survey of 800 adult Californians conducted in English and Spanish. Logistic regression was performed using backward selection to test for significant associations of each explanatory variable with the outcome variable. The odds of consent for electronic data sharing for healthcare decreased as Likert scale ratings for EHR impact on privacy worsened, odds ratio = 0.74, 95% CI [0.60, 0.90]; security, OR = 0.80, 95% CI [0.66, 0.98]; and quality, OR = 0.59, 95% CI [0.46–0.75]. The odds of consent for sharing for research was greater for those who think EHR will improve research quality, OR = 11.26, 95% CI [4.13, 30.73]; those who value research benefit over privacy OR = 2.72, 95% CI [1.55, 4.78]; and those who value control over research benefit OR = 0.49, 95% CI [0.26, 0.94]. Consumers’ choices about electronically sharing health information are affected by their attitudes toward EHRs as well as beliefs about research benefit and individual control. Design of person-centered interventions utilizing electronically collected health information, and policies regarding data sharing should address these values of importance to people. Understanding of these perspectives is critical for leveraging health data to support learning health care systems. (shrink)

Should religious believers proportion their religious beliefs to their evidence? They should: Religious faith is better, ceteris paribus, when the beliefs accompanying it are evidence-proportioned. I offer two philosophical arguments and a biblical argument. The philosophical arguments conclude that love and trust, two attitudes belonging to faith, are better, ceteris paribus, when accompanied by evidence-proportioned belief, and that so too is the faith in question. The biblical argument concludes that beliefs associated with faith, portrayed in the Hebrew Bible and the (...) New Testament, are typically, and normatively, exhorted on the basis of evidence. I hope to convince religious believers and nonbelievers alike that religious beliefs should be evidence-proportioned. (shrink)

Personal narratives can let us in on aspects of reality which we have not experienced for ourselves, and are thus important sources for philosophical reflection. Yet a venerable tradition in mainstream philosophy has little room for arguments which rely on personal narrative, on the grounds that narratives are particular and testimonial, whereas philosophical arguments should be systematic and transparent. I argue that narrative arguments are an important form of philosophical argument. Their testimonial aspects witness to novel facets of reality, but (...) their argumentative aspects help us to understand those facets for ourselves. My argument takes the form of a case study of the exemplary narrative argument penned by Rachel Moran, a former prostitute who uses her experiences to argue that prostitution amounts to sexual abuse. We’ll see that narrative arguments can enjoy expository Advantages over analytic ones. (shrink)

Several prominent debates in biology, such as those surrounding adaptationism, group selection, and punctuated equilibrium, have focused on disagreements about the relative importance of a cause in producing a phenomenon of interest. Some philosophers, such as John Beatty have expressed scepticism about the scientific value of engaging in these controversies, and Karen Kovaka has suggested that their value might be limited. In this paper, I challenge that scepticism by giving a novel analysis of relative significance controversies, showing that there are (...) three forms they can take. I argue that these controversies can have significant epistemic upshots, in that they help scientists form predictions about new instances of the phenomenon of interest. Finally, using two historical examples, I show how engaging in these controversies can improve our understanding of causal relationships. (shrink)

1. Kantian moral theories have been criticized for their inability to make sense of the phenomenology and propriety of regret in the face of difficult moral choices. As Bernard Williams puts it, re...

Ciudad Cayalá in Guatemala brands itself as the country’s first private city. I turn to Hannah Arendt to show how and why Cayalá does not and cannot provide the space of appearance she argues is needed to support the possibility of political action. I show how Arendt provides two apparently distinct phenomenological accounts in The Human Condition—one historically-oriented and the other politically-oriented—that articulate how Cayalá fails in its aspiration to privatize the political. Yet the apparent divergence between her accounts raises (...) concern about her relevance for liberatory feminist projects. To demonstrate how and why Arendt’s political phenomenology is aligned with certain feminist aims, I also generate a Cayaláian reading of Arendt to demonstrate the coherence of her two phenomenological accounts through interpreting her thinking by way of Cayalá’s architecture. This article enacts a dialogue between Arendt and Cayalá, mediated by feminist and architectural theory, concerning why efforts toward the privatization of cities will fail. (shrink)

The ideal of objectivity is in crisis in science and the law, and yet it continues to do important work in both practices. This article describes that crisis and develops a shared rescue strategy for objectivity in both domains. In a recent article, Inkeri Koskinen attempts to bring unity to the fragmented discourse on objectivity in the philosophy of science with a risk account of objectivity. To put it simply, she argues that we call practitioners, processes, and products of science (...) objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic risks. We endorse this view and attempt to tailor Koskinen's strategy to the problem of objectivity in the legal context. To do so, we develop a novel notion of phronetic risk, and argue that we call practitioners, processes, and products of law objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic and/or phronetic risks. Our attempt to rescue objectivity is especially important for work at the intersection of law and psychiatry. For that intersection represents a place where skeptical worries about objectivity in science and law work in tandem to pose serious critical challenges to contemporary practice; and our rescue strategy represents a promising way to negotiate those challenges. (shrink)

Marxism has defined its key values in opposition to animals other than human in order to promote the interests of the most downtrodden human beings. Although it has characterized itself as a scientific historical and economic theory, sympathy for human suffering has provided its most powerful motivation as a political force. This capacity for sympathy, causing in modern times an extension of Marxist concerns beyond "class" in the original sense, is beginning to accommodate animals as are the theoretical concepts of (...) alienation, surplus value, and historical materialism. Marxism's inconsistencies are being resolved in favor of the side that, for human as well as animal benefit, favors individual sentience and other pro-animal values. So, in a truly dialectical progression, the same quality of sympathy that at first caused Marxism to denigrate animals is now coming out in their support. (shrink)

This paper responds to comments on the paper "True Faith: Against Doxastic Partiality about Faith (in God and Religious Communities) and in Defense of Evidentialism" (Australasian Philosophical Review). I begin with some clarifications on faith and its normativity (section 1). I then zero in on doxastic normativity (section 2), where an ideological rift emerges between evidentialism and partialist critiques (section 3). I then discuss evidentialist reason and its relationship to objectivity (section 4), and the sort of norms at issue (section (...) 5). (shrink)

This paper will examine universality spectra for relational theories which cannot be described in first-order logic. We will give a method using functors to show that two types of structures have the same universality spectrum. A combination of methods will be used to show universality results for certain ordered structures and graphs. In some cases, a universal spectrum under GCH will be obtained. Since the theories are not first-order, the classic model theory result under GCH does not hold.

Agriculture is a serious contributor to pollution and other environmental harms, making it an important site of action for the development of environmentally friendly products and practices. However, farmer adoption of such options is varied and dependent on a wide range of factors including the visual appeal of sustainable farming. Recent studies have shown that negative aesthetics related to more environmentally friendly ways of farming can delay or prevent adoption of such practices. Drawing on the concepts of good farming, cultural (...) capital, and the aesthetics of waste, this paper aims to assess the status of biodegradable plastic mulch in relation to a range of alternative and conventional specialty crop growers’ aesthetic perceptions. BDM has the potential to significantly reduce non-biodegradable polyethylene mulch waste, thus addressing serious environmental and human health concerns. However, the aesthetics of BDM may present a challenge. BDM looks identical to PE plastic, and its degradation throughout the season results in scraps in the soil. To investigate aesthetics as a possible barrier to BDM adoption, we conducted five photo-elicitation focus groups with specialty crop growers in Washington State. Results indicate that alternative growers are slightly more adverse to the aesthetics of BDM, especially because of its ‘plastic’ appearance. Conventional growers had higher rates of BDM adoption, even though they felt a strong aesthetic aversion to the messy nature of BDM degradation. Confidence in the product, particularly as a result of education and experience, was believed to be the key to overcoming this negative aesthetic. Study participants offered a variety of ways to enhance the acceptability of BDM, such as making the mulch brown instead of black. These findings have wider implications for the acceptance and adoption of practices that, although environmentally friendly, have an unattractive visual element. (shrink)

Variability is prevalent in early language acquisition, but, whether it supports or hinders learning is unclear; while target variability has been shown to facilitate word learning, variability in competitor items has been shown to make the task harder. Here, we tested whether background variability could boost learning in a referent selection task. Two groups of 2-year-old children saw arrays of one novel and two known objects on a screen, and they heard a novel or known label. Stimuli were identical across (...) conditions, with the exception that in the constant color condition objects appeared on a uniform white background, and in the variable color condition backgrounds were different, uniform colors. At test, only children in the variable condition showed evidence of retaining label-object associations. These data support findings from the adult memory literature, which suggest that variability supports learning by decontextualizing representations. We argue that these data are consistent with dynamic systems accounts of learning in which low-level entropy adds sufficient noise to the developmental system to precipitate a change in behavior. (shrink)

There is a growing recognition among many scientists and philosophers that metaphysical presuppositions guide scientific research. These ontological claims, in turn, prescribe a particular methodology for how to go about investigating and explaining those kinds of things. There is thus what I call a move from metaphysics to methods. Using cancer research as a case study, I defend the existence of this move, and I argue for an “agnostic” attitude towards the metaphysical presuppositions guiding cancer research. I defend this agnosticism (...) on two grounds: first, the underdetermination of metaphysical frameworks by empirical research, and second, on the ground of inductive risk, namely that when it comes to cancer research, there are more than just epistemic consequences for making the wrong metaphysical choice. I conclude that one should instead allow for a pluralism of metaphysical frameworks to guide cancer research. (shrink)

Between 1820 and 1870, middle-class Americans became convinced of the role nonhuman animals could play in socializing children. Companion animals in and around the household were the medium for training children into self-consciousness about, and abhorrence of, causing pain to other creatures including, ultimately, other people. In an age where the formation of character was perceived as an act of conscious choice and self-control, middle-class Americans understood cruelty to animals as a problem both of individual or familial deficiency and of (...) good and evil. Training children to be self-conscious about kindness became an important task of parenting. Domestic advisors also argued that learning kindness was critical for boys who were developmentally prone to cruelty and whose youthful cruelty had implications both for the future of family life and for the body politic. The practice of pet keeping, where children became stewards of companion animals who were then able to teach young humans such virtues as gratitude and fidelity, became a socially meaningful act. (shrink)

Shen et al. (2024) present a new and updated framework on the ethical, social, and legal implications of returning individual research results (IRRs) in digital phenotyping psychiatric research. Th...

Newman’s dramatic poem, “The Dream of Gerontius”, was set to music by Edward Elgar in 1900. This essay brings out the sympathy of mind and heart between poet and composer, and perhaps between them both and the listener of today, as well as the universality and depth of the human stake in some kind of personal and peopled life after death.