The purpose of this paper is to use the Social Cognitive Theory and its moral disengagement framework to emphasize the need for stock-type horse associations to minimize potential and actual threats to their legitimacy in an effort to maintain and strengthen self-regulating governance, specifically relating to the occurrence of inhumane treatment to horses. Despite having stated rules within their handbooks, the actions of leading stock-type associations in response to reports of inhumane treatment provide evidence of their ability to self-regulate. The (...) authors recommend the following actions: develop a commonly understood and accepted definition of inhumane treatment; publicly communicate with stakeholders violation enforcement efforts of inhumane treatment rules; increase efforts to educate stakeholders on the reasons why certain training techniques or methods are inhumane and harmful to the horse; ensure all actions taken are proactively focused on shaping future behaviors, and critically review more cases of inhumane treatment and the industry’s response. (shrink)

Sandra Harding's feminist standpoint epistemology makes two claims. The thesis of epistemic privilege claims that unprivileged social positions are likely to generate perspectives that are “less partial and less distorted” than perspectives generated by other social positions. The situated knowledge thesis claims that all scientific knowledge is socially situated. The bias paradox is the tension between these two claims. Whereas the thesis of epistemic privilege relies on the assumption that a standard of impartiality enables one to judge some perspectives as (...) better than others, the situated knowledge thesis seems to undermine this assumption by suggesting that all knowledge is partial. I argue that a contextualist theory of epistemic justification provides a solution to the bias paradox. Moreover, contextualism enables me to give empirical content to the thesis of epistemic privilege, thereby making it into a testable hypothesis. (shrink)

In this book, Kristina Musholt offers a novel theory of self-consciousness, understood as the ability to think about oneself. Traditionally, self-consciousness has been central to many philosophical theories. More recently, it has become the focus of empirical investigation in psychology and neuroscience. Musholt draws both on philosophical considerations and on insights from the empirical sciences to offer a new account of self-consciousness—the ability to think about ourselves that is at the core of what makes us human. -/- Examining theories (...) of nonconceptual content developed in recent work in the philosophy of cognition, Musholt proposes a model for the gradual transition from self-related information implicit in the nonconceptual content of perception and other forms of experience to the explicit representation of the self in conceptual thought. A crucial part of this model is an analysis of the relationship between self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Self-consciousness and awareness of others, Musholt argues, are two sides of the same coin. -/- After surveying the philosophical problem of self-consciousness, the notion of nonconceptual content, and various proposals for the existence of nonconceptual self-consciousness, Musholt argues for a non-self-representationalist theory, according to which the self is not part of the representational content of perception and bodily awareness but part of the mode of presentation. She distinguishes between implicitly self-related information and explicit self-representation, and describes the transitions from the former to the latter as arising from a complex process of self–other differentiation. By this account, both self-consciousness and intersubjectivity develop in parallel. (shrink)

This introduction consists of two parts. In the first part, the special issue editors introduce inductive metaphysics from a historical as well as from a systematic point of view and discuss what distinguishes it from other modern approaches to metaphysics. In the second part, they give a brief summary of the individual articles in this special issue.

In this paper, I shall present the theoretical view on the reliability democracy as presented in Prijić Samaržija’s book Democracy and Truth, and examine its validity through the case of the division of epistemic labour in the process of deliberation on autism treatment policies. It may appear that because of their strong demands, namely, the demand for rejection of medical authority and for exclusive expertise on autism, autistic individuals gathered around the neurodiversity movement present a threat to the reliability democracy.

For millennia, human beings have believed that it is morally wrong to judge others by the fortuitous or unfortunate events that befall them or by the actions of another person. Rather, an individual’s own intended, deliberate actions should be the basis of his or her evaluation, reward, and punishment. In a series of studies, the authors investigated whether such rules guide the judgments of children. The first 3 studies demonstrated that children view lucky others as more likely than unlucky others (...) to perform intentional good actions. Children similarly assess the siblings of lucky others as more likely to perform intentional good actions than the siblings of unlucky others. The next 3 studies demonstrated that children as young as 3 years believe that lucky people are nicer than unlucky people. The final 2 studies found that Japanese children also demonstrate a robust preference for the lucky and their associates. These findings are discussed in relation to M. J. Lerner’s (1980) just-world theory and J. Piaget’s (1932/1965) immanent-justice research and in relation to the development of intergroup attitudes. (shrink)

In today’s pandemic, many countries have experienced shortages of medical resources and many healthcare providers have often been faced with dramatic decisions about how to allocate beds, intensive care, or ventilators. Despite recognizing the need for triage, responses are not the same everywhere, and opinions and practices differ around what guidelines should be used, how they should be implemented, and who should ultimately decide. To some extent, triage issues reflect community values, revealing a given society’s moral standards and ideals. Our (...) goal is to study two countries which share many common features—Italy and France—as they deal with the pandemic, revealing the moral organization of medicine and healthcare, the power structures, and the nature of the disruptions in each context. (shrink)

: As a response to the critics of feminist science studies I argue that it is possible to formulate empirical hypotheses about gender ideology in the practice of the physical sciences without (1) reinforcing stereotypes about women and mathematical sciences or (2) assuming at the outset that the area of physics under investigation is methodologically suspect. I will then critically evaluate two case studies of gender ideology in the practice of the physical sciences. The case studies fail to show that (...) gender ideologies have influenced the practice of the physical sciences in a profound way--not because it is impossible to conceive how gender ideologies could influence the practice of the physical sciences even in a profound way--but because they do not provide the right kind of evidence. This, however, leaves open the possibility that future studies might provide such evidence. (shrink)

Current education paradigms were informed by the classical Newtonian worldview of brain functioning in which the mind is simply the physical activity of the brain, and our thoughts cannot have any effect upon the physical world. However, researchers in the field of quantum mechanics found that the outcomes of certain subatomic experiments are determined by the consciousness of the observer, leading philosophers to propose that the observed and the observer are linked. Quantum mechanics also demonstrates that distant minds may behave (...) in simultaneous correlational ways, in the absence of being linked through any known energetic signal. Further, researchers in this field propose that an external memory space is operating in the human brain, suggesting that this proposed external memory space may be a quantum field surrounding the brain and interacting with other fields, generating a global mental field of information flow. This article proposes that current education paradigms, which have been informed by a classical Newtonian physics worldview may need to be expanded to include a quantum mechanics worldview. The author seeks to understand if, and how, quantum mechanics could inform education practices, theories and paradigms and invites discussion, debate and speculation on the implications this would have for education systems. (shrink)

Does matter consist of the simple or is it divisible into infinity? This is the question posed by the second antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason. In this first comprehensive systematic study of the antinomy of division, its derivation, the proofs for thesis and antithesis as well as the resolution are analysed. The developmental and historical dimensions of the topic are also discussed. The study shows that although the antinomy of division is on the one hand a critique of (...) metaphysics, it nevertheless achieves a positive result for Kant's transcendental philosophy: On the one hand, the resolution of the antinomy represents a conceptual sharpening of realism and idealism as well as of the transcendental concept of appearance. On the other hand, it shows that the structure of matter is conditioned by a priori determinations of reason and understanding. These insights are highly relevant not only for Kant's enterprise of an a priori foundation of the natural sciences, but also for the problem of the soul. (shrink)

Epistemic trustworthiness depends not only on one’s epistemic but also on moral qualities. Such qualities need to be upheld by scientific communities and institutions as well as by individual scientific experts. While non-experts can often take scientific experts’ epistemic trustworthiness for granted, in some cases they cannot rationally treat it as the default, and they need to be convinced of the experts’ commitment to the well-being of others. This study contributes to philosophical discussions on public trust in science by introducing (...) an impact assessment model. The model helps philosophers understand how scientific experts can build and maintain epistemic trustworthiness in relation to those social groups who have reasons to distrust scientists. (shrink)

An analysis of group justification enables us to understand what it means to say that a research group is justified in making a claim on the basis of evidence. I defend Frederick Schmitt's (1994) joint account of group justification by arguing against a simple summative account of group justification. Also, I respond to two objections to the joint account, one claiming that social epistemologists should always prefer the epistemic value of making true judgments to the epistemic value of maintaining consistency, (...) and another one claiming that the notion of joint commitment implicit in the joint account is epistemically unacceptable. (shrink)

Much of the literature on values in science is limited in its perspective because it focuses on the role of values in individual scientists’ decision making, thereby ignoring the context of scientific collaboration. I examine the epistemic structure of scientific collaboration and argue that it gives rise to two arguments showing that moral and social values can legitimately play a role in scientists’ decision to accept something as scientific knowledge. In the case of scientific collaboration some moral and social values (...) are properly understood to be extrinsic epistemic values, that is, values that promote the attainment of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The tension between economic policy and health policy is a longstanding dilemma, but one that was brought to the fore with the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement in 1994. The pharmaceutical industry has long argued that intellectual property protection is vital for innovation. At the same time, there are those who counter that strong IPP negatively impacts the affordability and availability of essential medicines in developing countries. However, actors on both sides of the debate were (...) in agreement that something needed to be done to address the HIV/AIDS crisis, especially in developing countries. In response to sustained and significant pressure from civil society groups, members of the World Trade Organization agreed to the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health in 2001. The Declaration clarified that countries unable to manufacture the needed pharmaceuticals could obtain more affordable generics elsewhere if necessary. (shrink)

Fenomenológia ducha, zdôrazňuje Heidegger, je prvou časťou Hegelom plánovaného systému vied. Jej podtitul znie: Veda o skúsenosti vedomia. Tou vedou (Wissenschaft) bude filozofia, chápaná ako veda o skúsenosti vedomia, teda o skúsenosti, ktorú má vedomie seba samého. Filozofii, podľa Hegela, ide o absolútne poznanie, teda o poznanie v najvšeobecnejšom zmysle slova. Možno teda tvrdiť, že kým Hegelovi išlo vo Fenomenológii ducha o vzťah človeka, poznávajúceho subjektu, schopného sebauvedomenia, k absolútnu, tak Heideggerovi v jeho interpretácii Hegelovej Fenomenológie ducha išlo predovšetkým o (...) absolútno samé, teda o bytie, ako ho chápal. Pre Heideggera nie je problematika obsiahnutá vo Fenomenológii ducha ničím iným ako artikuláciou protikladu: nekonečnosť bytia verzus konečnosť jestvujúcna. (shrink)

The present article studies the representation of economy in Wunderkammer, a collection of poetry by Finland-Swedish author Ralf Andtbacka. Going back to the historical form of cabinets of curiosities, Wunderkammer depicts acts of buying, selling, and collecting. By showing the connectivity of objects and their impact on human subjects, Andtbacka actualizes and deconstructs topics originally initiated by Karl Marx, such as value, fetish, commodifica-tion, and alienation. The portrayal of capitalism, both past and pres-ent, in the book is highly ambivalent. On (...) the one hand, collecting functions as a critical, anticapitalistic act. On the other hand, eco-nomic discourse has invaded the text and turned the author into a writing machine powered by the energy of neoliberal labor. Besides an excess of objects, the poems display an overflow of information, a characteristic feature of a postcapitalist economy. As an exam-ple of cognitive mapping, Wunderkammer allegorically portrays humans, objects, and information in the middle of a paradoxical economic transformation. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to present the model of recognition as a substantial part of contemporary conceptions of justice. Its basis is the clarification of the theoretical background of the problem of recognition in the communitarian critique of liberalism. This critique embodies the dilemma of the relationship between equal approach and the recognition of differences. Attention is paid to the models of recognition in the theories of N. Fraser and A. Honneth and to how they can contribute to (...) understanding the contemporary globalizing society. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between implicit self-related information and explicit self-representation and argues that the latter is required for self-consciousness. It is further argued that self-consciousness requires an awareness of other minds and that this awareness develops over the course of an increasingly complex perspectival differentiation, during which information about self and other that is implicit in early forms of social interaction becomes redescribed into an explicit format.

In practice, the role of lay members of research ethics committees (RECs) often involves checking the accessibility of written materials, checking that the practical needs of participants have been considered and ensuring that a lay summary of the research will be produced. In this brief report, I argue that all these tasks would be more effectively carried out through a process of patient involvement (PI) in research projects prior to ethical review. Involving patients with direct experience of the topic under (...) investigation brings added value beyond the contributions typically made by lay REC members, who are often not patients themselves. This is because PI tailors the design and conduct of research to the specific interests and concerns of the people who will actually take part in a project and make use of its findings. If a project has PI in its early stages, then a similar input from lay REC members could at best result in duplication of effort and at worst create the potential for conflict. The rationale for lay REC membership will therefore need to change from ‘contributing a patient perspective’ to ‘ensuring transparency and public accountability in REC decisions’. This has implications for addressing more strategic questions about lay REC membership, including who is best recruited to the role and how they should be expected to contribute in practice. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement among both supporters and opponents that affirmative action either must not violate any principle of equal opportunity or procedural justice, or if it does, it may do so only given current extenuating circumstances. Many believe that affirmative action is morally problematic, only justified to the extent that it brings us closer to the time when we will no longer need it. In other words, those that support affirmative action believe it is acceptable in nonideal theory, but (...) not ideal theory. This paper argues that affirmative action is entirely compatible with equal opportunity and procedural justice and would be even in an ideal world. I defend a new analysis of Rawlsian procedural justice according to which it is permissible to interfere in the outcomes of procedures, and thus I show that affirmative action is not morally problematic in the way that many have supposed. (shrink)

One can remember events and one can remember facts: to remember an event (e.g. the barista's pouring my coffee this morning), one needs to have personally witnessed this event. To remember a fact (e.g. that the barista was trained in Italy), it suffices to have learned this fact from some other source. The distinction between event-directed (i.e. experiential) and fact-directed (or propositional) attitudes is an established distinction in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science that is also exemplified by other attitudes (incl. (...) seeing, imagining, and dreaming). Until recently, semantics and the philosophy of language have assumed that experiential attitudes can be more or less straightforwardly reduced to propositional attitudes. However, new work has identified some key properties of experiential attitudes that cast doubt on this reducibility. The present paper discusses the most notable of these properties, focusing on experiential attitude reports. It links these properties to recent developments in formal and philosophical semantics in an effort to foster the development of a rigorous, empirically adequate account of experiential attitudes. (shrink)

Self-consciousness can be defined as the ability to think 'I'-thoughts. Recently, it has been suggested that self-consciousness in this sense can (and should) be accounted for in terms of nonconceptual forms of self-representation. Here, I will argue that while theories of nonconceptual self-consciousness do provide us with important insights regarding the essential genetic and epistemic features of self-conscious thought, they can only deliver part of the full story that is required to understand the phenomenon of self-consciousness. I will provide two (...) arguments to this effect, drawing on insights from the philosophy of language and on structural differences between conceptual and nonconceptual forms of representation. Both arguments rest on the intuition that while self-consciousness requires explicit self-representation, nonconceptual content can at best provide implicit self-related information. I will conclude that in order to explain the emergence of self-conscious thought out of more basic forms of representations one has to explain the transition between implicit self-related information and explicit self-representation. (shrink)

It is a widely accepted assumption within the philosophy of mind and psychology that our ability for complex social interaction is based on the mastery of a common folk psychology, that is to say that social cognition consists in reasoning about the mental states of others in order to predict and explain their behavior. This, in turn, requires the possession of mental-state concepts, such as the concepts belief and desire. In recent years, this standard conception of social cognition has been (...) called into question by proponents of so-called ‘direct-perception’ approaches to social cognition and by those who argue that the ‘received view’ implies a degree of computational complexity that is implausible. In response, it has been argued that these attacks on the classical view of social cognition have no bite at the subpersonal level of explanation, and that it is the latter which is at issue in the debate in question. In this paper, I critically examine this response by considering in more detail the distinction between personal and subpersonal level explanations. There are two main ways in which the distinction has been developed. I will argue that on either of these, the response proposed by defenders of the received view is unconvincing. This shows that the dispute between the standard conception and alternative approaches to mindreading is a dispute concerning personal-level explanations - what is at stake in the debate between proponents of the classical view of social cognition and their critics is how we, as persons, navigate our social world. I will conclude by proposing a pluralistic approach to social cognition, which is better able to do justice to the multi-faceted nature of our social interactions as well as being able to account for recent empirical findings regarding the social cognitive abilities of young infants. (shrink)

This paper explores the development of an ethical guardrail framework for AI systems, emphasizing the importance of customizable guardrails that align with diverse user values and underlying ethics. We address the challenges of AI ethics by proposing a structure that integrates rules, policies, and AI assistants to ensure responsible AI behavior, while comparing the proposed framework to the existing state-of-the-art guardrails. By focusing on practical mechanisms for implementing ethical standards, we aim to enhance transparency, user autonomy, and continuous improvement in (...) AI systems. Our approach accommodates ethical pluralism, offering a flexible and adaptable solution for the evolving landscape of AI governance. The paper concludes with strategies for resolving conflicts between ethical directives, underscoring the present and future need for robust, nuanced and context-aware AI systems. (shrink)

Attitudinal propositionalism is the view that all mental attitude content is truth-evaluable. While attitudinal propositionalism is still silently assumed in large parts of analytic philosophy, recent work on objectual attitudes (i.e. attitudes like ‘fearing Moriarty’ and ‘imagining a unicorn’ that are reported through intensional transitive verbs with a direct object) has put attitudinal propositionalism under explanatory pressure. This paper defends propositionalism for a special subclass of objectual attitudes, viz. experiential attitudes. The latter are attitudes like seeing, remembering, and imagining whose (...) grammatical objects intuitively denote (events or) scenes. I provide a propositional analysis of experiential attitudes that preserves the merits of propositionalism. This analysis uses the possibility of representing the target-scenes of experiential attitudes by the intersection of all propositions that are true in these scenes. I show that this analysis makes available the usual (Russellian) account of intensionality and the common (Boolean) logic for entailments. (shrink)

In artificial intelligence (AI), responses generated by machine-learning models (most often large language models) may be unfactual information presented as a fact. For example, a chatbot might state that the Mona Lisa was painted in 1815. Such phenomenon is called AI hallucinations, seeking inspiration from human psychology, with a great difference of AI ones being connected to unjustified beliefs (that is, AI “beliefs”) rather than perceptual failures). -/- AI hallucinations may have their source in the data itself, that is, the (...) source content, or in the training procedure, i.e. the way the knowledge was encoded in the model’s parameters, so that errors in encoding and decoding textual and non-textual representations can cause hallucinations. In this paper, we will observe how such errors come to life and how they might be mitigated. For this purpose, we will analyze the usability of justification logics, to behave as a proof checker for validating the correctness of large language models’ (LLM) responses. Justification logic was developed by S. Artemov, and later on mostly by Artemov and M. Fitting, deriving its main idea from the logic of proofs (LP): knowledge and belief modalities are seen as justification terms, i.e. t:X stands for t is a (proper) justification for X. Justification logic originated from attempts to create semantics for intuitionistic logic where proofs were the most proper justifications, but in further development, justification logic could be applied to different kinds of justifications). With the recent attempts to mitigate incorrect LLM responses, we will analyze various guardrails that are currently used for LLM responses, and see how the logic of justification may provide its benefits as an AI safety layer against false data. (shrink)

Obstetric ultrasound has become a significant tool in obstetric practice, however, it has been argued that its increasing use may have adverse implications for women’s reproductive freedom. This study aimed to explore Australian obstetricians’ experiences and views of the use of obstetric ultrasound both in relation to clinical management of complicated pregnancy, and in situations where maternal and fetal health interests conflict.

The main thesis of this article is that in Christian Wolff’s Deutsche Metaphysik, empirical sources of knowledge play important if not foundational roles and that inductive methods of reasoning are extensively applied. It is argued that experiential self-awareness plays a foundational role and that empirical evidence, phenomena, and scientific theories from the empirical sciences of Wolff’s time are used for inferential purposes. Wolff also makes use of inductive reasoning, i.e., abduction to hidden causes of empirical phenomena, and inferences to the (...) best or to the only possible explanation. Wolff’s Deutsche Metaphysik is therefore a prefiguration and an interesting case of inductive metaphysics in the contemporary sense. From this contemporary perspective, Wolff draws the distinction between valid and speculative abductions in a different way – but it is also different from that of his more empirically oriented contemporaries. (shrink)

The “explanatory gap” is proposed to be the “hard problem” of consciousness research and has generated a great deal of recent debate. Arguments brought forward to reveal this gap include the conceivability of zombies or the “super-neuroscientist” Mary. These are supposed to show that the facts of consciousness are not a priori entailed by the microphysical facts. Similar arguments were already proposed by emergence theories in the context of the debate between mechanism and vitalism. According to synchronic emergentism, the property (...) of a system is emergent, when it cannot - in principle - be deduced from a complete description of the system’s components. Here, I argue that apart from phenomenal properties there are many other properties that, even though they are clearly physical, are not reductively explainable either. The explanatory gap of consciousness is therefore only a part of a much more general problem. (shrink)

The subject matter of the essay is the autonomy of art, which will be analysed from a Jungian perspective. What Jung had in mind with his notion of the independence of the artistic process is its freedom from the conscious mind of an artist, rather than its independence from the current social, political or cultural conditions. Art, according to Jung, is autonomous if it comes from deeper levels of the human psyche, and that is unconsciousness. To test the validity of (...) Jung’s "autonomous complex", I will be checking the empirical reality of artistic creation, by providing professional artists’ accounts of the creative process. Also, I will challenge the categorically laid and the deeply rooted idea of a close link between artistic talent and mental illness, trying to see if the artistic process can be independent of an artist’s psychological state. In Jung’s view, art happens instead of and not because of potential illness of an artist. Additionally, I am going to contrast his view with Freud’s, for whom an artwork is a sublimation of sexual drive or a product of neurosis. This idea was not acceptable to Jung, as he believed in the existence of not only sexual but also art complex. Finally, I will try to argue that Jung’s view is more accurate in the depiction of artistic process than Freud’s and that his emphasis on the autonomy in art, although radical, deserves more attention from scholars in philosophy and psychology of art. (shrink)

I examine ramifications of the widespread view that scientific objectivity gives us a permission to trust scientific knowledge claims. According to a widely accepted account of trust and trustworthiness, trust in scientific knowledge claims involves both reliance on the claims and trust in scientists who present the claims, and trustworthiness depends on expertise, honesty, and social responsibility. Given this account, scientific objectivity turns out to be a hybrid concept with both an epistemic and a moral-political dimension. The epistemic dimension tells (...) us when scientific knowledge claims are reliable, and the moral-political dimension tells us when we can trust scientists to be socially responsible. While the former dimension has received a fair amount of attention, the latter is in need of analysis. I examine what it means for scientists to be socially responsible, that is, to follow “sound” moral and social values in different stages of scientific inquiry. Social responsibility is especially important when scientists function as experts in society. Members of the public and policymakers do not want to rely on scientific research shaped by moral and social values they have good reasons to reject. Moreover, social responsibility is important in social research in which moral and social values can legitimately play many roles. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different answers to the question of how social scientists can identify appropriate moral and social values to inform their research. I argue that procedural accounts of social responsibility, such as well-ordered science and deliberative polling, have limitations. (shrink)