This article provides a transnational analysis of the campaigns for the organization of expeditions to the central Arctic region by the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the Prussian cartographer August Petermann between 1851 and 1853. By adopting a comparative approach, this study focuses on three interventions in the history of Arctic science and exploration: the construction of scientific expertise surrounding the relationship between the ‘armchair’ and the field, the role of transnational networks, and the significance of maps as (...) travelling epistemic objects in the production of knowledge about the Arctic regions. In bringing both campaigns in conversation with each other, this article demonstrates that the histories of Kane's and Petermann's campaigns did not constitute isolated episodes but form part of a transnational nexus of imperial science and Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century. Moreover, based on research in libraries and archives in the United States, Germany and England, this study reconnects otherwise siloed collections and contributes new findings on the interpersonal networks of science and exploration. Finally, this article illustrates the importance of adopting comparative transnational approaches for understanding the fluid and reciprocal nature of Arctic science throughout the transatlantic world. (shrink)

The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality is about research design, specifically concerning research that uses observational data to make a causal inference. It is separated into two halves, each with different approaches to that subject. The first half goes through the concepts of causality, with very little in the way of estimation. It introduces the concept of identification thoroughly and clearly and discusses it as a process of trying to isolate variation that has a causal interpretation. Subjects (...) include heavy emphasis on data-generating processes and causal diagrams. Concepts are demonstrated with a heavy emphasis on graphical intuition and the question of what we do to data. When we "add a control variable" what does that actually do? (shrink)

Ame, vie, souffle, qui saurait bien les distinguer exactement?1like heartburn, a pronounced discomfort with the very idea of consciousness followed the early days of experimental psychology. Received wisdom has it that psychologists came to mistrust consciousness for largely behaviorist reasons—they are supposed to have worried about the alleged impossibility of performing quantifiable, repeatable measurements on an essentially private phenomenon.2 But this is a historical distortion, one that obscures some interesting and earlier philosophical concerns about the scientific study of consciousness.Behaviorists rejected (...) the scientific respectability of consciousness, to be sure. But by the... (shrink)

Many philosophers have claimed that evidence for a theory is better when multiple independent tests yield the same result, i.e., when experimental results are robust. Little has been said about the grounds on which such a claim rests, however. The present essay presents an analysis of the evidential value of robustness that rests on the fallibility of assumptions about the reliability of testing procedures and a distinction between the strength of evidence and the security of an evidence claim. Robustness can (...) enhance the security of an evidence claim either by providing what I call second-order evidence, or by providing back-up evidence for a hypothesis. (shrink)

Medical devices are often referred to as being invasive or non-invasive. Though invasiveness is relevant, and central, to how devices are understood and regarded in medicine and bioethics, a consensus concept or definition of invasiveness is lacking. To begin to address this problem, this essay explores four possible descriptive meanings of invasiveness: how devices are introduced to the body, where they are located in the body, whether they are foreign to the body, and how they change the body. An argument (...) is offered that invasiveness is not purely descriptive, but implicates normative concepts of danger, intrusion, and disruption. In light of this, a proposal is offered for how to understand use of the concept of invasiveness in discussions of medical devices. (shrink)

I argue that appreciation of the phenomenon of forgetting requires serious attention to its origins and place in nature. This, in turn, necessitates metaphysical inquiry as well as empirical backing – a combination likely to be eschewed by psychological orthodoxy. But, if we hope to avoid the conceptual vacuity that characterizes too much of contemporary psychological inquiry (e.g., Klein, 2012, 2014a, 2015a, 2016a), a “big picture” approach to phenomena of interest is essential. Adopting this investigative posture turns the “received (...) view” of the relation between remembering and forgetting on its head: Rather than treated as the result of breakdowns and limitations of biologically engineered systems of remembering, forgetting is accorded elevated status as the driving force behind the evolution of organic systems of information retention. (shrink)

"Dreaming with open eyes" is a tagline for Spinoza's critique of Descartes; the dreams in question are principally those of volition and the active imagination. In this article, I compare the Cartesian theory of imagination as an active, but not fully rational, power of the mind and the Cartesian account of the volitional self to Spinoza's views. Descartes's own dreams and theories of dreaming are the focus of the first part of the article. Thereafter I examine Spinoza's critique of Descartes (...) and his alternative account of imagination. Finally, I argue that there is a positive sense of dreaming with open eyes to be recuperated in Spinoza's thought. Construed positively, to dream with open eyes is to understand dreams and imagination as natural phenomena and so to be able to respond constructively to them in ethical and political, as well as epistemological, life. (shrink)

Frédérique de Vignemont argues on the basis of several empirical counterexamples that Bain and Klein are wrong about the relationship between pain and bodily care. I argue that the force of the putative counterexamples is weak. Properly understood, the association between pain and care is preserved in a way that is consistent with both de Vignemont's own views and the empirical facts.

These matched essays constitute an extremely valuable contribution on the place of religious ideas in our country’s political life. Robert Audi defends an “exclusivist” position: participants in political life fulfill the responsibilities of liberal citizenship best if they support only measures justified on secular grounds. Nicholas Wolterstorff argues for an “inclusivist” position: citizens and legislators are encouraged to rely on whatever sources, including religious ones, they find convincing.

I consider the error-statistical account as both a theory of evidence and as a theory of inference. I seek to show how inferences regarding the truth of hypotheses can be upheld by avoiding a certain kind of alternative hypothesis problem. In addition to the testing of assumptions behind the experimental model, I discuss the role of judgments of implausibility. A benefit of my analysis is that it reveals a continuity in the application of error-statistical assessment to low-level empirical hypotheses and (...) highly general theoretical principles. This last point is illustrated with a brief sketch of the issues involved in the parametric framework analysis of tests of physical theories such as General Relativity and of fundamental physical principles such as the Einstein Equivalence Principle. (shrink)

The clinical relationship has been underexplored in dementia care. This is in part due to the way that the clinical relationship has been articulated and understood in bioethics. Robert Veatch’s social contract model is representative of a standard view of the clinical relationship in bioethics. But dementia presents formidable challenges to the standard clinical relationship, including ambiguity about when the clinical relationship begins, how it weathers changes in narrative identity of patients with dementia, and how the intimate involvement of family (...) fits alongside a paradigmatically dyadic relationship. Drawing on work in recent feminist theory, a critique is offered of the standard clinical relationship in bioethics as underwritten by an individualistic conception of autonomy. An alternative view of the clinical relationship in dementia, one that embraces a relational account of autonomy, is put forward. (shrink)

The Swiss Cantons had no greater admirer in the eighteenth-century than the French political thinker Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. The feeling was mutual, at least to some extent, since the Bernese Patriotic Society awarded its first prize in 1763 to Mably, for his dialogue Entretiens de Phocion. The prize then led to an exchange of letters, stretching across some two decades, with Daniel Fellenberg, founder of the Patriotic society—the most important block of Mably's correspondence to have survived. This essay considers (...) the 1763 prize and the correspondence with Fellenberg for the light they cast both on Mably and on Bernese participation in the wider currents of eighteenth-century thought. (shrink)

The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on (...) an open-source reimplementation of their algorithm in Python, optimized to be usable on much larger networks. In addition to the algorithm and package, we also show the ability to scale up our package to large synthetic social network graph profiling, and finally demonstrate its utility in analyzing real-world empirical evidence of ‘echo chambers’ on online social media, as well as evidence of interdisciplinary diversity in an academic communications network. (shrink)

Through a close analysis of texts from the Second Objections and Replies to the Meditations, this article addresses the tension between the pursuit of certainty and the preservation of divine transcendence in Descartes’s philosophy. Via a hypothetical “atheist geometer,” the Objectors charge Descartes with pantheism. While the Objectors’ motivations are not clear, the objection raises provocative questions about the relation of the divine and the human mind and about the being of created or dependent entities inDescartes’s metaphysics. Descartes contends that (...) there are real, eternal essences present in the human intellect as innate ideas. I argue that this claim implicates him in pantheism, not merely univocity. In the course of the analysis, I consider recent interpretations by Wells, Marion, and Hatfield. (shrink)

O propósito deste artigo é mostrar como podem ser desenvolvidas explicações robustas de justificação e de certeza no interior do infinitismo. Primeiro, eu explico como a concepção infinitista de justificação epistêmica difere das concepções fundacionista e coerentista. Em segundo lugar, explico como o infinitista pode oferecer uma solução ao problema do regresso epistêmico. Em terceiro lugar, explico como o infinitismo, per se, é compatível com as teorias daqueles que sustentam 1) que o conhecimento requer certeza e que uma tal forma (...) superior de conhecimento é possível, bem como com as daqueles que rejeitam algum ou ambos os conjuntos em 1). Em outras palavras, o infinitismo nem endossa, nem rejeita o ceticismo, tomando-se essa tese como sendo aquela segundo a qual nós não possuímos conhecimento naquelas situações que nos parecem cognoscíveis. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Certeza. Coerentismo. Fundacionismo. Infinitismo. Pirronismo. Regresso epistêmico. ABSTRACT The purpose of the paper is to show how robust accounts of justification and certainty can be developed within infinitism. First, I explain how the infinitist conception of epistemic justification differs from both the foundationalist and coherentist conceptions. Second, I explain how the infinitist can provide a solution to the epistemic regress problem. Third, I explain how infinitism, per se, is compatible with both the views of those who hold 1) that knowledge requires certainty and that such high-grade knowledge is possible as well as those who deny either or both conjuncts in 1). In other words, infinitism neither endorses nor rejects skepticism, taking that view to mean that we do not have knowledge in those areas commonly thought to be within our ken. KEY WORDS – Certainty. Coherentism. Foundationalism. Infinitism. Pyrrhonism. Epistemic regress. (shrink)

_This first book-length work of the prominent German philosopher Gunter Figal to appear in English offers a radical defense of metaphysical philosophy in the era of postmodern thought._.

Against Maudlin, I argue that machines which merely reproduce a pre-programmed series of changes ought to be classed with Turing’s O-Machines even if they would counterfactually show Turing Machine-like activity. This can be seen on an interventionist picture of computational architectures, on which basic operations are the primitive loci for interventions. While constructions like Maudlin’s Olympia still compute, then, claims about them do not threaten philosophical arguments that depend on Turing Machine architectures and their computational equivalents.

Ignacio Ellacuría reconstructs three aspects of Karl Rahner’s metaphysics and fundamental theology for a Latin American context. First, Ellacuría reframes Rahner’s focus on the metaphysics of being, arguing instead that historical reality is the proper object of a truly Latin American theology and philosophy. Second, Ellacuria builds upon and diverges from aspects of Rahner’s use of the hylomorphic theory and the role of the agent intellect in his theory of knowing, using Xavier Zubiri’s analysis of the role of sentient intelligence (...) in order to reconstruct Rahner’s theological epistemology. And third, Ellacuría appropriates and reframes Rahner’s supernatural existential, situating it within the larger horizon of historical reality, which he says the tradition asserts has been transformed by grace. (shrink)

As a philosopher of sport who takes a broadly neo-Aristotelian, virtue-ethical approach, Sabrina B. Little’s The Examined Run seems tailor-made for me. Little uses Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, and ot...

This paper contests social psychology’s emphasis on the biased, erroneous, and constructed nature of social cognition by: showing how the extent of bias and error in classic research is overstated; summarizing research regarding the accuracy of social beliefs; and describing how social stereotypes sometimes improve person perception accuracy. A Goodness of Judgment Index is also presented to extract evidence regarding accuracy from research focusing on bias. We conclude that accuracy is necessary for understanding social cognition.

When individuals hold expectations about other people, they can elicit from these targets behaviors that are consistent with their expectations, even if these expectations are independent of the target’s real characteristics. In this paper, we consider the role that this phenomenon, known as behavioral confirmation, plays in shaping the social perceptions of perceivers, targets, and outside observers. As well, we address the value of laboratory research on behavioral confirmation for understanding the dynamics and outcomes of social interactions in naturally occurring (...) settings. Building on these considerations, we then examine the role of behavioral confirmation phenomena in shaping intergroup relations, with particular reference to delineating conditions in which such phenomena serve to preserve these relations. Based on this analysis, we suggest that dyadic confirmation phenomena are likely to occur in naturally occurring settings and may contribute to the maintenance and perpetuation of social stereotypes and societal structures. (shrink)

The paper introduces a broad family of metrics applicable to finite and countably infinite strings, or, by extension, to formal structures serving as semantics for countable languages. The main focus is on applications to sets of pointed Kripke models, a semantics for modal logics. For the resulting metric spaces, the paper classifies topological properties including which metrics are topologically equivalent, providing sufficient conditions for compactness, characterizing clopen sets and isolated points, and characterizing the metrical topologies by a concept of logical (...) convergence. We then apply the approach to maps from dynamic epistemic logic, showing that product updates with action models yield continuous maps, hence allowing for an interpretation of the iterated updates as discrete time dynamical systems. (shrink)

Chalmers' (2018) meta-problem of consciousness emphasizes unexpected common ground between otherwise incompatible positions. We argue that the materialist should welcome discussion of the meta-problem. We suggest that the core of the metaproblem is the seeming arbitrariness of subjective experience. This has an unexpected resolution when one moves to an interventionist account of scientific explanation: the same interventions that resolve the hard problem should also resolve the meta-problem.

Within democratic theory, electoral competition is typically associated with minimalist and realist views of democracy. In contrast, this article argues for a reinterpretation of electoral competition as an important element of an egalitarian theory of democracy. Current relational egalitarian theories, in focusing on the equalization of individual power-over, present electoral institutions as in tension with equality. Against this view, the article contends that electoral competition can foster equality by incentivizing the equalization of cooperative power. The article develops the normative category (...) of equal opportunity to access cooperative power and shows how it can generate an egalitarian defense of electoral competition. Yet this ideal is not an affirmation of the status quo. Rather, it points to the need to reform electoral systems to make them more competitive and so more likely to foster cooperative power, as well as reforms to provide direct support to associations like unions that equalize cooperative power. (shrink)

It is sometimes held that facts confirm a hypothesis only if they were not used in the construction of that hypothesis. This requirement of "use novelty" introduces a historical aspect into the assessment of evidence claims. I examine a methodological principle invoked by physicists in the experimental search for the top quark that bears a striking resemblance to this view. However, this principle is better understood, both historically and philosophically, in terms of the need to conduct a severe test than (...) in terms of use novelty. Nevertheless, a historical factor remains in the assessment of some evidence claims. (shrink)

In 2003 the UK National Blood Service introduced a policy of ‘male donor preference’ which involved women’s plasma being discarded following blood collection. The policy was based on the view that data relating to the incidence of Transfusion-Related Acute Lung Injury (TRALI) was linked to transfusion with women’s plasma. While appearing to treat female donors as equal to male donors, exclusion criteria operate after donation at the stage of processing blood, thus perpetuating myths of universality even though only certain ‘extractions’ (...) from women are retained for use in transfusion. Many women in the UK receive a plasma-derived product called Anti-D immunoglobulin which is manufactured from pooled male plasma. This article examines ways in which gender has significance for understanding blood relations, and how the blood economy is gendered. In our study of relations between blood donors and recipients, we explore how gendered bodies are produced through the discursive and material practices within blood services. We examine both how donation policies and the manufacturing and use of blood products produces gendered blood relations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy by Trevor PearceAlexander KleinTrevor Pearce. Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 384. Paperback, $35.00.Pragmatist pioneers were young lions in the days of Darwin. Evolutionary-biological thinking infused this philosophical movement from the start. And yet the last time a major monograph appeared on classic pragmatism and evolutionary biology—Philip Wiener's Evolution and (...) the Founders of Pragmatism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1949)—the author could personally thank Ralph Barton Perry, William James's junior colleague and eventual biographer. John Dewey himself wrote the foreword.Almost seventy-five years later, we have Trevor Pearce's painstakingly researched Pragmatism's Evolution. The author has graduate training in both biology and philosophy and is a former student of William Wimsatt and Robert Richards's (343). The book offers an intricate portrait of how debates about evolutionary biology informed the thinking of a loose-knit group of pragmatists between the years 1860 and 1910. While a remarkable variety of figures are discussed, ten pragmatists command the most attention: Chauncey Wright, C. S. Peirce, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, John Fiske, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, Jane Addams, G. H. Mead, and W. E. B. Du Bois (18). Call them "the American Ten."Without downplaying Darwin, an overarching theme is the special significance of Herbert Spencer. Despite many specific disagreements with him (see e.g. 74, 207–8, 253–54, 281), the American Ten all accepted something more fundamental from Spencer: an intellectual framework that explains mind and morality in terms of functional relationships between organism and environment.After an introduction outlining what Pearce identifies as four chronological "cohorts" of pragmatists (more on this concept below), he examines the 1860s and 1870s reception of Darwin (chapter 1) and Spencer (chapter 2), showing how senior pragmatists like Wright, Peirce, and James defended evolution during this period. In chapter 2, we meet the Metaphysical Club's arch Spencerian, John Fiske, and we get a reading of James's critique of Spencer's psychology and sociology. Chapter 3 gives a highly detailed, reference-work-like portrait of the second cohort's training in evolutionary biology during the 1880s—chiefly Royce, Dewey, Addams, Mead, and Du Bois. In chapter 4, we learn that in the 1880s and 1890s, idealists like Edward Caird, Samuel Alexander, David George Ritchie, and Josiah Royce all co-opted ideas from evolutionary biology, which they apparently thought compatible with Hegelian dialectics. Chapter 5 shows that central planks of Peirce's metaphysics and Dewey's ethics are responsive to an 1890s dispute over the causes of the biological variation upon which selection acts (the so-called "factors" debate). The final two chapters show how pragmatist ethics (chapter 6) and epistemology (chapter 7) were infused with substantive ideas about evolution and about scientific experiment more generally.The depth and use of historical scholarship on offer here are both remarkable. On depth, Pearce draws from nineteen special collections and archives housed at institutions from California to Manchester, UK. The reference list (published on Pearce's website) runs [End Page 160] to 118 pages and was apparently too long for inclusion in the book. Archival research and lengthy bibliographies are to be expected in today's history of philosophy. But the sheer range of sources Pearce draws from is, by any measure, impressive.The use to which he puts those sources is provocative. Close reading, and in particular argument reconstruction, is usually the stock in trade for historians of philosophy. Pearce takes a different approach (7), seeking interpretive insight through a kind of philosophical network analysis. The nodes are mainly philosophers, scientists, and social critics. Unlike digital network analyses, Pearce connects his nodes by hand, via a great multiplicity of social, educational, and intellectual relations. We learn who studied evolution where, with whom, and when; what specific texts were assigned in classes taken, in classes taught; who attacked whom, who sided with whom; and so on.The resulting networks are rich, though they can be difficult to track due to their complexity. At its best, the book uses networks to produce genuine insights that... (shrink)