Uncertainty is recognized as a key issue in water resources research, amongst other sciences. Discussions of uncertainty typically focus on tools and techniques applied within an analysis, e.g. uncertainty quantification and model validation. But uncertainty is also addressed outside the analysis, in writing scientific publications. The language that authors use conveys their perspective of the role of uncertainty when interpreting a claim —what we call here “framing” the uncertainty. This article promotes awareness of uncertainty framing in four ways. 1) It (...) proposes a typology of eighteen uncertainty frames, addressing five questions about uncertainty. 2) It describes the context in which uncertainty framing occurs. This is an interdisciplinary topic, involving philosophy of science, science studies, linguistics, rhetoric, and argumentation. 3) We analyze the use of uncertainty frames in a sample of 177 abstracts from the Water Resources Research journal in 2015. This helped develop and tentatively verify the typology, and provides a snapshot of current practice. 4) Provocative recommendations promote adjustments for a more influential, dynamic science. Current practice in uncertainty framing might be described as carefully-considered incremental science. In addition to uncertainty quantification and degree of belief (present in ~5% of abstracts), uncertainty is addressed by a combination of limiting scope, deferring to further work (~25%) and indicating evidence is sufficient (~40%) – or uncertainty is completely ignored (~8%). There is a need for public debate within our discipline to decide in what context different uncertainty frames are appropriate. Uncertainty framing cannot remain a hidden practice evaluated only by lone reviewers. (shrink)

Is the tendency to morally prioritize humans over animals weaker in children than adults? In two pre-registered studies (N = 622), 5- to 9-year-old children and adults were presented with moral dilemmas pitting varying numbers of humans against varying numbers of either dogs or pigs and were asked who should be saved. In both studies, children had a weaker tendency to prioritize humans over animals than adults. They often chose to save multiple dogs over one human, and many valued the (...) life of a dog as much as the life of a human. While they valued pigs less, the majority still prioritized ten pigs over one human. By contrast, almost all adults chose to save one human over even one hundred dogs or pigs. Our findings suggest that the common view that humans are far more morally important than animals appears late in development and is likely socially acquired. (shrink)

Let the moral question of personal identity be the following: what is the nature of the entities we should focus our prudential concerns and ascriptions of responsibility around? (If indeed we should structure these things around any entities at all.) Let the semantic question of personal identity be the question of what is the nature of the entities that ‘person’ is true of. A naive (in the sense of simple and intuitive) view would have it that the two questions are (...) so intimately connected that the entities we should focus our concerns and ascriptions around are, pretty trivially, the persons. In part, my aim here is to evaluate this naive view. However, I will not actually attempt to give a definite verdict on it. Rather, I will identify the assumptions under which the naive view is true, and discuss how to go about evaluating those assumptions. (shrink)

There are two possible ways to understand form and substance in legal reasoning. The first refers to the distinction between concepts and their applications, whereas the second concentrates on the difference between authoritative and non-authoritative reasons. These approaches refer to the formalistic and positivistic conceptions of the law, the latter being the author's point of departure. Nevertheless, they are both helpful means of analysis in legal interpretation. Interpretation is divided into formal and substantive justification. They have certain functions and they (...) are utilized in interaction. Authoritative reasons and formal reasoning constitute the necessary point of departure. However, substantive reasons are also necessary in order to justify choices included in interpretation. In addition to formal and substantive reasoning, the role of legal concepts is analysed. (shrink)

This paper deals with the concept of practical wisdom and its applications in the field of jurisprudence. The starting point is the Aristotelian idea that a skill to understand and apply law is an embodiment of practical sense. racticality of law has many dimensions. One important dimension is contextuality. Contextuality appears as the situation dependence of interpretation. Hence, the ultimate content of law is context dependent, too. I try to elucidate the essence of practicality of law and its interpretation by (...) examining a precedent of the Finnish Supreme Court (KKO 1997: 87). It is a case involving the distribution of an estate among heirs. The main idea of that decision is that the proper values of inheritance‐shares depend on the utilization values of them and the whole economic situation among heirs. What is just depends on a situation. Taken seriously, the practicality and contextuality of law forces us to adopt an unconventional conception of jurisprudence. First, it is doubtful if one can point to any scientific method at all. Second, according to this conception, legal dogmatics is not a description of law. Rather, it is a skill of argumentation, the skill of taking considered steps from different kinds of arguments to conclusions. The purpose of legal dogmatics is to offer valid and useful arguments to be used in different situations. (shrink)

Jaakko Hintikka's Kantianism in philosophy of logic and mathematics is known to go further than Kant's own, for he argues that mathematical reasoning involves the "language-games" of seeking and finding. Therefore, logic mirrors the structure of this activity. But Hintikka also pushes the Copemican Revolution further to epistemology and philosophy of science. He agrees that "reason has insight only into what which it produces after a plan of ist own", but gives the idea a new logical turn. Kant thought that (...) reason imposes certain architectonic constraints on the possible outcome of inquiry, but Hintikka's interrogative model of inquiry also emphasizes the activity of and therefore the strategy in, putting questions to Nature. (shrink)

The Discourses of Master Kong: The Essence of Confucianism, written in Finnish by Jyrki Kallio, is a laudable work on Confucianism not only for students of Chinese philosophy but for a broader audience as well. The book is the first comprehensive work on Confucianism in the Finnish language: it comprises an annotated and critical complete translation of the Analects as well as longer selected and annotated translations from the Guodian corpus and central early Confucian classics such as the Mengzi and (...) Xunzi; it also revisits texts from later Confucian thinkers. This lucidly written work is more than a translation of the seminal Confucian Analects; it is a handbook of Confucian philosophy and... (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) governance and auditing promise to bridge the gap between AI ethics principles and the responsible use of AI systems, but they require assessment mechanisms and metrics. Effective AI governance is not only about legal compliance; organizations can strive to go beyond legal requirements by proactively considering the risks inherent in their AI systems. In the past decade, investors have become increasingly active in advancing corporate social responsibility and sustainability practices. Including nonfinancial information related to environmental, social, and (...) governance (ESG) issues in investment analyses has become mainstream practice among investors. However, the AI auditing literature is mostly silent on the role of investors. The current study addresses two research questions: (1) how companies’ responsible use of AI is included in ESG investment analyses and (2) what connections can be found between principles of responsible AI and ESG ranking criteria. We conducted a series of expert interviews and analyzed the data using thematic analysis. Awareness of AI issues, measuring AI impacts, and governing AI processes emerged as the three main themes in the analysis. The findings indicate that AI is still a relatively unknown topic for investors, and taking the responsible use of AI into account in ESG analyses is not an established practice. However, AI is recognized as a potentially material issue for various industries and companies, indicating that its incorporation into ESG evaluations may be justified. There is a need for standardized metrics for AI responsibility, while critical bottlenecks and asymmetrical knowledge relations must be tackled. (shrink)

People who habituate to stress show a repetition-induced response attenuation—neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, neuroenergetic, and emotional—when exposed to a threatening environment. But the exact dynamics underlying stress habituation remain obscure. The free energy principle offers a unifying account of self-organising systems such as the human brain. In this paper, we elaborate on how stress habituation can be explained and modelled using the free energy principle. We introduce habituation priors that encode the agent’s tendency for stress habituation and incorporate them in the agent’s (...) decision-making process. Using differently shaped goal priors—that encode the agent’s goal preferences—we illustrate, in two examples, the optimising behaviour of agents. We show that habituation minimises free energy by reducing the precision of goal preferences. Reducing the precision of goal priors means that the agent accepts adverse states. Acceptance or tolerance of adverse outcomes may explain why habituation causes people to exhibit an attenuation of the stress response. Given that stress habituation occurs in brain regions where goal priors are encoded, i.e., in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and that these priors are encoded as sufficient statistics of probability distributions, our approach seems plausible from an anatomical-functional and neuro-statistical point of view. The ensuing formal and generalisable account—based on the free energy principle—further motivate our novel treatment of stress habituation. Our analysis suggests that stress habituation has far-reaching consequences, protecting against the harmful effects of toxic stress, but on the other hand making the acceptability of precarious living conditions and the development of the obese type 2 diabetes mellitus phenotype more likely. (shrink)

Intentionality of cognitive states is not reducible to information if the latter is construed in terms of analytical and nomic constraints. Intentionality and the individuation of cognitive states presupposes cultural constraints that let socially constructed information flow. Fred dretske's information-Theoretical account of intentionality is criticised for ignoring the cultural constraints of human cognition.

Many bioethical disputes are conceptual. This means that people quarrel about the use of words that they see as important. The underlying idea is that whoever wins the verbal argument will also be ethically right.

En este trabajo se analizará la interpretación que hace Gilles Deleuze de la naturaleza y el genio como símbolos de la unidad suprasensible de las facultades en la Crítica del juicio. Deleuze propone que el juicio estético puro sería el proceso por el cual se alcanzaría la unidad de las facultades del sujeto trascendental: lo bello expresaría una “unidad suprasensible indeterminada” del sujeto del juicio de gusto. De este modo, aquí se indagará la factibilidad de la tesis deleuziana y se (...) la utilizará como puntapié inicial para realizar una investigación sobre la noción de símbolo y su relación con el juicio de gusto a partir de una lectura de la Crítica del juicio. (shrink)

Metaontology – the study of the nature of ontological issues – has flourished in recent years. The focus of this summary will be on some views and arguments that are central to today’s debate. One theme will be that of how seriously to take ontology: whether there is reason to take a skeptical or deflationary attitude toward ontological claims, as theorists like Rudolf Carnap, Hilary Putnam, and Eli Hirsch in different ways have urged. The other theme will be that of (...) the viability of the Fregean and Quinean approaches to ontology that have been and still are central to analytic philosophy. (shrink)

En este trabajo se analizarán las nociones de “Espacio aliento” y “Espacio cualquiera” desarrolladas por el filósofo francés Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) en Cine I: La imagen-movimiento, Cine II: La imagen-tiempo y en sus lecciones de Cine dictadas en la Universidad de Vicennes entre 1982 y 1984. La hipótesis principal es que estos espacios tienen la característica de ser pro-nominales, puesto que las personas se desintegran en ellos, perdiendo si individualidad, luego de un proceso de absorción e interacción con la atmósfera (...) del mismo. Esta desterritorialización sería análoga a aquella del paisaje pictórico, debido a lo cual un análisis de los espacios cualesquiera y espacios-aliento es pertinente para abordar la estética deleuziana. (shrink)

_Liberal Utilitarianism and Applied Ethics_ explores the foundations of early utilitarianism and, at the same time, the theoretical bases of social ethics and policy in modern Western welfare states. Matti Hayry sees the main reason for utilitarianism's growing disrepute among moral philosophers is that its principles cannot legitimately be extended to situations where the basic needs of the individuals involved are in conflict. He is able to formulate a solution to this fundamental problem by arguing convincingly that by combining (...) a limited version of liberal utilitarianism and the methods of applied ethics, we are able to define our moral duties and rights. _Liberal Utilitarianism and Applied Ethics_ will appeal to students and teachers of philosophy who are interested in the doctrine of utilitarianism or in ethical decison-making. (shrink)

History and Philosophy of Logic, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 106-108, February 2012.