Lectio Praecursoria 5.10.2018: Artikkeli on väitöstilaisuudessa esitetyn englanninkielisen lectio praecursorian käännös. Väitöskirja tutkii ranskalaisfilosofi Michel Foucault’n kokemuksen käsitteitä sekä teemoja, joita hän käsittelee näiden käsitteiden avulla. Analysoimalla eri kokemuksen käsitteitä Foucault'n filosofiassa voimme paitsi ymmärtää paremmin hänen länsimaiseen nykyajatteluun olennaisesti vaikuttanutta työtään myös peilata käsityksiämme terveydestä, mielenterveysongelmista ja itseen kohdistuvista käytännöistä. Usein häneen viitataan ajattelijana, joka kyseenalaistaa kokemusnäkökulman lähtökohtana tieteelliselle tiedolle. Kokemuksen käsitteillä on kuitenkin erityisasema Foucault’n varhaisissa, psykiatriaa ja psykologiaa käsittelevissä kirjoituksissa sekä hänen myöhäisissä etiikkaa tutkivissa teksteissään, joissa hän (...) palaa käsittelemään terveyden ja huolenpidon teemoja. Teksteistä löytyy runsaasti viitteitä ”elettyyn kokemukseen”, ”taustakokemukseen”, ”transformatiiviseen kokemukseen”, ”rajakokemukseen”, ”kokemuksen kenttään” ja ”kokemuksen muotoihin”. Väitöskirja siis asettaa kokemuksen Foucault’n filosofian keskiöön ja analysoi kokemuksen käsitteiden teoreettisia tehtäviä ja merkityksiä. Tutkimus käsittelee myös sitä, minkälaiseksi kokemuksen itsestä on ajateltu muodostuvan filosofisissa traditioissa, joissa kehotetaan kuuntelemaan ja tarkastelemaan itseä, kääntymään itseen, uskomaan itseensä sekä löytämään itsensä. Lopulta tutkimus nivoo kokemusteeman yhteen Foucault’n kriittisen filosofian kanssa. (shrink)

At the heart of Youth Justice Conferencing, a form of restorative justice aimed at addressing youth crime, is the notion that young persons who have committed an offence should be ‘reintegrated’ into their communities (Braithwaite in Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989). This paper focuses on the role of parents as support persons, in particular the ‘crying mum’, an identity often leveraged by the Convenor when prompting the young person to express remorse to the circle. We explore (...) an Avouchment genre that we have observed whereby support persons vouch for the character of the young person. Our analysis considers the ways in which values are composed (as ideational categories are coupled with evaluative interpersonal ones) and unfold in discourse as invitations for participants to align. In Knight’s (2010) terms, when shared, couplings of ideation and evaluation engender bonds through which participants may commune. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide an account of how hunger motivates us to seek food and eat. It seems that the way that it feels to be hungry must play some role in it fulfilling this function. We propose that hunger is best viewed as a complex state involving both affective and somatic constituents, as well as, crucially, changes in the way in which the hungry agent’s attention is deployed. We argue that in order to capture the (...) distinctive way in which hunger motivates we need to articulate the relations amongst such components. The resulting account explains how hunger as an aversive affective reaction to a state of need motivates us specifically to eat and not to just to rid ourselves of the unpleasant sensations associated to it. We suggest, however, that there is more than this to the overall affective experience of the hungry agent, because hunger ordinarily facilitates the elicitation of other, positive affective reactions such as interest and appetite, and recruits them to further its function. (shrink)

In the past decade the central principles of western feminist theory have been dramatically challenged. many feminists have endorsed post-structuralism's rejection of essentialist theoretical categories, and have added a powerful gender dimension to contemporary critiques of modernity. Earlier 'women' have been radically undermined, and newer concerns with 'difference', 'identity', and 'power' have emerged. Destabilizing Theory explores these developments in a set of specially commissioned essays by feminist theorists. Does this change amount to a real shift within feminist theory, or will (...) feminism's links with an emancipatory modernism reinstate an older political agenda? Can we transcend the common counterposition of equality and difference, or is feminism condemned to argue within the terms of this binary opposition? (shrink)

The pluralist sheds the more traditional ideas of truth and ontology. This is dangerous, because it threatens instability of the theory. To lend stability to his philosophy, the pluralist trades truth and ontology for rigour and other ‘fixtures’. Fixtures are the steady goal posts. They are the parts of a theory that stay fixed across a pair of theories, and allow us to make translations and comparisons. They can ultimately be moved, but we tend to keep them fixed temporarily. Apart (...) from considering rigour of proof as a fixture, I discuss fixed models, invariant notions and fixed information about objects across theories. There are other fixtures, but it is enough to start with these. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy, Volume 62, Issue 4, Page 336-358, December 2021.

In the original publication of the article, the funding information was inadvertently missed out. The information is provided in this Correction.

The presence of easily accessible yet unpossessed evidence seems to matter epistemically. In this chapter I offer an inquiry-theoretic explanation of this datum. I argue that agents in the target cases fail to be competent inquirers and gather the relevant easily accessible evidence. This offers a deflationary explanation of the initial datum. I then show how to inflate this explanation to vindicate the thought that unpossessed evidence has defeating power over the justificatory status of one’s beliefs. The inflationary explanation rests (...) on two main planks. First, the subject who believes that p in the target cases ought to have gathered the target piece of evidence that bears on p. Secondly, such a duty is incompatible with justifiedly believing p. Along the way, the chapter offers a framework for thinking about zetetic competence, comments on the existence of epistemic duties of inquiry, and discusses the relationship between such duties and traditional epistemic norms of belief. (shrink)

Recent epidemiological reports of associations between socioeconomic status and epigenetic markers that predict vulnerability to diseases are bringing to light substantial biological effects of social inequalities. Here, we start the discussion of the moral consequences of these findings. We firstly highlight their explanatory importance in the context of the research program on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and the social determinants of health. In the second section, we review some theories of the moral status of health inequalities. (...) Rather than a complete outline of the debate, we single out those theories that rest on the principle of equality of opportunity and analyze the consequences of DOHaD and epigenetics for these particular conceptions of justice. We argue that DOHaD and epigenetics reshape the conceptual distinction between natural and acquired traits on which these theories rely and might provide important policy tools to tackle unjust distributions of health. (shrink)

I present a puzzle about inquiry and discuss two potential solutions. The puzzle stems from two equally compelling sets of data suggesting that, on the one hand, there’s something epistemically defective with inquiring into questions that don’t have true answers. On the other hand, however, there can be scenarios in which we are epistemically permitted to inquire into questions that don’t have true answers. How is it that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers can both be defective and (...) permissible from an epistemic point of view? The first solution I consider maintains that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers are always impermissible but can be excusable. The second solution maintains that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers are bad inquiries that can be conducted by inquirers we can legitimately trust. I argue against the former and in favor of the latter. (shrink)

In this study, we explore the role of Chief Executive Officers’ incentives, split between monetary and non-monetary, in relation to corporate social responsibility. We base our analysis on a sample of 597 US firms over the period 2005–2009. We find that both monetary and non-monetary incentives have an effect on CSR decisions. Specifically, monetary incentives designed to align the CEO’s and shareholders’ interests have a negative effect on CSR and non-monetary incentives have a positive effect on CSR. The study has (...) important implications for the design of executive remuneration plans, as we show that there are many levers that can affect the CEO’s decisions with regard to CSR. Our evidence also confirms the prominent role of the CEO in relation to CSR decisions, while also recognizing the complexity of factors affecting CSR. Finally, we propose a research design that takes into account endogeneity issues arising when examining compensation variables. (shrink)

Law and racism are intertwined, with legal tools bearing the potential to serve as instruments of oppression or equity. This Special Issue explores this dual nature of health law, with attention to policing in the context of mental health, schools, and substance use disorders; industry and the environment in the context of food advertising, tobacco regulation, worker safety, and environmental racism; health care and research in the context of infant mortality, bias in medical applications of AI, and diverse inclusion in (...) research; and anti-racist teaching and practice in the context of building an interprofessional curriculum and medical-legal partnerships. (shrink)

Trust and monitoring are traditionally antithetical concepts. Describing trust as a property of a relationship of reliance, we introduce a theory of trust and monitoring, which uses mathematical models based on two classes of functions, including _q_-exponentials, and relates the levels of trust to the costs of monitoring. As opposed to several accounts of trust that attempt to identify the special ingredient of reliance and trust relationships, our theory characterizes trust as a quantitative property of certain relations of reliance that (...) can be quantified and expressed as a scalar quantity. Our theory is applicable to both human–human and human–artificial agent interactions, as it is agnostic with respect to the concrete realization of trustworthiness properties, and is compatible with many views differing on which properties contribute to trust and trustworthiness. Finally, as our mathematical models make the quantitative features of trust measurable, they provide empirical studies on trust with a rigorous methodology for its measurement. (shrink)

Em minha tese de doutorado defendi que, para compreender como Hegel articula a passagem da contradição dialética à lógica, o conceito hegeliano de contradição deve ser analisado sob a perspectiva de uma antinomia. Para sustentar este argumento, propus uma atualização deste conceito a partir de uma estrutura antinômica. Essa atualização, porém, trouxe um outro problema: nessa reconstrução, a contradição, em Hegel, continua a se desenvolver de maneira gradativa, ao passo que a lógica tradicional trabalha apenas com valores de p e (...) -p, e não com níveis de gradação. Assim, para continuar sustentando o argumento de que o conceito hegeliano de contradição, sob a perspectiva de uma antinomia, pode ser compreendido como uma contradição lógica, seria necessário encontrar uma lógica que não operasse apenas com valores binários, mas também com níveis de gradação. Foi a partir dessa necessidade que surgiu a ideia de aplicar o conceito de contradição em Hegel à Lógica Difusa, e esta é, portanto, a proposta do presente artigo. (shrink)

This book by Dr. Desmarais is by all means a positive contribution in the field of Yoga, Indology and cognitive neurosciences. It covers Eastern and Western, ancient and modern, religion and metaphysics, psychology and epistemology, as well as the cultural heritage for these. The book is arranged in six chapters using our common concept of show as a metaphysical stage: getting ready for the show; entering the theatre; taking the stage; all the world as stage; following the plot; thickening of (...) the plot; and finally, the lights come up. This has its source in the Samkhya metaphor of prakrti as analogous to a divine actor, on the world stage and in a cosmic drama. Another symbolic metaphor that comes before our mind is that of Ardhanarinatesvara of Lord Siva, depicted as the Cosmic divine Supreme actor endowed with half-female in his person. The reader, the spectator or audience member, symbolizes the Purusa of Samkhya and yoga. (shrink)

This paper applies Plato’s cave allegory to Enron’s success and downfall. Plato’s famous tale of cave dwellers illustrates the different levels of truth and understanding. These levels include images, the sources of images, and the ultimate reality behind both. The paper first describes these levels of perception as they apply to Plato’s cave dwellers and then provides a brief history of the rise of Enron. Then we apply Plato’s levels of understanding to Enron, showing how the company created its image (...) and presented information to support that image, and how the public eventually emerged from the cave to realize the truth about Enron’s actual accounting practices and financial state, which led to the corporation’s downfall. We find Plato’s allegory both useful in analyzing the relationship between Enron and the public and instructive about the power and moral responsibility of Enron’s executives. (shrink)

In the literature, there have been several methods and definitions for working out whether two theories are “equivalent” or not. In this article, we do something subtler. We provide a means to measure distances between formal theories. We introduce two natural notions for such distances. The first one is that of axiomatic distance, but we argue that it might be of limited interest. The more interesting and widely applicable notion is that of conceptual distance which measures the minimum number of (...) concepts that distinguish two theories. For instance, we use conceptual distance to show that relativistic and classical kinematics are distinguished by one concept only. (shrink)

Over the last decades the problem of the existence of Byzantine philosophy has been posed in terms of the determination of its status, its function, and its subject matter. To a certain extent, this approach to Byzantine philosophy has been motivated by the increasing disciplinary autonomy reached by the other branches of what is nowadays called «medieval philosophy». A series of significant scholarly achievements over the last twenty years have contributed to the development of more-or-less well defined scholarly fields of (...) research concerning the medieval Latin, Arabic, and Jewish philosophical traditions. In regard to Byzantine philosophy the situation is much more complicated. In the first chapter of his La philosophie médiévale, Alain de Libera devotes his first words to the retarded scholarly development of the study of Byzantine philosophy. He claims that Byzantine philosophy has been mainly ignored and misunderstood, and has not been deeply studied. However, from the second half of the twentieth century one can find relevant and extremely important attempts to establish not only the basic features and developments, but the very existence of Byzantine philosophy. In this Forschungsbericht I shall attempt to reconstruct the scholarly debate on this topic, testing the main interpretive attitudes against some concrete cases of thinkers who lived in the area of the Eastern Roman Empire and who are labelled by most modern historians as «Byzantine». (shrink)

It is often claimed that democratic voters have epistemic responsibilities. However, it is not often specified why voters have such epistemic responsibilities. In this paper, I contend that voters have epistemic responsibilities because voting is best understood as an act that bears assertoric force. More precisely, voters perform what I call an act of political advocacy whereby, like an asserter who states or affirms that something is the case, they state or affirm that a certain course of political action is (...) the one that should be followed or enacted. Consequently, the performance of acts of political advocacy such as voting should be understood as bounded by epistemic norms mirroring those binding the act of assertion and yield epistemic responsibilities mirroring the ones required to satisfy these norms. (shrink)

In 2003, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Regina McKnight, an African American woman who was convicted at the age of twenty‐two for committing “homicide by child abuse.” She became the first woman in the United States to be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for experiencing a stillbirth. Rather than an outlier case in the annals of American jurisprudence that stretched law beyond reason while restraining compassion and justice, McKnight's conviction inspired similar prosecutions of other poor black women (...) and then of other women. More than one‐third of states consider pregnant women's illicit drug use a form of child abuse, resulting in unprecedented forms of criminal and civil punishment. Laws previously understood to protect pregnant women from domestic violence during pregnancy, such as fetal protection laws, now serve as the vehicles for prosecuting pregnant women. What these prosecutions and laws expose are the multitudinous ways in which the criminalization of poor pregnant women—and normalization of that criminalization, such that even doctors and nurses are expected to participate in it—serve to humiliate women, interfere with their reproductive health, and ultimately rob women of reproductive autonomy. (shrink)

1. Une polémique historique En matière de syntaxe, la notion de corpus fut très controversée et reste encore problématique. Avant Chomsky, les structuralistes utilisaient des corpus, mais le terme désignait alors un échantillon représentatif et homogène d’un aspect syntaxique particulier ou d’une langue donnée et était utilisé dans une perspective behaviouriste exlusivement empiriste et taxinomique. C’est contre ce type de « corpus » que Chomsky s’est prononcé lorsqu’il a commencé à développe...

In technologically grounded organizations, culture is bound tightly to the material characteristics of the technology that the organization manufactures, distributes, or services. Technological grounding helps explain why high-technology organizations often experience cultural integration problems following a merger. Examining the recent merger of US West and Qwest, this article analyzes how powerful actors strategically used the process of technological grounding to enroll a core technology to situate postmerger integration in technological terms, creating a discourse of inevitability that then justified publicly Qwest's (...) cultural domination of US West. (shrink)

The validity of psychological measurement is crucially connected to a peculiar form of epistemic circularity. This circularity can be a threat when there are no independent ways to assess whether a certain procedure is actually measuring the intended target of measurement. This paper focuses on how Gustav Theodor Fechner addressed the measurement circularity that emerged in his psychophysical research. First, I show that Fechner's approach to the problem of circular measurement involved a core idealizing assumption of a shared human physiology. (...) Second, I assess Fechner's approach to this issue against the backdrop of his own epistemology of measurement and the measurement context of his time. Third, I claim that, from a coherentist and historicallysituated perspective, Fechner's quantification can be regarded as a first successful step of a longer-term quantification process. To conclude, I draw from these insights some general epistemological reflections that are relevant to current quantitative psychology. (shrink)

A popular definition of epistemic peerage maintains that two subjects are epistemic peers if and only if they are equals with respect to general epistemic virtues and share the same evidence about the targeted issue. In this paper I shall take up the challenge of defending the necessity of the evidential equality condition for a definition of epistemic peerage from criticisms that can be elicited from the literature on peer disagreement. The paper discusses two definitions that drop this condition and (...) argues that they yield implausible verdicts about the instantiation of the epistemic peerage relation. (shrink)

Biotechnology surpasses even computer technology in predictions of its potential for revolutionary effects on humankind. It includes agribusiness and phar-maceuticals. The U.S. government began investing heavily in biotechnology research in the 1980s, and by 1987 had spent approximately $2.7 billion to support research and development, including $150 million for agricultural biotechnology. The approximately sixty U.S. biotechnology companies invested $3.2 billion in R and D in 1991 alone, with a total of more than $10 billion spent since the industry began in (...) the late 1970s. (shrink)

The intriguing issue of pain and suffering in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOCs), particularly in Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome/Vegetative State (UWS/VS) and Minimally Conscious State (MCS), is assessed from a theoretical point of view, through an overview of recent neuroscientific literature, in order to sketch an ethical analysis. In conclusion, from a legal and ethical point of view, formal guidelines and a situationist ethics are proposed in order to best manage the critical scientific uncertainty about pain and suffering in DOCs (...) and ensure the best possible care for the patient. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a new term, adoptism, to characterize the unique form(s) of marginalization to which adopted persons are subjected. Adoptism shows up primarily as enforced gratitude, and this injunction to be grateful carries with it epistemic harms that have heretofore been overlooked because the dominant social narrative surrounding adoption is that it is an overwhelmingly positive practice. This dominant view stems largely from adoptive parents and the adoption industry, which is an institution, I argue, that is far (...) from child-centered and beneficent. Because those most impacted by being adopted, adopted persons, are conspicuously absent in discussions of adoption, there is a great potential for epistemic injustice. These injustices are magnified when adoptees attempt to provide testimony that challenges the prevailing social script surrounding adoption. Using my lived experience as a domestic adoptee, as well as the testimony of many other adopted persons, I uncover and examine the ways adoptees are harmed in our capacities as knowers. Finally, after dispelling the myths that adoptist ideology upholds, I suggest ways to redress the otherwise hidden injustices of adoption. (shrink)

The desire to control how others see us is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Decades of research have suggested that the results associated with how others see us are too great an influence to ignore. The tactics we use and behaviors we engage in to control how others see us is known as impression management. This study examines the relationship between regulatory focus and the use of exemplification or supplication impression management tactics. We use regulatory focus theory to examine this phenomenon. First, (...) we investigate the main effects that occur between prevention-focused individuals and exemplification, and between promotion-focused individuals and exemplification and supplication. We then introduce supervisor behavioral integrity as a moderator between regulatory focus and impression management. Our findings suggest a positive relationship between prevention-focused and exemplification, and between promotion-focused and exemplification and supplication. We also find that behavioral integrity strengthens the relationship between prevention-focused and exemplification and promotion-focused and supplication, but not promotion-focused and exemplification. Implications and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

The paper explores the idea that some singular judgements about the natural numbers are immune to error through misidentification by pursuing a comparison between arithmetic judgements and first-person judgements. By doing so, the first part of the paper offers a conciliatory resolution of the Coliva-Pryor dispute about so-called “de re” and “which-object” misidentification. The second part of the paper draws some lessons about what it takes to explain immunity to error through misidentification. The lessons are: First, the so-called Simple Account (...) of which-object immunity to error through misidentification to the effect that a judgement is immune to this kind of error just in case its grounds do not feature any identification component fails. Secondly, wh-immunity can be explained by a Reference-Fixing Account to the effect that a judgement is immune to this kind of error just in case its grounds are constituted by the facts whereby the reference of the concept of the object which the judgement concerns is fixed. Thirdly, a suitable revision of the Simple Account explains the de re immunity of those arithmetic judgements which are not wh-immune. These three lessons point towards the general conclusion that there is no unifying explanation of de re and wh-immunity. (shrink)

We characterize the positional social preference correspondences (spc) satisfying the qualified majority property for any given majority threshold. We also characterize the positional spcs satisfying the minimal majority property. We next evaluate the probability that the Borda, the plurality and the antiplurality spcs fulfil the two aforementioned properties under the Impartial and Anonymous Culture assumption in the presence of three and four alternatives for various sizes of the society. Our results show that the Borda spc is the positional spc which (...) better behaves in relation with the qualified majority principle and the minimal majority principle. (shrink)