The dialogue between science and theology is no longer confined to discussing theology, physics and biology, but, as these essays make clear, sociology, psychology & neuroscience are now open for discussions between theologians and scientists.

This commentary discusses whether abstract metrical frames are stored. For stress-assigning languages (e.g., Dutch and English), which have a dominant stress pattern, metrical frames are stored only for words that deviate from the default stress pattern. The majority of the words in these languages are produced without retrieving any independent syllabic or metrical frame.

Resonance is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the world of physics and biology, emerging from energy exchanges between interrelated but distinct systems. Resonance experiences, by contrast, are widespread in the human and animal world but not ubiquitous. This essay discusses theological and ethical aspects of resonance theory, particularly pertaining to everyday human experiences of resonance in relation to the more-than-human world. Consistently, resonance experiences intersect the human and the non-human world, and the phenomenon of resonance may thus serve as a bridging (...) concept between science and theology. I argue that while the ubiquitous feature of physical resonance is particularly helpful for reformulating a contemporary creation theology, human resonance experiences are a source for religious experience, hence highly informative for theology and ethics. Resonance theory thus challenges the widespread view that nature is primarily mute, indifferent, or even hostile to human concerns. (shrink)

A fresh look at the importance of natural and international law in the religious politics at the heartlands of the Reformation, from the Low Countries, the German principalities up to Transylvania; from Niels Hemmingsen to Gian Battista Vico; from religious reasons for the universalist claims of natural law to political arguments for the sacred polity, their tension and creative potential.

We present a conservative extension of a Bayesian account of confirmation that can deal with the problem of old evidence and new theories. So-called open-minded Bayesianism challenges the assumption—implicit in standard Bayesianism—that the correct empirical hypothesis is among the ones currently under consideration. It requires the inclusion of a catch-all hypothesis, which is characterized by means of sets of probability assignments. Upon the introduction of a new theory, the former catch-all is decomposed into a new empirical hypothesis and a new (...) catch-all. As will be seen, this motivates a second update rule, besides Bayes’ rule, for updating probabilities in light of a new theory. This rule conserves probability ratios among the old hypotheses. This framework allows for old evidence to confirm a new hypothesis due to a shift in the theoretical context. The result is a version of Bayesianism that, in the words of Earman, “keep[s] an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out”. (shrink)

What's wrong with joining corona parties? In this article, I defend the idea that reasons to avoid such parties come in degrees. I approach this issue from a participation-based perspective. Specifically, I argue that the more people are already joining the party, and the more likely it is that the virus will spread among everyone, the stronger the participation-based reason not to join. In defense of these degrees, I argue that they covary with the expression of certain attitudes.

Philosophers such as Gettier, Frankfurt, and Thomson are famous for their thought experiments. This makes one wonder: how did they invent their cases? Were they just lucky to devise a good case, or did they follow some basic rules that are available to all of us? In this paper, we argue for the latter answer by presenting a guidebook for analysing thought experiments. Our guidebook clearly specifies which factors should be included in a thought experiment, and which factors should be (...) left out. This will help students to see through the fantastical elements of TEs, to learn the practice, and to check whether philosophers are doing things right. We illustrate our account in some detail using examples from Thomson’s thought experiments. (shrink)

According to an influential view by Elizabeth Harman, moral ignorance, as opposed to factual ignorance, never excuses one from blame. In defense of this view, Harman appeals to the following considerations: that moral ignorance always implies a lack of good will, and that moral truth is always accessible. In this paper, I clearly distinguish these considerations, and present challenges to both. If my arguments are successful, sometimes moral ignorance excuses.

Strategic ignorance is a widespread phenomenon. In a laboratory setting, many participants avoid learning information about the consequences of their behaviour in order to act egoistically. In real life, many consumers avoid information about their purchases or the working conditions in which they were produced in order to retain their lifestyle. The question is whether agents are blameworthy for such strategically ignorant behaviour. In this paper, I explore quality of will resources, according to which agents are blameworthy, roughly, depending on (...) their moral concern. The account I will propose—the Maximal Account—has three innovative features: it utilizes a suitable concept of maximal moral concern, it offers an accountability version of the account which significantly differs from the more familiar attributability variant, and it maintains that agents without maximal concern are blameworthy. (shrink)

Previous research has yielded inconsistent findings concerning the relationship between envy and schadenfreude. Three studies examined whether the distinction between benign and malicious envy can resolve this inconsistency. We found that malicious envy is related to schadenfreude, while benign envy is not. This result held both in the Netherlands where benign and malicious envy are indicated by separate words (Study 1: Sample A, N = 139; Sample B, N = 150), and in the USA where a single word is used (...) to denote both types (Study 2, N = 180; Study 3, N = 349). Moreover, the effect of malicious envy on schadenfreude was independent of other antecedents of schadenfreude (such as feelings of inferiority, disliking the target person, anger, and perceived deservedness). These findings improve our understanding of the antecedents of schadenfreude and help reconcile seemingly contradictory findings on the relationship between envy and schadenfreude. (shrink)

To investigate whether Swedish physicians, contrary to Swedish health care policy, employ considerations of patient responsibility for illness when rationing expensive treatments.

It is widely assumed that it is rational to suspend one’s belief regarding a certain proposition only if one’s evidence is neutral regarding that proposition. In this paper I broaden this condition, and defend, on the basis of an improved ancient argument, that it is rational to suspend one’s belief even if the available evidence is not neutral – or even close to neutral.

This article critically reviews a new collection on Pyrrhonism edited by Diego Machuca, Pyrrhonism in Ancient, Modern, and Contemporary Philosophy, which fits within the recent focus on the systematic, philosophical import of Pyrrhonism. In this article I both situate and summarize the problems posed by the authors regarding the Pyrrhonist's position (concerning its coherence, its theoretical motivation, and its practical motivation), and indicate to what extent Pyrrhonists might be able to meet them. I conclude that, so far, Pyrrhonism, i.e. the (...) view which propagates global suspension of belief, remains a promising option. (shrink)

The role tradition played in preindustrial societies has been supplanted by the decisions of countless specialists organized by means of an intellectual and professional division of labor shaping a knowledge infrastructure that sustains these decisions. Three limitations of this knowledge system are discussed: (a) on the macrolevel, it imposes an end-of-pipe approach for dealing with the undesired consequences of decision making, rarely getting to the root of any problem; (b) on the microlevel, individual practitioners of a specialty are trapped in (...) a triple abstraction, leading to a poor ratio of desired to undesired effects of their decision making; and (c) on the intermediate level, it bars the road to genuine solutions to many difficulties faced by contemporary civilization. In this first of four articles, the beginning of a response is developed for the profession of engineering, which will be paradigmatic for other professions, the social sciences, and the university as a whole. (shrink)

This third part continues the exploration of how we can overcome the limitations of the present knowledge system. In preparation, two aspects of current engineering theory and practice are examined because they are paradigmatic: the concept that engineering is essentially problem-solving, which goes against our understanding of human skill acquisition, and the existence of parallel modes of knowing technology derived from professional education and practice and from living in a society permeated by technology. The former suspends practitioners in the previously (...) examined triple abstraction as a primary microlevel characteristic of the current knowledge system and is thus separated from experience and culture. The second mode of knowing derives from daily life experience, symbolically represented by the organization of the brain-mind, which also functions as a mental map for skillfully coping with the world according to a culture. The practitioner primarily derives analytical exemplars from the former knowing and design exemplars from the latter. It is shown how this affects the building of cities and the design of production systems. Umbrella concepts and round tables are introduced as further steps toward transforming university departments, and (as we will see in Part 4) the operation of the university. (shrink)

The Access principle places an epistemic restriction on our obligations. This principle falls prey to the ‘Shirker Problem’, namely that shirkers could evade their obligations by evading certain epistemic circumstances. To block this problem, it has been suggested that shirkers have the obligation to learn their obligations. This solution yields a regress, yet it is controversial what the moral of the regress actually is. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, I spell out this intricate dispute. Second, on the (...) basis of my analyses I propose solutions to the Shirker Problem. (shrink)

This fourth part outlines a strategy for overcoming the limitations of the knowledge system for engineering by combining intellectual maps, preventive approaches, umbrella concepts, and round tables as described in the earlier parts. A discussion of the issues faced by modern medicine illustrates the paradigmatic nature of the diagnosis and prescription made for engineering. The social sciences face mirror-image problems. One response has been the rise of new disciplines such as communications, environmental studies, urban affairs, criminology, and policy studies. To (...) avoid the limitations of discipline-based knowing and doing, a similar strategy for their transformation will have to be implemented. Considerable synergies would result if parallel efforts to transform the present knowledge system were carried out throughout the university. Some suggestions are made as to how this can be supported by organizational and institutional changes. Finally, it is suggested that such a transformation of the university could make a critical and decisive contribution to overcoming the current economic, social, and environmental crises. (shrink)

We develop an approach to automatically identify the most probable multiword constructions used in children’s utterances, given syntactically annotated utterances from the Brown corpus of CHILDES. The found constructions cover many interesting linguistic phenomena from the language acquisition literature and show a progression from very concrete toward abstract constructions. We show quantitatively that for all children of the Brown corpus grammatical abstraction, defined as the relative number of variable slots in the productive units of their grammar, increases globally with age.

In a recent article in this journal, Sus purports to account for what have been identified as the ‘two miracles’ of general relativity—that (1) the local symmetries of all dynamical equations for matter fields coincide, and (2) the symmetries of the dynamical equations governing matter fields coincide locally with the symmetries of the metric field—by application of the familiar result that every symmetry of the action is also a symmetry of the resulting equations of motion. In this reply, we argue (...) that, while otherwise exemplary in its clarity, Sus’ paper fails in this regard, for it rests upon a illegitimate application of the aforementioned result. Thus, we conclude, pace Sus, that these two miracles persist in general relativity. (shrink)