In some applications to human beings, the precautionary principle seems to raise specific ethical concerns. For instance, it has been used by a business owner in a court of justice to justify his refusal to hire applicants with a certain geographical origin for safety reasons. Or in public management, the precautionary principle has been used to exclude men who have sexual relations with men from donating blood on the basis of a higher HIV prevalence in this group. Does not the (...) precautionary principle here amount to justifying a form of discrimination? To help analyze what is at stake from a decision-theoretic viewpoint and to consider the possibility of ethical catastrophes, we offer a lexical utility model of the precautionary principle, which generalizes a previous model by Bartha and DesRoches (Synthese 199:8701–8740, 2021), Steel and Bartha (Risk Anal https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13892, 2022). Traditional expected utility theory also comes out as a special case of the model. Our proposal opens new perspectives for considering ethical dilemmas within a precautionary approach. It is intended to serve as a guiding tool for management teams in socially responsible companies, public institutions, and government agencies. (shrink)

The investigation in political science and political sociology often has as objective to settle down the conditions that associate with the occurrence of some type of historical event as, for example, changes of political régime. In the cases in that the unit of time is discreet, the logistical reg..

Moslem thinkers have treated the idea of justice from a religious and human point of view by examining it on two planes: God and Man. Whatever their inclinations may be, their concept of justice is linked to other connected notions such as beauty and ugliness, good and evil, free will, the volition and wisdom of God, and predestination. In the framework of this study of the idea of justice and its related concepts, we shall confine ourselves to setting out the (...) points of view of the principal sects (the Ash'arites, the Mu'tazilites and Maturidism) and of certain philosophers such as Averroes and some mystics including Ibn'Arabi. We shall probably be led to a brief comparison of the ideas of Ibn'Arabi with those of Leibniz. For more ample details on this subject, we refer the reader to a series of articles already published in which we underlined the points of convergence between these two philosophers with regard to the infinite, monadism, optimism, good and evil, and predestination. (shrink)

This paper argues for continuity in purpose and specific results between some hand drawn nebulae, especially those ‘descriptive maps’ by John F. W. Herschel and E. P. Mason in the late 1830s, and the first photographs made of the nebulae in the 1880s. Using H. H. Turners’ explication in 1904 of the three great advantages of astrophotography, the paper concludes that to some extent Herschel’s and Mason’s hand-drawings of the nebulae were meant to achieve the same kinds of results. This (...) is surprising not only because such drawings were conceived and achieved over forty-years earlier, but also because the procedures used in the production of these pictorially and metrically rich images were those directly inspired by cartography, geodesy, and land-surveying. Such drawings provided the standard for what was depicted, expected and aimed at by way of successful representations of the nebulae; standards that seemed to have been used to judge the success of nebular photographs. Being conditions of expectation and possibility for later photography, these drawings were themselves made possible by such techniques of representation and measurement as isolines and triangulation, so fundamental to Imperial and ‘Humboltian science.’Keywords: Ebenezer Porter Mason; Cartography; Draughtsmanship; Observation; Scientific Representation; Philosophy of Scientific Practice. (shrink)

Todo autor tiene su favorito entre los libros que ha escrito. El mío es Confesiones de un médico. Así se refiere el médico y filósofo estadounidense Alfred Tauber a esta obra con ya 12 años de recorrido a sus espaldas que acaba de ser traducida al castellano por Antonio Casado. Un texto que da inicio a la andadura de la epistemología moral defendida por su autor y en el que, por lo tanto, se trazan las líneas maestras de esa propuesta (...) que ocupa un lugar esencial en la obra posterior de este referente de las humanidades médicas en Estados Unidos. Confesiones de un médico se constituye, de esta manera, en la obra de presentación de la filosofía rectora de Tauber y actúa al mismo tiempo como el punto de inicio y el eje sobre el que se ha ido expandiendo su visión. (shrink)

Current scientific research almost always requires collaboration among several (if not several hundred) specialized researchers. When scientists co-author a journal article, who deserves credit for discoveries or blame for errors? How should scientific institutions promote fruitful collaborations among scientists? In this book, leading philosophers of science address these critical questions.

The on-the-ground case conference at the interface of philosophical ethics and clinical psychiatry is an innovative idea that advances pedagogy in presenting a creative approach to teaching and practicing psychiatric ethics. In the current exercise of the proposed partnership, there was a generally positive outcome. The philosopher and the psychiatrist learned from each other, were able to find norms that made their collaboration productive, and found that clinical care was enhanced. My commentary aims to help others replicate this model, and (...) preserve its virtues without its vulnerabilities.Would a mathematical logician or philosopher of aesthetics be as good of a collaborator as a moral philosopher? Probably not.... (shrink)

En este trabajo abordamos la cuestión de la inflación tropológica a partir de los trabajos de Hans Kellner y el debate suscitado a partir de ellos con Wallace Martin. Se trata de la proyección indefinida de los tropos desde el lenguaje hacia dominios que lo exceden, tales como la conciencia o un periodo histórico. Nuestro objetivo es revisitar los problemas que acarrea la inestabilidad y la proliferación tropológica con el fin de evaluar el estatus de la solución aportada por la (...) tropología tetrádica contemporánea. Sostenemos que la tesis de la base figurativa del lenguaje siempre debe dar cuenta de la inestabilidad que introducen los tropos en los intercambios lingüísticos. En este sentido, la tétrada tropológica debe ser evaluada a partir de su productividad heurística, de lo que permite o no hacer con el lenguaje, y no como la versión correcta o definitiva de la clasificación de los tropos. Finalmente, todo esto supone el rechazo de la clásica oposición entre lógica y retórica o tropología como una manera de estabilizar el significado. Para ello, dividimos este trabajo en tres apartados: en el primero presentamos las características de la cuestión de la inflación tropológica y lo ejemplificamos con los trabajos de R. Jakobson y H. White; en el segundo, analizamos algunos problemas implicados en la tesis de la base figurativa del lenguaje que da lugar a la inflación tropológica, especialmente el problema de la inestabilidad del significado; en el tercero, presentamos dos objeciones realizadas por Wallace Martin a los trabajos de Kellner con el fin de ilustrar algunas de las dificultades que acarrea este problema. ARK: ark:/s18537960/pmr1iax/5. (shrink)

Con base en la teoría valorativa de las emociones, desarrollada por Frijda y sus colegas, se argumenta que los sentimientos pueden entenderse como parcialmente isomorfos a las emociones, cuyo rasgo fundamental radica en las disposiciones de un individuo a creer en sus experiencias emocionales y actu..

Epistemic accounts of scientific collaboration usually assume that, one way or another, two heads really are more than twice better than one. We show that this hypothesis is unduly strong. We present a deliberately crude model with unfavorable hypotheses. We show that, even then, when the priority rule is applied, large differences in successfulness can emerge from small differences in efficiency, with sometimes increasing marginal returns. We emphasize that success is sensitive to the structure of competing communities. Our results suggest (...) that purely epistemic explanations of the efficiency of collaborations are less plausible but have much more powerful socioepistemic versions. (shrink)

Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope’s digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely on handmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of handdrawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim (...) investigates hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers. (shrink)

For this year’s Virtual Issue, our guest editor, Omar W. Nasim, has collected together papers from the Aristotelian Society archives that represent a substantial part of a dispute that contributed to the emergence of analytic philosophy in Britain at the turn of the 20th Century. The dispute was primarily concerned with the problem of the external world – the nature of the sensible objects of perception, and how they relate to physical things and the perceiving subject. The participants in (...) this controversy contested the nature of the appearance-reality distinction, whether it is it is possible for a thing to instantiate contrary sensible qualities at the same place and time, the distinction between presentation and representation, the nature of knowledge by acquaintance, and the nature of sense-data – e.g., whether sense-data are psychical or physical, whether they persist unperceived, and how they give rise to knowledge of the external world. G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell were significant contributors to these debates, but so too were several philosophers whose names are now less well known: G. F. Stout, G. Dawes Hicks, Abraham Wolf, T. Percy Nunn, and S. Alexander. This Virtual Issue collects together, for the first time, the important contributions made to these debates by all of these figures. In doing so it provides a fascinating insight into the ways in which Russell’s earliest attempts to construct the external world from sense-data were influenced by the ideas and arguments of his immediate contemporaries. Omar W. Nasim’s specially commissioned introduction to the Virtual Issue sets out the historical context of these disputes about the external world, and details the prominent role played by the Aristotelian Society in making them possible. (shrink)

Human agents happen to judge that a conjunction of two terms is more probable than one of the terms, in contradiction with the rules of classical probabilities—this is the conjunction fallacy. One of the most discussed accounts of this fallacy is currently the quantum-like explanation, which relies on models exploiting the mathematics of quantum mechanics. The aim of this paper is to investigate the empirical adequacy of major quantum-like models which represent beliefs with quantum states. We first argue that they (...) can be tested in three different ways, in a question order effect configuration which is different from the traditional conjunction fallacy experiment. We then carry out our proposed experiment, with varied methodologies from experimental economics. The experimental results we get are at odds with the predictions of the quantum-like models. This strongly suggests that this quantum-like account of the conjunction fallacy fails. Future possible research paths are discussed. (shrink)

Muslim physicians and Islamic jurists analyze the moral dimensions of biomedicine using different tools and processes. While the deliberations of these two classes of experts involve judgments about the deliverables of the other's respective fields, Islamic jurists and Muslim physicians rarely engage in discussions about the constructs and epistemic frameworks that motivate their analyses. The lack of dialogue creates gaps in knowledge and leads to imprecise guidance. In order to address these discursive and conceptual gaps we describe the sources of (...) knowledge and reasoning employed by Islamic jurists and clinicians to resolve the question of when a patient must seek healthcare. As we examine both the scriptural evidence and legal reasoning of jurists and the types of medical evidence used by clinicians to address the same question, we draw attention to the epistemic frameworks and constructs at play and identify how constructs from one field may sharpen the deliberative exercises of the other. Hence our work advances discourses at the intersection of Islam and medicine and offers building blocks for a comprehensive Islamic framework that fully integrates the deliverables of medical science within the deliberations of Islamic jurists. (shrink)

Desde el enfoque del pensamiento ambiental estético-complejo, el artículo presenta un esbozo de lo que podría llamarse una ontología de la agricultura. Su objetivo es aportar con algunas reflexiones para la construcción de una epistemología de los estudios agroecológicos.

Legends thrive, but there is little tangible evidence about dozens of Malay kingdoms, which are said to have flourished long before the emergence of Melaka in the late 14th century. The Bujang Valley in South Kedah, for one, is Malaysia’s richest archaeological site. The valley is the guardian of countless hidden tales which are waiting to be unveiled. Here, the beliefs of the Malay ancestors were centred upon nature and the spirits which permeate every aspect of their lives. These beliefs (...) have been passed down to the next generation by the elderly. They have valuable information to share about their families and ethnicity of which written evidence is often scarce. Such tales may perish if they are not well documented. Oral history, adopted as its testimony, permits us to gather data not available in written records. Oral history techniques are able to elicit facts, feelings, and descriptions, contributing to social history. Moreover, this technique is able to reveal how individual values and actions shaped the past, and how the past shapes present-day values and actions. Findings include offerings made to appease the spirits of the rivers and lands. Other findings include the revelation of the Bujang Valley as the centre of knowledge. The establishment of madrasah – “sekolah pondok” brought about a better understanding of Islam resulting in the inherent beliefs in the supernatural to slowly diminish. All these recollections form a body of knowledge that is priceless and worth recording. Knowledge published in tangible forms is a key factor to worldwide recognition. Therefore, these efforts to safeguard oral history and family stories should be a top priority for new knowledge development and commercial enhancement for generations to come. (shrink)

Understanding how culture evolves in society is an extremely difficult task. The bifocal stance theory (BST) deploys two copying strategies which can be linked to dual-system theories of behavior. BST would benefit from incorporating results from these theories, such as the evolution of attention to goals or steps of a behavioral sequence, and the role of the environment in prompting different copying strategies.

Para la investigación que conllevó al presente artículo se utilizó el método hermenéutico analógico. Con base en los pasos primordiales de análisis e interpretación se acudió al lenguaje narrativo literario y a su relación inmediata con otros tipos de lenguaje: visual, audiovisual, de imagen, televisivo y mixto. Se estudiaron textos escritos, hablados y actuados. Se efectuó un recorrido narrativo, textual, argumentativo siendo fiel a los planteamientos del autor, al medio y al lector, y se acudió a los textos que presentan (...) un mensaje polisémico. Los interrogantes apuntaron a ¿qué quiere decir el autor con el texto referido a la piel? Y, en particular, ¿qué le significa o resignifica el texto analizado a la temática del proyecto? Así, la estructura clásica discursiva se enmarca desde un preludio con un horizonte epistemológico del mito y su relación con la piel hasta un posludio haciendo eco a la virtus hermenéutica que plantea e implementa Beucheot y que implica una interpretación “adecuada” y ceñida a la “verdad” del texto: la piel, el órgano más grande y complejo del ser humano supone una trascendencia biológica y anatómica determinante, la cual debe ser entendida, analizada e interpretada desde diversos contextos estéticos, éticos y narrativos. (shrink)

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of (...) the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them. (shrink)

I this paper, I draw on recent research on the radically embodied and perceptual bases of conceptualization in linguistics and cognitive science to develop a new way of reading and evaluating abstract concepts in social theory. I call this approach Sociological Idea Analysis. I argue that, in contrast to the traditional view of abstract concepts, which conceives them as amodal “presuppositions” removed from experience, abstract concepts are irreducibly grounded in experience and partake of non-negotiable perceptual-symbolic features from which a non-propositional (...) “logic” naturally follows. This implies that uncovering the imagistic bases of allegedly abstract notions should be a key part of theoretical evaluation of concepts in social theory. I provide a case study of the general category of “structure” in the social and human sciences to demonstrate the analytic utility of the approach. (shrink)

I discuss here the definition of computer simulations, and more specifically the views of Humphreys, who considers that an object is simulated when a computer provides a solution to a computational model, which in turn represents the object of interest. I argue that Humphreys's concepts are not able to analyse fully successfully a case of contemporary simulation in physics, which is more complex than the examples considered so far in the philosophical literature. I therefore modify Humphreys's definition of simulation. I (...) allow for several successive layers of computational models, and I discuss the relations that exist between these models, the computer, and the object under study. An aim of my proposal is to clarify the distinction between computational models and numerical methods, and to better understand the representational and the computational functions of models in simulations. (shrink)

This paper accepts as given that business students want to get ahead. It criticizes business schools for their failure to reduce the incongruence between doing what is right and doing what it takes to get ahead. Because of this failure business school graduates carry negative ideas, attitudes and behaviors vis-à-vis social responsibility from business schools into the business world. Recommendations are made for increasing the social responsibility of business schools.

ArgumentKeeping records has always been an essential part of science. Aside from natural history and the laboratory sciences, no other observational science reflects this activity of record-keeping better than astronomy. Central to this activity, historically speaking, are tools so mundane and common that they are easily overlooked; namely, the notebook and the pencil. One obvious function of these tools is clearly a mnemonic one. However, there are other relevant functions of paperwork that often go unnoticed. Among these, I argue, is (...) the strategic use made of different procedures of record keeping to prolong observational time with a target object. Highlighting this function will help us to appreciate the supporting role played by the notebook and the pencil to extend the observational time spent with a target object. With objects as delicate, faint, and mysterious as the nebulae, the procedures used to record their observations helped nineteenth-century observers overcome the temporal handicaps and limitations of large and clumsy telescopes, mounted in the altazimuth manner. To demonstrate the importance of paper and pencil, I will closely examine the observing books, the drawings found therein, and the telescopes of three nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John F. W. Herschel, Lord Rosse, and William Lassell. (shrink)