This paper contrasts two influential theoretical accounts of language change and evolution – Iterated Learning and Social Coordination. The contrast is based on an experiment that compares drawings produced with Garrod et al’s ‘pictionary’ task with those produced in an Iterated Learning version of the same task. The main finding is that Iterated Learning does not lead to the systematic simplification and increased symbolicity of graphical signs produced in the standard interactive version of the task. A second finding is that (...) Iterated Learning leads to less conceptual and structural alignment between participants than observed for those in the interactive condition. The paper concludes with a comparison of the two accounts in relation to how each promotes signs that are effi cient, systematic and learnable. (shrink)

Originally published in 1927, John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems is a landmark work in pragmatist political philosophy. Today many commentators appreciate it as the mature expression of the American pragmatist’s democratic theory (though at least two later essays are perhaps more representative). It is also considered a classic text for students of twentieth-century American political thought. The book was originally a series of lectures given at Kenyon College in 1926. Many of its central ideas grew out of debate (...) Dewey had with a fellow public intellectual, Walter Lippmann. Besides its inclusion in the collected works (1996, edited by Larry Hickman), the only other edition to be released was by Swallow Press in 1954, containing Dewey’s half-page foreword (1927) and his twelve-page afterword (1946). With the arrival of Penn State Press’ new edition, introduced and edited by Melvin L. Rogers, The Public and Its Problems receives a monumental facelift. It includes a chronology of Dewey’s life events, an editorial note, and Rogers’ introduction to the work, subtitled ‘Revisiting the Public and Its Problems’. (shrink)

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an urgent threat to global public health and development. Mitigating this threat requires substantial short-term action on key AMR priorities. While international legal agreements are the strongest mechanism for ensuring collaboration among countries, negotiating new international agreements can be a slow process. In the second article in this special issue, we consider whether harnessing existing international legal agreements offers an opportunity to increase collective action on AMR goals in the short-term. We highlight ten AMR priorities and (...) several strategies for achieving these goals using existing “legal hooks” that draw on elements of international environmental, trade and health laws governing related matters that could be used as they exist or revised to include AMR. We also consider the institutional mandates of international authorities to highlight areas where additional steps could be taken on AMR without constitutional changes. Overall, we identify 37 possible mechanisms to strengthen AMR governance using the International Health Regulations, the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, the International Convention on the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System, and the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm conventions. Although we identify many shorter-term opportunities for addressing AMR using existing legal hooks, none of these options are capable of comprehensively addressing all global governance challenges related to AMR, such that they should be pursued simultaneously with longer-term approaches including a dedicated international legal agreement on AMR. (shrink)

This paper argues that, in addition to humanitarian concerns, policies toward immigrants should also be shaped by recognition of special responsibilities toward some populations of noncitizens. National governments acquire such responsibilities in part through their histories of coercive impositions on those populations. Former imperial powers, in particular, often possess special obligations toward the inhabitants of their foreign colonies that go beyond their general humanitarian responsibilities. Those obligations might be met in various ways; but if national governments of wealthy, formerly imperial (...) states granted greater access for immigration to the poor of their former colonies, migration flows might significantly contribute to reductions in global levels of inequality. (shrink)

Populist protests against Coronavirus-related restrictions in the US appear paradoxical in three respects. Populism is generally hostile to expertise, yet it has flourished at a moment when expertise has seemed more indispensable than ever. Populism thrives on crisis and indeed often depends on fabricating a sense of crisis, yet it has accused mainstream politicians and media of overblowing and even inventing the Corona crisis. Populism, finally, is ordinarily protectionist, yet it has turned anti-protectionist during the pandemic and challenged the allegedly (...) overprotective restrictions of the nanny-state. I address each apparent paradox in turn before speculating in conclusion about how populist distrust of expertise, antipathy to government regulation, and skepticism toward elite overprotectiveness may come together – in the context of intersecting medical, economic, political, and epistemic crises – in a potent and potentially dangerous mix. (shrink)

Human beings can have “strongly certain” beliefs—indubitable, veridical beliefs with a unique phenomenology—about necessarily true propositions like 2+2=4. On the plausible assumption that mathematical entities are platonic abstracta, naturalist theories fail to provide an adequate causal explanation for such beliefs because they cannot show how the propositional content of the causally inert abstracta can figure in a chain of physical causes. Theories which explain such beliefs as “corresponding” to the abstracta, but without any causal relationship, entail impossibilities. God, or a (...) very god-like being, provides the best causal explanation for such beliefs. (shrink)

Americans have always been divided over whether to welcome or to discourage immigration. But virtually all American leaders have rested their views on notions that the United States has unique providential or world-historical significance-as an asylum for the world's oppressed, as a model to the world, or even as the world's leader. Today, it is normatively desirable for the U.S. to view itself not as the world's "city on a hill" but simply as one worthy political society among many others. (...) Whether such a view can be made politically appealing to most Americans, however, remains in doubt. (shrink)

A corrected and extensively annotated version of the sole meeting between two of the most important figures in twentieth-century intellectual life.

This article explores the affective dimension of resilient epistemological systems. Specifically, I argue that responsible epistemic practice requires affective engagement with nondominant experiences. To begin, I outline Kristie Dotson's account of epistemological resilience whereby an epistemological system remains stable despite counterevidence or attempts to alter it. Then, I develop an account of affective numbness. As I argue, affective numbness can promote epistemological resilience in at least two ways. First, it can reinforce harmful stereotypes even after these stereotypes have been rationally (...) demystified. To illustrate, I examine the stereotype of Black criminality as it relates to false confessions. Second, it can encourage “epistemic appropriation”, which I demonstrate by examining the appropriation of “intersectionality” and #MeToo by white culture. Finally, I conclude that resisting harmful resilience requires affective resistance, or efforts that target numbness via different kinds of affective engagement. I consider Kantian “disinterestedness” as a candidate. (shrink)

An international legal agreement governing the global antimicrobial commons would represent the strongest commitment mechanism for achieving collective action on antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Since AMR has important similarities to climate change—both are common pool resource challenges that require massive, long-term political commitments—the first article in this special issue draws lessons from various climate agreements that could be applicable for developing a grand bargain on AMR. We consider the similarities and differences between the Paris Climate Agreement and current governance structures for (...) AMR, and identify the merits and challenges associated with different international forums for developing a long-term international agreement on AMR. To be effective, fair, and feasible, an enduring legal agreement on AMR will require a combination of universal, differentiated, and individualized requirements, nationally determined contributions that are regularly reviewed and ratcheted up in level of ambition, a regular independent scientific stocktake to support evidence informed policymaking, and a concrete global goal to rally support. (shrink)

Human uterus transplantation is currently under investigation as a treatment for uterine infertility. Without a uterus transplant, the options available to women with uterine infertility are adoption or surrogacy; only the latter has the potential for a genetically related child. UTx will offer recipients the chance of having their own pregnancy. This procedure occurs at the intersection of two ethically contentious areas: assisted reproductive technologies and organ transplantation. In relation to organ transplantation, UTx lies with composite tissue transplants such as (...) face and limb grafts, and shares some of the ethical concerns raised by these non-life saving procedures. In relation to ART, UTx represents one more avenue by which a woman may seek to meet her reproductive goals, and as with other ART procedures, raises questions about the limits of reproductive autonomy. This paper explores the ethical issues raised by UTx with a focus on the potential gap between women's desires and aspirations about pregnancy and the likely functional outcomes of successful UTx. (shrink)

Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent traces America's woes to an erosion of community and a loss of a sense of collective self‐governance. He recommends a more communitarian, republican public philosophy as the cure. His book illuminates many important historical and contemporary issues, particularly the link between systems of political economy and visions of citizenship. His methods are, however, too impressionistic to support his empirical claims. He particularly neglects the role of civic republicanism in America's history of racial, gender, and religious discrimination. (...) Hence his call for Americans to minimize liberal doctrines of individual rights in favor of communally minded republicanism is not fully persuasive. (shrink)

Political theorists have argued for and against the propriety of a civic ethics of “public reason” that would set normative bounds on the expression of religious views in the public discourse of government officials and, to a lesser degree, citizens. This essay explores whether critics of ethical restraints on religious discourse have grounds to criticize the religious rhetoric of President George W. Bush. Quantitative and qualitative studies show that Bush has used a distinctive “prophetic” mode of religious expression more often (...) than any modern predecessor. This sort of religious discourse is argued to be ethically dubious from the standpoints of most public reason advocates and most of their critics. Even as it champions democracy and adherence to the plans of divine providence, it discourages and de-legitimates democratic dissent and fails to provide the religious guidance it promises. (shrink)

The first section introduces a distinction between 2 families of cognitive operations, called System 1 and System 2. The second section presents an attribute-substitution model of heuristic judgment, which elaborates and extends earlier treatments of the topic. The third section introduces a research design for studying attribute substitution. The fourth section discusses the controversy over the representativeness heuristic. The last section situates representativeness within a broad family of prototype heuristics, in which properties of a prototypical exemplar dominate global judgments concerning (...) an entire set. (shrink)

It is a commonplace to observe that we have been living through an extraordinary pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist moment. But do the heterogeneous phenomena lumped under the rubric “populist” in fact belong together? Or is “populism” just a journalistic cliché and political epithet? In the first part of the article, I defend the use of “populism” as an analytic category and the characterization of the last few years as a “populist moment,” and I propose an account of populism as a (...) discursive and stylistic repertoire. In the second part, I specify the structural trends and the conjunctural convergence of a series of crises that jointly explain the clustering in space and time that constitutes the populist moment. The question in my title is thus twofold: it is a question about populism as a term or concept and a question about populism as a phenomenon in the world. The article addresses both the conceptual and the explanatory question, limiting the scope of the explanatory argument to the pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist conjuncture of the last few years. (shrink)