Deduction is important to scientific inquiry because it can extend knowledge efficiently, bypassing the need to investigate everything directly. The existence of closure failure—where one knows the premises and that the premises imply the conclusion but nevertheless does not know the conclusion—is a problem because it threatens this usage. It means that we cannot trust deduction for gaining new knowledge unless we can identify such cases ahead of time so as to avoid them. For philosophically engineered examples we have “inner (...) alarm bells” to detect closure failure, but in scientific investigation we would want to use deduction for extension of our knowledge to matters we don’t already know that we couldn’t know. Through a quantitative treatment of how fast probabilistic sensitivity is lost over steps of deduction, I identify a condition that guarantees that the growth of potential error will be gradual; thus, dramatic closure failure is avoided. Whether the condition is fulfilled is often obvious, but sometimes it requires substantive investigation. I illustrate that not only safe deduction but the discovery of dramatic closure failures can lead to scientific advances. (shrink)

A contemporary of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, Tommaso Campanella was a controversial philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet who was persecuted during the Inquisition and spent much of his adult life imprisoned because of his heterodox views. He is best known today for two works: _The City of the Sun_, a dialogue inspired by Plato’s _Republic_, in which he prophesies a vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy; and his well-meaning _Defense of Galileo_, which may have done (...) Galileo more harm than good because of Campanella’s previous conviction for heresy. But Campanella’s philosophical poems are where his most forceful and undiluted ideas reside. His poetry is where his faith in observable and experimental sciences, his astrological and occult wisdom, his ideas about deism, his anti-Aristotelianism, and his calls for religious and secular reform most put him at odds with both civil and church authorities. For this volume, Sherry Roush has selected Campanella’s best and most idiosyncratic poems, which are masterpieces of sixteenth-century Italian lyrics, displaying a questing mind of great, if unorthodox, brilliance, and showing Campanella’s passionate belief in the intrinsic harmony between the sacred and secular. (shrink)

Physicist J. Richard Gott uses the Copernican principle that “we are not special” to make predictions about the future lifetime of the human race, based on how long the human race has been in existence so far. We show that the predictions which can be derived from Gott’s argument are less strong than one might be inclined to believe, that Gott’s argument illegitimately assumes that the human race will not last forever, that certain versions of Gott’s argument are incompatible with (...) Bayesian conditionalization, and that Gott’s argument is self-refuting. -/- *****Note: For Bradley Monton's up-to-date thoughts on Gott's argument, see his _Philosophical Quarterly_ paper co-authored with Brian Kierland, "How To Predict Future Duration from Present Age".*****. (shrink)

Sherri Roush ([2005]) and I ([2001], [2006]) have each argued independently that the most significant challenge to scientific realism arises from our inability to consider the full range of serious alternatives to a given hypothesis we seek to test, but we diverge significantly concerning the range of cases in which this problem becomes acute. Here I argue against Roush's further suggestion that the atomic hypothesis represents a case in which scientific ingenuity has enabled us to overcome the problem, (...) showing how her general strategy is undermined by evidence I have already offered in support of what I have called the 'problem of unconceived alternatives'. I then go on to show why her strategy will not generally (if ever) allow us to formulate and test exhaustive spaces of hypotheses in cases of fundamental scientific theorizing. (shrink)

This paper defends the naïve thesis that the method of experiment has per se an epistemic superiority over the method of computer simulation, a view that has been rejected by some philosophers writing about simulation, and whose grounds have been hard to pin down by its defenders. I further argue that this superiority does not come from the experiment’s object being materially similar to the target in the world that the investigator is trying to learn about, as both sides of (...) dispute over the epistemic superiority thesis have assumed. The superiority depends on features of the question and on a property of natural kinds that has been mistaken for material similarity. Seeing this requires holding other things equal in the comparison of the two methods, thereby exposing that, under the conditions that will be specified, the simulation is necessarily epistemically one step behind the corresponding experiment. Practical constraints like feasibility and morality mean that scientists do not often face an other-things- equal comparison when they choose between experiment and simulation. Nevertheless, I argue, awareness of this superiority and of the general distinction between experiment and simulation is important for maintaining motivation to seek answers to new questions. (shrink)

Many prescriptions offered in the literature for enhancing creativity and innovation in organizations raise ethical concerns, yet creativity researchers rarely discuss ethics. We identify four categories of behavior proffered as a means for fostering creativity that raise serious ethical issues: breaking rules and standard operating procedures; challenging authority and avoiding tradition; creating conflict, competition and stress; and taking risks. We discuss each category, briefly identifying research supporting these prescriptions for fostering creativity and then we delve into ethical issues associated with (...) engaging in the prescribed behavior. These four rubrics illustrate ethical issues that need to be incorporated into the creativity and innovation literature. Recommendations for how organizations can respond to the ethical issues are offered based on practices of exemplary organizations and theories of organizational ethics. A research agenda for empirically investigating the ethical impact these four categories of behavior have on organizations concludes the article. (shrink)

Sherrilyn Roush defends a new theory of knowledge and evidence, based on the idea of "tracking" the truth, as the best approach to a wide range of questions about knowledge-related phenomena. The theory explains, for example, why scepticism is frustrating, why knowledge is power, and why better evidence makes you more likely to have knowledge. Tracking Truth provides a unification of the concepts of knowledge and evidence, and argues against traditional epistemological realist and anti-realist positions about scientific theories and (...) for a piecemeal approach based on a criterion of evidence, a position Roush calls "real anti-realism." Epistemologists and philosophers of science will recognize this as a significant original contribution. (shrink)

How confident does the history of science allow us to be about our current well-tested scientific theories, and why? The scientific realist thinks we are well within our rights to believe our best-tested theories, or some aspects of them, are approximately true.2 Ambitious arguments have been made to this effect, such as that over historical time our scientific theories are converging to the truth, that the retention of concepts and claims is evidence for this, and that there can be no (...) other serious explanation of the success of science than that its theories are approximately true. There is appeal in each of these ideas, but making such strong claims has tended to be hazardous, leaving us open to charges that many typical episodes in the history of science just do not fit the model. (See, e.g., Laudan 1981.) Arguing for a realist attitude via general claims – properties ascribed to sets of theories, trends we see in progressions of theories, and claimed links between general properties like success and truth that apply or fail to apply to any theory regardless of its content – is like arguing for or via a theory of science, which brings with it the obligation to defend that theory. I think a realist attitude toward particular scientific theories for which we have evidence can be maintained rationally without such a theory, even in the face of the pessimistic induction over the history of science. The starting point at which questions arise as to what we have a right to believe about our theories is one where we have theories and evidence for them, and we are involved in the activity of apportioning our belief in each particular theory or hypothesis in accord with the strength of the particular evidence.3 The devil’s advocate sees our innocence and tries his best to sow seeds of doubt. If our starting point is as I say, though, the innocent believer in particular theories does not have to play offense and propose sweeping views about science in general, but only to respond to the skeptic’s challenges; the burden of initial argument is on the skeptic.. (shrink)

Contemporary art can seem chaotic: it may be made of toilet paper, candies you can eat, or meat that is thrown out after each exhibition. Some works fill a room with obsessively fabricated objects, while others purport to include only concepts, thoughts, or language. Immaterial argues that, despite these unruly appearances, making rules is a key part of what many contemporary artists do when they make their works, and these rules can explain disparate developments in installation art, conceptual art, time-based (...) media art, and participatory art. -/- Sherri Irvin shows how rules are now an artistic medium: they are part of the work's structure and shape what it expresses. Rules are meaningful in themselves and help to activate the meanings of non-art materials and found objects, so audiences need to know about the rules to get the most out of their art experiences. Loss of information about the rules, like loss of a chunk of marble, can seriously damage the work, and preserving rules as well as objects is reshaping how museums maintain their collections. Where rules collide with real-world circumstances, they may be broken maliciously, mistakenly, or for good reasons, threatening the work's meanings and sometimes its very existence. -/- Should we celebrate the prominence of rules in contemporary art? Irvin argues that, while rules aren't always used well, they can be used to create distinctive meanings and provide powerful immersive experiences not achievable through any other means. (shrink)

The first generation of children to grow up with electronic toys and games saw computers as our “nearest neighbors.” They spoke of computers as rational machines and of people as emotional machines, a fragile formulation destined to be challenged. By the mid-1990s, computational creatures, including robots, were presenting themselves as “relational artifacts,” beings with feelings and needs. One consequence of this development is a crisis in authenticity in many quarters. In an increasing number of situations, people behave as though they (...) no longer place value on living things and authentic emotion. This paper examines watershed moments in the history of human–machine interaction, focusing on the pertinence of relational artifacts to our collective perception of aliveness, life’s purposes, and the implications of relational artifacts for relationships. For now, the exploration of human–robot encounters leads us to questions about the morality of creating believable digital companions that are evocative but not authentic. (shrink)

According to a common sense theory, facial expressions signal specific emotions to people of all ages and therefore provide children easy access to the emotions of those around them. The evidence, however, does not support that account. Instead, children’s understanding of facial expressions is poor and changes qualitatively and slowly over the course of development. Initially, children divide facial expressions into two simple categories (feels good, feels bad). These broad categories are then gradually differentiated until an adult system of discrete (...) categories is achieved, likely in the teen years. Children’s understanding of most specific emotions begins not with facial expressions, but with their understanding of the emotion’s antecedents and behavioral consequences. (shrink)

Nursing practice occurs in the context of conversations with healthcare users, other healthcare professionals, and healthcare institutions. This discussion paper draws on symbolic interactionism and Fairclough's method of critical discourse analysis to examine language that nurses use to describe the people in their care and their practice. We discuss how nurses’ use of language constructs meaning about healthcare users and their own work. Through language, nurses are articulating what they believe about healthcare users and nursing practice. We argue that the (...) language nurses use can contribute to viewing their practice as tasks on bodies that must be accomplished efficiently and objectively within the biomedical model, rather than relational and person‐centered. Moreover, the language nurses use can perpetuate a sense of powerlessness within healthcare systems yet paradoxically they are in a position of power over healthcare users. Nurses’ compliance with the efficiency and biomedical model results in a lack of emphasis on the full breadth of nursing work, which could be enacted in relational rather than power‐laden practices. We conclude by positing that careful use of language among nurses in all settings is essential, if we are to begin to articulate what nursing is to ourselves and to others. (shrink)

Open Access: This article argues for an aesthetic approach to resisting oppression based on judgments of bodily unattractiveness. Philosophical theories have often suggested that appropriate aesthetic judgments should converge on sets of objects consensually found to be beautiful or ugly. The convergence of judgments about human bodies, however, is a significant source of injustice, because people judged to be unattractive pay substantial social and economic penalties in domains such as education, employment and criminal justice. The injustice is compounded by the (...) interaction between standards of attractiveness and gender, race, disability, and gender identity. -/- I argue that we should actively work to reduce our participation in standard aesthetic practices that involve attractiveness judgments. This does not mean refusing engagement with the embodiment of others; ignoring someone’s embodiment is often a way of dehumanizing them. Instead, I advocate a form of practice, aesthetic exploration, that involves seeking out positive experiences of the unique aesthetic affordances of all bodies, regardless of whether they are attractive in the standard sense. I argue that there are good ethical reasons to cultivate aesthetic exploration, and that it is psychologically plausible that doing so would help to alleviate the social injustice attending judgments of attractiveness. -/- This essay was the winner of the 30th Anniversary of the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

There is a widespread view that in order to be rational we must mostly know what we believe. In the probabilistic tradition this is defended by arguments that a person who failed to have this knowledge would be vulnerable to sure loss, or probabilistically incoherent. I argue that even gross failure to know one's own beliefs need not expose one to sure loss, and does not if we follow a generalization of the standard bridge principle between first-order and second-order beliefs. (...) This makes it possible for a subject to use probabilistic decision theory to manage in a rational way cases of potential failure of this self-knowledge, as we find in implicit bias. Through such cases I argue that it is possible for uncertainty about what our beliefs are to be not only rationally permissible but advantageous. (shrink)

This paper addresses two examples due to Peter Achinstein purporting to show that the positive relevance view of evidence is too strong, that is, that evidence need not raise the probability of what it is evidence for. The first example can work only if it makes a false assumption. The second example fails because what Achinstein claims is evidence is redundant with information we already have. Without these examples Achinstein is left without motivation for his account of evidence, which uses (...) the concept of explanation in addition to that of probability. (shrink)

As aesthetic beings, we are receptive to and engaged with the sensuous phenomena of life while also knowing that we are targets of others’ awareness: we are both aesthetic agents and aesthetic objects. Our psychological health, our standing within our communities, and our overall wellbeing can be profoundly affected by our aesthetic surroundings and by whether and how we receive aesthetic recognition from others. When our embodied selves and our cultural products are valued, and when we have rich opportunities for (...) aesthetic experience and for the exercise of aesthetic agency, the aesthetic can foster and sustain wellbeing and help to make our lives worthwhile. But when we are subjected to aesthetic blight, restriction of our aesthetic agency, and aesthetic devaluing of our embodied selves and our communities’ cultural products, the aesthetic can do great harm: such aesthetic maneuvers play a significant role in oppression and social hierarchy related to race, gender, fatness, and disability. This essay explores the notions of aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents, their relations with each other, and the unique affordances of persons’ status as simultaneously aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents. It examines the prospects for bodily aesthetic experience to promote wellbeing and, at the end, considers how the aesthetic might play a role in establishing forms of mutual vulnerability and recognition to combat oppressive social hierarchies. (shrink)

Ethical choice paralysis is a major barrier to the implementation of ethical design materials into the technology design process. Choice paralysis seems to result from tacit background assumptions propagated by humanistic modes of critical inquiry. I propose that one way of obviating choice paralysis at the professional level is to educate STEM students on how to select ethical design materials for a project. In order to advance that endeavor, I propose some obligations especially for humanistically trained STEM ethics educators. Specifically, (...) I propose that these include obligations to affirm that students can indeed select workable ethical design materials for their projects, to avoid using humanistic modes of critical ethical inquiry when instructing on how to make those selections, and to note that maximizing for ideally ethical results may not be a primary selection criterion. (shrink)

In Tracking Truth I undertook a broader project than is typical today toward questions about knowledge, evidence, and scientific realism. The range of knowledge phenomena is much wider than the kind of homely examples—such as ‘‘She has a bee in her bonnet’’—that are often the fare in discussions of knowledge. Scientists have knowledge gained in sophisticated and deliberate ways, and non-human animals have reflexive and rudimentary epistemic achievements that we can easily slip into calling ‘‘knowledge.’’ What is it about knowledge (...) that makes it natural for us to use the same word in cases that are so vastly different? How is it possible for knowledge to have evolved? What is it about knowledge that it should enhance our power over nature, as Francis Bacon observed? What is it about evidence and knowledge that makes you more likely to have the latter when you have the former? Specialization is necessary to progress, but the division of labor it requires has allowed such questions to fall through the gaps between discussions. These gaps are opportunities. Sometimes newly discovered problems can bring new and better answers even to old questions. The questions I have asked above are ‘‘Why?’’ questions expressed as (apparently) Socratic ‘‘What is?’’ questions, and that is the approach taken in the first five chapters of this book, to offer explanations of familiar phenomena on the basis of rigorous definitions of knowledge and evidence. One might object that this is an old, not a new, style of answer, and one that I ought to be educated enough to reject. Many have thought the project of giving necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge was in its death rattle long ago. The most common argument for this conclusion is an empirical one, that no such attempt has ever been successful in giving the right answer for all examples. And when one asks, as one must, what the ‘‘right’’ answer would be answering to anyway, the project can look even more depressing. But even if there is a clear.... (shrink)

Izard (2010) did not seek a descriptive definition of emotion—one that describes the concept as it is used by ordinary folk. Instead, he surveyed scientists’ prescriptive definitions—ones that prescribe how the concept should be used in theories of emotion. That survey showed a lack of agreement today and thus raised doubts about emotion as a useful scientific concept.

Why should we make our beliefs consistent or, more generally, probabilistically coherent? That it will prevent sure losses in betting and that it will maximize one’s chances of having accurate beliefs are popular answers. However, these justifications are self-centered, focused on the consequences of our coherence for ourselves. I argue that incoherence has consequences for others because it is liable to mislead others, to false beliefs about one’s beliefs and false expectations about one’s behavior. I argue that the moral obligation (...) of truthfulness thus constrains us to either conform to the logic our audience assumes we use, educate them in a new logic, or give notice that one will do neither. This does not show that probabilistic coherence is uniquely suited to making truthful communication possible, but I argue that classical probabilistic coherence is superior to other logics for maximizing efficiency in communication. (shrink)

In the last three decades several cosmological principles and styles of reasoning termed 'anthropic' have been introduced into physics research and popular accounts of the universe and human beings' place in it. I discuss the circumstances of 'fine tuning' that have motivated this development, and what is common among the principles. I examine the two primary principles, and find a sharp difference between these 'Weak' and 'Strong' varieties: contrary to the view of the progenitors that all anthropic principles represent a (...) departure from Copernicanism in cosmology, the Weak Anthropic Principle is an instance of Copernicanism. It has close affinities with the step of Copernicus that Immanuel Kant took himself to be imitating in the 'critical' turn that gave rise to the Critique of Pure Reason. I conclude that the fact that a way of going about natural science mentions human beings is not sufficient reason to think that it is a subjective approach; in fact, it may need to mention human beings in order to be objective. (shrink)

How confident does the history of science allow us to be about our current well-tested scientific theories, and why? The scientific realist thinks we are well within our rights to believe our best-tested theories, or some aspects of them, are approximately true.2 Ambitious arguments have been made to this effect, such as that over historical time our scientific theories are converging to the truth, that the retention of concepts and claims is evidence for this, and that there can be no (...) other serious explanation of the success of science than that its theories are approximately true. There is appeal in each of these ideas, but making such strong claims has tended to be hazardous, leaving us open to charges that many typical episodes in the history of science just do not fit the model. (See, e.g., Laudan 1981.) Arguing for a realist attitude via general claims – properties ascribed to sets of theories, trends we see in progressions of theories, and claimed links between general properties like success and truth that apply or fail to apply to any theory regardless of its content – is like arguing for or via a theory of science, which brings with it the obligation to defend that theory. I think a realist attitude toward particular scientific theories for which we have evidence can be maintained rationally without such a theory, even in the face of the pessimistic induction over the history of science. The starting point at which questions arise as to what we have a right to believe about our theories is one where we have theories and evidence for them, and we are involved in the activity of apportioning our belief in each particular theory or hypothesis in accord with the strength of the particular evidence.3 The devil’s advocate sees our innocence and tries his best to sow seeds of doubt. If our starting point is as I say, though, the innocent believer in particular theories does not have to play offense and propose sweeping views about science in general, but only to respond to the skeptic’s challenges; the burden of initial argument is on the skeptic.. (shrink)

Relatively few philosophers of science today could do all of what Nicholas Maxwell does without hesitating: treat theoretical physics as indicative of all science because it is deemed fundamental, observe and expect science to exhibit a cumulative history of more and more unified knowledge, claim to solve the problem of induction, and insist that philosophy, particularly metaphysics, is crucially relevant to ongoing progress in science. Maxwell is distinctly out of fashion—this is no dappled world—but in hewing to a line he (...) has been developing for decades he presents several intriguing and intertwined proposals for understanding and continuing the progress of physics over the last three and a half centuries toward a single, true, theory of everything. (shrink)

Drawing upon contemporary virtue ethics theory, The Model of The Principled Advocate and The Pathological Partisan is introduced. Profiles are developed of diametrically opposed archetypes of public relations and advertising practitioners. The Principled Advocate represents the advocacy virtues of humility, truth, transparency, respect, care, authenticity, equity, and social responsibility. The Pathological Partisan represents the opposing vices of arrogance, deceit, secrecy, manipulation, disregard, artifice, injustice, and raw self-interest. One becomes either a Principled Advocate or a Pathological Partisan by habitually enacting or (...) embodying the virtues or vices in the context of professional practices. (shrink)

When we get evidence that tells us our belief-forming mechanisms may not be reliable this presents a thorny set of questions about whether and how to revise our original belief. This article analyzes aspects of the problem and a variety of approaches to its solution.

Taylor Swift’s choice to re-record several of her early studio albums might seem purely commercial. But the depth and intensity of the project suggests that Taylor’s Versions are new artworks, not just financially motivated copies. The elements of appropriation, audience participation, and institutional critique tie Swift’s project to a tradition dating back more than a century: conceptual art. I will stop short of arguing outright that Taylor’s Versions is a conceptual art project: it is foremost a contribution to popular music. (...) But considering it in relation to conceptual art sheds light on its achievements and one notable limitation. In the realm of appropriation, the fact that the re-recordings exhibit both close resemblance to and subtle differences from the originals has prompted an intensity of close listening by audience members, with distinctive aesthetic experiences in the realm of the uncanny. In the realm of participation, Swift has creatively motivated her fans to abandon her beloved original albums, and the fans have in turn evolved a variety of strategies to shift their allegiance to the new versions and hold each other accountable. When it comes to institutional critique—the movement in conceptual art that highlights and challenges the power structures governing art institutions—Swift’s project has raised awareness of troubling and exploitative power dynamics in the music industry. However, consideration of historical precursors of Swift’s institutional critique may lead us to question some elements of her self-presentation as a victim of gendered exploitation. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to determine if reading achievement of students from high-poverty US schools differs as a function of participation in summer tutoring versus access to books. Data fro...