While the importance of social norms for shaping and transforming communities is uncontested, their nature and normativity are controversial. Most recent theorists take social norms to arise if members hold certain attitudes, such as expectations on others, perhaps along with certain behaviours. Yet attitudes do not create norms, let alone social norms or social normativity. Social norms are instead ‘made’: through a social process. Social norming processes are special communication processes, often non-verbal and informal. We present different versions of a (...) process-based account of social norms and social normativity. The process-based view brings social norms closer to legal norms, as processes represent social ‘acts’, just as laws and contracts arise through acts rather than mere attitudes, for instances acts of voting or signing. (shrink)

This review essay provides a critical discussion of Linda Zagzebski’s Exemplarist Moral Theory. We agree that emt is a book of impressive scope that will be of interest to ethical theorists, as well as epistemologists, philosophers of language, and philosophers of religion. Throughout the critical discussion we argue that exemplarism faces a number of important challenges, firstly, in dealing with the fallibility of admiration, which plays a central role in the theoretical framework, and secondly, in serving as a practical guide (...) for moral development. Despite this, we maintain that emt points the way for significant future theoretical and empirical research into some of the most well-established questions in ethical theory. (shrink)

We consider Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis’s generalization of Aumman’s famous result on “agreeing to disagree", in the context of imprecise probability. The main purpose is to reveal a connection between the possibility of agreeing to disagree and the interesting and anomalous phenomenon known as dilation. We show that for two agents who share the same set of priors and update by conditioning on every prior, it is impossible to agree to disagree on the lower or upper probability of a hypothesis unless (...) a certain dilation occurs. With some common topological assumptions, the result entails that it is impossible to agree not to have the same set of posterior probabilities unless dilation is present. This result may be used to generate sufficient conditions for guaranteed full agreement in the generalized Aumman-setting for some important models of imprecise priors, and we illustrate the potential with an agreement result involving the density ratio classes. We also provide a formulation of our results in terms of “dilation-averse” agents who ignore information about the value of a dilating partition but otherwise update by full Bayesian conditioning. (shrink)

This paper studies Aumann’s agreeing to disagree theorem from the perspective of dynamic epistemic logic. This was first done by Dégremont and Roy (J Phil Log 41:735–764, 2012) in the qualitative framework of plausibility models. The current paper uses a probabilistic framework, and thus stays closer to Aumann’s original formulation. The paper first introduces enriched probabilistic Kripke frames and models, and various ways of updating them. This framework is then used to prove several agreement theorems, which are natural formalizations of (...) Aumann’s original result. Furthermore, a sound and complete axiomatization of a dynamic agreement logic is provided, in which one of these agreement theorems can be derived syntactically. These technical results are used to show the importance of explicitly representing the dynamics behind the agreement theorem, and lead to a clarification of some conceptual issues surrounding the agreement theorem, in particular concerning the role of common knowledge. The formalization of the agreement theorem thus constitutes a concrete example of the so-called dynamic turn in logic. (shrink)

In their paper ‘Responsibility, second opinions and peer-disagreement: ethical and epistemological challenges of using AI in clinical diagnostic contexts’, Kempt and Nagel discuss the use of medical AI systems and the resulting need for second opinions by human physicians, when physicians and AI disagree, which they call the rule of disagreement.1 The authors defend RoD based on three premises: First, they argue that in cases of disagreement in medical practice, there is an increased burden of proof for the physician in (...) charge, to defend why the opposing view is adopted or overridden. This burden for justification can be understood as an increased responsibility. In contrast, such burden does allegedly not arise, when physicians agree in their judgement. Second, in those medical contexts where humans collaborate with humans such justification can be provided, since human experts can discuss the evidence and reasons that have led them to their judgement, through which the sources of disagreement can be found and a justified decision can be made by the physician in charge. Third, unlike human-to-human collaboration, such communicative exchange is not possible with an AI system. Due to AI’s opacity, the physician in charge has no means of illuminating why the AI disagrees. Conclusively, the authors propose RoD as a solution. RoD suggests that a second human expert should be consulted for advise in cases of human–AI disagreement. Once AI systems become more widespread in clinical practice, it can be expected that such type of disagreement occurs more frequently. AI, after all, is being implemented, because it promises, among others, higher accuracy, which implies that some abnormalities will be detected that the physician would have missed.2 Hence, it is laudable to discuss the moral implications of …. (shrink)

In this article, we extend the well-known ‘agreeing-to-disagree’ and ‘no-trade’ results from economics and game theory to international relations. We show that two rational countries should never agree to go to war when war is inefficient and when rationality is common knowledge. We argue that this result might provide one possible explanation for the empirical finding, often referred to as the ‘democratic peace’, that modern democracies rarely go to war with one another. We propose that the informational properties of pluralistic (...) institutions (as opposed to oligarchies or dictatorships) lead to better decision-making by democracies and that democracies are therefore more likely to be the rational actors necessary for the ‘no-war’ result. We discuss empirical evidence in support of this proposition. (shrink)

In his plea for consensual democracy in Africa, Kwasi Wiredu recommends unanimity about what is to be done, not what ought to be done, or unanimity on action rather than unanimity of values, beliefs and opinion. I caution the use of this procedural instrument by showing that some issues are so value-laden that a group decision cannot be value-neutral. It may sometimes be more productive to entertain value differences to keep them from going underground and becoming dangerous. However, the ability (...) to locate some common interest or ground seems to be crucial for such value confrontation. (shrink)

What type of speech act is a norm of action, when the norm is agreed upon as the conclusion of an argumentative dialogue? My hypothesis is that, whenever a norm of action is the conclusion of an argument, it should be analyzed as the statement of a norm and thus as a verdictive speech act. If the context is appropriate, and the interlocutors are sincerely (or institutionally) committed to their argumentative exchange and its conclusion, then this verdictive motivates and institutes (...) a new one with the force of an exercitive. The interlocutors’ recognition and acceptance that the new illocution has been performed lends the norm its exercitive force. (shrink)

In “Agreeing to Disagree” [1], Robert Aumann proves that a group of agents who once agreed about the probability of some proposition for which their current probabilities are common knowledge must still agree, even if those probabilities reflect disparate observations. Perhaps one saw that a card was red and another saw that it was a heart, so that as far as that goes, their common prior probability of 1/52 for its being the Queen of hearts would change in the one (...) case to 1/26, and in the other to 1/13. But if those are indeed their current probabilities, it cannot be the case that both know them, and both know that both know them, etc., etc. (shrink)

Many ICT services require that users explicitly consent to conditions of use and policies for the protection of personal information. This consent may become ‘routinised’. We define the concept of routinisation and investigate to what extent routinisation occurs as well as the factors influencing routinisation in a survey study of internet use. We show that routinisation is common and that it is influenced by factors including gender, age, educational level and average daily internet use. We further explore the reasons users (...) provide for not reading conditions and policies and show that they can be grouped in meaningful ways that may delineate different types of routinsation. (shrink)

In discussions about the legalisation of active, voluntary euthanasia it is sometimes claimed that what should happen in a liberal society is that the two sides in the debate “agree to disagree”. This paper explores what is entailed by agreeing to disagree and shows that this is considerably more complicated than what is usually believed to be the case. Agreeing to disagree is philosophically problematic and will often lead to an unstable compromise.

Collaborative interaction pervades everyday practices: work meetings, innovation and product design, education and arts. Previous studies have pointed to the central role of acknowledgement and acceptance for the success of joint action, by creating affiliation and signaling understanding. We argue that various forms of explicit miscommunication are just as critical to challenge, negotiate and integrate individual contributions in collaborative creative activities. Through qualitative microanalysis of spontaneous coordination in collective creative LEGO constructions, we individuate three interactional styles: inclusive, characterized by acknowledgment (...) and praise; instructional, characterized by self-repair; and integrative, characterized by widespread self- and other-repair. We investigate how different interaction styles leave distinct traces in the resulting LEGO models. The inclusive interaction style results in concatenations of individual contributions with little coherence and core narrative. The instructional style produces coherent, but individually driven models. Finally, the integrative style generates more innovative models, synthesizing individual contributions in shared narratives or schemas. (shrink)

David Hollenbach, working within the context of human rights theory, has developed the notion of "indigenous pluralism" as a means of coping with the problems that arise when different religious traditions hold distinct or incompatible interpretations of human rights. It will be argued that indigenous pluralism is a theoretically and practically useful concept for bioethics as well and hence should be incorporated into bioethical methodology and processes of bioethical policy formation. Subsequently, the notion of indigenous pluralism will be discussed in (...) relation to determinations of death as a means of illustrating this concept's applicability to bioethical inquiry. (shrink)

The editor suggested my writing an article on the question whether it was possible to provide an ethics based upon principles which would be agreed to by all enlightened men, and he further suggested that I should begin the article by stating clearly what morality is. That is a somewhat difficult task, because while “morality” might be defined as “living as one ought,” it is a very disputable question whether and how this “ought” is itself to be defined, and I (...) could not undertake to deal with this question by the way as an introduction to an article on something else. It is, however, clear that there is another sense of “ought” besides the strictly moral sense. We do use the term in cases where it does not entail that a man is neglecting his moral duty if he does not do what he “ought.” For instance we say: “You ought to have seen that film,” “You ought not to have made that move,” “You ought to have seen through that argument,” even “Hitler ought to have invaded England after Dunkirk” where we should have regarded it as the reverse of a good thing if he had done what we say he ought. In none of these cases are we asserting a moral obligation. For we do not ordinarily regard people as under a moral obligation to seek their own pleasure, nor to make certain moves in a game, and while we should say that in matters of serious concern a person is morally obliged to do his best to form a true view as to the merits of a relevant argument, we should not say that he was morally obliged actually to form a true view, for this does not depend solely on his will. And in the fourth instance the action is one which we should think morally wrong rather than morally obligatory. What is there in common between “ought” as used in these cases and the moral “ought”? It is that in each case the action fits the situation, either wholly, or with certain limitations, as in the last instance where we presumably mean that to invade England would have fitted in better with Hitler's ends in the given environment than did the policy Hitler actually adopted. (shrink)

Collaborative interaction pervades many everyday practices: work meetings, innovation and product design, education and arts. Previous studies have pointed to the central role of acknowledgement and acceptance for the success of joint action, by creating affiliation and signaling understanding. We argue that various forms of explicit miscommunication are just as critical to challenge, negotiate and integrate individual contributions in collaborative creative activities. Through qualitative microanalysis of spontaneous coordination in collective creative LEGO constructions, we individuate three interactional styles: inclusive, characterized by (...) acknowledgment and praise; instructional, characterized by self-repair; and integrative, characterized by widespread self- and other-repair. We then investigate how different interaction styles leave distinct material traces in the resulting LEGO models. The inclusive interaction style generally results in concatenations of individual contributions with little coherence and core narrative. The instructional style produces coherent, but largely individually driven models. Finally, the integrative style generates more innovative models, synthesizing individual contributions in shared narratives or schemas. (shrink)

In Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman presents a framework to quantify the epistemic effects that various policies, procedures, and behaviors can have on a group of agents. In this essay, I show that the framework requires some modifications when applied to agents with credences. The required modifications carry with them an interesting consequence, namely, that any group whose members disagree can become more accurate by forming a consensus through averaging their credences. I sketch a way that this result (...) can be used to show that individual norms of rationality and group norms of rationality can dictate conflicting behaviors for the members of some groups. I conclude by discussing how some of the assumptions used to generate the consensus result might be loosened.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.WE OUGHT TO AGREE: A CONSEQUENCE OF REPAIRING GOLDMAN'S GROUP SCORING RULEVolume 9, Issue 2Matthew KopecDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.3Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. WE OUGHT TO AGREE: A CONSEQUENCE OF REPAIRING GOLDMAN'S GROUP SCORING RULEVolume 9, Issue 2Matthew KopecDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.3Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. WE OUGHT TO AGREE: A CONSEQUENCE OF REPAIRING GOLDMAN'S GROUP SCORING RULEVolume 9, Issue 2Matthew KopecDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.3Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

This squib attempts to constrain semantic theories of agree wh constructions by broadening the data set and collecting naive speakers’ intuitions. Overall, our data suggest relatively permissive truth-conditions for these constructions. They also suggest a previously undiscussed presupposition for agree wh and also indicate that agree wh is not straightforwardly reducible to agree that. Although some accounts suggest differences in truth conditions among different asymmetrical agree with constructions and symmetrical agree constructions, we do not find any indication of such truth-conditional (...) distinctions. In the course of our exploration of the data, we offer a new approach to distinguishing between truth, falsity and presuppositional failure. (shrink)

How should we deal with noncompliance in the context of the Paris Agreement? After having delimited the scope of noncompliance as a motivational issue, I will argue that two kinds of reasons can motivate agents to comply, moral and prudential reasons. Then, I will show that moral and prudential reasons can motivate compliance, although in different ways, as moral reasons require the institutions, whereas prudential reasons are thought to be self-sufficing. Prudential reasons come with the assumption that they have ample (...) motivational force to elicit compliance. I will contend that, for what concerns climate treaties, this assumption does not hold. To do so, I will argue that, from an interest-based perspective, reasons for agreeing on a treaty rarely conflate with the reasons that motivate agents to complying with it, so, if we want to ensure compliance, the international climate regime should establish institutions to oversee compliance when prudential reasons fails to motivate. (shrink)

This article identifies conditions under which robust predictive modeling results have special epistemic significance---related to truth, confidence, and security---and considers whether those conditions hold in the context of present-day climate modeling. The findings are disappointing. When today’s climate models agree that an interesting hypothesis about future climate change is true, it cannot be inferred---via the arguments considered here anyway---that the hypothesis is likely to be true or that scientists’ confidence in the hypothesis should be significantly increased or that a claim (...) to have evidence for the hypothesis is now more secure. (shrink)

Religious education (RE) has often found itself at the centre of debates about education's role in promoting social cohesion in contemporary multi-religious societies. The paper considers RE's relationship to religious plurality within the broader context of politics of curriculum and debates on pluralism. Drawing upon the recent works on the history of religion and using the teaching of the histories and cultures of Muslims in RE as a case study, it argues that RE has yet to fulfill its potential in (...) this regard. The paper examines reasons for this and recommends alternative approaches to content which may help RE rise to the challenges posed above. (shrink)

Mathematicians often conduct aesthetic judgements to evaluate mathematical objects such as equations or proofs. But is there a consensus about which mathematical objects are beautiful? We used a comparative judgement technique to measure aesthetic intuitions among British mathematicians, Chinese mathematicians, and British mathematics undergraduates, with the aim of assessing whether judgements of mathematical beauty are influenced by cultural differences or levels of expertise. We found aesthetic agreement both within and across these demographic groups. We conclude that judgements of mathematical beauty (...) are not strongly influenced by cultural difference, levels of expertise, and types of mathematical objects. Our findings contrast with recent studies that found mathematicians often disagree with each other about mathematical beauty. (shrink)

This paper discusses the definition of argumentation as a means for persuading an audience on the acceptability of a thesis. It is argued that persuasion is a goal that relates more to the communicative situation, the type of interaction or the type of discourse, rather than to the argumentative nature of it. Departing from the analysis of a short conversational sequence between people who agree on an issue and nevertheless argue, I suggest that a definition of argumentation in terms of (...) persuasion fails to account for what people are actually doing in these situations. I propose instead that several functions may be assigned to argumentation when considering the context in which it is produced: a cognitive function (which helps participants to elaborate a position on the discussed issue), and an identifying function (which enables them to portray themselves through the expression and the justification of their opinion). In the case analyzed here, a third function to which the argumentative activity contributes can also be identified, namely the enhancing of the emotional tonality of the relationship between the participants. While it becomes clear from the discussion of this argumentative sequence that the participants do not seek to persuade each other or some third party, it is not suggested that argumentation never aims at persuading an audience, but rather that persuasion cannot be considered as a defining feature of argumentation. (shrink)

We represent consensus formation processes based on iterated opinion pooling as a dynamic approach to common knowledge of posteriors :1236–1239, 1976; Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis in J Econ Theory 28:192–200, 1982). We thus provide a concrete and plausible Bayesian rationalization of consensus through iterated pooling. The link clarifies the conditions under which iterated pooling can be rationalized from a Bayesian perspective, and offers an understanding of iterated pooling in terms of higher-order beliefs.

In Bester’s article (2018) challenging the use of the harm principle and advocating sole reliance on the use of a best interest standard (BIS) in pediatric decision-making, we believe that the auth...

End-of-life decision-making is controversial. There are different views about when it is appropriate to limit life-sustaining treatment, and about what palliative options are permissible. One approach to decisions of this nature sees consensus as crucial. Decisions to limit treatment are made only if all or a majority of caregivers agree. We argue, however, that it is a mistake to require professional consensus in end-of-life decisions. In the first part of the article we explore practical, ethical, and legal factors that support (...) agreement. We analyse subjective and objective accounts of moral reasoning: accord is neither necessary nor sufficient for decisions. We propose an alternative norm for decisions – that of ‘professional dissensus’. In the final part of the article we address the role of agreement in end-of-life policy. Such guidelines can ethically be based on dissensus rather than consensus. Disagreement is not always a bad thing. (shrink)

Since 1989, social change in Europe has moved between two stories. The first being a politics of memory emphasizing the specificity of culture in national narratives, and the other extolling the virtues of the Enlightenment heritage of reason and humanity. While the Holocaust forms a central part of West European collective memory, national victimhood of former Communist countries tends to occlude the centrality of the Holocaust. Highlighting examples from the Estonian experience, this article asks whether attempts to find one single (...) European memory of trauma ignore the complexity of history and are thus potentially disrespectful to those who suffered under both Communism and National Socialism. Pluralism in the sense of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin is presented as a way in which to move beyond the settling of scores in the past and towards a respectful recognition and acknowledgement of historical difference. (shrink)

The closeness of preferences in a preference profile has mainly been measured by aggregating the distances between each pair of preferences. We argue in this paper that some important information is lost in this process and we opt for considering the profile as a whole when constructing such a measure. With this idea in mind, we propose axioms a cohesiveness measure should satisfy and show that these properties fully characterize a new family of measures.

Bien, Victor This article addresses the importance of science to Humanists, as expressed in an object of the Humanist Society of NSW, namely 'to promote the fullest use of science for human welfare'. Similarly, Humanist support for science is expressed in the Amsterdam Declaration endorsed by the 50th Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in 2002. Paragraph 2 reads: Humanism is rational. It seeks to use science creatively, not destructively. Humanists believe that the solutions to the world's problems (...) lie in human thought and action rather than divine intervention. Humanism advocates the application of the methods of science and free inquiry to the problems of human welfare. But Humanists also believe that the application of science and technology must be tempered by human values. Science gives us the means but human values must propose the ends. (shrink)

In one of the unpublished parts of his manuscript titled the Spicilegia, Arthur Schopenhauer presents an uncharacteristically sympathetic reading of an Aristotelian text. The text in question, De anima III. 5, happens to include the only occurrence of arguably the most controversial idea in Aristotle, namely the distinction between active and passive nous. Schopenhauer interprets these two notions as corresponding to his own notions of the ?will? and the ?intellect? or ?subject of knowledge?, respectively. The result is a unique interpretation, (...) according to which Aristotle's active nous is in fact non-intellectual: it is devoid of any interaction with intelligible objects, and hence lacks any intellectual activity. I show that this interpretation, though counterintuitive, is tenable, and that it may contribute to our understanding of Aristotle even if we do not adopt Schopenhauer's metaphysics. (shrink)

When can a Bayesian investigator select an hypothesis H and design an experiment (or a sequence of experiments) to make certain that, given the experimental outcome(s), the posterior probability of H will be lower than its prior probability? We report an elementary result which establishes sufficient conditions under which this reasoning to a foregone conclusion cannot occur. Through an example, we discuss how this result extends to the perspective of an onlooker who agrees with the investigator about the statistical model (...) for the data but who holds a different prior probability for the statistical parameters of that model. We consider, specifically, one-sided and two-sided statistical hypotheses involving i.i.d. Normal data with conjugate priors. In a concluding section, using an "improper" prior, we illustrate how the preceding results depend upon the assumption that probability is countably additive. (shrink)