Floods are one of the most common natural disasters in the world that affect all aspects of life, including human beings, agriculture, industry, and education. Research for developing models of flood predictions has been ongoing for the past few years. These models are proposed and built-in proportion for risk reduction, policy proposition, loss of human lives, and property damages associated with floods. However, flood status prediction is a complex process and demands extensive analyses on the factors leading to the occurrence (...) of flooding. Consequently, this research proposes an Internet of Things-based flood status prediction (IoT-FSP) model that is used to facilitate the prediction of the rivers flood situation. The IoT-FSP model applies the Internet of Things architecture to facilitate the flood data acquisition process and three machine learning (ML) algorithms, which are Decision Tree (DT), Decision Jungle, and Random Forest, for the flood prediction process. The IoT-FSP model is implemented in MATLAB and Simulink as development platforms. The results show that the IoT-FSP model successfully performs the data acquisition and prediction tasks and achieves an average accuracy of 85.72% for the three-fold cross-validation results. The research finding shows that the DT scores the highest accuracy of 93.22%, precision of 92.85, and recall of 92.81 among the three ML algorithms. The ability of the ML algorithm to handle multivariate outputs of 13 different flood textual statuses provides the means of manifesting explainable artificial intelligence and enables the IoT-FSP model to act as an early warning and flood monitoring system. (shrink)

The Yazidi community is one of the largest minority groups in Iraq, who have suffered the most. They have been subjected to marginalization and trauma for decades, which has not been documented adequately in the past. The study adopted a descriptive exploratory research to collect and investigate historical evidence regarding the marginalization and traumatic experience of the Yazidi minority in Iraq and explore whether the western secularism could be helpful in achieving restorative justice and rehabilitation. Through the study of available (...) data in interdisciplinary sources, an attempt was made to fill the literature gap. The current study perceived whether the western so-called secularism could be effective in bringing reconciliation of the Yazidi minority with the Government of Iraq and the KRG. The study also found out that the Yazidi community does not need a European-style revolutionary and atheistic secularism which does not recognize any social, religious or political affiliation in the name of democratic principles. What the Yazidi community needs is a region specific, US-led political-religious initiative, equipped with principles of non-violence, peaceful coexistence, justice, and accessibility to equal human rights and a shared vision along with the majority of the Iraqi population and recognition by the KRG, failing which the Yezidi will continue to be considering themselves as a separate ethnic group and represent as the failure of western secularism. (shrink)

The Iraqi constitution of 2005 grants freedom of religious thought, belief and practice for all religions. This study was also based on the premise that the constitutional rights are not adhered to in Iraq, even by government officials, which could be due to the absence of suitable legislations subsequent to the framing of the constitutional provisions. An analytical and descriptive research design was adopted for this study. Data was collected from primary and secondary sources through documentation research and evaluation of (...) historical sources. The primary data comprised Articles of the Iraqi constitution, and a few national and international legal instruments related to religious freedom. Secondary data included empirical research studies, books, articles and other published sources. This study therefore took the form of an empirical legal research as it involved the issues of constitutional reforms in the field of religious freedom. A comparative approach was adopted in analyzing the documents about religion and politics related to both the Arab region and the West. The focus was on the measures that should be adopted to advance the dialogues of religious freedom and maintain religious neutrality in all government policies. The study found out that there were apparent contradictions between the constitutional provisions and the State Laws. Similarly, the Iraqi civil and penal codes remain silent regarding legal remedies for the violation of constitutional provisions. (shrink)

Many humanists and social scientists argue—if not assume—that race's centrality in social-scientific research provides an empirical justification for its reality as a constructed kind. In this paper, we first regiment these arguments, and then show that they face significant challenges. Specifically, race-concepts' social-scientific success is compatible with race being neither constructed nor real.

Many epistemologists endorse true-belief monism, the thesis that only true beliefs are of fundamental epistemic value. However, this view faces formidable counterexamples. In response to these challenges, we alter the letter, but not the spirit, of true-belief monism. We dub the resulting view “inquisitive truth monism”, which holds that only true answers to relevant questions are of fundamental epistemic value. Which questions are relevant is a function of an inquirer’s perspective, which is characterized by his/her interests, social role, and background (...) assumptions. Using examples of several different scientific practices, we argue that inquisitive truth monism outperforms true-belief monism. (shrink)

This article describes a multilevel theoretical framework that examines the multiple causes of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in the social environment of business. We argue that substantive and/or symbolic reporting flows from individual‐, aggregate‐, organizational‐, and institution‐level phenomena, and is thus a complex outcome of CSR and corporate social performance (CSP). Theoretical lenses range from reinforcement theory at the microlevel to legitimacy and stakeholder theories at the macrolevel, and include a discussion of the emergence of lower‐level CSR‐relevant characteristics to (...) higher level constructs. Our goal is to clarify how this behavior develops from microlevel, mesolevel, and macrolevel processes with a view toward assisting corporations to better enact CSR reporting, and their stakeholders to effectively promote substantive reporting behavior. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, given the way that AI models work and the way that ordinary human rationality works, it is very likely that people are anthropomorphizing AI, with potentially serious consequences. I start with the core idea, recently defended by Thomas Kelly (2022) among others, that bias involves a systematic departure from a genuine standard or norm. I briefly discuss how bias can take on different explicit, implicit, and “truly implicit” (Johnson 2021) forms such as bias by (...) proxy. I then discuss biased anthropomorphism of technology, focusing on the case of Large Language Models (LLMs) like chatGPT. As with other kinds of bias, there are importantly different kinds of anthropomorphism, some of which can persist without others, and some of which can encourage others. Anthropomorphism can take rather subtle, implicit forms, that can be difficult to detect, resist, and dislodge. Attention to these kinds of anthropomorphism can help us avoid confusing importantly different kinds of evaluation, better assess the risks, and inform strategies for bias prevention and mitigation. (shrink)

Many epistemologists take Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) to be “fundamental.” For instance, Lycan (1988, 128) writes that “all justified reasoning is fundamentally explanatory reasoning.” Conee and Feldman (2008, 97) concur: “fundamental epistemic principles are principles of best explanation.” Call them fundamentalists. They assert that nothing deeper could justify IBE, as is typically assumed of rules of deductive inference, such as modus ponens. However, logicians account for modus ponens with the valuation rule for the material conditional. By contrast, fundamentalists (...) account for IBE with an ill-defined set of relations that happen to furnish their favorite set of inductive inferences. To our eye, this seems a little too convenient—there is too much room for ad hoc, just-so stories about the “striking” correspondence between our explanatory and inductive practices. We will argue that the (explanatory) pluralism adopted by the leading theorists of the best explanation—philosophers of science—undermines fundamentalism. Section 1 clarifies fundamentalism’s key tenets. Section 2 presents pluralism’s challenge to fundamentalism. Section 3 considers a potential fundamentalist reply to this challenge. Sections 4 through 6 canvass the leading candidates for developing this fundamentalist reply, showing each to be unsatisfactory. (shrink)

Because idealizations frequently advance scientific understanding, many claim that falsehoods play an epistemic role. In this paper, we argue that these positions greatly overstate idealiza...

From antiquity to the end of the twentieth century, philosophical discussions of understanding remained undeveloped, guided by a 'received view' that takes understanding to be nothing more than knowledge of an explanation. More recently, however, this received view has been criticized, and bold new philosophical proposals about understanding have emerged in its place. In this book, Kareem Khalifa argues that the received view should be revised but not abandoned. In doing so, he clarifies and answers the most central questions (...) in this burgeoning field of philosophical research: what kinds of cognitive abilities are involved in understanding? What is the relationship between the understanding that explanations provide and the understanding that experts have of broader subject matters? Can there be understanding without explanation? How can one understand something on the basis of falsehoods? Is understanding a species of knowledge? What is the value of understanding? (shrink)

Among epistemologists, it is common to assume that insofar as coherence bears on the justification of belief, the only relevant coherence relations are those _within_ an individual subject’s web of beliefs. After clarifying this view and exploring some plausible motivations for it, we argue that this individualistic account of the epistemic relevance of coherence fails to account for central facets of scientific practice. In its place we propose a social account of coherence. According to the view we propose, a scientist (...) _S_’s belief that _p_ is _prima facie_ unjustified if this belief negatively coheres with justified scientific claims in her scientific community. This account of coherence yields an epistemology for scientific belief which, we argue, has all of the benefits and none of the liabilities of its more individualistic predecessor. (shrink)

This article critically studies coronavirus pandemic news in the press. The article attempts to study the way the news of COVID-19 is used for political and ideological purposes. In order to achieve the aim, two newspapers namely, The New York Times from the United States of America and Global Times from China are selected. Van Dijk’s news schemata framework is used for the analysis of the reports selected from the two newspapers. Van Dijk’s news schemata is crucial for the analysis (...) of any news story whether such a news story is taken from a news channel or a newspaper and whether broadcasted or printed. Based on data analysis, the article found out that the news of COVID-19 has been politicized and used for ideological interests. The article recommends that pandemics should not be politicized, instead we should work together to save our lives and live peacefully. (shrink)

Recently, several authors have argued that scientific understanding should be a new topic of philosophical research. In this article, I argue that the three most developed accounts of understanding--Grimm's, de Regt's, and de Regt and Dieks's--can be replaced by earlier accounts of scientific explanation without loss. Indeed, in some cases, such replacements have clear benefits.

Peter Lipton has argued that understanding can exist in the absence of explanation. We argue that this does not denigrate explanation's importance to understanding. Specifically, we show that all of Lipton's examples are consistent with the idea that explanation is the ideal of understanding, i.e. other modes of understanding ought to be assessed by how well they replicate the understanding provided by a good and correct explanation. We defend this idea by showing that for all of Lipton's examples of non-explanatory (...) understanding of why p , there exists a correct and reasonably good explanation that would provide greater understanding of p. (shrink)

This article examines a series of Schelling-like models of residential segregation, in which agents prefer to be in the minority. We demonstrate that as long as agents care about the characteristics of their wider community, they tend to end up in a segregated state. We then investigate the process that causes this and conclude that the result hinges on the similarity of informational states among agents of the same type. This is quite different from Schelling-like behavior and suggests that segregation (...) is an instance of macrobehavior that can arise from a wide variety of micromotives. (shrink)

Jonathan Kvanvig has argued that “objectual” understanding, i.e. the understanding we have of a large body of information, cannot be reduced to explanatory concepts. In this paper, I show that Kvanvig fails to establish this point, and then propose a framework for reducing objectual understanding to explanatory understanding.

Several argue that truth cannot be science’s sole epistemic goal, for it would fail to do justice to several scientific practices that advance understanding. I challenge these arguments, but only after making a small concession: science’s sole epistemic goal is not truth as such; rather, its goal is finding true answers to relevant questions. Using examples from the natural and social sciences, I then show that scientific understanding’s epistemically valuable features are either true answers to relevant questions or a means (...) thereof. (shrink)

Recently, it has been debated as to whether understanding is a species of explanatory knowledge. Those who deny this claim frequently argue that understanding, unlike knowledge, can be lucky. In this paper I argue that current arguments do not support this alleged compatibility between understanding and epistemic luck. First, I argue that understanding requires reliable explanatory evaluation, yet the putative examples of lucky understanding underspecify the extent to which subjects possess this ability. In the course of defending this claim, I (...) also provide a new account of the kind of ‘grasping’ taken to be central to understanding. Second, I show that putative examples of lucky understanding unwittingly deploy a kind of luck that is compatible with knowledge. Finally, appealing to a number of works on explanation and its attendant epistemology, I argue that alleged instances of lucky understanding that overcome these two obstacles will invariably violate certain norms of explanatory inquiry – our paradigmatic understanding-oriented practice. By contrast, knowledge of the same information is immune to these criticisms. Consequently, if understanding is environmentally lucky, it is always inferior to the understanding that a corresponding case of knowledge would provide. (shrink)

Recent literature on non-causal explanation raises the question as to whether explanatory monism, the thesis that all explanations submit to the same analysis, is true. The leading monist proposal holds that all explanations support change-relating counterfactuals. We provide several objections to this monist position. 1Introduction2Change-Relating Monism's Three Problems3Dependency and Monism: Unhappy Together4Another Challenge: Counterfactual Incidentalism4.1High-grade necessity4.2Unity in diversity5Conclusion.

We provide two programmatic frameworks for integrating philosophical research on understanding with complementary work in computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. First, philosophical theories of understanding have consequences about how agents should reason if they are to understand that can then be evaluated empirically by their concordance with findings in scientific studies of reasoning. Second, these studies use a multitude of explanations, and a philosophical theory of understanding is well suited to integrating these explanations in illuminating ways.

Playback studies have been used to assess whether birds recognize the calls and songs of other birds. In this experiment, contact calls were recorded from three pairs of budgerigars. These calls were then used as stimuli in playback experiments. Calls were stored on a computer and played to the birds either randomly or in response to calling. The bird’s vocal responses to these stimuli were recorded and counted. Results indicate that the birds showed a preference for particular calls. Overall, the (...) birds responded more frequently to their mate’s call than to the calls of other birds. (shrink)

The genetic code is a set of instructions that determine how the information in our genetic material is translated into amino acids. In general, it is universal for all organisms, from viruses and bacteria to humans. However, in the last few decades, exceptions to this rule have been identified both in pro‐ and eukaryotes. In this review, we discuss the 16 described alternative eukaryotic nuclear genetic codes and observe theories of their appearance in evolution. We consider possible molecular mechanisms that (...) allow codon reassignment. Most reassignments in nuclear genetic codes are observed for stop codons. Moreover, in several organisms, stop codons can simultaneously encode amino acids and serve as termination signals. In this case, the meaning of the codon is determined by the additional factors besides the triplets. A comprehensive review of various non‐standard coding events in the nuclear genomes provides a new insight into the translation mechanism in eukaryotes. (shrink)

Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education, popularized via his magnum opus, The Pedagogy of the oppressed (2000 [1970]) ‘shocked’ the world, sort of constructively, with its trenchant, au courant and futuristic meditations on the onto-epistemological lives of the marginalized in Latin America, and by elliptical extension, across the world. The central tenets of Freire’s thought as reflectively (and reflexively) acting upon the world to transform it, are as current today as these were in the late 1960s, majorly because of the subjectively (...) active ways it interacts with our onto-epistemological locations and intentions. It is in appreciating such durable temporality about his philosophy that one can sense, indeed, thickly discern it trans-spatial and transcultural connections with the humanist African philosophy of Ubuntu and it educational foundations. Ubuntu in its across-Africa readings, represents both a practical and aspirational humanization of all people (more popularly, perceiving and practicing our personhoods through the personhoods of others) with the potential outcome, in the words of Desmond Tutu (in Battle, 2009), of the cessation of inter-people conflict and oppression. With these perspectives and prospects from Freire and Ubuntu, the intersecting subsets of the two are, I argue, thickly important with analytically discernible onto-epistemological and pedagogical connections and operations. (shrink)

This chapter gives an overview of the various themes and issues discussed in the volume. It includes summaries of all chapters and places the contributions, some of which are part of a critical conversation format, in the context of the larger literature and debates.

This essay presents a fully inferentialist-expressivist account of scientific representation. In general, inferentialist approaches to scientific representation argue that the capacity of a model to represent a target system depends on inferences from models to target systems. Inferentialism is attractive because it makes the epistemic function of models central to their representational capacity. Prior inferentialist approaches to scientific representation, however, have depended on some representational element, such as denotation or representational force. Brandom’s Making It Explicit provides a model of how (...) to fully discharge such representational vocabulary, but it cannot be applied directly to scientific representations. Pursuing a strategy parallel to Brandom’s, this essay begins with an account of how surrogative inference is justified. Scientific representation and the denotation of model elements are then explained in terms of surrogative inference by treating scientific representation and denotation as expressive, analogous to Brandom’s account of truth. The result is a thoroughgoing inferentialism: M is a scientific representation of T if and only if M has scientifically justified surrogative consequences that are answers to questions about T. (shrink)

Many have argued that the human sciences feature a unique form of understanding that is absent from the natural sciences. However, in the last decade or so, epistemologists and philosop...

Explanation is asymmetric: if A explains B, then B does not explain A. Tradition- ally, the asymmetry of explanation was thought to favor causal accounts of explanation over their rivals, such as those that take explanations to be inferences. In this paper, we develop a new inferential approach to explanation that outperforms causal approaches in accounting for the asymmetry of explanation.

Epistemologists have recently debated whether understanding is a species of knowledge. However, because they have offered little in the way of a detailed analysis of understanding, they lack the resources to resolve this issue. In this paper, I propose that S understands why p if and only if S has the non-Gettierised true belief that p, and for some proposition q, S has the non-Gettierised true belief that q is the best available explanation of p, S can correctly explain p (...) with q, and S can identify the features that make q the best explanation of p. On this analysis, understanding is reducible to knowing that p and that q is the best available explanation of p. (shrink)

The underconsideration argument against inference to the best explanation and scientific realism holds that scientists are not warranted in inferring that the best theory is true, because scientists only ever conceive of a small handful of theories at one time, and as a result, they may not have considered a true theory. However, antirealists have not developed a detailed alternative account of why explanatory inference nevertheless appears so central to scientific practice. In this paper, I provide new defences against some (...) recent objections to the underconsideration argument, while also developing an account of explanatory inference that both survives these criticisms and does not entail realism. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop and refine the idea that understanding is a species of explanatory knowledge. Specifically, we defend the idea that S understands why p if and only if S knows that p, and, for some q, S’s true belief that q correctly explains p is produced/maintained by reliable explanatory evaluation. We then show how this model explains the reception of James Bjorken’s explanation of scaling by the broader physics community in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The (...) historical episode is interesting because Bjorken’s explanation initially did not provide understanding to other physicists, but was subsequently deemed intelligible when Feynman provided a physical interpretation that led to experimental tests that vindicated Bjorken’s model. Finally, we argue that other philosophical models of scientific understanding are best construed as limiting cases of our more general model. (shrink)

Terrorist organisations have increased and widened in Iraq in particular and the world in general in recent years. People have suffered a lot from these terrorist organisations due to their thirst for killing innocent civilians. The study aims to convey the suffering of innocent Iraqis caused by terrorist acts to the world. In order to achieve the aim, the research adopted Barthes’s framework to analyse the selected photographs. The researchers have selected iconic photographs for the analysis. The photographs are taken (...) from the main websites of the local, Arabic, and foreign media. The study found out that terrorism is the brutal enemy of all Iraqi societies including Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, Christians, and Yazidis. This research is a clear example that shows the world the extent of the suffering, pain, and fear Iraqi people are facing because of terrorism. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a framework to understand the transition in Foucault’s work from the disciplinary model to the governmentality model. Foucault’s work on power emerges within the general context of an expression of capitalist rationality and the nature of freedom and power within it. I argue that, thus understood, Foucault’s transition to the governmentality model can be seen simultaneously as a deepening recognition of what capitalism is and how it works, but also as a recognition of the changing (...) historical nature of the actually existing capitalisms and their specifically situated historical needs. I then argue that the disciplinary model should be understood as a contingent response to the demands of early capitalism, and argue that with the maturation of the capitalist enterprise many of those responses are no longer necessary. New realities require new responses; although this does not necessarily result in the abandonment of the earlier disciplinary model, it does require their reconfiguration according to the changed situation and the new imperatives following from it. (shrink)

This essay presents the interwoven phenomenological reflections of three feminist women, situated across various intersections of difference, whose plans to conduct research on Black feminism and ambiguity were affected by the coronavirus and the social climate resulting from widespread responses to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States during the summer of 2020. The authors offer an experimental, juxtaposed intersubjective phenomenology of research, located in the critical phenomenological framework of intersectional ambiguity. The reflections include reconsiderations (...) of the utility of research and its (inter)subjective dimensions. Each writer captures how differences in their sociopolitical identity and positioning affected their ability to conduct “research” during a summer of unrest and unease. Taken in sum, these reflections argue that critical phenomenology provides many opportunities for reflecting upon lived experience and the relevance of intellectual labor and knowledge-production to the sociopolitical challenges we face. (shrink)

Several authors suggest that understanding and epistemic coherence are tightly connected. Using an account of understanding that makes no appeal to coherence, I explain away the intuitions that motivate this position. I then show that the leading coherentist epistemologies only place plausible constraints on understanding insofar as they replicate my own account’s requirements. I conclude that understanding is only superficially coherent.

In earlier work, I criticized de Regt’s contextual theory of understanding, and advertised the advantages of my own, knowledge-based account. Using the early history of the standard model in particle physics as an illustration, I instead consider the benefits of unifying these two accounts of understanding. I argue that de Regt’s account substantially improves my own account of explanatory consideration, and that my account of explanatory comparison substantially improves upon his account of explanatory evaluation. De Regt and my apparent disagreement (...) about the so-called factivity of understanding is defused through a voluntaristic approach to the scientific realism debates. (shrink)

Economists use the term ‘stylized fact’ in many contexts, though the meaning of this phrase and the motivation for using such a concept is unclear. In this paper, we provide a philosophical analysis of stylized facts, which aims to be methodologically interesting and useful. While our framework applies to all principled uses of stylized facts, we illustrate its core features by applying it to Nicholas Kaldor's initial and exemplary use of stylized facts in growth economics.

Is discomfort intrinsic to wonder? The author pursues this question by showing how early visitors to the Niagara Falls found that efforts to improve the view eliminated the difficulty that made viewing the falls rewarding in the first place. Visitors’ experiences accord with eighteenth-century accounts that suggest that wonder thrives on difficulty and desire thrives on inaccessibility. This aesthetic effect finds expression in The Arabian Nights and other texts that both represent and enact narrative withholding, and also in the visual (...) form of the arabesque, which beguiles the eye with movement but does not go anywhere. The essay concludes by connecting these insights into aesthetic difficulty to present-day concerns that attempts to bring the humanities to a broader audience may “dumb down” art. I conclude that such concerns miss the point that aesthetic experiences depend upon a tension between legibility and illegibility that artworks continue to generate in new and unforeseen ways. (shrink)

Is discomfort intrinsic to wonder? The author pursues this question by showing how early visitors to the Niagara Falls found that efforts to improve the view eliminated the difficulty that made viewing the falls rewarding in the first place. Visitors’ experiences accord with eighteenth-century accounts that suggest that wonder thrives on difficulty and desire thrives on inaccessibility. This aesthetic effect finds expression in The Arabian Nights and other texts that both represent and enact narrative withholding, and also in the visual (...) form of the arabesque, which beguiles the eye with movement but does not go anywhere. The essay concludes by connecting these insights into aesthetic difficulty to present-day concerns that attempts to bring the humanities to a broader audience may “dumb down” art. I conclude that such concerns miss the point that aesthetic experiences depend upon a tension between legibility and illegibility that artworks continue to generate in new and unforeseen ways. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose to look closely at certain crucial aspects of the logic of Rawls' argument in Political Liberalism and related subsequent writings. Rawls' argument builds on the notion of comprehensiveness, whereby a doctrine encompasses the full spectrum of the life of its adherents. In order to show the mutual conflict and irreconcilability of comprehensive doctrines, Rawls needs to emphasise the comprehensiveness of doctrines, as their irreconcilability to a large extent emanates from that comprehensiveness. On the other hand, (...) in order to show the possibility and plausibility of the political liberal solution he needs to emphasise that most of these doctrines are reasonable: i.e., they are willing to cede a portion of their authority to political liberalism for the right reasons. Yet, if they are willing to cede a portion of their authority to a political conception they cannot be as comprehensive as we initially thought they were. All these elements highlight the tension in the argument itself. I suggest that many of these tensions can be removed by making Rawls' account more flexible. In this context I propose certain amendments to Rawls' account, which may overcome some of the tensions mentioned above. (shrink)

BackgroundProfessional ethics refers to the use of logical and consistent communication, knowledge, clinical skills, emotions and values in nursing practice. This study aimed to explore and describe factors that affect professional ethics in nursing practice in Iran.MethodsThis qualitative study was conducted using conventional content analysis approach. Thirty nurses with at least 5 years of experience participated in the study; they were selected using purposive sampling. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis.ResultsAfter encoding and classifying the data, (...) five major categories were identified: individual character and responsibility, communication challenges, organizational preconditions, support systems, educational and cultural development.ConclusionsAwareness of professional ethics and its contributing factors could help nurses and healthcare professionals provide better services for patients. At the same time, such understanding would be valuable for educational administrators for effective planning and management. (shrink)

In his “EMU and Inference,” Mark Newman European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 4:55–74, 2014 provides several interesting challenges to my explanatory model of understanding :15–37, 2012). I offer three replies to Newman’s paper. First, Newman incorrectly attributes to EMU an overly restrictive view about the role of abilities in understanding. Second, his main argument against EMU rests on this incorrect attribution, and would still face difficulties even if this attribution were correct. Third, contrary to his stated ambitions, his own, (...) inferential model of understanding does not have any distinctive advantages over EMU. These three points defend EMU against Newman’s objections. (shrink)

Criticism is a staple of the scientific enterprise and of the social epistemology of science. Philosophical discussions of criticism have traditionally focused on its roles in relation to objectivity, confirmation, and theory choice. However, attention to criticism and to criticizability should also inform our thinking about scientific pursuits: the allocation of resources with the aim of developing scientific tools and ideas. In this paper, we offer an account of scientific pursuitworthiness which takes criticizability as its starting point. We call this (...) the apokritic model of pursuit. Its core ideas are that pursuits are practices governed by norms for asking and answering questions, and that criticism arises from the breach of these norms. We illustrate and advertise our approach using examples from institutional grant review, neuroscience, and sociology. We show that the apokritic model can unify several indices of criticizability, that it can account for the importance of criticizing pursuits in scientific practice, and that it can offer ameliorative advice to erstwhile pursuers. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that a person is obligated to explain why p just in case she has a role-responsibility to answer the question “Why p?”. This entails that the normative force of explanatory obligations is fundamentally social. We contrast our view with other accounts of explanatory obligations or the so-called “need for explanation,” in which the aforementioned normative force is epistemic, determined by an inquirer's interests, or a combination thereof. We argue that our account outperforms these alternatives.

In this essay, we extend earlier inferentialist-expressivist treatments of traditional logical, semantic, modal, and representational vocabulary (Brandom 1994, 2008, 2015; Peregrin 2014) to explanatory vocabulary. From this perspective, Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) appears to be an obvious starting point. In its simplest formulation, IBE has the form: A best explains why B, B; so A. It thereby captures one of the central inferential features of explanation. An inferentialist-expressivist treatment of “best explains” would treat it as a logical operator. (...) Analogous to the inferentialist-expressivist treatment of other logical operators, this essay aims to provide introduction and elimination rules for “best explains.” Indeed, by exhibiting a form of detachment, IBE superficially looks like an elimination rule. The sequent calculus LEA+, described in Section 5 below, makes good on this intuition. By showing how “A best explains why B” is related to the underlying, scientific inference “A, so B,” we can purchase the inference ticket of IBE for no more than the cost of science’s material inferences. (shrink)

The present study investigates variability among raters from different linguistic backgrounds, who evaluated the pragmatic performance of English language learners with varying native languages (L1s) by using both self- and peer-assessments. To this end, written discourse completion task (WDCT) samples of requesting speech acts from 10 participants were collected. Thereafter, the participants were asked to assess their peers’ WDCTs before assessing their own samples using the same rating scale. The raters were further asked to provide an explanation for their rating (...) decisions. Findings indicate that there may indeed be a link between a rater’s language background and their scoring patterns, although the results regarding peer- and self-assessment are mixed. There are both similarities and differences in the participants’ use of pragmatic norms and social rules in evaluating appropriateness. (shrink)