This article examines the Dobsonian Telescope as an object of material culture, showing how starting with the materiality of a scientific instrument opens up new perspectives that are lost by focusing purely on its instrumentality. It argues that the simple design and homely materials of the Dobsonian telescope, as well as the gestures that it requires from its users, are at the core of its significance to the popularization of amateur astronomy and amateur telescope making.

Attentional control theory suggests that high cognitive demands impair the flexible deployment of attention control in anxious adults, particularly when paired with external threats. Extending this...

How should physical entities be characterized? Physicalists, who have most to do with the notion, usually characterize the physical by reference to two components: 1. The physical entities are the entities treated by fundamental physics with the proviso that 2. Physical entities are not fundamentally mental (that is, do not individually possess or bestow mentality) Here I explore the extent to which the appeals to fundamental physics and to the NFM (“no fundamental mentality”) constraint are appropriate for characterizing the physical, (...) especially for purposes of formulating physicalism. Ultimately, I motivate and defend a version of an account incorporating both components: The physics-based NFM account: An entity existing at a world w is physical iff (i) it is treated, approximately accurately, by current or future (in the limit of inquiry, ideal) versions of fundamental physics at w, and (ii) it is not fundamentally mental (that is, does not individually either possess or bestow mentality). (shrink)

Self-control is integral to successful human agency. Without it we cannot extend our agency across time and secure central social, moral, and personal goods. But self-control is not a unitary capacity. In the first part of this paper we provide a taxonomy of self-control and trace its connections to agency and the self. In part two, we turn our attention to the external conditions that support successful agency and the exercise of self-control. We argue that what we call moral security (...) is a critical foundation for agency. Parts three and four explore what happens to agency when moral security is lacking, as in the case of those subject to racism, and those living in poverty. The disadvantages suffered by those who are poor, in a racial minority or other oppressed group, or suffering mental illness or addiction, are often attributed to a lack of individual self-control or personal responsibility. In particular, members of these groups are often seen as irresponsibly focused on short-term pleasures over long-term good, a view underwritten by particular psychological theories of self-control. We explore how narratives about racism and poverty undermine moral security, and limit and distort the possibility of synchronic and diachronic self-control. Where moral security is undermined, the connection between self-control and diachronic goods often fails to obtain and agency contracts accordingly. We close with some preliminary reflections on the implications for responsibility. (shrink)

Liberal democracies who perpetrate torture represent an apparent paradox: a flagrant violation of human rights by states supposedly dedicated to protecting human rights. In liberal democracies, the political, social, and legal narratives used to justify torture portray torture as an individual act motivated by important moral values. This individualized torture narrative then shapes the moral framework through which the public, policy-makers, and individual torturers view torture, and masks the institutional nature of torture perpetration. It is this interaction between an individualized (...) torture narrative and the moral framework of torture that distinguishes democratic perpetrators (Critchell et al. 2017, 9-10) from nondemocratic perpetrators of torture. Yet, the implementation of a torture program in a democratic state is remarkably similar to the implementation of a torture program in a nondemocratic state. In both cases, torture is an institutionalized practice given moral and political meaning through broad social and political narratives. This chapter uses the post-9/11 US torture program as a case study of a democratic perpetrator in order to explore the interaction between democratic narratives of torture, state implementation of torture, and the moral psychology of individual torturers. This permits a way of thinking about torture perpetration that goes beyond a myopic focus on torture as individual act to understand the interaction and mutual reinforcement of different forms of torture perpetration. This analysis also offers a starting point from which to consider how to resist and oppose torture narratives that sustain democratic tortue, a question I explore in the conclusion of this chapter. (shrink)

Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and effects (...) will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (shrink)

The following dialogue takes up recent calls within nursing scholarship to critically imagine alternative nursing futures through the relational process of call and response. Towards this end, the dialogue builds on letters which we, the authors, exchanged as part of the 25th International Nursing Philosophy Conference in 2022. In these letters, we asked of ourselves and each other: If we were to think about a new philosophy of mental health nursing, what are some of the critical questions that we would (...) need to ask? What warrants exploration? In thinking through these questions, our letters facilitated a collaborative enquiry in which philosophy and theory were generative tools for thinking beyond what is and towards what is yet to come. In this paper, we expand the dialogue within these letters—in a ‘dialogue‐on‐dialogue’—and take up one thread of our discussion to argue that a new philosophy of mental health nursing must rethink the relationships between ‘practitioner’/‘self’ and ‘self’/‘other’ if it is to create a radically different future. Further, we posit solidarity and public love as possible alternatives to foregrounding the ‘work’ of mental health nursing. The possibilities we present here should be received as partial, contingent and unfinished. Indeed, our purpose in this paper is to provoke discussion and, in so doing, to model what we believe is a necessary shift towards criticality in our communities of nursing scholarship. (shrink)

(Note: the posted version of this paper is undergoing non-trivial revision; an updated version will be posted in June 2024.) Is there a need for a distinctively diachronic conception of metaphysical emergence? Here I argue to the contrary. In the main, my strategy consists in considering a representative sample of accounts of purportedly diachronic metaphysical emergence, and arguing that in each case, the purportedly diachronic emergence at issue either can (and should) be subsumed under a broadly synchronic account of metaphysical (...) emergence, or else is better seen as simply a case of causation. In addition, I consider and argue against the suggestion that 'in-principle unpredictability' accounts of diachronic emergence support there being distinctively diachronic metaphysical emergence. (shrink)

Ellen Meiksins Wood is a leading contemporary political theorist who has elaborated an innovative approach to the history of political thought, the social history of political theory .

A number of examples of studies from the field ‘The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice’ (PMP) are given. To characterise this new field, three different strands are identified: an agent-based, a historical, and an epistemological PMP. These differ in how they understand ‘practice’ and which assumptions lie at the core of their investigations. In the last part a general framework, capturing some overall structure of the field, is proposed.

Debates about terrorism and technology often focus on the potential uses of technology by non-state terrorist actors and by states as forms of counterterrorism. Yet, little has been written about how technology shapes how we think about terrorism. In this chapter I argue that technology, and the language we use to talk about technology, constrains and shapes our understanding of the nature, scope, and impact of terrorism, particularly in relation to state terrorism. After exploring the ways in which technology shapes (...) moral thinking, I use two case studies to demonstrate how technology simultaneously hides and enables terroristic forms of state violence: police control technologies and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones. In both these cases, I argue that features of these technologies, combined with a narrative of precision and efficiency, serves to mask the terroristic nature of the violence that these practices inflict and reinforces the moral exclusion of those against whom these technologies are deployed. In conclusion, I propose that identifying acts of terrorism requires a focus on the impact of technologies of violence (whether they are “high tech” or not) on those most affected, regardless of whether users of these technologies conceive of their actions as terroristic. (shrink)

Increased technological and pharmacological interventions in patient care when patient outcomes are uncertain have been linked to the escalation in moral and ethical dilemmas experienced by health care providers in acute care settings. Health care research has shown that facilities that are able to attract and retain nursing staff in a competitive environment and provide high quality care have the capacity for nurses to process and resolve moral and ethical dilemmas. This article reports on the findings of a systematic review (...) of the empirical literature (1980 — February 2007) on the effects of unresolved moral distress and poor ethical climate on nurse turnover. Articles were sought to answer the review question: Does unresolved moral distress and a poor organizational ethical climate increase nurse turnover? Nine articles met the criteria of the review process. Although the prevailing sentiment was that poor ethical climate and moral distress caused staff turnover, definitive answers to the review question remain elusive because there are limited data that confidently support this statement. (shrink)

Although affective facial pictures are widely used in emotion research, standardised affective stimuli sets are rather scarce, and the existing sets have several limitations. We therefore conducted a validation study of 490 pictures of human facial expressions from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database (KDEF). Pictures were evaluated on emotional content and were rated on an intensity and arousal scale. Results indicate that the database contains a valid set of affective facial pictures. Hit rates, intensity, and arousal of the 20 (...) best KDEF pictures for each basic emotion are provided in an appendix. (shrink)

Some claim that Non-reductive Physicalism is an unstable position, on grounds that NRP either collapses into reductive physicalism, or expands into emergentism of a robust or ‘strong’ variety. I argue that this claim is unfounded, by attention to the notion of a degree of freedom—roughly, an independent parameter needed to characterize an entity as being in a state functionally relevant to its law-governed properties and behavior. I start by distinguishing three relations that may hold between the degrees of freedom needed (...) to characterize certain special science entities, and those needed to characterize their composing physical entities; these correspond to what I call ‘reductions’, ‘restrictions’, and ‘eliminations’ in degrees of freedom. I then argue that eliminations in degrees of freedom, in particular—when strictly fewer degrees of freedom are required to characterize certain special science entities than are required to characterize their composing physical entities—provide a basis for making sense of how certain special science entities can be both physically acceptable and ontologically irreducible to physical entities. (shrink)

This document presents the Bonn PRINTEGER Consensus Statement: Working with Research Integrity—Guidance for research performing organisations. The aim of the statement is to complement existing instruments by focusing specifically on institutional responsibilities for strengthening integrity. It takes into account the daily challenges and organisational contexts of most researchers. The statement intends to make research integrity challenges recognisable from the work-floor perspective, providing concrete advice on organisational measures to strengthen integrity. The statement, which was concluded February 7th 2018, provides guidance on (...) the following key issues: § 1.Providing information about research integrity § 2.Providing education, training and mentoring § 3.Strengthening a research integrity culture § 4.Facilitating open dialogue § 5.Wise incentive management § 6.Implementing quality assurance procedures § 7.Improving the work environment and work satisfaction § 8.Increasing transparency of misconduct cases § 9.Opening up research § 10.Implementing safe and effective whistle-blowing channels § 11.Protecting the alleged perpetrators § 12.Establishing a research integrity committee and appointing an ombudsperson § 13.Making explicit the applicable standards for research integrity. (shrink)

Assertion is a fundamental feature of language. This volume will be the place to look for anyone interested in current work on the topic.

Technologies to rapidly alert people when they have been in contact with someone carrying the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 are part of a strategy to bring the pandemic under control. Currently, at least 47 contact-tracing apps are available globally. They are already in use in Australia, South Korea and Singapore, for instance. And many other governments are testing or considering them. Here we set out 16 questions to assess whether — and to what extent — a contact-tracing app is ethically justifiable.

Research groups around the world are currently busy trying to invent new life in the laboratory, looking for extraterrestrial life, or making machines increasingly more life-like. In the case of astrobiology, any newly discovered life would likely be very old, but when discovered it would be new to us. In the case of synthetic organic life or life-like machines, humans will have invented life that did not exist before. Together, these endeavors amount to what we call the emerging plurality of (...) lives because we see a future where we are surrounded by, and interact with, life of many different origins, as well as entities that we have not traditionally seen as being alive. In the future these entities will likely possess properties that we so far have only associated with living beings, thereby transcending and perhaps blurring the borders between life and non-life. (shrink)

Jessica Flanigan defends patients' rights of self-medication on the grounds that same moral reasons against medical paternalism in clinical contexts are also reasons against paternalistic pharmaceutical policies, including prohibitive approval processes and prescription requirements.

Pt. I. The apparent good. Evaluative cognition -- Perceiving the good -- Phantasia and the apparent good -- pt. II. The apparent good and non-rational motivation. Passions and the apparent good -- Akrasia and the apparent good -- pt. III. The apparent good and rational motivation. Phantasia and deliberation -- Happiness, virtue, and the apparent good -- Practical induction -- Conclusion : Aristotle's practical empiricism.

Perception of temporal patterns is fundamental to normal hearing, speech, motor control, and music. Certain types of pattern understanding are unique to humans, such as musical rhythm. Although human responses to musical rhythm are universal, there is much we do not understand about how rhythm is processed in the brain. Here, I consider findings from research into basic timing mechanisms and models through to the neuroscience of rhythm and meter. A network of neural areas, including motor regions, is regularly implicated (...) in basic timing as well as processing of musical rhythm. However, fractionating the specific roles of individual areas in this network has remained a challenge. Distinctions in activity patterns appear between "automatic" and "cognitively controlled" timing processes, but the perception of musical rhythm requires features of both automatic and controlled processes. In addition, many experimental manipulations rely on participants directing their attention toward or away from certain stimulus features, and measuring corresponding differences in neural activity. Many temporal features, however, are implicitly processed whether attended to or not, making it difficult to create controlled baseline conditions for experimental comparisons. The variety of stimuli, paradigms, and definitions can further complicate comparisons across domains or methodologies. Despite these challenges, the high level of interest and multitude of methodological approaches from different cognitive domains (including music, language, and motor learning) have yielded new insights and hold promise for future progress. (shrink)

Can we take the purpose of nurse education for granted, and, more importantly, should we? That is the issue at stake in this paper. The question of purpose is conspicuously absent in the nursing literature; our aim here is to urge that it not be overlooked by demonstrating its importance to the future of nursing. We approach the question of nurse education's purpose in concrete and speculative terms through two distinct yet interrelated questions: what is the purpose of nurse education? (...) and what should it be? Amidst the complexity and uncertainty of our time, we cast doubt on the adequacy of manualised and regulated approaches—ubiquitous in nurse education—to prepare nurses who can meet the challenges of contemporary practice. We also assert that transgressive approaches to education, as the antithesis of manualisation, reach the same impasse by (over)predetermining what the educational ‘output’ will be. To move beyond this impasse, we draw on the theory of Gert Biesta and Ron Barnett to contrast cultivation and existential‐type education. In so doing, we do not seek to provide ‘answers’ to nurse education's purpose but, rather, raise the profile of what we believe is a right and proper question for the discipline to grapple with. (shrink)

The term "fake news" ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more precisely. A common theme in this nascent philosophical (...) discussion is that contemporary fake news is not a new kind of phenomenon, but just the latest iteration of a broader kind of phenomenon that has played out in different ways across the history of human information-dissemination technologies. While we agree with this, we argue that newer sorts of fake news reveal substantial flaws in earlier understandings of this notion. In particular, we argue that no deceptive intentions are necessary for fake news to arise; rather, fake news arises when stories which were not produced via standard journalistic practice are treated as though they had been. Importantly, this revisionary understanding of fake news allows us to accommodate and understand the way that fake news is plausibly generated and spread in a contemporary setting, as much by non-human actors as by ordinary human beings. (shrink)

Putting the ethical tools of philosophy to work, Ellen K. Feder seeks to clarify how we should understand "the problem" of intersex. Adults often report that medical interventions they underwent as children to "correct" atypical sex anatomies caused them physical and psychological harm. Proposing a philosophical framework for the treatment of children with intersex conditions—one that acknowledges the intertwined identities of parents, children, and their doctors—Feder presents a persuasive moral argument for collective responsibility to these children and their families.

Contextualists such as Cohen and DeRose claim that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions vary contextually, in particular that the strength of epistemic position required for one to be truly ascribed knowledge depends on features of the attributor's context. Contextualists support their view by appeal to our intuitions about when it's correct (or incorrect) to ascribe knowledge. Someone might argue that some of these intuitions merely reflect when it is conversationally appropriate to ascribe knowledge, not when knowledge is truly ascribed, (...) and so try to accommodate these intuitions even on an invariantist view. DeRose (Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, 1998; Philosophical Review, 2002) argues that any such 'warranted assertibility manoeuvre', or 'WAM', against contextualism is unlikely to succeed. Here, I argue that his objections to a WAM against contextualism are not persuasive and offer a pragmatic account of the data about ascriptions of knowledge. (shrink)

A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena.The Restless Clock examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals—dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us (...) through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency.The Restless Clock reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Race and racism are matters of urgent concern for the international nursing community. Recent global events have presented the discipline with an opportunity to generate and sustain long overdue discussions. However, with this opportunity comes a need to consciously attend to what we mean by race and racism, especially in the context of the nursing literature. Indeed, the development of antiracism depends on how we conceptualise race and racism; it is these conceptualisations that actively shape the scope and priorities of (...) antiracist organising and action. The aim of this critical interpretative synthesis (CIS) is to examine conceptualisations of race and racism in the nursing literature by drawing on contemporary race scholarship. The synthesis of diverse literature is enabled through the explorative and expansive process of the CIS method. This review generates three synthesising arguments—a problem ‘of’ not ‘for’; conceptual inconsistencies and drift; and reliance on the lens of experience—that both critique and contribute to the nursing literature. In the pursuit of antiracism, this article urges us to pay close attention to our conceptualisations of race and racism by illuminating the pitfalls that occur when our conceptualisations are inconsistent, contradictory, or simply neglected. (shrink)

Some health care organizations allow physicians to withhold cardiopulmonary resuscitation from a patient, despite patient or surrogate requests that it be provided, when they believe it will be more harmful than beneficial. Such cases usually involve patients with terminal diagnoses whose medical teams argue that aggressive treatments are medically inappropriate or likely to be harmful. Although there is state-to-state variability and a considerable judicial gray area about the conditions and mechanisms for refusals to perform CPR, medical teams typically follow a (...) set of clearly defined procedures for these decisions. The procedures are based on the principle of nonmaleficence and typically include consultation with hospital ethics committees, reflecting the guidelines of relevant professional associations. Ethical debates about when CPR can and should be limited tend to rely more on discussions of theory, principles, and case studies than systematic empirical study of the situations in which such limitations are applied. Sociologists of bioethics call for empirical study, arguing that what ethicists and health professionals believe they are doing when they draft policies or invoke principles does not always mirror what is happening on the ground. In this article, we begin the task of modeling the empirical analyses sociologists call for, focusing on a cohort at Massachusetts General Hospital. We inductively analyzed ethics committee notes and medical records of nineteen patients whose surrogates did not accept the decision to withhold CPR. (shrink)

Background: Use of patients’ medical data for secondary purposes such as health research, audit, and service planning is well established in the UK. However, the governance environment, as well as public understanding about this work, have lagged behind. We aimed to systematically review the literature on UK and Irish public views of patient data used in research, critically analysing such views though an established biomedical ethics framework, to draw out potential strategies for future good practice guidance and inform ethical and (...) privacy debates. Methods: We searched three databases using terms such as patient, public, opinion, and electronic health records. Empirical studies were eligible for inclusion if they surveyed healthcare users, patients or the public in UK and Ireland and examined attitudes, opinions or beliefs about the use of patient data for medical research. Results were synthesised into broad themes using a framework analysis. Results: Out of 13,492 papers and reports screened, 20 papers or reports were eligible. While there was a widespread willingness to share patient data for research for the common good, this very rarely led to unqualified support. The public expressed two generalised concerns about the potential risks to their privacy. The first of these concerns related to a party’s competence in keeping data secure, while the second was associated with the motivation a party might have to use the data. Conclusions: The public evaluates trustworthiness of research organisations by assessing their competence in data-handling and motivation for accessing the data. Public attitudes around data-sharing exemplified several principles which are also widely accepted in biomedical ethics. This provides a framework for understanding public attitudes, which should be considered in the development in any guidance for regulators and data custodians. We propose four salient questions which decision makers should address when evaluating proposals for the secondary use of data. (shrink)

Philosophical questions surrounding skill and expertise can be traced back as far as Ancient Greece, China, and India. In the twentieth century skilled action was an important factor in the work of phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and analytic philosophers including Gilbert Ryle. However, as a subject in its own right it has, until now, remained largely in the background. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise is an outstanding reference source and the first major collection of (...) its kind, reflecting the explosion of interest in the topic recent years. Comprising thirty-nine chapters written by leading international contributors, the Handbook is organised into six clear parts: Skill in the History of Philosophy Skill in Epistemology Skill, intelligence, and agency Skill in Perception, Imagination, and Emotion Skill, Language, and, Social Cognition Skill and Expertise in Normative Philosophy. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, epistemology and ethics, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise is also suitable for those in related disciplines such as social psychology and cognitive science. It is also relevant to those who are interested in conceptual issues underlying skill and expertise in fields such as sport, the performing arts, and medicine. (shrink)

I årtusenden har människan försökt definiera livet – hur levande djur och växter skiljer sig från död materia. Problemet är dock att livet är mångfacetterat, och varje regel har sitt undantag. Vi försöker möta kommande utmaningar med nya livsformer, genom att lyfta fram en ny definition av liv.

According to Ian Hacking, some human kinds are subject to a peculiar type of classificatory instability: individuals change in reaction to being classified, which in turn leads to a revision of our understanding of the kind. Hacking’s claim that these ‘human interactive kinds’ cannot be natural kinds has been vehemently criticized on the grounds that similar patterns of instability occur in paradigmatic examples of natural kinds. I argue that the dialectic of the extant debate misses the core conceptual problem of (...) human interactive kinds. The problem is not that these kinds are particularly unstable but ‘capricious’—their members behave in wayward, unexpected manners that defeats existing theoretical understanding. The reason for that, I argue, is that human interactive kinds are often ‘hybrid kinds’ consisting of a base kind and an associated status, which makes mechanisms that support patterns of change and stability systematically difficult to understand and predict. 1Introduction2The Extant Discussion 2.1Hacking’s account of interactive kinds2.2Classificatory feedback in non-human kinds3Natural kinds and Ontological Instability 3.1Understanding instability3.2The problem of stabilizing feedback3.3Summary4Capricious Kinds 4.1Biased conceptualization4.2Studying social status5Conclusion. (shrink)

One antidote to moral distress is stronger moral agency—that is, an enhanced ability to act to bring about change. The Clinical Ethics Residency for Nurses, an educational program developed and run in two large northeastern academic medical centers with funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration, intended to strengthen nurses’ moral agency. Drawing on Improving Competencies in Clinical Ethics Consultation: An Education Guide, by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and on the goals of the nursing profession, CERN (...) sought to change attitudes, increase knowledge, and develop skills to act on one's knowledge. One of the key insights the faculty members brought to the design of this program is that knowledge of clinical ethics is not enough to develop moral agency. In addition to lecture‐style classes, CERN employed a variety of methods based in adult learning theory, such as active application of ethics knowledge to patient scenarios in classroom discussion, simulation, and the clinical practicum. Overwhelmingly, the feedback from the participants (sixty‐seven over three years of the program) indicated that CERN achieved transformative learning. (shrink)

Previous meta-analyses support a female advantage in decoding non-verbal emotion (Hall, 1978, 1984), yet the mechanisms underlying this advantage are not understood. The present study examined whether the female advantage is related to greater female attention to the eyes. Eye-tracking techniques were used to measure attention to the eyes in 19 males and 20 females during a facial expression recognition task. Women were faster and more accurate in their expression recognition compared with men, and women looked more at the eyes (...) than men. Positive relationships were observed between dwell time and number of fixations to the eyes and both accuracy of facial expression recognition and speed of facial expression recognition. These results support the hypothesis that the female advantage in facial expression recognition is related to greater female attention to the eyes. (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions are a central topic of research in both philosophy and science. In this collection of new essays on knowledge ascriptions, world class philosophers offer novel approaches to this long standing topic.

This volume is about the notion of 'defeat' in philosophy. The idea is that someone who has some knowledge, or a justified belief, can lose this knowledge or justified belief if they acquire a 'defeater' - evidence that undermines it. The contributors examine the role of defeat not just in epistemology but in practical reasoning and ethics.

By mid-2019 there were more than 80 AI ethics guides available in the public domain. Despite this, 2020 saw numerous news stories break related to ethically questionable uses of AI. In part, this is because AI ethics theory remains highly abstract, and of limited practical applicability to those actually responsible for designing algorithms and AI systems. Our previous research sought to start closing this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the creation of a searchable typology (...) of tools and methods designed to translate between the five most common AI ethics principles and implementable design practices. Whilst a useful starting point, that research rested on the assumption that _all_ AI practitioners are aware of the ethical implications of AI, understand their importance, and are actively seeking to respond to them. In reality, it is unclear whether this is the case. It is this limitation that we seek to overcome here by conducting a mixed-methods qualitative analysis to answer the following four questions: what do AI practitioners understand about the need to translate ethical principles into practice? What motivates AI practitioners to embed ethical principles into design practices? What barriers do AI practitioners face when attempting to translate ethical principles into practice? And finally, what assistance do AI practitioners want and need when translating ethical principles into practice? (shrink)