This article defends deliberative democracy against the problem of tacit knowledge. It has been argued that deliberative democracy gives a privileged position to linguistic communication and therefore excludes tacit forms of knowledge which cannot be expressed propositionally. This article shows how the exclusion of such knowledge presents important challenges to both proceduralist and epistemic conceptions of deliberative democracy, and how it has been taken by some to favour markets over democratic institutions. After pointing to the limitations of market alternatives, deliberative (...) democracy is defended by arguing that tacit knowledge can be brought into deliberation through the mechanism of trust in testimony. By trusting the testimony of a speaker, deliberators are able to act on knowledge even without it being explicitly expressed. The article then goes on to discuss the implications of this defence for deliberative theory, and particularly, the forms of reason which deliberative democrats must see as legitimate. (shrink)

Political polarization is one of the most discussed challenges facing contemporary democracies and is often associated with a broader epistemic crisis. While inspiring a large literature in political science, polarization’s epistemic problems also have significance for normative democratic theory, and this study develops a new approach aimed at understanding them. In contrast to prominent accounts from political psychology—group polarization theory and cultural cognition theory—which argue that polarization leads individuals to form unreliable political beliefs, this study focuses on system-level diversity. It (...) argues that polarization’s epistemic harms are best located in its tendency to reduce the diversity of perspectives utilized in a democratic system and in how this weakens the system’s ability to identify and address problems of public concern. Understanding such harms is also argued to require a greater consideration of the political dynamics of polarization and issues of elite discourse, alongside political psychology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Power Without Knowledge, Jeffrey Friedman develops a critique of technocracy and in doing so makes an epistemic case for exit over voice. He argues that a technocracy that fails to take people’s ideational heterogeneity into account is unlikely to possess the knowledge required to solve social problems, and that the alternative of “exitocracy” may, in some cases, overcome these limits. By creating the conditions under which individuals can exit from undesirable social situations, an exitocracy may allow people to (...) escape their social ills without knowing their society-wide causes or solutions. As Friedman recognizes, however, an exitocracy still requires technocratic knowledge, and this paper explores these requirements in further detail. First, it investigates the limits of exit as a solution to social problems, and the extent to which technocratic policies can be substituted for exit. Second, it considers the need for technocratic knowledge in the promotion of exit opportunities, and how this undermines Friedman’s defense of exitocracy. (shrink)

Non-human animals are as a matter of routine used as means to human ends. They are killed for food, employed for labour or sport, and experimented on in the pursuit of human health, knowledge, comfort and beauty. Lip-service is paid to the obligation to cause no unnecessary suffering, but human necessity is interpreted so generously that this is a negligible constraint. The dominant traditions of Western thought, religious and secular, have provided legitimation of the low or non-existent moral status of (...) beasts. The rival tradition, which includes the Neo-Platonists, Plutarch and Montaigne, is eccentric and archaic. But the teleologies and hierarchies of orthodoxy are equally incredible now and owe their greater respectability and influence to the inertia of custom. Disregard for beasts is supported partly by the vestigial and unowned belief that they are intended for our use, partly by a more recent piece of lore which is not only thought to be compatible with, but is sometimes held to be integral to, an enlightened scientific outlook, namely that beasts are mere complex stimulus—response mechanisms. The latter is a vexatious obstacle to progress but despite that the state of scientific and philosophical knowledge is now enormously more propitious for a re-appraisal of the moral status of beasts. Two moral philosophers, Peter Singer and Stephen Clark, have recently published books in which such a re-appraisal is attempted. Here I try to compare and assess some of the main features of their very different approaches. (shrink)

This paper contributes to growing debates over the decision-making ability of democracy by considering the epistemic value of deliberative democracy. It focuses on the benefits democratic deliberation can derive from its diversity, and the extent to which these benefits can be realised with respect to the complexities of political problems. The paper first calls attention to the issue of complexity through a critique of Hélène Landemore and the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem. This approach underestimates complexity due to its reliance on (...) an ‘oracle assumption’ and this is shown to highlight more general difficulties for applying the benefits of diversity to the realities of political problems. The paper then develops a new model of deliberation—based on an relationship between cognitive diversity and diminishing returns to cognitive type—which does not involve an oracle assumption and can therefore support the epistemic value of deliberative democracy even for complex problems. The benefits of diversity are also argued to be better realised though sortition than either democratic elections or epistocracy, pointing to the value of deliberation between randomly selected citizens. Finally, and contrary to past work, the new account suggests that diversity cannot alone establish the superiority of democratic deliberation over all non-democratic alternatives, and that it is insufficient to mount a purely epistemic argument for deliberative democracy. The paper therefore furthers our understanding of the epistemic value of deliberative democracy by clarifying when and to what extent diversity is a benefit to political problem solving. (shrink)

A number of writers have drawn on Hayek’s epistemic defence of market institutions to argue that free-markets and tort law are best placed to overcome the knowledge problems associated with the environmental sphere. This paper argues to the contrary, that this Austrian School approach itself suffers from significant knowledge problems. The first of these relates to the ability of Austrian economics to assign victim compensation and the second to the difficulty of establishing causation in complex environmental problems. The paper will (...) also show how alternative approaches may not suffer from these epistemic challenges and are better placed to overcome them. (shrink)

Friedrich von Hayek’s classical liberalism argued that free markets allow individuals the greatest opportunity to achieve their ends. This paper develops an internal critique of this claim. It argues that once externalities are introduced, the forms of economic knowledge Hayek thought to undermine government action and orthodox utilitarianism also rule out relative welfarist assessments of more or less regulated markets. Given the pervasiveness of externalities in modern economies, Hayek will frequently be unable to make comparative welfarist claims, or he must (...) relax his epistemic assumptions and allow for greater government action than his classical liberalism would wish to accept. (shrink)

Presupposing no prior knowledge of philosophy, John Benson introduces the fundamentals of environmental ethics by asking whether a concern with human well-being is an adequate basis for environmental ethics. He encourages the reader to explore this question, considering techniques used to value the environment and critically examining 'light green' to 'deep green' environmentalism. Each chapter is linked to a reading from a key thinker such as J.S. Mill and E.O. Wilson. Key features include activities and exercises, enabling readers to monitor (...) their progress throughout the book, chapter summaries and guides to further reading. (shrink)

Epistemic questions have become an important area of debate within democratic theory. Epistemic democrats have revived epistemic justification of democracy, while social scientific research has speared a significant debate on voter knowledge. An area which has received less attention, however, is the epistemic case for markets. Market advocates have developed a number of epistemic critiques of democracy which suggest that most goods are better provided by markets than democratic institutions. Despite representing important challenges to democracy, these critiques have gone without (...) reply as democratic theorists have tended to exclude markets from consideration. This article responds to these critiques and argues that there are good epistemic grounds for granting a much greater role to democracy than its market critics have claimed. It argues that there is a broad range of goods, including important ethical goods, which are better provided by democracy than markets due to the particular epistemic burdens they create. (shrink)

Frank Sibley was one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics of the last fifty years, whose published papers are required reading for serious students of the subject. Approach to Aesthetics will be welcomed both for bringing together these well known papers, and for its inclusion of new, previously unpublished papers. This timeless body of work will continue to demand and reward the attention of scholars and students.

The paper discusses some relationships between aesthetic and non-aesthetic reasons for valuing rural landscape, i.e., landscape shaped by predominantly non-aesthetic purposes. The first part is about the relationship between aesthetic reasons and considerations of utility and argues for an intimate connection between them. The next part considers the relationship between aesthetic and other non-instrumental reasons for valuing landscape and argues that there are important contingent but no essential connections between them. The third part considers the strength or weakness of aesthetic (...) reasons for resisting landscape changes that would result from changes in land use. (shrink)

This essay further substantiates the author’s earlier thesis that St. Bonaventure’s De reductione was the second half (or resumptio) of his inaugural lecture atParis. After reviewing the central aspect of that thesis, the essay further shows how an unedited inaugural sermon, Fons sapientiae Verbum Dei in excelsis (found in Vatican Burghesiani 157) received the De reductione in its earliest form, particularly in its use of specific authorities and its division of the lights of knowledge. The discovery of this sermon further (...) confirms in its reception of the De reductione that the work was originally an inaugural lecture. The essay then further explores the purpose and uniqueness of the De reductione as an inaugural lecture by comparing it to Fons sapientiae. (shrink)

Evidence that an animal is capable of some degree of symbolic, human language processing supports the argument that the animal's consciousness is to some degree human-like. In this paper, we reinterpret the findings of Savage- Rumbaugh et al. using the twin tools of Deacon's referential hierarchy and Systemic Functional Linguistics, with a view to providing further corroborative evidence for a Bonobo ape's symbolic processing abilities, and as a result to open a window into the consciousness of at least one non-human (...) primate. (shrink)

In this manuscript I explore an example of an over-privileged white woman who encounters two young Black men in a parking garage stairwell. Two related axioms are central to the oppressive script that lies before these subjects: the hetero-patriarchal axiom that women are not safe alone at night and the racist axiom that Black men, especially young ones, are dangerous. These axioms are intended to ensure a practical conclusion—white women and Black men are supposed to avoid each other—thereby conferring legitimacy (...) on the white male, hetero-patriarchal order. If this is a performance of oppression, we must ask, what is the performance of freedom? Freedom, I argue, is the practice of allowing and encouraging a subject's multiple selves to interact so that one may devise and pursue courses of action that have been strategically hidden by systems of domination designed to cultivate pliant agency. My project augments accounts of multiplicitous subjectivity wherein our multiple social worlds socially constitute persons as both oppressor and oppressed, empowered and pliant. The practice of freedom conceived here acknowledges multiplicity while positioning us to seek feminist and antiracist futures that are not configured by oppression. (shrink)

Human beings find themselves sharing the world with a great variety of other animals. Besides using them in various ways, we think about them and compare ourselves with them, and it is hard to envisage the difference it would make to our understanding of ourselves if they were not there. For one thing we should not have the concept of the human species, and that human beings should be thought of, however theoretically, as all belonging to one species is of (...) momentous importance for morality. The existence of other species might be significant in that way, however, even if we did not pay much attention to them and even if more particular thoughts about or observations of them did not form part of the fabric of our moral thinking. It is with some particular ways in which other species enter our moral thinking and our thinking about morals that I intend to concern myself. There are three of these that I shall discuss: first, the use of animal characters in moral tales, secondly the description of human characteristics in terms of real or supposed analogies with the characteristics of beasts; and thirdly much more briefly the application to human beings of behaviour patterns established in studies of other animals. (shrink)

Human beings find themselves sharing the world with a great variety of other animals. Besides using them in various ways, we think about them and compare ourselves with them, and it is hard to envisage the difference it would make to our understanding of ourselves if they were not there. For one thing we should not have the concept of the human species, and that human beings should be thought of, however theoretically, as all belonging to one species is of (...) momentous importance for morality. The existence of other species might be significant in that way, however, even if we did not pay much attention to them and even if more particular thoughts about or observations of them did not form part of the fabric of our moral thinking. It is with some particular ways in which other species enter our moral thinking and our thinking about morals that I intend to concern myself. There are three of these that I shall discuss: first, the use of animal characters in moral tales, secondly the description of human characteristics in terms of real or supposed analogies with the characteristics of beasts; and thirdly much more briefly the application to human beings of behaviour patterns established in studies of other animals. (shrink)

The Nazis hijacked Germany’s medical establishment and appropriated medical language to hegemonize their ideology. In White Noise, shifting medical information stifles the public into docility. In Nazi Germany the primacy of language and medical authority magnified the importance of academic doctors. The muddling of identities caused complex insecurities and the need for psychological doubles. In White Noise, Professor Gladney is driven by professional insecurities to enact a double in Murray. Through the manipulation of language and medical overreach the U.S., exemplified (...) in the novel White Noise, has become a hypermedicalized society where the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath has eroded. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionIn 1974 at a gathering celebrating the seventh centenary of Bonaventure's death, Ignatius Brady reviewed the Quaracchi edition of Bonaventure's works. He noted various problems with the edition and considered the authenticity of a number of works discovered since the edition's completion in 1902. He argued against the attribution of all the texts then newly ascribed to Bonaventure, but pointed forward to texts that might still be looked for, (...) "either by identifying them in pieces already published or by searching for them in manuscripts."Brady singled out two texts in particular: a text he referred to as a principium biblicum, and defined as the opening discourse of a baccalaurius biblicus; and a principium magisteriale or aulicum, which Brady defined as a "recommendatio s. scripturae or recommendatio sacrae doctrinae given in brief form by the doctorandus in the aula/hall of the bishop and repeated at length soon after his promotion." He went on to lament that we possess lectures pertaining to these forms from great medieval theologians like John of La Rochelle and Thomas Aquinas, but none for Bonaventure. According to Brady, two primary reasons explained this gap in Bonaventure's corpus: 1) the Quaracchi editors really had no clear conception of the genre of principium and hence never looked for Bonaventure's; 2) some scholars reasoned that Bonaventure's well-known sermon "Christ the one teacher of all" functioned as his principium and hence looked no further. As Brady noted, however, "Christ the one teacher of all" could never function as Bonaventure's principium without doing extreme violence to the literary parameters set for that academic exercise. Bonaventure's principium thus remained at large and has continued to elude scholars since Brady's reflections thirty-four years ago. Until now.Though Brady's terminology requires modification in the light of more recent studies, the thesis I will argue for in this article is that the text we know as the De reductione is in fact the second half of Bonaventure's two part inaugural lecture as a master at Paris. The first half of the lecture I have identified and provisionally edited: an overlooked sermon beginning with the verse, Omnium artifex docuit me sapientia .In order to demonstrate my thesis that the De reductione is part of Bonaventure's inaugural lecture as a master or his principium, I will first review the specific terminology required to understand this literary genre. Second, I will focus on the form and subject matter of the De reductione itself in order to establish that it may be understood as sermon and that its subject matter fits within the genre of principia. Third, I will highlight known principia that share concerns and style similar to the De reductione thus further demonstrating that the text is Bonaventure's principium. Fourth, I will discuss two manuscripts that present the De reductione as a principium. In connection, I will also indicate how these two manuscripts present the relationship between Bonaventure's overlooked sermon Omnium artifex docuit me sapientia and the De reductione. Fifth, I will show how Omnium artifex forms an essential prologue to the De reductione.I. Clarifying the literary genre of the principiumThe term principium can cause confusion since the term takes on different meanings in accordance with the variety of meanings and associations the term possessed in the middle ages. Clarity regarding this term is crucial if the present thesis is to be proved and so I must review the basic ways the term could be used.In a broad sense, the term principium refers simply to "the inaugural lecture of a course," which in turn belongs to the much broader category of sermon. In this sense of inaugural lecture or sermon, Bonaventure's prologues to each of the four books of Peter Lombard's Sentences, the prologues to his biblical commentaries, and even to some degree the prologue to.. (shrink)

Defects of growth inhibitory pathways have an important role in disorders of cell growth and differentiation. The discovery of a mutation in one of the principle components of the transforming growth factor β (TGFβ) receptor system which is linked to a DNA repair defect(1) represents one possible mechanism of escape from negative regulatory influences acting upon cells. TGFβ is a pre‐eminent negative growth factor and this article discusses (1) the role of TGFβ in maintaining epithelial homeostasis; (2) how breakdown of (...) inhibitory pathways can promote neoplastic development; (3) the significance of a receptor defect in a negative signalling pathway; and (4) the potential therapeutic sequelae resulting from restoration of cellular responsiveness to TGFβ. (shrink)

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John Benson; XIV—The Characterisation of Actions and the Virtuous Agent, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 251–266.

The theory of negation developed in the grammatical-philosophical system of later Vyākaraṇa remains almost entirely unstudied, despite its close links with the (widely studied) approaches to negation found in other philosophical schools such as Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā, and despite its consequent importance for a comprehensive understanding of the theory of negation in ancient India. In this paper we present an edition, translation and commentary of the relevant sections of Nāgeśa’s _Paramalaghumañjūṣā_, a concise presentation by the final authority of the Pāṇinian (...) tradition, together with an explanatory introduction outlining the grammarians’ theory of negation and its relations particularly with the Nyāya theory of negation. (shrink)

The complexity of biobank research raises concerns about individuals’ understanding of the information conveyed in the consent process for such research.. We report the results of a qualitative, cognitive interview study with an ethnically, linguistically, and educationally diverse sample of 43 respondents to assess the clarity and utility of a multimedia tool developed for a biobank. Using weighted randomization, respondents were assigned to either view the multimedia tool or read a written consent document . The study illustrates the utility of (...) cognitive interviews for gaining insights from prospective research participants about the clarity of informed consent tools. Findings suggest that a multimedia tool is useful for communicating key messages but should be combined with a written consent document and personal interaction with the study staff. We recommend that the potential value of multimedia tools should be more rigorously tested in a randomized controlled trial. (shrink)

This analysis examines whistleblowing within the context of organizational culture. Several factors which have provided impetus for organizations to emphasize ethical conduct and to encourage internal, rather than external, whistleblowing are identified. Inadequate protection for whistleblowers and statutory enticement for them to report ethical violations externally are discussed. Sundstrand's successful model for cultural change and encouragement of internal whistleblowing is analyzed to show how their model of demonstrating management's commitment to ethical conduct, establishing ethical expectations of employees, training to ensure (...) that employees understand the concepts and expectations, promoting of employee ownership of the program, making the program visible, protecting the whistleblower and undertaking periodic reviews of the program's success may serve as a model for other organizations. (shrink)