Addressing mobility issues in mobile environment

Realitzat en col·laboració amb el centre o empresa: Lappeenranta University of Technolog

Volume 107, Number 3 (2024)

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/judicature/1028/thumbnail.jp

Bad Beliefs

Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational processes. We’ve missed the rationality of bad beliefs because we’ve failed to recognize the ubiquity of the higher-order evidence that shapes beliefs, and the rationality of being guided by this evidence. The book argues that attention to higher-order evidence should lead us to rethink both how minds are best changed and the ethics of changing them: we should come to see that nudging—at least usually—changes belief (and behavior) by presenting rational agents with genuine evidence, and is therefore fully respectful of intellectual agency. We needn’t rethink Enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy and rationality, but we should reshape them to take account of our deeply social epistemic agency

Taking Disagreement Seriously: Towards understanding the significance of disagreement in judicial decision making

This thesis concerns the understanding of disagreement, exploring what implications its study might possess for law. Specifically, I focus my attention on the recent Epistemology of Disagreement literature (ED), which seeks to identify what one should do when one finds oneself in disagreement with an 'epistemic peer'. In applying ED, I use as a test site the UKSC - an elite forum of peers from which rulings are of great social importance, thereby providing a critical test of the insights offered by ED's approach. My findings lie across the disciplines. In philosophy, I suggest that ED fails a test of their making; that the theory can extend from the idealised instances of disagreement typical of the literature, to more complex 'real-world' disagreements such as those in law. Within my analysis two features warrant special mention. First, I identify deficits in the construction of peers in ED. Through application to UKSC Justices I argue that the definition employed is simply unattainable, failing to extend even to the narrow forum of the UKSC. Second, deficits are identified in the construction of 'disagreement' - I argue that unnecessary restrictions unduly limit our understanding of genuine disagreement. The identified deficits enable us to see that ED's limited focus on circumscribed and artificial instances of disagreement offers little about disagreement itself, and little about disagreement in real-world cases. In law, I conclude that ED fails to apply to the disagreements subject to analysis. I further argue that the deficits encountered are not in fact limited to ED, but rather betray a more foundational mistreatment of the notion of disagreement that is evidenced in wider jurisprudential literature. In this respect, I identify a gap that is faced in both philosophy and jurisprudence in the treatment of disagreement. Finally, in spotlighting deficits in the present literature, I begin to map out important clarifications and insights that can be brought together to fill the gap, so that we might begin to take disagreement seriously

Bad Beliefs

Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational processes. We’ve missed the rationality of bad beliefs because we’ve failed to recognize the ubiquity of the higher-order evidence that shapes beliefs, and the rationality of being guided by this evidence. The book argues that attention to higher-order evidence should lead us to rethink both how minds are best changed and the ethics of changing them: we should come to see that nudging—at least usually—changes belief (and behavior) by presenting rational agents with genuine evidence, and is therefore fully respectful of intellectual agency. We needn’t rethink Enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy and rationality, but we should reshape them to take account of our deeply social epistemic agency

Science and Religion: A Conflict of Methods

There is an epistemological conflict between religion and science. While the claims of science are justified using epistemic methods whose reliability has been corroborated by other people and by other methods, the claims of religion are not justified in the same way. Different methods are used. This thesis offers both a comprehensive description of the distinctive epistemic methods of religion and a philosophical appraisal of the claim that such methods are knowledge-conferring. The methods explored are various and care has been taken to sample a broad range of religious cultures. It is found that the same religious methods, when used to answer the same questions, generate different answers for different practitioners. Additionally, the results of religious methods fail to agree with the results of other epistemic methods when employed independently. This lack of independent agreement is the primary reason for the exclusion of religious methods from science. It is further argued that (a) this lack of agreement is evidence that religious methods are unreliable, and (b) the agreement generated by scientific methods is evidence for their reliability

Philosophical perspectives on the stigma of mental illness

This thesis is concerned with philosophical perspectives on the stigma of mental illness, with each chapter exploring different philosophical issues. Chapter one delineates the central concept around which the rest of the work revolves: the stigma of mental illness. It provides an outline of the stigma mechanism, how it applies to mental illness, why it is such a large public health concern and what has been done so far to combat it. Chapter two is concerned with the application of recent literature in the philosophy of implicit bias to the topic of mental illness. It suggests that we have hitherto been preoccupied with explicit formulations of the stigma mechanism, but argues that there are distinctive issues involved in combatting forms of discrimination in which the participants are not cognisant of their attitudes or actions, and that anti-stigma initiatives for mental illness should take note. Chapter three applies the philosophical literature concerning the ethics of our epistemic practices to the stigma of mental illness. It contains an analysis of how epistemic injustice- primarily in the forms of testimonial injustice and stereotype threat- affects those with mental illnesses. The fourth chapter brings in issues in the philosophy of science (particularly the philosophy of psychiatry) to explore the possibility of intervening on the stigma process to halt the stigma of mental illness. The first candidate (preventing labelling) is discounted, and the second (combatting stereotype) is tentatively endorsed. The fifth chapter is concerned with how language facilitates the stigma of mental illness. It suggests that using generics to talk about mental illness (whether the knowledge structure conveyed is inaccurate or accurate) is deeply problematic. In the former, it conveys insidious forms of social stereotyping. In the latter, it propagates misinformation by presenting the category as a quintessential one

A Communication Methodology for Negotiating a Wheat Contract with China

This study is not a study in cross-cultural communication; nor is it a study of Chinese cultural, socioeconomic, or political factors; nor is it a prescription of communication techniques for the would-be cross-cultural negotiator. Likewise it is not intended to provide advice regarding global economic affairs or international diplomacy. Instead, it is a study in human communication. The result of this study is a communication methodology designed for use by representatives of a United States (hereafter referred to as U.S.) wheat trading company while planning and negotiating any wheat deal with representatives of the People\u27s Republic of China (hereafter referred to as China). This methodology provides a systematic means by which company selected negotiation personnel can generate any combination of communication strategies to meet the needs of the particular negotiation situation