From the perspective of philosophy and political science it is often pointed out that trust is of central value for democracy. The paper critically examines this claim and argues that we should not overestimate the role of trust in democracy. In order to do that, I argue for a specific understanding of the notion of trust that appropriately accounts for the distinction between trust and mere reliance. In a second step, I argue that we have no reason to put (...) this kind of trust in our elected officials and representatives, but should instead focus on legislative and institutional ways to make sure that they are reliable in particular respects. After contrasting my suggestion with the position of Hardin, I point to two advantages of my account: The avoidance of political analysis through the lens of trust allows us to react more flexibly to unforeseen circumstances and resist populist attempts to emotionalize public debates; at the same time, diffusing the tension between trust and civic vigil... (shrink)

The fact that A has relied on B to do something is often taken to be a relevant factor in judging that B has a moral or legal obligation to do that thing. This paper investigates the relation between reliance and obligation. Specifically, the question is whether reliance and moral obligation are connected by some relation of conditionality. I consider four such relations - necessary condition, sufficient condition, necessary part of a sufficient condition, and independent necessary part of (...) a sufficient condition. I argue that only the third one connects reliance and moral obligation, and that it does so in a trivial way. There are nevertheless two justifications for the prominence given to reliance in morality and law. First, reliance appears to be a sufficient condition of states of affairs involving concepts related to obligation. Second, reliance is a fairly reliable indicator of obligation. (shrink)

It is common to think of the attitude of trust as involving reliance of some sort. For example, Annette Baier argues that trust is reliance on the good will of others, and Richard Holton argues that trust is reliance from a participant stance. However, it is puzzling how trust could involve reliance, because reliance, unlike trust, is responsive to practical reasons: we rely in light of reasons that show it worthwhile to rely, but we don’t (...) trust in light of reasons that show it worthwhile to trust. To address the puzzle, I sketch an account of reliance, according to which reliance consists in action, and I sketch an account of trust, according to which trust consists in belief held from a participant stance. I conclude that it is plausible to see trust as the grounds for reliance. (shrink)

Philosophers have in general offered only a partial view of the normative grounds of reliance. Some maintain that either one of evidence or of pragmatic considerations has a normative bearing on reliance, but are silent about whether the other kind of consideration has such a bearing on it as well. Others assert that both kinds of considerations have a normative bearing on reliance, but sidestep the question of what their relative normative bearing is. My aim in this (...) article is to offer a more systematic and comprehensive view of reasons for reliance. (shrink)

The new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on the Use of a Single Institutional Review Board (sIRB) for Multi-Site Research was adopted primarily to simplify and speed the review of complex multisite clinical trials. However, speeding review requires overcoming a number of obstacles. Perhaps the most substantial obstacle is the time and effort needed to develop reliance agreements among the participating sites. We conducted 102 semistructured interviews with sIRB personnel, including directors, chairs, reviewers, and staff, from 20 IRBs (...) that acted as sIRBs for multisite research, including 6 commercial/independent sIRBs, and 10 university-based academic and 4 federal sIRBs. Almost without exception, the interviewees agreed that reliance agreements were complex, difficult to develop, and time-consuming. A major problem for relying sites was that different agreements specified different responsibilities for the relying sites. Attitudes differed about whether these problems will be resolved as IRB staff and managers become more experienced with sIRBs. However it is clear that the process of developing reliance agreements must be simplified. Federal assistance in standardizing at least some sections of reliance agreements might reduce the difficulties involved. (shrink)

In the face of powerful criticism, the "reliance interest" continues to hold an impactful position in judicial and academic treatment of contract damages. And yet, the theoretical foundation of reliance damages for breach of contract remains unsettled. This Article exposes the inability of the reliance scholarship to coherently explain and justify the widespread judicial practice of awarding reliance damages in lieu of expectation damages. Considering this resounding failure, the Article offers a hitherto overlooked promise-based conception of (...) the reliance interest. Under reliance-as-promise, the right to be reimbursed for one's reasonably foreseeable performance costs is a secondary remedial right grounded in an implied contractual promise which the law attributes to every contracting party. When due to a total breach it becomes clear that the contract will not be performed, the background duty to reimburse comes into play. The Article presents and develops this promise-based account. It claims that reliance as promise can provide a more coherent normative and explanatory account of the phenomenon of awarding reliance damages for breach of contract. Apart from its explanatory force, and the normative support it can find in major contract theories, reliance as promise finds support in basic psychological insights and in the findings of a preliminary empirical study conducted by the authors. (shrink)

The idea of self-reliance is important not only because it is often taken to be definitive of the ethics of democratic individualism, but because its greatest theorists have been uncommonly forthright about a problem that, though familiar to ordinary civic experience, frequently gets ignored: that self-reliant individuality is a basis for not fully supporting otherwise endorsed social justice causes. This article turns to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bob Dylan who are unusual for so honestly reflecting upon (...) this problem and who, because of the differences in the way they conceptualize it, are instructive for civic ethics. I demonstrate that Emerson and Thoreau imbue their self-reliant withdrawal from social action with a self-satisfaction that is lacking for Dylan, who is much readier to acknowledge the moral costs of self-reliance. This acknowledgement does not invalidate self-reliance but alters its epistemological, ethical and political features, providing a variant of self-reliance more suitable to contemporary conditions. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to provide a conceptual framework for thinking about reliance in a systematic way. I argue that reliance is a cognitive attitude that has a tighter connection to the guidance of our thought and action than ordinary belief does. My main thesis is that reliance has a ‘constitutive aim’: namely, it aims at guiding our thought and action in a way that is sensible from the standpoint of practical or theoretical ends. This helps (...) explain why reliance is, in contrast to belief, typically formed and revised in response to pragmatic considerations. (shrink)

The ongoing debate about reliance and trust in artificial intelligence (AI) systems seems to be never ending, challenging our understanding and application of these concepts in human-AI interactions. In this work, we argue for a pragmatic approach to solve this conundrum by focusing on reliance and the three key expectations that should guide human-AI interactions: appropriate reliance, efficiency, and motivation by objective reasons. By focusing on these expectations, we show that it is possible to reconcile reliance (...) with trust in a manner that is both theoretically sound and practically useful. As it turns out, reliance is the key relation of interest while trust in AI is a derived concept that helps explaining these expectations. Our reliance-centered framework does not dismiss the concept of trust in AI but repositions it as a key property of reliance, offering a pragmatic alternative to classical rational or motivational accounts of trust that prove difficult to apply in the context of human-AI interactions. As AI continues to integrate into society, particularly in high-stakes environments like healthcare, our pragmatic approach provides a practical and meaningful framework for addressing the nuances of trust in AI. (shrink)

Trusting someone in an intuitive, rich sense of the term involves not just relying on that person, but manifesting reliance on them in the expectation that this manifestation of reliance will increase their reason and motive to prove reliable. Can trust between people be formed on the basis of Internet contact alone? Forming the required expectation in regard to another person, and so trusting them on some matter, may be due to believing that they are trustworthy; to believing (...) that they seek es teem and will be rationally responsive to the good opinion communicated or promised by an act of trust; or to both factors at once. Neither mechanism can rationally command confidence, however, in the case where people are related only via the Internet. On the Internet everyone wears the ring of Gyges; everyone is invisible, in their personal identity, to others. (shrink)

In voicing commitments to the principle that the adoption of artificial-intelligence (AI) tools by armed forces should be done responsibly, a growing number of states have referred to a concept of “Responsible AI.” As part of an effort to help develop the substantive contours of that concept in meaningful ways, this position paper introduces a notion of “responsible reliance.” It is submitted that this notion could help the policy conversation expand from its current relatively narrow focus on interactions between (...) an AI system and its end-user to also encompass the wider set of interdependencies involved in fulfilling legal obligations concerning the use of AI in armed conflicts. The authors argue that to respect international humanitarian law and ensure accountability, states ought to devise and maintain a framework that ensures that natural persons involved in the use an AI tool in an armed conflict could responsibly rely at least on: (1) the tool’s technical aspects, (2) the conduct of other people involved in development and use of that AI tool; and (3) the policies and processes implemented at the state level. According to the authors, the “responsible reliance” notion could serve, among other examples, as a basis on which to articulate legal requirements, prohibitions, and permissions across diverse areas, from the design of AI tools to human-machine interactions to configuration of responsible-command frameworks. (shrink)

A standard view of trust sees trust as intimately related to reliance; on this standard view, trust is reliance plus some other factor. A significant literature has now developed that seeks to explain what factor, in addition to reliance, serves to distinguish cases of trust from cases of mere reliance. I argue that this approach to the analysis of trust is misguided. Although reliance, properly understood, frequently accompanies trust, reliance is not a necessary condition (...) of trust. (shrink)

Forming a belief on the basis of accepting another’s testimony often involves a kind of reliance on the (say-so of the) testifier. I argue that this reliance has epistemically relevant features that cannot be represented in most mainstream theories in the epistemology of testimony. The targeted views are those that embrace individualism about testimonial justification.

Trust is commonly defined as a metaphysically-hybrid notion involving an attitude and an action. The action component of trust is defined as a special form of reliance in which the trustor has: (1) heightened expectations of their trustee; and (2) a disposition to justifiably feel betrayed if their trust is broken. The first aim of this paper is to reject the view that trust is a form of reliance. -/- The second aim of this paper is to develop (...) and defend a non-reliance-based variation of Katherine Hawley’s commitment trust account. Roughly, on my variant account, if X trusts Y to ϕ, then X has a belief with the following counterfactual as its content: ‘if I were to rely on Y to keep a commitment to ϕ, then I believe that Y would keep that commitment to ϕ.’ I defend this account against the objection that non-reliance accounts cannot explain the intuition that trust involves heightened expectations, and that it elicits justified betrayal when broken. I also respond to the argument that such accounts can’t provide adequate explanations of therapeutic trust, which is taken to be a counterexample of belief trust insofar as it describes instances where trustors trust trustees despite not believing that they are trustworthy. (shrink)

According to a prominent thought, in one’s practical reasoning one should rely only on what one knows. Yet for many choices, the relevant information is uncertain. This has led Schiffer to the following objection: oftentimes, we are fully rational in reasoning from uncertain premises which we do not know. For example, we may decide to take an umbrella based on a 0.4 credence that it will rain. There are various ways proponents of a knowledge norm for practical reasoning can respond. (...) One option is to say that the right way of dealing with uncertain information requires knowledge of probabilities. Another option is to say that credences can be knowledge because they really are beliefs with an unusual kind of content that consists of a set of probability spaces. Mixed accounts are possible as well. On neither of the accounts in the literature, however, can reasoning from uncertain premises be taken as reasoning based on a graded attitude, a credence, toward an ordinary proposition. To make room for this possibility, I argue that reliance comes in degrees. The knowledge norm is only plausible when taken to be concerned with full reliance.Partial reliance, on the other hand, goes hand in hand with credence. (shrink)

The ongoing debate about reliance and trust in artificial intelligence (AI) systems continues to challenge our understanding and application of these concepts in human-AI interactions. In this work, we argue for a pragmatic approach to defining reliance and trust in AI. Our approach is grounded in three expectations that should guide human-AI interactions: appropriate reliance, efficiency, and motivation by objective reasons. By focusing on these expectations, we show that it is possible to reconcile reliance with trust (...) in a manner that is both theoretically sound and practically useful. To do so, one needs to re-frame trust in AI as a quantitative property of reliance that is antithetical to the investment of resources during the interaction with the system. Our reliance-centered framework does not dismiss the concept of trust in AI but repositions it as a key property of reliance, offering a practical alternative to rational or motivational accounts. As AI continues to integrate into society, particularly in high-stakes environments like healthcare, our pragmatic approach provides a practical and meaningful framework for addressing the nuances of trust in AI. (shrink)

Emerson was a great moral philosopher. One of his principle contributions is the theory of self-reliance, a view of democratic individuality. 'Nietzsche was Emerson's best reader,' and George Kateb provides an accessible reading of Emerson that is friendly to the interests of Nietzsche and to later Nietzscheans such as Weber, Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault.

The reversal of Roe v. Wade raises the prospect that other due process guarantees upon which individuals have organised their lives, including the constitutional rights to same-sex intimacy and marriage, will be overturned. These potential upheavals in the hard-won legal infrastructure of basic social status call for a careful look at reliance arguments for sustaining constitutional precedent. When does reliance on a judicial decision provide reason for a court to sustain a precedent in the face of substantial doubts (...) or convictions that the original decision was importantly mistaken?Our commitments to democratic law pose distinctive challenges for reliance arguments in the public law domain that do not burden reliance arguments in the private law domain. A persuasive reliance argument in the public law context must offer a merits-independent rationale identifying limited circumstances in which reliance would justify honouring a prior (mistaken) decision and honouring it prospectively, into the future. I detail the challenges and offer a democratic account to identify when overturning a mistaken decision would impose an unfair and inequitable hardship. On this account, abortion, contraception, and same-sex intimacy rights warrant continued affirmation given reliance behaviours, but not other rights, including rights to gun ownership and freedom of contract. (shrink)

An adequate theory of the nature of belief should help us explain the most obvious features of belief as we find it. Among these features are: guiding action and reasoning non-inferentially; varying in strength in ways that are spontaneously experience-sensitive; ‘aiming at truth’ in some sense and being evaluable in terms of correctness and warrant; possessing inertia across time and constancy across contexts; sustaining expectations in a manner mediated by propositional content; shaping the formation and execution of plans; generalizing spontaneously (...) projectively; and being independent of the will and resisting instrumentalization. Using the method of ‘creature construction’, I attempt to show how we can build an attitude with these features step-by-step from simpler components, thereby avoiding the problems of regress or circularity affecting a number of influential accounts of belief. (shrink)

We argue four points. First, perception always relies on environmental constraints, not only in special cases. Second, constraints are taken advantage of by detecting information granted by the constraints rather than by internalizing them. Third, apparent motion phenomena reveal reliance on constraints that are irrelevant in everyday perception. Fourth, constraints are selected through individual learning as well as evolution. The “perceptual-concept-of-velocity” phenomenon is featured as a relevant case. [Hecht; Kubovy & Epstein; Shepard].

The notion of rational certainty[1] had developed a long way in four decades. Many now recognize that even to do science we characteristically claim rational certainty where we lack supporting proof of our own, have not engaged in some balancing of evidence, and have not even undertaken any articulate inquiry. Many further recognize that rational reliance is notably voluntary[2]and that our feelings, especially refined feelings, have indispensable roles in determining our willing reliances and in sustaining them. Scientists, and ordinary (...) people, judiciously sidestep the Lockean principle that one`s degree of commitment ought not exceed the evidence one has for it, realizing that Locke's idea supposed a social system of knowing that does not exist even science, much less in the rest of life and around the most important beliefs of life. (shrink)

This chapter attempts to articulate a novel approach to thinking about urban politics and urban public policy. Building on the observation that all action requires reliance, the chapter argues that elements of the urban environment function as what we call reliance structures. These are the structures that allow agents to realize their intentions as actions. That is, reliance structures are constitutive features of the capacity for action, that is, for agency. The chapter then argues that the urban (...) can be understood as a network of reliance structures. It follows that the urban partially constitutes human agency—agential capacities are partially constituted by urban reliance systems. This is meant to be a substantive diagnostic tool for making sense of the ways that urban public policy can produce and reproduce forms of human agency and, ultimately, the way that the urban partially determines human freedom. (shrink)

Shared agency is of central importance in our lives in many ways. We enjoy engaging in certain joint activities with others. We also engage in joint activities to achieve complex goals. Current approaches propose that we understand shared agency in terms of the more basic phenomenon of shared intention. However, they have presented two antagonistic views about the nature of this phenomenon. Some have argued that shared intention should be understood as being primarily a structure of attitudes of individual participants (...) and their interrelations (Bratman, Searle, Tuomela and Miller). Others have claimed that shared intention should be regarded as being primarily a normative transaction which gives rise to interpersonal obligations (Gilbert). In contrast to these approaches, I propose a compromise view. I argue that shared intention involves a complex socio-psychological structure which ensures, in the absence of special circumstances, the existence of relevant moral obligations. My argument involves two main steps. First, I show that shared intention includes important relations of mutual reliance between the participants. Then, I argue that the existence of these relations of mutual reliance in shared intention helps us explain why, failing special circumstances, shared intention generates those obligations. This provides, in my view, a solution to the vexed question of the relation between shared intention and interpersonal obligations. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is changing healthcare and the practice of medicine as data-driven science and machine-learning technologies, in particular, are contributing to a variety of medical and clinical tasks. Such advancements have also raised many questions, especially about public trust. As a response to these concerns there has been a concentrated effort from public bodies, policy-makers and technology companies leading the way in AI to address what is identified as a "public trust deficit". This paper argues that a focus on trust (...) as the basis upon which a relationship between this new technology and the public is built is, at best, ineffective, at worst, inappropriate or even dangerous, as it diverts attention from what is actually needed to actively warrant trust. Instead of agonising about how to facilitate trust, a type of relationship which can leave those trusting vulnerable and exposed, we argue that efforts should be focused on the difficult and dynamic process of ensuring reliance underwritten by strong legal and regulatory frameworks. From there, trust could emerge but not merely as a means to an end. Instead, as something to work in practice towards; that is, the deserved result of an ongoing ethical relationship where there is the appropriate, enforceable and reliable regulatory infrastructure in place for problems, challenges and power asymmetries to be continuously accounted for and appropriately redressed. Data sharing not applicable as no datasets generated and/or analysed for this study. (shrink)

Inside vocational training systems, like those implemented in health and social sector, overcoming the gap and tensions between the times and different places of the training are the periods of practical training in the field and institute training sequences calls for the establishment of cooperation between stakeholders: trainees, trainers and tutors. The latter, regarded as lighting built-reliance, takes different forms and uses different means (educational devices, booklets, portfolios, etc.). The study of some of them showed that they can be (...) located with reference to two poles having value paradigms: one referring to a technical vision of the training and practice of the profession ( and a «technician identity), the other in a clinical approach to training and a «clinician identity» of the professions. (shrink)

Education has always been at the heart of most, if not all, human endeavours. This explains the growing interest of many scholars in educational issues. Self-Reliance, one of Emerson’s most impressive and influential works, provides an outstanding contribution to education in general and particularly to the personal development of individuals in society. The relevance of the educational values addressed in Self-Reliance makes it an appropriate context for academic reflection. This paper scrutinises the educational dimension of Emerson’s work with (...) a focus on language didactics. My concern is to provide evidence that the educational values expressed instruct didactics. The study of Self-Reliance reveals the expression of some values, the main ones being trust, responsibility, commitment, creativity, autonomy, independence, self-esteem, self-determination, self-evaluation, and individual talents. By reflecting on their educational dimension with a focus on their didactic implications I come to conclude that even though didactics does not draw directly on Emerson’s educational philosophy, it integrates some aspects, notably the values referred to in this paper. (shrink)

The stated aim of cryptocurrencies is to free the monetary system from the need to trust financial intermediaries, by relying on incentive design and technology. Many descriptive studies, however, have questioned cryptocurrencies’ delivery on the promise of trustlessness. This paper promotes a normative analysis of trust in cryptocurrencies by discussing (i) whether trust is in principle eliminable, and (ii) whether trustlessness is in itself a desirable goal. These issues are closely related, we argue, to the further issue of what kind (...) of institutions cryptocurrencies represent. We discuss the cognitive functions played by cryptocurrencies through the lens of the “extended mind” hypothesis in the philosophy of mind and hence conceive of cryptocurrencies as mind-extending institutions. As the models of institutional mind extension differ in the fiduciary bond they assume exists between individuals and institutional resources, we compare the reliance-based model of “scaffolding institutions” with the trust-based model of “cognitive institutions,” showing that the ineliminability and desirability of trust lead to seeing cryptocurrencies as instances of the latter. In the end, our discussion suggests that trust is a necessary component of cryptocurrencies’ cognitive functions and its promotion helps to perform such cognitive functions more effectively and sustainably. (shrink)

A version of this paper is forthcoming in Nous.

Ethicisation refers to the tendency to frame issues in ethical terms and can be observed in different areas of society, particularly in relation to policy-making on emerging technologies. The turn to ethics implies increased use of ethics expertise, or at least an expectation that this is the case. Calling for experts on ethics when ethically complicated questions need to be handled helps us to uphold central virtues, but there are also problems connected with ethicisation. In policy-making processes, the turn to (...) ethics may not always be a sign of a sincere aspiration to moral performance, but a strategic move to gain acceptance for controversial or sensitive activities, and ethicisation may depoliticise questions and constrain room for democratic participation. Nevertheless, ethicisation, and the ensuing call for ethics experts, suggests an expectation of confidence in ethics and ethics expertise, and that ethical guidance is an effective way of governing people’s behaviour in a morally desirable way. The purpose of this article is to explore democratic and epistemic challenges of ethicisation in the context of emerging technologies, with a specific focus on how the notions of _under-reliance_ and _over-reliance_ of ethics expertise can unpack the processes at play. By using biotechnology and the EU process of bio-patents and the publication of ethical guidelines for AI development as illustrations, it is demonstrated how ethicisation may give rise to democratic and epistemic challenges that are not explicitly addressed in discussions on the political use of ethics expertise. (shrink)

Dependency stands for manygrievances and is generally considered asymptom of oppression. An opposing concept,offered as the preferred state, isself-reliance. Dependency and self-reliance arekey concepts in sustainable developmentprograms that feature participatory approaches.Some of the ways in which development projectsemploy the concepts of dependency andself-reliance, however, are troubling.Dependency and self-reliance in two programsfor participatory sustainable development areexamined, one in Canada and the other in NewZealand. Frameworks for dependency and self-reliance aredrawn from social psychology and philosophy toexamine problematic (...) aspects associated with theconcepts. Analysis produced a proposal foruse of the term situatedinterdependence as a way to cast the outcomesof participatory sustainable development moreprecisely. The location of the cases (Canadaand New Zealand) centers the discussion withina context of industrialized agriculture, butalso points to issues pertinent to developingcountries. (shrink)

L’information est, fondamentalement, de l’ordre de l’utilitaire. À l’inverse, la communication ne saurait se réduire à l’échange d’une simple marchandise. Mais communiquer, c’est autre chose, comme l’a démontré Dominique Wolton dans ses travaux ou Michel Maffesoli quand il parle de « reliance » : c’est rajouter du ciment social ; c’est la « colle » du monde actuel. L’imaginaire de la mondialisation est la juxtaposition des fragments collés par la communication disséminée par des moyens technologiques. Néanmoins, de telles technologies (...) aident certes à créer de nouveaux imaginaires, mais elles ne sont pas, en soi, suffisantes. Encore faut-il que les imaginaires culturels communiquent entre eux, à l’épreuve de l’altérité : la traduction, de ce point de vue, est une interface incontournable. La traduction de Michel Houellebecq au Brésil servira d’illustration concrète.Information is fundamentally utilitarian, but communication cannot be reduced to a mere exchange of merchandise. Communication is something else, as Dominique Wolton has demonstrated in his work, or Michel Maffesoli when he discusses the French concept of “reliance” . Communication is the cement that binds society, the glue that holds our world together. Globalisation, in our imagination, is a juxtaposition of fragments that are glued together by communication disseminated through technological means. However, although these technologies clearly play their part in developing new imaginative conceptions, they do not suffice in themselves. The imaginative conceptions of different cultures have to communicate and confront their differences. Translation, from this point of view, is a uniquely necessary interface. Translations of Michel Houellebecq in Brazil are used here as an illustration. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) produce fluent, persuasive answers even when the interaction provides no adequate reason to accept them. The risk falls on the human side: overcommitment to claims that the exchange does not support. To assess it, we propose Turing's mirror, a structural inversion of the Turing test. Where the Turing test fixes a restricted dialogue and asks whether a machine can pass for a human, Turing's mirror keeps the same roles, dialogue, and evaluation but reverses the target: the (...) human subject is the examinee, the LLM becomes part of the apparatus, and the question is whether the subject's expressed commitment tracks the warrant that the interaction makes available. Unlike adjacent work on automation bias and appropriate reliance, which records whether people accept or reject suggestions, this inversion makes the calibration of commitment to available warrant the measured quantity, a target we call protocol-relative warranted commitment. We distinguish settings in which suspension of judgment is responsible from settings in which some commitment must be expressed under uncertainty, and we introduce a light formal schema that separates truth in the world from what a protocol makes decisively settleable. On that basis, we specify a family of trial types, a graded report over support for truth, support for falsity, and unresolved commitment, and a limited role for proper scoring. Worked examples show why a subject may be correct without being warranted, and cautious without thereby failing. The result is a disciplined starting point for studying warrant-sensitive reliance on fluent LLM output. (shrink)

In their article, “Rare Disease, Advocacy and Justice: Intersecting Disparities in Research and Clinical Care,” Halley et al. (2023) use three case examples to describe challenges patients with rar...

Reliance is ubiquitous, and is important socially, normatively and philosophically. This paper offers an account of reliance as a four-place relation among agent A, A’s action of φing, A’s goal P, and the object of reliance Q. I propose, amplify and defend this analysis of action in reliance: A, in φing, relies, for P, on Q if and only if: (1) A φs; (2) A’s goal is P; (3) A by φing achieves P only if q; (...) (4) A believes that (3); (5) A believes that q; and (6) (1) because. (shrink)

Scientific realists contend that theory-conjunction presents a problem for empiricist conceptions of scientific knowledge and practice. Van Fraassen (1980) has offered a competing account of theory-conjunction which I argue fails to capture the mercenary character of epistemic dependence in science. Representative cases of theory-conjunction developed in the present paper show that mercenary reliance implies a "principle of epistemic symmetry" which only a realist can consistently accommodate. Finally, because the practice in question involves the conjunction of theories, a version of (...) realism more robust than the "entity realism" of Cartwright (1983, 1989) and Hacking (1983) is required to explain the success of theory-conjunction. (shrink)

Flush with the juices of adolescence, American philosophy declared independence from its European parentage in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his generation. In 1837, Emerson addressed the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society on the occasion of its inaugural meeting for the year, which he called a "holiday." Emerson began: I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength (...) or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give letters any more. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better than the expectations of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. (shrink)

How should we discover the truth about language? The received view among Linguistic Pragmatists, indeed among philosophers of language generally, is that we should proceed by consulting intuitions about language. I argue that this is a mistake and constitutes the First Methodological Flaw of Linguistic Pragmatism. Why is it thought to be appropriate to consult intuitions? (1) A seemingly popular answer is that these intuitions are a priori. I argue that, even if we suppose that there is some a priori (...) knowledge, we should not suppose that we have it of meanings. (2) Stich has suggested that philosophers might be guided by linguistics in answering the question: competent speakers of a language derive their semantic intuitions, like syntactic ones, from linguistic rules of the language embodied in their minds. I argue that this “voice of competence” view of our linguistic intuitions is mistaken. Instead, I urge that intuitions are empirical theory-laden central-processor responses to phenomena differing from other such responses only in being immediate and fairly unreflective. This being so, we should prefer the intuitions of the more expert philosophers to those of the folk. More importantly, we should seek direct, less theory-laden, evidence by studying what the intuitions are about, the linguistic reality itself. (shrink)

The author concludes that the failure of major powers to comply with the rules they themselves set has encouraged emulation by the rest of the world.

What texts did Buddhists of South Asia and beyond read? How did they read, interpret, and use these texts? This essay focuses primarily on the first of the two questions and examines in this connection instances of citation found in the early Mūlamadhyamakakārikā commentaries and in a related Tibetan work as evidence of the uses of Buddhist texts. The collected samples indicate two major shifts in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist textual practices. The first transition occurred in the sixth and seventh (...) centuries when Indian commentaries on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā began to cite scriptural passages with greater frequency, especially from the Mahāyāna sūtras. The example of Tsong kha pa’s Madhyamaka work represents a later trend in which Tibetan writers repeated sūtra passages previously cited in the Indian texts that were the main objects of their study and attention. What emerges here is the pivotal role played by the middle-period Indian Mādhyamikas. Writers such as Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti contributed very substantially to the collection of core scriptural citations that were deployed in the Madhyamaka texts. While some of the sūtra passages these Indian Madhyamaka authors used were circulated outside the circle of their own philosophical tradition, others appear to have been newly collected through their private reading experience. (shrink)

This study considers the ethical implications of quoting children with particular emphasis on privacy and accuracy. A content analysis is used to examine how newspaper reporters quote children and teenagers. The study found that youths most likely are named when they are quoted in the newspaper. Teens who are 17 are the most likely to be quoted. Youths most frequently appear in feature stories, and they most frequently are treated as experts who provide the reporter with factual information. The researcher (...) argues that journalists should consider the vulnerabilities of youths before quoting them. (shrink)

L’aphorisme met en scène dans l’écriture le paradoxe dont le propre est de subvertir les opinions reçues et de mettre en rapport le singulier et l’universel.