Scholarly Works, Philosophy

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Diviners and Divination in Aristophanic Comedy
Smith, N. D. (University of California Press, 1989-04)
Recent Work on Aristotelian Biology
Grene, Marjorie (MIT Press, 2000-12)
The Dilemma of Case Studies Resolved: The Virtues of Using Case Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science
Burian, Richard M. (MIT Press, 2001-12)
Philosophers of science turned to historical case studies in part in response to Thomas Kuhn's insistence that such studies can transform the philosophy of science. In this issue Joseph Pitt argues that the power of case studies to instruct us about scientific methodology and epistemology depends on prior philosophical commitments, without which case studies are not philosophically useful. Here I reply to Pitt, demonstrating that case studies, properly deployed, illustrate styles of scientific work and modes of argumentation that are not well handled by currently standard philosophical analyses. I illustrate these claims with exemplary findings from case studies dealing with exploratory experimentation and with interdisciplinary cooperation across sciences to yield multiple independent means of access to theoretical entities. The latter cases provide examples of ways that scientists support claims about theoretical entities that are not available in work performed within a single discipline. They also illustrate means of correcting systematic biases that stem from the commitments of each discipline taken separately. These findings illustrate the transformative power of case study methods, allow us to escape from the horns of Pitt's ?dilemma of case studies?, and vindicate some of the post-Kuhn uses to which case studies have been put.
The Dilemma of Case Studies: Toward a Heraclitian Philosophy of Science
Pitt, Joseph C. (MIT Press, 2001-12)
What do appeals to case studies accomplish? Consider the dilemma: On the one hand, if the case is selected because it exemplifies the philosophical point, then it is not clear that the historical data hasn't been manipulated to fit the point. On the other hand, if one starts with a case study, it is not clear where to go from there?for it is unreasonable to generalize from one case or even two or three.
The beautiful soul and the autocratic agent: Schiller's and Kant's 'children of the house'
Baxley, A. M. (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2003-10)
In his extended essay "On Grace and Dignity," Friedrich Schiller sets out an important challenge to Kant when he argues that sensibility must play a constitutive role in the ethical life. This paper argues that there is much we can learn from Schiller's "corrective" to Kant's moral theory and Kant's reply to this critique, for what is at stake in their debate are rival conceptions of the proper state of moral health for us as finite rational beings and competing political notions concerning the ideal form of self-governance that we ought to strive to attain.
Ethical pluralism without complementarity
FitzPatrick, William J. (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2004)
Grinnell, Bishop, and McCullough (2002) have proposed extending Bohr's notion of complementarity from the realm of quantum physics to that of bioethics, arguing that many ethical disputes cannot in principle be resolved. On this view, we should give up the aim of reaching all-things-considered moral verdicts on a variety of disputed questions, settling instead for a holism of irreducibly complementary perspectives. I discuss a number of difficulties with this proposal, and argue that the desire for inclusiveness that motivates it is properly captured through a different approach to ethical pluralism already familiar in moral philosophy, which does allow for resolution.
Restoring the Fallen Blue Sky: Management Issues and Environmental Legislation for Lake Sevan, Armenia
Lind, Douglas; Taslakyan, Lusine (UC Davis School of Law, 2005)
Armenia is a small, landlocked country in the Southern Caucasus Mountains. It is one of the world's oldest civilizations,¹ yet a very young country. It was formed as one of the Newly Independent States (NIS) following the 1991 breakup 'of the Soviet Union. Armenia's landscape ranges from rugged, impassible volcanic peaks in the Caucasus that reach nearly 3,600 meters above sea level, to highly fertile land in the Ararat Valley, the principal agricultural region of the country. Lake Sevan, the "Heart-of Armenia,"² at one time encompassed nearly five percent of the country's surface area. Lake Sevan is one of the oldest, largest, and highest alpine lakes in the world. It is the lake heralded by Maxim Gorky as a glorious piece of fallen blue sky.³ The size, depth, and high mountain location of Lake Sevan has made it an important ecological and cultural focus for the people of Armenia over many centuries. Yet these features also turned the lake into one of the most misguided and ecologically catastrophic engineering follies of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1930s, the government of the Soviet Union undertook a series of management'decisions to divert a substantial quantity of Lake Sevan's waters to the Hrazdan River for irrigation in the Ararat Valley and for hydroelectric power generation.⁴ The Soviet plan called for decreasing the lake's surface area, thereby decreasing water loss from evaporation and increasing the amount available each year for agricultural and hydroelectric purposes.⁵ Water was taken from the lake at rates significantly above the natural inflow, which decreased its volume by over forty percent and lowered its level by roughly nineteen meters over a span of forty years.⁶ The lake's surface area has diminished from 1,416 square kilometers to about 1,240 square kilometers.⁷ This decrease in water level, together with increased pollution loads from point and non-point sources, has significantly destabilized Lake Sevan's hydrology and ecology, resulting in an accelerated eutrophication process (algae growth) and substantial adverse impacts on the lake and its basin's flora and fauna.⁸ Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, restoration of Lake Sevan has become a matter of high priority within the newly independent Armenia, and has drawn the interest of the international environmental community.⁹ Organizations outside Armenia, such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the Ramsar Convention, and USAID have brought international attention to the lake, adopting management plans and position statements designed to increase protection, conservation, and restoration of the lake. Armenia, in turn, has responded by enacting a number of environmental laws that bear upon management of the lake and its surrounding region, including a series of laws that address only Lake Sevan. This article examines the ecological problems plaguing Lake Sevan as a result of the lake's decreased water level during the Soviet era and the legal efforts taken to address them. Part I presents an overview of the lake's limnology, comparing its original natural conditions with those found in the current wake of the level lowering project. Part II canvasses the laws enacted over the years to address the Sevan problem. This review begins at the political source of the problem-the philosophy of Soviet Marxism, the Stalinist policy to transform nature, and the few legal initiatives taken near the end of the Soviet era to address water resource issues throughout the USSR. The article then covers the post-Soviet era during which the independent Republic of Armenia enacted laws designed to address the environment in general and Lake Sevan in particular. This section reviews the international agreements and action plans that hold significance for Sevan. Finally, Part III undertakes an assessment of the various laws and management plans that impact the lake's iestoration and future health. The article concludes that while the laws and plans derive from well-meaning intent, there is little reason to expect meaningful restoration. So long as the Armenian economy remains depressed and dependent upon the exploitation of Sevan's dwindling resources, and until the laws affecting the lake's health become more pragmatic in approach and better endowed with enforcement provisions that are carried out with force, the lake's health will likely continue to decline.
Intrinsicality without Naturalness
Witmer, D. Gene; Butchard, William; Trogdon, Kelly Griffith (2005-03)
Rae Langton and David Lewis have proposed an account of "intrinsic property" that makes use of two notions: being independent of accompaniment and being natural. We find the appeal to the first of these promising; the second notion, however, we find mystifying. In this paper we argue that the appeal to naturalness is not acceptable and offer an alternative definition of intrinsicality. The alternative definition makes crucial use of a notion commonly used by philosophers, namely, the notion of one property being had in virtue of another property. We defend our account against three arguments for thinking that this "in virtue of' notion is unacceptable in this context. We also take a look at a variety of cases in which the definition might be applied and defend it against potential counterexamples. The upshot, we think, is a modest but adequate account of what we understand by "intrinsic property."
The practical turn in ethical theory: Korsgaard's constructivism, realism, and the nature of normativity
FitzPatrick, William J. (University of Chicago Press, 2005-07)
My aim is to assess the merits of Korsgaard's rejection of realism as well as the prospects for her practical approach to normativity, and I shall both raise problems for her constructivism and develop a realist response to her central challenge. To make clear what is at stake, I will begin by elucidating the "normative question" that motivates her negative and positive projects alike and by describing the realist and constructivist positions in this debate. Then, in Section II, I will lay out her central critique of realism and go on, in Section III, to explain her current strategy for avoiding the problems she raises for realists. As described more fully at the end of Section III, I will then examine Korsgaard's distinctive approach to normativity by looking at how her practical_problem_solving conception of normativity applies specifically to the principle at the heart of Kantian ethics-the formula of humanity, which she believes must be derived in a purely constructivist fashion in order to be binding. Giving careful attention to such derivations in light of her general account of normativity (Secs. IV-VI) is the best way both to clarify what is really at issue in the debate over normativity and to see concretely how her constructivist approach to deriving normative principles is supposed to deliver what is required by her practical_problem_solving account of binding normative force.
Cartesianism Revisited
Lewis, Eric P. (MIT Press, 2007-12)
Moral Responsibility and Normative Ignorance: Answering a New Skeptical Challenge
FitzPatrick, William J. (University of Chicago Press, 2008-07)
Philosophical doubts about moral responsibility have typically been rooted in worries about free agency in the face of causal determinism, culminating in familiar metaphysical arguments against the very possibility of moral responsibility.1 Recently, however, a skeptical argument has emerged that is simultaneously less ambitious and potentially more challenging to many of our common beliefs and practices concerning responsibility. It is less ambitious because the aim is to show not that agents cannot in principle be responsible for what they do but only that the ascription of responsibility or blame for bad actions is never warranted in any particular case.2 Since this more modest argument does not rely on the truth of determinism, however, the worries it raises for attributions of moral responsibility are likewise not mitigated by familiar compatibilist strategies for rescuing moral responsibility from the threat of determinism. The problems remain whatever one concludes about the underlying metaphysical issues.
Plan-Based Expressivism and Innocent Mistakes
Daskal, S. (University of Chicago Press, 2009-01)
Over the past hundred years, there has been a series of metaethical views according to which we ought to deepen our understanding of normative terms by inquiring after the states of mind they express. This is the class of views, sometimes identified as forms of noncognitivism, that Allan Gibbard has dubbed "expressivist." It includes the emotivism of A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson as well as, on some readings, the prescriptivism of R. M. Hare. More recently, Simon Blackburn's "quasi_realist" projectivism is a sophisticated form of expressivism, and Gibbard has also developed and defended an expressivist theory of his own.1 What these views share is the thought that normative terms are intimately linked to emotions or actions in a way that cannot be captured in a purely descriptive analysis. They also share a set of common objections. For instance, all expressivists must confront the so_called Frege_Geach problem, according to which an expressivist analysis of normative terms will be unable to account for the many ways in which such terms can be embedded in otherwise descriptive sentences.2 Expressivists also face objections, raised most prominently by Ronald Dworkin, according to which their analyses of normative terms fail to provide an adequate degree of objectivity for normative judgments.3
A Statistical Scientist Meets a Philosopher of Science: A Conversation between Sir David Cox and Deborah Mayo (as recorded, June, 2011)
Mayo, Deborah G. (RMM, 2011)
Statistical Science and Philosophy of Science: Where Do/Should They Meet in 2011 (and Beyond)?
Mayo, Deborah G. (RMM, 2011)
Debates over the philosophical foundations of statistics have a long and fascinating history; the decline of a lively exchange between philosophers of science and statisticians is relatively recent. Is there something special about 2011 (and beyond) that calls for renewed engagement in these fields? I say yes. There are some surprising, pressing, and intriguing new philosophical twists on the long-running controversies that cry out for philosophical analysis, and I hope to galvanize my co-contributors as well as the reader to take up the general cause.
Statistical Science Meets Philosophy of Science Part 2: Shallow versus Deep Explorations
Mayo, Deborah G. (RMM, 2012)
Inability to clearly defend against the criticisms of frequentist methods has turned many a frequentist away from venturing into foundational battlegrounds. Conceding the distorted perspectives drawn from overly literal and radical expositions of what Fisher, Neyman, and Pearson ‘really thought’, some deny they matter to current practice. The goal of this paper is not merely to call attention to the howlers that pass as legitimate criticisms of frequentist error statistics, but also to sketch the main lines of an alternative statistical philosophy within which to better articulate the roles and value of frequentist tools.
Garrison Rejoinder
Garrison, J. (University of Chicago Press, 2012-05)
Individuality, Equality, and Creative Democracy-the Task Before Us
Garrison, J. (University of Chicago Press, 2012-05)
On the Birnbaum Argument for the Strong Likelihood Principle
Mayo, Deborah G. (Statistical Science, 2014)
An essential component of inference based on familiar frequentist notions, such as p-values, significance and confidence levels, is the relevant sampling distribution. This feature results in violations of a principle known as the strong likelihood principle (SLP), the focus of this paper. In particular, if outcomes x∗ and y∗ from experiments E1 and E2 (both with unknown parameter θ) have different probability models f1(·), f2(·), then even though f1(x∗; θ) = cf2(y∗; θ) for all θ, outcomes x∗ and y∗ may have different implications for an inference about θ. Although such violations stem from considering outcomes other than the one observed, we argue this does not require us to consider experiments other than the one performed to produce the data. David Cox [Ann. Math. Statist. 29 (1958) 357–372] proposes the Weak Conditionality Principle (WCP) to justify restricting the space of relevant repetitions. The WCP says that once it is known which Ei produced the measurement, the assessment should be in terms of the properties of Ei . The surprising upshot of Allan Birnbaum’s [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 57 (1962) 269–306] argument is that the SLP appears to follow from applying the WCP in the case of mixtures, and so uncontroversial a principle as sufficiency (SP). But this would preclude the use of sampling distributions. The goal of this article is to provide a new clarification and critique of Birnbaum’s argument. Although his argument purports that [(WCP and SP) entails SLP], we show how data may violate the SLP while holding both the WCP and SP. Such cases also refute [WCP entails SLP].
Dynamical Kinds and their Discovery
Jantzen, Benjamin C. (2016)
We demonstrate the possibility of classifying causal systems into kinds that share a common structure without first constructing an explicit dynamical model or using prior knowledge of the system dynamics. The algorithmic ability to determine whether arbitrary systems are governed by causal relations of the same form offers significant practical applications in the development and validation of dynamical models. It is also of theoretical interest as an essential stage in the scientific inference of laws from empirical data. The algorithm presented is based on the dynamical symmetry approach to dynamical kinds. A dynamical symmetry with respect to time is an intervention on one or more variables of a system that commutes with the time evolution of the system. A dynamical kind is a class of systems sharing a set of dynamical symmetries. The algorithm presented classifies deterministic, time-dependent causal systems by directly comparing their exhibited symmetries. Using simulated, noisy data from a variety of nonlinear systems, we show that this algorithm correctly sorts systems into dynamical kinds. It is robust under significant sampling error, is immune to violations of normality in sampling error, and fails gracefully with increasing dynamical similarity. The algorithm we demonstrate is the first to address this aspect of automated scientific discovery.
Environmental Remediation to Address Childhood Lead Poisoning Epidemic due to Artisanal Gold Mining in Zamfara, Nigeria
Tirima, Simba; Bartrem, Casey; von Lindern, Ian; von Braun, Margrit; Lind, Douglas; Anka, Shehu Mohammed; Abdullahi, Aishat (National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, 2016-09)
Background: From 2010 through 2013, integrated health and environmental responses addressed an unprecedented epidemic lead poisoning in Zamfara State, northern Nigeria. Artisanal gold mining caused widespread contamination resulting in the deaths of > 400 children. Socioeconomic, logistic, and security challenges required remediation and medical protocols within the context of local resources, labor practices, and cultural traditions. Objectives: Our aim was to implement emergency environmental remediation to abate exposures to 17,000 lead poisoned villagers, to facilitate chelation treatment of children ≤ 5 years old, and to establish local technical capacity and lead health advocacy programs to prevent future disasters. Methods: U.S. hazardous waste removal protocols were modified to accommodate local agricultural practices. Remediation was conducted over 4 years in three phases, progressing from an emergency response by international personnel to comprehensive cleanup funded and accomplished by the Nigerian government. Results: More than 27,000 m³ of contaminated soils and mining waste were removed from 820 residences and ore processing areas in eight villages, largely by hand labor, and disposed in constructed landfills. Excavated areas were capped with clean soils (≤ 25 mg/kg lead), decreasing soil lead concentrations by 89%, and 2,349 children received chelation treatment. Pre-chelation geometric mean blood lead levels for children ≤ 5 years old decreased from 149 μg/dL to 15 μg/dL over the 4-year remedial program. Conclusions: The unprecedented outbreak and response demonstrate that, given sufficient political will and modest investment, the world’s most challenging environmental health crises can be addressed by adapting proven response protocols to the capabilities of host countries. Citation: Tirima S, Bartrem C, von Lindern I, von Braun M, Lind D, Anka SM, Abdullahi A. 2016. Environmental remediation to address childhood lead poisoning epidemic due to artisanal gold mining in Zamfara, Nigeria. Environ Health Perspect 124:1471–1478; http://dx.doi. org/10.1289/ehp.1510145

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