Quill Rebecca Kukla

Several accounts of representation in cognitive systems have recently been proposed. These look for a theory that will establish how a representation comes to have a certain content, and how these representations are used by cognitive systems. Covariation accounts are unsatisfactory, as they make intelligent reasoning and cognition impossible. Cummins' interpretation-based account cannot explain the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive systems, nor how certain cognitive representations appear to have intrinsic meaning. Cognitive systems can be defined as model-constructers, or systems that use information from interpreted models as arguments in the functions they execute. An account based on this definition solves many of the problems raised by the earlier proposals

Ghostwriting scandals are pervasive in industry-funded biomedical research, and most responses to them have presumed that they represent a sharp transgression of the norms of scientific authorship. I argue that in fact, ghostwriting represents a continuous extension of current socially accepted authorship practices. I claim that the radically collaborative, decentralized, interdisciplinary research that forms the gold standard in medicine is in an important sense unauthored, and that this poses a serious problem in applied social epistemology. It is no easy matter to find procedural or architectural solutions that can secure epistemic trust and accountability for collaborative publishing in biomedicine.

The Routledge Companion to Bioethics is a comprehensive reference guide to a wide range of contemporary concerns in bioethics. The volume orients the reader in a changing landscape shaped by globalization, health disparities, and rapidly advancing technologies. Bioethics has begun a turn toward a systematic concern with social justice, population health, and public policy. While also covering more traditional topics, this volume fully captures this recent shift and foreshadows the resulting developments in bioethics. It highlights emerging issues such as climate change, transgender, and medical tourism, and re-examines enduring topics, such as autonomy, end-of-life care, and resource allocation.

Practical ethics is a peculiar field; it has no agreed-upon methods or foundations and takes a wide variety of forms. Its relationship to traditional “pure” philosophical ethics is contested and inconsistent. Since its beginnings, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics has been at the forefront of methodological reflections on the nature, grounding, and appropriate standards for practical ethics. Institute scholars such as Tom Beauchamp, Robert Veatch, and Henry Richardson have been among the most influential philosophers engaged in such metaethical conversations. Correspondingly, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal has hosted some of the most vigorous debates in this subfield. In this issue of the journal, we..

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality by Helen LonginoRebecca KuklaReview: Helen Longino, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality, University of Chicago Press, 2013In Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality, Helen Longino meticulously examines a wide variety of research programs devoted to studying human behavior, specifically aggression and sexual orientation. She teases apart the methodologies of the various approaches, examining their epistemic structure, the assumptions they must hold fixed, the research questions they enable and those they necessarily occlude, their underlying ontologies, the interests that motivate them, the ideological investments they help buttress, and the practical and political uses they serve. By the end of the book she has made clear that the so-called ‘nature-nurture’ debates invoke a hopelessly simplistic and distorting dualism when it comes to any interesting question about the etiology of a behavior. This is a readable, informative, rigorous, and elegantly organized new work from a leading scholar who has had a major hand in turning the interplay among science, ethics, and social interests into a topic of rigorous philosophical study.In the first part of the book, Longino devotes a chapter or substantial section to each major methodological approach to studying aggression and sexual orientation, including (using her labels): quantitative behavioral genetics, social-environmental approaches, molecular behavioral genetics, neurobiological approaches, and several ‘integrative’ approaches (such as developmental systems theory) that focus on the interactions and dynamics between causal factors over time rather than trying to isolate one causal contribution. She also briefly discusses human ecology, which takes the unit of study to be the behavior of a population, studied in its material environment, rather than the behavior of an individual.Longino shows elegantly how each of these research programs is equipped to reveal certain specific kinds of truths about behavior, while making other important dimensions of the phenomena invisible. Many of her examples are technical and detailed, but I can recap a few relatively simple and powerful examples: (1) Behavioral researchers have no shared understanding of what an ‘environment’ is or which features of it we need [End Page E-97] to measure. Whatever operationalization of ‘environment’ is used within a study or set of studies, this operationalization is not itself scientifically validated, but merely presupposed (33). Thus how much of a behavior shows up in a study as due to the ‘environment’ depends on just what we measure. On the behavioral genetic approach this will include everything other than genes, but on, say, the neurobiological approach this will be everything other than neural structure. But these are quite different senses of ‘environment’ with different scopes, and there’s no good reason to think they are easily commensurable. (2) ‘GxExN’ researchers use techniques to study the etiology of behavior that were developed expressly for studying disorders (112). This work thus presupposes that we can understand whatever behavior is under study on the disorder model, and will yield no well-formed results to the extent that this model does not fit. But it is at best non-obvious that a disorder model is unproblematic when it comes to aggression or—especially!—sexual orientation. (3) Most of the research programs Longino covers treat the behaving individual as the unit of analysis and study, as opposed to, for example, human ecologists’ focus on whole populations. But as she demonstrates, this affects what kinds of causes we can study, because patterns at the population level may not be detectable using the kinds of measures that can be manipulated at the individual level. Furthermore, some kinds of behaviors may require more than one participant to exist at all; for instance, the very same thing that counts as an aggressive act within one interaction may be a peaceful act in another (175).Longino does a lovely job of showing what sorts of social interests are served and buttressed by which kinds of research. For example, social-environmental approaches will, in virtue of their methodology, focus on social factors that are manipulable, and this makes them particularly amenable to generating suggestions for social interventions. Such research thus better serves the ends of those who are looking to implement...

: Mothers serve as an important layer of the health-care system, with special responsibilities to care for the health of families and nations. In our social discourse, we tend to treat maternal "choices" as though they were morally and causally self-contained units of influence with primary control over children's health. In this essay, I use infant feeding as a lens for examining the ethical contours of mothers' caretaking practices and responsibilities, as they are situated within cultural meanings and institutional pressures. I give a close critical reading of the content and strategy of the new breastfeeding advocacy campaign sponsored by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. I argue that the campaign is unlikely to substantially increase breastfeeding rates, unresponsive and even hostile to many women's actual concerns about breastfeeding, and well positioned to produce shame and compromise agency among the women it targets

We can understand objectivity, in the broadest sense of the term, as epistemic accountability to the real. Since at least the 1986 publication of Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism, so-called standpoint epistemologists have sought to build an understanding of such objectivity that does not essentially anchor it to a dislocated, ‘view from nowhere’ stance on the part of the judging subject. Instead, these theorists have argued that a proper understanding of objectivity must recognize that different agential standpoints offer different access to objective truths, with some standpoints holding better epistemic potential than others. As Harding puts it, standpoint epistemology calls for “a critical evaluation of which social situations tend to generate the most objective knowledge claims” so as to identify those standpoints that “produce empirically more accurate descriptions and theoretically richer explanations” (1991, 142, 149). Which standpoints enable the most objectivity with respect to a particular inquiry is, for the standpoint theorists, always an empirical at least as much as a conceptual question; it requires attention to the actual, material relationship between knowers, knowledge practices, and objects known. Standpoint epistemology was developed primarily by self-identiªed feminist epistemologists. Virtually all developments of standpoint episte-.

Moral perception, as the term is used in moral theory, is the perception of normatively contoured objects and states of affairs, where that perception enables us to engage in practical reason and judgment concerning these particulars. The idea that our capacity for moral perception is a crucial component of our capacity for moral reasoning and agency finds its most explicit origin in Aristotle, for whom virtue begins with the quality of perception. The focus on moral perception within moral theory has made a comeback in the last few decades, especially in the hands of self-proclaimed neo-Aristotelians such as John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, and Nancy Sherman. For these writers, our perceptual capacities are not static, and the laborious honing of our perceptual skills is a crucial moral task. On this picture, as Nancy Sherman puts it, “How to see becomes as much a matter of inquiry as what to do.”Moral particularists—including but not restricted to the neo-Aristotelians—have emphasized the centrality of moral perception to moral agency and judgment, as a corrective to moral theories that treat deliberation in terms of universal principles as the privileged keystone of moral agency.

This paper discusses a crisis of accountability that arises when scientific collaborations are massively epistemically distributed. We argue that social models of epistemic collaboration, which are social analogs to what Patrick Suppes called a “model of the experiment,” must play a role in creating accountability in these contexts. We also argue that these social models must accommodate the fact that the various agents in a collaborative project often have ineliminable, messy, and conflicting interests and values; any story about accountability in a massively distributed collaboration must therefore involve models of such interests and values and their methodological and epistemic effects

Over the last several years, as cesarean deliveries have grown increasingly common, there has been a great deal of public and professional interest in the phenomenon of women 'choosing' to deliver by cesarean section in the absence of any specific medical indication. The issue has sparked intense conversation, as it raises questions about the nature of autonomy in birth. Whereas mainstream bioethical discourse is used to associating autonomy with having a large array of choices, this conception of autonomy does not seem adequate to capture concerns and intuitions that have a strong grip outside this discourse. An empirical and conceptual exploration of how delivery decisions ought to be negotiated must be guided by a rich understanding of women's agency and its placement within a complicated set of cultural meanings and pressures surrounding birth. It is too early to be 'for' or 'against' women's access to cesarean delivery in the absence of traditional medical indications – and indeed, a simple pro- or con- position is never going to do justice to the subtlety of the issue. The right question is not whether women ought to be allowed to choose their delivery approach but, rather, taking the value of women's autonomy in decision-making around birth as a given, what sorts of guidelines, practices, and social conditions will best promote and protect women's full inclusion in a safe and positive birth process.