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100Clinical Decisions Using AI Must Consider Patient ValuesNature Medicine 28. 2022.Built-in decision thresholds for AI diagnostics are ethically problematic, as patients may differ in their attitudes about the risk of false-positive and false-negative results, which will require that clinicians assess patient values.
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76Are Kin and Group Selection Rivals or Friends?Current Biology 29 (11). 2019.Kin selection and group selection were once seen as competing explanatory hypotheses but now tend to be seen as equivalent ways of describing the same basic idea. Yet this ‘equivalence thesis’ seems not to have brought proponents of kin selection and group selection any closer together. This may be because the equivalence thesis merely shows the equivalence of two statistical formalisms without saying anything about causality. W.D. Hamilton was the first to derive an equivalence result of this t…Read more
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66The Difference Between the Scope of a Norm and Its Apparent SourceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.We should distinguish between the apparent source of a norm and the scope of the norm's satisfaction conditions. Wide-scope social norms need not be externalised, and externalised social norms need not be wide in scope. Attending to this distinction leads to a problem for Stanford: The adaptive advantages he attributes to externalised norms are actually advantages of wide-scope norms.
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54Animal sentience and the Capabilities Approach to justice (review)Biology and Philosophy 38 (4): 1-13. 2023.Martha Nussbaum’s _Justice for Animals_ calls upon humanity to secure for all sentient beings the central capabilities they need to flourish. This essay review critically examines the ethical and scientific foundations of Nussbaum’s position. On the ethical side, we explore the tension between a robust defence of animal rights and political liberalism, which requires tolerance of a range of reasonable views. On the scientific side, we reflect on how our uncertainty regarding the distribution of …Read more
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31From the “coding metaphor” to a theory of representationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.Brette highlights a conceptual problem in contemporary neuroscience: Loose talk of “coding” sometimes leads to a conflation of the distinction between representing and merely detecting a property. The solution is to replace casual talk of “coding” with an explicit, demanding set of conditions for neural representation. Various theories of this general type can be found in the philosophical literature.
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26Correction to: Science and policy in extremis: the UK’s initial response to COVID‑19European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (3): 1-1. 2023.This corrects a single typographical error in the article "Science and policy in extremis: the UK’s initial response to COVID‑19".
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20Knowing Science, by Alexander Bird (review)Mind. forthcoming.A review essay on Alexander Bird's book Knowing Science. The review examines Bird's reasons for thinking the human element in science may be entirely dispensable. It offers counterarguments highlighting problems with the idea that a group can know a proposition that none of its individual members know.
London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
PhilPapers Editorships
Evolutionary Biology |