人文科学最新文献

• Contributors

Michiel De Proost is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University and is affiliated with the Bioethics Institute Ghent and the METAMEDICA consortium.

Benjamin Chin-Yee is a hematologist in the Division of Hematology, Western University, Canada, and a doctoral student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His research interests span philosophy of medicine, values in science, and the ethics of scientific and clinical communication.

Ilvie Prince is a doctoral candidate at Leibniz University Hannover. Her work focuses on the complex relationship between ethics and epistemology in medicine, with a particular interest in medical practices that challenge established concepts and methods.

Megan A. Dean is an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at Michigan State University and the North American coordinator of Culinary Mind: Center for Philosophy of Food. She works in feminist bioethics with a focus on the ethics of eating.

Jonathan Ichikawa is a professor and department head in philosophy at the University of British Columbia. His research interests center around epistemology, feminist philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of language, especially the points at which those philosophical subfields interact with one another.

Several suggestions have been made to embolden and reorient the concept of solidarity given the emergence of data-driven medicine. Recently, the European Union introduced a new consent model for so-called data altruism to motivate people to make their data available for purposes such as scientific research or improving public services. Others have introduced the alternative concept of data solidarily, which assumes that people's interests in data sharing result from a collective commitment to assist others. What those perspectives have in common is a focus on top-down organizational structures to deal with data-driven medicine. In this article, I offer an alternative reading of data solidarity, drawing on anarchist theory that highlights the disposition of mutual aid as a broader characteristic of solidarity. I begin by briefly indicating how the existing approaches to data solidarity in healthcare remain legalistic and state-centered without thoroughly considering socially critical notions of solidarity that highlight the impact of structural injustices. I then sketch out how an anarchist understanding of mutual aid could inform the conceptualization of solidarity. Finally, I focus on two implications for the practice of data-driven medicine: (1) current proposals of data altruism seem to engender a form of reversed charity; and (2) data solidarity practices could arise from the bottom-up through spontaneous order and direct action.

Historian of physics Roger H. Stuewer (1934–2022), co-founder of Physics in Perspective, passed away on July 28, 2022. His loss is greatly felt in the discipline. To commemorate his considerable contribution to the history of physics, the editorial team at Physics in Perspective have elected to publish his autobiographical recollections, which cover both his esteemed academic career and many of his personal thoughts and reflections.

Generalizations in medical research can be informative, but also misleading. Building on recent work in the philosophy of science and ethics of communication, I offer a novel analysis of common generalizations in clinical trials as generics in natural language. Generics, which express generalizations without terms of quantification, have attracted considerable attention from philosophers, psychologists, and linguists. My analysis draws on probabilistic and contextual features of generics to diagnose how these generalizations function and malfunction across communicative contexts in medicine. Given a high risk of misinterpretation ("slippage"), I recommend avoidance of generic claims about medical interventions in public contexts, exemplified by clinical trials and medical research more generally. Generics should only be used with vigilance in private contexts, exemplified by the physician–patient encounter. My analysis provides tools to support vigilance when communicating with generics, suggests new norms for public science communication, and raises deeper questions in the ethics of clinical communication.

Considering public moral attitudes is a hallmark of the anticipatory governance of emerging biotechnologies, such as heritable human genome editing. However, such anticipatory governance often overlooks that future morality is open to change and that future generations may perform different moral assessments on the very biotechnologies we are trying to govern in the present. In this article, we identify an 'anticipatory gap' that has not been sufficiently addressed in the discussion on the public governance of heritable genome editing, namely, uncertainty about the moral visions of future generations about the emerging applications that we are currently attempting to govern now. This paper motivates the relevance of this anticipatory gap, identifying the challenges it generates and offering various recommendations so that moral uncertainty does not lead to governance paralysis with regard to human germline genome editing.

In 2021 and 2022, researchers carried out an implementation trial that considered how the capsule sponge test might be used to screen for Barrett's oesophagus using a mobile clinic in East Anglia. This paper offers insights from 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork studying the trial. It aims to highlight the value of the test in offering reassurance to worried patients, particularly to those with a family history of oesophageal adenocarcinoma. It also considers the variety of aims people held for the capsule sponge test, including the hope that it would address their symptoms of acid reflux, and the conflict that sometimes emerged as a result. The second half of the paper uses fieldwork carried out in virtual support groups for people with Barrett's oesophagus to explore experiences postdiagnosis, which sometimes were defined by fear of future cancers. It describes notable differences between the care offered to people with morphological risk conditions like Barrett's oesophagus and the care given to those with genetic risk conditions, including the provision of genetic counselling. More broadly, the paper highlights a tension between patient-centred and risk-centred medicine that is likely to grow as healthcare services continue to shift towards preventative approaches.

Here I look to some work in the historical sciences in order to draw out some of the epistemic benefits of "speculative narratives," which bears on some more general epistemic benefits of speculative reasoning. Due to the contingent nature of much historical evidence, some degree of speculative reasoning is necessary to get the epistemological ball rolling in the historical sciences, and I argue that speculative narratives provide the necessary sort of frameworking apparatus for doing precisely this. I use contemporary work on the first peopling of the Americas (the "Clovis First Debate") for illustration.

In the realm of language education, the influence of learners' personality traits on their educational outcomes within novel instructional frameworks has gained prominence, prompting an exploration into the effects of ambiguity tolerance on grammar acquisition among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. This study investigates the impact of learners' personality traits on their learning outcomes in innovative instructional models, such as flipped and blended classes. A sample of 120 EFL students was divided into four comparative groups and two control groups based on their proficiency and ambiguity tolerance (AT) scores. The study utilized a Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver instruction to the different groups. The blended group received a combination of online and face-to-face instruction, while the flipped group received online instruction using the flipped approach. The control group received only face-to-face instruction. After a semester of instruction, a posttest on grammar learning was administered. The findings showed that the blended group performed better than the flipped and face-to-face groups in terms of grammar learning. The study also found no significant differences in grammar learning between high AT and low AT participants in the flipped and blended classes. However, high AT students in the face-to-face class demonstrated higher levels of success in grammar learning compared to low AT students.

Reviewed by:

• Green Light Ethics: A Theory of Permissive Consent and its Moral Metaphysics by Hallie Liberto
• Jonathan Ichikawa (bio)

Hallie Liberto's Green Light Ethics offers a framework for conceptualizing permissive consent. The book is a philosopher's work of philosophy. Although it touches on non-ideal social realities, especially sexism, it is most centrally a contribution to a quite abstract literature in normative ethics, following in the tradition of scholars like David Owens, Heidi Hurd, Alan Wertheimer, and Tom Dougherty—it may have a few too many Φs and abstractions to be accessible to and comfortable for many people outside the analytic philosophical tradition. The central approach to permission and consent is general—not specific to sexual consent—although some discussions are specific to sex.

I have always appreciated and learned from Liberto's work on this topic, and I was excited to read her new book. As I'd hoped, it exhibits fresh and interesting moral and philosophical instincts, and advances plausible and interesting ideas. I did feel, however, that it was sometimes more difficult than one might hope to identify exactly what those ideas are. At key points, I found myself wanting more precision or explanation. I am not the kind of philosopher who shuns abstraction—I value both the concrete/non-ideal and the theoretical/abstract. And I'm not afraid of all those Φs. But as I see it, the point of writing in that mode—the reason it can be worth the cost in accessibility and style—is the ability to express and examine complex ideas with a high degree of precision. As I was reading this book, I found that much of my own intellectual contribution centered around attempts to interpret Liberto's ideas and technicalities before I was in a good position to learn from them. This was a bit of a shame, because there are intriguing ideas in this book, well worthy of consideration. I'll give my own reconstruction of a few of them below, along with some critical engagement.

1. domain authority

Liberto posits that there are certain domains over which people hold a special kind of moral authority, which she calls "domain authority" (38). Someone would wrong you if they acted in your domains outside of your normative control. For example, you have domain authority over sexual contact with your body; any actions by others within that domain must [End Page 429] be in accordance with your moral control, or they are violative. Liberto typically uses the following abbreviations to discuss domain authority: S is a person who may or may not be g

Since the invention of hormonal contraceptives, there has been disagreement between users and providers about the existence of side effects and their implications for care. The lack of consideration for cisgender women, and other people who may become pregnant, has often been explained by sexist bias in the philosophy of medicine. My goal is to contribute additional elements to this discussion. I will argue that there are structurally embedded assumptions about the responsibilities and goals of medicine that open the door to this sexism in the first place. While we tend to accept that contraception is part of medicine for pragmatic reasons, we do not exhibit the same form of pragmatism when it comes to dealing with side effects. This is an unjustified double standard that fails to recognize the goals of contraception and the fact that it relies on medical expertise to achieve them.