Normative systems and medical metaethics Part II: Health-maximizing and persons

Two common medical-ethical axions, the health-maximizing axiom and the personhood-respecting axiom, are discussed. On the basis of a philosophical analysis of personhood and freedom of the will it is shown that these two axioms are incompatible. The rejection of the first axiom is suggested.     

Truthmaking, metaethics, and creeping minimalism

Creeping minimalism threatens to cloud the distinction between realist and anti-realist metaethical views. When anti-realist views equip themselves with minimalist theories of truth and other semantic notions, they are able to take on more and more of the doctrines of realism (such as the existence of moral truths, facts, and beliefs). But then they start to look suspiciously like realist views. I suggest that creeping minimalism is a problem only if moral realism is understood primarily as a semantic doctrine. I argue that moral realism is better understood instead as a metaphysical doctrine. As a result, we can usefully regiment the metaethical debate into one about moral truthmakers: In virtue of what are moral judgments true? I show how the notion of truthmaking has been simmering just below the surface of the metaethical debate, and how it reveals one metaethical view (quasi-realism) to be a stronger contender than the others.     

Dreaming,cognition, and physical illness: Part I

Part I of a two part article on the effect upon dreaming on physical illness briefly explores the historical medico-philosophical antecedents of the notion that dreams can be diagnostic of bodily disease. Modern sleep research findings relating REM sleep to physiologic changes are also explored. The controversy of whether dreams are merely the consequence of random brain activity or whether they are a valid psychological phenomenon is discussed. Six contemporary views of the function of REM sleep are outlined. A seventh view of dreaming, that of a “cognitive monitoring system” is suggested. Like earlier historical notions, it is suggested that dreaming is a cognitive activity that processes bodily cues indicating illness or disease. Part II. presents a clinical compendium of dreams relating to Part I.     

Value Commitment,Resolute Choice,and the Normative Foundations of Behavioural Welfare Economics

Given the endowment effect, the role of attention in decision-making, and the framing effect, most behavioural economists agree that it would be a mistake to accept the satisfaction of revealed preferences as the normative criterion of choice. Some have suggested that what makes agents better off is not the satisfaction of revealed preferences, but ‘true’ preferences, which may not always be observed through choice. While such preferences may appear to be an improvement over revealed preferences, some philosophers of economics have argued that they face insurmountable epistemological, normative, and methodological challenges. This article introduces a new kind of true preference – values-based preferences – that blunts these challenges. Agents express values-based preferences when they choose in a manner that is compatible with a consumption plan grounded in a value commitment that is normative, affective, and stable for the agent who has one. Agents who choose according to their plans are resolute choosers. My claim is that while values-based preferences do not apply to every choice situation, this kind of preference provides a rigorous way for thinking about classic choice situations that have long interested behavioural economists and philosophers of economics, such as ‘Joe-in-the-cafeteria.’     

Part II: Applications of Process-Based Theories: Process and Emergence: Normative Function and Representation

Kim's argument appears to render causally efficacious emergence impossible: Hume's argument appears to render normative emergence impossible, and, in its general form, it precludes any emergence at all. I argue that both of these barriers can be overcome, and, in fact, that they each constitute reductions of their respective underlying presuppositions. In particular, causally efficacious ontological emergence can be modeled, but only within a process metaphysics, thus avoiding Kim's argument, and making use of non-abbreviatory forms of definition, thus avoiding Hume's argument. I illustrate these points with models of the emergent nature of normative function and of representation.     

Normative systems of discovery and logic of search

New computer systems of discovery create a research program for logic and philosophy of science. These systems consist of inference rules and control knowledge that guide the discovery process. Their paths of discovery are influenced by the available data and the discovery steps coincide with the justification of results. The discovery process can be described in terms of fundamental concepts of artificial intelligence such as heuristic search, and can also be interpreted in terms of logic. The traditional distinction that places studies of scientific discovery outside the philosophy of science, in psychology, sociology, or history, is no longer valid in view of the existence of computer systems of discovery. It becomes both reasonable and attractive to study the schemes of discovery in the same way as the criteria of justification were studied: empirically as facts, and logically as norms.     

Longitudinal findings from the Normative Aging Study: III. Personality, individual health trajectories, and mortality

Individual differences in physical and psychological health trajectories were examined in 1,515 Normative Aging Study men. Mean age at baseline was 47.15 years (range = 28-80), and average follow up was 18.55 years (range = 8-25). Both linear and nonlinear growth curves were estimated with random-effects models and then clustered to identify patterns of change. Men whose physical health trajectories were characterized by high, increasing symptoms were higher in hostility and anxiety, were overweight, and smoked. Those whose trajectories were characterized by low symptoms were emotionally stable, educated, nonsmokers, and thin. Men with high, stable psychological trajectories had high hostility; those with low, stable trajectories had high emotional stability; those with moderate anxiety levels had nonlinear trajectories with peaks in psychological symptoms at different life stages. Personality had life-long effects on health trajectories, but these effects varied across traits and health outcomes.     

Normative Force and Normative Freedom: Hume and Kant, But Not Hume versus Kant

Our notion of normativity appears to combine, in a way difficult to understand but seemingly familiar from experience, elements of force and freedom. On the one hand, a normative claim is thought to have a kind of compelling authority; on the other hand, if our respecting it is to be an appropriate species of respect, it must not be coerced, automatic, or trivially guaranteed by definition. Both Hume and Kant, I argue, looked to aesthetic experience as a convincing example exhibiting this marriage of force and freedom, as well as showing how our judgment can come to be properly attuned to the features that constitute value. This image of attunement carries over into their respective accounts of moral judgment. The seemingly radical difference between their moral theories may be traceable not to a different conception of normativity, but to a difference in their empirical psychological theories – a difference we can readily spot in their accounts of aesthetics.     

Part I: Psychoanalysis and Undergraduate Education

ABSTRACT

Part I consists of two articles by the professors who invented the Chicago course, articulating why they think that teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates is crucial. Marcia Dobson, who is a clinician along with being a professor of Classics, gives some personal history as to why she is so invested in psychoanalysis and offers a clinical understanding for why she thinks undergraduates need psychoanalysis to help them understand themselves better. John Riker, a philosopher, concentrates on why the conceptual tools of psychoanalysis are crucial for undergraduates as they think about who they are, who they want to be, and how they are going to negotiate adult life.     

Normative Value Change Across the Human Life Cycle: Similarities and Differences Across Europe

Normative change in people’s value priorities (Schwartz, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 25:1–65, 1992) was examined by analyzing repeated cross sections of the 26 countries that participated in at least four of the first seven waves of the European Social Survey (2002–2015). For this purpose, we compared data from different samples taken from five historical cohorts over time in order to identify generalizable patterns in value development that could apply to most people. Results suggest that most cohorts increasingly valued Self-Transcendence over Self-Enhancement in the transition from late adolescence to young adulthood. During and after middle adulthood, age effects were virtually nonexistent in Eastern Europe, relatively weak in Southern Europe, and limited to midlife in North-Western Europe. The results also suggest that all cohorts, except most Northern and Western European cohorts in midlife, became relatively more conservative and less open with age. We present evidence that differences between historical cohorts produced some of the age–values associations that have been found in previous studies. Latent growth curve modeling was used to further summarize the observed intracohort-aging trajectories and to identify potential country-level moderators. This analysis showed that the positive association between normative aging and Self-Transcendence endorsement was stronger in countries that are more affluent.