Knowing Our Limits

Author(s):  
Nathan Ballantyne

Changing our minds isn’t easy. Even when we recognize our views are disputed by intelligent and informed people, we rarely doubt our rightness. Why is this so? How can we become more open-minded, putting ourselves in a better position to tolerate conflict, advance collective inquiry, and learn from differing perspectives in a complex world? In this engrossing, provocative book, Nathan Ballantyne defends the indispensable role of epistemology in tackling these issues. For early modern philosophers, the point of reflecting on inquiry was to understand how our beliefs are often distorted by prejudice and self-interest, and to improve the foundations of human knowledge. Ballantyne seeks to recover and modernize this classical tradition by vigorously defending an interdisciplinary approach to epistemology, blending philosophical theorizing with insights from the social and cognitive sciences. We need tools to help us think more circumspectly about our controversial views. Ballantyne develops a method for distinguishing between our reasonable and unreasonable opinions, in light of evidence about bias, information overload, and rival experts. This method guides us to greater intellectual openness—in the spirit of skeptics from Socrates to Montaigne to Bertrand Russell—making us more inclined to admit that sometimes we don’t have the right answers. With vibrant prose and fascinating examples from science and history, Ballantyne shows how epistemology can help us know our limits.

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Beata Gessel-Kalinowska vel Kalisz

THE PERCEPTION OF THE PRACTICE OF CONFIDENTIALITY IN ARBITRATION. AN ANALYSIS OF THE RESULTS OF A SURVEY CARRIED OUT BY THE LEWIATAN COURT OF ARBITRATION AMONG POLISH ARBITRATION PRACTITIONERS Summary As with numerous other systems of law, such as Norwegian, Swedish or Australian law, the Polish legal system does not have a clear and uniform norm of law governing confidentiality and privacy in arbitration. Public opinion frequently refers to the role of custom as the source of the obligation to preserve confidentiality, although usually it does so without a detailed analysis of the subject and object of this obligation. This fact provided the inspiration for a survey carried out among Polish arbitration practitioners. The results of the survey present an interesting picture of what is subjectively perceived by arbitration practitioners as forming part of the confidentiality canons in arbitration proceedings. In principle, they reflect the worldwide trends, i.e. as far as the object of the confidentiality obligation is concerned – in camera sessions and the confidentiality of awards, and as regards its subject – the confidentiality obligation imposed on arbitrators and arbitration institutions. In addition, the customary practice of keeping confidential any information obtained in the course of proceedings is perceived as the right conduct as far as the object of the obligation is concerned. One of the very controversial issues is the matter of parties’ responsibilities, which leads to further questions as to individual arbitrators’ membership of the social (professional) group known as “arbitration practitioners”.


Author(s):  
Michael Pakaluk

The reception of Thomistic political and legal philosophy is considered with respect to what is called ‘political liberalism’. The appeal to a hypothetical state of nature should be rejected, as it misconstrues the social nature of human beings. Aquinas’ account of the origin of political society starts from an interpretation of human nature. On this basis one can account for human rights, the importance of the right to religious liberty, the family as the basic cell of society, civil society as including subsidiary authorities, the importance of private property, and the nature and role of freedom. A key question for the continued flourishing of a free society is what practically enables persons to govern for the genuine good of others.


Author(s):  
Joanna L. Grossman ◽  
Lawrence M. Friedman

This chapter describes what might be the last battleground over “traditional” marriage—same-sex marriage, and the social and legal revolution that brought us from an era in which it was never contemplated to one in which, depending on the state, it is either expressly authorized or expressly prohibited. Same-sex marriage has posed—and continues to pose—a challenge to traditional definitions of marriage and family. But, more importantly, the issue implies broader changes in family law—the increasing role of constitutional analysis; limits on the right of government to regulate the family; and the clash between the traditional family form and a new and wider menu of intimate and household arrangements, and all this against the background of the rise of a stronger form of individualism.


Author(s):  
Frederik Truyen ◽  
Filip Buekens

Several co-evolving trends have impacted expectations of professional workers’ quality of knowledge. The abundance of information shared through the Internet, the ever-increasing specialization of tasks, the possibility of immediately accessible information through social networks, the participation of stakeholders in the social web, and the increased requirements for separation of duty in a corporate context have contributed to a situation where the current ‘knowledge worker’ is not expected to have the same level of readily available knowledge as before. This chapter describes this phenomenon in detail with a case study from ICT-expert jobs. It shows that an ICT manager can no longer overlook the work of collaborators, just by virtue of being the smartest employee around. He/she will increasingly rely on organizational procedures and professional standards to assess whether the right people - with the right competencies for the job – are at his/her disposal. After describing the specifics of professional knowledge for ICT experts and the role of social software plays in this, the chapter focuses on the epistemological aspects of ICT expertise. The authors discuss current strands of reliabilistic accounts for knowledge in relation to expertise. They show that besides reliability, it is accuracy that is needed in order to perform as an expert.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Charles Devellennes

This chapter gives introduces the gilet jaunes. The gilets jaunes, a group of French protesters named after their iconic yellow vests donned during demonstrations, have formed a new type of social movement. The gilets jaunes have been variously interpreted since they began their occupation of French roundabouts. They were at first received with enthusiasm on the right of the French political establishment, and with caution on the left. The fourth weekend saw scenes of violence erupt on the Champs Élysées, notably around and within the Arc de Triomphe, which towers over the first roundabout built in France. The headlines of newspapers and stories of the news media became almost exclusively focused on the violence of the protests. Images of state violence became ever-present on Twitter and independent media outlets, making it clear that it was the use of disproportionate force by police units that was at the centre of the events. The chapter explains that the aim of the book is to show that the use of violence is not the only tale to be told about the role of the protesters in the contemporary French context. Their contribution to the political landscape of France is quite different. They have provided a fundamental challenge to the social contract in France, the implicit pact between the governed and their political leaders. The movement has seen the numbers of participants diminish over time, but the underlying tension between the haves and the have-nots, the winners of globalization and those at risk of déclassement [social downgrading], are enduring and persistent.


Author(s):  
Cem Özatalay ◽  
Gözde Aytemur Nüfusçu ◽  
Gülistan Zeren

The use of blood money by powerful people during the judicial process following different kinds of homicides (workplace homicides, state homicides, gun homicides and so on) has become commonplace within the neoliberal context. Based on data obtained from five cases in Turkey, this chapter shows, on the one hand, how the use of blood money serves as an effective tool in the hands of powerful people to consolidate power relations, particularly necropower, as well as the relationship of domination, which rests upon class and identity-based inequalities. The analysis indicates that the blood money offers made by powerful people allows them to minimize potential penalties within penal courts and also to keep their privileged positions in the social hierarchy by purchasing the ‘right to kill’. On the other hand, the resistance of the oppressed and aggrieved people to the subjugation of life to the power of death is analysed with a particular focus on the role of power asymmetries between perpetrators and victims and their unequal positions in the social hierarchy. This conflictual relationship, which we qualify as an expression of necrodomination, offers novel insights into Turkey’s historically shaped system of domination.


Author(s):  
Rhona K. M. Smith

This chapter examines the right to work in international human rights law. It discusses the right to just and favourable conditions of work and remuneration, and the right to equal pay for equal work. The chapter highlights the role of the International Labour Organization in setting the standard for worker protection, and the contributions of the Social Charters of the Council of Europe in providing evidence of the change in such standards over the years.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-163
Author(s):  
Scott L. Edwards

In the multilingual environments of Central European cities and courts, Italian musicians found a receptive market for their music. There they confronted a range of linguistic abilities that encouraged innovative approaches to musical composition and publication. Recent rediscovery of the opening sheets of Giovanni Battista Pinello’s 1584 Primo libro dele neapolitane enables us to assess one Genoese composer’s experience of a multi-ethnic, Central European milieu during an unprecedented migrational wave. As chapelmaster at the electoral court in Dresden with ties to aristocratic circles in Prague, Pinello also issued a German version that can be sung, according to the composer, simultaneously with the napolitane. This study examines the Central European market for Italian music, the role of the Holy Roman Empire in facilitating Italian migration, and cultural challenges foreign musicians faced in their new homes. Nineteenth-century myths of nationhood depended on histories of folk-like immobility, but in fact migration was a basic condition of early modern European life. Music historians have long been aware of individual musicians’ travels from the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, along with a new trend, emerging around 1600, toward northward emigration by Italian musicians. Nonetheless, there is much more to say about the social underpinnings of such movements. Pinello’s fusion of languages, poetic forms, and registers invites us to reimagine the multi-ethnic complexion of Central European musical centers in the late sixteenth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Maximiliano Senci ◽  
Hipólito Hasrun ◽  
Rodrigo Moro ◽  
Esteban Freidin

In most bribery games in the literature, there is no mention of rights and duties associated to participants’ roles. Authors have hitherto relied on loaded frames, negative externalities, and the possibility of sanctions to implicitly signal prescriptive norms. We argue that participants’ interpretation of these factors may not be univocal. In this study, a participant in the role of a common citizen either did or did not acquire the right to obtain a monetary benefit and could offer a bribe to an associated participant in the role of public official. This participant, in turn, had an explicit duty of providing the benefit only if the citizen acquired the right to it. Conditions with/without the acquisition of the right were crossed with the presence/absence of negative externalities associated with transgressions of the official’s duty. One last (fifth) condition mimicked other bribery games in the literature which rely on loaded frames and negative externalities but no information on rights and duties. We found that both the presence of externalities and information about rights were effective bribery deterrents, and that bribe offers and acceptances were most discouraged with their synergic effect. Interestingly, officials followed prescriptive information even when it was inefficient to do so (when there were no externalities), and implied choosing against their material self-interest (by rejecting a bribe), and not reciprocating bribe offers. We conclude by highlighting the limits of making generalizations from results without explicit normative information and the relevance of present findings as anti-corruption behavioral insights.


1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Sharpe

One of the most striking features of recent writing on early modern social history has been the emergence of the family as a subject of central concern. As befits an historical area being subjected to new scrutiny, much of this concern has expressed itself in the form of specialized, and often narrowly-focused articles or essays.1 To these have been added a number of more general works intended to examine the broader developments in and implications of family life in the past.2 Several themes within family history have already received considerable attention: the structure of the family, for example, a topic already rendered familiar by earlier work on historical demography; the concomitant topic of sexual practices and attitudes; and the economic role of the family, especially in its capacity as a unit of production. These are, of course, important matters, and the research carried out on them has revealed much of interest and consequence to the social historian; this should not, however, obscure the existence of a number of other significant dimensions of family life in the past which await thorough investigation.


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