UT Philosophy Announces a New Minor in Philosophy of Science and Medicine
The Philosophy Department will offer a new Philosophy of Science and Medicine Minor beginning in fall 2024. This minor requires six philosophy courses at the 200 level or above, allowing science, engineering, and pre-professional (such as pre-med.) students to engage with philosophical topics that closely relate to but significantly expand on their majors.
The program will emphasize questions about the relationship between experiments, theories, and scientific practice, addressing:
- Ethical issues in healthcare such as euthanasia, eugenics, human experimentation, and the doctor-patient relationship.
- The objectivity of science, how theories change and how scientific disputes get settled.
- Issues of gender and race in science and medicine.
- The ethics of AI.
- Philosophical perspectives on neuroscience.
- Implications for understanding the nature of disability as part of the human condition.
The minor provides a coherent approach to these and other issues that lie at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. It also provides an opportunity for science and engineering students to engage with important social, ethical, and theoretical issues in science and medicine that are crucial for training responsible, inquisitive, and enlightened doctors, scientists, and engineers.
The Philosophy of Science and Medicine Minor consists of 18 hours of philosophy courses 200 or above. Students select four courses from a list that includes several new courses:
- Ethics and Technology (new)
- Bioethics
- Philosophy of Science
- Philosophy of Social Science (new)
- Philosophy of Disability (new)
- Intermediate Formal Logic
- Topics in Philosophy of Science, Race, Science, & Medicine (new)
- Feminist Philosophy of Science (new)
They also select any two other philosophy courses at or above the 200-level.
Georgi Gardiner Published in ‘The Conversation’
Are you really in love? How expanding your love lexicon can change your relationships and how you see yourself
What is love? Could those feelings you label as love be something else?
What about infatuation? Obsession? A passing fancy? Being smitten? Enthrallment? Beguilement? Lust? A crush? A squish? Platonic admiration? Why do people categorize some attachments as romantic love but not others?
Suppose Holly meets someone on vacation. They quickly become romantically and sexually intimate and seem deeply compatible. Holly is from the U.K., where the term “holiday romance” is commonly used and part of her vocabulary. Because she knows this term, she can apply its social scaffolding to this relationship. She understands that the rapid emotional intimacy and apparent compatibility she experienced likely sprang from fleeting circumstances that aren’t meant to last.
Someone from the U.S., however, where this term is rarely used, might more easily interpret this rapid intimacy as a sign of deep, significant lifelong compatibility.
Judging that you are in love can be powerful. It can affect your feelings, relationships and even your sexuality. But how do people judge whether they are in love?
This, I argue, depends on your linguistic community. That is, how the people around you talk about romance, relationships and attraction.
I am a philosopher who studies categorization schemas – how, when and why people label things such as emotions, sexuality and health. I examine the effects of those labels on how people understand themselves and on their well-being, and how alternative taxonomies and labels can make people understand and shape the world differently.
What happens when a culture instills a broader, more encompassing definition of love, or a narrower, more restrictive definition? How does having a richer vocabulary of words in the neighborhood of love change how we understand it?
The social scaffolding of words
Self-ascriptions of love depend on two things. The first are introspective judgments about your feelings: Are you attracted to the person? Energized by them? Nervous around them? And the second is what you think love is: Does love require caring about the person? Thinking about them a lot? Sexual attraction? When how you feel about a person and what you think love is match up, you self-ascribe love. That is, you judge that you are in love.
Words provide social scaffolding. That is, they create expectations and norms that steer how you behave and react to other people. And vocabularies vary by culture and era.
Categorizing an attachment as a “holiday romance” doesn’t just describe it but can also change its course. The label affects what Holly notices and values about the time she spends together with another person and whether she is inclined to pursue a long-term relationship.
Vocabulary is empowering. Having an even more expansive vocabulary would allow Holly to experiment with different labels, and these could shape her relationships in different ways.
For example, the term “eintagsliebe,” based on the German word for “mayfly” and translating to “one day’s love,” refers to an intense and brief relationship. “Comet lovers” have a deep romantic bond but see each other only intermittently, living far apart the rest of the time without much contact. A “holibae” is a perennial date that happens only when you’re visiting home for the holidays. See also “zipcoding” – dating someone only when you’re both in the same ZIP code.
The dictionary of polyamory
Words create possibilities, and the recent surge of interest in polyamory, or having more than one romantic relationship at a time, has introduced substantial amounts of new vocabulary.
An “anchor partner” is a central figure in your romantic life. A “nesting partner” is a partner you live with. And a “satellite partner” has emotional and physical distance from your home. Vocabularies sculpted by traditional monogamous relationships might not distinguish between these types of attachments because they see non-cohabitating partnerships only as temporary transition phases that end by breaking up or become serious by moving in.
By rejecting the mainstream social scaffolding about relationships, polyamory creates the need for more terms to describe innovative relationship structures. And those words in turn create more possibilities for how polyamorous people interpret and structure their attachments.
“New relationship energy” is the buzzing excitement of a new relationship. “Established relationship energy” is the comfort of a stable, long-term relationship. These emotions are especially salient within polyamorous relationships, where the excitement of a new relationship can arise alongside the comfort of preexisting relationships.
But monogamous relationships also benefit from these linguistic innovations. Monogamous relationships might also involve new relationship energy, established relationship energy, and nesting, anchor and satellite partnerships, even if they aren’t labeled as such. Such self-understandings affect the values, emotions, commitments and beliefs people use to forge relationships.
Conceptual tourism
Conceptual schemas, or the words and concepts we have for understanding ourselves and the world around us, have permissive flexibility: People can disagree about what words like “love,” “crush” and “bi-curious” mean. Disagreement doesn’t mean that someone is wrong. Rather, flexibility allows us to explore different ways to understand the world and ourselves. We can be conceptual tourists.
Suppose Nell develops an ambiguous attachment to a new classmate. She finds her charming, witty and pretty, but it isn’t a clear-cut case of romantic attraction. Nell can adopt a broad or narrow definition of the word “crush,” depending on whether her feelings meet how she defines a “crush.” Altering what she means by a “crush” would change whether she labels herself as having a crush. This, in turn, could affect whether Nell sees herself as queer or straight.
If she knows other terms to describe her feelings, Nell might interpret them as “alterous attraction,” which is the desire for emotional intimacy in a way that is neither platonic nor romantic. She might seek a “queerplatonic relationship,” which resembles a conventional romantic relationship but without sex or conventional romance. Or, if her feelings are intense, Nell might self-ascribe “limerence,” which is obsessive infatuation.
Self-ascribing labels affects what people notice about themselves, how they interpret their feelings and what they appreciate about their attachments. What she pays attention to fuels particular emotions and can bolster certain attitudes, like profound gratitude, that might distinguish love from crushes.
For example, if Nell interprets herself as having a crush, she may become more attuned to the excitement she feels around her classmate, which can fuel those emotions in a feedback loop. If she labels her feelings as platonic admiration, she might instead interpret herself as being nervous about impressing her new classmate.
Nell can experimentally adopt different labels – alterous attraction, queer, crush, limerence, straight and more – to see which fit best. Some labels might better match her emotions. And those labels might also change her emotions and become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Conceptual tourism can be a valuable cognitive skill. It requires the mental dexterity to inhabit rival conceptual schemas and try on new interpretative terms. Doing so can increase your self-understanding, cultivate self-determination and even help steer your heart.
Culture unavoidably provides a lexicon of attachment that shapes how you relate to other people. A culture that is more deliberate about the words it uses for different kinds of attraction can help people bond in new and more open-minded ways.
It’s also a great motivator for education: Learning new words can help you improve your love life.
Georgi Gardiner, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of the University of Tennessee Humanities Center (UTHC), University of Tennessee
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Jon Garthoff Published in ‘The Conversation’
Training an animal? An ethicist explains how and why your dog − but not your frog − can be punished
People talk to their pets every day: offering praise when they’re good, reassurance when they’re confused and affection when they’re cuddling. We also speak to animals when they misbehave. “Why did you do that?” someone might ask their dog. Or we might scold the cat – “Don’t touch that!” – as we move a family heirloom across the room.
But is it ever appropriate to punish or rebuke an animal?
When people talk about “punishment,” this implies more than a loss of privileges. The term suggests someone is being asked to learn a lesson after breaking a rule they can understand. But an animal’s understanding is different from a human’s, which raises questions about what lessons they can learn and what, if any, rebukes of animals are ethical.
These issues involve what researchers know about different animals’ cognition. But they also go beyond this by raising questions about what kind of moral standing animals have and how people who interact with animals should train them.
As an ethical theorist, I’ve explored these and related questions, including with some of my colleagues in psychology and anthropology. I would argue it is important to distinguish three types of learning: conditioning, instruction and education.
Conditioning
One type of learning, called “classical conditioning,” was popularized by the psychologist Ivan Pavlov just after the turn of the 20th century. By repeatedly ringing a bell while presenting food, Pavlov famously induced dogs to salivate from the bell ring alone. Such learning proceeds merely from associating two types of stimuli: a sound and a snack, in this case.
When scientists talk about punishment, they normally mean “operant conditioning,” which was popularized by the psychologists Edward Thorndike and B. F. Skinner shortly thereafter. In operant conditioning, positive or pleasurable stimuli are used to reinforce desired behavior, and negative or painful stimuli are used to deter undesired behavior. We may give a dog a treat, for example, to reward it for following a command to sit.
The kind of learning that operant conditioning aims to achieve, however, lacks a crucial ingredient of human punishment: responsibility. When people punish, it is not just to discourage an undesired behavior. They are trying to drive home that someone has transgressed – that the individual’s behavior merits punishment.
But can nonhuman animals transgress? Do they ever deserve rebuke? I would argue they do – but with key differences from human wrongdoing.
Instruction
Training for many animals, such as horses and dogs, goes beyond conditioning. It involves a more sophisticated kind of learning: instruction.
One important way instruction differs from conditioning is that an instructor addresses their trainee. Pet owners and animal trainers speak to cats and dogs, and though these animals have no knowledge of grammar, they can understand what many human words refer to. Caretakers also often listen to their animals’ vocalizations in an attempt to understand their meaning.
To be sure, people condition cats and dogs – consider spraying a cat with water when it nibbles on a houseplant. The goal is for the cat to associate an off-limits snack with an unpleasant experience, and so to leave the plant alone.
But training pets can go beyond changing their behavior. It can aim to improve animals’ ability to reason about what to do: a trainer teaches a dog how to navigate an agility course, for example, or how to get through a new pet door. Instruction involves understanding, whereas learning based on mere conditioning does not.
An animal’s ability to be instructed stems from the nature of their mental life. Scientists do not know exactly which animals’ cognition involves understanding, genuine problem-solving and the ability to reason or infer.
But research on perception – on how humans and other animals convert sensory information into mental representations of physical objects – has helped philosophers and psychologists distinguish thought from more basic mental capacities such as vision and hearing.
It is extremely likely that some nonhuman animals – including dolphins, apes and elephants – do think, as philosopher Gary Varner argued in the 2012 book “Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition.” My research suggests the distinction between thinking and nonthinking animals tracks well with the distinction between animals that can be instructed and those that can, at most, be conditioned.
This difference is crucial to how different pets should be treated. An owner should have concern for their pet frog, of course, and care for its needs. But they do not need to recognize the frog the same way they should recognize a dog: by addressing it, listening to it and comforting it.
Though an owner may rebuke the dog to hold it responsible for its actions, they must also hold themselves responsible to the animal, including by considering how the pet has interpreted events.
Education
Some nonhuman animals have demonstrated impressive cognitive abilities in experimental settings, such as recognizing their bodies in mirrors and recalling past experiences. Some birds, for example, display sensitivity to details about food they have cached, such as its perishability and how long ago it was stored.
Still, scientists do not possess strong evidence that animals have critical thinking abilities or a concept of self, the key requirements for genuine education. Unlike conditioning and instruction, education aims to enable a learner to explain the world, to evaluate and debate rationales for decisions. It also prepares people to ask – and to try to answer – ethical questions like, “How should I live” and “Was that action justified?”
A cat or dog cannot pose these questions. Much of the time, human beings do not concern themselves with these questions, either – but they can. In fact, caretakers pay great attention to these matters during child-rearing, as when they ask children, “How would you like it if someone did that to you” or “Do you really think it’s OK to act that way?”
Assuming that animals do not reflect and criticize, and therefore are not capable of education, I would say that they have no moral obligations. It is fair to say a pet has transgressed, since animals such as dogs and cats can come to understand how to act better. But morally speaking, an animal cannot commit wrongdoing, for it lacks a conscience: It may understand some of its behavior, but not its own mind.
In my view, addressing an animal and acting with an understanding of how it interprets events is central to the ethical training of pets. But if someone treats an animal as though it were responsible for justifying itself to us, as though it could offer excuses and apologies, they anthropomorphize the animal and ask too much of it. Pet owners often do this in a mock way, saying things like, “Now you know you shouldn’t have done that” – the same phrases they might use with a child.
Unlike a child, however, the animal’s transgression is not a failure to fulfill a moral obligation. In human relationships we aspire to relations of mutual justification, where reasons are exchanged and excuses and apologies evaluated. But that’s not the nature of our relationships with our pets – however tempted we may be to think otherwise.
Jon Garthoff, Professor of Philosophy, University of Tennessee
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
