Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence, or perhaps it must be reliably formed, or perhaps there is some other ‘good-making’ features it must have. But does a belief’s justification also require some sort of awareness of its good-making features? The answer to this question has been hotly contested in contemporary epistemology, creating a deep divide among its practitioners. Internalists insist that such awareness is required for justification whereas externalists insist that it is not. The first part of this book argues that internalism faces an inescapable dilemma: either it leads to vicious regress problems and, ultimately, radical skepticism or it is entirely unmotivated. The second part of the book begins by developing the author’s own externalist theory of justification, one imposing both a proper function and a no-defeater requirement. It concludes by demonstrating the failure of two prominent critiques of externalism: that it is infected with epistemic circularity and that it cannot respond adequately to skepticism. Together, the two parts of the book provide a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism.
Purpose: We analyzed the effects of COVID-19 as well as its accompanying epidemiological control measures on health-related outcomes (physical and mental health) and unmet care needs of both caregivers and care recipients across Europe and Israel by taking into account country differences.Methods: We applied comparisons of adjusted predictions, controlling for a large set of relevant respondent characteristics, to investigate changes in the physical and mental health of caregivers and care recipients due to COVID-19. Furthermore, multilevel regression models were used to analyze the effect of individual and contextual indicators on the probability of reporting difficulties in receiving care. For the analyses, we used data from 26 countries with 51,983 respondents over 50 years based on the eighth wave of the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which had to be suspended in March 2020, and the SHARE Corona Survey fielded from June to August 2020.Results: During the first phase of the pandemic in spring/summer 2020, the frequency of providing personal care to parents increased in almost all European countries, while care to children, in turn, decreased. Parental caregivers who increased the frequency of providing personal care reported significantly more mental health strains, that is, feeling sad/depressed and anxious/nervous more often since the outbreak of the pandemic. With respect to receiving care, about one out of five care recipients had difficulty in obtaining adequate care from outside the household during the pandemic. The perception of unmet care needs was significantly associated with country differences regarding the duration of the stay-at-home orders. In contrast, the number of confirmed deaths did not have a significant effect on perceiving difficulties related to receiving care.Conclusions: Our findings show the extent of the burden to which caregivers and care recipients were exposed with respect to the unintended consequences of COVID-19-related epidemiological control measures. There is a great need within this population for interventions, which effectively reduce the burden as well as the symptoms of anxiety or depression for caregivers as well as care recipients. This should be recognized by (health) policymakers and social organizations.
For twenty years now, William Rowe has been defending an evidential argument from evil. 1 Here's his 1996 summary of that argument: E1 is the case of a fawn trapped in a forest fire and undergoing several days of terrible agony before dying. E2 is the case of the rape, beating, and murder by strangulation of a five-year old girl.! P: No good we know of justifies an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being in permitting E1 and E2; therefore @it is probable that#, Q: no good at all justifies an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being in permitting E1 and E2; therefore @it is probable that#, not-G: there is no omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being.~262-63! 2Recently, however, Rowe has concluded that his attempt to defend the inductive inference from P to Q in the above argument is "weak" and "inadequate". It is inadequate, he says, because its adequacy requires what he hasn't given us, namely, a "reason to think it likely that the goods we know of... are representative of the goods there are". Instead of trying to provide us with such a reason, he has decided to "abandon this argument altogether and give what @he# believe@s# is a better argument". 3 This new "better" argument, along with skeptical theism, will be the focus of this paper.Before turning to that new argument, let's consider the stance Rowe seems to have taken toward skeptical theism. What is skeptical theism? It has two components-a skeptical component and a theistic one. The skeptical theist's theism is just the traditional monotheistic view that there exists an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being. It is the skeptical theist's skepticism that
The delivery of safe, visible wavelengths of light can be an effective, pathogen-agnostic, countermeasure that would expand the current portfolio of SARS-CoV-2 intervention strategies beyond the conventional approaches of vaccine, antibody, and antiviral therapeutics. Employing custom biological light units, that incorporate optically engineered light-emitting diode (LED) arrays, we harnessed monochromatic wavelengths of light for uniform delivery across biological surfaces. We demonstrated that primary 3D human tracheal/bronchial-derived epithelial tissues tolerated high doses of a narrow spectral band of visible light centered at a peak wavelength of 425 nm. We extended these studies to Vero E6 cells to understand how light may influence the viability of a mammalian cell line conventionally used for assaying SARS-CoV-2. The exposure of single-cell monolayers of Vero E6 cells to similar doses of 425 nm blue light resulted in viabilities that were dependent on dose and cell density. Doses of 425 nm blue light that are well-tolerated by Vero E6 cells also inhibited infection and replication of cell-associated SARS-CoV-2 by > 99% 24 h post-infection after a single five-minute light exposure. Moreover, the 425 nm blue light inactivated cell-free betacoronaviruses including SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 up to 99.99% in a dose-dependent manner. Importantly, clinically applicable doses of 425 nm blue light dramatically inhibited SARS-CoV-2 infection and replication in primary human 3D tracheal/bronchial tissue. Safe doses of visible light should be considered part of the strategic portfolio for the development of SARS-CoV-2 therapeutic countermeasures to mitigate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Internalists tend to impose on justification higher‐level requirements, according to which a belief is justified only if the subject has a higher‐level belief (i.e., a belief about the epistemic credentials of a belief). I offer an error theory that explains the appeal of this requirement: analytically, a belief is not justified if we have a defeater for it, but contingently, it is often the case that to avoid having defeaters, our belief must satisfy a higher‐level requirement. I respond to the objection that externalists who endorse this error theory will be forced to accept a radical form of scepticism.
Consider the following dialogue:Juror #1: You know that witness named Hank? I have doubts about his trustworthiness.Juror #2: Well perhaps this will help you. Yesterday I overheard Hank claiming to be a trustworthy witness. Juror #1: So Hank claimed to be trustworthy did he? Well, that settles it then. I'm now convinced that Hank is trustworthy.Is the belief of Juror #1 that Hank is a trustworthy witness justified? Most of us would be inclined to say it isn't. Juror #1 begins by having some doubts about Hank's trustworthiness, and then he comes to believe that Hank is trustworthy. The problem is that he arrives at this belief on the basis of Hank's own testimony. That isn't reasonable. You can't sensibly come to trust a doubted witness on the basis of that very witness's testimony on his own behalf. '
The question I consider is this:The Question: Can two people -who are, and realize they are, intellectually virtuous to about the same degree -both be rational in continuing knowingly to disagree after full disclosure (by each to the other of all the relevant evidence they can think of) while at the same time thinking that the other may well be rational too? E P I S T E M E 2009
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