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Open for Debate

Legal Character Evidence Prohibitions and the Opacity of Character

Posted on 14 June 2021 by Georgi Gardiner

    We tend to think another person’s character helps explain why she acts as she does. When we observe patterns in how others act, we take this to be evidence of a trait or disposition. We attribute loyalty to those we can rely on, generosity to those who donate significant time and resources, and
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Open for Debate

“With the intent to defraud or mislead”: Opioids, corporate propaganda, and epistemic rights

Posted on 31 May 2021 by Lani Watson

In May 2007, Purdue Frederick Company Inc., an affiliate of Purdue Pharma, along with three of its top executives, were ordered to pay fines totalling $634 million after pleading guilty to criminal charges of misbranding in relation to the opioid-based painkiller, OxyContin. Among other things, the company falsely claimed that OxyContin was less addictive than
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Deepfakes, Fake Barns, and Problems of Safe Belief

Posted on 17 May 2021 by Taylor Matthews

Every year, Queen Elizabeth II speaks to the UK in her annual Christmas Address. In her 2020 Address, the Queen not only spoke highly of NHS nurses, doctors, and other frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, but she also expressed her desire to appear on the TV programme Strictly Come Dancing. Anyone who has watched
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Open for Debate

Normative Entanglement in Public Discourse (Part 3)

Posted on 3 May 2021 by Susan Notess

To recap: In Part One of this series we looked at how our impulse to reduce messy situations to nice clean epistemological facts can cause us to miss what is at stake for people—the normative entanglements at issue. In Part Two, we looked at how such normative entanglements show us what is going on in
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