Epistemic Questions Research Articles

Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Case of ESL Reading Class

More than the recognition, perception, and interpretation of written materials, reading has been dubbed as our bridge to other skills that are necessary for academic success. Subsequently, one way for teachers to monitor both the quantity and quality of output of the students is through Classroom discourse analysis, which is an aspect of classroom process research (Jiang, 2012). This paper, therefore, aimed to determine teacher’s questioning vis-à-vis students’ reading strategies in the case of an ESL reading class in one of the private schools in Zamboanga City, Philipenese through classroom discourse analysis. As a qualitative endeavor, it made use of classroom observations with the aid of an audio recorder to enable the analysis. A total of 131 exchanges were generated in a 45-minute discussion, with roughly 25 minutes allotted to the said discourse, and the rest for other activities. Teacher-Pupil-Teacher (TPT) captured as Teacher-Student-Teacher (TST) in the case of this paper, is the recurring sequence during the whole duration of the discourse. Discourse analysis that was done to an audio recording transcript of a reading class observation revealed patterns that are primarily present in some, if not most, discourse analysis (DA) research literature. Interestingly, it, however, uncovered the following: for teacher’s way of questioning (in this case, echoice and epistemic), epistemic questions (mostly, rhetorical for this matter), were made reference(s) by the students in answering questions. Consequently, the lesson or activity became, to some extent, communicative, because of the above mentioned points.

Can We Map Culture?

Images that convert culture into physical space have a durable appeal, and numbers make it possible to literalize a spatial representation of culture by measuring the “distances” between cultural artifacts. But do cultural relationships really behave like physical distance? There are good reasons to think the analogy is imperfect, and a number of alternative geometries have been proposed—extending, in a few cases, to a systematic distinction between the mathematics of “embodied experience” and “epistemic experience” (Chang and DeDeo 2020). We test several proposed alternatives to spatial metrics against ground truth implicit in human behavior. While it is sometimes possible to improve on distance metrics, we do not yet find evidence that the information-theoretical measures recommended as appropriate for epistemic questions are generally preferable in the cultural domain.

Otherness With(Out) Boundaries: Implications of Self-Versus-Other in the Search for Common Ground on the Human

Epistemic questions about what constitutes the “human” are intrinsically tied to discussions of “identity” and the dynamic tensions between universal and relative constructions of the “self” versus the “other.” In this paper, putting the writings of Pope Francis on migration in conversation with Paul Ricoeur’s concept of solicitude, which takes into account the “suffering other,” and “nameless” or “anonymous” faces, and Kristin Heyer’s discussion of civic kinship with its emphasis on embracing human difference, I examine the relations between “identity,” “self” and “otherness,” and assess their implications for discussions of solidarity.

Unseen Wounds

Philosophical interest in vulnerability focusses mainly on normative questions concerning its relevance for moral, political and legal theory. However, beneath these questions there lies another one which is epistemological: How do we gain clear knowledge about another person’s pain and suffering? How do we recognize a wounded life? Drawing primarily on the account of Elaine Scarry (1984), the article aims at showing that the difficulties to apprehend and recognize a life as injured are not only grounded in political and cultural frames, as Judith Butler contends, but also in the phenomenological and epistemic features of pain itself. Pain is epistemically fragile. Whereas it is almost impossible to ignore one’s own pain, it is very easy to overlook the pain of others. This epistemic slope has concrete effects on the social and political life. Regarding vulnerability, the normative question of recognition and the epistemic question of recognizability, thus, are closely intertwined.

As incertezas como narrativa do imprevisível: o real e o complexo

Este artigo, se propõe a apresentar e refletir sobre quatro diferentes modos de explicar fenômenos complexos: a questão epistêmica, a subjetividade da ameaça, o mal diante da negação e a incerteza como narrativa do imprevisível. A metodologia é bibliográfica de natureza reflexiva e a base teórica respalda-se na epistemologia da complexidade, de Edgar Morin e outros autores. Apresentamos e discutimos duas catástrofes existenciais: as mudanças climáticas e a pandemia de Covid-19 que assolam a humanidade e nos mostram as imprevisibilidades diante da ciência e das ações humanas. O texto coloca a educação como perspectiva de autoanálise e autocrítica para a transformação da realidade e aposta na esperança de ecologização das práticas e das ideias para o enfrentamento dos desafios da contemporaneidade. Considerando ainda, os Objetivos de desenvolvimento sustentável, da ONU, com respeito, solidariedade e fraternidade, os autores entendem que talvez seja possível um mundo melhor, com mais justiça social, cidadãos mais participativos e sujeitos mais felizes.

Chaos or coherence? Future directions for moral education

ABSTRACT This introduction attempts to draw together the various threads which comprise this special issue and place them in the context of recent disruptions to the political order occasioned by the rise of populist politics, the resurgence of widespread racial tensions in a number of polities and the emergence of a global pandemic. Central to the challenges thrown up by these ‘events’ and a motive force, has been the incremental advancement of libertarianism with its capacity to disorient and displace a more socially oriented liberalism. Together with a range of changes (some might argue enhancements) to our technological capacities these moves offer significant challenges to the advancement of a moral education that is sufficiently robust. The discussion moves from the development of historico-political readings of our present situation and challenge, through some important epistemic questions about truth-telling, integrity and sociality, and on to practical questions about the relationship between technology and personal moral capacities. This last challenge is explored with respect to the need to maintain the very analogue capacity of judgement in the face of a digitally mediated world. Moreover, this introduction also explores the structural and political challenges posed by narrow specialisation in the field of moral education, the evolution of bio-technology/materials and consciousness.

The many lives of a medieval Muslim scholar: An introduction to the life and times of Minhaj Siraj al-Din Juzjani, 1193–1260 CE

This essay explores the many lives of Minhaj Siraj al-Din Juzjani (fl. 1193–1260), author of the Tabaqat-i Nasiri. Before writing the Tabaqat-i Nasiri in Delhi in 1259–60, Juzjani had served for a half-century in the role of judge, imam, and other positions. In re-reading the historical evidence, I offer twofold analyses of the extant evidence regarding this under-studied historian of Islam. Firstly, I show that Juzjani's personal and social privileges defined his career peregrinations across medieval “Afghanistan” and Hindustan. He belonged to a Sunni scholarly bureaucratic family from Khurasan with deep familial, career, and political connections to the Ghaznavid and Ghuri ruling houses. Secondly, this re-reading of the Tabaqat-i Nasiri is an attempt to make a contribution to the basic epistemic question of how to study the human and historical agency of medieval Muslim scholar-historians like Juzjani without losing sight of the political landscapes and historical contexts in which they operated, and wrote key works of medieval Islamic history.

Whom to trust: Joker or teacher

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to examine whom young children (4-5-year olds) would depend on for social actions and ask for information, and whose information they would endorse: the one supplied by a person who makes them laugh or the other by a person who teaches them something new. The participants consist of 59 young children in Şanlıurfa province in Turkey. The participants interacted with two assistants, one of whom made them laugh (the joker) and the other taught them something new (the teacher). After the meetings, a third assistant asked the participants six social trust questions and two sets of epistemic trust questions demanding from the children to make a selection between the joker and the teacher and assessing their relative preference for the joker and the teacher. All Mann–Whitney U Tests revealed that the children trusted the joker assistant significantly more than the teacher assistant. This suggests that humour positively influences children’s social and epistemic trust.

Hadassah and the Gender of Modern Jewish Thought: The Affective, Embodied Messianism of Jessie Sampter, Irma Lindheim, and Nima Adlerblum

Hadassah and the Gender of Modern Jewish Thought:The Affective, Embodied Messianism of Jessie Sampter, Irma Lindheim, and Nima Adlerblum* Cara Rock-Singer (bio) In the first third of the twentieth century, a cohort of American women activist-thinkers emerged who engaged seriously with messianism. They were among the founders and influential early leaders of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America,1 and included Jessie Sampter (1883–1938), a writer and educator;2 Irma Levy Lindheim (1886–1978), Hadassah's second national president, a writer, and rabbinical student;3 and Nima Adlerblum (1881–1974), philosopher, educator, and the founder and director of Hadassah's National Cultural and Educational Program.4 Hadassah's leaders were among the cultural critics who reckoned with the magic and loss of scientific and technological progress, lived with the lingering legacies of Platonic distinctions that elevated form over matter, [End Page 423] and wrestled with whether Judaism was an ethical, universal religion or a particular, national, and biological identity.5 They theorized Judaism in terms that exceeded the dominant framings set by male religious elites, like Stephen S. Wise and Mordecai Kaplan, with whom they collaborated. Furthermore, in an intellectual climate that presumed that secularization had unstoppable momentum, Hadassah's leaders located vitality within Jewish tradition that could bring light to the world in a time of darkness. Hadassah's thinkers engaged in metaphysical and epistemic questions about the Jewish people as constituents of social, historical, and biological systems and harnessed the intellectual resources of the Jewish tradition to nurture redemption in the physical, material world. And yet, you have likely never heard of them. If these women have been recognized at all, it has been for their involvement in American Zionism. Women's intellectual contributions to Zionist thought have undoubtedly been underappreciated. This article, however, does not primarily seek to address a problem within social or intellectual history focused on Zionism. Rather, it makes a bolder claim: Sampter, Lindheim, and Adlerblum were modern Jewish messianic thinkers. Their work to imagine and build a more perfect world through Jewish political and religious traditions has gone unrecognized as such because of the fundamentally gendered constructions that undergird these traditions and their study. The subfield modern Jewish thought is at once capacious and limiting, inconsistently inclusive of Jewish philosophy and theology, as well as of Jewish intellectuals engaged with political and social questions. According to The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, it is an open question "whether there is and has been such a thing as modern Jewish philosophy," and, if so, "what it is." Who "fit[s] that categorization" remains unsettled. One thing, however, seems clear: it is a male domain.6 [End Page 424] As Mara Benjamin has shown, the most recognized modern Jewish thinkers "assumed adult male subjects" and transformed "'daily life' or 'everydayness' into a philosophical abstraction."7 Recognizing Sampter, Lindheim, and Adlerblum as Jewish thinkers whose work remains rooted in their embodied, emotional lives, is a step toward toppling the "tyranny of the same," the patriarchal investment in reproducing the image of man.8 This article is a theoretical and methodological critique, the main goal of which is to model how to think with other forms of Jewish thought in which embodiment is central. To do so, I amplify alternative voices to more fully understand how intellectuals have reckoned with the Jewish place in modernity, which I take to be the defining feature of modern Jewish thought.9 Several factors combine to explain why the women I study have not been considered as Jewish thinkers. Not only were they women who were active intellectually during the first half of the twentieth century, but they lived and worked in the United States and the Yishuv, writing primarily for American audiences. In addition, they expressed their ideas through poetry and prose, performances on stage and in the public and private practices of their everyday lives. The reason it is hard to think of these women as messianists is related to the reason it is hard to consider them as thinkers writ large: we continue to live in a world, as they did, shaped by the "pernicious cultural and intellectual legacy of Greek...

Expectation Biases and Context Management with Negative Polar Questions

This paper examines distinctive discourse properties of preposed negative yes/no questions (NPQs), such as Isn’t Jane coming too?. Unlike with other yes/no questions, using an NPQ ∼ p? invariably conveys a bias toward a particular answer, where the polarity of the bias is opposite of the polarity of the question: using the negative question ∼ p? invariably expresses that the speaker previously expected the positive answer p to be correct. A prominent approach— what I call the context-management approach, developed most extensively by Romero and Han (Linguistics and Philosophy, 27, 609-658 2004)— attempts to capture speaker expectation biases by treating NPQs fundamentally as epistemic questions about the proper discourse status of a proposition. I raise challenges for existing context-managing accounts to provide more adequate formalizations of the posited context-managing content, its implementation in the compositional semantics and discourse dynamics, and its role in generating the observed biases. New data regarding discourse differences between NPQs and associated epistemic modal questions are introduced. I argue that we can capture the roles of NPQs in expressing speakers’ states of mind and managing the discourse common ground without positing special context-managing operators or treating NPQs as questions directly about the context. I suggest that we treat the operator introduced with preposed negation as having an ordinary semantics of epistemic necessity, though lexically associated with a general kind of endorsing use observed with modal expressions. The expressive and context-managing roles of NPQs are explained in terms of a general kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. The distinctive expectation biases and discourse properties observed with NPQs are derived from the proposed semantics and a general principle of Discourse Relevance.

Projetivismo, circularidade e o problema da atitude moral

A projectivist thesis about the nature of morality, broadly understood, aims to explain moral judgments from subjective causal reactions to the world—this world in itself devoid of moral value (in terms of objects, properties and relations). For the projectivist thesis to work, it seems to be necessary that it be capable of specifying the type(s) of subjective reaction(s) which is(are) on the basis of moral judgments and of doing it in non-moral terms, in order to avoid circularity. If the subjective reactions have conceptual priority over moral judgments and predication, then it seems to be necessary that they be specified without referring themselves to the very moral judgments and moral vocabulary that they purport to explain. The moral attitude problem consists in this challenge to moral projectivism. Here in this article, we shall argue that, on the one hand, the projectivist is not able to completely avoid the objection of circularity. However, on the other hand, we shall try to show that, despite incurring in one form of circularity, the projectivist has an answer to the moral attitude problem. The upshot of all this is that, properly conceived, the moral attitude problem is not an obstacle to projectivism, and that the traditional formulation of the problem confuses an epistemic question with a metaphysical one. Keywords : metaethics; moral projectivism; circularity.

Fundamentos epistemológicos transdisciplinares de educación y neurociencia

El proceso de emergencia de la nueva área de conocimiento, producto de la convergencia entre los campos de la neurociencia y la educación, se encuentra aún en su etapa de consolidación. En este punto de evolución disciplinar, resulta imprescindible definir un marco multidimensional para la construcción del conocimiento, con el fin de fundamentar la consiliencia entre los campos académicos implicados. En este trabajo se realiza una revisión crítica de la literatura asociada a las cuestiones epistemológicas, que subyacen en el intento de comunicación entre disciplinas, proporcionando un marco teórico que parte de cuestiones epistémicas básicas, para finalmente concretizarse en unas bases que fundamenten la sinergia entre las ciencias de la educación y las ciencias del cerebro. En el conjunto de literatura revisada emergió de forma explícita el estado de indefinición terminológica del área referida como neurociencia educativa, neuroeducación, o mente, cerebro y educación. Esta inconcreción en la nomenclatura encuentra su correlato en la ambigüedad epistemológica de las distintas propuestas, así como la necesidad de superación de modelos unidireccionales de comunicación. En conclusión, este tipo de modelo relacional, situado en el marco interdisciplinar, podría estar demandando una evolución hacia un enfoque transdisciplinar: con el establecimiento de una bidireccionalidad efectiva que incorpore a los profesionales e investigadores educativos como agentes activos en los procesos de construcción de conocimiento de este nuevo campo

Introduction: Science Studies and the Blue Humanities

Introduction:Science Studies and the Blue Humanities Stacy Alaimo (bio) I am pleased to introduce this special volume of Configurations, focused on science studies and the blue humanities. Scholarship in what Laura Winkiel, in her cogent introduction to a recent volume on "Hydro-Criticism," calls the "oceanic turn,"1 has been rapidly expanding, along with the theoretical, literary, and artistic projects that "think with water" more broadly.2 For this volume, I have chosen the term "blue humanities" to underscore the environmental orientation of oceanic and other aquatic scholarship. While science studies has been vital for the environmental (green) humanities, it is even more essential for the development of the blue humanities, since most aquatic zones, species, and topics exist beyond human domains, requiring the mediation of science and technology. The fact that most of the ocean cannot be encountered directly by terrestrial humans means that the ocean and many of its species spark disciplinary, methodological, ontological, and epistemic questions and quandaries. Indeed, D. Graham Burnett concludes his massive, extensively researched, nearly eight-hundred-page volume, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century, by stating, "The fundamental lesson I have taken from the research and writing of this book amounts to nothing less than a kind of sweeping epistemological humiliation."3 What is "exportable" [End Page 429] about his undertaking is, he contends, an "anti-analysis," about what he has "not figured out."4 While a recognition of epistemological limits has been articulated as an ethical stance within feminist theory, environmental theory, and animal studies as a means of countering colonizing epistemologies of mastery, Burnett seems stranded within his own strict division between the archives of whale sciences and the actual whales. He warns us, early on, that there will be no whales in this book, "Only words about whales." He continues, "What were the whales saying? I have no idea. Do I give too much agency to (human) words? Maybe. It is ever thus with bookish folk. If it is whales you want, you have to go to sea."5 Burnett's rather coy conclusions dilute or evaporate the potential for science and humanistic (or posthumanistic) inquiries to yield something solid or lucid that could enable us to understand something of the creatures of the sea. By contrast, the enunciation of recent headlines such as "A Big-Hearted Iron Snail Is the First Deep-Sea Species to Be Declared Endangered Due to Seabed Mining"6 seems to issue forth from a rather solid stage, where data about even the most remote creatures are accurate and available. And yet the article itself, appearing in DSM Observer: Deep Sea Mining News and Resources, explains the difficulties of listing deep-sea creatures on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list, given the strict protocols of the list on the one hand, and the insufficient data about many deep-sea species on the other. "Insufficient data" is putting it mildly. Since so little is known about so many species in the deep and pelagic seas—including, most intriguingly, the creatures that likely exist but have not yet been discovered—it is unlikely that there are not many species in the deep seas that have already become extinct due to anthropogenic causes, besides deep-sea mining. Extinction and "discovery" may happen simultaneously in the Anthropocene seas, paradoxical places that are greatly altered but little known, harboring both compressed and expansive temporalities.7 Add the economic drive for deep-sea mining to this scene, and the [End Page 430] need for robust, complex, revealing, transdisciplinary inquiries plus environmental and political interventions becomes apparent.8 Even the rather straightforward DSM Observer tenderly notes the "giant heart" of this snail, whose habitat "covers only a few square meters of area in a vast, unforgiving ocean."9 The rather intimate portrait of this armored snail suggests wider oscillations in depictions of sea creatures, which cast them as alien and weird but also as aesthetically marvelous—unfathomably distant yet worthy of beholding. The often highly aestheticized aquatic figures underscore how the arts and humanities are essential for understanding the scientific captures and dissemination of particular narratives, tropes, and styles across science...

Od Fichtego do Kanta i z powrotem. Kilka uwag o Marka J. Siemka idei transcendentalizmu

From Fichte to Kant and back. Several considerations on Marek J. Siemek’s concept of transcendentalism: The basic interpretation claim presented in Marek J. Siemek’s book is that Kant created a completely new level of philosophical reflection, for which the epistemological question remains characteristic. This question — in contrast to the epistemic questions posed before Kant — neither solely focuses on the problem of the ontic structure of the reality nor it does on the cognitive conditions which enable a subject to get to know the latter. The epistemological question deals with the very relationship that occurs between the cognition (subject) and the reality (object) and constitutes both the ontological and cognitive conditions of knowledge. According to Siemek, Kant developed a transcendental perspective, but only Fichte was able to fully develop it, while Kant dealt with interweaving epistemic and epistemological threads. However, one can defend the thesis that Kantian solutions, on the one hand, are much more strongly situated on the epistemological level of reflection than Siemek was ready to admit, and on the other hand, they offer a weaker (static) model of transcendentalism which — in contrast to the stronger (genetic) Fichte’s model — explores only the impassable limits of transcendental reflection.

Knowledge and Communication in Democratic Politics: Markets, Forums and Systems

Epistemic questions have become an important area of debate within democratic theory. Epistemic democrats have revived epistemic justification of democracy, while social scientific research has speared a significant debate on voter knowledge. An area which has received less attention, however, is the epistemic case for markets. Market advocates have developed a number of epistemic critiques of democracy which suggest that most goods are better provided by markets than democratic institutions. Despite representing important challenges to democracy, these critiques have gone without reply as democratic theorists have tended to exclude markets from consideration. This article responds to these critiques and argues that there are good epistemic grounds for granting a much greater role to democracy than its market critics have claimed. It argues that there is a broad range of goods, including important ethical goods, which are better provided by democracy than markets due to the particular epistemic burdens they create.

Epistemic Self-Trust and Doxastic Disagreements

The recent literature on the epistemology of disagreement focuses on the rational response question: how are you rationally required to respond to a doxastic disagreement with someone, especially with someone you take to be your epistemic peer? A doxastic disagreement with someone also confronts you with a slightly different question. This question, call it the epistemic trust question, is: how much should you trust our own epistemic faculties relative to the epistemic faculties of others? Answering the epistemic trust question is important for the epistemology of disagreement because it sheds light on the rational response question. My main aim in this paper is to argue—against recent attempts to show otherwise—that epistemic self-trust does not provide a reason for remaining steadfast in doxastic disagreements with others.

Toward a Methodology for Analyzing Visual Rhetoric in Corporate Reports

This article presents a methodology that organizational scholars can use to analyze, explain, and critically interpret the role of visual rhetoric in organizational communications. Corporations invest heavily in the visual design of organizational communications, including corporate reports, recognizing the distinctive role and benefits of visual imagery, as well as the rhetorical function of these documents. Current analytical approaches to visual rhetoric are either predominantly theoretical (with little structured guidance) or procedural (with little acknowledgment of important epistemic questions). This leaves a need for a methodology that combines a clear theoretical framework with explicit guidance on how to analyze visual rhetoric. This article bridges this analytic gap by offering a methodology that integrates a theoretical foundation of a priori analytical categories informed by selected writings of the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes with three abductively derived phases (categorical analysis, content analysis, rhetorical analysis) for analysis of visual design of corporate reports. We apply this methodology in an examination of a Qantas Annual Review and articulate our contributions to the field of organizational research methods.

Humble Humbugs and Good Frauds: Harold Frederic, Christian Science, and the Anglo-American Professions

L. Ashley Squires, “Humble Humbugs and Good Frauds: Harold Frederic, Christian Science, and the Anglo-American Professions” (pp. 353–378) In October 1898, American novelist Harold Frederic died of complications following a stroke while in the care of a Christian Scientist named Athalie Goodman Mills, summoned to his bedside by the author’s mistress, Kate Lyon. His death was later the subject of a coroner’s inquest and unsuccessful manslaughter charge, making the author’s death central to an already raging debate about the efforts of an ascendant medical profession to criminalize the activities of healers they saw as illegitimate. This essay reads the public controversy as represented in newspapers and medical journals alongside Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), arguing that both texts demonstrate a widening epistemic gap between an ascendant class of experts and the broader public they served. In each, the concept of placebo emerges as a useful organizing metaphor for this tension. In the wake of cases like Frederic’s, many physicians began advocating for a broader use of “suggestive therapeutics” in response to the challenge that Christian Science presented, raising discomfiting epistemic and ethical questions because its use presumes a dissonance between what the doctor knows and what the patient believes. The ministers in The Damnation of Theron Ware likewise confront the problem of administering a kind of theological placebo, a primitive faith demanded by their congregants that the ministers themselves have come to doubt. Placebo therefore describes a way in which experts could assert their relevance and social necessity in the face of populist energies, exemplified in Christian Science, that challenged their rise to dominance.

Naming an activity: Arriving at recognitionals in team-teacher planning talk

Based on a video-recorded corpus of pre-class planning sessions, this study focuses on how team-teachers from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds accomplish the interactional task of identifying and explaining pedagogical activities they will later teach together during an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lesson. Since a basic issue for these teachers is arriving at a recognizable name for the proposed task that can be understood by both parties, we analyze the interactional practices involved in naming an activity. We draw on Conversation Analytic (CA) research on word choice to show how sequential, categorical, epistemic and bilingual practices are brought to bear on the joint accomplishment of a recognitional formulation of an activity. We identify several interactional practices in which recognitionals play a key role in planning talk between language teachers. Speakers can treat the activity name as potentially unrecognizable through post-formulation explanations or initiating epistemic questions, or use a known recognitional to explain a new activity. Additionally, after a speaker lists the sub-steps involved in a proposed task, a recipient can proffer a name for the activity. These generic interactional practices are put to use in this intercultural workplace to make the plan accessible to all parties. The data are in English and Japanese.

Causation and Opportunity in Tort

This article shows that we can approach both ‘epistemic’ and ‘conceptual’ problems of causation in tort with the aid of a moral idea sketched out by HLA Hart and developed into a more general account by TM Scanlon. Applied to causation, that idea is that we may justify principles that require people to meet a certain standard of causation and principles that specify a standard of proof for that purpose by appealing to the value for people of the opportunities that the relevant principles make available to them. The idea is developed in the context of epistemic questions, then extended to conceptual ones. The idea explains both why we may apply certain familiar standards of causation in easy cases, and why and how far we ought to relax or modify those standards in hard cases.