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Epistemic universalism, the view that epistemic intuitions are culturally universal, plays an important role in underwriting ordinary practice in contemporary epistemology. But is it true? Here the authors present several studies that examine epistemic universalism by looking at the relationships between cultural background, folk knowledge attribution, and salience effects, whereby mention of an unrealized possibility of error undermines our willingness to attribute knowledge. These studies suggest that there may be structural universals, universal epistemic parameters that influence epistemic intuitions, but that these parameters can vary in such a way that certain epistemic intuitions, in either their strength or propositional content, display patterns of genuine cross-cultural diversity.

Empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM) has become a dominant research style in the 21st century. EIPM relies on empirical results in various ways. However, the extant literature lacks an empirical description of how EIPM philosophers rely on empirical results. Moreover, though EIPM is essentially a form of cross-disciplinary research, it has not been analyzed as cross-disciplinary research so far. We aim to fill the above two gaps in the literature by producing quantitative and qualitative descriptions of EIPM as a kind of cross-disciplinary research. Our descriptions aim to enable metaphilosophers to evaluate EIPM methodologically and epistemically. Our analyses use co-citation and categorization analyses informed by the literature on interdisciplinarity. We present five sets of descriptions and identify the three most common types of cross-disciplinary interactions in EIPM. The resulting descriptions enable us to locate two metaphilosophical challenges for EIPM philosophers. One concerns how they should incorporate empirical results in different disciplinary contexts, and the other concerns which theoretical virtue(s) they should aim for when tinkering with scientific theories.

Objective: Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) has been implemented as a form of treatment for olfactory dysfunction. In this study, we aimed to use a tailored Guizhi decoction for the treatment of traumatic olfactory dysfunction.Methods: Patients who had lost olfactory function after experiencing head trauma and whose olfactory function was anosmic were selected. The eligible patients were randomly assigned to two groups. In the CHM group, a tailored Guizhi decoction was prescribed, with patients also undergoing olfactory training (OT). In the OT group, patients performed OT only. The olfactory function of each patient was evaluated by both the phenyl ethyl alcohol (PEA) odor detection threshold test and the traditional Chinese version of the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (TC-UPSIT), at both 3 and 6 months after the completion of treatment.Results: A total of 38 patients in the CHM group and 40 in the OT group completed the study. The TC-UPSIT scores of patients slightly rose after treatment in both the CHM and OT groups. Nevertheless, there were no significant differences in TC-UPSIT scores before and after treatment in both groups. However, the PEA thresholds improved significantly in both CHM and OT groups (p = 0.005 and 0.016, respectively). Of note, there were no significant differences in threshold or identification scores between the CHM and OT groups.Conclusion: Our results show that adding a tailored Guizhi decoction to OT conferred a limited benefit to the olfactory function of patients experiencing traumatic anosmia.

This paper aims to address some methodological issues related to case-based research in the philosophy of contemporary sciences. We focus on the selection processes by which philosophers pick or generate a particular set of papers to conduct their casebased research. We illustrate how to use various quantitative and qualitative methods to improve the epistemic features of the selection processes, and help generate some potential case-based hypotheses for further philosophical investigation.