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A cardinal rule of academic research with human participants is to protect their confidentiality. While there are limits to confidentiality, universities and researchers will make strenuous efforts to protect the identity of participants. This is especially important where they are at risk of serious harm if confidentiality is breached. Yet, some researchers doing highly sensitive research have found themselves subject to encroachment by law enforcement who seek access to the data collected by them in order to build evidence for legal purposes. University regulations require scholars to conduct research ethically in accordance with specific conditions and extensive review processes set by bodies such as Institutional Review Boards or Human Ethics Committees following extensive application processes. If academic staff fulfill these conditions, what obligations do universities have to protect researchers, participants and confidential data? It seems that universities have limited legal liability to protect researchers when incriminating data has been collected. Presenting examples of recent cases such as Boston College's 'Belfast Project', the paper argues that universities have a stringent ethical obligation to protect academic researchers and an obligation to proscribe forced disclosures of confidential research data to enforcement agencies.

Many countries' constituencies are populated by polarised groups with sharply contrasting political loyalties and convictions, which appear to be becoming more and more extreme. We wish to explore such extreme political convictions with a focus on their place in a supporter's mind, which underpins their engagement with a political movement. We look at how a political narrative can be internalised within the person as one of their narrative threads alongside other narratives concerning, for example, familial relationships, hobbies, and work. Such a bundle of narrative threads, or at least the more central ones, can be said to constitute their identity. Using that framework, we explore the mechanisms that foster such extreme political engagement and the way a group member is committed to a political narrative. As even a very powerful political narrative is not the totality of a person's internal narrative we can see how an individual has the potential to release the hold of a political narrative, particularly if those outside the political narrative can recognise and acknowledge those non-political parts of their identity. In this way, people can build bridges across socio-political divides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of the scope problem that motivates pluralism about truth have argued that it is a pseudo-problem. If the criticism is correct, then truth pluralism is left unmotivated and potentially bankrupt. In this paper, I argue that closely related to the scope problem is another problem, which I call "the scalar problem." If the property of truth is sensitive to how an agent expresses the truth predicate within a single linguistic discourse and different agents or groups of agents express truth differently within that discourse, then there are different ways of being true within the same linguistic discourse. Given this possibility, even if the scope problem fails, truth pluralism remains fully motivated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although we agree with the spirit of Knobe's competence model, our aim in this commentary is to argue that the default position should be made more precise. Our quibble with Knobe's model is that we find it hard to ascribe a coherent view to some experimental subjects if the default position is not clearly defined. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X10001901