Burt's critique of using polygenic scores in social science conflates the “scientific costs” of sociogenomics with “sociopolitical and ethical” concerns. Furthermore, she paradoxically enlists recent advances in controlling for environmental confounding to argue such confounding is scientifically “intractable.” Disinterested social scientists should support ongoing efforts to improve this technology rather than obstructing progress and excusing genetically confounded research.

The essay theorizes the responsibilities moral agents may be said to have in relation to global structural social processes that have unjust consequences. How ought moral agents, whether individual or institutional, conceptualize their responsibilities in relation to global injustice? I propose a model of responsibility from social connection as an interpretation of obligations of justice arising from structural social processes. I use the example of justice in transnational processes of production, distribution and marketing of clothing to illustrate operations of structural (...) social processes that extend widely across regions of the world. The social connection model of responsibility says that all agents who contribute by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice have responsibilities to work to remedy these injustices. I distinguish this model from a more standard model of responsibility, which I call a liability model. I specify five features of the social connection model of responsibility that distinguish it from the liability model: it does not isolate perpetrators; it judges background conditions of action; it is more forward looking than backward looking; its responsibility is essentially shared; and it can be discharged only through collective action. The final section of the essay begins to articulate parameters of reasoning that agents can use for thinking about their own action in relation to structural injustice. a Footnotesa Thanks to David Alexander, Daniel Drezner, David Owen, and Ellen Frankel Paul for comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks to David Newstone for research assistance. (shrink)

The scope of this investigation is to find out to what extent the style (Stil), for the young Nietzsche, consists of a means through which the philosopher accomplishes the supreme task of philosophy: the formation (Bildung). I start from the statement that the stylistic problem composes one of the main elements of the evaluation that the young philosopher makes of the German formation and culture (Kultur) of his time to, finally, present how Nietzsche finds in the extemporaneous character (...) of style and in the Schopenhauer's philosophy the way to overcome the barbarism (Barbarei). (shrink)

The 1860s—the epoch of great reforms—brought to Russia a remarkable assortment of official actions that emancipated the serfs, liberalized the judicial system, created zemstva as experiments in limited local self‐government, granted universities an unprecedented scope of academic autonomy, and dramatically enlarged the number of young Russians enrolled in the leading Western universities in search of higher degrees in the sciences. These and similar reforms created an atmosphere favoring women's access to professional positions and contributing to the removal of the (...) harshest aspects of the lingering patriarchal system.Ann Hibner Koblitz's book offers a richly documented and judiciously analyzed portrayal of the widening scope of Russian women's active participation in the professional life of the nation. The book's analysis operates on two levels: the general dynamics of the rising social pressure to expand the range of professions open to women, and the personal experiences of individual women selected for special analysis. Koblitz is fully aware that the process of the emancipation and professional advancement of women was occasionally disrupted by adverse shifts in government policies. Concentrating primarily on the 1860s, this book makes many references to subsequent developments and provides enough documented information to create an adequate picture of the state of women's emancipation and professional employment during the waning decades of the nineteenth century.As might have been expected, Koblitz devotes the most interesting and penetrating analysis to the life and work of the mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaia, the brightest star in the emancipation movement and a most respected model of high professional aspiration and achievement. Inspired by the philosophy and ideology of the Nihilist movement of the 1860s, Kovalevskaia decided to enter the challenging world of science, specializing in mathematics, the queen in the world of scientific thought. The Nihilists made the idea of close interdependence of science and democracy a pivotal point of their ideology. Encouraged and guided by the well‐known German mathematician Karl Weierstrass of Göttingen University, Kovalevskaia published a series of mathematical papers that attracted wide professional attention. Henri Poincaré, a leading mathematical physicist, referred to the paper that brought her the Prix Bordin from the Paris Academy of Sciences as a “celebrated memoir.” The Petersburg Academy of Sciences elected Kovalevskaia an honorary member, the first woman to receive such a high honor—she was not, however, allowed to work for a magisterial degree in Russia, a requirement for university employment.Koblitz shows that despite compounded obstructions on the path to professional achievement, women's gains in Russia were equal to those in the West. Her study provides solid information and cogent comments on the historical background and the educational role of the higher courses for women established in all major cities. Women, however, had less difficulty in acquiring higher education than in finding employment commensurate with their professional qualifications. Their employment by institutions devoted to scientific research was almost always at the level of auxiliary personnel. I. P. Pavlov's main laboratory showed that even at this level there were women who not only manifested originality in experimental work but also published advanced scientific papers. In his classic volume on the development of the theory of conditioned reflexes, Pavlov referred to the publications of eleven women.This book is welcome as the first solid effort to draw a general picture of the multiple ramifications of the ascent of Russian women to professional positions in science. It also contributes to a better understanding of the growing movement in favor of broader participation by women in the full spectrum of professional activities. This book is a rich source of topics for special studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:La Métaphysique de Royce, avec un appendice de texts, publiée et préfacée par Miklos VetöDwayne Alexander TunstallGabriel Marcel La Métaphysique de Royce, avec un appendice de texts, publiée et préfacée par Miklos Vetö Paris L'Hartmattan, 2005xix + 250 pp.Gabriel Marcel's La Métaphysique de Royce (MR) is the most influential Continental interpretation of Josiah Royce's philosophy. Moreover, Marcel's monograph-length study of Royce's metaphysics remains the only significant work (...) on Royce's philosophy written in French. MR was originally published as a series of four articles in La Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (May-June 1918 and January-April 1919) and published, in a slightly edited form, as a monograph by Aubier in 1945. The L'Hartmattan edition of Marcel's MR is, to my knowledge, the first edition of Marcel's MR to be published in any language since the publication of the English translation of MR in 1956 under the title, Royce's Metaphysics.1Because an English translation of MR is already available, this review will not examine Marcel's actual monograph in any significant detail. Rather, it will describe Vetö's preface and the texts comprising this book's appendices.Vetö's preface seeks to fulfill two aims: (1) to situate MR in its own historical context and (2) to convey its insights to a contemporary audience. Vetö fulfills the first aim by situating Royce's thought within the milieu of late nineteenth-century Anglo-American idealism and its reception of German idealism (pp. vii-viii). He also fulfills this aim by explaining how a young Marcel could have devoted an entire monograph to Royce's thought. As for fulfilling the second aim, Vetö admits that doing so will be difficult, since Royce's thought "attracts only very modest attention from philosophers and historians of philosophy outside of America" (p. vii). It seems that Vetö attempts to fulfill the second aim by concentrating on how Royce's thought influenced the development of Marcel's thought. Due to space constraints, I will describe only a few of the more insightful observations Vetö makes about Marcel's MR in his preface.One such insightful observation is Vetö's recognition that, unlike most formulations of the principle of individuation in the Western philosophic tradition, Royce's principle of individuation is essentially volitional. Following Marcel, Vetö explains how Royce does not think that an individual is definable, ontologically speaking, by its empirical qualities or by some logical designation of class membership. Royce thought that an individual cannot be defined apart from the communal and moral interests of the one who recognizes that individual (p. xi). In fact, the act of recognizing an individual is an act of love for Royce. What Royce regards as love is different than the common definitions of the term, however. Vetö reminds the reader that Roycean love involves the exclusive selection of an individual to be the object of one's attention. This means that whenever one exclusively attends to someone or something in the world, that someone or something becomes a genuine individual.2 [End Page 582]Another insightful observation is Vetö's recognition that Royce's conception of God as fellow-sufferer, indeed as the One who experiences our sufferings more intensely and meaningfully than we do, seems to anticipate Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and, to a greater extent, Charles Hartshorne's process theology (p. xiv).A third insightful observation is Vetö's description of how Royce's thought influenced the development of Marcel's thought. While Marcel writes that Royce's thought had only a negligible influence on the formation of his mature position on intersubjectivity in his author's preface to the English translation of his monograph in 1956, Vetö contends that Royce obviously played an important role in Marcel's early insights into the nature of intersubjectivity. This is especially true of Marcel's insights into intersubjectivity as they are articulated in the second part of his Metaphysical Journal (1927).3 In that work, Marcel notes how his own nascent existentialism, e.g., his distinction between being and having... (shrink)

Natural selection of specific protobiomonomers during abiogenic development of the prototype genetic code is hindered by the diversity of structural, spatial, and rotational isomers that have identical elemental composition and molecular mass (M), but can vary significantly in their physicochemical characteristics, such as the melting temperature Tm, the Tm:M ratio, and the solubility in water, due to different positions of atoms in the molecule. These parameters differ between cis- and trans-isomers of dicarboxylic acids, spatial monosaccharide isomers, and structural isomers of (...) α-, β-, and γ-amino acids. The stable planar heterocyclic molecules of the major nucleobases comprise four (C, H, N, O) or three (C, H, N) elements and contain a single –C=C bond and two nitrogen atoms in each heterocycle involved in C–N and C=N bonds. They exist as isomeric resonance hybrids of single and double bonds and as a mixture of tautomer forms due to the presence of –C=O and/or –NH2 side groups. They are thermostable, insoluble in water, and exhibit solid-state stability, which is of central importance for DNA molecules as carriers of genetic information. In M–Tm diagrams, proteinogenic amino acids and the corresponding codons are distributed fairly regularly relative to the distinct clusters of purine and pyrimidine bases, reflecting the correspondence between codons and amino acids that was established in different periods of genetic code development. The body of data on the evolution of the genetic code system indicates that the elemental composition and molecular structure of protobiomonomers, and their M, Tm, photostability, and aqueous solubility determined their selection in the emergence of the standard genetic code. (shrink)

Over the course of the Progressive Era, revised scientific accounts of the connections between dust, germs, and disease recast debates over public health. The American School of Home Economics and other institutions affiliated with the emerging subfield of household bacteriology regarded detecting and eliminating pathogens as necessary means to achieve safer homes and communities. Although several historians have attributed the rise of early twentieth-century technocracy and the decline of grassroots health activism to germ theory, household bacteriology complicates this standard narrative. (...) Educators like Sophronia Maria Elliott (1854–1942) rejected the command-and-control tactics of the “new” public health and instead instructed women how to culture microorganisms and to measure the risks of infection within their surrounding environments using kitchen experiments. Household bacteriologists aspired to train “sanitary citizens” with the right and the duty to test for germs with everyday equipment, to prevent disease with effective housekeeping, and to advocate for policies and infrastructure to keep society well. (shrink)

A major aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between time perspective, i.e., habitual ways of relating to the past, present, and future, and sleep quality. A second aim was to test a model by which the expected negative relationship between deviation from a balanced time perspective, a measure taking temporal biases across all three time frames into account, and life satisfaction was mediated by poor sleep quality. To these ends, a sample of young adults completed (...) a version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. A measure of chronotype was in addition included for control purposes. Bivariate analyses revealed that the S-ZTPI subscales Past Negative, Future Negative and Present Fatalistic were associated with poorer sleep quality, with significant associations in the opposite direction for Past Positive and Future Positive. However, DBTP was the strongest predictor of sleep quality, suggesting that time perspective biases have an additive effect on sleep quality. Regression analyses with PSQI as the dependent variable and all six ZTPI subscales as the predictors indicated that time perspective accounted for about 20% of the variance in sleep quality, with Past Negative, Past Positive, and Future Negative as the unique predictors. The results additionally confirmed a strong relationship between DBTP and life satisfaction. Finally, data were consistent with the hypothesis that the association of DBTP and life satisfaction is mediated, in part, by sleep quality. Taken together, the results confirmed a substantial link between time perspective sleep-related problems, factors that may have a negative impact on life satisfaction. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the historical stages of development of nanotechnology in Russia as well as the political framework for this. It is shown that early federal nanotechnology programs in Russia date back to the 1990s and that since the mid-2000s, nanotechnology has attracted the increasing attention of government. I characterize the formation of the political landscape and the basic institutions for the promotion of nanotechnology in relation to the adoption of the Russian Federation president’s initiative “Strategy of Nanoindustry (...) Development” in 2007. The evaluative part of the article deals with three aspects: (a) bibliometric to assess Russian research output in nanotechnology, (b) scientific cadre to assess the research capacity of Russia in the long term, and (c) economical to consider the early results and prospects of the domestic nanoindustry. To construct the scientometric indicators, I used the Science Citation Index Expanded and some internal databases. The texts of program documents and available reports served as the source of economic information. (shrink)

This book makes trouble: it explores the reality that digital culture is largely an extension of an older coloniality of power of the global north. It suggests a line of inquiry for the social sciences to reflect on their own imperial role and develop a contemporary critical and pragmatic scope, shifting their gaze from problems to opportunities.

The article reviews the concepts of the multi-author book Society. National Strategy. War: Political and Strategic Lessons of the First World War. This collective research is notable for rich original scientific apparatus and methodological proficiency. Thus, the analysis of participating countries is conducted according to a single template, which includes: the state of pre-war society in all participating countries ; goals of engaging in war and expectations of the powerful and financial elites for the war ; assessment of how did (...) different strata of society find the war; the evolution of the morale of the people during the war; problems that arose during the war ; the evolution of women’s position in society during the war, the development of a broad segment of women-workers, the extension of emancipation as one of the positive results of the war; the outcome of the war for the country. Special attention is drawn to the pacifist nature of the ideology of the reviewed research, demonstration of deprivation and suffering of people in all countries. The book’s authors identify the main causes of the First World War: ambitions and inefficiency of the world’s elites, the lack of a coherent strategy. As the result, the USA, thanks to their strategy, received the maximum dividends with minimal participation. At the same time, it is noted that the context of research on the nature of war should be expanded to take into account the general competition of countries and civilizations. The authors comprehensively analyze the informational and propaganda activities of the participating countries and conclude that England’s activities in this field were the most effective. Based on the methodology of this collective research, the nature of a future world war, its potential participants and their goals can be considered. (shrink)

A critique and provincialization of Western social science and Global Northern academia by the author of The Digital Coloniality of Power, exposing shared colonial and extractive rationalities and histories of research, higher education, digitalization and bioeconomy while proposing in the idea of BluesCollarship a sketch for an alternative culture of worlding and commoning knowledge work and for making care matter in research and higher education. In a discourse analysis and provincialization of research and higher education, a tradition of elitarian White (...) Collaredness in academia and in the social sciences in general is criticized and an alternative attitude towards the production, transfer and use of knowledge - BluesCollarship - is proposed. The latter is rooted in a different idea of what 'infrastructure' is and in practices of decoloniality. Noting the current political climate of propaganda and populism, the persistence of social inequalities as well as of racism and misogynism, it is proposed that how people give warrant for knowledge claims should be reviewed under different terms. A coherent theme is that there is a genealogical root for current neo-extractive and neo-colonial rationalities in the Athenian idea of oikos conflating family, household, and property. In taking a distinctly writerly approach - rather than giving ready-made answers - the book aims at permanently provoking readers at every turn to think further, as well as before-and-beyond what is written, but to do so in thinking together with Others. Thereby the book addresses scholars and students from across the social sciences who seek challenges to established ways of thinking in academia without simply replacing one canon for merely another. This book is for those who think of themselves as knowledge and cultural laborers in this age of precarization who seek to replace the university and cognitive capitalism with a pluriversity and an infrastructure build on knowledge and culture as fundamental value. (shrink)

This is the second of two special issues, and the articles are grouped according to two themes: The previous, first issue featured articles that shared the theme Technologies and the Political, while this second issue is focused on the theme of Subjectivities. In this second, somewhat expanded, introduction, the “sky’s the limit.” This introduction canvasses various theoretical and conceptual-empricial perspectives that the articles of both issues touch on and further tries to open many doors through which readers are invited to (...) go on their own rather than give readymade answers. This introduction is written not only to give both an overview of some of the most important conceptual, methodological, and empirical contexts that the two special issues evoke but also to create invitations for many further conversations to be had from here on forward by beginning the interrogating and troubling of the intercourse between “science” and “science fiction”: beause all of this has happened before and will happen again. (shrink)

The article focuses on juxtaposing the stances of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas on the notion of the Other based on the metaphysical principles of modernity so as to expose the prerequisites for their attitude to metaphysics in whole. The peculiarity of the proposed approach is the analysis of the notions of the Other in Rosenzweig and Levinas from the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. The scrutiny proceeds from the assumption that the national philosophies, having been considered as the specific (...) response to the effects of the encounter of societies to be modernized with the spreading modernity, for that very reason attach great importance to the construal of the Other. It is emphasized that the similarities between the national schools of philosophy indicate correlating the particular with the general as the paradigm for the comprehension of the Other, whereas the Jewish philosophy has previously conceptualized that paradigm by way of the opposition of “Athens and Jerusalem”. In an effort to assess the capabilities of the above-mentioned paradigm the analysis of the relevant range of problems is set into the wider context and they are considered in connection with the transition from essentialism to anti-essentialism that characterizes already the late modernity. It is disclosed that Rosenzweig’s stance was still essentialist, while Levinas tried to abandon the essentialist understanding of the Other, albeit he did not complete the transition to anti-essentialism. Levinas’ break with metaphysics was brought to a close by Derrida whose anti-essentialist stance on identity and difference radically diverges from the thinking that adheres to the “metaphysics of presence”. In the issue, Derrida who does not formally belong to the Jewish philosophy could afford to summarize Rozenzweig’s and Levinas’ approaches to the problem of the Other, and in so doing he makes a contribution to both general and Jewish philosophy. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the interrelations between the notions of one’s own and the foreign in later Heidegger’s philosophy. It is pointed out that later Heidegger contextualized the notion of the world by the notion of home and its derivatives “homelessness” and “homecoming” that are of great value in his philosophy. The scrutiny proceeds from the study of the peculiarities of Heidegger’s approach to the problem of being that is considered to be the knot of his (...) philosophy. It is noted that Heidegger, having deserted the traditional ontology already in his early works, continued, nevertheless, using its terms including “being” for a long time and thereby in a way obscured the peculiarities of his approach. Only later Heidegger tried to reject the traditional concept of being as infinitely continuing state in favor of the concept of Ereignis that is usually translated as “appropriating event” or “event of appropriation”. Thus, according to Heidegger, being gives us beings as a whole by appropriating sense to them and thereby turning them into the familiar and accessible environment for dwelling. Just the “givenness” of beings as a whole makes them familiar, one’s own. Accordingly, the “dwelling” means for Heidegger not only the security, but also the intelligibility of the environment, whereas the homelessness means the latter’s uncanny incomprehensibility. It is emphasized that Heidegger’s interpretation of homelessness is closely connected with a standard theoretical model explaining the emergence of the private and public realms. According to this model, just the extension of family as the initial one’s own resulted in the turning of household into city-state that, having been specified by the image of one super-family, added the elements of the foreign to the initial state of society. (shrink)

The purpose of the research is to analyze the context, the essence, and the philosophical implications of Franz Rosenzweig's reconsideration of the ban on idolatry as an implication of pure monotheism. As often as not idolatry is defined generally as the adoration of some images that, representing deity, are considered to be autonomous and hereupon become the objects of worship. The study confines itself to the analysis of the significance of the ban on idolatry in Rosenzweig's interpretation of the concept (...) of difference that underlies his theoretical model of the Other. The consideration proceeds on the general assumption that the encounter of tradition with modernity is the factor that determines the radical change in the philosophies of societies under modernization. In this context, the ancient ban on idolatry means the rejection and prohibition of whatever representation as intricate mediation that is, in turn, the hallmark of modernity. However, according to Rosenzweig, idolatry is not the usage of images as the representations of the reputedly unrepresentable God, but the fixation on one image which would mean the arbitrary limitation of God's infinite freedom to reveal himself visually. This implies that the reconsidered ban on idolatry does not require the absolute prohibition of representation, but the latter should be construed as temporal. Such an approach prevents the identification of the representation of entity with this entity itself, the sign with the thing, and therefore prohibits self-referentiality. Rosenzweig's stance determines also his understanding of familiarity, unfamiliarity, and difference in art and translation. Rosenzweig's emphasis on the shocking influence of the defamiliarizing difference as the feature of the work of art correlates with his interpretation of the translation that should make stable shared senses unfamiliar. Thus, the reconsidered ban on idolatry underlies Rosenzweig's conception of the reconciliation between Jewish tradition and modernity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Discover the Unknown Chekhov in Your ESL ClassroomNinah Beliavsky (bio)I was born in Moscow, ate aladushki, and listened to my mother read Chekhov in Russian. Kashtanka, a tale about a young, ginger-colored pup who gets lost, made me cry. And when I read about the death of Ivan Dmitrich Kreepikov, in The Death of a Civil Servant, I did not know whether to laugh or to cry. The (...) poor civil servant was sitting and watching an opera in a theater when all of a sudden he sneezed and spattered an old gentlemen, General Shpitzalov, in front of him. Now, as Chekhov writes, sneezing is not prohibited to any one or in any place; peasants sneeze, and even the chiefs of police sneeze. But, you see, the poor civil servant, being very much rank-conscious, could no longer live with himself after committing such a misconduct. He apologized profusely and went home, and without taking off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa, and... died.And what about Van'ka Zhukov, an orphan boy of nine apprenticed to a shoemaker who is being beaten and overworked. He writes a letter to his grandfather on Christmas Eve, begging him for the dear Lord's sake to take him away from his misery. After scratching his head and thinking for a moment, he dips his pen in ink and addresses his envelope: "The Village. To Grand Dad." He then dashes out into the street and pushes his precious letter through the opening of the postbox...The second part of my childhood I spent in Jerusalem; there I ate falafel with humus, was obsessed with perfecting the pronunciation of the Hebrew guttural "r," and read Miriam Yalan Shtekelis's children's poetry, which was filled with magical objects that laughed and cried. By the time I was in high school I was living in Milwaukee, eating fries and ice cream sundaes and reading O. Henry.The literature that one comes in contact with during childhood and young [End Page 101] adulthood is often deeply engraved on a person's psyche. It is similar to an adult craving sweets because of the psychological association with her childhood and a safe and protected environment. We tend to think back to the "good old days" because we find comfort in our past. Today, as an adult, a wife, and a mother, I often find refuge in my childhood memories. And, like most people, much of what I encounter and read today I tend to associate with my past. If I come across a story that I heard in my childhood, as I search for something new and amusing to give to my college English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students, I try to incorporate it into my curriculum. A few years ago I came across the story The Necklace by Guy de Mappassant and immediately recalled reading it in my adolescence. This story brought back the warm memories of home that I felt would be understood and identified with by my foreign students. Today, this story is one of my students' favorites. By using stories from my own past, I feel that I can bring to my class discussions a unique perspective—my own recollections and feelings and an interpretation not only academic in nature but also personal. Often, my international students will recall hearing or reading some of the same stories (that I bring to class) in their childhood, in their native tongues, and thus these stories will not seem out of context anymore because there will be a sense of connection.I teach ESL to college students—reading and writing at the intermediate and advanced levels. Aside from following the standard curriculum of using grammar and writing textbooks, I bring to my ESL classes music, opera, art, young adult novels by American writers, and short stories by both international and American writers. For instance, my students enjoy reading O. Henry's "The Christmas Present," "The Last Leaf," and "The Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen." These stories are about real people—just like my students—they are about everyday events, they are humorous and tragic in nature, and they have an unexpected twist... (shrink)

This is the first of two special issues and the articles are grouped according to two themes: This first issue will feature articles that share a theme we call Technologies and the Political, while the second issue will feature the theme Subjectivities. However, we could equally consider them exercises in provincialization in the (counter)factual register in the first issue, and by affective historiography as conceptual-empirical labor(atory) in the second issue. What we have generally asked of all authors is to consider (...) that the relation between science and society is often heavily influenced by and identified in the intermediary figurations portrayed in the genre of science fiction. (shrink)

The authors try to show that even Wittgensteinian definition of concept is not always sufficient to analyze what really happens in science. As a result, in addition to “concept” we propose “conception” as a new promising tool for philosophy of science. We provide a brief historical analysis of this term and reveal two main interpretations of “conception” in philosophy and scientific disciplines. In accordance with the first view, conception appears as either a “twin” of the concept, or a pair entity (...) to the concept. According to the second view, conception is a kind of “strange concept” that exists among “normal” concepts. Since conception is understood differently in sciences and philosophical systems, it is not possible to give a generalized definition of conception. That is, it is impossible to formulate this definition, so to speak, inductively. Moreover, even if it was possible, such a definition would not necessarily have to be automatically accepted by philosophy of science. That is why the introduction of a concept of conception was carried out through the analysis of a global process associated with the return of metaphysics to science. We define conception as a semantic construction denoting the unknown (and, possibly, fundamentally unknowable) and ensuring the possibility of working with this unknown (unknowable). By virtue of the way conception was introduced (conception is not a “generalization” of the interpretations available in specific sciences) many conceptions that are considered as conception in specific sciences turn out to not to be conceptions within this definition. Thus, the article interprets conception as a new possible tool of philosophy of science, which is aimed at understanding how specific sciences develop. (shrink)

Research on escalation of commitment has predominantly been studied in the context of a single decision without consideration for the psychological consequences of escalating. This study sought to examine a) the extent to which people escalate their commitment to a failing course of action in a sequential decision-making task, b) confidence and anger as psychological consequences of escalation of commitment, and c) the reciprocal relationship between escalation of commitment and confidence and anger. Participants were 110 undergraduate students who completed a (...) series of investment decisions regarding a failing endeavor. Results revealed that although a high proportion of individuals escalate through all decisions, the extent to which they escalated decreased with each decision as they were less willing to invest money in the project. Furthermore, as participants escalated, confidence in one’s decision decreased and anger increased. Lastly, the analyses revealed that the relationship between escalation and confidence is reciprocal. Escalation was negatively associated with confidence, and confidence predicted escalation in the subsequent decision. These results highlight the importance of considering both the determinants and psychological consequences of escalation of commitment. (shrink)

Modeling mechanisms is central to the biological sciences – for purposes of explanation, prediction, extrapolation, and manipulation. A closer look at the philosophical literature reveals that mechanisms are predominantly modeled in a purely qualitative way. That is, mechanistic models are conceived of as representing how certain entities and activities are spatially and temporally organized so that they bring about the behavior of the mechanism in question. Although this adequately characterizes how mechanisms are represented in biology textbooks, contemporary biological research practice (...) shows the need for quantitative, probabilistic models of mechanisms, too. In this paper we argue that the formal framework of causal graph theory is well-suited to provide us with models of biological mechanisms that incorporate quantitative and probabilistic information. On the ba-sis of an example from contemporary biological practice, namely feedback regulation of fatty acid biosynthesis in Brassica napus, we show that causal graph theoretical models can account for feedback as well as for the multi-level character of mechanisms. However, we do not claim that causal graph theoretical representations of mechanisms are advantageous in all respects and should replace common qualitative models. Rather, we endorse the more balanced view that causal graph theoretical models of mechanisms are useful for some purposes, while being insufficient for others. (shrink)

Two fundamentally different perspectives on knowledge diffusion dominate debates about academic disciplines. On the one hand, critics of disciplinary research and education have argued that disciplines are isolated silos, within which specialists pursue inward-looking and increasingly narrow research agendas. On the other hand, critics of the silo argument have demonstrated that researchers constantly import and export ideas across disciplinary boundaries. These perspectives have different implications for how knowledge diffuses, how intellectuals gain and lose status within their disciplines, and how intellectual (...) reputations evolve within and across disciplines. We argue that highly general claims about the nature of disciplinary boundaries are counterproductive, and that research on the nature of specific disciplinary boundaries is more useful. To that end, this paper uses a novel publication and citation network dataset and statistical models of citation networks to test hypotheses about the boundaries between philosophy of science and 11 disciplinary clusters. Specifically, we test hypotheses about whether engaging with and being cited by scientific communities outside philosophy of science has an impact on one’s position within philosophy of science. Our results suggest that philosophers of science produce interdisciplinary scholarship, but they tend not to cite work by other philosophers when it is published in journals outside of their discipline. Furthermore, net of other factors, receiving citations from other disciplines has no meaningful impact—positive or negative—on citations within philosophy of science. We conclude by considering this evidence for simultaneous interdisciplinarity and insularity in terms of scientific trading theory and other work on disciplinary boundaries and communication. (shrink)

This book provides brief expositions of the central concepts in the field of Global Studies. Former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev says, “The book is intelligent, rich in content and, I believe, necessary in our complex, turbulent, and fragile world.” 300 authors from 50 countries contributed 450 entries. The contributors include scholars, researchers, and professionals in social, natural, and technological sciences. They cover globalization problems within ecology, business, economics, politics, culture, and law. This interdisciplinary collection provides a basis (...) for understanding the concepts and methods within global studies and for accessing lengthier and more technical research in the field. The articles treat such important topics as the biosphere, ozone depletion, land resources and pollution, world health challenges, education, global modeling, sustainable development, war, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. The book also promotes academic cooperation, political dialogue, and mutual understanding across diverse traditions and national identities that are needed to engage successfully the many daunting challenges of globalization. (shrink)

Evidence has long suggested that ‘hardwiring’ is a poor metaphor for brain development. But the metaphor may be an apt one for the dominant paradigm for researching sex differences, which pushes most neuroscience studies of sex/gender inexorably towards the ‘discovery’ of sex/gender differences, and makes contemporary gender structures appear natural and inevitable. The argument we forward in this paper is twofold. In the first part of the paper, we address the dominant ‘hardwiring’ paradigm of sex/gender research in contemporary neuroscience, which (...) is built on broad consensus that there are important ‘original’ sex differences in brain structure and function, organized by sex-differentiating prenatal hormone exposures. We explain why this consensus is both unscientific and unethical. In the second part of the paper, we sketch an alternative research program focused not on the origins of sex/gender differences but on variability and plasticity of brain/behavior. We argue that interventional experiments based on this approach will address more tractable questions, and lead to much more satisfactory results than the brain organization paradigm can provide. (shrink)

Few studies have examined how trait emotion dysregulation relates to momentary affective experiences and the emotion regulation strategies people use in daily life. In the current study, 112 c...

The present study investigated whether individual differences between psychologists in thinking styles are associated with accuracy in diagnostic classification. We asked novice and experienced clinicians to classify two clinical cases of clients with two co-occurring psychological disorders. No significant difference in diagnostic accuracy was found between the two groups, but when combining the data from novices and experienced psychologists accuracy was found to be negatively associated with certain decision making strategies and with a higher self-assessed ability and preference for a (...) rational thinking style. Our results underscore the idea that it might be fruitful to look for explanations of differences in the accuracy of diagnostic judgments in individual differences between psychologists (such as in thinking styles or decision making strategies used), rather than in experience level. (shrink)

In Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), an apparent tension arises between his pursuit of a self-proclaimed “new theory of everything,” or general ontology, and his assertion that any ontology must be able to account for distinctions among various regions of being. This paper delves into this tension between universality and specificity, particularly concerning the question of animal ontology, and examines the potential for constructing an object-oriented animal ontology. By juxtaposing Harman’s perspectives with those of Matthew Calarco and other scholars, I (...) aim to demonstrate the feasibility of developing an animal ontology using the framework of OOO. (shrink)