In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Is Literature Self-Referential?Eric MillerIIs literary language necessarily self-referential? And does this put paradox at the heart of literature? For at least two decades now, affirmative answers to both questions have been articles of faith among critics in the structuralist and poststructuralist mainstream. Literature’s ineluctable paradoxicality attracts us so because a paradox suggests that there are limits to human rationality, and thus strikes a blow for literature and against (...) science. Paradox ensures literature its own special realm, safe from the culturally imperialistic inroads of science’s orderly, rational-empirical constructions. Literature thus gets to be seen as “bigger” than reason, because only literature can live with paradox, and thus only literature reveals those “deeper” truths of contradiction-ridden human existence, whereas science can never penetrate beyond rational manipulations of phenomenal surfaces. Indeed, for anyone who holds all human existence to be fundamentally paradoxical, this special capacity makes literature the only genuine, demystified species of human knowledge. In the war between C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures, a war humanists are now losing badly, we like to regard paradox as our ultimate weapon.Belief in the paradoxicality of literature may also be found among the New Critics, 1 and in fact goes back at least to the Romantics, 2 but they did not derive this belief from a necessary self-referentiality of literary language. This newer way of deriving paradox appears to offer several competitive advantages. Self-reference seems to be the ultimate version of “art for art’s sake”: if all literary language is necessarily self-referential, then literature must be something totally self-contained, and is thus legitimized solely in and through itself. In addition, deriving [End Page 475] literature’s paradoxicality from self-reference seems to ground it in the same conceptual realm as mathematical logic, and thus tempts us to claim for literature a “rigor” normally conceded only to logic, mathematics, and theoretical physics. Self-referentiality would thus seem both to protect literature’s autonomy and to raise its cultural status into the company of mathematics and science.But it is a trap. For behind this new strategy lurks a capitulation to the underlying conceptual scheme of natural science, and literature thus comes to be conceived, in effect, as a science. Self-reference is, after all, still a kind of reference; paradox is still a kind of truth-relational construction;—and truth-relations built around reference constitute the correspondence theory of truth. From such a foundational commitment to reference and correspondence-truth, flows the rest of the scientific worldview: the dualism of referring expression and referent, word and object, sentence and fact, theory and data, language and world, culture and nature. The presentation of literature as a quasi-negation of this ontology changes nothing. The dualism of reference still functions as literature’s conceptual starting point, as its arche. We only appear to be defining a peculiar and radically distinct sphere for literature when we insist on its self-referentiality, on the (recursive) identity, for it, of referring expression and referent. For, this is still to treat the conceptual distinction between the two as foundational, and literature thereby tacitly assimilates science’s fundamental categorial division: the referential language-world duality of correspondence truth. Indeed, literature thus comes to live even more completely in the margins of science: it will have no essence of its own; it will differ at most in being a photo-negative image of science’s positiv(istic) project. In Snow’s war, self-reference is a Trojan horse.With self-reference as the essence of literature, we are thus staking our reputations on literature’s being a special field of formalizable “knowledge about...,” rather than, say, a quality or kind or realm of possible experience—which is to adopt science’s understanding of what is important. Matters are only made worse by that other attempt to define literary studies as a negation of the theory-data dualism of natural science: the poststructuralist denial of the distinction between criticism and literature. For the institutional need professional critics have to be seen as a discipline with a method and a subject, as a form of “knowledge about,” hardly disappears with... (shrink)

The liberal conception of the state is marked by an insistence upon the equal civil and political rights of each inhabitant. Recently, though, a number of writers have argued that this emphasis on uniform rights ignores the fact that the populations of most states are culturally diverse, and that their inhabitants have significant interests qua members of particular cultures. They argue that liberals should recognize special, group-based cultural rights as a necessary part of a theory of justice in multicultural societies. (...) In this thesis I examine the idea of special cultural rights. In the first part, I begin by setting out some of the different conceptions of culture and multiculturalism that are involved in the debate over cultural rights. I then discuss three claims made by supporters of special cultural rights: that having culture is an essential part of individual autonomy; that people have morally significant interests qua members of particular cultures; and that these interests are inadequately protected by existing liberal conceptions of human rights. Although I conclude that is correct, I argue that both and are mistaken. Among other things, I suggest that the version of culture relied upon by supporters of special cultural rights is an implausible one and I outline what I take to be a more plausible, cosmopolitan conception of culture. In the second part, I begin by looking at specific instances of cultural rights-claims, and analyzing the concept of cultural rights qua rights. I consider the practical and conceptual difficulties with special cultural rights at great length. But the core of my thesis is that our interest in culture lies in its contribution of worthwhile goals and options, and that this interest lies in culture generally rather than in particular cultures. Hence, adopting a special or group-based distribution of any right to culture would seem to be inconsistent with liberal egalitarian principles. If there are such things as cultural rights, I argue, they are general rather than special rights. I conclude by offering a very preliminary account of what a cosmopolitan conception of cultural rights might involve in the case of the right to free association and language rights. (shrink)

The ‘Standard View’ regarding computer-based medical diagnostic decision support programs is that, while such systems may be useful adjuncts to human decision-making, they cannot replace human diagnosticians. Mazoué (1990) disputes this viewpoint. He notes that human diagnosis is prone to a variety of errors, and claims that the processes of data collection for diagnosis and the intellectual task of making a diagnosis are independent. Mazoué believes that recent progress in computer-based diagnosis has been encouraging enough to consider the concept of (...) “human-assisted computer diagnosis”. This commentary explains why the Standard View should remain standard. Diagnosis is a complex process more involved than producing a nosological label for a set of patient descriptors. Efficient and ethical diagnostic evaluation requires a broad knowledge of people and of disease states. The state of the art in computer-based medical diagnosis does not support the optimistic claim that people can now be replaced by more reliable diagnostic programs. (shrink)

"A Pilgrim Press book." Bibliography: p. 241-244.

THEOLOGIES OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION explores the interactive relationships between religious education and thirteen widely different current schools of theologies. Central to this volume is the basic question of whether theology exercises determinative conrol over all phases of religious educaion theory and practice, OR whether theolgy is simply an important contributor to the field of religous educaiton. Does theology in itself possess the capability of directly generating teaching procedures and verifying the instrucitonal effects of these procedures?

The pulse-taking scene in Laurence Sterne’s 1768 Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is representative of the fiction. The episode, in which Yorick palpates the wrist of a Parisian grisette or shopgirl, engages with both literal and figurative matters of the heart. Scholars have long speculated about what Sterne may have meant when he described Sentimental Journey as a “work of redemption.” None has connected Yorick’s discourse of sensibility to a contemporary Catholic controversy of which, circumstantial evidence suggests, Sterne may (...) have been aware. This controversy could well have informed the Anglican Sterne’s equivocal rapprochement with Catholic practice. In 1765, Pope Clement XIII approved some measure of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He thus gave credence to the visions of the nun Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, which occurred between 1673 and 1675. After the second Jacobite uprising, in the late 1740s, the young Sterne had joined with his rabidly anti-Papist uncle Jacques to prosecute the nuns of Micklegate Bar outside York, who occupied one of only two convents left in England. In Sentimental Journey, which develops its own tragicomic theory of the Sacred Heart, Sterne may make eccentric amends for his former zealotry. (shrink)

The organization of the modern police is a contingent social choice about how to engage in the process of governance when regulating public order on the street. The police are the agency authorized to act upon the state’s duty to govern in response to public emergencies. The duty to govern exists when there is some urgent social need that could be resolved by acting, and some person or institution has the resources and ability to do that act. The duty is (...) impersonal: anybody with the relevant skill set is obligated to act to address the relevant need. Problems can arise, however, when too few individuals respond or too many compete to resolve the need. A core feature of governance, then, is to create publicly recognized institutions with special authority, resources, and abilities to address the demand for public services when someone needs to step in and do something to the exclusion of ordinary members of the public. Police agencies are further characterized by various powers and duties. These powers are normative powers to change the legal status of the people with whom the police interact, rather than physical powers to use some amount of violence to coerce individuals to comply with police demands. The core powers of the police include the powers to make authoritative determinations about how to respond to an emergency, to detain individuals, and to trespass upon their person or property, along with conjoined duties to govern, to protect, and to intervene at risk to themselves. The dominant approach attempts to distinguish the police from other institutions using the police ability to use violent to respond to public emergencies. On the governance based model of the police, however, the ability to use force is simply one of the resources available to the police, and does not mark them off as different from other public governance agencies. (shrink)

In this polyphonic dialogue, Gilles Châtenay, Eric Laurent, and Jacques-Alain Miller, responding to questions by Yann Moulier Boutang and Olivier Surel, ponder the consequences of the newest waves of digital processing of data related to the personal life, and of their increasing interconnection. In this “numerical tsunami” and in the political rhetoric that supports it by promoting maximal security and risk management, they identify a resurgence of utilitarianism, and, due to the technological power thus unleashed, a considerable danger (...) for privacy. Against this trend of rationalized totalization of data related to identities, they call for citizens’ resistance and for a sustained public debate on the issue. (shrink)

This chapter describes the development of a workshop series focused on helping students develop research lab ethics guidelines. The workshop was developed through a National Science Foundation-funded project that situates ethics education within the research environment. Students in four departments at a private research university were recruited to join a Student Ethics Committee that collaboratively developed context-specific codes-of-ethics-based guidelines for their departments. These bottom-up developed guidelines were revised in an iterative process, including feedback from faculty, other graduate students, and the (...) original Student Ethics Committee. The goal of the workshops was to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up approach to developing context-specific guidelines and to identify factors that students consider relevant to the ethical conduct of research. After describing the workshop series, this chapter presents a qualitative content analysis of the guidelines. The guidelines developed by the Student Ethics Committees reflect the current culture of experimental labs in these departments and the ethical issues that students think are important. The content of these guidelines and the ethical issues the students focused on contrast in some key ways with what ethical issues faculty who head research groups saw as paramount. The chapter describes the first two iterations of the ethics education workshop module, a qualitative analysis of the first draft of these guidelines, and finally reflects on future work in this area of in situ ethics education. (shrink)

Leading scholars address the work of American philosopher Calvin O. Schrag.

:In this article, we present an educational intervention that embeds ethics education within research laboratories. This structure is designed to assist students in addressing ethical challenges in a more informed way, and to improve the overall ethical culture of research environments. The project seeks to identify factors that students and researchers consider relevant to ethical conduct in science, technology, engineering, and math and to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up (...) approach to developing context-specific, ethics-based guidelines. An important assumption behind this approach is that direct involvement in the process of developing laboratory specific ethical guidelines will positively influence researchers’ understanding of ethical research and practice issues, their handling of these issues, and the promotion of an ethical culture in the respective laboratory. The active involvement may increase the sense of ownership and integration of further discussion on these important topics. Based on the project experiences, the project team seeks to develop a module involving the bottom-up building of codes-of-ethics-based guidelines that can be used by a broad range of institutions and that will be distributed widely. (shrink)

Eric Miller's affordable, elegant translation of Nemesis divina by Carolus Linnaeus reveals a little-known side of the great natural historian. A classic of Swedish literature that influenced luminaries such as August Strindberg, Nemesis divina was composed over years, apparently for the edification of Linnaeus's wayward son Carl. A surprising field-guide to theodicy, the book explores the occult operation of a Theologia experimentalis, an "empirical theology," in the lives of men and women. Many of these people were known to (...) Linnaeus himself. Eric Miller, an award-winning poet and scholar, set Linnaeus's fascinating and eloquent work in a broad literary and philosophical context, linking it to matters as diverse as New England Transcendentalism, the subculture of Black Metal, the Icelandic sagas and contemporary Swedish poetry. Nemesis divina will intrigue students of literature, religion, science, and philosophy alike. (shrink)

Gilbert Imlay’s 1793 epistolary novel The Emigrants, which dramatizes several characters’ journey across the Alleghenies to occupy and develop a tract in the Ohio country, features the use of allusions and commonplaces that illuminate this fiction’s provocative campaign to conciliate physiocracy, proto-feminism, and the new philosophy with the expulsion of indigenous people in the region. Imlay uses Pope, Sterne and Thomson to justify and eroticize U.S. expansiveness. The heroine Caroline T—n embodies, especially, the wondering, wonderful vindication of a world-historical land-grab. (...) Comparisons with contemporary stories by Chateaubriand, Blake, Radcliffe, and the Seneca leader known as the Cornplanter highlight ways in which Imlay—partaking of a rhetorical repertoire demonstrably familiar to his peers—mutes history, religion, appropriation, and aggression in favour of erotic appeal, a series of emblematic, excusatory metonymies, and the picturesque language of an early phase of the North American real estate pitch. (shrink)

Gilbert Imlay’s 1793 epistolary novel The Emigrants, which dramatizes several characters’ journey across the Alleghenies to occupy and develop a tract in the Ohio country, features the use of allusions and commonplaces that illuminate this fiction’s provocative campaign to conciliate physiocracy, proto-feminism, and the new philosophy with the expulsion of indigenous people in the region. Imlay uses Pope, Sterne and Thomson to justify and eroticize U.S. expansiveness. The heroine Caroline T—n embodies, especially, the wondering, wonderful vindication of a world-historical land-grab. (...) Comparisons with contemporary stories by Chateaubriand, Blake, Radcliffe, and the Seneca leader known as the Cornplanter highlight ways in which Imlay—partaking of a rhetorical repertoire demonstrably familiar to his peers—mutes history, religion, appropriation, and aggression in favour of erotic appeal, a series of emblematic, excusatory metonymies, and the picturesque language of an early phase of the North American real estate pitch. (shrink)

Felony disenfranchisement is best understood as a means of vote suppression. Quite apart from its significance as a form of criminal stigma, disenfranchisement is most properly characterized as one of the ways in which the American voting system reserves political participation for a privileged social and intellectual class. Thus understood, felony disenfranchisement reveals the theoretical underpinnings of an exclusionary version of American democracy in which more or less widespread disenfranchisement is an acceptable or necessary political tactic. Felony disenfranchisement should not (...) be characterized as a sanction for criminal conduct: It fits none of the usual justifications for punishment. Most commentators agree that felony disenfranchisement as a collateral sanction for criminal conduct stigmatizes alike a disparate collection of individuals convicted of crimes carrying a penalty of one year or more - everything from drug possession to murder - and extends, in many instances, long after former felons have completed their sentences. Justifications for refusing the vote to felons, and to former felons who are no longer incarcerated, are surprisingly weak and clearly related to larger issues of democratic participation. Accordingly, it is under the framework of democratic participation that the most persuasive justifications of disenfranchisement might be found. Under the framework of democratic participation, the disenfranchisement debate implicates competing theories of democracy, each of which has profound consequences for the constitution of the American polity. I contend that there are currently three models for the right to vote in American society: (1) a membership model premised upon popular participation in the democratic process as an expression of citizenship; (2) a deliberative model in which popular participation is conditioned upon the duty to be an informed and reflective citizen; and (3) an elite model entrenching political office in a political class that competes for votes among the electoral masses. The continuing vitality of these three models at the level of political debate and constitutional doctrine unsettles the dominant history of the franchise as one of progress from an exclusionary to an inclusionary extension of the mandate, and requires us to acknowledge felony disenfranchisement as part of a larger process of voter exclusion and suppression. (shrink)

Quality-of-life policing, responsive to the concerns of urban communities, presents a profound paradox. On the one hand, the collateral effects of drug use, especially in public and in racially fragmented, low-income communities, result in levels of crime and fear of crime that renders the communities almost uninhabitable; on the other, the collateral effects of policing drug crime, for these same communities, destroy the community's human fabric. A "new" generation of legal scholars have embraced and transformed the Broken Windows model of (...) policing urban communities. These theorists share a "social norms"perspective: they suggest that law's direct threat of imposing sanctions is not the sole means of constraining conduct. A variety of other devices, including non-legal, "social" norms, may supplement the law's coercive power. The social norms "take" on the Broken Windows argument is that public low-level crime undermines the social structures of local communities. Inner city blight sends a distinct message: that community members reject or ignore norms supporting law-abiding behavior in favor of norms supporting law-breaking. Accordingly, social norms theorists advocate empowering police and local communities through a variety of traditional and newly minted public order offenses (such as anti-loitering statutes and youth curfews) as means of attacking high crime in urban and predominantly minority neighborhoods. In this article, I take up the challenge of public order policing. My claim is that the sort of preventative policing social norms theorists advocate can and should be separated from reactive "investigative" policing directed at apprehending criminals. Separating preventative and investigative policing means that the police, as currently constituted, are the wrong people to engage in preventative policing. Instead, the appropriate people include municipal officials with no power to engage in investigation but who have the authority to enforce norms of public order. My proposal is to radically restructure the manner in which we think about the legitimacy of various policing practices and the type of authority the police wield. Our current focus on constitutional remedies for low-level police abuses has failed to ameliorate the justified resentment expressed by individuals and local communities subject to heightened amounts of increasingly invasive policing.The attempt to limit police authority through prospective constitutional (and other) norms that control their ability to search, seize, and interrogate suspects is properly confined to the police's investigative role. Limits do not work to constrain their ability to police public order and engage in crime prevention. Yet even at the investigative stage, the Court has already replaced the rule-based due-process model of authority with a series of role-based exceptions to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments' constitutional requirements. Both role- and rule-based concepts of authority concern the proper scope of legitimate authority. Rule-based authority has its basis in adherence to the content of particular rules; role-based authority is based in the powers afforded individuals in particular roles of public authority. Whereas rule-based authority derives its legitimacy primarily from the government's right to promulgate norms, role-based authority gains legitimacy from the degree to which the official's role is matched to the circumstances triggering authority. (shrink)

When addressing the burdens borne by victims of police wrongdoing, we often overlook moral harms in focusing on the physical and psychological harms that they suffer. These moral harms undermine the moral status of the victim, her ability to consistently pursue the values she endorses, and her character. Victimhood is a morally significant social role. Victimhood imposes normative standards that measure the moral or political status of victim. Conforming to these standards affects our assessment of the conduct of the victim (...) and her moral standing. Considering the victims’ role provides important insights into contemporary practices of policing in the United States. The physical and verbal acts of the police often force race-based degradation upon racially subordinated groups. There is often no morally good way out of racially discriminatory encounters when the choice is to degrade oneself or suffer violence or even death. Worse, how we respond to the threat of police violence morally undermines our relationships with those we would keep safe from police violence. (shrink)

This narrative review summarizes the empirical literature on children's competence for consent and assent in research and treatment settings. Studies varied widely regarding methodology, particularly in the areas of participant sampling, situational context studied (e.g., psychological versus medical settings), procedures used (e.g., lab-based vs. real-world approaches), and measurement of competence. This review also identified several fundamental dilemmas underlying approaches to children's informed consent. These dilemmas, including autonomy versus best interests approaches, legal versus psychological or ethical approaches, child- versus family-based approaches, (...) and approaches that emphasize consent versus those that emphasize assent, have implications for the measurement of children's competence and interpretation of findings. Recommendations for future research in the area of children's informed consent include the use of diverse samples and control groups, development of multidimensional and standardized measures of competence, utilization of observational methods and longitudinal designs, examination of noncognitive aspects of children's competence, and comparison of children's competence for treatment and research decisions. (shrink)

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are central to any educational system. The term started with the National Science Foundation as “SMET” and was changed to STEM at a later date due to phonetic reasons. The term was not widely used until Virginia Tech University began offering a “STEM education” degree in 2005 (Friedman 2005). The term STEM covers a broad spectrum of different disciplines. While, in general, STEM is used as an umbrella term for the natural sciences, engineering, (...) mathematics, and technology-related fields, there are some variations in its usage. For example, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) characterizes STEM as including chemistry, computers and information technology, engineering, geoscience, life sciences, mathematical sciences, physics and astronomy, psychology, social sciences, educational research, and STEM education (Gonzalez and Kuezi 2012). Whereas this approach considers the social sciences to be of central importance to STEM and the STEM workforce (Spalter-Roth 2004), in the United Kingdom, STEM is seen to include fields such as medicine, dentistry, and architecture but exclude the social sciences and education (United Kingdom, House of Lords, Science, and Technology, Committee 2012). (shrink)

Student researchers encounter ethical issues daily, but little is known about their unique perspectives. This article presents the results of 30 qualitative semi-structured interviews exploring students’ views and experiences around ethical issues in research groups. During the interviews, students were asked to describe challenges and successes they have encountered in their lab, their conception of what counts as an “ethical issue in research,” and how they handle these issues when they arise. Against this background, the article discusses students’ conceptions of (...) ethical issues in research environments, the types of issues students reported facing, how these issues were ultimately resolved, and finally, the factors, internal qualities, and lessons learned that help students thrive in research environments, as well as some of the challenges students face – especially international students. Many of the ethical challenges interviewees discussed focused on interpersonal issues, highlighting the intense collaboration most graduate students have with their colleagues and supervisors. Findings from this study point to the need for targeted training programs for students and faculty supervisors focusing on building mentoring relationships and finding space in the lab where open communication can occur around ethical research practices. (shrink)

This study described parent participation in the informed consent conference for randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in childhood leukemia and documented the relationship of physician communication to parent participation. Parents of 140 children with newly diagnosed leukemia who were eligible for RCTs were studied at six sites using comprehensive methods involving direct observation and transcripts of parent-physician communication based on audiotapes. Parent participation during the informed consent conference reflected a wide range of content categories. Consistent with hypotheses, Physician Rapport and Partnership (...) Building related to parent participation in the informed consent conference but Information Giving did not. Higher parent socioeconomic status also was related to greater parent participation for two of three measures of parent participation. Findings suggest that physician behaviors that provide support and facilitate communication may enhance parental participation in the informed consent conference for RCTs in childhood leukemia. (shrink)