This study uses a “science pipeline” model and cross-national data to examine women's participation in science education and occupations in seven countries. Gender stratification in later science education and in science occupations is found in every country examined. Young women's participation in science education decreases with each stage in the science pipeline, but there is considerable cross-national variation in the extent of gender stratification in science. Findings show greater gender stratification in science occupations than in science education, suggesting factors other (...) than training help maintain inequality in high-status science occupations. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Drawing on work of the past decade, this volume brings together articles from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, and many other branches of the biological sciences. The volume delves into the latest theoretical controversies as well as burning questions of contemporary social importance. The issues considered include the nature of evolutionary theory, biology and ethics, the challenge from religion, and the social implications of biology today (in particular the Human Genome Project).

In the literature on persons and their identity, it is customary to distinguish the issue of the nature of personhood—“What is a person?”—from the issue of per- sonal identity—“What are the persistence conditions of a person over time?” In recent years, Eric Olson and Lynne Rudder Baker have brought to the forefront of discussion the related, but often neglected, issue of our essence: “What are we, most fundamentally (essentially)—human animals, persons, or something else?” -/- Attacking what he calls the Standard (...) View of personal identity, according to which personal identity consists in some type of psychological continuity, Olson contends that this thesis has highly implausible implications. Attributing the claim that we are essentially persons to the Standard View, Olson defends the alterna- tive thesis that we are essentially (living) human animals, members of the species Homo sapiens, and that our persistence conditions are biological, having nothing to do with psychology. At the heart of his critique is the contention that the Standard View lacks a plausible account of the relationship between a person and the human animal associated with her. Defending “person essentialism” and defining persons as beings with first-person perspectives, Lynne Rudder Baker responds to Olson’s challenge with the Constitution View: We (human) persons are constituted by, but not identical to, human animals. -/- After reconstructing Olson’s critique of the Standard View, I argue that Baker goes a long way toward meeting his challenge to account plausibly for the relationship between persons and human animals. Then I contend that her person-based Constitution View nevertheless has major difficulties: a “newborn problem”; a dubious ontology; and a problematic account of personal identity. I conclude with general reflections about this dialectic. (shrink)

Bioethicists function in an environment in which their peers - healthcare executives, lawyers, nurses, physicians - assert the integrity of their fields through codes of professional ethics. Is it time for bioethics to assert its integrity by developing a code of ethics? Answering in the affirmative, this paper lays out a case by reviewing the historical nature and function of professional codes of ethics. Arguing that professional codes are aggregative enterprises growing in response to a field's historical experiences, it asserts (...) that bioethics now needs to assert its integrity and independence and has already developed a body of formal statements that could be aggregated to create a comprehensive code of ethics for bioethics. A Draft Model Aggregated Code of Ethics for Bioethicists is offered in the hope that analysis and criticism of this draft code will promote further discussion of the nature and content of a code of ethics for bioethicists. (shrink)

Background Various authorities recommend the participation of patients in promoting patient safety, but little is known about health care professionals' (HCPs') attitudes towards patients' involvement in safety-related behaviours. Objective To investigate how HCPs evaluate patients' behaviours and HCP responses to patient involvement in the behaviour, relative to different aspects of the patient, the involved HCP and the potential error. Design Cross-sectional fractional factorial survey with seven factors embedded in two error scenarios (missed hand hygiene, medication error). Each survey included two (...) randomized vignettes that described the potential error, a patient's reaction to that error and the HCP response to the patient. Setting Twelve hospitals in Switzerland. Participants A total of 1141 HCPs (response rate 45%). Measurements Approval of patients' behaviour, HCP response to the patient, anticipated effects on the patient–HCP relationship, HCPs' support for being asked the question, affective response to the vignettes. Outcomes were measured on 7-point scales. Results Approval of patients' safety-related interventions was generally high and largely affected by patients' behaviour and correct identification of error. Anticipated effects on the patient–HCP relationship were much less positive, little correlated with approval of patients' behaviour and were mainly determined by the HCP response to intervening patients. HCPs expressed more favourable attitudes towards patients intervening about a medication error than about hand sanitation. Conclusions This study provides the first insights into predictors of HCPs' attitudes towards patient engagement in safety. Future research is however required to assess the generalizability of the findings into practice before training can be designed to address critical issues. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: There are some problems with Lynne Baker’s constitution account of personal identity that become evident when we consider brain transplant thought experiments and two kinds of rare cases of conjoined twins — the first appears to be one organism but two persons and the second seems to involve two organisms associated with one person. To handle the problems arising from brain transplants, the constitution theorist must admit an additional level of constitution between the organism and the person. To resolve (...) the problems posed by the two kinds of conjoined twins, the constitution theorist must accept that constitution is not always a one-to-one relationship. RESUME: La théorie constitutionnelle de l’identité personnelle de Lynne Baker soulève certains problèmes qui deviennent évidents lorsque l’on considère des expériences de pensée sur des transplantations de cerveaux et deux genres de cas rares de jumeaux conjoints — du premier cas paraît s’ensuivre qu’il y a deux personnes pour un seul organisme alors que du deuxième découle qu’une seule personne existe dans deux organismes. Afin d’expliquer les problèmes qui surviennent avec les transplantations de cerveaux, le théoricien de la constitution doit admettre un niveau de constitution intermédiaire entre l’organisme et la personne. Pour résoudre les problèmes que posent les cas de jumeaux conjoints, le théoricien de la constitution doit accepter que la relation de constitution ne se réalise pas toujours entre deux termes. (shrink)

I consider an argument, due to Geoffrey Lee, that we can know a priori from the left-right asymmetrical character of experience that our brains are left-right asymmetrical. Lee's argument assumes a premise he calls relationism, which I show is well-supported by the best philosophical picture of spacetime. I explain why Lee's relationism is compatible with left-right asymmetrical laws. I then show that the conclusion of Lee's argument is not as strong or surprising as he makes it out to be.

According to comparativist theories of quantities, their intrinsic values are not fundamental. Instead, all the quantity facts are grounded in scale-independent relations like "twice as massive as" or "more massive than." I show that this sort of scale independence is best understood as a sort of metaphysical symmetry--a principle about which transformations of the non-fundamental ontology leave the fundamental ontology unchanged. Determinism--a core scientific concept easily formulated in absolutist terms--is more difficult for the comparativist to define. After settling on the (...) most plausible comparativist understanding of determinism, I offer some examples of physical systems that the comparativist must count as indeterministic although the relevant physical theory gives deterministic predictions. Several morals are drawn. In particular: comparativism is metaphysically contingent if true, and it is most natural for a comparativist to accept an at-at theory of motion. (shrink)

Eleanor Knox has argued that our concept of spacetime applies to whichever structure plays a certain functional role in the laws (the role of determining local inertial structure). I raise two complications for this approach. First, our spacetime concept seems to have the structure of a cluster concept, which means that Knox's inertial criteria for spacetime cannot succeed with complete generality. Second, the notion of metaphysical fundamentality may feature in the spacetime concept, in which case spacetime functionalism may be uninformative (...) in the absence of answers to fundamental metaphysical questions like the substantivalist/relationist debate. (shrink)

The nature of antimatter is examined in the context of algebraic quantum field theory. It is shown that the notion of antimatter is more general than that of antiparticles. Properly speaking, then, antimatter is not matter made up of antiparticles—rather, antiparticles are particles made up of antimatter. We go on to discuss whether the notion of antimatter is itself completely general in quantum field theory. Does the matter–antimatter distinction apply to all field theoretic systems? The answer depends on which of (...) several possible criteria we should impose on the space of physical states. (shrink)

Eleanor Knox has argued that our concept of spacetime applies to whichever structure plays a certain functional role in the laws. I raise two objections to this inertial functionalism. First, it depends on a prior assumption about which coordinate systems defined in a theory are reference frames, and hence on assumptions about which geometric structures are spatiotemporal. This makes Knox’s account circular. Second, her account is vulnerable to several counterexamples, giving the wrong result when applied to topological quantum field theories (...) and parity- and time-asymmetric theories. I advance an alternative account on which our spacetime concept is a cluster concept. On this view, the notion of metaphysical fundamentality may feature in the cluster, in which case spacetime functionalism may be uninformative in the absence of answers to fundamental metaphysical questions like the substantivalist/relationist debate. (shrink)

I examine some problems standing in the way of a successful `field interpretation' of quantum field theory. The most popular extant proposal depends on the Hilbert space of `wavefunctionals.' But since wavefunctional space is unitarily equivalent to many-particle Fock space, two of the most powerful arguments against particle interpretations also undermine this form of field interpretation. IntroductionField Interpretations and Field OperatorsThe Wavefunctional InterpretationFields and Inequivalent Representations 4.1. The Rindler representation 4.2. Spontaneous symmetry breaking 4.3. Coherent representations The Fate of Fields (...) in Interacting QFTConclusions. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that string theory posits a fundamental ontology including extended mereological simples, either in the form of minimum-sized regions of space or of the strings themselves. But there is very little in the actual theory to support this claim, and much that suggests it is false. Extant string theories treat space as a continuum, and strings do not behave like simples.

The widely held picture of dynamical symmetry as surplus structure in a physical theory has many metaphysical applications. Here, I focus on its relevance to the question of which quantities in a theory represent fundamental natural properties.

The permutation symmetry of quantum mechanics is widely thought to imply a sort of metaphysical underdetermination about the identity of particles. Despite claims to the contrary, this implication does not hold in the more fundamental quantum field theory, where an ontology of particles is not generally available. Although permutations are often defined as acting on particles, a more general account of permutation symmetry can be formulated using superselection theory. As a result, permutation symmetry applies even in field theories with no (...) particle interpretation. The quantum mechanical account of permutations acting on particles is recovered as a special case. (shrink)

Nature seems to be such that we can describe it accurately with quantum theories of bosons and fermions alone, without resort to parastatistics. This has been seen as a deep mystery: paraparticles make perfect physical sense, so why don’t we see them in nature? We consider one potential answer: every paraparticle theory is physically equivalent to some theory of bosons or fermions, making the absence of paraparticles in our theories a matter of convention rather than a mysterious empirical discovery. We (...) argue that this equivalence thesis holds in all physically admissible quantum field theories falling under the domain of the rigorous Doplicher–Haag–Roberts approach to superselection rules. Inadmissible parastatistical theories are ruled out by a locality-inspired principle we call charge recombination. 1 Introduction2 Paraparticles in Quantum Theory3 Theoretical Equivalence3.1 Field systems in algebraic quantum field theory3.2 Equivalence of field systems4 A Brief History of the Equivalence Thesis4.1 The Green decomposition4.2 Klein transformations4.3 The argument of Drühl, Haag, and Roberts4.4 The Doplicher–Roberts reconstruction theorem5 Sharpening the Thesis6 Discussion6.1 Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics6.2 Structuralism and haecceities6.3 Paraquark theories. (shrink)

"Legend is overdue for replacement, and an adequate replacement must attend to the process of science as carefully as Hull has done. I share his vision of a serious account of the social and intellectual dynamics of science that will avoid both the rosy blur of Legend and the facile charms of relativism.... Because of [Hull's] deep concern with the ways in which research is actually done, Science as a Process begins an important project in the study of science. It (...) is one of a distinguished series of books, which Hull himself edits."—Philip Kitcher, Nature "In Science as a Process, [David Hull] argues that the tension between cooperation and competition is exactly what makes science so successful.... Hull takes an unusual approach to his subject. He applies the rules of evolution in nature to the evolution of science, arguing that the same kinds of forces responsible for shaping the rise and demise of species also act on the development of scientific ideas."—Natalie Angier, New York Times Book Review "By far the most professional and thorough case in favour of an evolutionary philosophy of science ever to have been made. It contains excellent short histories of evolutionary biology and of systematics (the science of classifying living things); an important and original account of modern systematic controversy; a counter-attack against the philosophical critics of evolutionary philosophy; social-psychological evidence, collected by Hull himself, to show that science does have the character demanded by his philosophy; and a philosophical analysis of evolution which is general enough to apply to both biological and historical change."—Mark Ridley, Times Literary Supplement "Hull is primarily interested in how social interactions within the scientific community can help or hinder the process by which new theories and techniques get accepted.... The claim that science is a process for selecting out the best new ideas is not a new one, but Hull tells us exactly how scientists go about it, and he is prepared to accept that at least to some extent, the social activities of the scientists promoting a new idea can affect its chances of being accepted."—Peter J. Bowler, Archives of Natural History "I have been doing philosophy of science now for twenty-five years, and whilst I would never have claimed that I knew everything, I felt that I had a really good handle on the nature of science, Again and again, Hull was able to show me just how incomplete my understanding was.... Moreover, [Science as a Process] is one of the most compulsively readable books that I have ever encountered."—Michael Ruse, Biology and Philosophy. (shrink)

The decision-theoretic account of probability in the Everett or many-worlds interpretation, advanced by David Deutsch and David Wallace, is shown to be circular. Talk of probability in Everett presumes the existence of a preferred basis to identify measurement outcomes for the probabilities to range over. But the existence of a preferred basis can only be established by the process of decoherence, which is itself probabilistic.

A new argument is given for the thesis that only symmetry-invariant physical quantities are real. Non-invariant quantities are dynamically epiphenomenal in that they have no effect on the evolution of invariant quantities, and it is a significant theoretical vice to posit epiphenomenal quantities.

The decision-theoretic account of probability in the Everett or many-worlds interpretation, advanced by David Deutsch and David Wallace, is shown to be circular. Talk of probability in Everett presumes the existence of a preferred basis to identify measurement outcomes for the probabilities to range over. But the existence of a preferred basis can only be established by the process of decoherence, which is itself probabilistic.

Eleanor Knox has argued that our concept of spacetime applies to whichever structure plays a certain functional role in the laws. I raise two objections to this inertial functionalism. First, it depends on a prior assumption about which coordinate systems defined in a theory are reference frames, and hence on assumptions about which geometric structures are spatiotemporal. This makes Knox’s account circular. Second, her account is vulnerable to several counterexamples, giving the wrong result when applied to topological quantum field theories (...) and parity- and time-asymmetric theories. I advance an alternative account on which our spacetime concept is a cluster concept. On this view, the notion of metaphysical fundamentality may feature in the cluster, in which case spacetime functionalism may be uninformative in the absence of answers to fundamental metaphysical questions like the substantivalist/relationist debate. (shrink)

The phenomenon of broken spacetime symmetry in the quantum theory of infinite systems forces us to adopt an unorthodox ontology. We must abandon the standard conception of the physical meaning of these symmetries, or else deny the attractive “liberal” notion of which physical quantities are significant. A third option, more attractive but less well understood, is to abandon the existing (Halvorson-Clifton) notion of intertranslatability for quantum theories.

Comparativism--the view that comparative relations like mass ratios are fundamental and intrinsic values of quantities are not--faces a challenge from physics. In its standard form, comparativism predicts indeterminism in physical theories that are ordinarily understood as deterministic. I explore an option for saving comparativism from this objection: the introduction of "mixed" relations that compare values of unlike quantities. Although tenable, this revised version of comparativism lacks some of the theoretical virtues of the standard version.

Compares classic and contemporary theories of genetics and evolution and explores the role of teleological thought in biology.

If we divide our physical theories into theories of matter and theories of spacetime, quantum field theory is our most fundamental empirically successful theory of matter. As such, it has attracted increasing attention from philosophers over the past two decades, beginning to eclipse its predecessor theory of quantum mechanics in the philosophical literature. Here I survey some central philosophical puzzles about the theory's foundations.

Biological species have been treated traditionally as spatiotemporally unrestricted classes. If they are to perform the function which they do in the evolutionary process, they must be spatiotemporally localized individuals, historical entities. Reinterpreting biological species as historical entities solves several important anomalies in biology, in philosophy of biology, and within philosophy itself. It also has important implications for any attempt to present an "evolutionary" analysis of science and for sciences such as anthropology which are devoted to the study of single (...) species. (shrink)

We agree with Shors & Matzel's general hypothesis that the proposed link between NMDA-dependent LTP and memory is weak. They suggest that NMDA-dependent LTP is important to arousal or attentional processes which influence learning in an anterograde manner. However, current evidence is also consistent with the view that NMDA receptors modulate memory consolidation retroactively, as occurs in several other receptor classes.

Comments and replies from the 2021 Eastern APA book symposium on Jill North's Physics, Structure, and Reality.

We pose and resolve a puzzle about spontaneous symmetry breaking in the quantum theory of infinite systems. For a symmetry to be spontaneously broken, it must not be implementable by a unitary operator in a ground state's GNS representation. But Wigner's theorem guarantees that any symmetry's action on states is given by a unitary operator. How can this unitary operator fail to implement the symmetry in the GNS representation? We show how it is possible for a unitary operator of this (...) sort to connect the folia of unitarily inequivalent representations. This result undermines interpretations of quantum theory that hold unitary equivalence to be necessary for physical equivalence. (shrink)

I offer a novel argument for spacetime substantivalism: We should take the spacetime of general relativity to be a substance because of its active role in gravitational causation. As a clear example of this causal behavior I offer the cosmological constant, a term in the most general form of the Einstein field equations which causes free floating objects to accelerate apart. This acceleration cannot, I claim, be causally explained except by reference to spacetime itself.

Examines the issues of self (including gender), truth, and transcendence in classical Chinese and Western philosophy.

Cognitive neuroscientists are turning to an increasingly rich array of neurodynamical systems to explain mental phenomena. In these explanations, cognitive capacities are decomposed into a set of functions, each of which is described mathematically, and then these descriptions are mapped on to corresponding mathematical descriptions of the dynamics of neural systems. In this paper, I outline a novel explanatory schema based on these explanations. I then argue that these explanations present a novel type of dynamicism for the philosophy of mind (...) and neuroscience, componential dynamicism, that focuses on the parts of cognitive systems that fill certain functional roles in producing cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

Response to wrongdoing is modeled as a decision process in an organizational context. The model is grounded in theory of risk, ambiguity, and informational influences on decision making. Time pressure, inadequate information and coworker influences are addressed. Along the way, a handful of propositions are provided which emphasize influences on the actual choice between response options.