In this article, the author argues that we need to conceptualize gender as a social structure, and by doing so, we can better analyze the ways in which gender is embedded in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of our society. To conceptualize gender as a structure situates gender at the same level of general social significance as the economy and the polity. The author also argues that while concern with intersectionality must continue to be paramount, different structures of inequality (...) have different constructions and perhaps different influential causal mechanisms at any given historical moment. We need to follow a both/and strategy to understand gender structure, race structure, and other structures of inequality as they currently operate while also systematically paying attention to how these axes of domination intersect. Finally, the author suggests we pay more attention to doing research and writing theory with explicit attention to how our work can indeed help transform as well as inform society. (shrink)

One often hears it said that our visual-perceptual contact with the world is “perspectival.” But this can mean quite different things. Three different senses in which our visual contact with the world is “perspectival” are distinguished. The first involves the detection or representation of behaviorally important relations, holding between a perceiving subject and the world. These include time to contact, body-scaled size, egocentric position, and direction of heading. The second perspective becomes at least explicitly manifest in taking up the “proximal (...) mode” and involves the representation of relational “appearance properties,” such as, perhaps , angular size and angular/projective shape at or from a viewpoint. The third perspective is associated with the pencil of rays structured by the position and geometry of the eyes. The relationships between these three perspectives are charted, and their connection with conscious experiential awareness discussed. So, e.g., there is no simple or direct route from the detection of the relations constitutive of perspective2 to detection of the relations constitutive of perspective1. The relations definitive of perspective3 are probably not themselves detected or represented by the visual system, but define the informational arena within which detection of the relations definitive of perspective1 and perspective2 takes place. (shrink)

The particular design of any technology may have profound social implications. Computing technologies are deeply intermeshed with the activities of daily life, playing an ever more central role in how we work, learn, communicate, socialize, and participate in government. Despite the many ways they have improved life, they cannot be regarded as unambiguously beneficial or even value-neutral. Recent experience shows they can lead to unintended but harmful consequences. Some technologies are thought to threaten democracy through the spread of propaganda on (...) online social networks, or to threaten privacy through the aggregation of datasets that include increasingly personal information, or to threaten justice when machine learning is used in such high-stakes, decision-making contexts as loan application reviews, employment procedures, or parole hearings. It is insufficient to ethically assess technology after it has produced negative social impacts, as has happened, for example, with facial recognition software that discriminates against people of color and with self-driving cars that are unable to cope with pedestrians who jay-walk. Developers of new technologies should aim to identify potential harmful consequences early in the design process and take steps to eliminate or mitigate them. This task is not easy. Designers will often have to negotiate among competing values—for instance, between efficiency and accessibility for a diverse user population, or between maximizing benefits and avoiding harm. There is no simple recipe for identifying and solving ethical problems. -/- Computer science education can help meet these challenges by making ethical reasoning about computing technologies a central element in the curriculum. Students can learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also whether they should create that technology. Learning to reason this way requires courses unlike those currently standard in computer science curricula. A range of university courses on topics in areas of computing, ethics, society and public policy are emerging to meet this need. Some cover computer science broadly, while others focus on specific problems like privacy and security; typically, these classes exist as stand-alone courses in the computer science curriculum. Others have integrated ethics into the teaching of introductory courses on programming, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. (shrink)

This article argues that individuals paradigms have predominated social scientific explanations for gendered behavior in intimate relationships but that a microstructural paradigm adds necessary additional information. The results of a study designed to test the relative strengths of individualist and microstructural explanations for “mothering behavior” are presented. The microstructural hypothesis is that single fathers will adopt parental behavior that more closely resembles that of women who mother than that of married fathers. Parenting behaviors of single fathers, single mothers, married parents (...) with mothers at home, and married two-paycheck couples are compared. Overall, the hypothesis is supported. The article ends with a discussion of the implications of the microstructural perspective for social change in a feminist direction. (shrink)

For a biological anthropologist interested in the prehistory of religion, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen's book is welcome and resonant. Van Huyssteen's central thesis is that humans' capacity for spirituality emerges from a transformation of cognition and emotions that takes place in the symbolic realm, within Homo sapiens and apart from biology. To his thesis I bring to bear three areas of response: the abundant cognitive and emotional capacities of living apes and extinct hominids; the role of symbolic ritual in the (...) evolutionary history of Homo sapiens; and the closely intertwined nature of biology and culture in the workings of evolutionary change. (shrink)

Delivering high quality genomics-informed care to patients requires accurate test results whose clinical implications are understood. While other actors, including state agencies, professional organizations, and clinicians, are involved, this article focuses on the extent to which the federal agencies that play the most prominent roles — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services enforcing CLIA and the FDA — effectively ensure that these elements are met and concludes by suggesting possible ways to improve their oversight of genomic testing.

Barbara J. Blodgett proposes a practical sexual ethic for adolescent girls based on a discourse of vulnerability and trust rather than one of erotic liberation. Her work directly challenges feminist theologies of the erotic, which seek to establish the erotic as unquestionably freeing and empowering.Blodgett declares that inconsistent worlds of meaning surround girls' moral deliberation about sexual activity despite their sincere yearning for guidance.This ground-breaking book: -- Critiques feminist theologies of the erotic-- Draws upon actual narratives of adolescent girls (...) about sexuality and romance-- Uses a psychoanalytic theory for Christian ethics-- Points the way to an alternative model of sexual ethics in theological ethics, while factoring in the stark realities of gender, power, and cultureBlodgett suggests relationships are either stabilized by the exercise of trust or friendly distrust. (shrink)

The individual right of access to one’s own data is a crucial privacy protection long recognized in U.S. federal privacy laws. Mobile health devices and research software used in citizen science often fall outside the HIPAA Privacy Rule, leaving participants without HIPAA’s right of access to one’s own data. Absent state laws requiring access, the law of contract, as reflected in end-user agreements and terms of service, governs individuals’ ability to find out how much data is being stored and how (...) it might be shared with third parties. Efforts to address this problem by establishing norms of individual access to data from mobile health research unfortunately can run afoul of the FDA’s investigational device exemption requirements. (shrink)

Regulatory policy for genomic testing may be subject to biases that favor reliance on existing regulatory frameworks even when those frameworks carry unintended legal consequences or may be poorly tailored to the challenges genomic testing presents. This article explores three examples drawn from genetic privacy regulation, oversight of clinical uses of genomic information, and regulation of genomic software. Overreliance on expedient regulatory approaches has a potential to undercut complete and durable solutions.

A coin rotating back in depth in some sense presents a changing, elliptical shape. How are we to understand such (in this case) ‘appearances of ellipticality’? How is the experiential sense of such shifting shape appearances related to the experiential sense of enduring shape definitive of perceived shape constancy? Is the experiential recovery of surface shape based on the prior (perhaps more fundamental) recovery of point or element 3D spatial locations?—or is the perception of shape a largely independent perceptual achievement? (...) Do we gain access to enduring shape properties by first detecting and working from ‘shape appearances’? These are some of the topics taken up in this paper. (shrink)

This essay argues that techniques for assessing testimonial credibility were well established in English legal contexts before they appeared in English natural philosophy. ‘Matters of fact’ supported by testimony referred to human actions and events before the concept was applied to natural phenomena. The article surveys English legal views about testimony and argues that the criteria for credible testimony in both legal and scientific venues were not limited to those of gentle status. Natural philosophers became concerned with testimony when they (...) shifted their attention from universal statements about nature to particular natural and experimental events. Testimony thus became important in the construction of natural and experimental histories constructed by English naturalists. The shift to a more Baconian approach to natural investigation, itself shaped in part by legal concepts and practice, made it possible for members of the Royal Society to adopt an already familiar and societally approved approach to testimony. However, the essay also suggests how the use of scientific instruments and the desire to avoid the adversarial processes of the law modified legal conditions for fact determination, and made it possible for later generations to associate the concept of fact, supported by credible testimony, with the natural rather than the human sciences.Author Keywords: Natural history; Natural philosophy; Testimony; Credibility; Science and law. (shrink)

Laland et al.'s bidirectional model is a welcome starting point that can be enhanced by a full incorporation of systems thinking into its framework. Systems thinkers note that culture is not transmitted linearly in chunks but is co-constructed within subgroups. Niche construction, particularly among primates, should be studied primarily through the effects that social relationships have on selection pressures.

Ontogeny, specifically the role of language in the human family now and in prehistory, is central to Locke & Bogin's (L&B's) thesis in a compelling way. The unique life-history stages of childhood and adolescence, however, must be interpreted not only against an exceptionally “high quality” human infancy but also in light of the evolution of co-constructed, emotionally based communication in ape, hominid, and human infancy.

Our starting point for the origins of language goes beyond prosody or infant-directed speech to highlight the affective, multimodal, and co-constructed nature of meaning-making that was likely present before the split between African great apes and hominins. Analysis of vocal and gestural caregiving practices in hominins, and of meaning-making via gestural interaction in African great apes, supports our thesis.

Aggleton & Brown predict that recognition and episodic recall depend on different brain systems and can thus be dissociated from one another. However, intact recall with impaired recognition has not yet been demonstrated if the same type of information is used in both tests. Current evidence suggests that processes underlying familiarity-based recognition are redundant with processes underlying episodic memory.

Studies of neuropsychological patients are relevant to models of how long-term memories are stored. If amnesia is considered a binding deficit and not a difficulty in transferring information from short-term to long-term memory, it is unclear why context-free semantic learning is impaired. Also the model should account for the reverse temporal gradient seen in patients with semantic dementia.

Andrea Wiggins and John Wilbanks offer a rich and nuanced description of citizen science, which they define as “a range of participatory models for involving non-professionals as collaborators in s...

Philosophers and cognitive scientists address the relationships among the senses and the connections between conscious experiences that form unified wholes. In this volume, cognitive scientists and philosophers examine two closely related aspects of mind and mental functioning: the relationships among the various senses and the links that connect different conscious experiences to form unified wholes. The contributors address a range of questions concerning how information from one sense influences the processing of information from the other senses and how unified states (...) of consciousness emerge from the bonds that tie conscious experiences together. Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness is the first book to address both of these topics, integrating scientific and philosophical concerns. A flood of recent work in both philosophy and perception science has challenged traditional conceptions of the sensory systems as operating in isolation. Contributors to the volume consider the ways in which perceptual contact with the world is or may be “multisensory,” discussing such subjects as the modeling of multisensory integration and philosophical aspects of sensory modalities. Recent years have seen a similar surge of interest in unity of consciousness. Contributors explore a range of questions on this topic, including the nature of that unity, the degree to which conscious experiences are unified, and the relationship between unified consciousness and the self. Contributors Tim Bayne, David J. Bennett, Berit Brogaard, Barry Dainton, Ophelia Deroy, Frederique de Vignemont, Marc Ernst, Richard Held, Christopher S. Hill, Geoffrey Lee, Kristan Marlow, Farid Masrour, Jennifer Matey, Casey O'Callaghan, Cesare V. Parise, Kevin Rice, Elizabeth Schechter, Pawan Sinha, Julia Trommershaeuser, Loes C. J. van Dam, Jonathan Vogel, James Van Cleve, Robert Van Gulick, Jonas Wulff. (shrink)