We argue that a conceptual tension exists between “diversity” and “heterogeneity” and that glossing over their differences has practical, moral, and epistemic costs. We examine how these terms are used in ecology and the social sciences; articulate a deeper linguistic intuition; and test it with the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The results reveal that ‘diversity’ and ‘heterogeneity’ have conflicting rather than interchangeable meanings: heterogeneity implies a collective entity that interactively integrates different entities, whereas diversity implies divergence, not integration. Consequently, (...) striving for diversity alone may increase social injustice and reduce epistemic outcomes of academic institutions and governance structures. (shrink)

Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health were developed using in-depth qualitative interviews with editorial staff from nineteen genetics journals, focusing on the methodological and conceptual mechanisms required to make race/ethnicity a genetic variable. As such, these analyses explore how and why race/ethnicity comes to be used in the context of genetic research, set against the background of continuing critiques from anthropology and related human sciences that focus on the social construction, structural (...) correlates and limited genetic validity of racial/ethnic categories. The analyses demonstrate how these critiques have failed to engage geneticists, and how geneticists use a range of essentially cultural devices to protect and separate their use of race/ethnicity as a genetic construct from its use as a societal and social science resource. Given its multidisciplinary, biosocial nature and the cultural gaze of its ethnographic methodologies, anthropology is well placed to explore the cultural separation of science and society, and of natural and social science disciplines. Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore disparities in health suggest that moving beyond genetic explanations of innate difference might benefit from a more even-handed critique of how both the natural and social sciences tend to essentialize selective elements of race/ethnicity. Drawing on the example of HIV/AIDS, this paper demonstrates how public health has been undermined by the use of race/ethnicity as an analytical variable, both as a cipher for innate genetic differences in susceptibility and response to treatment, and in its use to identify at greater risk of becoming infected and infecting others. Clearly, a tendency for biological reductionism can place many biomedical issues beyond the scope of public health interventions, while socio-cultural essentialization has tended to stigmatize and the communities where these are more prevalent. (shrink)

The concept of difference has a long and important research tradition. We identify and explicate a heretofore overlooked distinction in the meaning and measurement of two different meanings of 'difference': 'diversity' and 'heterogeneity'. We argue that ‘diversity’ can describe a population well enough but does not describe a collective well. In contrast, ‘heterogeneity’ describes a collective better than a population and therefore ought to describe a collective. We argue that ignoring these distinctions can lead to a surprising and disturbing conflict (...) between diversity and heterogeneity. In particular, focusing on the 'diversity' of human communities can be self-defeating for those who truly care about the importance of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. (shrink)

Explores the theories of democratic individualism articulated in the works of the American transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey, and African-American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison.

In Computer Science stepwise refinement of algebraic specifications is a well-known formal methodology for rigorous program development. This paper illustrates how techniques from Algebraic Logic, in particular that of interpretation, understood as a multifunction that preserves and reflects logical consequence, capture a number of relevant transformations in the context of software design, reuse, and adaptation, difficult to deal with in classical approaches. Examples include data encapsulation and the decomposition of operations into atomic transactions. But if interpretations open such a new (...) research avenue in program refinement, (conceptual) tools are needed to reason about them. In this line, the paper’s main contribution is a study of the correspondence between logical interpretations and morphisms of a particular kind of coalgebras. This opens way to the use of coalgebraic constructions, such as simulation and bisimulation, in the study of interpretations between (abstract) logics. (shrink)

The study aimed at measuring the dominant pattern of leadership and its relation to the performance of the administrative staff in the Palestinian universities. The study community consists of all the administrative staff from Al-Azhar University and the Islamic University, and through the census of the study society it was found to consist of (655) administrative staff. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, the researchers used the method of random sample in the study, and the study was (...) conducted on a sample of (221) administrative staff of the surveyed universities and the response rate was (82.35%). The study found that there is a high degree of satisfaction with the Dominant Pattern of Leadership in the Palestinian universities in Gaza Strip from the point of view of the administrative staff, which reached (71.67%). There is a high level of performance from the point of view of administrative staff, with a percentage of (82.53%). There is a direct correlation between the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff, the absence of differences between the sample according to the gender variable in their perception of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff, the absence of differences in the perception of employees of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff depending on the age variable. There are differences of statistical significance according to the variable of scientific qualification in the Dominant Pattern of Leadership, while there were no differences in performance, the differences in the dominant pattern of leadership according to the scientific qualification were in favor of those who obtained the diploma degree compared to other practical qualifications, the absence of differences in the perception of employees of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff depending on the variable years of service, the absence of differences in the perception of employees of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff depending on the variable level of career (Director, Head of Department, and Administrative Officer). There were differences in the perception of workers to the dominant pattern of leadership depending on the variable of the workplace, where there were differences in favor of workers in deanships and colleges compared with the workers in the technical departments. While there were no differences in job performance according to the workplace variable, the existence of differences in the perception of workers to the dominant pattern of leadership depending on the university in which they work in favor of the Islamic University and the absence of differences in performance between the Islamic University and Al-Azhar University. The study reached a number of recommendations, the most important of which is that the interest of the managements of the Palestinian universities in improving the dominant pattern of leadership, to give universities the opportunity to participate in decision-making, the continued administration of universities interest and continuous improvement of the performance of its employees, enhance the periodic evaluation of job performance and to inform employees and express their opinion, solving workers' problems and giving them the opportunity to contribute to solving their own problems, the use of the staff rotation method periodically and strengthening the democratic the dominant pattern of leadership and empowering university staff. -/- . (shrink)

Lily Furedi’s Subway (1934) is full of individuals. It is a painting of a subway car filled with people on their way home from work. At first, these individuals appear rather isolated, just doing their own thing. But upon closer examination, a viewer notices something rather peculiar, namely that these individuals are surreptitiously, unconsciously, uncontrollably interested in each other. A couple quietly leans in for a kiss; a man watches furtively as a woman applies her make-up; a woman reads over (...) the shoulder of a fellow passenger; and the viewer’s eyes fix on a sleeping man holding a violin case. Furedi places her viewer on this subway and in so doing allows her to catch sight of individualism in its private.. (shrink)

In this paper, I plan to show that the use of a specific population concept—Millstein’s Causal Interactionist Population Concept (CIPC)—has interesting and counter-intuitive ramifications for discussions of the reality of biological race in human beings. These peculiar ramifications apply to human beings writ large and to individuals. While this in and of itself may not be problematic, I plan to show that the ramifications that follow from applying Millstein’s CIPC to human beings complicates specific biological racial realist accounts—naïve or otherwise. (...) I conclude with the notion that even if biological races do exist—by fulfilling all of the criteria needed for Millstein’s population concept (which, given particular worries raised by Gannett (Synthese 177:363–385, 2010), and Winther and Kaplan (Theoria 60:54–80, 2013) may not)—the lower-bound limit for the scope of biological racial realism is at the level of populations, and as such they cannot say anything about whether or not individual organisms themselves have races. (shrink)

Pragmatism seeks to reconstruct the individual's understanding of herself so that she is better equipped to grow and seek integration in her community. Given radical changes through the modern age and into our contemporary time, the idea of individualism that informs modern philosophy is radically out of step with reality. Pragmatism holds that individuality develops in interaction with an environment and, therefore, there is no originary individual such as moderns like Locke posit that exists antecedent to social life. However, the (...) rejection of modern philosophy's Promethean individual is not a rejection of individuality. Wholesale rejection makes the mistake of reinforcing the individual-society dualism by .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Sexual Ethics: A Theological Introduction by Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler, and: Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times by Marvin M. EllisonDarryl W. StephensReview of Sexual Ethics: A Theological Introduction TODD A. SALZMAN and MICHAEL G. LAWLER Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012. 280 pp. $26.95Review of Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times MARVIN M. ELLISON Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012. 176 (...) pp. $18.00Intended for “the general educated Catholic population” (xiii), Sexual Ethics: A Theological Introduction (SE) is a masterfully abridged version of the authors’ award-winning 2008 book, The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology (TSP). Nearly all of the text of Sexual Ethics is common to both volumes, much of it edited for a broader audience. Omitted in Sexual Ethics are about seventy pages presenting contemporary debates between the methods and anthropologies of traditionalists and revisionists (most of TSP chapters 2 and 3). New in Sexual Ethics are “Questions for Reflection” at the end of each chapter and a brief discussion of “conscience” (xxv–xxvi).In both books, the authors offer a “historically conscious and revisionist approach” to Catholic sexual morality (SE, 221). Beginning with “two magisterial principles” in “Catholic moral, sexual tradition”—procreation and the confines of marriage—the authors note different theological bases for these principles—nature and reason, respectively (xiii–xiv)—and propose a significant shift in focus from the “‘nature’ of the act” to “the meaning of the act for the human person” (xvii). Chapter 1, which could stand on its own, provides a helpful, “brief history” of “sexual morality in the Catholic tradition,” undergirding the authors’ historical (in contrast with a classicist) approach. In chapter 2, the theological crux of the argument, Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler proceed to explore methodological developments and tensions in magisterial teaching, choosing “the principle of the human person adequately considered,” theologically articulated in Gaudium et spes, as the basis for their proposal of a “unitive sexual anthropology” (47). This holistic anthropological approach to the sexual person attempts to shift the magisterium’s “focus on acts and absolute norms” in sexual ethics to a method more akin to its social ethics, focusing on general principles, interrelationships, and the common good (59). Central to their [End Page 226] argument is a reworking of the concept of complementarity purged “of every suggestion of either gender or sexual inequality” (63). The remainder of the book illustrates “how these principles apply in real, concrete, particular human relationships” (87).To critique the argument of Sexual Ethics necessarily implicates The Sexual Person, which is beyond the scope of this review. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to ask whether the same argument presented as a “renewed Catholic anthropology” (in TSP) for professional theologians functions equally well as a “theological introduction” to sexual ethics (in SE) for a lay (nonscholarly) audience. Chapter 6, “Artificial Reproductive Technologies,” is the most successful in this regard, exploring a range of ethical concerns (e.g., means versus ends, burden of proof, presumptions against, appropriate cautions, and consideration of the common good) to arrive at a qualified expansion of magisterial teaching, which becomes a guide to personal discernment. Other topics in Sexual Ethics include marriage and contraception (chapter 3), cohabitation and premarital sexuality (chapter 4), and homosexuality (chapter 5).Overall, Sexual Ethics functions better as an introduction to Catholic sexual teaching and moral anthropology than as an introduction to sexual ethics. For example, reworking the concept of “complementarity”—despite the authors’ inclination “to abandon both the word and the idea” (63)—may be necessary for reconstructing Catholic tradition, but is not necessarily the most helpful starting point for sexual ethics. Sexual Ethics will be challenging for readers lacking theological training and will be of most interest to those already committed to and invested in magisterial teaching. My recommendation would be to use The Sexual Person as a teacher’s guide when assigning Sexual Ethics. By any measure, these books present a brilliant, careful, and sophisticated scholarly argument that revises Catholic sexual teaching in important and faithful ways.In Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times (MLJ), Marvin Ellison provides an accessible, engaging introduction to sexual ethics for... (shrink)

Deception is part of the natural repertoire of adaptive behaviours in many organisms. In humans we see it in all domains of human activity including health care. Within health care, deception can be a matter of concern, but it is also used to protect patients, for instance against overwhelming and negative diagnostics. This paper demonstrates that deception and self‐deception are closely interlinked and that self‐deception facilitates deception. Furthermore, self‐deception tends to be used to reduce the discomfort we feel when we (...) are dishonest (cognitive dissonance). The paper includes references to core psychological mechanisms and ethical aspects. (shrink)

This chapter aims to bring to the fore some of the ontological presuppositions that undergird the concepts of race and racism as they are used in public health. Included are discussions of differing accounts for race in public health, the ways in which racism is understood to be a public health issue, and where future research in public health, as it relates to the concepts of race and racism, is headed.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A new characterization of tabularity in tense logic is established, namely, a tense logic L is tabular if and only if $\mathsf {tab}_n^T\in L$ for some $n\geq 1$. Two characterization theorems for the Post-completeness in tabular tense logics are given. Furthermore, a characterization of the Post-completeness in the lattice of all tense logics is established. Post numbers of some tense logics are shown.

The vast majority of contributions to the literature on spirituality in nursing make extravagant claims about transcendence, eternity, the numinous, higher powers, higher levels of existence, invisible forces, cosmic unity, the essence of humanity, or other supernatural concepts. Typically, these assertions are made without the support of argument or evidence; and, as a consequence, alternative ways of theorizing ‘spirituality’ have been closed off, while the lack of consistent scholarship has turned the topic into a metaphysical backwater. In this paper, I (...) adopt a different premise, rejecting unsupported claims, and surveying the ‘spirituality’ terrain from a naturalistic and reductionist perspective. I argue that, if we rid ourselves of non‐naturalistic assumptions, we will discover theoretical and clinical resources in health psychology, social psychology, neuropsychology, and pharmacopsychology – resources which confirm that it is possible to conceptualize the study of existential concerns, and how health professionals might respond to them, in a properly scientific manner. In order to illustrate the potential usefulness of these resources, I will take palliative care as an example. (shrink)

When people engage in conversation, they tailor their utterances to their conversational partners, whether these partners are other humans or computational systems. This tailoring, or adaptation to the partner takes place in all facets of human language use, and is based on a mental model or a user model of the conversational partner. Such adaptation has been shown to improve listeners' comprehension, their satisfaction with an interactive system, the efficiency with which they execute conversational tasks, and the likelihood of achieving (...) higher level goals such as changing the listener's beliefs and attitudes. We focus on one aspect of adaptation, namely the tailoring of the content of dialogue system utterances for the higher level processes of persuasion, argumentation and advice-giving. Our hypothesis is that algorithms that adapt content for these processes, according to a user model, will improve the usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of dialogue systems. We describe a multimodal dialogue system and algorithms for adaptive content selection based on multi-attribute decision theory. We demonstrate experimentally the improved efficacy of system responses through the use of user models to both tailor the content of system utterances and to manipulate their conciseness. (shrink)

Positive changes or transformations have been the subject of study within spiritual traditions as well as humanistic and transpersonal psychology. The aim of the current study is to understand the process of transformation among Moslems in Indonesia, who follow spiritual practices, to achieve the nafs al-muṭma ínnah [tranquil self]. Ten participants in Yogyakarta province were involved in this study. They were recruited using nafs al-muṭmaʾinnah scale developed by the authors. In-depth interviews of both the participants and their significant others were (...) conducted. To analyse the data, an interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed. Five themes emerged from the data, including deviation from the basis of religious environment, spiritual discipline, transformative experiences, new characters and a continuous process. We conclude that participants experience spiritual-religious transformation and achieve the state of nafs al-muṭma ínnah [tranquil self]. The process of transformation occurs gradually after a sudden experience, and it continuously happens throughout the course of life. Three factors contribute to the transformation, including the role of predisposition, the role of a spiritual guide and the role of spiritual experiences.Contribution: As the study of spiritual-religious transformation is mainly conducted within a Judea-Christian tradition, this study significantly contributes to the literature by providing spiritual-religious transformation from an Islamic-Sufi perspective. (shrink)

This text explores how human beings construe experience: experience as a resource, as a potential for understanding, representing and acting on reality.

Psychological research has shown that cognitive illusions, of which visual illusions are just a special case, are systematic and pervasive, raising epistemological questions about how error in all forms of research can be identified and eliminated. The quantitative sciences make use of statistical techniques for this purpose, but it is not clear what the qualitative equivalent is, particularly in view of widespread scepticism about validity and objectivity. I argue that, in the light of cognitive psychology, the ‘error question’ cannot be (...) dismissed as a positivist obsession, and that the concepts of truth and objectivity are unavoidable. However, they constitute only a ‘minimal realism’, which does not necessarily bring a commitment to ‘absolute’ truth, certainty, correspondence, causation, reductionism, or universal laws in its wake. The assumption that it does reflects a misreading of positivism and, ironically, precipitates a ‘crisis of legitimation and representation’, as described by constructivist authors. (shrink)

Many contemporary logicians acknowledge a plurality of logical theories and accept that theory choice is in part motivated by logical evidence. However, just as there is no agreement on logical theories, there is also no consensus on what constitutes logical evidence. In this paper, I outline Jean Piaget’s psychological theory of reasoning and show how he used it to diagnose and solve one of the paradoxes of material implication. I assess Piaget’s use of psychology as a source of evidence for (...) logical theory in light of reservations raised by psychologism, and I highlight some ramifications for exceptionalism and anti-exceptionalism about logic by considering his use of psychology as logical evidence in the framework of genetic epistemology, Piaget’s research programme. I conclude that Piaget’s psychological theory of reasoning not only plausibly serves as a source of evidence for logical theory but also makes a strong case for anti-exceptionalism about logic. (shrink)