Background. Positive schizophrenic symptoms, especially passivity phenomena, including auditory hallucinations, may be caused by an abnormal sense of agency, which people with schizotypal personality traits also tend to exhibit. A sense of agency asserts that it is oneself who is causing or generating an action. It is possible that this abnormal sense of self-agency is attributable to the abnormal prediction of one’s own movements in motor control. Method. We conducted an experiment using the “disappeared cursor” paradigm in which non-clinical, healthy (...) participants were required to click on a target using an invisible mouse cursor. Prediction error was defined as the distance between the target and the click point. Results. The results showed that schizotypal personality traits, but not depressive or anxious traits, were correlated with deficits in predicting movements of the subjects’ left hand. In particular, auditory hallucination proneness had the strongest relationship with movement prediction error. In this report, we also discuss the error tendency. Conclusions. This finding is in accordance with the idea that passivity phenomena or proneness may be caused by the abnormal prediction of one’s own actions or movements. (shrink)

Previous studies have suggested that auditory hallucination is closely related to thought insertion. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the external misattribution of thought and auditory hallucination-like experiences. We used the AHES-17, which measures auditory hallucination-like experiences in normal, healthy people, and the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm, in which false alarms of critical lure are regarded as spontaneous external misattribution of thought. We found that critical lures elicited increased the number of false alarms as AHES-17 scores increased and that scores (...) of AHES-17 predicted the rate of false memory of critical lures. Furthermore, we revealed that the relationship between AHES-17 scores and the rates of false alarms to critical lures was strictly linear. Therefore, it might be said that individual differences in auditory hallucination-like experiences are highly related to the external misattribution of thought. We discussed these results from the perspective of the sense of agency over thought. (shrink)

We investigated output-monitoring errors over speech based on findings in the research on the sense of agency. Several words were presented one-by-one, and we asked participants to say the word aloud, mouth the word, or imagine saying the word aloud. Later, participants were asked whether each word was said aloud. We found that the “said aloud” response was higher for generated words than that for observed words; it was decreased when the pitch of the feedback was lowered but still higher (...) than when no feedback was received, and it was the same when no feedback was received and when feedback was replaced by another’s voice. Furthermore, we found that the “said aloud” response did not decrease even when the altered feedback was received with a short delay. These results were discussed according to the sense of agency and agency memory. (shrink)

The present study used the experience sampling method to detect fluctuations in thinking, such as self-focus or concreteness in daily life, and to examine their relationship with depressive symptoms and concurrent negative affect. Thirty-one undergraduates recorded their negative affect, ruminative self-focus, and concreteness of thinking eight times a day for 1 week. Multilevel modeling showed that individuals with increasing levels of depression showed lower levels of concreteness in their daily thinking. Further analysis revealed a significant positive association between momentary ruminative (...) self-focus and concurrent negative affect only with low concreteness of thinking. These results suggested that individuals with increasing levels of depression chronically process self-related information on an abstract level, which reflects a malfunction of their self-regulatory cycle and might serve to maintain or even exacerbate dysphoric moods. (shrink)

When participants observed a rubber hand being touched, their sense of touch was activated . While this illusion might be caused by multi-modal integration, it may also be related to empathic function, which enables us to simulate the observed information. We examined individual differences in the RHI, including empathic and schizotypal personality traits, as previous research had suggested that schizophrenic patients would be more subject to the RHI. The results indicated that people who experience a stronger RHI might have stronger (...) empathic and schizotypal personalites simultaneously. We discussed these relationships in terms of self-other representations. (shrink)

近代性批判から実践的人間論を構想。家族・性・教育・情報/生命・医療・死/ビジネス・貧困・環境などの日常的な等身大の諸問題を考察。.

This article presents a unified theory of irony which claims, with the help of Fauconnier’s (1985) mental space theory, that an ironical utterance refers to the mental space of a mutually manifest expectation. According to this view, what a typical ironical speaker does is to say without any distinct space builders that something is the case in the mental space of expectation in order to make it mutually manifest that it is not so in the initial reality space. This expectation (...) space theory of irony integrates the explanatory power of Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) echoic interpretation theory with the descriptive power of the view of irony as relevant inappropriateness. (shrink)

ヒトと自然の交流の産物として生まれた田舎の景色には、どこか安堵する懐かしさがある。しかし、このような田舎、里山は今どれだけ残っているだろうか?21世紀にむかって、ヒトと自然環境、その産物としての文化遺 産のあり方が地球規模で問われている。本書は、21世紀にむかって文化遺産のあり方を問う。.

生命が今こそ、語り直されなくてはならない!文明論、歴史、メタ科学、経済批判、生権力の視点から。.

なぜ脳死が人の死とされるのか、なぜ尊厳死が推進されるのか。「人間の尊厳」の系譜を、ギリシア哲学やキリスト教神学からたどり直し、生権力の淵源に迫る画期的な著作。.

人のいのちと向き合う医学は、冷徹な科学的思考と人間哲学の激突する現場である。哲学としての医学概論を創始した澤瀉久敬の思想を繙き、分子生物学や臨床疫学、フランクルの人間論、さらには近藤誠のがんもどき理論 やスピリチュアリティなど現代の諸問題をも論じつつ、科学と哲学の葛藤を調停し、医学のあるべき思想的立脚点を探る。.

In prior research, signal detection theory has been widely utilized to assess metacognitive ability. However, the SDT metacognitive model requires the use of a two-alternative forced-choice task, while confidence must also be measured discretely. In our model, participants’ cognitive ability and their confidence in the cognitive task were used to estimate their metacognitive abilities. Therefore, in this study, a metacognitive model that can be applied to various cognitive tasks was developed. This model implements the item response theory and Q-learning models (...) to estimate cognitive ability; participants’ metacognitive ability is defined as the discrepancy between their confidence in their cognitive ability and their actual cognitive ability. The entire procedure was divided into two experiments. In experiment 1, two different cognitive tasks were used to estimate metacognitive ability and to examine overall discriminative and convergent validity. Notably, the parameters representing metacognitive ability did not correlate with cognitive ability but were positively correlated between the two tasks. In experiment 2, we performed a similar analysis using a different task to test the replicability of experiment 1. The results for experiment 2 were replicated for discriminative and convergent validity, albeit with weak results. Our metacognitive model exhibited high interpretability and versatility. (shrink)

“Aleatory materialism” does not merely constitute that which, in an overly linear perspective, one would call the “fourth Althusser”. Even if, in the last decade of his life, Althusser did indeed attempt to construct a “new philosophy”, seen as an alternative to “dialectical materialism”, one should rather perceive, behind the past arguments, so assertive and sharp, advanced by the previous Althusser, something like a discreet practical layer, self-conscious or not, wherein such arguments would have found their true point of anchorage. (...) What is at stake in this philosophy “starting from nothing” is what has always been the most necessary and the most unthinkable question, that of political subjectivation. (shrink)

The ontology of Toni Negri, as political philosophy of the multitude, supposes a very speck relation between philosophy and politics, determined by the non-difference between the two of them, while refusing, at the same time, to make the one proceed from the other, or to médiatise them and to unite them by a third necessity. They unite there only by the univocity of freedom that registers the political-philosophical indeterminacy. Hence the difficulty of making them into a political programme, of «organizing» (...) the multitude as a political subject. But the notion of void, concomitant this univocity and defined as the very possibility of any qualitative change, establishes the philosophical-political particularity of the negrian ontology related to 1) the deconstructionist founding of the political and democracy and 2) Alain Badiou’s ontology. Far from being incapable of presenting a politics, Negri’s void designs a way to act « doing and saying at the same time » in politics. (shrink)

異文化コミュニケーションのスキル、仕事の現場、技術者倫理など、グローバルエンジニアを志す人に必要な情報をまとめた一冊。.

Currently in Japan, discontinuing an invasive mechanical ventilator (IMV) is illegal; therefore IMV-related decision making is a crucial issue. This study examined IMV decision-making factors and psychological conflict in 50 patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The Herth Hope Index was used for the assessment of pre- and post-IMV conflict. Interviews identified some decision-making factors: patient’s decision, patient’s and family’s mutual decision, family’s decision, and emergency-induced without patient’s or family’s consent. Participants who experienced no IMV-related regret received sufficient prior IMV education (...) from physicians and nurses, and time for reflection and family consultation. Their hope was similar to their pre-onset levels. Patients who received no prior IMV education accepted treatment as a natural progression. Their hope levels were lower than pre-onset. Those who received only a brief prior IMV explanation rejected the ventilator, experiencing regret if they were given an emergency IMV. Their hope levels were among the lowest. However, some of these patients managed to overcome their regret through being helped by nurses. Sufficient physician explanation and nursing advocacy for autonomous patient decision making are critical for improving hope in this patient group. (shrink)

In the epoch of Empire, the American economy is sustained by a global monetary circuit totally different front that of the imperialist period. Whilst the imperialist countries were constituted as « centres » of production, the contemporary US is no longer just a centre of absorption and evacuation of money which necessitates the existence of a financial pump to the outside. In becoming that pump, the Japanese economy became integral to the global market. The imperial monetary circuit also functions as (...) a mode of capture, particularly of value, that one can qualify as « financial » with regard to the classic « exploitation » of workers. This paper tries to demonstrate that ultimately the two modes of capture are nonetheless achieved by a single function of money. (shrink)

Not turned upside down, as Marx did to Hegel, but « inverted » by the mere contact with speaking beings, the Cartesian order of reasons becomes, according to Antonia Birnbaum, a device which generates both the subject and its environment, all at once, determining them as elements of the political - which has however already become « accidental » due to this invention, which exposes the speaking being to the world, and confronts it with the haecceity of the event. Cartesian (...) « politics » thus takes place in the forest, the privileged figure of the philosopher and the sign of the absence of any orientation, the truth of which Antonia Birnbaum tends to identify in and through Beckett s Molloy: far from being an possible community, it is full of « good things ». (shrink)

“Reversal”, in dialectics, takes place between two things located on the same level of substantiality, while “inversion” participates in a paradoxical ontology where the things to be inverted do not pre-exist the inversion itself. Such is the meaning of an ontological thesis largely shared by today’s Marxism : the primacy of class struggle over classes. While making a clear distinction between the two in The Capital, Jacques Rancière insistently asks whether these two operations can be separated without resorting to “kautskism”, (...) which introduces it within the struggle from the exterior of the struggle, thus denying the ontological primacy of struggle. The solution he provides is unheard of : on the one hand, he radicalises inversion as a politics of subjectivation within which there no longer is any “constituted” ; on the other hand, he reconfigures the reversal as an activity of the imagination which perpetually differs from itself, as in “labor’s dream” or in “heretical speech”. He thus presents these two operations as mutually conditioning and producing each other. (shrink)

From Captain Beefheart to Stockhausen, through the Velvet Underground and La Monte Young, this article redefines the « noise continuum » not so much as a transgeneric reality than, more surprisingly, as the emanation of a raucous « ritournelle » anchored in the work songs of the African-American community. Minor shifts in a chord progression, notes held beyond their expected duration, smoking blabbers : the source of noise music is to be located in the gutters of the musical roads built (...) by the bluesmen. (shrink)

Résumé Par rapport au « renversement » qui, comme dans la dialectique, s’opère entre deux choses ayant le même niveau de substantialité, l’ « inversion » fonde une ontologie paradoxale où les choses à inverser ne préexistent pas à l’inversion elle-même. Tel est le sens d’une thèse ontologique largement partagée dans le marxisme d’aujourd’hui : le primat de la lutte de classes sur les classes. Tout en discernant nettement la différence du renversement et de l’inversion dans Le Capital, Jacques Rancière (...) ne cesse de poser la question de savoir si le clivage des deux opérations est possible sans recours au « kautskisme » qui l’introduit dans la lutte de l’extérieur de la lutte, ce qui dénie purement et simplement le primat ontologique de la lutte. La solution donnée par lui est inouïe : radicalisant d’un côté l’inversion en tant que politique identique à la subjectivation, dans laquelle il n’y a plus de « constitué », et restituant de l’autre le renversement en tant qu’activité de l’imagination qui se différencie perpétuellement de soi comme dans le « rêve ouvrier » ou la « parole hérétique », il fait de ces deux opérations les conditions réciproques pour que l’une et l’autre viennent au jour. (shrink)

Traumatized with the national « blunder » of the Gulf War, the Japanese government tries now to cross a historic threshold: contribution to the war for the « new world order » must not be limited any more to finances, but widened in the military cooperation, which is formally forbidden with the Constitution. A revision of that this is nevertheless unthinkable, because the political tension which would be then created would return the new late Constitution on the situation. Where from (...) big current effort to coexist legal pacifism and military «duty », to deny and assert at the same time the current Constitution. « Theological » attempt which invents funny solutions. (shrink)

The attack of September 11 verified M Hardt’s and T Negri’s main thesis and by breaking with the politics of nation-state, Empire materializes under our eyes. At the same time however, event leads us to question definitions proposed in their book. It seems that we attend the end of the « small crises» which characterized Empire. And that the current visibility is how a protest against the definition of its essence as « abstract machine ». But the most serious problem (...) is in its «ontological » foundation: the Multitudes. If they are they who support and determine the state of the Empire, are they forced to keep pace with this last one, including when the stability seems shaken ? Which is then the line of possible flight for the Multitudes ? (shrink)