Philosophers of science have insisted that evidence of underlying mechanisms is required to support claims about the effects of medical interventions. Yet evidence about mechanisms does not feature on dominant evidence-based medicine “hierarchies.” After arguing that only inferences from mechanisms (“mechanistic reasoning”)—not mechanisms themselves—count as evidence, I argue for a middle ground. Mechanistic reasoning is not required to establish causation when we have high-quality controlled studies; moreover, mechanistic reasoning is more problematic than has been assumed. Yet where the problems can (...) be overcome, mechanistic reasoning can and should be used as evidence. (shrink)

In recent decades, epistemology has witnessed the development and growth of externalist theories of knowledge and justification. Critics of externalism have focused a bright spotlight on this approach and judged it unsuitable for realizing the true and original goals of epistemology. Their own favored approach, internalism, is defended as a preferable approach to the traditional concept of epistemic justification. I shall turn the spotlight toward internalism and its most prominent rationale, revealing fundamental problems at the core of internalism and challenging (...) the viability of its most popular rationale. Although particular internalist theories such as (internalist) foundationalism and coherentism will occasionally be discussed, those specific theories are not my primary concern. The principal concern is rather the general architecture of internalism, and the attempt to justify this architecture by appeal to a certain conception of what justification consists in. (shrink)

This article develops a new phenomenological account of the shame people typically tend to feel when seen naked by others. Although shame at nakedness is a paradigmatic and widespread form of shame, it has been under-explored in the literature on shame. The central thesis of the article is that shame at nakedness is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and constituted by our capacity for social self-consciousness. I argue that our ability to sense how others see us and judge (...) us gives rise to a dynamic tension between our effort to control our public self-presentation and the experience of being exposed to others in an uncontrolled manner. What makes us prone to feel shame or shame anxiety at being seen naked is that we feel that we have revealed our naked and true self as potentially or actually shameful and that our public persona has been undermined. Furthermore, the vulnerability and lack of control that are part and parcel of naked exposure can be a source of shame. In my analysis, shame at nakedness encompasses both literal bodily nakedness and other kinds of uncontrolled and unguarded exposure. The article also offers an argument as to the roots of the more or less ubiquitous tendency to feel shame at exhibiting one’s genitals in public. I develop my account through critical engagements with the main contemporary attempts to account for shame at nakedness, critiquing their insufficiencies and reframing their insights. (shrink)

Nature Exposed to our Method of Questioning explores how we create our cultural assumptions about personhood, culture and nature.

A different perspective is offered on the problematic arguments for the identity of various virtues in the 'Protagoras' by taking into account the dramatic context in which Socrates makes these arguments. A close examination of the portrayal of Protagoras's profession of sophistry, particularly in his telling of a version of the Promethean Myth, reveals a concealed and ignoble doctrine about human virtue. Viewing Socrates' primary intention to be exposing the sophist, particularly his conception of virtue as disunified, explains some of (...) the puzzling aspects of the arguments Socrates offers for the unity of the virtues. (shrink)

On s’interroge, dans ce livre, sur la façon dont les peuples sont représentés : question indissolublement esthétique et politique. Les peuples aujourd’hui semblent exposés plus qu’ils ne l’ont jamais été. Ils sont, en réalité, sous-exposés dans l’ombre de leurs mises sous censure ou – pour un résultat d’invisibilité équivalent – sur-exposés dans la lumière artificielle de leurs mises en spectacle. Bref ils sont, comme trop souvent, exposés à disparaître. À partir des exigences formulées par Walter Benjamin (une histoire ne vaut (...) que si elle donne voix aux « sans noms ») ou par Hannah Arendt (une politique ne vaut que si elle fait surgir ne fût-ce qu’une « parcelle d’humanité »), on interroge ici les conditions d’une possible représentation des peuples. Cela passe moins par l’histoire du portrait de groupe hollandais et des « portraits de troupes » totalitaires que par l’attention spécifique accordée aux « petits peuples » par les poètes (Villon, Hugo, Baudelaire par exemple), les peintres (Rembrandt, Goya ou Gustave Courbet), les photographes (Walker Evans, August Sander ou, pour un exemple contemporain, Philippe Bazin). Le cinéma, quant à lui, nomme figurants ces « petits peuples » devant lesquels agissent et s’agitent les « acteurs principaux », les stars comme on dit. D’où que les figurants incarnent un enjeu crucial, historique et politique, du cinéma lui-même, depuis sa naissance – La Sortie des usines Lumière – jusqu’à ses élaborations modernes chez Eisenstein et Rossellini, et bien au-delà encore. Une longue analyse est ici consacrée au travail de Pier Paolo Pasolini, à sa façon de retrouver les « peuples perdus » dans leurs « gestes survivants », selon un processus que permettent d’éclairer les analyses d’Erich Auerbach (pour les formes poétiques), d’Aby Warburg (pour les formes visuelles) et d’Ernesto De Martino (pour les formes sociales). Sans oublier quelques exemples plus contemporains, tel que le film du Chinois Wang Bing intitulé, précisément, L’Homme sans nom. (shrink)

Exposing Fake Logic by Avi Sion is a collection of essays written after publication of his book A Fortiori Logic, in which he critically responds to derivative work by other authors who claim to know better. This is more than just polemics; but allows further clarifications of a fortiori logic and of general logic. This collection includes essays on: a fortiori argument (in general and in Judaism); Luis Duarte D’Almeida; Mahmoud Zeraatpishe; Michael Avraham (et al.); an anonymous reviewer of BDD (...) (a Bar Ilan University journal); and self-publishing. (shrink)

Cet article propose une reconstruction de la ligne d’argumentation de l’exposé de 1805 de la Doctrine de la Science de Fichte. Son objet fondamental consiste à répondre à la question : qu’est-ce que le savoir ? ce qui implique de répondre à cette autre question : qu’est-ce que le « est » ? Fichte répond : ce savoir est l’existence absolue, ce qui est équivalent à l’existence de l’absolu – et l’auteur le montre à travers cinq tentatives de démonstration (...) de cette thèse. Cela aboutit à la compréhension du caractère inconditionné de la raison , résultat de la philosophie transcendantale en général.This paper proposes a reconstruction of the argumentative line of the exposition of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge of 1805. Its fundamental object consists in answering the question : what is knowledge ? what implies to answer another question : what ‘is’ is ? Fichte answers that knowledge is absolute existence, what is equivalent to the existence of absolute – and the author demonstrates his thesis through five attempts. It ends up at the comprehension of the unconditioned character of reason , result of the transcendental philosophy in general. (shrink)

An argument is presented according to which exposing pseudo-scientific medical claims may be ethically wrong. It is then suggested that this argument gives an interesting explanation why the successful outing of pseudo-science may lead to an increase in medical pseudo-science overall.

Biases in cognition are ubiquitous. Social psychologists suggested biases and stereotypes serve a multifarious set of cognitive goals, while at the same time stressing their potential harmfulness. Recently, biases and stereotypes became the purview of heated debates in the machine learning community too. Researchers and developers are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that some biases, like gender and race biases, are entrenched in the algorithms some AI applications rely upon. Here, taking into account several existing approaches that address the (...) problem of implicit biases and stereotypes, we propose that a strategy to cope with this phenomenon is to unmask those found in AI systems by understanding their cognitive dimension, rather than simply trying to correct algorithms. To this extent, we present a discussion bridging together findings from cognitive science and insights from machine learning that can be integrated in a state-of-the-art semantic network. Remarkably, this resource can be of assistance to scholars (e.g., cognitive and computer scientists) while at the same time contributing to refine AI regulations affecting social life. We show how only through a thorough understanding of the cognitive processes leading to biases, and through an interdisciplinary effort, we can make the best of AI technology. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

This paper defines and analyzes the processes of “othering” as they manifest in the practice and praxis of nursing education. Othering is bound up in the establishment and reinforcement of norms, and shores up power inequities that negatively impact faculty, students, and patients. While previous analyses have addressed othering in nursing more broadly, this paper adds a consideration of the multiple processes of othering that operate within the context of nursing education spaces. Cases from recent nursing education literature are interpreted (...) through the frameworks of exclusionary, inclusionary, and structural othering, and provide specific illustrations of the concepts described. The paper concludes by arguing for an application of norm‐critical pedagogical practice to counteract, disrupt and dismantle othering processes within nursing education. (shrink)

Researchers have explored important questions about employees’ prosocial motivation to impact others through their work and about employees’ engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Studies show that job seekers are attracted to CSR-engaged employers, but little is known about whether and why prospective employees are attracted by job roles that allow them to have positive social impact. We used prosocial motivation theory to develop hypotheses about processes through which a greater desire for social impact in work is associated with (...) being predisposed to it (due to trait-like prosocial motivation), being exposed to the possibility of it (through CSR-related educational choices), and both in partially mediated sequence. Analyses of data from 187 prospective employees provided support for most hypotheses. Our findings inform new directions for research on CSR and recruitment, the CSR education literature, and recruitment practices that leverage prospective employees’ desire for social impact through performing their regular work. (shrink)

Since the late nineties there has been an increased interested in probabilistic logic learning, an area within AI that combines machine learning with logic-based knowledge representation and uncertainty reasoning. Several different formalisms for combining first-order logic with probability reasoning have been proposed, and it has been studied how models in these formalisms can be automatically learned from data. -/- This talk starts with a brief introduction to probabilistic logic learning, after which we will focus on a relatively new formalism known (...) as CP-logic. CP-logic stands for “causal probabilistic logic”. It is a knowledge representation formalism that allows us to write down rules that indicate that a certain combination of conditions may cause certain effects with a particular probability (e.g., tossing a coin may cause a result of heads or tails, each with 50% probability). Besides the fact that this formalism is interesting for knowledge representation in itself, it also offers interesting opportunities from the machine learning point of view. Indeed, given the semantics of these CP-logic programs, learning them from data amounts to extracting probabilistic causal influences from data. We will discuss recent research on learning CP-logic programs, including: algorithms for learning them; how they relate to graphical models; and applications of learning CP-logic programs. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner’s dedication to investigating Hobbes’s concept of liberty in a number of essays and books has born some unusual fruit. Not only do we see the enormous problems that Hobbes set himself by proceeding as he did, but Skinner’s careful analysis allows us to chart Hobbes’ ingenuity as he tried to steer a path between the Charybdis of determinism and the Scylla of voluntarism – not very successfully, as we shall see. The upshot is a theory of individual freedom (...) and civil liberty to challenge the classical republican traditionThis Article does not have an abstract. (shrink)

Multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii is recognized to be among the most difficult antimicrobial-resistant gram negative bacilli to control and treat. One of the major challenges that the pathogenic bacteria face in their host is the scarcity of freely available iron. To survive under such conditions, bacteria express new proteins on their outer membrane and also secrete iron chelators called siderophores. Antibodies directed against these proteins associated with iron uptake exert a bacteriostatic or bactericidal effect against A. baumanii in vitro, by blocking (...) siderophore mediated iron uptake pathways. Attempts should be made to discover peptides that could mimic protein epitopes and possess the same immunogenicity as the whole protein. Subsequently, theoretical methods for epitope prediction have been developed leading to synthesis of such peptides that are important for development of immunodiagnostic tests and vaccines. The present study was designed to in silico resolving the major obstacles in the control or in prevention of the diseases caused by A. baumannii. We exploited bioinformatic tools to better understand and characterize the Baumannii acinetobactin utilization structure of A. baumannii and select appropriate regions as effective B cell epitopes. In conclusion, amino acids 26–191 of cork domain and 321–635 of part of the barrel domain including L4–L9, were selected as vaccine candidates. These two regions contain functional exposed amino acids with higher score of B cell epitopes properties. Majority of amino acids are hydrophilic, flexible, accessible, and favorable for B cells from secondary structure point of view. (shrink)

Au sein de l’organisation Tactical Tech qui milite pour des usages émancipateurs et engagés au sein des nouvelles technologies, Laura Ranca coordonne le projet « Exposing the Invisible » voué à transmettre des outils d’investigation indépendant ainsi qu’à donner un espace d’exposition aux résultats de contre-enquêtes souvent basées sur des données en open source.

L’œuvre mathématique de Leibniz a ceci d’intéressant qu’au travers des innombrables manuscrits de travail dont nous disposons dans ses archives à Hanovre, le philosophe nous a confié le matériel nécessaire pour rétablir ses divers cheminements de recherche ainsi que ses méthodes de découvertes à l’origine de ses créations mathématiques. L’exemple des exposants que nous allons traiter permet d’éclairer utilement la façon dont Leibniz apprend les mathématiques et change progressivement de posture et de démarche. Ainsi, dans sa première année parisienne, la (...) primauté est-elle donnée aux relations tabulaires, plutôt qu’aux formes et aux similitudes. Ces enjeux épistémologiques expliquent la manière dont Leibniz généralise partiellement la notion d’exposant. (shrink)

In this article I explore how a philosophical conception of love may be used to draw debate on the death of God beyond the binary opposition between theology and philosophy through a comparative study of the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy. Although Marion’s reading of love—in both its theological and phenomenological guises—proposes an innovative phrasing of a non-metaphysical notion of divinity, I argue that it is ultimately unable to maintain its coherence in nominal discourse due to Marion’s insistence (...) on keeping love and being separate. In contrast, through his unique thinking on ontology, Nancy’s philosophy allows us to reposition love at the heart of being, from whence it may serve as a means of disrupting the very principle governing the atheist and theist world-views. Far from dismantling Marion’s core proposition, I conclude that the two thinkers may in fact be more closely aligned than previous scholarship has acknowledged, coming together in the need to affirm an experience of the impossible that takes place in the present rather than in any eschatological fulfillment to come. At this intersection between two nominally very different thinkers, love forms an ontological limit-point for thought that poses a challenge to both theology and philosophy alike as they continue to grapple with the question of religion in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions imposed to stop its advance have affected the entire population. Children living with difficulties or in vulnerable situations prior to the pandemic might have suffered an even greater impact. This present study examines the psychological impact of quarantine on children and adolescents exposed to intimate partner violence against their mothers. Participants were 185 mothers who reported 269 children, as well as 108 children who self-reported. An emotional and behavioral checklist was administered to both mothers and (...) children throughout confinement. Results show mothers observed changes in their children’s psychological state. Children, in turn, reported an increase in different variables. Mothers reported a higher percentage of overall increase for both general and severe symptoms than their children. Differences were found by sex and age. Future research with similar population groups is necessary to establish the support and intervention children require in similar contexts, as well as to clarify possible causes of differences found by age and sex. (shrink)

In their article “Two Minds, One Patient: Clearing Up Confusion About ‘Ambivalence,’” Moore et al. argue that “different kinds of ‘ambivalence’ may call for different approaches” to resolution in c...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Expose of a BreakdownIngrid HindellIregard my pension as a social wage, and even though I wish it took my disability and the extra costs that brings into consideration, eighteen years ago, I felt privileged to be able to work in the community, not in a sheltered workshop.At this time, a number of us worked voluntarily for numerous little organizations when the government cut their funding and in effect, took (...) away our jobs.It was around this time that I started a “stress cough.” Foolishly, I didn’t take much notice. I was enjoying “life”—studying, working, taking part in a documentary called “Untold Desires” and being a member of the “Friendship Group”—in which a group of us tackled the subject and nature of friendship for people with and without disabilities....The processes and the cohesion of the group brought up a lot of “stuff” for me that I wasn’t able to articulate. It made me question the wisdom of my lifestyle up to then—of marrying a person without a physical disability, for example.My mother used to tell me to tell him to tidy the flat, not in the least realizing that: i) it was distressing that I couldn’t do this; ii) that given all our interests it was difficult to tidy up. (This situation was also not helped, I now realize, by us trying to live and run home businesses from my small three–roomed accommodation behind my parent’s home, without enough support worker hours....)The flat was always cluttered, not conducive to encouraging a feeling of ease in us bringing clients onto the premises. As Robert’s massage workload grew, so did our underlying tension, I see now. And when I was starting to counsel other people with disabilities the situation was made worse....Added to this, my mother had, just prior to this period in our lives, stopped giving us our main meal because we were becoming more and more interested in eating organic and vegetarian food.At the same time, listening to other group members’ stories made me realize how “undervalued” people with disabilities are in society as I had been brought up in a loving extended family and had not long been “out.”It made me realize how much people with disabilities were constrained by lack of governmental funding for recreational—especially relationship options—with each other and with able–bodied people. The government was trying to close down little advocacy organizations that could keep this issue in the forefront of policy makers’ minds. No wonder I was getting close to breaking point! [End Page E1]When I got really bad, my husband almost went mad himself trying to cope with me. I had been the outgoing partner in the relationship for the past 12 years. Now I was getting panic attacks and clinging like poison ivy....And the therapists I went to at that stage didn’t help. The Naturopath was so expensive she made me much worse. She had told a “friend” of Rob’s that she would treat me for $30.00 a time. She did not say that she would present me with an ever– increasing bill every time I had an appointment—to pay her back when I could! And that her admin assistant would keep commenting, in my hearing, that people wouldn’t pay their bills on time.... At last, when the amount got to $450.00, I paid her all my savings, and managed to quit.I now also believe she treated me with a totally inappropriate therapy—colonic irrigation—for far too long, any natural therapist would say nowadays—five weeks!I believe it made my mental state worse. People say that an unquiet mind can stress the body into illness but I believe losing too much weight too fast as I certainly did, stressed my mind, instead of other way around.By this time I wasn’t only having panic attacks. I had slipped into, what I recently discovered, was a clinical depression. This brought in its wake, a terror so real, so all encompassing that I wonder I lived through a day of it—much less four... (shrink)

L’enfant exposé aux violences conjugales est encore trop peu considéré comme victime directe de ces violences, malgré les études réalisées en France et en Amérique du Nord. Les auteures ont mené une recherche qualitative clinique auprès de huit enfants témoins de violences conjugales durant leur petite enfance, accueillis avec leur mère dans deux structures dédiées, afin d’étudier leur fonctionnement psychique en leur proposant le test projectif du Patte-Noire. L’intérêt de cette étude réside dans le fait de recueillir la parole (...) de l’enfant, alors que les recherches internationales sont souvent basées sur des questionnaires adressés à la mère. Les résultats révèlent l’intériorisation précoce de modalités relationnelles violentes et pointent l’importance d’un accompagnement sur le versant psychologique de l’enfant et du (des) parent(s). (shrink)

Population surveys of emotion offer great potential to understand subjective wellbeing, though most do not reveal how emotions other than happiness and satisfaction impact on daily lives. This article presents a case study analysis of data from Kahneman and Krueger’s Princeton Time and Affect Survey to demonstrate that the choice of emotions or affects measured in surveys does matter in determining wellbeing in contexts such as those in which gender plays an important role. It finds that that tiredness and interest (...) comprise a large part of American women’s but not men’s unpleasant education, unpaid housework, and childcare. The article concludes by suggesting that the most appropriate method for establishing a “minimum” set of emotions is to conduct survey-based “audits” of emotions experienced in daily activities. (shrink)

We explicate recent results that shed light on the obscure and troubling problem of renormalization in Quantum Field Theory (QFT). We review how divergent predictions arise in perturbative QFT, and how they are renormalized into finite quantities. Commentators have worried that there is no foundation for renormalization, and hence that QFTs are not logically coherent. We dispute this by describing the physics behind liquid diffusion, in which exactly analogous divergences are found and renormalized. But now we are looking at a (...) problem that is physically and formally well-defined, proving that the problems of renormalization, by themselves, cannot refute QFT. (shrink)

We explicate recent results that shed light on the obscure and troubling problem of renormalization in Quantum Field Theory. We review how divergent predictions arise in perturbative QFT, and how they are renormalized into finite quantities. Commentators have worried that there is no foundation for renormalization, and hence that QFTs are not logically coherent. We dispute this by describing the physics behind liquid diffusion, in which exactly analogous divergences are found and renormalized. But now we are looking at a problem (...) that is physically and formally well-defined, proving that the problems of renormalization, by themselves, cannot refute QFT. (shrink)

Hegel congratulated himself on noticing that the German verb aufheben embodied a speculative dialectic in the interrelation of its multiple meanings. Translators have been hard put to find an equivalent English word. I think I have found a similar word in English, which, if not exactly a translation, still shows a similar interaction among the contrasting motions of its different meanings.

Kant’s treatment of laughter in section 54 of the Critique of Judgment is intriguing: he places laughter among the arts, but does not deem it serious enough to be a fine art. According to Kant, laughter is an agreeable art, and ministers only to the senses. But when he describes to us what laughter actually does, it turns out that this bodily phenomenon is actually a moral phenomenon akin to the sublime in that it elevates and humbles us at the (...) same time. This paper revisits Kant’s aesthetic themes, shows the distinctive role of laughter in the third Critique, and explores the possibilities of a true reunification of law and freedom through laughter. (shrink)