ABSTRACT Philosophers of education have written about the moral, ethical, racial, and gendered dimensions of the hidden curriculum of what we eat, who we eat with, and the significance afforded this moment of the school day. To this body of literature, we add the observation that female bodies were positioned by Jean Jacques Rousseau as necessary food for the stuff of society. We trace the ways in which Rousseau’s rendering of the natural female body have followed us into our modern (...) educational systems such that any hopes for gender equality in our educational and social structures must attend to the pervasive naturalization of the bodies – human and nonhuman – that we are taught to milk for all that they are worth. (shrink)

We propose that the isomorphism generally observed between the representations composing our momentary phenomenal experience and the structure of the world is the end-product of a progressive organization that emerges thanks to elementary associative processes that take our conscious representations themselves as the stuff on which they operate, a thesis that we summarize in the concept of Self-Organizing Consciousness (SOC). Key Words: Associative learning; automatism; consciousness; development; implicit learning; incubation; language; mental representation; perception; phenomenal experience.

The muscle-specific kinase MuSK is part of an agrin receptor complex which stimulates tyrosine phosphorylation and drives clustering of acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) in the postsynaptic membrane at the vertebrate neuromuscular junction. MuSK also regulates synaptic gene transcription in subsynaptic nuclei. Over the past few years decisive progress has been made in the identification of MuSK effectors, helping at understanding its function in the formation of the NMJ. Alike AChR, MuSK and several of its partners are the target of mutations responsible (...) for diseases of the NMJ, such as congenital myasthenic syndromes. This minireview will focus on the multiple MuSK effectors so far identified that place MuSK at the center of a multifunctional signaling complex involved in the organization of the NMJ and associated disorders. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that boredom can be an important experience that contributes to personal autonomous agency by providing authentic motivation, and that strategies of social media providers to bind users’ attention to their platforms undermine this authenticity. As discussed in social epistemology and media ethics for a while now, such strategies can lead to so-called epistemic or filter bubbles. Our analysis of the relation between boredom and social media use focuses on a similarly impairing effect of social media (...) on users’ autonomy, which we call authenticity bubbles. (shrink)

The objective of the present study was to show that the use of adversative and conclusive connectives to mark off the prototypical schema of argumentative text begins to set in at approximately the age of 10 or 11. Based on Adam's (1992) proposals, we constituted an argumentative text with two blocks of arguments separated by an adversative instruction (the connective but or an equivalent) and followed by a conclusion introduced by a conclusive instruction (the connective thus or an equivalent). Four (...) revising tasks (insertion or substitution with or without five connectives) have been used to asses children's knowledge of the argumentative schema and the use of connectives that punctuate them. The study of good and erroneous locations (concerning the placement of but and thus) showed that there was some regularity in the choices made by the children. The main result of this study shows that argumentative connectives are used differently by children aged 9 and children aged 10 or 11. The argumentative schema is used more consciously by 11-year-olds to guide revising tasks than by 10-year-olds. (shrink)

L'etude historique du principe de vie dans l'oeuvre de Descartes et dans celle de ses predecesseurs souligne notamment l'enjeu de la scission cartesienne entre l'ame et les phenomenes biologiques. Elle permet de comprendre, dans sa nouveaute radicale, la notion de principe de vie chez Descartes, qui associe la decouverte recente de la circulation du sang par W. Harvey, a une explication mecanique de la chaleur du coeur. Du traite de L'Homme aux Passions de l'ame, Descartes identifie en effet la notion (...) de principe de vie a la chaleur contenue dans le coeur, nourrie par la circulation du sang. Une telle conception s'oppose a la vision aristotelicienne, ou la biologie et la psychologie sont etroitement liees, ainsi qu'aux adeptes du panpsychisme que Descartes a critiques: Campanella et Henry More. (shrink)

The study aimed at evaluating the extent to which the feedback related negativity, an ERP component associated with feedback processing, is related to learning in school-age children. Eighty typically developing children between the ages of 8 and 11 years completed a declarative learning task while their EEG was recorded. The study evaluated the predictive value of the FRN on learning retention as measured by accuracy on a follow-up test a day after the session. The FRN elicited by positive feedback was (...) found to be predictive of learning retention in children. The relationship between the FRN and learning was moderated by age. The P3a was also found to be associated with learning, such that larger P3a to negative feedback was associated with better learning retention in children. (shrink)

This study examined whether the stability of highly relevant animate and inanimate information predicted encoding. Participants viewed audiovisual media and completed a change detection task of screenshots taken from the viewing session. The screenshots were either left as originally viewed or a factor was altered. The factors were all motivationally and story relevant. Half were part of an animal and half were part of other environmental information. This was crossed with whether the information was stable or fleeting in the scene. (...) Changes to animals were more recognized than inanimate information. Changes to fleeting inanimate information were better recognized than changes to stable inanimate information. These findings indicate potential for relevant change in environmental threat and opportunity is adaptively significant and likely to increase attention and encoding across animate and inanimate categories of information. (shrink)

In many parts of the world, homework is a form of labour characterised by precariousness, lack of regulation, and invisibility and lack of protection of the workers who are often amongst the world's poorest and most exploited. Homework is spreading, due to firm practices such as outsourcing. The analysis and understanding of complex corporate networks may assist with the identification and protection of those most at risk within the supply chain network. It can also expose some of the key ethical (...) issues and dilemmas of supply chain management and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Based on a case-study of the Australian FairWear Campaign (FWC), this article identifies an ethical network that aims to increase corporate accountability (CA) via greater transparency in corporate supply chains and improve work conditions for homeworkers and increase their recognition in the supply chain. (shrink)

Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation, co-edited by Nathan Poirier, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Annie Bernatchez of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, is a brilliant radical engaging intersectional book promoting total liberation from new fresh critical animal studies voices throughout the world. This captivating critical animal studies collection, influenced by historical and ongoing radical movements such as green anarchism, Black liberation, prison abolition, feminism, Queer liberation, disability rights, and decolonization, is one (...) of the most powerful texts in the last decade within the animal liberation movement. We must begin to listen to new and young scholars for social justice to evolve in order to end speciesism and all forms of oppression. Read, share, reflect and act on this interdisciplinary collection of scholar-activists from sociology, anthropology, criminology, economics, philosophy, cultural studies, eco-theology, environmental studies, and education that will transform the global movement for radical social justice and propel total liberation forward. (shrink)

Multinational enterprises are aware of their responsibility to protect human rights now more than ever, but severe human rights violations, including physical integrity abuses, continue unabated. To explore this puzzle, we engage theoretically with the means-ends decoupling literature to examine if and when oil and gas firms’ policies and practices prevent severe human rights abuse. Using an original dataset, we identify two pathways to mitigate means-ends decoupling: while human rights policies alone do not reduce human rights abuses, firms with a (...) high-quality human rights policy over the long-term reduce severe human rights abuses; firms that combine preparedness—which we define as a firm’s capabilities, practices, and engagement—with a long-term human rights policy also reduce the likelihood of human rights abuses. Preparedness, we argue, can lead to reinforcement dynamics between long-term policy efforts and additional capabilities that provide a more holistic understanding of firm behavior. (shrink)

La violence est un sujet d’une brûlante actualité et de nombreuses recherches ont tenté d’en comprendre les causes et les mécanismes, tant dans notre société que dans les mondes anciens. C’est dans cette perspective que s’inscrit le livre de Katherine Lu Hsu, The Violent Hero: Heracles in the Greek Imagination : un bien vaste programme, centré sur l’une des divinités les plus complexes du panthéon grec. À la lecture du livre toutefois, le thème apparaît beaucoup plus restreint puisque cette é...

Describing a cognitive system at a mechanistic level requires an engineering task analysis. This involves identifying the task and developing models of possible solutions. Evolutionary psychology and Bayesian modeling make complimentary contributions: Evolutionary psychology suggests the types of tasks that human brains were designed to solve, while Bayesian modeling provides a rigorous description of possible computational solutions to such problems.

This paper investigates the learnability by positive examples in the sense of Gold of Pregroup Grammars. In a first part, Pregroup Grammars are presented and a new parsing strategy is proposed. Then, theoretical learnability and non-learnability results for subclasses of Pregroup Grammars are proved. In the last two parts, we focus on learning Pregroup Grammars from a special kind of input called feature-tagged examples. A learning algorithm based on the parsing strategy presented in the first part is given. Its validity (...) is proved and its properties are examplified. (shrink)

Including empirical examples and theoretical clarifications on many of the analytical issues raised in his recently published Down to Earth, this conversation with Bruno Latour and his collaborator, Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, offers key insights into Latour’s recent and ongoing work. Revolving around questions on political ecology and social theory in our ‘New Climatic Regime’, Latour argues that in order to have politics you need a land and you need a people. This interview present reflections on such politics, such (...) land and such people, and it ends with a call for a sociology that takes up the task of connecting the three by investigating what he and Schultz call ‘geo-social classes’. The interview was conducted by Jakob Stein in Paris in November 2018. (shrink)

When publishing his first book anonymously at Leyden in 1637, Descartes showed his deep interest in medicine. Part five of the Discourse on Method offers a detailed account of the movement of the heart and discusses Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood. We should note that in the margins of the Discourse on Method, William Harvey’s name is mentioned in Latin and so too is the title De motu cordis. Furthermore, in the text, Descartes speaks of “an English physician, (...) who must be praised for having broken the ice” on the circulation of the blood. Harvey is indeed the only author who is mentioned by name in the Discourse, and his name is mentioned with the respect due to a genuine discoverer. These pages in the fifth part of the Discourse offer a totally new way of dealing with medical questions in the first part of the seventeenth century. I will consider here the Descartes-Harvey debate on the cause of the movement of the heart and Descartes’ approbation of Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. Yet, the medical context of the seventeenth century must be taken into account if we are properly to understand Descartes’ attitude towards Harvey, as well as the medical goals that Descartes had in mind when he attempted to explain the movement of the heart. (shrink)

Why does symbolic communication in humans develop primarily in an oral medium, and how do theories of language origin explain this? Non-human primates, despite their ability to learn and use symbolic signs, do not develop symbols as in oral language. This partly owes to the lack of a direct cortico-motoneuron control of vocalizations in these species compared to humans. Yet such modality-related factors that can impinge on the rise of symbolic language are interpreted differently in two types of evolutionary storylines. (...) 1) Some theories posit that symbolic language originated in a gestural modality, as in “sign languages”. However, this overlooks work on emerging sign and spoken language showing that gestures and speech shape signs differently. 2) In modality-dependent theories, some emphasize the role of iconic sounds, though these lack the efficiency of arbitrary symbols. Other theorists suggest that ontogenesis serves to identify human-specific mechanisms underlying an evolutionary shift from pitch varying to orally-modulated vocalizations (babble). This shift creates numerous oral features that can support efficient symbolic associations. We illustrate this principle using a sound-picture association task with 40 learners who hear words in an unfamiliar language (Mandarin) with and without a filtering of oral features. Symbolic associations arise more rapidly and accurately for sounds containing oral features compared to sounds bearing only pitch features, an effect also reported in experiments with infants. The results imply that, beyond a competence to learn and use symbols, the rise of symbolic language rests on the types of signs that a modality of expression affords. (shrink)

This collection of essays is a response to a challenge that is undoubtedly paradoxical: to introduce in Italy an author who is already known and appreciated by scholars who have encountered his work, and, often, followed his teachings. While the transmission of knowledge has traditionally been through both exoteric and esoteric teachings (the former intended for the general public, and the latter for a small group of researchers), this divide is reproduced constantly through the distinction between ‘institutionalised’ knowledge found even (...) in ‘philosophy manuals’, and the knowledge that animates the research and discussions of researchers. If we keep in mind this distinction, we will undoubtedly better understand the influence and role of the work of Jean Greisch (born in 1942), within the Italian hermeneutical tradition from the second half of the last century. If on the one hand, the work of this philosopher is still not much known to the general public (owing to the lack of Italian translations), on the other hand it is difficult, if not impossible, to meet a scholar in the field of hermeneutical tradition who has not been engaged with at least some of Greisch’s works, and who has not suggested or not recommended their reading to junior researchers interested in acquiring hermeneutical reason. This gradual dissemination of Greisch’s work has led to the building of a growing community of scholars gathered around his work, a community that goes beyond all pretentious ‘Rubicon’ divide between German and French hermeneutics. (shrink)

Through the concept of self-organizing consciousness (SOC), we posit that the dynamic of the mind stems from the recurrent interplay between the properties of conscious experiences and the properties of the world, hence making it unnecessary to postulate the existence of an unconscious mental level. In contrast, arguments are provided by commentators for the need for a functional level of organization located between the neural and the conscious. Other commentaries challenge us concerning the ability of our model to account for (...) specific phenomena in the domains of language, reasoning, incubation, and creativity. The possibility of unconscious semantic access and other alleged instances of adapted performance in the absence of any conscious counterpart are also put forth as evidence against our view. Our response emphasizes the fact that opponents to our model often present as factual, theory-free evidence which is in fact nothing more than the postulates underlying the classical computational framework. (shrink)

This paper compares and contrasts the impact and the interface of different sets of values held by social care practitioners in their decision-making process with regard to ethical dilemmas. Specifically, it explores some of the fundamental distinctions between self-directed groupworkers and other qualified social workers practising in both statutory and voluntary sectors. The methodology is qualitative and draws upon a Grounded Theory process. In contrasting the contribution of different sets of values in decision making, we found that participants, regardless of (...) their approach to work, showed an overall fit between their personal and professional values. However, when we explored the influence of participants? agencies on their decision-making processes, participants tended to prioritise organisational values, whereas for participants practising in the self-directed approach, the impact was less marked. Reflections on the role of values in increasing social workers? resistance to organisational constraints, and discussion of some implications for social work education, conclude the article. (shrink)

We outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. We propose that children employ specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate “causal map” of the world: an abstract, coherent representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously represented by the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or “Bayes nets”. Human causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learnig causal Bayes nets and for predicting with (...) them. Preliminary experimental results suggest that 2- to 4-year-old children spontaneously construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes-Net formalism. (shrink)

"Cet ouvrage est le fruit d'un seminaire de philosophie des sciences organise au Centre Sevres a Paris pendant l'annee universitaire 1987-1988"--Avant-propos.

"Cet ouvrage est le fruit d'un seminaire de philosophie des sciences organise au Centre Sevres a Paris pendant l'annee universitaire 1987-1988"--Avant-propos.

As nursing professionals, we believe access to healthcare is fundamental to health and that it is a determinant of health. Therefore, evidence suggesting access to healthcare is problematic for many Indigenous peoples is concerning. While biomedical perspectives underlie our current understanding of access, considering alternate perspectives could expand our awareness of and ability to address this issue. In this paper, we critique how access to healthcare is understood through a biomedical lens, how a postcolonial theoretical lens can extend that understanding, (...) and the subsequent implications this alternative view raises for the nursing profession. Drawing on peer‐reviewed published and gray literature concerning healthcare access and Indigenous peoples to inform this critique, we focus on the underlying theoretical lens shaping our current understanding of access. A postcolonial analysis provides a way of understanding healthcare as a social space and social relationship, presenting a unique perspective on access to healthcare. The novelty of this finding is of particular importance for the profession of nursing, as we are well situated to influence these social aspects, improving access to healthcare services broadly, and among Indigenous peoples specifically. (shrink)

Rare diseases, defined as having a prevalence inferior to 1/2000, are poorly understood scientifically and medically. Appropriate diagnoses and treatments are scarce, adding to the burden of living with chronic medical conditions. The moral significance of rare disease experiences is often overlooked in qualitative studies conducted with adults living with rare diseases. The concept of morally problematic situations arising from pragmatist ethics shows promise in understanding these experiences. The objectives of this study were to (1) acquire an in-depth understanding of (...) morally problematic situations experienced by adults living with rare diseases in the province of Québec and (2) to develop an integrative model of the concept of morally problematic situations. To this end, an online survey targeting this population was developed through a participatory action research project. Respondents provided 90 long testimonies on the most important morally problematic situations they faced, often in healthcare settings. An integrative model was developed based on various qualitative analyses of these testimonies and relevant literature. The integrative model showcases that morally problematic situations have causes (i.e., contextual and relational factors, personal factors, jeopardized valuations), have affective repercussions (i.e., emotions and feelings, internal tensions), prompt action (i.e., through empowerment strategies leading to the evolution of situations), and elicit outcomes (i.e., factual consequences, residual emotions and feelings, positive or negative resolutions). In sum, this study advances understanding of the moral experiences of adults living with rare diseases while proposing a comprehensive conceptual tool to guide future empirical bioethics research on moral experiences. (shrink)

Several researchers point to disorganized attachment as a core feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, recent studies suggest that specific internal working models (IWMs) of each parent combine to account for child outcomes and that a secure relationship with one parent can protect against the deleterious effects of an insecure relationship with the other parent. It was thus hypothesized that adolescents with BPD are more likely to be disorganized with both their parents, whereas non-clinical controls are more secure with (...) at least one of their caregivers. Thirty-six adolescents with BPD and 30 control participants (aged 13-19) were included. Psychiatrist diagnosis was verified with the SIDP-IV and comorbidity was assessed using the Kiddie-SADS. Reported trauma was assessed with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Attachment IWMs of each parent were assessed with the Attachment Multiple Model Interview (AMMI), which enables separate coding for each attachment figure and in which disorganization is conceptualized as conflicting attachment strategies within a specific relationship. Results of a logistic regression analysis suggested that beyond insecure attachment, being disorganized not just with one but with both parents is particularly characteristic of adolescents with BPD. Conversely, belonging to the non-clinical group was predicted by higher security scores with the father and lower deactivation with the mother. Although higher levels of childhood abuse or neglect were reported by adolescents with BPD, the retained attachment dimensions predicted group membership over and above reported trauma. These findings have important implications for clinical intervention and highlight the protective role fathers may have. (shrink)