General Ontological Language (GOL) is a formal framework for representing and building ontologies. The purpose of GOL is to provide a system of top-level ontologies which can be used as a basis for building domain-specific ontologies. The present paper gives an overview about the basic categories of the GOL-ontology. GOL is part of the work of the research group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) at the University of Leipzig which is based on the collaborative work of the Institute of Medical Informatics (...) (IMISE) and the Institute for Computer Science (IfI). It represents work in progress toward a proposal for an integrated family of top-level ontologies and will be applied to several fields of medicine, in particular to the field of Clinical Trials. (shrink)

This volume shows how nanotechnology takes on a wide range of socio-historically specific meanings in the context of globalization, across multiple localities, institutions and collaborations, through diverse industries, research labs, and government agencies and in a variety of discussions within the public sphere itself. It explores the early origins of nanotechnologies; the social, economic, and political organization of the field; and the cultural and subjective meanings ascribed to nanotechnologies in social settings.

Every domain-specific ontology must use as a framework some upper-level ontology which describes the most general, domain-independent categories of reality. In the present paper we sketch a new type of upper-level ontology, which is intended to be the basis of a knowledge modelling language GOL (for: 'General Ontological Language'). It turns out that the upper- level ontology underlying standard modelling languages such as KIF, F-Logic and CycL is restricted to the ontology of sets. Set theory has considerable mathematical power and (...) great flexibility as a framework for modelling different sorts of structures. At the same time it has the disadvantage that sets are abstract entities (entities existing outside the realm of time, space and causality), and thus a set-theoretical framework should be supplemented by some other machinery if it is to support applications in the ripe, messy world of concrete objects. In the present paper we partition the entities of the real world into sets and urelements, and then we introduce several new ontological relations between these urelements. In contrast to standard modelling and representation formalisms, the concepts of GOL provide a machinery for representing and analysing such ontologically basic relations. (shrink)

Hydraulic fracturing ('fracking') has enabled the recovery of previously inaccessible resources and rendered new areas of the underground 'productive'. While a number of studies in the US and UK have examined public attitudes toward fracking and its various impacts, how people conceptualise the deep underground itself has received less attention. We argue that views on resources, risk and the deep underground raise important questions about how people perceive the desirability and viability of subterranean interventions. We conducted day-long deliberation workshops (two (...) in each country), facilitating discussions among diverse groups of people on prospective shale extraction in the US and UK. Themes that emerged in these conversations include seeing the Earth as a foundation; natural limits (a greater burden than the subsurface can withstand versus simply overuse of natural resources); and ideas about the fragility, instability and opacity of the deep underground. We find that concerns in both countries were not limited to specific, localised impacts but also addressed ecosystem links between surface and subsurface environments and broader questions about the use, identification and value of natural resources. (shrink)

The objective of this research programme is to contribute to the establishment of the emerging science of Formal Ontology in Information Systems via a collaborative project involving researchers from a range of disciplines including philosophy, logic, computer science, linguistics, and the medical sciences. The re­searchers will work together on the construction of a unified formal ontology, which means: a general framework for the construction of ontological theories in specific domains. The framework will be constructed using the axiomatic-deductive method of modern (...) formal ontology. It will be tested via a series of applications relating to on-going work in Leipzig on medical taxonomies and data dictionaries in the context of clinical trials. This will lead to the production of a domain-specific ontology which is designed to serve as a basis for applications in the medical field. (shrink)

In times of global economic and political crises, the notion of solidarity is gaining new currency. This book argues that a solidarity-based perspective can help us to find new ways to address pressing problems. Exemplified by three case studies from the field of biomedicine: databases for health and disease research, personalised healthcare, and organ donation, it explores how solidarity can make a difference in how we frame problems, and in the policy solutions that we can offer.

Combining knowledge of social policy and practice with insights from poststructural and feminist theory, the text demonstrates how democratic citizens and the political are continually recreated.

Romano Guardini gilt als einer der massgeblichen christlichen Denker des 20. Jahrhunderts. Seine Schriften, philosophische und theologische Abhandlungen, aber auch zahlreiche meditative und spirituelle Texte, haben eine weltweite Verbreitung gefunden und pragen ungebrochen bis heute Generationen von Leserinnen und Lesern. Der vorliegende Band, der aus Anlass des 50. Todestages Romano Guardinis am 1. Oktober 2018 sowie zur Eroffnung des Seligsprechungsprozesses erscheint, versammelt Beitrage namhafter Autorinnen und Autoren. Aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven widmen sie sich insbesondere Guardinis Buch "Der Herr" uber Person (...) und Botschaft Jesu Christi, aber beispielsweise auch Aspekten der Gottesfrage, der Ethik oder des Gebets. Eine Fundgrube fur alle, die sich der Person und dem Denken Guardinis neu nahern mochten. Mit Beitragen von Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, Jean Greisch, Karl Kardinal Lehmann (+), Peter Reifenberg, Marius Reiser, Peter Schallenberg, P. Kosmas Lars Thielmann OCist, Karl-Heinz Wiesemann. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the various guidelines presented in the literature for instituting an ethics curriculum and to empirically study their effectiveness. Three questions are addressed concerning the trainability of ethics material and the proper integration and implementation of an ethics curriculum. An empirical study then tested the effect of ethics training on moral awareness and reasoning. The sample consisted of two business classes, one exposed to additional ethics curriculum (experimental), and one not exposed (control). For (...) the experimental group, ethics exercises and discussion relevant to each topic were completed. Findings suggested gender differences such that, relative to other groups, women in the experimental group showed significantly improved moral awareness and decision-making processes. An explanation of the underlying cognitive processes is presented to explain the gender effect. (shrink)

Whistleblowing is a controversial yet socially significant topic of interest due to its impact on employees, organizations, and society at large. The purpose of this paper is to integrate knowledge of whistleblowing with theoretical advancements in the broader domain of business ethics to propose a novel approach to research and practice engaged in this complex phenomenon. The paper offers a conceptual framework, i.e., the wheel of whistleblowing, that is developed to portray the different features of whistleblowing by applying the whistleblower’s (...) perspective. The framework is based on five “W” questions: Who, What, hoW, Why, and to Whom? The answers to the proposed questions clarify the main aspects of whistleblowing, provide insights into existing studies of the subject, and identify relevant gaps in the literature which, in turn, offer opportunities for future research. (shrink)

This paper makes a plea for more reflexive attempts to develop and anchor the emerging concept of responsible research and innovation. RRI has recently emerged as a buzzword in science policy, becoming a focus of concerted experimentation in many academic circles. Its performative capacity means that it is able to mobilise resources and spaces despite no common understanding of what it is or should be ‘made of’. In order to support reflection and practice amongst those who are interested in and (...) using the concept, this paper unpacks understandings of RRI across a multi-disciplinary body of peer-reviewed literature. Our analysis focuses on three key dimensions of RRI that remain particularly opaque. A total of 48 publications were selected through a systematic literature search and their content was qualitatively analysed. Across the literature, RRI is portrayed as a concept that embeds numerous features of existing approaches to govern and assess emerging technologies. Our analysis suggests that its greatest potential may be in its ability to unify and provide political momentum to a wide range of long-articulated ethical and policy issues. At the same time, RRI’s dynamism and resulting complexity may represent its greatest challenge. Further clarification on what RRI has to offer in practice—beyond what has been offered to date—is still needed, as well as more explicit engagement with research and institutional cultures of responsibility. Such work may help to realise the high political expectations that are attached to nascent RRI. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to report what can be learned about nurses’ ethical conflicts by the systematic analysis of methodologically similar studies. Five studies were identified and analysed for: (1) the character of ethical conflicts experienced; (2) similarities and differences in how the conflicts were experienced and how they were resolved; and (3) ethical conflict themes underlying four specialty areas of nursing practice (diabetes education, paediatric nurse practitioner, rehabilitation and nephrology). The predominant character of the ethical conflicts was (...) disagreement with the quality of medical care given to patients. A significant number of ethical conflicts were experienced as ‘moral distress’, the resolution of which was variable, depending on the specialty area of practice. Ethical conflict themes underlying the specialty areas included: differences in the definition of adequacy of care among professionals, the institution and society; differences in the philosophical orientations of nurses, physicians and other health professionals involved in patient care; a lack of respect for the knowledge and expertise of nurses in specialty practice; and difficulty in carrying out the nurse’s advocacy role for patients. (shrink)

The paper investigates the ethical decisions of Millennials, who are not only part of an expanding cohort of the workforce, but also represent potential future managers with a growing influence on work practices and employment relationships. In the conceptual model, we propose that three ethical frames of reference, represented by perceived organisational ethics, perceived employee ethics and reflective moral attentiveness, antecede ethical judgements, which further influence the ethical intentions of Millennials. Using structural equation modelling, we test the model for three (...) different business ethics scenarios: paying a consulting fee, dumping hazardous waste, and running an offensive advertising campaign. The findings confirm the link between ethical judgements and intentions across the board, while the influence of the ethical frames of reference varies among the scenarios. We propose that the differences in the predictive ability of the ethical frames of reference depend on the nature of the ethical issue, which holds important implications for today's managers in their attempts to encourage ethical behaviour of Millennial employees. (shrink)

This would have been a better book if Sampson had argued his main point, the usefulness of the Simonian principle as an explanation of the evolution, structure, and acquisition of language, on its own merits, instead of making it subsidiary to his attack on ‘limited-minders’ (e.g., Noam Chomsky). The energy he has spent on the attack he might then have been willing and able to employ in developing his argument at reasonable length and detail. He might then have found that (...) argument faulty, or even wrong. Underdeveloped as it is, however, his point about the Simonian principle does seem to have thepossibility of some significance in understanding the empirical issues of this book (and the dichotomy of ‘limited’ and ‘creative’ minds is certainly not one of these).What Sampson has done inMaking Sense has the appearance of science, and theoretical linguistics, and therefore it is somewhat puzzling to find the conclusions that the human mind cannot be scientifically studied (p. 10), and that theoretical linguistics is a “mirage” (p. 210). His statement that It may still seem worthwhile to some to work out the exact implications for present-day linguistic structure of the fact that languages are evolved systems, but I cannot see that there is much glamour or, indeed, much substance in this task (p. 210) would surely be surprising to a geneticist or ethologist. We hope his apparent misunderstanding on this point will not lead him to give up his profession, in which he seems willing and able to make a significant contribution.What in particular is required is a clear indication of how the Simonian principle imposes itself in the ontogenesis of language. Consider Chomsky's example of the rule for forming questions in English. For sentence (1) below, children able to deal with such examples would give (2) but not (3) as the corresponding question (Chomsky, 1975, p. 31).The man who is tall is in the room.Is the man who is tall in the room?*Is the man who tall is in the room?Now compare Sampson's evolutionary explanation for the structure-dependence of rules which is illustrated in (1)-(3): “once a behavior-pattern has become thoroughly established, it will tend to be treated as a fixed given when used as a constituent of a more complex, later-learned behavior-pattern” (p. 183). In order for this to account for Chomsky's example it would have to be the case that children learn relative clauses before they learn questions, which simply isn't true.In conclusion, we wish not to seem unaware of the problems with the position Sampson is attacking, or unaware of the sometimes dogmatic way it too has been presented. Chomsky's hypothesis of innate linguistic ideas seems, fundamentally, to derive from the claimed rapidity and uniformity of language acquisition in the face of limited and degenerate data. Chomsky appears to have been unwilling to argue these points directly or to show their relation to others, for which he has argued, for example, the implausibility of some abstract constraint's having been learned (cf. 1971, pp. 22–44; 1975, pp. 30–33; 1980, pp. 35–52). And almost from his first invoking of rationalism in support of his linguistic method, Chomsky has himself resorted to an unnecessarily polemical attack on empiricism (cf. 1965, p. 58, n. 33). The innateness issue is just not clear or simple enough to justify so much animus, or even conviction. (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.

This article provides a concise overview of the history of scholarship on solidarity in Europe and North America. While recent decades have seen an increase in conceptual and scholarly interest in solidarity in North America and other parts of the Anglo-Saxon world, the concept is much more strongly anchored in Europe. Continental European politics in particular have given rise to two of the most influential traditions of solidarity, namely, socialism and Christian ethics. Solidarity has also guided important public instruments and (...) institutions in Europe. Despite the much stronger affinity of continental European societies to solidaristic thinking, we argue that solidarity has much to offer for addressing societal challenges on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. After proposing a working definition of solidarity that highlights its utility for guiding policy and practice, we give an example of how a solidarity-based perspective can shape instruments for the governance of data use. (shrink)

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the body and the world. Several studies reveal ways that people alone or together use gesture and marks on paper to structure and augment their thought for comprehension, inference, and discovery. The studies show that the mapping of thought to gesture or the page is more direct than the arbitrary mapping to language and suggest that these forms of visual/spatial/action representation are used to “translate” language into mental representations. It is argued that (...) actions in space create patterns in the world that reflect abstractions, that the actions are incorporated into gestures and the patterns into diagrams, a network that integrates gesture, action, the designed world, and abstraction dubbed spraction. (shrink)

With the advent of legalized medical assistance in dying [MAiD] in Canada in 2016, nursing is facing intriguing new ethical and theoretical challenges. Among them is the concept of conscientious objection, which was built into the legislation as a safeguard to protect the rights of healthcare workers who feel they cannot participate in something that feels morally or ethically wrong. In this paper, we consider the ethical complexity that characterizes nurses' participation in MAiD and propose strategies to support nurses' moral (...) reflection and imagination as they seek to make sense of their decision to participate or not. Deconstructing the multiple and sometimes conflicting ethical and professional obligations inherent in nursing in such a context, we consider ways in which nurses can sustain their role as critically reflective moral agents within a context of a relational practice, serving the diverse needs of patients, families, and communities, as Canadian society continues to evolve within this new way of engaging with matters of living and dying. (shrink)

In this imaginative and provocative book, Barbara Goodwin explores the question of how lottery systems can achieve egalitarian social justice in societies with seemingly ineradicable inequalities. She begins with the utopian fable of Aleatoria, a country not unlike our own in the not-too-distant-future, where most goods are distributed by lottery--even the right to have children. She then analyzes the philosophical arguments for and against lottery distribution and a comparison of "justice by lottery" with other contemporary theories of justice. Goodwin (...) also applies her theory to practical problems in the real world which could be--or have been--justly resolved by the use of lotteries, such as military drafts, jury duty, and immigration eligibility. She demonstrates that in many areas, including that of political power, a regular and random reallocation of goods would be a fairer and more democratic method than the distributive systems found in liberal democracies today. (shrink)

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the body and the world. Several studies reveal ways that people alone or together use gesture and marks on paper to structure and augment their thought for comprehension, inference, and discovery. The studies show that the mapping of thought to gesture or the page is more direct than the arbitrary mapping to language and suggest that these forms of visual/spatial/action representation are used to “translate” language into mental representations. It is argued that (...) actions in space create patterns in the world that reflect abstractions, that the actions are incorporated into gestures and the patterns into diagrams, a network that integrates gesture, action, the designed world, and abstraction dubbed spraction. (shrink)

The Cognitive Reserve (CR) hypothesis suggests that the brain actively attempts to cope with neural damages by using pre-existing cognitive processing approaches or by enlisting compensatory approaches. This would allow an individual with high CR to better cope with aging than an individual with lower CR. Many of the proxies used to assess CR indirectly refer to the flexibility of thought. The present paper aims at directly exploring the relationships between CR and creativity, a skill that includes flexible thinking. We (...) tested a sample of 72 adults (aged between 45 and 78) assessing both their level of CR and their creativity. To evaluate CR we used the proxies commonly used in literature, namely, three subtests from the WAIS (vocabulary, similarities, and digit span) and the years of education. We also used an ad-hoc test asking people to report how frequently they tend to perform activities that are believed to increase CR. We used verbal creativity tasks (alternative uses and generation of acronyms) to assess individual levels of creativity. We asked participants to describe their main occupation (present or past) and coded each occupation as creative or not creative. Results (controlling for age-related differences) showed that scores from the WAIS correlated positively with creativity performance, even though correlations varied across the subtests. Focusing on the frequency and type of activities that people perform, and comparing individuals who have or had a creative job to those with a routine job, a clear relationship between creativity and CR emerged. This effect was more relevant than the level of job complexity. Implications for the study of CR and aging are discussed. (shrink)

This paper proposes an approach to narrative deixis which offers a coherent analysis of the respective roles of proximal and distal deictic expressions. The paper starts by arguing that fictional narratives require an approach to deixis which modifies a number of broadly held assumptions, especially as regards the interaction between tense and other deictic forms. It then considers the widely discussed instance of the temporal adverb now in the context of Past Tense. The second part of the paper gives special (...) focus to demonstratives in narrative fiction, showing their role in temporal construals. It argues that both temporal and demonstrative expressions are primarily used to serve narrative viewpoint construction. Examples from several novels are then used to show how the proximal and distal choices of demonstratives, temporal adverbs and locative adverbs structure narrative viewpoint, including narrative representation of character experience. The paper concludes by proposing that in the context of fictional narratives the proximal/distal contrast is more relevant to meaning emergence than individual aspects of deixis, and that the construal of time can be achieved through the whole spectrum of deictic forms, not just tense and temporal adverbs such as now and then. (shrink)

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind puts it into the world, notably in diagrams and gestures.Both use space and arrays of elements, depictive and non-depictive, to convey ideas, concrete and abstract,clear and sketchy. The arrays and the non-depictive elements like boxes and arrows serve to showrelationships and organizations, thematic, categorical, and more. on paper, in the air, in the diagrammedworld. Human actions organize space to convey abstractions: spraction.

Containment and support have traditionally been assumed to represent universal conceptual foundations for spatial terms. This assumption can be challenged, however: English in and on are applied across a surprisingly broad range of exemplars, and comparable terms in other languages show significant variation in their application. We propose that the broad domains of both containment and support have internal structure that reflects different subtypes, that this structure is reflected in basic spatial term usage across languages, and that it constrains children's (...) spatial term learning. Using a newly developed battery, we asked how adults and 4-year-old children speaking English or Greek distribute basic spatial terms across subtypes of containment and support. We found that containment showed similar distributions of basic terms across subtypes among all groups while support showed such similarity only among adults, with striking differences between children learning English versus Greek. We conclude that the two domains differ considerably in the learning problems they present, and that learning in and on is remarkably complex. Together, our results point to the need for a more nuanced view of spatial term learning. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit Landau and Jackendoff's () paper, “What and where in spatial language and spatial cognition,” proposing a friendly amendment and reformulation. The original paper emphasized the distinct geometries that are engaged when objects are represented as members of object kinds, versus when they are represented as figure and ground in spatial expressions. We provided empirical and theoretical arguments for the link between these distinct representations in spatial language and their accompanying nonlinguistic neural representations, emphasizing the “what” (...) and “where” systems of the visual system. In the present paper, I propose a second division of labor between two classes of spatial prepositions in English that appear to be quite distinct. One class includes prepositions such as in and on, whose core meanings engage force-dynamic, functional relationships between objects, with geometry only a marginal player. The second class includes prepositions such as above/below and right/left, whose core meanings engage geometry, with force-dynamic relationships a passing or irrelevant variable. The insight that objects’ force-dynamic relationships matter to spatial terms’ uses is not new; but thinking of these terms as a distinct set within spatial language has theoretical and empirical consequences that are new. I propose three such consequences, rooted in the fact that geometric knowledge is highly constrained and early-emerging in life, while force-dynamic knowledge of objects and their interactions is relatively unconstrained and needs to be learned piecemeal over a lengthy timeline. First, the two classes will engage different learning problems, with different developmental trajectories for both first and second language learners; second, the classes will naturally lead to different degrees of cross-linguistic variation; and third, they may be rooted in different neural representations. (shrink)

Whistleblowers remain essential as complainants in allegations of research misconduct. Frequently internal to the research team, they are poorly protected from acts of retribution, which may deter the reporting of misconduct. In order to perform their important role, whistleblowers must be treated fairly. Draft regulations for whistleblower protection were published for public comment almost a decade ago but never issued. In the face of the growing challenge of research fraud, we suggest vigorous steps, to include: organizational responsibility to certify the (...) accuracy of research including audit, required whistleblower action in the face of imminent or grave harm to subjects, strengthened legal protections against retaliation including prompt enactment of Federal whistleblower protections and consideration of criminalizing the most egregious cases of research misconduct. (shrink)

Wallace's contributions to biological thought tend to be overlooked or overly praised, neither of which produces a satisfactory assessment. Examples of the latter tendency are the recent expositions by Brackman and Brooks; although both books contain much worthwhile material, both are flawed. At critical points their theories fail to measure up, Brackman's because of his misinterpretations of events in the month of June 1858, and Brooks's Darwin's September 5 letter to Gray could, and probably did, represent an ordering of his (...) ideas in response to a felt challenge.A fruitful way to characterize the relationship between Darwin and Wallace may be found in terms of game theory. Most scholars look upon the relationship as a zero-sum game, with a winner and a loser, the matter of priority being considered as a “single event.” Another approach would be to look upon it as a non-zero-sum game with each man influencing the other. In this case, the productivity of one is stimulated by the contributions of the other, resulting in a net gain in knowledge overall, and both men become winners, or codiscoverers. This approach is possible if Wallace's contributions to the theory of evolution by means of natural selection are recognized. (shrink)

Landau also pushes the role of syntax and its mapping to semantics in learning what some would consider “easy words”—the simplest spatial prepositions in English, in and on. Taking as a starting point that the syntactic distribution of a word is a reflex of its meaning, Landau shows that careful study of how children and adults linguistically encode a range of containment and support configurations reveals a special status for “core” configurations in each domain. She proposes that children come to (...) learning spatial terms with the expectation that configurations reflecting core concepts of containment and support will be expressed with the maximally simple, unmarked, linguistic expression. (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.

We investigate the complexity of isomorphisms of computable structures on cones in the Turing degrees. We show that, on a cone, every structure has a strong degree of categoricity, and that degree of categoricity is${\rm{\Delta }}_\alpha ^0 $-complete for someα. To prove this, we extend Montalbán’sη-system framework to deal with limit ordinals in a more general way. We also show that, for any fixed computable structure, there is an ordinalαand a cone in the Turing degrees such that the exact complexity (...) of computing an isomorphism between the given structure and another copy${\cal B}$in the cone is a c.e. degree in${\rm{\Delta }}_\alpha ^0\left$. In each of our theorems the cone in question is clearly described in the beginning of the proof, so it is easy to see how the theorems can be viewed as general theorems with certain effectiveness conditions. (shrink)

Designing the future of work is crucial to the health and well‐being of people and societies. Experts predict that developments such as the advancement of digital technologies, automation, and the movement of manufacturing jobs to low‐wage countries will lead to major transformations in the labour market, and some foresee significant job losses. Due to the close relationship between employment and health, major job losses would have significant negative impacts on the health and well‐being of individuals and societies. Job losses would (...) also pose a major challenge to solidaristic support within societies because they would negatively affect the recognition of similarities among people, which is vital for solidaristic practice and institutions. To prevent these negative effects, a fundamental redesign of the relationship between work and income is necessary. And for this project to succeed, we need to reconsider of the value of work. Building on definitions of flourishing people and societies, we argue that the value of work should not be determined by the labour market, but according to its importance for society. Using a solidarity‐based framework we argue that such a re‐valuation of work will help to ensure social cohesion and increase reciprocity in our societies. It will serve as a foundation upon which we can reconfigure the relationship between work and income without risking the loss of social cohesion and solidarity. (shrink)

. . . I should like to review and summarize the preceding general points: 1. For any particular narrative, there is no single basically basic story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of other narratives that can be constructed in response to it or perceived as related to it.2. Among the narratives that can be constructed in response to a given narrative are not only those that we commonly refer to as "versions" of it but also those retellings (...) that we call "plot summaries," "interpretations," and, sometimes, "basic stories." None of these retellings, however, is more absolutely basic than any of the others.3. For any given narrative, there are always multiple basic stories that can be constructed in response to it because basic-ness is always arrived at by the exercise of some set of operations, in accord with some set of principles, that reflect some set of interests, all of which are, by nature, variable and thus multiple. Whenever we start to cut back, peel off, strip away, lay bare, and so forth, we always do so in accord with certain assumptions and purposes which, in turn, create hierarchies of relevance and centrality; and it is in terms of these hierarchies that we will distinguish certain elements and relations as being central or peripheral, more important or less important, and more basic or less basic.4. The form and feature of any "version" of a narrative will be a function of, among other things, the particular motives that elicited it and the particular interests and functions it was designed to serve. Some versions, such as translation and transcriptions, may be constructed in order to preserve and transmit a culturally valued verbal structure. Others, such as adaptations and abridgements, may be constructed in order to amuse or instruct a specific audience. And some versions, such as "interpretations," "plot summaries," and "basic stories," may be constructed in order to advance the objectives of a particular discipline, such as literary history, folklore, psychiatry—or, of course, narratology. None of these latter versions, however, is any less motivated or, accordingly, formally contingent than any of the other versions constructed to serve other interests or functions. Barbara Herrnstein Smith is professor of English and communications and the director of the Center for the Study of Art and Symbolic Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. "On the Margins of Discourse" was also contributed as an essay to Critical Inquiry in the June 1975 issue. Responses to the present essay are Nelson Goodman's "The Telling and the Told" and Seymour Chatman's "Reply to Barbara Herrnstein Smith". Both appear in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The organ donor shortfall in the UK has prompted calls to introduce legislation to allow for presumed consent: if there is no explicit objection to donation of an organ, consent should be presumed. The current debate has not taken in account accepted meanings of presumption in law and science and the consequences for rights of ownership that would arise should presumed consent become law. In addition, arguments revolve around the rights of the competent autonomous adult but do not always consider (...) the more serious implications for children or the disabled. (shrink)

In 1960, a relatively new ‘syndrome’ began appearing with growing frequency in psychiatric hospitals and in doctors’ offices. Eventually termed ‘delicate self-cutting’, this new model for typical self-mutilative behavior was developed in conjunction with a description of the ‘typical’ self-mutilator: young (adolescent to just post-adolescent), female, and almost always attractive. This article contends that, despite recent efforts to change the nature of research on self-mutilation, the myth of a typical mutilator, developed from a particular historical bias, continues to work in (...) popular and medical discourses on the subject. I will begin with a detailed discussion of the medical discourse in an effort to ask how the myth was made. Noting that the female body, here, is singled out as pathological at a time when, specifically in the USA, the emergent Women’s Movement was beginning to contest certain gender lines, I would like to examine how the medical discourse and material bodies interrelate and interact with each other and with the cultural narratives around them. Finally, I end with examples from the 1999 film Girl, Interrupted, as well as other recent popular and medical accounts, to illustrate not only the perpetuation of the myth of the ‘typical’ self-mutilator but also the inability or refusal to recognize the biased nature of the medical discourse in the instance on self-mutilation. (shrink)

State provision of “merit goods” and of narrowly targeted cash payments has higher priority than large universal cash grants. Analysis of the Swedish budget shows that advanced countries do not have the taxing capacity to do both at once. Other problems with cash payments schemes include the disincentive to work for pay, reducing taxpaying capacity, and retrograde effects on gender equality. After the achievement of a welfare state, rises over time in productivity may gradually open up room in the national (...) budget for universal cash payments. (shrink)

We show that Sacks' and Shoenfield's analogs of jump inversion fail for both tt- and wtt-reducibilities in a strong way. In particular we show that there is a ${\mathrm{\Delta }}_{2}^{0}$ set B > tt ∅′ such that there is no c.e. set A with A′ ≡ wtt B. We also show that there is a ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}_{2}^{0}$ set C > tt ∅′ such that there is no ${\mathrm{\Delta }}_{2}^{0}$ set D with D′ ≡ wtt C.

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.