Why has fiction been so successful over time? We make the case that fiction may have properties that enhance both individual and group-level fitness by (a) allowing risk-free simulation of important scenarios, (b) effectively transmitting solutions to common problems, and (c) enhancing group cohesion through shared consumption of fictive worlds.

The intensification of ethnic and religious identity, accompanied by growing tendencies for creating new national states and escalations of regional conflicts, characterize the post-Cold War era. This article examines the growing impact of religion and the potential of religious activism as a tool for peacebuilding. A case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be accompanied by a historical-genealogical approach and analysis and deduction methods. By using those methods, I will answer the question of whether religion has a cohesive role (building (...) of civil society) or divisive effect (accentuation of mutual differences and distancing of ‘other’) in the process of peacebuilding. The research results show that religious activism did positively contribute to peacebuilding but that the existent conciliatory potential is not adequately used for overcoming mutual differences and the creation of civil society, primarily due to the political and institutional framework in which it operates. (shrink)

Electronic informed consent represents an opportunity to redesign the way that participants understand and elect to enroll in clinical research studies. However, electronic consent faces certain barriers common to all informed consent processes and other barriers specific to the technical environment. At Sage Bionetworks, we designed an electronic consent process as a software product and released it as an open source tool. We believe that using contemporary design processes to intentionally create cognitive friction, where potential study participants are confronted with (...) interfaces that require them to slow down and contemplate study concepts, offers a significant opportunity for ethical design as research increasingly uses smartphones and digital methodologies. (shrink)

Advancements in technology are shifting the ways that biomedical data are collected, managed, and used. The pervasiveness of connected devices is expanding the types of information that are defined as ‘health data.’ Additionally, cloud-based mechanisms for data collection and distribution are shifting biomedical research away from traditional infrastructure towards a more distributed and interconnected ecosystem. This shift provides an opportunity for us to reimagine the roles of scientists and participants in health research, with the potential to more meaningfully engage in (...) partnership across the research process. At the same time, these emerging practices present a potential to expose research participants to unanticipated and unintended consequences. Social norms and policy can help to mitigate these risks, but their development is often slow relative to the pace of technological advances and, as such, they can become reactive rather than prospective. As an alternative, the integrated development of data governance structures within technological advancements, supports their effective implementation, evaluation and evolution in a manner that can balance the benefits and risks of biomedical researcher in a decentralized ecosystem. (shrink)

Mobile devices with health apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, crowd-sourced information, and other data sources have enabled research by new classes of researchers. Independent researchers, citizen scientists, patient-directed researchers, self-experimenters, and others are not covered by federal research regulations because they are not recipients of federal financial assistance or conducting research in anticipation of a submission to the FDA for approval of a new drug or medical device. This article addresses the difficult policy challenge of promoting the welfare and interests of (...) research participants, as well as the public, in the absence of regulatory requirements and without discouraging independent, innovative scientific inquiry. The article recommends a series of measures, including education, consultation, transparency, self-governance, and regulation to strike the appropriate balance. (shrink)

Beginning in the 20th century, scientific research came to be dominated by a growing class of credentialed, professional scientists who overwhelmingly displaced the learned amateurs of an earlier time. By the end of the century, however, the exclusive realm of professional scientists conducting research was joined, to a degree, by “citizen scientists.” The term originally encompassed non-professionals assisting professional scientists by contributing observations and measurements to ongoing research enterprises. These collaborations were especially common in the environmental sciences, where citizen scientists (...) participated in counting wildlife and measuring environmental conditions. Later, patient groups began to play a more active role in supporting clinical trials and collecting health records from affected individuals. (shrink)

The article covers electronic informed consent from different dimensions so that practitioners might understand the history, regulation, and current status of eIC. It covers the transition of informed consent to electronic screens and the implications of that transition in terms of design, costs, and data analysis. The article explores the limits of regulation mandating eIC for mobile application research, and addresses some of the broader social context around eIC.

Background:There have been a number of debates in the field of nursing ethics. Researchers have focused on various aspects of nursing ethics, such as professional ethics, professional, nursing and ethical values. Within this research, a variety of literature reviews have been conducted, but to the best of our knowledge, bibliometric mapping has not yet been used.Objective:This article aims to analyse the production of literature within nursing ethics research.Research design:In order to examine publishing patterns, we focused on publishing dynamics, prolific research (...) entities and the most-cited articles. We additionally visualised the content of the literature using a novel mixed-method approach, combining bibliometric analysis and mapping with thematic analysis.Ethical considerations:In our study, ethical review was not required.Findings:A total of 1416 information sources were found in the Scopus database. Overall, literature production has increased; however, in recent years, the quantity of published material has begun to decrease. The most prolific countries are the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, and the most prolific source titles are Nursing Ethics, Journal of Advanced Nursing and Nursing Times. Lately, research in the field of nursing ethics has been focused more on life care (providing for the basic needs of older residents), moral distress and community nursing.Discussion:The dynamics of research literature production showed an exponential rise in the number of published information sources – a rise which started in the period between 1974 and 1998. Since that period, the trend has stabilised, which might indicate that nursing ethics research is starting a transition to a mature phase.Conclusion:The innovative use of bibliometric analysis and mapping, together with thematic analysis, is a useful tool for analysis of research production in the field of nursing ethics. The results presented can be an excellent starting point for literature reviews and more exhaustive data, information and knowledge seeking. (shrink)

The present work is, as its title indicates, a study of Hume's theory of imagination. Naturally, it is a study of a particular sort. It has a certain scope and limitations, takes a certain line of approach, exhibits certain emphases, has certain ends-in-view, etc. As an initial step in specifying the nature of this study, I shall indicate its central problem, i. e. , that problem to the solution of which the solutions of the various other problems with which it (...) is concerned are merely means. The central problem of this study is that of determining how Hume's theory of im agination is related to, or involved in, the generic features and main lines of argument of his philosophy of the human understanding. The expression "philosophy of the human understanding" is obvious to allude to a restriction on the scope of this investigation. ly intended Actually, it is a title suggested to me by two of Hume's philosophical writings; and to anyone who is even modestly acquainted with these writings, its reference should be no mystery. Hume published the first two so-called "Books" of his A Treatise of Human Nature in 1739. The first of these two Books was entitled "Of the Human Understanding. " Nine years later, he published a work under the title, An Enquiry Con cerning Human Understanding. (shrink)

Von Hippel & Trivers (VH&T) propose that self-deception has evolved to facilitate the deception of others. However, they ignore the subjective moral costs of deception and the crucial issue of credibility in self-deceptive speech. A self-signaling interpretation can account for the ritualistic quality of some self-deceptive affirmations and for the often-noted gap between what self-deceivers say and what they truly believe.

In this paper I focus on two contrasting concepts of deduction and induction that have appeared in introductory (formal) logic texts over the past 75 years or so. According to the one, deductive and inductive arguments are defined solely by reference to what arguers claim about the relation between the premises and the conclusions. According to the other, they are defined solely by reference to that relation itself. Arguing that these definitions have defects that are due to their simplicity, I (...) develop definitions that remove these defects by assigning a combination of roles to both arguers’ claims concerning the premises/conclusion relation and the relation itself. Along the way I also present and briefly defend definitions of both deductive and inductive validity that are significantly different from the norm. (shrink)

In the early 1970s, a World Health Organization‐initiated and United States‐funded project released lab‐reared mosquitoes outside New Delhi in the first large‐scale field trials of the genetic control of mosquitoes. Despite partnering with the Indian Council of Medical Research and investing significantly in outreach to local communities at the release sites, the project was embroiled in controversy and became an object of vehement debate within the Indian parliament and diplomatic contretemps between the United States and India. This early episode of (...) genetic control research demonstrates how a scientific collaboration was entangled in geopolitics and shaped by the legacy of colonialism. This historical case study has implications for public deliberation in the present, pointing to the challenges of shared decision‐making in the context of structural inequality, the way that a backdrop of military interest in a technology can impede trust, and the long‐term consequences of projects that foster mistrust. (shrink)

Citizen science models of public participation in scientific research represent a growing area of opportunity for health and biomedical research, as well as new impetus for more collaborative forms of engagement in large-scale research. However, this also surfaces a variety of ethical issues that both fall outside of and build upon the standard human subjects concerns in bioethics. This article provides background on citizen science, examples of current projects in the field, and discussion of established and emerging ethical issues for (...) citizen science in health and biomedical research. (shrink)

Cognitive science is experiencing a pragmatic turn away from the traditional representation-centered framework toward a view that focuses on understanding cognition as "enactive." This enactive view holds that cognition does not produce models of the world but rather subserves action as it is grounded in sensorimotor skills. In this volume, experts from cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, robotics, and philosophy of mind assess the foundations and implications of a novel action-oriented view of cognition. Their contributions and supporting experimental evidence show that (...) an enactive approach to cognitive science enables strong conceptual advances, and the chapters explore key concepts for this new model of cognition. The contributors discuss the implications of an enactive approach for cognitive development; action-oriented models of cognitive processing; action-oriented understandings of consciousness and experience; and the accompanying paradigm shifts in the fields of philosophy, brain science, robotics, and psychology. ContributorsMoshe Bar, Lawrence W. Barsalov, Olaf Blanke, Jeannette Bohg, Martin V. Butz, Peter F. Dominey, Andreas K. Engel, Judith M. Ford, Karl J. Friston, Chris D. Frith, Shaun Gallagher, Antonia Hamilton, Tobias Heed, Cecilia Heyes, Elisabeth Hill, Matej Hoffmann, Jakob Hohwy, Bernhard Hommel, Atsushi Iriki, Pierre Jacob, Henrik Jörntell, Jürgen Jost, James Kilner, Günther Knoblich, Peter König, Danica Kragic, Miriam Kyselo, Alexander Maye, Marek McGann, Richard Menary, Thomas Metzinger, Ezequiel Morsella, Saskia Nagel, Kevin J. O'Regan, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Giovanni Pezzulo, Tony J. Prescott, Wolfgang Prinz, Friedemann Pulvermüller, Robert Rupert, Marti Sanchez-Fibla, Andrew Schwartz, Anil K. Seth, Vicky Southgate, Antonella Tramacere, John K. Tsotsos, Paul F. M. J. Verschure, Gabriella Vigliocco, Gottfried Vosgerau. (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

Self-plagiarism, textual recycling and redundancy seemed to be controversial and unethical; however some questions about its definition are still open. The objective in this paper presented study was to use bibliometric analysis to synthesise and visualize the research literature production and derive a typology of self-plagiarism research. Five topics emerged: Self-plagiarism, Institutional self-plagiarism, Self-plagiarism and ICT, Self-plagiarism in academic writing, Self-plagiarism in science. The state of the art topics seem to be “social medium”, “virtual world”, “face book”, “sociomateriality”, “knowledge sharing”, (...) “open access”, “institutional repository”, “retraction” and “responsible conduct”. (shrink)

Summary Tycho Brahe's lunar theory, mostly the work of his assistant Christian Longomontanus, published in the Progymnasmata (1602), was the most advanced and accurate lunar theory yet developed. Its principal innovations are: the introduction of equant motion for the first inequality in order to separate the determination of direction and distance; a more accurate limit for the second inequality although requiring a more complex calculation; additional inequalities of the variation and, in place of the annual inequality in Tycho's earlier theory, (...) a reduction in the equation of time; in the latitude theory a variation of the inclination of the orbital plane and an inequality of the motion of the nodes; a reduction in the range of variation of distance, parallax, and apparent diameter. Some of these were already present in Tycho's earlier lunar theory (1599), but all were changed in notable ways. Twenty years later Longomontanus published a modified version of the lunar theory in Astronomia Danica (1622), for the purpose of facilitating the calculation through new correction tables, and also explained his reasons for parts of the theory in the Progymnasmata. This paper is a technical study of both lunar theories. (shrink)

Wiggins and Wilbanks (2019) present citizen science as a range of “models” that fall under the rubric of public participation. They seem to have accepted what they call the “‘populist rhetoric’ tha...

Wiggins and Wilbanks’s (2019) article draws attention to the rise of citizen science in the medical domain, part of a larger participatory turn in which citizens and patients are increasingly invol...

Wiggins and Wilbanks (2019) provide an overview of what they consider to be different models of citizen science in health and biomedical research and highlight related ethical issues. They offer, h...

Andrea Wiggins and John Wilbanks offer a rich and nuanced description of citizen science, which they define as “a range of participatory models for involving non-professionals as collaborators in s...

Wiggins and Wilbanks (2019) raise a number of interesting concerns vis-à-vis citizen science and research. However, one area of innovation in citizen science that has seen significant advancements...

In their article “The Rise of Citizen Science in Health and Biomedical Research,” Wiggins and Wilbanks (2019) present a new typology for understanding the complex landscape of health and biomedical...

In their target article, “The Rise of Citizen Science in Health and Biomedical Research,” Andrea Wiggins and John Wilbanks (2019) summarize some of the emerging ethical issues related to citizen sc...

In their contribution, Wiggins and Wilbanks (2019) discuss the rise of citizen science and elaborate on several ethical issues that go beyond standard approaches in research ethics. They rightly sa...

Andrea Wiggins and John Wilbanks’ article (2019) presents us with a welcome overview of the neglected, novel ethical issues raised by the advent of citizen science in health and biomedical contexts. This contribution takes a rather different approach, focusing on a very specific (yet also overlooked) problem in this context - the ethical implications of self-administered genetic testing. This problem, however, is particularly illustrative of the “ethics gap” between traditional medical settings and new public-driven scientific practices, emphasized by Wiggins (...) and Wilbanks in their more wide-ranging treatment. (shrink)

The target article by Wiggins and Wilbanks (2019) reports on the history and typology of the models of citizen science emerging in health and biomedical research with the rapid dispersion and repur...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind by Timothy M. CostelloeSaul TraigerTimothy M. Costelloe. The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 312. Hardback. ISBN: 9781474436397. $107.00.If anything about Hume’s philosophy can be characterized as widely accepted, it is that the imagination is front and center in Hume’s account of the mind. The aim of (...) Timothy Costelloe’s book is to fully develop the observation, that the imagination, as Hume understands it, is “the canvas of the mind.” Costelloe amply demonstrates that the imagination is a broad canvas, ranging from Hume’s epistemology and metaphysics, to his aesthetics, moral and political philosophy, history, philosophy of religion, and his general conception of philosophy itself. Seven substantial chapters cover these areas, and show how Hume takes the imagination to play a pivotal role in each.One of the many strengths of this book is that Costelloe responsibly mines the secondary literature, carefully explaining the interpretations he seconds and those he finds wanting. The attention to the relevant secondary literature is apparent from the start, where Costelloe laments the surprising dearth of book-length treatments of Hume on the imagination, but helpfully highlights both the lesser known Hume-centric monographs on the imagination by Furlong and Wilbanks, as well as more widely read interpretations.The introductory chapter makes important distinctions and introduces some main concepts. Hume differentiates the imagination’s “combinatory power” from its “creative power.” While the uninhibited ability to concatenate ideas might also be seen as a creative act, Costelloe sees the creative power where the imagination [End Page 173] “generates a class of ideas—‘fictions’ of a certain sort—independent of experience and according to its own inner logic” (21). This characterization makes sense when viewing the imagination’s function as directed towards a goal, such as achieving coherence or creating an aesthetically pleasing effect. Costelloe suggests that achieving an aesthetically pleasing effect is an element in any exercise of the imagination’s creative power. The imagination creates easy transitions among ideas where there were none, where doing so is pleasurable, or aided by the passions.Costelloe introduces his account of Hume’s fictions as errors of the imagination whereby ideas are formed in a manner different from the standard derivation from antecedent impressions. He insists, helpfully, that fictions are not illusions, but rather errors of a different kind. Though both involve error, fictions, unlike illusions, are not described in terms of jest or irony (30).Though he acknowledges that Hume does not describe any fictions as “artificial,” Costelloe finds it helpful to draw a distinction between natural and artificial fictions. Natural fictions are generated without reflection. Artificial fictions, such as those created by poets and philosophers, issue from “the voluntary act of imagination” (31). Costelloe holds that artificial fictions “are rarely taken to refer to objects with real existence and that any professed belief is really a matter of people being persuaded of something and taking the ideas in question as having real referents, thus only lending themselves to their existence for one reason or another” (31). This is a bit unclear. Certainly, poetic fictions are voluntary creations not intended to refer to real objects. But substance, and the double existence of ideas and external objects, as philosophical fictions, surely both involve belief and the corresponding existential commitments on the part of the philosophers who are committed to them. It is also difficult to see the purported contrast between belief and taking ideas to have real referents.Chapter 2, on metaphysics, is the longest chapter in the book, and it addresses the fictions of the imagination in Hume’s account of space and time, continued and distinct existence, liberty and necessity, and personal identity. Costelloe is sensitive to the worry that classifying Hume’s subject in Book 1 of the Treatise as metaphysics may appear to be slighting the central epistemological concerns and failing to appreciate Hume’s nascent cognitive psychology. Such worries fall away as Costelloe explores the roles that the imagination plays in the formation of our conception of duration without change, and the identity... (shrink)