Clinical diagnostic medicine is an experimental science based on observation, hypothesis making, and testing. It is an use dynamic process that involves observation and summary, diagnostic conjectures, testing, review, observation and summary, new or revised conjectures, i.e. it is an iterative process. It can then be said that diagnostic hypotheses are also ‘observation-laden’. My aim is to enlarge on the strategies of medical diagnosis as these are meshed in training and clinical experience—that is, to describe the patterns of reasoning used (...) by experienced clinicians under different diagnostic circumstances and how these patterns of inquiry allow further insight into the evaluation and treatment of patients. I do not aim to present a theory and illustrate it with examples; I wish rather am to let a realistic example, similar to actual clinical scenarios, direct the exposition. To this end, I introduce an account of medical diagnosis—briefly comparing and contrasting it to other accounts—in order to focus on discussing the process of diagnosis through a detailed clinical case. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:How does the diagnosis process work? This essay traces the philosophical underpinnings of diagnosis from Hume through Kant, Peirce, and Popper, analyzing how pathologists amalgamate sensibility, intuition, and imagination to form new hypotheses that can be tested by evidence and experience.

In Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice every set has the same cardinal number as some ordinal. Von Rimscha has weakened this condition to “Every set has the same cardinal number as some transitive set”. In set theory without the axiom of choice, we study the deductive strength of this and similar statements introduced by von Rimscha.

Clinical diagnostic medicine is an experimental science based on observation, hypothesis making, and testing. It is an use dynamic process that involves observation and summary, diagnostic conjectures, testing, review, observation and summary, new or revised conjectures, i.e. it is an iterative process. It can then be said that diagnostic hypotheses are also ‘observation-laden’. My aim is to enlarge on the strategies of medical diagnosis as these are meshed in training and clinical experience—that is, to describe the patterns of reasoning used (...) by experienced clinicians under different diagnostic circumstances and how these patterns of inquiry allow further insight into the evaluation and treatment of patients. I do not aim to present a theory and illustrate it with examples; I wish rather am to let a realistic example, similar to actual clinical scenarios, direct the exposition. To this end, I introduce an account of medical diagnosis—briefly comparing and contrasting it to other accounts—in order to focus on discussing the process of diagnosis through a detailed clinical case. (shrink)

We study the relationships between definitions of compactness in topological spaces and the roll the axiom of choice plays in these relationships.

This grounded study investigated the negotiation of authorship by faculty members, graduate student mentors, and their undergraduate protégés in undergraduate research experiences at a private research university in the northeastern United States. Semi-structured interviews using complementary scripts were conducted separately with 42 participants over a 3 year period to probe their knowledge and understanding of responsible authorship and publication practices and learn how faculty and students entered into authorship decision-making intended to lead to the publication of peer-reviewed technical papers. Herein (...) the theoretical model for the negotiation of authorship developed through the analysis of these interviews is reported. The model identifies critical causal and intervening conditions responsible for the coping strategies faculty and students employ, which, in our study, appear to often produce unfortunate consequences for all involved. The undergraduate student researchers and their graduate student mentors interviewed in this study exhibited a limited understanding of authorship and the requirements for authorship in their research groups. The power differential between faculty and students, the students’ limited epistemic development, the busy-ness of the faculty, and the faculty’s failure to prioritize authorship have been identified as key factors inhibiting both undergraduate and graduate students from developing a deeper understanding of responsible authorship and publication practices. Implications for graduate education and undergraduate research are discussed, and strategies for helping all students to develop a deeper understanding of authorship are identified. (shrink)

6. Jürgen Habermas's Critical Hermeneutics Introduction Habermas and Critical Hermeneutics Life and Influences 132 Habermas's Place in Contemporary Thought ...

Biological scientists, like scientists in other disciplines, are uncertain about whether or how to use their knowledge and time to provide society with insight and guidance in handling the effects of inventions and discoveries. This article addresses this issue. It presents a typography of structures in which scientists may contribute to social understanding and decisions. It describes the different ways in which these contributions can be made. Finally it develops the ethical arguments that justify the view that biological scientists have (...) social responsibilities. (shrink)

In this concentrated, intelligible, and useful introductory volume Stanley Porter and Jason Robinson give a splendid overview of hermeneutical and interpretive thought. Neither an all-inclusive survey that moves too quickly over the surface of complex issues nor a specialized volume on a single, narrow topic, Porter and Robinson's Hermeneutics provides critical analysis of major movements and figures in hermeneutics and interpretive theory in the modern era -- from Schleiermacher and Heidegger to Thiselton and Culpepper -- showing especially how these (...) interpreters and their movements have impacted biblical and theological study. (shrink)

The willows and the hazel copses greenShall now no more be seenFanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.[Milton, Lycidas, Ll. 42-44] It is my thesis that the reader is always making sense , and in the case of these lines the sense he makes will involve the assumption of a completed assertion after the word "seen," to wit, the death of Lycidas has so affected the willows and the hazel copses green that, in sympathy, they will wither and die (...) . In other words at the end of line 43 the reader will have hazarded an interpretation, or performed an act of perpetual closure, or made a decision as to what is being asserted. I do not mean that he has done four things, but that he has done one thing the description of which might take any one of four forms—making sense, interpreting, performing perpetual closure, deciding about what is intended. Whatever he has done he will undo it in the act of reading the next line; for here he discovers that his closure, or making of sense, was premature and that he must make a new one in which the relationship between man and nature is exactly the reverse of what was first assumed. The willows and the hazel copses green will in fact be seen, but they will not be seen by Lycidas. It is he who will be no more, while they go on as before, fanning their joyous leaves to someone else's soft lays . Nature is not sympathetic, but indifferent, and the notion of her sympathy is one of those "false surmises" that the poem is continually encouraging and then disallowing. Stanley E. Fish, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of John Skelton's Poetry, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. His other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" , "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" , "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time" . See also: "Professor Fish on the Milton Variorum" by Douglas Bush in Vol. 3, No. 1; "Stanley Fish's 'Interpreting the Variorum': Advance or Retreat?" by Steven Mailloux in Vol. 3, No. 1; "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" by Stanley E. Fish in Vol. 3, No. 1. (shrink)

In the summer of 1977, as I was preparing to teach Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology to a class at the School of Criticism and Theory in Irvine, a card floated out of the text and presented itself for interpretation. It read:WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE AUTHORImmediately I was faced with an interpretive problem not only in the ordinary and everyday sense of having to determine the meaning and the intention of the utterance but in the special sense occasioned by the (...) fact that I didn’t know who the author named or, rather, not named by the card was. It might have been Derrida himself whom I had met, but only in passing. Or it might have been Derrida’s translator, Gayatri Spivak whom I had known for some time and who might well have put me on the publisher’s list. Or it might have been the publisher, in this case the Johns Hopkins University Press of whose editorial board I was then a member. In the absence of any explicit identification, I found myself a very emblem of the difficulties or infelicities that attend distanced or etiolated communication: unable to proceed because the words were cut off from their anchoring source in a unique and clearly present intention. That is to say, I seemed, in the very moment of my perplexity, to be proving on my pulse the superiority of face-to-face communication, where one can know intentions directly, to communication mediated by the marks of writing and in this case by a writing that materialized without any clues as to its context of origin. It may not have been a message found in a bottle, but it certainly was a message found in a book. (shrink)

Risk management of nanotechnology is challenged by the enormous uncertainties about the risks, benefits, properties, and future direction of nanotechnology applications. Because of these uncertainties, traditional risk management principles such as acceptable risk, cost–benefit analysis, and feasibility are unworkable, as is the newest risk management principle, the precautionary principle. Yet, simply waiting for these uncertainties to be resolved before undertaking risk management efforts would not be prudent, in part because of the growing public concerns about nanotechnology driven by risk perception (...) heuristics such as affect and availability. A more reflexive, incremental, and cooperative risk management approach is required, which not only will help manage emerging risks from nanotechnology applications, but will also create a new risk management model for managing future emerging technologies. (shrink)

The uneasy relation between violence and sanctity, between oppression and culture, underlies the dramatic action of Euripides' "Ion." Ion's monody ends with his threatening to shoot the birds who would soil the temple, or in other words, to protect purity through violence and death. The earlier part of his song also shows how the forces of exclusion and domination create sacredness. Ritual silence , restricted access to the aduton, ritual chastity, even the irreversible transformation of natural gardens into laurel brooms (...) and jugs of water all suggest how violence and domination create culture out of nature. The rape of Creusa epitomizes the relation between culture and violence. Her meeting with Ion reveals the psychological cost of social oppression and portrays the imperfect interdependence between moral feelings and legal institutions. Various dramatic devices portray the divisions in Creusa's mind that the injustice has created, devices including self-address, riddling speech, self-restraint, and silence. Her reluctance to pose her bold question to the oracle, and her displacement of the story onto the person of a raped "friend," show her resentful awareness that social institutions collaborate in the oppression. Ion's disillusionment echoes her resentment more theoretically. Together their comments show how moral rules and legal institutions, though fundamentally based on personal feelings such as shame and indignation, enact these feelings only imperfectly; the resulting dissonance in turn leads to further indignation and moral reflection. Finally, the allusions to fifth-century politics in Ion's speech on Athenian politics and elsewhere suggest that democracy itself depends on political domination and imperialism. (shrink)

Let κ denote a regular uncountable cardinal and NS the normal ideal of nonstationary subsets of κ. Our results concern the well-known open question whether NS fails to be κ + -saturated, i.e., are there κ + stationary subsets of κ with pairwise intersections nonstationary? Our first observation is: Theorem. NS is κ + -saturated iff for every normal ideal J on κ there is a stationary set $A \subseteq \kappa$ such that $J = NS \mid A = \{X \subseteq (...) \kappa:X \cap A \in NS\}$ . Turning our attention to large cardinals, we extend the usual (weak) Mahlo hierarchy to define "greatly Mahlo" cardinals and obtain the following: Theorem. If κ is greatly Mahlo then NS is not κ + -saturated. Theorem. If κ is ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable (e.g., weakly compact), ethereal (e.g., subtle), or carries a κ-saturated ideal, then κ is greatly Mahlo. Moreover, there is a stationary set of greatly Mahlo cardinals below any ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable cardinal. These methods apply to other normal ideals as well; e.g., the subtle ideal on an ineffable cardinal κ is not κ + -saturated. (shrink)