In ‘Kripke on epistemic and metaphysical possibility: two routes to the necessary a posteriori’, Scott Soames identifies two arguments for the existence of necessary a posteriori truths in Naming and Necessity . He argues that Kripke's second argument relies on either of two principles, each of which leads to contradiction. He also claims that it has led to ‘two-dimensionalist’ approaches to the necessary a posteriori which are fundamentally at odds with the insights about meaning and modality expressed in NN. I (...) argue that the alleged second argument is not in NN. I identify the mistakes that lead to Soames' misinterpretation. (shrink)

This paper raises questions concerning Ted Morris’ interpretation of Hume’s notion of meaning and investigates the private and public aspects of Hume’s notion of meaning.

Metaphysicians are among the very wiliest of philosophers. This means that an attack on a metaphysical position will fail if it only proceeds by showing that the posited objects are odd in some metaphysically significant way. To choose a pertinent example, if one wants to oppose the fictional realist, it isn’t enough to show that fictional entities have arbitrary individuation conditions, that they flit in and out of existence, or that they are far more numerous and varied than one imagines. (...) As Eaker (2012) and Effingham (2012) remind us, the fictional realist and the metaphysical fundamentalist can agree that this is what fictional objects are like. It’s even insufficient to claim that such objects are mind- and language dependent, utterly dependent on our thinking of them (or on our coining terms that stipulatively ‘refer’ to them). Fictional realists and metaphysical fundamentalists can agree with this too, but deny these are sufficient conditions for non-existence. (shrink)

Encourages Christian teenage girls to explore and discover Truth.

Hume’s moral philosophy is a sentiment-based view. Moral judgment is a matter of the passions; certain traits of character count as virtues or vices because of the approval or disapproval they evoke in us, feelings that express concern we have about the social effects of these traits. A sentiment-based approach is attractive, since morality seems fundamentally to involve caring for other people. Sentiment-based views, however, face a real challenge. It is clear that our affections are often particular; we favor certain (...) persons over others. This poses a problem when it comes to determining the proper content of morality. The ties of sentiment would seem to be in tension with the aspirations of morality toward impartiality and universality. (shrink)

Much has been made of the importance of training ethical, socially conscious engineers, but does US engineering education actually encourage neophytes to take seriously their professional responsibility to public welfare? Counter to such ideals of engagement, I argue that students’ interest in public welfare concerns may actually decline over the course of their engineering education. Using unique longitudinal survey data of students at four colleges, this article examines (a) how students’ public welfare beliefs change during their engineering education, (b) whether (...) engineering programs emphasize engagement, and (c) whether these program emphases are related to students’ public welfare beliefs. I track four specific public welfare considerations: the importance to students of professional/ethical responsibilities, understanding the consequences of technology, understanding how people use machines, and social consciousness. Suggesting a culture of disengagement, I find that the cultural emphases of students’ engineering programs are directly related to their public welfare commitments and students’ public welfare concerns decline significantly over the course of their engineering education. However, these findings also suggest that if engineering programs can dismantle the ideological pillars of disengagement in their local climates, they may foster more engaged engineers. (shrink)

Contributing to the cultural ecosystem services literature, this paper draws on the in-depth place narratives of two coastal case-study sites in Wales (UK) to explore how people experience and understand landscape change in relation to their sense of place, and what this means for their wellbeing. Our place narratives reveal that participants understand coastal/intertidal landscapes as complex socio-ecological systems filled with competing legitimate claims that are difficult to manage. Such insights suggest that a focus on diachronic integrity (Holland and O'Neill (...) 1996) within place narratives might offer a route to more socially and culturally acceptable environmental management strategies. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is again attracting significant attention across all areas of social life. One important sphere of focus is education; many policy makers across the globe view lifelong learning as an essential means to prepare society for an “AI future” and look to AI as a way to “deliver” learning opportunities to meet these needs. AI is a complex social, cultural, and material artifact that is understood and constructed by different stakeholders in varied ways, and these differences have significant social (...) and educational implications that need to be explored. Through analysis of thirty-four in-depth interviews with stakeholders from academia, commerce, and policy, alongside document analysis, we draw on the social construction of technology to illuminate the diverse understandings, perceptions of, and practices around AI. We find three different technological frames emerging from the three social groups and argue that commercial sector practices wield most power. We propose that greater awareness of the differing technical frames, more interactions among a wider set of relevant social groups, and a stronger focus on the kinds of educational outcomes society seeks are needed in order to design AI for learning in ways that facilitate a democratic education for all. (shrink)

Moral reasoning among media professionals varies. Historically, advertising professionals score lower on the Defining Issues Test than their media colleagues in journalism and public relations. However, the extent to which professional identity impacts media professionals’ moral reasoning has yet to be examined. To understand how professional identity influences moral reasoning, if at all, and guided by theories of moral psychology and social identity, 134 advertising practitioners working in the USA participated in an online experiment. While professional identity was not a (...) significant predictor of moral reasoning, an interaction effect between gender and identity priming occurred. This finding suggests that we reconsider moral psychology theory’s explanatory power for media practitioners and consider how the complexity of professional identities in concert with gender and professional training, among other variables, interact to affect moral reasoning. In addition, advertising practitioners participating in this experiment scored higher on the DIT than those tested previously. (shrink)

In this paper we shall draw on Peirce’s four methods of fixating belief to provide a template for examining classroom experience. Such a template provides a context for understanding the dynamics that emerge at the intersection of existing belief and new experience. We shall develop several examples of tenacity as an impediment to student growth, discuss traditional responses to the irrationally tenacious student, develop Peirce’s four methods in the context of an educational setting, and draw conclusions from his work for (...) educational theory. Our belief is not that tenacity inevitably works against the cultivation of critical awareness, but that this virtue needs to be tempered by a full purview of educational aims and their attending virtues. (shrink)

Guided by theories of moral psychology and social identity, one hundred and fifty-three public relations practitioners working in the United States participated in an online experiment that tested...

The computations involved in statistical learning have long been debated. Here, we build on work suggesting that a basic memory process, chunking, may account for the processing of statistical regularities into larger units. Drawing on methods from the memory literature, we developed a novel paradigm to test statistical learning by leveraging a robust phenomenon observed in serial recall tasks: that short‐term memory is fundamentally shaped by long‐term distributional learning. In the statistically induced chunking recall (SICR) task, participants are exposed to (...) an artificial language, using a standard statistical learning exposure phase. Afterward, they recall strings of syllables that either follow the statistics of the artificial language or comprise the same syllables presented in a random order. We hypothesized that if individuals had chunked the artificial language into word‐like units, then the statistically structured items would be more accurately recalled relative to the random controls. Our results demonstrate that SICR effectively captures learning in both the auditory and visual modalities, with participants displaying significantly improved recall of the statistically structured items, and even recall specific trigram chunks from the input. SICR also exhibits greater test–retest reliability in the auditory modality and sensitivity to individual differences in both modalities than the standard two‐alternative forced‐choice task. These results thereby provide key empirical support to the chunking account of statistical learning and contribute a valuable new tool to the literature. (shrink)

What does American pragmatism contribute to contemporary debates about human-animal relationships? Does it acknowledge our connections to all living things? Does it bring us closer to an ethical treatment of all animals?

Conventionalists about promising believe that it is wrong to break a promise because the promisor takes advantage of a useful social convention only to fail to do his part in maintaining it. Anti-conventionalists claim that the wrong of breaking a promise has nothing essentially to do with a social convention. Anti-conventionalists are right that the social convention is not necessary to explain the wrong of breaking most promises. But conventionalists are right that the convention plays an essential role in any (...) satisfactory account of promising. A new conventionalism can explain this by appealing to special features of social conventions. Two of these special features have important implications for any moral requirements they mediate, such as the requirement to keep one's promises and the moral requirements attached to social or occupational roles. First, these requirements will not depend on features of a situation that are inaccessible to typical participants in the convention. Second, these requirements often cannot be tailored to fit the overly unusual circumstances of participants. (shrink)

How linguistic structures evolve so as to become easier to process is addressed by Isbilen and Christiansen for the Now‐or‐Never bottleneck. The authors suggest that this fundamental challenge in language processing is coped with by rapid compression of the transient linguistic input into chunks then to be passed on. As linguistic structures that can be chunked more easily tend to stabilize and proliferate, language evolves to fit learners’ cognitive capabilities.

Individuals tend to judge bad side effects as more intentional than good side effects (the Knobe or side- effect effect). Here, we assessed how widespread these findings are by testing eleven adult cohorts of eight highly contrasted cultures on their attributions of intentional action as well as ratings of blame and praise. We found limited generalizability of the original side-effect effect, and even a reversal of the effect in two rural, traditional cultures (Samoa and Vanuatu) where participants were more likely (...) to judge the good side effect as intentional. Three follow-up experiments indicate that this reversal of the side-effect effect is not due to semantics and may be linked to the perception of the status of the protagonist. These results highlight the importance of factoring cultural context in our understanding of moral cognition. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is (...) to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward. (shrink)

Since 1984, when Cole and Zuckerman referred to gender differences in productivity among academic scientists as a puzzle, sociologists have sought to explain these differences by incorporating primarily institutional-level factors. In addition to these factors, the author contends that an undertheorized and heretofore unmeasured concept—the extent of research specialization—can also help explain the process by which gender affects research productivity. Although some researchers have examined areas of specialization, the extent of research specialization has been completely neglected in studies of academic (...) careers. Using a probability sample of academics in two disciplines, primary data collection, and simultaneous equation modeling, the author finds that the extent of research specialization is a critical intervening variable: Women specialize less than men and thereby lose out on an important means of increasing their productivity. (shrink)

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from _Thought in the Act _Combining philosophy and aesthetics, _Thought in the Act_ is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” (...) a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. _Thought in the Act_ enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics. (shrink)

From co-authored publications to sponsored projects involving multiple partner institutions, collaborative practice is an expected part of work in the academy. As evaluators of a National Science Foundation Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate grant awarded to four university partners in a large southern state, the authors recognized the increasing value of collaborative practice in the design, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination of findings in the partnership over time. When planning a program among partnering institutions, stakeholders may underestimate the need (...) for, and value of, collaborative practice in facilitating partnership functioning. This method paper outlines an evaluative model to increase the use of collaborative practice in funded academic partnership programs. The model highlights collaborative practice across multiple stakeholder groups in the academic ecology: Sponsors of funded programs, Program partners and participants, Assessment and evaluation professionals, academic researchers, and the national and global Community. The SPARC model emphasizes evidence-based benefits of collaborative practice across multiple outcome domains. Tools and frameworks for evaluating collaborative practice take a view of optimizing partnership operational performance in achieving stated goals. Collaborative practice can also be an integral element of program activities that support the academic success and scholarly productivity, psychosocial adjustment, and physical and psychological well-being of stakeholders participating in the program. Given the goal of our alliance to promote diversification of the professoriate, the model highlights the use of collaborative practice in supporting stakeholders from groups historically underrepresented in STEM fields across these outcome domains. Using data from a mixed-methods program evaluation of our AGEP alliance over 4 years, the authors provide concrete examples of collaborative practice and their measurement. Results discuss important themes regarding collaborative practice that emerged in each stakeholder group. Authors operationalize the SPARC model with a checklist to assist program stakeholders in designing for and assessing collaborative practice in support of project goals in funded academic partnership projects, emphasizing the contributions of collaborative practice in promoting diversification of the professoriate. (shrink)

Erin Plunkett draws from both analytic and continental sources to argue for the philosophical relevance of style, making the case that the essay form is uniquely suited to address the sceptical problem. The authors examined here-Montaigne, Hume, the early German Romantics, Kierkegaard and Stanley Cavell-bring into relief the relationship between scepticism and ordinary life and situate the will to know within a broader frame of meaningful human activity. The formal features of the essay call attention to time, subjectivity, and (...) language as the existential conditions of knowledge. -/- In contrast to foundationalist approaches, which expect philosophy to reach empirical or rational certainty, Plunkett demonstrates through these writings the philosophical advantages of a fragmentary, non-dogmatic style of writing. A Philosophy of the Essay shows how this medium can help us come to terms with the contingency and uncertainty of life. (shrink)

A philosopher and mother mines classic Daoist texts of Chinese philosophy for wisdom relevant to today's parents. The ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius compared children to tender sprouts, shaped by soil, sunlight, water, and, importantly, the efforts of patient farmers and gardeners. At times children require our protection, other times we need to take a step back and allow them to grow. Like sprouts, a child's character, tendencies, virtues, and vices are at once observable and ever-changing. A practical parenting manual, philosophical (...) reflection on the relationship between parent and child, and necessary response to modern stereotypes of Chinese parenting, Little Sprouts reconsiders cultural definitions of success and explores how we might support and nourish young people. Engaging deeply with foundational Daoist and Confucian thinkers, Georgetown philosopher Erin Cline offers accessible, provocative musings on key parenting issues-from family rituals to learning and vocation to challenges and disabilities-and helps us grow into better parents of joyful, fulfilled children. (shrink)

If someone says, “Asians are good at math” or “women are empathetic,” I might interject, “you're stereotyping” in order to convey my disapproval of their utterance. But why is stereotyping wrong? Before we can answer this question, we must better understand what stereotypes are and what stereotyping is. In this essay, I develop what I call the descriptive view of stereotypes and stereotyping. This view is assumed in much of the psychological and philosophical literature on implicit bias and stereotyping, yet (...) it has not been sufficiently defended. The main objection to the descriptive view is that it fails to include the common-sense idea that stereotyping is always objectionable. I argue that this is actually a benefit of the view. In the essay's final part, I put forward two hypotheses that would validate the claim that stereotyping is always morally or epistemically wrong. If these hypotheses are false—which is very likely—we have little reason to build moral or epistemic defect into the very idea of a stereotype. Moreover, we must abandon the seemingly attractive claim that judging individuals based on group membership is intrinsically wrong. (shrink)

In his most recent book, Philip Pettit presents and defends a “republican” political philosophy that stems from a tradition that includes Cicero, Machiavelli, James Harrington, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Madison. The book provides an interpretation of what is distinctive about republicanism—namely, Pettit claims, its notion of freedom as nondomination. He sketches the history of this notion, and he argues that it entails a unique justification of certain political arrangements and the virtues of citizenship that would make those arrangements possible. Of (...) historical and philosophical interest, he stresses, is the fundamental contrast between freedom as nondomination and slavery. Joseph Priestly, for instance, invoked this contrast in defending the cause of the American Revolution, and in 1769 declared, incredibly, that if the parliament of Great Britain continued to tax the American colonies, “the colonists will be reduced to a state of as complete servitude, as any people of which there is an account in history”. Those opposed to American independence, among them Jeremy Bentham, relied instead on a Hobbesian notion of freedom as noninterference, using it to argue that the colonists were no more interfered with by the British government than were citizens of Britain. Drawing out this contrast, Pettit aims to establish that a republican view of freedom better supports the institutions of a constitutional democracy than does liberalism. His account of the distinguishing characteristics and strengths of republicanism is, however, only partially successful. Neither his case that a republican notion of freedom provides for a more solid defense of democratic institutions and constitutional protections than is available within liberalism, nor his argument that republicanism can better address “private” injustices, is convincing. (shrink)

Among philosophers, the question about strategic fouls has been whether they are ethically justified in light of our best conception of sport. This paper proposes a different defense. I argue that many strategic fouls should be excused even if we regard them as unjustified. I first lay out a partial defense of the assumptions that playing to win cannot be subordinate to playing skillfully and that winning has value that cannot be accounted for in terms of the skill that produces (...) it. I then argue that the logic of competitive play structures practical reason such that it is unreasonable to require even an ethical competitor always to subordinate the aim of winning to ethical standards within the game. Some ethical failures should be excused. The argument implies limits on the excusing conditions. I discuss these limits in some detail, showing that they fit patterns in the common acceptance of strategic fouls. I then address possible objections. In conclusion I argue that the logic of excuse rather than justification explains a common reaction to strategic fouls, resolving what might otherwise appear to be a contradiction in that reaction. (shrink)

Over the past two decades the growth of the organic sector has been accompanied by a shift away from first party, or peer review, systems of certification and towards third party certification, in which a disinterested party is responsible for the development of organic standards and the verification of producer compliance. This paper explores some of the limitations of the third party certification model and presents the case of Mexico as an example of how an alternative form of participatory certification (...) has emerged. The paper suggests that participatory guarantee systems (PGS) are reflective of the growing “beyond organic” movement, which focuses on reconstructing the local and re-embedding food systems into their socio-ecological contexts. It argues that PGS offers a number of benefits for producers and consumers, particularly in the South, but that it faces a number of challenges as well, such as a lack of formal recognition, social conflicts and dependence on donated resources. (shrink)

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. The author underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion (...) that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.--. (shrink)

The idea of ‘moral responsibility’ is typically linked with praise and blame, and with the notion of ‘the voluntary’. It is often thought that if we are free, in the relevant sense, we may “deserve” praise or blame; otherwise, we do not. But when we look at whether and why we need the notions of praise and blame, we find that they are not as intimately connected with desert as many philosophers have thought. In particular, this paper challenges the idea (...) that forms of evaluation and behavior tied to our “reactive attitudes” (especially resentment) best further morality’s aims, properly understood. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 17-19.

A core tenet of research ethics is that risks assumed by research participants are reasonable, balanced, and minimized in relation to benefit to the individual and to society. It is also generally accepted that people who cannot give their own informed consent ought only to be exposed to low risks in research, unless there is a compensating potential for direct benefit.However, there is no consensus on whether individuals should be able to voluntarily consent to high net risk in research—or, in (...) other words, to research that is not justified by direct benefits to the individual and must be justified by benefits to others in society. The Belmont Report—perhaps the most canonical document in research ethics—does not... (shrink)

There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this book, sports (...) fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are. Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are. (shrink)

While there has been extensive research on deception, extant literature has not examined how deception is processed solely from the customer's perspective. Extensive qualitative interviews were conducted and analyzed to inform the proposed framework. Cognitive dissonance theory and attribution theory are used to frame the process consumers go through when deception is perceived. When consumers perceive deceit, they will consider attribution before determining intentionality. Internal attributions relieve the company of wrongdoing to some extent, whereas external attributions lead consumers to examine (...) several elements of deception including intent. Unintentional deceit will trigger assessments of magnitude, stability, and switching costs; while less is considered when deceit is intentional. The findings of this research are important for advancing theory in relation to deceit and for helping practitioners understand the importance of changing consumer cognitions before consumers decide to change their behavior by discontinuing the relationship. (shrink)

This article examines whether and how a particular research practice is overseen and supervised, and by whom. This investigation fills notable gaps in the literature on science, including a lack of emphasis on larger sociopolitical structures, a neglect of regulation, and indifference toward ethics. The author focuses on the oversight of a particular research practice; data editing; which embodies qualities that are intriguing to sociologists of science: invisibility, uncertainty, heterogeneity, and reliance on tacit knowledge. These characteristics pose unique challenges to (...) oversight efforts. An analysis of in-depth interviews with gatekeepers reveals that although the methodological and ethical implications of data editing strategies can be substantial, oversight of such practices falls outside the stages and domains of current gatekeeping activity. These findings serve as the basis for recommendations to ensure data integrity while maintaining the professional autonomy of researchers. (shrink)

The widespread use of stimulants among healthy individuals to improve cognition has received growing attention; however, public attitudes toward this practice are not well understood. We determined the effect of framing metaphors and context of use on public opinion toward cognitive enhancement. We recruited 3,727 participants from the United States to complete three surveys using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk between April and July 2017. Participants read vignettes describing an individual using cognitive enhancement, varying framing metaphors (fuel versus steroid), and context of (...) use (athletes versus students versus employees). The main outcome measure was the difference in respondent-assigned level of acceptability of the use of cognitive enhancement by others and by themselves between the contrasting vignettes. Participants were more likely to support the use of cognitive enhancement by others than by themselves and more when the use of enhancement by others was framed with a fuel metaphor than with a steroid metaphor. Metaphoric framing did not affect participants’ attitudes toward their own use. Participants supported the use of enhancement by employees more than by students or athletes. These results are discussed in relation to existing ethical and policy literature. (shrink)

In this paper, we derive a four-stage process model of how hybrid organizations respond to specific challenges that arise under conditions of value pluralism and institutional complexity. Engaging in exploratory qualitative research of six Australian hybrid organizations, we identify institutional and organizational responses to pluralism, particularly as organizations strive to uphold multiple value commitments, such as social, environmental and/or financial outcomes. We find that by employing a process of separating, negotiating, aggregating, and subjectively assessing the value that is created, our (...) cases demonstrate how they move between logics in a dynamic fashion and address specific challenges of cognitive dissonance, incommensurability, interdependence and aggregation. Our model contributes to the literature by reframing the notion of ‘tensions’ that arise in conditions of hybridity and characterize specific challenges and sequential responses that may go some way to addressing why some hybrids employ particular responses to pluralism and why some succeed. (shrink)

Although Archaea inhabit the human body and possess some characteristics of pathogens, there is a notable lack of pathogenic archaeal species identified to date. We hypothesize that the scarcity of disease‐causing Archaea is due, in part, to mutually‐exclusive phage and virus populations infecting Bacteria and Archaea, coupled with an association of bacterial virulence factors with phages or mobile elements. The ability of bacterial phages to infect Bacteria and then use them as a vehicle to infect eukaryotes may be difficult for (...) archaeal viruses to evolve independently. Differences in extracellular structures between Bacteria and Archaea would make adsorption of bacterial phage particles onto Archaea (i.e. horizontal transfer of virulence) exceedingly hard. If phage and virus populations are indeed exclusive to their respective host Domains, this has important implications for both the evolution of pathogens and approaches to infectious disease control. (shrink)

In _Always More Than One_, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects (...) this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation? (shrink)

Due to the complexity of aesthetic ideas and the lack of a determinate concept that is adequate to the experience, we search for the words to describe our encounters with art. Sometimes, that search is in vain, and we have difficulty expressing ourselves. In such cases, we are so taken aback by the sheer amount of cognitive activity spurred by our aesthetic experience that we are silenced by art. Instead of viewing what happens in judgments of taste as “discursively mute,” (...) as does Joseph Cannon in his essay, “The Intentionality of Judgments of Taste in Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” I will show how the excess of aesthetic experience has the potential to foster sociability, communication, and ultimately, community. .. (shrink)

Biological and epidemiological phenomena are often measured with error or imperfectly captured in data. When the true state of this imperfect measure is a confounder of an outcome exposure relationship of interest, it was previously widely believed that adjustment for the mismeasured observed variables provides a less biased estimate of the true average causal effect than not adjusting. However, this is not always the case and depends on both the nature of the measurement and confounding. We describe two sets of (...) conditions under which adjusting for a non-deferentially mismeasured proxy comes closer to the unidentifiable true average causal effect than the unadjusted or crude estimate. The first set of conditions apply when the exposure is discrete or continuous and the confounder is ordinal, and the expectation of the outcome is monotonic in the confounder for both treatment levels contrasted. The second set of conditions apply when the exposure and the confounder are categorical. In all settings, the mismeasurement must be non-differential, as differential mismeasurement, particularly an unknown pattern, can cause unpredictable results. (shrink)