Dennett’s theory of consciousness is often misread as broadly anti-realist. His aversion to ontology encourages readers to form their own interpretations, and the rhetoric he employs often seems to support the anti-realist reading. Dennett does offer defenses against the anti-realist charge, but these are piecemeal and diffuse. This paper examines Dennett’s most current expression, which proves insufficient on its own as a resolution to the ontological dispute. Drawing on related discussions in an attempt to find a resolution leads to a (...) further challenge from Schwitzgebel. Crucial distinctions between inner and outer, cause and effect, and reporting and expressing, unite in a general characterization of how a realist explanation of consciousness should bottom out. Dennett’s form of realism depends upon distinguishing the explananda of consciousness from their doomed explanans; anti-realism about the latter makes room for genuine explanation of how things seem to us. (shrink)

Francis Fukuyama's controversial new book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, has elicited varied reactions, but like it or not, it seems likely to be influential. Here are three opinions. —Ed.

Examination of a limited number of publisher’s Instructions for Authors, guidelines from two scientific societies, and the widely accepted policy document of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) provided useful information on authorship practices. Three of five journals examined (Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) publish papers across a variety of disciplines. One is broadly focused on topics in medical research (New England Journal of Medicine) and one publishes research reports in a single (...) discipline (Journal of Bacteriology). Similar elements of publication policy and accepted practices were found across the policies of these journals articulated in their Instructions for Authors. A number of these same elements were found in the professional society guidelines of the Society for Neuroscience and the American Chemical Society, as well as the ICMJE Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. Taken together, these sources provide the basis for articulating best practices in authorship in scientific research. Emerging from this material is a definition of authorship, as well as policy statements on duplicative publication, conflict of interest disclosure, electronic access, data sharing, digital image integrity, and research requiring subjects’ protection, including prior registration of clinical trials. These common elements provide a foundation for teaching about scientific authorship and publication practices across biomedical and life sciences disciplines. (shrink)

The sociological study of knowledge infrastructures and classification has traditionally focused on the politics and practices of classifying things or people. However, actors’ work to escape dominant infrastructures and pre-established classification systems has received little attention. In response to this, this article argues that it is crucial to analyze, not only the practices and politics of classification, but also actors’ work to escape dominant classification systems. The article has two aims: First, to make a theoretical contribution to the study of (...) classification by proposing to pay analytical attention to practices of escaping classification, what the article dubs classification egress. This concept directs our attention not only to the practices and politics of classifying things, but also to how actors work to escape or resist classification systems in practice. Second, the article aims to increase our understanding of the history of quantified and statistical health surveillance. In this, the article investigates how actors in health surveillance assembled a knowledge infrastructure for surveilling, quantifying, and detecting unknown patterns of congenital malformations in the wake of the thalidomide disaster in the early 1960s. The empirical account centers on the actors’ work to detect congenital malformations and escape the dominant nosological classification of diseases, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), by replacing it with a procedural standard for reporting of symptoms. Thus, the article investigates how actors deal with the tension between the-already-known-and-classified and the unknown-unclassified-phenomenon in health surveillance practice. (shrink)

This study examines the association between mystical experience, as captured by the Francis-Louden Mystical Orientation Scale, and psychological health, as captured by the Eysenckian three dimensional model of personality, among 329 students attending a state university in Turkey. The data reported no significant association between mystical orientation and psychoticism scores, and a small but significant positive association between mystical orientation and neuroticism scores, after controlling for sex differences. This finding suggests that there may be a small inverse association between (...) mystical experience and psychological health among students in Turkey. (shrink)

Between James Parkinson's 'shaking palsy' and the first report of the post-encephalitic manifestation — initially not recognizable as a complication of that incipient 'Spanish flu' epidemic — it took over a hundred years to arrive at a clear appreciation and differentiation of its most disabling feature: rigidity. This paper traces the development, step by hesitant or bold step, of the pertinent ideas and terms regarding muscle tone before and after Parkinson, their basis in neuropathological advances as they were made (...) for related syndromes of basal ganglia disorders, toward the eventual clinical correlation. Chief credits, after Sauvages, must go to Charcot for emphasizing the increase in muscle tone, and to Kinnier Wilson for establishing the extrapyramidal connection. (shrink)

Benveniste’s experiments were at the origin of a scientific controversy that has never been satisfactorily resolved. Hypotheses based on modifications of water structure that were proposed to explain these experiments were generally considered as quite improbable. In the present paper, we show that Benveniste’s experiments violated the law of total probability, one of the pillars of classical probability theory. Although this could suggest that quantum logic was at work, the decoherence process is however at first sight an obstacle to describe (...) this macroscopic experimental situation. Based on the principles of a personalist view of probability, a modeling could nevertheless be built that fitted the outcomes reported in Benveniste’s experiments. Indeed, in QBism, there is no split between microscopic and macroscopic, but between the world where an agent lives and his internal experience of that world. The outcome of an experiment is thus displaced from the object to its perception by an agent. By taking into account both the personalist view of probability and measurement fluctuations, all characteristics of Benveniste’s experiments could be described in a simple modeling: change of the biological system from resting state to “activated” state, concordance of “expected” and observed outcomes and apparent “jumping” of “biological activities” from sample to sample. No hypothesis on change of water structure was necessary. In conclusion, a modeling of Benveniste’s experiments based on a personalist view of probability offers for the first time a logical framework for these experiments that have remained controversial and paradoxical till date. (shrink)

We report empirical results on factors that influence how people reason with default rules of the form "Most x's have property P", in scenarios that specify information about exceptions to these rules and in scenarios that specify default-rule inheritance. These factors include (a) whether the individual, to which the default rule might apply, is similar to a known exception, when that similarity may explain why the exception did not follow the default, and (b) whether the problem involves classes of (...) naturally occurring kinds or classes of artifacts. We consider how these findings might be integrated into formal approaches to default reasoning and also consider the relation of this sort of qualitative default reasoning to statistical reasoning. (shrink)

In this paper we report preliminary results on how people revise or update a previously held set of beliefs. When intelligent agents learn new things which conflict with their current belief set, they must revise their belief set. When the new information does not conflict, they merely must update their belief set. Various AI theories have been proposed to achieve these processes. There are two general dimensions along which these theories differ: whether they are syntactic-based or model-based, and what (...) constitutes a minimal change of beliefs. This study investigates how people update and revise semantically equivalent but syntactically distinct belief sets, both in symbolic-logic problems and in quasi-real-world problems. Results indicate that syntactic form affects belief revision choices. In addition, for the symbolic problems, subjects update and revise semantically-equivalent belief sets identically, whereas for the quasi-real-world problems they both update and revise differently. Further, contrary to earlier studies, subjects are sometimes reluctant to accept that a sentence changes from false to true, but they are willing to accept that it would change from true to false. (shrink)

Examining the nature of teachers’ emotions and how they are managed and regulated in the act of teaching is crucial to assess the quality of teacher’s instructions. Despite the essential role emotions play in teachers’ lives and instruction, research on teachers’ emotions has not paid much attention on teachers’ state emotions in the context of daily teaching. Significant portion of literature has described teachers’ emotions by foregrounding trait emotions through deductive methodological approaches. This paper explored elementary teachers’ state and trait (...) emotions while preparing for teaching and during teaching, reasons that underlie these emotions, and the relationship between their emotions and the quality of their mathematics instruction. Participants were seven elementary teachers working in the U.S. who participated in Holistic Individualized Coaching (HIC) professional development that consisted of 5 cycles of coaching over an year. For each coaching cycle pre-coaching conversation and post-coaching conversation data were collected regarding state emotions teachers felt in anticipation of teaching and during teaching retrospectively. Also, teachers responded adapted Teaching Emotion Scale (TES) that was aimed to measure trait emotions. In order to compare teachers’ emotions with instructional quality, coaching session were video recorded and analyzed to determine the quality of instruction. Findings of this study showed that teachers reported 6 categories of emotions (positive, negative, neutral, mixed-positive, mixed-negative, and mixed-complex), and often in non-typical ways (e.g., “not nervous”, “anxious but in a positive way”), and mixed emotions were the most dominant category. Also, teachers had more positive emotions anticipating teaching, than actually teaching the lesson, and there was no noticeable change of emotions across the 5 coaching cycles. The reason teachers felt mixed emotions reflected complex and context-specific nature of teaching, which was not articulated in the literature. There were no clear relationships between emotional experiences and instructional quality. This study allowed participants to freely describe their authentic, complex, overlapping, and ambiguous emotions in the context of active teaching, which contributes opening up the possibilities of diversifying teacher emotion research and shows the significance and usefulness of understanding teachers’ state emotions. (shrink)

THINKER is an automated natural deduction first-order theorem proving program. This paper reports on how it was adapted so as to prove theorems in modal logic. The method employed is an indirect semantic method, obtained by considering the semantic conditions involved in being a valid argument in these modal logics. The method is extended from propositional modal logic to predicate modal logic, and issues concerning the domain of quantification and existence in a world's domain are discussed. Finally, we look at (...) the very interesting issues involved with adding identity to the theorem prover in the realm of modal predicate logic. Various alternatives are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Francis Sparshott TEXT AND PROCESS IN POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY Ir. H. Bradley in an optimistic moment described philosophy as an • unusually intense and sustained attempt to think clearly.1 If that is what it is, it is clearly a process; and, if it is a process, one does not see what a philosophical text could be. A text is surely not a process, though it may be the (...) product of one. A text that purported to be philosophy would deceive, as many of us complain that textbooks deceive, by substituting for the living endeavors of thought a series of slogans and purported conclusions the parroting of which demonstrates that thought has been evaded, not clarified. But there are such things as philosophical texts, and we could not easily do without them. They are, indeed, central to our experience ofwhat philosophy is. They must be doing some work, and it is up to us to establish what that work could be. 2. If philosophy is indeed a process of clarifying thought, it must in each of us be a self-critical monologue, and it must in the world be a manyvoiced conversation among Thaïes and his contemporaries and successors through history. (Similar traditions in other parts of the world constitute different conversations, in other corners of the room, and sometimes we eavesdrop on each other's conversations; but we will not be concerning ourselves witii them here.) A philosophical text should be a record of parts ofthat conversation, a minute ofthe long meeting ofminds. Without such a record the conversation could be no better than a bull session; we would be forever returning to the beginning, not to recover our origins but because memory had stretched to snapping. After all, what use would the clarification of thought be unless die progress won could be preserved? Philosophy begets philosophy as humanity begets humanity; there must be an Aristotelian efficient cause, a form-bearer. 2 Philosophy and Literature 3.As minute of the clarifying conversation, the text might serve the purpose of an interim conclusion, a tentative result. But not necessarily, and not if the clarity sought is indeed clarity in thinking. Minutes of decision-making bodies may record only the motions passed; but deliberating bodies often prefer to include in the minutes the arguments on either side, so that when they come to reconsider a matter on which a motion has been passed they may do so with renewed insight. A progress report may report only where one has progressed to, but it may also retrace the progression whereby die progress was made. So perhaps die best sort of text in philosophy is die sort I shall call a philosophoumenon, a text that recreates in and for the reader the experience ofclarification itself. But if this is to be done the reader must be sucked in: before clarification can be done, unclarity must be re-enacted. Confusion must be induced and its recognition must be enforced: the reader must be enticed not only to recognize but to undergo in person the Socratic elenchus, which for two millennia has ensured that the best philosophers shall be the best hated philosophers. To do its elenctic work, a philosophoumenal text must be deeply ambiguous, internally divided, blatantly self-contradictory. The Platonic dialogues are exemplary in this as in most ways: dramatic denunciations of drama, written disparagements of writing, conclusive proofs of the impotence of reason. But the other masters did the same: Descartes guides the reader of his Meditations step by step through the argument that is to lead the reader to doubt Descartes's existence; Aristotle invents and deploys a highly technical vocabulary which he never uses in the same way twice, and establishes a classification of intellectual methods into which none ofhis own work can be fitted; Wittgenstein obsessively philosophizes to show the folly of philosophizing, and carefully ensures diat his students circulate die content of the texts that he ostentatiously refuses to publish; Kierkegaard stridently claims authorship of his pseudonymous works so that he can repudiate them audioritatively; G. E. Moore accurately defines goodness so as to make it clear exactly what he is saying when he says that goodness is... (shrink)

One of the key intentions of fresh expressions of church is to reach the kind of people inherited church find it hard to reach. Psychological type profiling of church congregations has demonstrated that Anglican churches have particular difficulty in reaching those whose Jungian judging preference is for thinking rather than for feeling. Studies that have explored the psychological type profile of participants within fresh expressions suggest that they do not significantly differ from inherited congregations in terms of reaching thinking types. (...) Two previous studies, however, have reported higher proportions of thinking types attending cathedral carol services. The present study among 441 individuals attending the Holly Bough service in Liverpool Cathedral also found a higher proportion of thinking types among the participants. These findings suggest that cathedral carol services may be functioning as fresh expressions of church in a significant way.Contribution: Situated within the science of cathedral studies, rooted in psychological type theory, and drawing on data from 441 attendees at the Holly Bough service, this study demonstrates that cathedral services at Christmas are more successful than either inherited church or fresh expressions of church in reaching thinking types. (shrink)

A classic finding reported in Beck (1966a) is that observers tend to indicate a more natural texture break between a set of T’s and tilted T’s than between a set of T’s and backward L’s. This finding has played a prominent role in discussions about the properties of texture segmentation and in the development of computational theories of texture segmentation. Due to the small sample size of the original study, we replicated the original experiment with a larger sample. Regrettably, we (...) discovered that the description in Beck (1966a) is insufficient to allow us to reproduce the stimuli. For our replication, we created stimuli that seem consistent with the spirit of the original study. The results of the replication study partly matchBeck’s original data (r = .59), but conclusions indicated by these results deviate from some of Beck’s key conclusions.We also further explored the influential claim derived from a second experiment in Beck (1966a) that texture segmentation was not related to the perceived similarity of elements. Contrary to this claim, a re-analysis of Beck’s data indicates the counterintuitive conclusion that observers tend to indicate stronger texture segmentation between regions that are rated as being more similar. In a replication of the second experiment, this relation flipped so that the replication observers indicated stronger texture segmentation for regions with lower similarity ratings. Despite being influential, we conclude that there are substantial problems with the stimuli, analyses, and conclusions in Beck (1966a). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ippolito Desideri S.J.: Opere e BibliografiaFrancis V. TisoIppolito Desideri S.J.: Opere e Bibliografia. By Enzo Gualterio Bargiacchi. Roma: Institutum Historicum S.I., 2007. 303 pp.One of the great lacunae in the history of Buddhist-Christian relations has been a lack of attention to the work of missionaries who reported on Buddhist belief and practice in various parts of East and South Asia. As a result, the important work [End Page (...) 166] of the Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733) has not received the attention it deserves. There had been centuries of missionary contact with the Buddhists of Sri Lanka, Japan, and China, but it was not until the mission of Desideri to Tibet (1716–1721) that the connection between the Buddhism of Southeast Asia and that of China and Japan could be established on the basis of Desideri’s study of Tibetan historiographical materials.Desideri was the first European to become fluent in Tibetan, the first to understand Buddhist Mahayana scholasticism, the first to grasp the meaning of Vajrayana ritual and practice, the first to describe the political situation of Tibet, the first to engage in serious debate with Tibetan lamas, and the first to write extensively on Catholic Christianity in Tibetan. Desideri left a body of works in Tibetan that have been translated into Italian by Giuseppe Toscano, SX, and published by IsMEO during the 1980s. Yet Desideri’s greatest achievement, the translation into Latin of Je Tsong Kapa’s Lam Rim Chen Mo, seems to have been lost. Moreover, the great intellectual and spiritual accomplishments of this Jesuit missionary were not much appreciated in his own lifetime, in part because of the political situation of the Society of Jesus at that time. As a result, although the overall facts of Desideri’s life were never completely forgotten, his writings lay hidden in the Jesuit Archives at Rome at precisely the time when those engaging in contact with Asian religions would have benefited from his insights.The author of this summary of the works of Ippolito Desideri and of the entire corpus of materials related to his oeuvre, Enzo Gualtiero Bargiacchi, is convinced that even today the works of this eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary have something to offer. I would agree with Bargiacchi, because I am equally convinced that the Desiderian project is in many ways a better model for interreligious dialogue between Christians and Buddhists than any of the more recent models that have been proposed and implemented since the Second Vatican Council. Recent essays by Trent Pomplun and Michael Sweet in Buddhist-Christian Studies (vol. 26, 2006) have shown that exchanges between missionaries and Buddhists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were more profound and more fruitful than we are inclined to believe on the basis of superficial histories of the period. It seems that, with the suppression of the Jesuits (1773–1815), a certain retrenchment in the Catholic theology of grace operating outside the confines of the Church set in, muting the vibrant speculations of theologians seeking to make theological sense of the reports of missionaries such as Desideri.Desideri’s approach to the Buddhism of Tibet continues to challenge our own approach to interreligious dialogue. In the first place, Desideri underwent extensive linguistic, spiritual, and theological training as a young Italian Jesuit. He seems to have had unusual physical stamina and mental acuity, particularly for the study of languages. He learned Tibetan in about four months and immediately began writing a treatise, the Tho rangs, explaining Christianity to the Tibetan literati. As his Tibetan improved, he composed other, more sophisticated works in which he took up the topics on which Buddhists and Catholic Christians could agree (the contingency of the created world, the moral law) and on which they disagree (the law of karmic retribution, [End Page 167] emptiness, reincarnation, soteriology). Desideri sought to take seriously the philosophical positions of the lamas, with whom he lived and engaged in debate. He adapted his presentation of Christianity to the linguistic requirements of Tibet, and he did not hesitate to acknowledge the excellence he found in the moral character and intellectual refinement of the Tibetans. Finally, one detects a respect... (shrink)

The case of Elizabeth Bouvia, a handicapped woman who wanted doctors to assist her in dying, reveals that autonomy is insufficient as the sole or even the most important public policy principle. Where the community is asked to endorse a course of action by granting medical and financial assistance, considerations of autonomy must give way to the broader notion of the public good, which gives primacy to the respect for life.

Working within the sensing, intuition, feeling, thinking (SIFT) approach to biblical hermeneutics, the present study invited a hermeneutical community of 23 type-aware participants to explore the account of the Death of Lazarus as reported in John 11: 1–17 within type-alike groups differentiated according to the participants’ dominant function-orientation. Five groups were constituted differentiating: introverted sensing, introverted intuition, extraverted intuition, introverted and extraverted feeling and introverted and extraverted thinking. These five groups generated distinctive readings of the narrative that were characteristic of (...) the individual type preference. Contribution: The SIFT method, situated within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, is concerned with attending to the influence exerted by the psychological type profile of the reader on interpreting the text. The present study goes beyond previous work by comparing the responses of five hermeneutical communities (each distinguished by a different dominant function-orientation) to the same passage of scripture. (shrink)

Previous research employing Jungian psychological type theory has both demonstrated that Church of England inherited congregations have problems engaging thinking types and suggested that fresh expressions of church have failed to address that problem. Three previous studies, however, have reported higher proportions of thinking types attending cathedral carol services. The present study was designed to check that finding on a larger sample. The Francis Psychological Type Scales were completed by 941 participants at the afternoon Carol Services held in Liverpool (...) Cathedral on Christmas Eve 2019, and the data compared with the profile of 3304 participants within 140 inherited congregations. The present study also found a higher proportion of thinking types among the participants at these carol services. These findings suggest that cathedral carol services may be functioning as fresh expressions of church in a significant way. Further research is needed to explore whether other cathedral services may function in similar ways.CONTRIBUTION: Situated within the science of congregation studies, rooted in psychological type theory and drawing on data from 941 participants at the afternoon Carol Services held in Liverpool Cathedral on Christmas Eve 2019, this study confirms that cathedral carol services at Christmas are more successful than either inherited church or fresh expressions of church in reaching thinking types. (shrink)

This report is the testimony of a man who worked with plants, specifically, in what used to be called the ‘drugs and spices’ trade, selling simples for around 40 years. And what better vantage-point than the trader’s to trace, over several decades, the evolution of the attitude of French people (and Europeans more generally) towards plants and, by extension, towards ‘nature’? Beneath the need for medicinal plants, seasonings or flavourings there is a hidden desire of varying strength for ‘nature’. (...) This account describes the decline and disappearance of herbalism, the ‘return’ to plants and the ‘organic’ movement, the manipulations that ran alongside that ‘comeback’, and the market in ‘bogus nature’ created by the synthesizing laboratories. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the complex humanitarian crises of the 1990s, the concept of the Responsibility to Protect emerged powerfully on the international stage. The report of the International C...

Federal and state budgetary constraints continually challenge Medicaid. The effects of benefit cuts are common: long waiting lists for community‐based services, skeletonized drug formularies with unstable access to long‐term prescriptions, no psychiatric therapy for people immobilized by depression, and no more than fourteen days of acute hospitalization. Reimbursements may be so low that providers cannot hire qualified staff and must reduce services, close facilities, or refuse to take Medicaid altogether. Misguided efficiency policies may afflict some groups of patients as well. (...) Decisions to narrow access rights to publicly funded health care promote the perception that more broadly inclusive programs would be unwisely and unfairly generous. They also risk characterizing disability rights as “special,” confined to a narrow class of people who charitably ought not to be expected to provide for themselves. In contrast, on a philosophical view we have been exploring—one that addresses problems of justice under circumstances of injustice by pursuing rather than reducing inclusion—efforts like these are unjust. (shrink)

How much should the present generations sacrifice to reduce emissions today, in order to reduce the future harms of climate change? Within climate economics, debate on this question has been focused on so-called “ethical parameters” of social time preference and inequality aversion. We show that optimal climate policy similarly importantly depends on the future of the developing world. In particular, although global poverty is falling and the economic lives of the poor are improving worldwide, leading models of climate economics may (...) be too optimistic about two central predictions: future population growth in poor countries, and future convergence in total factor productivity (TFP). We report results of small modifications to a standard model: under plausible scenarios for high future population growth (especially in sub-Saharan Africa) and for low future TFP convergence, we find that optimal near-term carbon taxes could be substantially larger. (shrink)

The study reported here sought to examine the ethical orientations of business managers and business students in Singapore. Data were obtained using Defining Issue Test. Analysis of Variance revealed that age, education and religious affiliation had influenced cognitive moral development stages of the respondents. Vocation, gender and ethnicity did not seem to have affected moral judgement of the subjects. Contrary to the general view, both business students and business managers demonstrated the same level of sensitivity to ethical dimensions of decision-making. (...) Implications of the findings and limitations of the study are discussed. (shrink)

This is a response to the letter to the editor “Prioritizing the Prevention of Early Deaths during Covid‐19,” by Govind Persad.

It is often stated that optimal global climate policy requires global harmonization of marginal abatement costs – i.e., a single carbon price throughout the world. Chichilnisky and Heal (1994) have shown quite generally that this is only the case if distributional issues are ignored, or if lump-sum transfers are made between countries. Else, a policy in which different regions face different carbon prices may be superior to one with a single global carbon price from a welfare point of view. Still, (...) most integrated assessment models (IAMs) assume away distributional issues and report a single optimal carbon price. We calculate utilitarian-optimal carbon prices under zero cross-regional lump-sum transfers in the multi-region IAM NICE. The result is optimal global climate policy with different regional carbon prices in which the poorest regions face initially low prices, while the richest regions face very high prices from the outset. This entails significant welfare gains over the standard single price optima commonly reported, which, as we argue briefly in conclusion, can be improved upon still by allowing international trading in the corresponding emissions allocations. (shrink)

In July 2020, the H3Africa Ethics and Community Engagement (E&CE) Working Group organised a webinar with ethics committee members and biomedical researchers from various African institutions throughout the Continent to discuss the issue of whether and how biological samples for scientific research may be accessed by commercial entities when broad consents obtained for the samples are silent. 128 people including Research Ethics Committee members (10), H3Africa researchers (46) including members of the E&CE working group, biomedical researchers not associated with H3Africa (...) (27), representatives from the National Institutes of Health (16) and 10 other participants attended the webinar and shared their views. Several major themes emerged during the webinar, with the topics of broad versus explicit informed consent, defining commercial use, legacy samples and benefit sharing prevailing in the discussion. This report describes the consensus concerns and recommendations raised during the meeting and will be informative for future research on ethical considerations for genomic research in the African research context. (shrink)

When the Covid‐19 pandemic reached the United States in spring 2020, many states and hospitals announced crisis standards of care plans that used age as a categorical exclusion criterion. Such age choosing was quickly flagged as discriminatory, and so some states and hospitals shifted to embedding age as a tiebreaker deeper in their plans. Different rationales were given for using age as a tiebreaker: that younger patients were more likely to survive than older patients, that saving younger patients would save (...) more life years, and that younger patients deserved a chance to live through life's stages. We provide a critical analysis of these three rationales, noting the differences between them, and then questioning the ethical and legal justifications for such age choosing. (shrink)

Although perceptual grouping has been widely studied, its mechanisms remain poorly understood. We propose a neural model of grouping that, through top-down control of its circuits, implements a grouping strategy involving both a connection strategy (which elements to connect) and a selection strategy (that defines spatiotemporal properties of a selection signal to segment target elements and facilitate identification). We apply the model to a letter discrimination task that investigated relationships among uniform connectedness and the grouping principles of proximity and shape (...) similarity. Participants reported whether small circles formed a global letter E or H, and these circles could be connected by a line or be embedded in a matrix of squares. In the model, a good grouping strategy for this task consists of a connection strategy that connects circles but not squares for all conditions and a selection strategy that uses a selection signal of varying size, depending on whether squares were present. Consistent with empirical results, which were verified in two replication studies, model performance is worse with distractor squares, and line connectors improve performance only in the condition with squares. Rather than relying on abstract grouping principles, we show how the empirical results can be explained in terms of observers implementing a task-dependent grouping strategy that promotes overall performance. (shrink)

More than 50 years after the publication of the Harvard Committee Report that sought to define death according to whole-brain function criteria, this document continues to generate a diversity of o...

Following from life history and attachment theory, individuals are predicted to be sensitive to variation in environmental conditions such that risk and uncertainty are internalized by cognitive, affective, and psychobiological mechanisms. In turn, internalizing of environmental uncertainty is expected to be associated with attitudes toward risk behaviors and investments in education. Native American youth aged 10–19 years (n = 89) from reservation communities participated in a study examining this pathway. Measures included family environmental risk and uncertainty, present and future time (...) perspective, adolescent attachment, attitudes toward risk, investments in education, and salivary cortisol. Results support the idea that environmental risk and uncertainty are internalized during development. In addition, internalizing mechanisms significantly predicted attitudes toward risk and education: (1) lower scores on future time perspective and higher cortisol predicted higher scores on risk attitudes, and (2) higher scores on future time perspective and lower scores on problems with attachment predicted higher self-reported school performance. Gender differences were seen, with males anticipating a shorter lifespan than females, which predicted higher scores on risk attitudes and lower school performance. Implications for research on adolescent problem behavior and academic achievement are discussed. (shrink)

A number of recent legal cases in the United States have considered both disability‐based exceptions to Covid‐19‐related mask mandates and disability‐based claims to stronger masking rules in states restricting the abilities of local governments to enforce mask mandates. We argue that a proper legal and ethical analysis of such cases requires understanding the distinction between disability accommodations and disability modifications. Disability accommodations are individualized adjustments that enable qualified individuals to perform jobs or achieve access on terms comparable to those experienced (...) by others. Disability modifications are programmatic changes to structures or policies that increase accessibility. We contend that in the context of mask mandates, modifications rather than accommodations are ethically desirable because modification‐oriented policies promote disability access in a way that treats all individuals fairly, avoiding the risk of promoting misinformation and uncertainty about the health benefits of masking. (shrink)

Policies and processes dealing with institutional conflict of interest lag well behind those dealing with individual COI. To remediate this, academic institutions must develop strategies for addressing some of the unique challenges in iCOI, including: clarifying the definition of iCOI that addresses the range of individuals potentially involved; implementing a well-designed electronic database for reporting and managing iCOI across multiple leadership constituencies; and providing ongoing education to appropriate institutional officials that communicates the importance of managing iCOI.

“Much as I dislike the idea of ages, I think a good case can be made that science has now moved from an Age of Reductionism to an Age of Emergence, a time when the search for ultimate causes of things shifts from the behavior of parts to the behavior of the collective” (Laughlin 2005 , p. 208). This quotation by Nobel laureate in physics, Robert B. Laughlin, in his recent book, A Different Universe , raises interesting scientific and philosophical (...) issues. Bench chemists continue successfully to synthesize new compounds and report results through quantitative and structural analyses of constitutive elements. The whole continues to be understood by analysis of the parts. The relatively recent science of emergence comes with a different perspective: how to explain novel, irreducible, and unpredictable appearances in cosmic evolution? New wholes seem to be more that the sum of their parts. How do these wholes come to exist? Do classical concepts of matter satisfy the science of emergence? Descriptions of nature’s phenomena that challenge classical interpretations of the “Age of Reductionism” are presented to stimulate possible new scientific and philosophical concepts for an age of reductionism and emergence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology”Francis G. Lu (bio), David Lukoff (bio), and Robert P. Turner (bio)Jackson and Fulford have written an impor-tant paper which addresses an area of increasing interest in the United States—the relationship between religious/spiritual experiences and psychopathology. Using primarily the Present State Examination as the diagnostic framework, the authors describe in rich clinical detail three patients where certain phenomena lead to a possible diagnosis (...) of schizophrenia. However, the patients’ outcomes were uniformly positive—how can this be? The authors argue persuasively for the importance of a contextual assessment “in which psychotic phenomena themselves are embedded in the values and beliefs of the person concerned.” In this commentary, we will first present innovations in the DSM-IV relevant to cultural and religious/spiritual issues, which complement the authors’ conclusions, and then comment upon the paper from this perspective.In the DSM-IV Introduction (1994), a section entitled “Ethnic and Cultural Considerations” provides a rationale for innovations in DSM-IV that better enables its use with culturally diverse individuals: “A clinician who is unfamiliar with the nuances of an individual’s cultural frame of references may incorrectly judge as psychopathology those normal variations in behavior, belief, or experience that are particular to the individual’s culture. For example, certain religious practices or beliefs (e.g., hearing or seeing a deceased relative during bereavement) may be misdiagnosed as manifestations of a Psychotic Disorder” (xxiv). In the introduction, three types of information are cited: 1) sections entitled “Age, Gender and Cultural Considerations” in the text of ninety diagnostic categories discuss clinical variations due to these factors; 2) an Outline for Cultural Formulation designed to assist the clinician in systematically evaluating and reporting the impact of the individual’s cultural context; and 3) a Glossary of Culture-Bound Syndromes. These innovations, based on recommendations of the NIMH Workgroup on Culture, Diagnosis and Care to the Task Force on DSM-IV, are described in extensive detail in an important recent book (Mezzich, Kleinman, Fabrega, and Parron 1996).As an example of the importance of the Age, Gender, and Cultural Consideration section relevant to religious and spiritual experiences, consider the section in the text describing schizophrenia, where the following appears: “Clinicians assessing the symptoms of Schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations that are different from their own must take cultural differences into account. Ideas that may appear to be delusional in one culture (e.g., sorcery and witchcraft) may be commonly held in another. In some cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a [End Page 75] religious content may be a normal part of religious experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or hearing God’s voice)” (281). Secondly, in the analogous section of the text describing Brief Psychotic Disorder, the following appears: “It is important to distinguish symptoms of Brief Psychotic Disorder from culturally sanctioned response patterns. For example, in some religious ceremonies, an individual may report hearing voices, but these do not generally persist and are not perceived as abnormal by most members of the person’s community” (303).The Outline for Cultural Formulation provides the clinician a concise tool to specify the following information concerning the cultural context that is relevant to clinical care: cultural identity of the individual, cultural explanations of the individual’s illness, cultural factors related to psychosocial environment and levels of functioning, cultural elements of the relationship between the individual and the clinician, and overall cultural assessment for diagnosis and care. Religion is explicitly mentioned in the third section so as to encourage the assessment of “the role of religion... in providing emotional, instrumental, and information support” (1994, 844). This outline for cultural formulation is more fully explicated in a recent chapter by Lu, Lim, and Mezzich (1995).A major innovation in DSM-IV relevant to this topic is the new diagnostic category entitled Religious or Spiritual Problem defined as follows: “This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is a religious or spiritual problem. Examples include distressing experiences that involve loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of spiritual values that may not necessarily be related to an organized... (shrink)

: The technologies at the intersection of assisted reproduction and genetics call for a new regulatory approach, say Franco Furger and Francis Fukuyama, authors of the recent report Beyond Bioethics. In the essay below they map out their recommendation. In the following essays, James Fossett argues that regulation is likelier—and would be better—at the state level, Leonard Fleck calls for more robust public involvement, and John Robertson recommends sticking with the status quo. Turning from procedural to substantive issues, (...) Josephine Johnston takes up Furger and Fukuyama’s suggestion that children have a right to a traditional genetic parentage. (shrink)

Background Disclosure of obtaining informed consent from patients (ICP) and research ethics committee (REC) approval in published reports is sometimes omitted. To date, no disclosure data are available on surgical research. Objective Our aim was to assess whether REC approval and ICP were documented in surgical trials. Study design Overall, 657 randomised trials, published between 2005 and 2010 in 10 international journals, were included. We collected the report rate of REC approval and ICP and contacted the corresponding author when (...) ethical information was lacking. Results Among the 657 randomised controlled trials (RCT), 576 (87.7%) stated that an REC had approved the research, and 606 (92.2%) stated that ICP had been requested. Furthermore, 28 RCTs (4.3%) reported neither REC nor ICP. Conclusions The phase III randomised surgical trials that were analysed were shown to have respected fundamental ethical principles in approximately 90% of the cases examines. (shrink)