The prevalence and negative impact of brain disorders are increasing. Clinical Neuropsychology is a specialty dedicated to understanding brain-behavior relationships, applying such knowledge to the assessment of cognitive, affective, and behavioral functioning associated with brain disorders, and designing and implementing effective treatments. The need for services goes beyond neurological diseases and has increased in areas of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, among others. In Europe, a great deal of variability exists in the education and training of Clinical Neuropsychologists. Training models include (...) master’s programs, continuing education courses, doctoral programs, and/or post-doctoral specialization depending on the country, with no common framework of requirements, although patients’ needs demand equal competencies across Europe. In the past five years, the Standing Committee on Clinical Neuropsychology of the European Federation of Psychologists’ Association has conducted a series of surveys and interviews with experts in the field representing 30 European countries. The information, along with information from the existing literature, is used in presenting an overview of current and relevant topics related to policy and guidelines in the training and competencies in Clinical Neuropsychology. An option for the way forward is the EuroPsy Specialist Certificate which is currently offered in Work- and Organizational psychology and Psychotherapy. It builds upon the Basic Certificate and complements national standards without overriding them. General principles can be found that can set the basis for a common, solid, and comprehensive specialty education/training, sharpening the Neuropsychologists’ competencies across Europe. The requirements in Clinical Neuropsychology should be comparable to those for the existing specialty areas in the EuroPsy model. Despite the perceived challenges, developing a Specialist Certificate appears a step forward for the development of Clinical Neuropsychology. Recommendations are proposed towards a shared framework of competencies by the means of a common level of education/training for the professionals in Europe. Benchmarking training standards and competencies across Europe has the potential of providing protection against unqualified and ethically questionable practice, creating transparency, raising the general European standard, and promoting mobility of both Clinical Neuropsychologists and patients in Europe, for the benefit of the professional field and the population. (shrink)

The multitude of training models and curricula for the specialty of clinical neuropsychology around the world has led to organized activities to develop a framework of core competencies to ensure sufficient expertise among entry-level professionals in the field. The Standing Committee on Clinical Neuropsychology of the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations is currently working toward developing a specialty certification in clinical neuropsychology to establish a cross-national standard against which to measure levels of equivalency and uniformity in competence and service provision (...) among professionals in the field. Through structured interviews with experts from 28 European countries, we explored potential areas of core competency. Specifically, questions pertained to the perceived importance of a series of foundational, functional, and other competencies, as well as current training standards and practices, and optimal standards. Our findings revealed considerable agreement on academic and clinical training, despite varied actual training requirements currently, with fewer respondents relegating importance to training in teaching, supervision, and research, and even fewer to skills related to management, administration, and advocacy. European expert clinical neuropsychologists were in agreement with previous studies regarding the importance of sound theoretical and clinical training but management, administrative, and advocacy skills were not central to their perspective of a competent specialist in clinical neuropsychology. Establishing a specialty certificate in clinical neuropsychology based on core competencies may enable mobility of clinical neuropsychologists across Europe, and, perhaps, provide an impetus for countries with limited criteria to reconsider their training requirements and harmonize their standards with others. (shrink)

We discuss a recent attempt by Chris Daly and Simon Langford to do away with mathematical explanations of physical phenomena. Daly and Langford suggest that mathematics merely indexes parts of the physical world, and on this understanding of the role of mathematics in science, there is no need to countenance mathematical explanation of physical facts. We argue that their strategy is at best a sketch and only looks plausible in simple cases. We also draw attention to how frequently Daly and (...) Langford find themselves in conflict with mathematical and scientific practice. (shrink)

According to one popular nominalist picture, even when mathematics features indispensably in scientific explanations, this mathematics plays only a purely representational role: physical facts are represented, and these exclusively carry the explanatory load. I think that this view is mistaken, and that there are cases where mathematics itself plays an explanatory role. I distinguish two kinds of explanatory generality: scope generality and topic generality. Using the well-known periodical-cicada example, and also a new case study involving bicycle gears, I argue that (...) what is picked out by the mathematics are structural facts that go beyond any specific physical facts. (shrink)

We investigated people's ability to infer others’ mental states from their emotional reactions, manipulating whether agents wanted, expected, and caused an outcome. Participants recovered agents’ desires throughout. When the agent observed, but did not cause the outcome, participants’ ability to recover the agent's beliefs depended on the evidence they got. When the agent caused the event, participants’ judgments also depended on the probability of the action ; when actions were improbable given the mental states, people failed to recover the agent's (...) beliefs even when they saw her react to both the anticipated and actual outcomes. A Bayesian model captured human performance throughout, consistent with the proposal that people rationally integrate information about others’ actions and emotional reactions to infer their unobservable mental states. (shrink)

Background To describe the preferences for disclosure of individual biomarker results among mothers participating in a longitudinal birth cohort. Methods We surveyed 343 mothers that participated in the Health Outcomes and Measures of the Environment Study about their biomarker disclosure preferences. Participants were told that the study was measuring pesticide metabolites in their biological specimens, and that the health effects of these low levels of exposure are unknown. Participants were asked whether they wanted to receive their results and their child's (...) results. In addition, they were asked about their preferred method (letter vs in person) and format (more complex vs less complex) for disclosure of results. Results Almost all of the study participants wanted to receive their individual results (340/343) as well as their child's results (342/343). However, preferences for receiving results differed by education level. Mothers with less than a college degree preferred in-person disclosure of results more often than mothers with some college education or a college degree (34.3% vs 17.4% vs 7.9%, p<0.001). Similarly, mothers with less than a college education preferred a less complex disclosure format than mothers with some college education or a college degree (59.7% vs 79.1% vs 86.3%, p<0.0001). Conclusion While almost all study participants preferred to receive results of their individual biomarker tests, level of education was a key factor in predicting preferences for disclosure of biomarker results. To ensure effective communication of this information, disclosure of biomarker results should be tailored to the education level of the study participants. (shrink)

Philosophy textbooks typically treat bioethics as a form of "applied ethics"-i.e., an attempt to apply a moral theory, like utilitarianism, to controversial ethical issues in biology and medicine. Historians, however, can find virtually no cases in which applied philosophical moral theory influenced ethical practice in biology or medicine. In light of the absence of historical evidence, the authors of this paper advance an alternative model of the historical relationship between philosophical ethics and medical ethics, the appropriation model. They offer two (...) historical case studies to illustrate the ways in which physicians have "appropriated" concepts and theory fragments from philosophers, and demonstrate how appropriated moral philosophy profoundly influenced the way medical morality was conceived and practiced. (shrink)

Nonsense‐mediated RNA decay (NMD) represents an established quality control checkpoint for gene expression that protects cells from consequences of gene mutations and errors during RNA biogenesis that lead to premature termination during translation. Characterization of NMD‐sensitive transcriptomes has revealed, however, that NMD targets not only aberrant transcripts but also a broad array of mRNA isoforms expressed from many endogenous genes. NMD is thus emerging as a master regulator that drives both fine and coarse adjustments in steady‐state RNA levels in the (...) cell. Importantly, while NMD activity is subject to autoregulation as a means to maintain homeostasis, modulation of the pathway by external cues provides a means to reprogram gene expression and drive important biological processes. Finally, the unanticipated observation that transcripts predicted to lack protein‐coding capacity are also sensitive to this translation‐dependent surveillance mechanism implicates NMD in regulating RNA function in new and diverse ways. (shrink)

Abstract: On standard accounts, actions are caused by reasons (Davidson), and reasons are taken to be neural phenomena. Since neural phenomena are wholly understandable from a third-person perspective, standard views have no room for any ineliminable first-personal elements in an account of the causation of action. This article aims to show that first-person perspectives play essential roles in both human and nonhuman agency. Nonhuman agents have rudimentary first-person perspectives, whereas human agents—at least rational agents and moral agents—have robust first-person perspectives. (...) The author concludes with a view of intentional causation, according to which reasons are constituted by (but not identical to) neural phenomena. The idea of constitution without identity allows for a causal account of action that automatically includes first-personal aspects of agency. (shrink)

When randomly assigning participants to experimental roles and the according payment prospects, participants seem to receive “manna from heaven.” In our view, this seriously questions the validity of laboratory findings. We depart from this by auctioning off player roles via the incentive compatible random price mechanism thus avoiding the selection effect of competitive second price auctions. Our experiment employs the generosity game where the proposer chooses the size of the pie, facing an exogenously given own agreement payoff, and the responder (...) is the residual claimant. We find that entitlement crowds out equality seeking and strengthens efficiency seeking. More generally, we find that inducing entitlement for the roles in which participants find themselves makes a difference. Interpreting participants’ willingness to pay for their role as their aspiration level further allows to test satisficing and explore “mutual satisficing.” We find that responder participants apparently do not anticipate proposer generosity in aspiration formation. (shrink)

So, let us begin in the middle of things. There are two senses in which I think that philosophy must begin in the middle of things: The first is epistemological: I think that the Cartesian ideal of finding an absolute starting point without any presuppositions is illusory. The most that we can do is to be aware of our presuppositions; we cannot eliminate them. Wherever we choose to start, we are in the middle of things epistemologically. The second way in (...) which I think that philosophy must begin in the middle of things is ontological: The objects of my interest at least initially are medium-sized things—primarily people, but also nonhuman organisms and other natural objects, and artifacts, and artworks. These are the kinds of things that populate the world that we all unavoidably contend with and care about. And it is that world—the everyday life world—that I am ultimately interested in understanding. (shrink)

Collaborative remembering is essential to enabling teams to build shared understanding of projects and their progress. This article presents an analysis of collaborative remembering sequences in a corpus of interactions collected in a workplace where a team of designers developed a video television commercial. On the basis of coding and analysing linguistic and bodily behaviors in 158 such sequences, extracted from over 45 hours of video recordings, recurrent patterns of collaborative remembering processes were identified, relating to the interplay of work (...) roles. This article shows that collaborative remembering in the design studio is structured by behavioural, interactive and social factors. (shrink)

In his article ‘Divine hiddenness and the demographics of theism’ (Religious Studies, 42 (2006), 177-191) Stephen Maitzen develops a novel version of the atheistic argument from divine hiddenness according to which the lopsided distribution of theistic belief throughout the world’s populations is much more to be expected given naturalism than given theism. I try to meet Maitzen’s challenge by developing a theistic explanation for this lopsidedness. The explanation I offer appeals to various goods that are intimately connected with the human (...) cognitive constitution, and in particular, with the way in which we depend upon social belief forming practices for our acquisition of much of our knowledge about the world – features about us that God would value but that also make probable a lopsided distribution of theistic belief, or so I argue. (shrink)

7. The rights of immigrants: Joseph H. Carens.

Ever since the 1970’s, philosophers of mind have engaged in a lively discussion of Externalism. Externalism is the metaphysical thesis that the contents of one’s thoughts are determined partly by empirical features of one’s environment. Externalism appears to clash with another plausible thesis—the epistemological thesis that one can have knowledge of one’s own thoughts, without evidence or empirical investigation. Many have argued that the conjunction of these theses is incompatible. I have argued elsewhere for their compatibility.1 Here I’ll just assume (...) that they are compatible and explore some consequences of conjoining a particular externalist thesis about the contents of thoughts (Social Externalism) with a particular thesis about self-knowledge (First-Person Authority). (shrink)

How does fiction work? How can mere words create realities that exist only in the mind of the writer and the reader, yet seem so tangible in their realness? How can the first sentence of a novel transport one into a very real, yet purely objective, world — literally word-by-word? How do the subjective worlds of the writer and reader interact with the words on the page to create similar, yet always highly individualized, objective worlds? How can semiotics function as (...) a means to analyzing a written text in order to answer these questions about how the processes of writing and reading work? These, amongst others, are the questions explored in this paper, “Mrs. Dalloway and the Semiotics of a First Sentence”. In it I analyze Virginia Woolf ’s classic novel from a semiotic stance. Through exploring the semiotics of the novel’s first sentence, I attempt to show how we can read even the first nine words of a book and find ourselves transported to a whole, new, highly detailed world — the world of fiction. (shrink)

1. General. Explain briefly why the question, Do you believe in God? is ambiguous. (6) 2. The premodern period: (i) Set out as clearly as possible the cosmological argument for the existence of God. (ii) Explain why this does not entail infinite regress. (5) 3. The early modern period: Has the argument from the orderliness of nature (design) something new to add to the approach of the cosmological argument, by focussing on “natural” religion? Explain briefly. (5) 4. The later modern (...) period: (i) What is the name of Kant’s book in which it is argued that religion is unacceptable if not based on reason? (ii) What is it in our normal experience that, according to Kant, indicates the need for the postulate of God (even if the existence of God can’t be proved)? (iii) What two other postulates are required, in this respect? (4) ` Total: 20.. (shrink)

Self-directed and self-evaluative attitudes are often connected to one’s social position. Before investigating the dependence relations between individual self-evaluation and social positioning, however, there is a prior question to answer: What are the conditions under which an individual can have any self-directed attitudes at all? In order to be the subject of self-directed or selfevaluative attitudes, I shall argue, an individual must have linguistic and social relations. I’ll discuss the first-person perspective, self-concepts and their acquisition—all from a radically nonCartesian, externalist (...) point of view. This paper will combine my work on first-person perspectives with my work on “content externalism” in the philosophy of mind in order to understand how someone can have self-directed attitudes at all. Having self-directed attitudes—attitudes about oneself—is a precondition for making any individual self-evaluation. Self-directed attitudes and self-evaluative attitudes—such as self-love, self-esteem and self-loathing—“are [in the words of our organizers] often closely tied to the position one occupies within a network of social relations.”1 Quite so. But before investigating the particular dependence relations between individual self-evaluation and social positioning, there is a prior question to answer: What are the conditions under which an individual can have any self-directed attitudes at all? That is the question that I want to address here. Then, I want to draw a moral about what it is to be a human person. In order to be the subject of self-directed or self-evaluative attitudes, I shall argue, an individual must have linguistic and social relations. Some self-directed attitudes obviously require the subject to have linguistic and social relations. For example, pride in one’s class rank requires comparison between oneself and others (as well as having the concept *class rank*.) By contrast, other attitudes of self-satisfaction (such as one’s self-satisfaction in sticking to a healthful diet) do not obviously require one to have linguistic and social relations.. (shrink)