Until approximately twenty years ago, advances in the study of human genetics had little influence on the practice of medicine. In the 1980s, this changed dramatically with the mapping of the altered genes that cause cystic fibrosis and Huntington disease. In just a few years, these discoveries led to DNA-based tests that enabled clinicians to determine whether prospective parents were carriers of CF or whether an individual carried the Huntington gene and, as a result, would almost certainly develop the disease.Observers (...) interested in the social and economic implications of genetic technology realized that such genetic tests could be used by insurance companies to predict which insurance applicants were likely to become ill or even die from these diseases. (shrink)

Until approximately twenty years ago, advances in the study of human genetics had little influence on the practice of medicine. In the 1980s, this changed dramatically with the mapping of the altered genes that cause cystic fibrosis and Huntington disease. In just a few years, these discoveries led to DNA-based tests that enabled clinicians to determine whether prospective parents were carriers of CF or whether an individual carried the Huntington gene and, as a result, would almost certainly develop the disease.Observers (...) interested in the social and economic implications of genetic technology realized that such genetic tests could be used by insurance companies to predict which insurance applicants were likely to become ill or even die from these diseases. (shrink)

The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

Genetic discrimination is becoming an increasingly important problem in the United States. Information acquired from genetic tests has been used by insurance companies to reject applications for insurance policies and to refuse payment for the treatment of illnesses. Numerous states and the United States Congress have passed or are considering passage of laws that would forbid such use of genetic information by health insurance companies. Here we argue that much of this legislation is severely flawed because of the difficulty in (...) distinguishing genetic from nongenetic tests. In addition, barring the use by insurance companies of a genetic test but not a nongenetic test (conceivably for the same multifactorial disease) raises issues of fairness in health insurance. These arguments suggest that ultimately the problems arising from genetic discrimination cannot be solved by narrowly focused legislation but only by a modification of the entire health care system. (shrink)

Genetic discrimination is becoming an increasingly important problem in the United States. Information acquired from genetic tests has been used by insurance companies to reject applications for insurance policies and to refuse payment for the treatment of illnesses. Numerous states and the United States Congress have passed or are considering passage of laws that would forbid such use of genetic information by health insurance companies. Here we argue that much of this legislation is severely flawed because of the difficulty in (...) distinguishing genetic from nongenetic tests. In addition, barring the use by insurance companies of a genetic test but not a nongenetic test (conceivably for the same multifactorial disease) raises issues of fairness in health insurance. These arguments suggest that ultimately the problems arising from genetic discrimination cannot be solved by narrowly focused legislation but only by a modification of the entire health care system. (shrink)

A supertask is a process in which an infinite number of individuated actions are performed in a finite time. A Newtonian supertask is one that obeys Newton's laws of motion. Such supertasks can violate energy and momentum conservation and can exhibit indeterministic behavior. Perez Laraudogoitia, who proposed several Newtonian supertasks, uses a local, i.e., particle-by-particle, analysis to obtain these and other paradoxical properties of Newtonian supertasks. Alper and Bridger use a global analysis, embedding the system of particles in a Banach (...) space, to determine the origin of the strange behavior. This paper provides a common framework for the discussion of both the local and global methods of analysis. Using this single framework, the areas of disagreement and agreement are made explicit. Further examples of supertasks are proposed to illuminate various aspects of the discussion. (shrink)

A supertask is a process in which an infinite number of individuated actions are performed in a finite time. A Newtonian supertask is one that obeys Newton''s laws of motion. Such supertasks can violate energy and momentum conservation and can exhibit indeterministic behavior. Perez Laraudogoitia, who proposed several Newtonian supertasks, uses a local, i.e., particle-by-particle, analysis to obtain these and other paradoxical properties of Newtonian supertasks. Alper and Bridger use a global analysis, embedding the system of particles in a Banach (...) space, to determine the origin of the strange behavior. This paper provides a common framework for the discussion of both the local and global methods of analysis. Using this single framework, the areas of disagreement and agreement are made explicit. Further examples of supertasks are proposed to illuminate various aspects of the discussion. (shrink)

A large proportion of the total global burden of disease is caused by emergency medical conditions. Emergency care research is essential to improving emergency medicine but this research can raise some distinctive ethical challenges, especially with regard to (1) standard of care and risk–benefit assessment; (2) blurring of the roles of clinician and researcher; (3) enrolment of populations with intersecting vulnerabilities; (4) fair participant selection; (5) quality of consent; and (6) community engagement. Despite the importance of research to improve emergency (...) care in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the widely acknowledged ethical challenges, very little has been written on the ethics of emergency care research in LMICs. This paper examines the ethical and regulatory challenges to conducting emergency care research with human participants in LMICs. We outline key challenges, present potential solutions or frameworks for addressing these challenges, and identify gaps. Despite the ethical and regulatory challenges, conducting high-quality, ethical emergency care research in LMICs is possible and it is essential for global health. (shrink)

This book offers comparative ontologies of both Islam and liberalism as discourses more broadly construed. The author argues that, despite recent efforts to speak of overlapping consensuses and discursive congruence, the fundamental categories that constitute 'Islam' and 'Liberalism' remain very different, and that these differences should be taken seriously. Thus far, no recent scholarly works have explicitly or meticulously broken down where these differences lie. The author rigorously explores questions related to rights, moral epistemologies, the role of religion in the (...) public sphere, and more general approaches to legal discourse, via primary and canonical sources constitutive of both Islam and liberalism. He then goes on to articulate why communitarian modes of thought are better suited for engaging with Islam and contemporary socio-political modes of organization than liberalism. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Politics and International Relations, Islam, Liberalism, and Communitarianism. (shrink)

Neuroethological investigations of mammalian and avian auditory systems have documented species-specific specializations for processing complex acoustic signals that could, if viewed in abstract terms, have an intriguing and striking relevance for human speech sound categorization and representation. Each species forms biologically relevant categories based on combinatorial analysis of information-bearing parameters within the complex input signal. This target article uses known neural models from the mustached bat and barn owl to develop, by analogy, a conceptualization of human processing of consonant plus (...) vowel sequences that offers a partial solution to the noninvariance dilemma the locus equations orderly output constraint”) is hypothesized based on the notion of an evolutionarily conserved auditory-processing strategy. High correlation and linearity between critical parameters in the speech signal that help to cue place of articulation categories might have evolved to satisfy a preadaptation by mammalian auditory systems for representing tightly correlated, linearly related components of acoustic signals. (shrink)

The most frequent criticism of the target article is the lack of clear separability of human speech data relative to neuroethological data. A rationalization for this difference was sought in the tinkered nature of such new adaptations as human speech. Basic theoretical premises were defended, and new data were presented to support a claim that speakers maintain a low-noise relationship between F2 transition onset and offset frequencies for stops in pre-vocalic positions through articulatory choices. It remains a viable and testable (...) hypothesis that the phenomenon described by the locus equation is a functional adaptation of production mechanisms to processing preferences of the auditory system. (shrink)

Neil Tennant and Joseph Salerno have recently attempted to rigorously formalize Michael Dummett's argument for logical revision. Surprisingly, both conclude that Dummett commits elementary logical errors, and hence fails to offer an argument that is even prima facie valid. After explicating the arguments Salerno and Tennant attribute to Dummett, I show how broader attention to Dummett's writings on the theory of meaning allows one to discern, and formalize, a valid argument for logical revision. Then, after correctly providing a rigorous (...) statement of the argument, I am able to delineate four possible anti-Dummettian responses. Following recent work by Stewart Shapiro and Crispin Wright, I conclude that progress in the anti-realist's dialectic requires greater clarity about the key modal notions used in Dummett's proof. (shrink)

This article recovers mid-century proposals for sciences of concord and contextualizes them as part of a broader politics of commercial knowledge in eighteenth-century Britain. It begins by showing how merchants gained authority as formulators of commercial policy during the Commerce Treaty debates of 1713–1714. This authority held fast during the Walpolean oligarchy, but collapsed by the 1740s, when lobbying and patronage were increasingly maligned as corrupt by a ferment of popular republicanism. The article then explores how the Anglican cleric Josiah (...) Tucker and country pamphleteer Joseph Massie made use of this vacuum in authority to formulate a novel basis for the production of commercial knowledge. In pamphlets written between 1749 and 1760, they argued that the competing interests comprising the nation’s increasingly complex commercial system could only be reconciled and geared to the national interest through the establishment of a science which harnessed an impartial and systematizing epistemology, developing highly idealized accounts of the abstract market as a realm of concord which operated according to regular, rationally deducible principles. The conclusion suggests that their arguments introduced the foundational conceptual bases for later sciences of political economy and legitimated a new form of expertise in statecraft. (shrink)

Neil Tennant and Joseph Salerno have recently attempted to rigorously formalize Michael Dummett's argument for logical revision. Surprisingly, both conclude that Dummett commits elementary logical errors, and hence fails to offer an argument that is even prima facie valid. After explicating the arguments Salerno and Tennant attribute to Dummett, I show how broader attention to Dummett's writings on the theory of meaning allows one to discern, and formalize, a valid argument for logical revision. Then, after correctly providing a rigorous (...) statement of the argument, I am able to delineate four possible anti-Dummettian responses. Following recent work by Stewart Shapiro and Crispin Wright, I conclude that progress in the anti-realist's dialectic requires greater clarity about the key modal notions used in Dummett's proof. (shrink)

While life in general can be explained by the mechanisms of physics, chemistry and biology, to many scientists and philosophers it appears that when it comes to explaining consciousness, there is what the philosopher Joseph Levine called an “explanatory gap” between the physical brain and subjective experiences. Here we deduce the living and neural features behind primary consciousness within a naturalistic biological framework, identify which animal taxa have these features (the vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod molluscs), then reconstruct when consciousness (...) first evolved and consider its adaptive value. We theorize that consciousness is based on all the complex system features of life, plus the even more complex features of elaborate brains. We argue that the main reason why the explanatory gap between the brain and experience has been so refractory to scientific explanation is that it arises from both life and from varied and diverse brains and brain regions, so bridging the gap requires a complex, multifactorial account that includes the great diversity of consciousness, its personal nature that stems from embodied life, and the special neural features that make consciousness unique in nature. (shrink)

Technical change, defined as the manufacture and modification of tools, is generally thought to have played an important role in the evolution of intelligent life on earth, comparable to that of language. In this volume, first published in 1983, Jon Elster approaches the study of technical change from an epistemological perspective. He first sets out the main methods of scientific explanation and then applies those methods to some of the central theories of technical change. In particular, Elster considers neoclassical, evolutionary, (...) and Marxist theories, whilst also devoting a chapter to Joseph Schumpeter's influential theory. (shrink)

The twentieth century enjoys a firm grip on our profession. Well over half the research articles published in this journal since 2000 devote significant attention to the period between the 1890s and the 1990s. Similar trends prevail in other leading publications. But this outpouring of scholarship alone does not create a collective sense of how historians of science should confront the twentieth century as an epoch. The synthetic reflection that established the scientific revolution as a historiographical category and lent the (...) nineteenth century a sense of cohesion remains to be undertaken for the twentieth. A panoramic outlook on more recent historical eras is a pressing necessity. Publishing trends suggest that we will confront future methodological questions and navigate our evolving professional identity largely on twentieth-century turf. What, then, defines twentieth-century science? In some ways, this question is naive, even trivial: it surprises no one that the currents of history disdain our thin calendrical embankments. But centuries, decades, and other conventional durations often prove useful for collating practices that shared a family resemblance and naming periods about which we might claim that continuity prevailed over discontinuity. Can the twentieth century offer such utility? The books under review can each be read as an attempt to use the twentieth century in that way and, in so doing, to claim it for a particular vision of how the history of science should be done. (shrink)

Many pop culture pundits find characteristics of Jewish humor in their analysis of Jon Stewart's Jewish identity. Though no one has ever suggested that Stewart's a “good Jew,” Stewart still radiates a Jewish persona. This persona and Stewart's satiric treatment of Judaism echo Martin Buber's philosophy. What links the great humanist and the contemporary television satirist is that both point to the outside world and then explain to others what they should have seen. Our pursuit of Buber begins with Stewart's (...) life as a Jew. While it's impossible to watch The Daily Show without Stewart's Jewish persona being obvious, hearing an echo of Martin Buber's philosophy of engagement requires that we carefully review how Stewart's Jewish persona represents the great humanist. Buber insisted on political involvement and the seamless convergence of religion, ethics, politics, education, and art. (shrink)

Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin have argued that the insights obtained through the philosophical analysis of video games is not specific to video games, but to a larger class of artistic creations they term Self-Involving Interactive Fictions, or SIIFs. But there is at least one aspect of SIIF video games that is philosophically interesting and does not apply to the class of SIIFs as a whole, the ability to represent non-classical time. If SIIF video games are considered to be an (...) extension of the art form of graphic narrative story-telling, the art form dominated by film, then the ability to represent time in in this fashion represents a revolution akin to that of vanishing point perspective in painting. This makes SIIF video games philosophically interesting for both philosophers of film and philosophers of video games. (shrink)

In an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, Jon Stewart explained that the point of view of The Daily Show “is that we're passionately opposed to bullshit.” This might explain why Stewart invited Ivy League philosopher Harry Frankfurt to appear on The Daily Show (March 14, 2005) to discuss his bestseller On Bullshit. Philosopher‐comedian Stewart followed up the discussion of the lie/bullshit distinction with the following question, which he posed to Frankfurt but never quite let him answer: “What is the difference (...) between bullshit and political spin?” This chapter briefly considers Frankfurt's second visit to The Daily Show (January 9, 2007) when he discussed a much less sensational topic than bullshit. In his second very little book entitled On Truth—with its gold‐foiled cover that made Stewart think it would contain chocolates—Frankfurt is not very concerned with the “boring” philosophical question about the nature, or definition, of truth. (shrink)

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

Topics covered in Discrete Mathematics have become essential tools in many areas of studies in recent years. This is primarily due to the revolution in technology, communications, and cyber security. The book treats major themes in a typical introductory modern Discrete Mathematics course: Propositional and predicate logic, proof techniques, set theory (including Boolean algebra, functions and relations), introduction to number theory, combinatorics and graph theory. An accessible, precise, and comprehensive approach is adopted in the treatment of each topic. The ability (...) of abstract thinking and the art of writing valid arguments are emphasized through detailed proof of (almost) every result. Developing the ability to think abstractly and roguishly is key in any areas of science, information technology and engineering. Every result presented in the book is followed by examples and applications to consolidate its comprehension. The hope is that the reader ends up developing both the abstract reasoning as well as acquiring practical skills. All efforts are made to write the book at a level accessible to first-year students and to present each topic in a way that facilitates self-directed learning. Each chapter starts with basic concepts of the subject at hand and progresses gradually to cover more ground on the subject. Chapters are divided into sections and subsections to facilitate readings. Each section ends with its own carefully chosen set of practice exercises to reenforce comprehension and to challenge and stimulate readers. As an introduction to Discrete Mathematics, the book is written with the smallest set of prerequisites possible. Familiarity with basic mathematical concepts (usually acquired in high school) is sufficient for most chapters. However, some mathematical maturity comes in handy to grasp some harder concepts presented in the book. (shrink)

It is shown that the expressive power of second-order propositional modal logic whose modalities are S4.2 or weaker is the same as that of second-order predicate logic.

This volume tackles the slippery subject of 'meaning'.

This book brings together several directions of work in model theory between the late 1950s and early 1980s.