Translational research is a buzzword which dominates discussions about the quality, the utilization, and the benefits of medical research. Yet, although translational research has become a prominent topic, no commonly agreed definition of this terminology exists. Instead, experts from different contexts such as biomedical research, clinical practice or nursing discuss translational research in multiple ways depending on how they define the problem that translational research is supposed to be the solution to. In this paper, we do not seek to find (...) a ‘correct’ definition of translational research, but instead ask how actors using this terminology for describing their own research make sense of it. To do so, we asked three questions: Which actors are engaged in the debate about translational research? What kind of different meanings of translational research exist? And, which actors refer to which meaning of translational research when using the term? In answering these questions, we highlight the role this terminology plays in defining what medical science is about today. (shrink)

Translational research is a buzzword which dominates discussions about the quality, the utilization, and the benefits of medical research. Yet, although translational research has become a prominent topic, no commonly agreed definition of this terminology exists. Instead, experts from different contexts such as biomedical research, clinical practice or nursing discuss translational research in multiple ways depending on how they define the problem that translational research is supposed to be the solution to. In this paper, we do not seek to find (...) a ‘correct’ definition of translational research, but instead ask how actors using this terminology for describing their own research make sense of it. To do so, we asked three questions: Which actors are engaged in the debate about translational research? What kind of different meanings of translational research exist? And, which actors refer to which meaning of translational research when using the term? In answering these questions, we highlight the role this terminology plays in defining what medical science is about today. (shrink)

Translational research is a buzzword which dominates discussions about the quality, the utilization, and the benefits of medical research. Yet, although translational research has become a prominent topic, no commonly agreed definition of this terminology exists. Instead, experts from different contexts such as biomedical research, clinical practice or nursing discuss translational research in multiple ways depending on how they define the problem that translational research is supposed to be the solution to. In this paper, we do not seek to find (...) a ‘correct’ definition of translational research, but instead ask how actors using this terminology for describing their own research make sense of it. To do so, we asked three questions: Which actors are engaged in the debate about translational research? What kind of different meanings of translational research exist? And, which actors refer to which meaning of translational research when using the term? In answering these questions, we highlight the role this terminology plays in defining what medical science is about today. (shrink)

In this paper, we first classify different types of second opinions and evaluate the ethical and epistemological implications of providing those in a clinical context. Second, we discuss the issue of how artificial intelligent could replace the human cognitive labour of providing such second opinion and find that several AI reach the levels of accuracy and efficiency needed to clarify their use an urgent ethical issue. Third, we outline the normative conditions of how AI may be used as second opinion (...) in clinical processes, weighing the benefits of its efficiency against concerns of responsibility attribution. Fourth, we provide a ‘rule of disagreement’ that fulfils these conditions while retaining some of the benefits of expanding the use of AI-based decision support systems in clinical contexts. This is because the rule of disagreement proposes to use AI as much as possible, but retain the ability to use human second opinions to resolve disagreements between AI and physician-in-charge. Fifth, we discuss some counterarguments. (shrink)

This paper explores the role and resolution of disagreements between physicians and their diagnostic AI-based decision support systems. With an ever-growing number of applications for these independently operating diagnostic tools, it becomes less and less clear what a physician ought to do in case their diagnosis is in faultless conflict with the results of the DSS. The consequences of such uncertainty can ultimately lead to effects detrimental to the intended purpose of such machines, e.g. by shifting the burden of proof (...) towards a physician. Thus, we require normative clarity for integrating these machines without affecting established, trusted, and relied upon workflows. In reconstructing different causes of conflicts between physicians and their AI-based tools—inspired by the approach of “meaningful human control” over autonomous systems and the challenges to resolve them—we will delineate normative conditions for “meaningful disagreements”. These incorporate the potential of DSS to take on more tasks and outline how the moral responsibility of a physician can be preserved in an increasingly automated clinical work environment. (shrink)

The increased presence of medical AI in clinical use raises the ethical question which standard of explainability is required for an acceptable and responsible implementation of AI-based applications in medical contexts. In this paper, we elaborate on the emerging debate surrounding the standards of explainability for medical AI. For this, we first distinguish several goods explainability is usually considered to contribute to the use of AI in general, and medical AI in specific. Second, we propose to understand the value of (...) explainability relative to other available norms of explainable decision-making. Third, in pointing out that we usually accept heuristics and uses of bounded rationality for medical decision-making by physicians, we argue that the explainability of medical decisions should not be measured against an idealized diagnostic process, but according to practical considerations. We conclude, fourth, to resolve the issue of explainability-standards by relocating the issue to the AI’s certifiability and interpretability. (shrink)

Providing healthcare services frequently involves cognitively demanding tasks, including diagnoses and analyses as well as complex decisions about treatments and therapy. From a global perspective, ethically significant inequalities exist between regions where the expert knowledge required for these tasks is scarce or abundant. One possible strategy to diminish such inequalities and increase healthcare opportunities in expert-scarce settings is to provide healthcare solutions involving digital technologies that do not necessarily require the presence of a human expert, e.g., in the form of (...) artificial intelligent decision-support systems (AI-DSS). Such algorithmic decision-making, however, is mostly developed in resource- and expert-abundant settings to support healthcare experts in their work. As a practical consequence, the normative standards and requirements for such algorithmic decision-making in healthcare require the technology to be at least as explainable as the decisions made by the experts themselves. The goal of providing healthcare in settings where resources and expertise are scarce might come with a normative pull to lower the normative standards of using digital technologies in order to provide at least some healthcare in the first place. We scrutinize this tendency to lower standards in particular settings from a normative perspective, distinguish between different types of absolute and relative, local and global standards of explainability, and conclude by defending an ambitious and practicable standard of local relative explainability. (shrink)

Nagelaten manuscripten en notities van de Nederlandse hoogleraar in de filosofie (1892-1978), behorend tot de grondleggers van de wijsbegeerte der wetsidee.

Individuals with cerebral palsy (CP) have deficits in processing of somatosensory and proprioceptive information. To compensate for these deficits, they tend to rely on vision over proprioception in single plane upper and lower limb movements and in standing. It is not known whether this also applies to walking, an activity where the threat to balance is higher. Through this study, we used visual perturbations to understand how individuals with and without CP integrate visual input for walking balance control. Additionally, we (...) probed the balance mechanisms driving the responses to the visual perturbations. More specifically, we investigated differences in the use of ankle roll response i.e., the use of ankle inversion, and the foot placement response, i.e., stepping in the direction of perceived fall. Thirty-four participants (17 CP, 17 age-and sex-matched typically developing controls or TD) were recruited. Participants walked on a self-paced treadmill in a virtual reality environment. Intermittently, the virtual scene was rotated in the frontal plane to induce the sensation of a sideways fall. Our results showed that compared to their TD peers, the overall body sway in response to the visual perturbations was magnified and delayed in CP group, implying that they were more affected by changes in visual cues and relied more so on visual information for walking balance control. Also, the CP group showed a lack of ankle response, through a significantly reduced ankle inversion on the affected side compared to the TD group. The CP group showed a higher foot placement response compared to the TD group immediately following the visual perturbations. Thus, individuals with CP showed a dominant proximal foot placement strategy and diminished ankle roll response, suggestive of a reliance on proximal over distal control of walking balance in individuals with CP. (shrink)

Combining information from two or possibly several blocks of data is gaining increased attention and importance in several areas of science and industry. Typical examples can be found in chemistry, spectroscopy, metabolomics, genomics, systems biology and sensory science. Many methods and procedures have been proposed and used in practice. The area goes under different names: data integration, data fusion, multiblock analyses, multiset analyses and a few more. This book is an attempt to give an up-to-date treatment of the most used (...) and important methods within an important branch of the area; namely methods based on so-called components or latent variables. These methods have already obtained an enormous attention in for instance chemometrics, bioinformatics, machine learning and sensometrics and have proved to be important both for prediction and interpretation. The book is primarily a description of methodologies, but most of the methods will be illustrated by examples from the above-mentioned areas. The book is written such that both users of the methods as well as method developers will hopefully find sections of interest. In the end of the book there is a description of a software package developed particularly for the book. This package is freely available in R and covers many of the methods discussed. To distinguish the different type of methods from each other, the book is divided into five parts. Part I is introduction and preliminary concepts. Part II is the core of the book containing the main unsupervised and supervised methods. Part III deals with more complex structures and, finally, Part IV discusses alternative unsupervised and supervised methods. The book ends with Part V discussing the available software. Our recommendation for reading the book are as follows. A minimum read of the book would involve chapters 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7. Chapters 4, 6 and 8 are more specialized and chapters 9 and 10 contain methods we think are more advanced or less obvious to use. We feel privileged to have so many friendly colleagues who were willing to spend their time on helping us to improve the book by reading separate chapters. We would like to express our thanks to: Rasmus Bro, Margriet Hendriks, Ulf Indahl, Henk Kiers, Ingrid MaÌ⁽ge, Federico Marini, AÌ⁽smund Rinnan, Rosaria Romano, Lars Erik Solberg, Marieke Timmerman, Oliver Tomic, Johan Westerhuis and Barry Wise. Of course, the correctness of the final text is fully our responsibility! (shrink)

Conflicts in Interpretation applies novel methods of constraint interaction, derived from connectionist theories and implemented in linguistics within the framework of Optimality Theory, to core semantic and pragmatic issues such as polysemy, negation, (in) definiteness, focus, anaphora, and rhetorical structure. It explores the hypothesis that a natural language grammar is a set of potentially conflicting constraints on forms and meanings. Moreover, it hypothesizes that competent language users not only optimize from an input form to the optimal output meaning for this (...) form, or vice versa, but also consider the opposite direction of optimization, thus taking into account the speaker as a hearer and taking into account the hearer as a speaker. The book aims to show that such a bidirectional constraint-based grammar sheds new light on the relation between form and meaning, within a sentence as well as across sentence boundaries, within a single language as well as across languages, and within competent adult language users as well as during language development. An important dimension of the book is the structured investigation of issues at the interface of semantics with syntax and pragmatics, such as the effects of distinguishing between speaker's perspective and hearer's perspective in comprehension and production, stable and instable patterns of form and meaning across languages, and the development of a coherent pattern of form and meaning in children. Conflicts in Interpretation will be of interest to any researcher or advanced student in linguistics, cognitive science, language typology, or psycholinguistics who is interested in the capacity of our human mind to map meaning onto form, and form onto meaning. (shrink)

The revised edition contains a new chapter which provides an elegant description of the semantics. The various classes of lambda calculus models are described in a uniform manner. Some didactical improvements have been made to this edition. An example of a simple model is given and then the general theory (of categorical models) is developed. Indications are given of those parts of the book which can be used to form a coherent course.

Hendrik Lorenz presents a comprehensive study of Plato's and Aristotle's conceptions of non-rational desire. They see this as something that humans share with animals, and which aims primarily at the pleasures of food, drink, and sex. Lorenz explores the cognitive resources that both philosophers make available for the explanation of such desires, and what they take rationality to add to the motivational structure of human beings. In doing so, he finds conceptions of the mind that are coherent and deeply integrated (...) with both philosophers' views about such topics as the relation between body and soul, or the nature of the virtues. (shrink)

Beschouwing over het wezen van macht, de basis en de legitimering ervan.

Der Band befasst sich mit der in der politischen Philosophie geführten Diskussion um die (Nicht-) Vereinbarkeit von Vernunft und Herrschaft. Der bis auf Platon zurückreichende Versuch, Herrschaft (als) rational zu begründen, wird anhand seiner klassischen Varianten von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart auf seinen Vernunftanspruch hin kritisch analysiert. Mittels immanenter (Ideologie-)Kritik werden die Widersprüche in der begrifflichen Argumentation aufgedeckt und als Erscheinungen einer widersprüchlich verfassten gesellschaftlichen Ordnung dechiffriert, deren Herrschaftscharakter dem Vernunftvermögen des Menschen widerspricht.

Overzicht van het gedachtegoed van de Tsjechisch-Nederlandse geleerde (1592-1670), die streefde naar een synthese van wetenschap, waarden en wijsheid.

Aristotle takes practical wisdom and arts or crafts to be forms of knowledge which, we argue, can usefully be thought of as ‘empiricist’. This empiricism has two key features: knowledge does not rest on grasping unobservable natures or essences; and knowledge does not rest on grasping logical relations that hold among propositions. Instead, knowledge rests on observation, memory, experience and everyday uses of reason. While Aristotle’s conception of theoretical knowledge does require grasping unobservable essences and logical relations that hold among (...) suitable propositions, his conception of practical and productive knowledge avoids such requirements and is consistent with empiricism. (shrink)

With special attention being paid to recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and the Law, specifically related to evidentiary reasoning, this book ...

The project 'Facing Forward' started with a collaboration between five institutions: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, De Appel arts centre, W139, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and the art magazine Metroplis M. Having previously organized the lecture series and publications 'Right About Now: Art & Theory in the 1990s' (2005/2006) and 'Now is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century' (2008/2009), the organizing committee decided to take the final (...) step in this timeline and turn its attention to the far horizon. Informed by a shared interest in the role that history, speculation, and utopianism play in the field of contemporary art and design (as well as the larger context of global, socio-economic and political developments), a selection of seven themes emerged from the conversations of the initial organizers. These would eventually shape the seven lecture and discussions events - collected in this volume of essays - publicized under the banner Art & Theory From a Future Perspective. A great number of internationally renowned speakers were invited to reflect on the proposed themes during often sold-out events, which were presented at the Oude Lutherse Kerk in Amsterdam in 2011/2012. Yet, however compelling our desire as organizers to go beyond the framework of contemporary events and the current interest, well-nigh obsession, with history, it is obviously an illusion to think that we can escape the past by means of a turn towards the future."--Page 8. (shrink)

We analyze investors’ perception and long-term effects of board gender diversity on firms’ stock market performance in an international setting. Our results, controlling for the endogenous nature of board compositions, indicate that female board representation neither improves nor reduces firms’ long-term stock performance. Hence, we argue that it is imperative to go beyond the conventional thinking in terms of the business case for gender diversity and broaden the perspective also to incorporate societal and ethical aspects in the strive to board (...) gender equality. Even more so, as our results show that it does not entail reduced shareholder value, which the literature on mandatory gender quotas commonly seems to suggest. (shrink)

The reliability of clinical practice guidelines has been disputed because guideline panel members are often burdened with financial conflicts of interest. Current recommendations for COI regulation advise not only detailed declaration but also active management of conflicts. To continuously assess COI declaration and management in German guidelines we established the public database LeitlinienWatch. We analyzed all German guidelines at the highest methodological level that included recommendations for pharmacological therapy according to five criteria: declaration and assessment of COI, composition of the (...) guideline development group, independence of the coordinators and lead authors, imposed abstentions because of COI and public external review. Each criterion was assessed using predefined outcome categories. Most guidelines contained a detailed declaration of COI. However, none of the guidelines provided full transparency of COI assessment results. The guideline group was composed of a majority of participants with COI in 55% of the guidelines, no guideline was free of participants with COI. Only 9% of guidelines had coordinators and lead authors without any financial COI. Most guidelines did not provide a rule for abstentions for participants with COI. In 21% of guidelines there was a rule, but abstentions were either not practiced or not documented, whereas in 7% partial abstentions and in 2% complete abstentions were documented. Two thirds of the guideline drafts were not externally reviewed via a public website. COI are usually documented in detail in German guidelines of the highest methodological level. However, considerable improvement is needed regarding active management of COI, including recruitment of independent experts for guideline projects, abstention from voting for participants with COI and external review of the guideline draft. We assume that the publicly available ratings on GuidelineWatch will improve the handling of conflicts of interest in guideline development. (shrink)

Ancient philosophical theories of soul are in many respects sensitive to ways of speaking and thinking about the soul psuchê] that are not specifically philosophical or theoretical. We therefore begin with what the word ‘soul’ meant to speakers of Classical Greek, and what it would have been natural to think about and associate with the soul. We then turn to various Presocratic thinkers, and to the philosophical theories that are our primary concern, those of Plato (first in the Phaedo, then (...) in the Republic), Aristotle (in the De Anima or On the Soul ), Epicurus, and the Stoics. These are by far the most carefully worked out theories of soul in ancient philosophy. Later theoretical developments — for instance, in the writings of Plotinus and other Platonists, as well as the Church Fathers — are best studied against the background of the classical theories, from which, in large part, they derive. (shrink)

The central theme of this essay concerns the historical character of human nature and especially of human reason. This theme I will develop first of all by discussing briefly that aspect of the present-day philosophical debate, in which this theme takes pride of place. Thus, in the first section, I will try to show which predicament the participants of this debate face in the defense of their position. In the second section, I will discuss the main ideas of Herman Dooyeweerd’s (...) transcendental critique of theoretical thought. This critique, which Dooyeweerd himself considered to be a Christian critique on the whole tradition of philosophical thought, is closely tied up with the theme of this chapter. The problem of the historical character of human rationality — or in the words of Dooyeweerd, ‘the problem of historicism’ — formed for a large part the setting in which he developed his critique. Although I fully accord with the main thrust of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy and especially endorse that which motivated him in his transcendental critique, there are, nevertheless, elements in his conception which have dissatisfied me for a long time. His critique needs to be revised, in my opinion. In section three, I shall attempt such a revision, by taking as a starting point the idea of the ‘answering nature of humankind,’ an idea which I have worked out elsewhere. (shrink)

Pragma-dialectical approaches to legal argumentation seem to be rather different from traditional approaches appealing to standards of propositional logic. Pragma-dialectical analysis of arguments by analogy and e contrario seem to fall foul to the rigors of logical analysis, in which problems or even concepts of analogy and e contrario seem to disappear. The brunt of both types of special legal argumentation appears to be borne by often implicit general principles and an appeal to the system of the law as a (...) whole. Still, pragma-dialectics and logical analysis of legal argument are best seen as fruitfully supplementing each other in ongoing research of ever evolving legal argument. (shrink)