The current research applied a mid-level evolutionary theory that has been successfully employed across numerous animal species—life history theory—in an attempt to understand the Dark Triad personality trait cluster (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism). In Study 1 (N = 246), a measure of life history strategy was correlated with psychopathy, but unexpectedly with neither Machiavellianism nor narcissism. Study 2 (N = 321) replicated this overall pattern of results using longer, traditional measures of the Dark Triad traits and alternative, future-discounting indicators of (...) life history strategy (a smaller-sooner, larger-later monetary dilemma and self-reported risk-taking behaviors). Additional findings suggested two sources of shared variance across the Dark Triad traits: confidence in predicting future outcomes and openness to short-term mating. (shrink)

No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researchers (...) have an obligation to address the possibility of discovering IFs in their protocol and communications with the IRB, and in their consent forms and communications with research participants. Researchers should establish a pathway for handling IFs and communicate that to the IRB and research participants. We recommend a pathway and categorize IFs into those that must be disclosed to research participants, those that may be disclosed, and those that should not be disclosed. (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

Psychopathy is a disorder characterized by severe and frequent moral violations in multiple domains of life. Numerous studies have shown psychopathy-related limbic brain abnormalities during moral processing; however, these studies only examined negatively valenced moral stimuli. Here, we aimed to replicate prior psychopathy research on negative moral judgments and to extend this work by examining psychopathy-related abnormalities in the processing of controversial moral stimuli and positive moral processing. Incarcerated adult males (N = 245) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging protocol (...) on a mobile imaging system stationed at the prison. Psychopathy was assessed using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R). Participants were then shown words describing three types of moral stimuli: wrong (e.g., stealing), not wrong (e.g., charity), and controversial (e.g., euthanasia). Participants rated each stimulus as either wrong or not wrong. PCL-R total scores were correlated with not wrong behavioral responses to wrong moral stimuli, and were inversely related to hemodynamic activity in the anterior cingulate cortex in the contrast of wrong > not wrong. In the controversial > noncontroversial comparison, psychopathy was inversely associated with activity in the temporal parietal junction and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results indicate that psychopathy-related abnormalities are observed during the processing of complex, negative, and positive moral stimuli. (shrink)

"Et toutes ces belles idées sur la liberté, elles sont appliquées quelque part? - Ensemble, non. Mais par petits bouts, oui. Enfin, je crois. - Hé bien, tu n'as qu'à aller voir." C'est ainsi que je fus arraché à la torpeur de ma bibliothèque. Depuis lors, je voyage à travers le monde avec une ambition simple : étudier les thèmes de philosophie politique qui me sont chers là où ils sont mis en oeuvre. Faire apparaître derrière les concepts des histoires, (...) des visages. Pour comprendre la tolérance religieuse, j'ai parcouru le Kerala, en Inde, où les grands monothéismes coexistent depuis la nuit des temps. Pour me faire une opinion sur le libre-échange, j'ai suivi dans son quotidien le directeur de l'Organisation mondiale du commerce. Pour tester la libéralisation des drogues, j'ai côtoyé les entrepreneurs de la marijuana au Colorado. Pour mieux saisir les enjeux du revenu universel, j'ai enquêté dans les villages brésiliens où il est expérimenté. Pour apprécier la réalité du micro-crédit, j'ai sillonné les bidonvilles de Lima. Et pour m'assurer des vertus de la liberté, j'ai rencontré ceux qui en sont privés, dans les "prisons ouvertes" finlandaises. Chemin faisant, j'ai perdu certains préjugés, découvert de nouvelles idées, croisé des auteurs insoupçonnés. Et j'ai acquis une conviction : les problèmes posés par la liberté se résolvent par... davantage de liberté. G.K. (shrink)

Un révolutionnaire sommeille en chaque Français, prêt hier comme aujourd'hui à briser les rentes et les privilèges. Dans le même temps, un expert l'observe et le dirige, planifiant autoritairement la société. Et un geek lui tape sur l'épaule, l'entraînant dans le monde inconnu des nouvelles technologies qui fourmille de promesses et de menaces. Ces trois influences parfois contradictoires nous font tourner la tête. Gaspard Koenig propose donc de les interpréter à la lumière d'une nouvelle philosophie politique, fondée sur l'autonomie individuelle. (...) Car ce dont la France a besoin, ce n'est pas d'un énième diagnostic économique, mais de principes solides dont on pourra déduire des réformes radicales. Revenons au modèle révolutionnaire, ce «jacobinisme libéral» incarné par le député du tiers état Isaac Le Chapelier. Rejetons la tentation planiste, léguée par le régime de Vichy et responsable encore aujourd'hui de tant d'injustice et d'exclusion. Apprenons à maîtriser l'utopie numérique, en imaginant un nouvel humanisme qui réponde aux défis de la Silicon Valley et un Etat 2.0 qui nous redonne le contrôle de notre destin numérique. Pays des libertés, la France meurt de servitude volontaire. Terminons, enfin, notre Révolution! Et chacun deviendra son propre maître. (shrink)

As we look to the future in a world with porous borders and boundaries transgressed by technologies, an inevitable question is:Can there be a single, global bioethics? Intimately intertwined with this question is a second one: How might a global bioethics account for profound - and constantly transforming - sources of cultural difference? Can a uniform, global bioethics be relevant cross-culturally? These are not simple questions, rather, a multi-dimensional answer is required. It is important to distinguish between two meanings of (...) bioethics: the academic discipline of bioethics as opposed to bioethics as a set of practices governing clinical care and scientific research. There is growing evidence to support the notion of a shared global understanding of bioethics as a field of inquiry focused on the moral dimensions of science and biomedicine. (shrink)

As we look to the future in a world with porous borders and boundaries transgressed by technologies, an inevitable question is:Can there be a single, global bioethics? Intimately intertwined with this question is a second one: How might a global bioethics account for profound - and constantly transforming - sources of cultural difference? Can a uniform, global bioethics be relevant cross-culturally? These are not simple questions, rather, a multi-dimensional answer is required. It is important to distinguish between two meanings of (...) bioethics: the academic discipline of bioethics as opposed to bioethics as a set of practices governing clinical care and scientific research. There is growing evidence to support the notion of a shared global understanding of bioethics as a field of inquiry focused on the moral dimensions of science and biomedicine. (shrink)

This monograph attempts to clarify one significant but much neglected aspect of Peirce's contribution to the philosophy of science. It was written in 1963 as my M. A. thesis at the Uni versity of Illinois. Since the topic is still neglected it is hoped that its pUblication will be of use to Peirce scholars. I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. Max Fisch who broached this topic to me and who advised me con tinuously through its development, assisting (...) generously with his own insights and unpublished Peirce manuscripts. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1. A Current Issue in the Philosophy of Science 1 2. Peirce and His Theory of Abduction 5 3. The General Character of Abduction 7 PART I: THE EARLY THEORY 1. Peirce's Earliest Conception of Inference 11 2. Three Kinds of Inference and Three Figures of Syllogism 13 3. Ampliative Inference and Cognition 17 4. Induction and Hypothesis 20 5. The Method of Methods 23 PART II: THE LATER THEORY 1. The Transitional Period 28 2. Three Stages of Inquiry 31 3. Abduction and Guessing Instinct 35 4. Logic as a Normative Science 38 5. Hypothesis Construction and Selection 41 6. Abduction and Pragmatism 44 7. Economy of Research 47 8. Justification of Abduction 51 CONCLUSION 55 61 BIBLIOGRAPHY INTRODUCTION 1. (shrink)

In our article (Zawadzki and Adamczyk 2021), we analyzed threats that novel memory modifying interventions may pose in the future. More specifically, we discussed how optogenetics’ potential for reversible erasure/deactivation of memory “may impact authenticity by producing changes at different levels of personality.” Our article has received many thoughtful open peer commentaries for which we would like to express our great appreciation. We have identified two main threads of objections. They are related to the potential applicability of optogenetics as a (...) therapeutic memory modification technology (MMT) in humans—applicability thread, and the normative value of authenticity, that is, the assumption that preserving authenticity is valuable (either in general or in the particular approach we adopted)—normative thread. Both of these threads concern fundamental issues: The former deals with the scientific credibility of the case vignette on which our discussion is based, and the latter deals with the normative weight of our considerations. We think that addressing both of them can be instructive in a broader context as they reflect a more general disagreement among neuroethicists about the very purpose and method of our discipline. (shrink)

Genomic research results and incidental findings with health implications for a research participant are of potential interest not only to the participant, but also to the participant's family. Yet investigators lack guidance on return of results to relatives, including after the participant's death. In this paper, a national working group offers consensus analysis and recommendations, including an ethical framework to guide investigators in managing this challenging issue, before and after the participant's death.

Many scientists and doctors hope that affordable genome sequencing will lead to more personalized medical care and improve public health in ways that will benefit children, families, and society more broadly. One hope in particular is that all newborns could be sequenced at birth, thereby setting the stage for a lifetime of medical care and self‐directed preventive actions tailored to each child's genome. Indeed, commentators often suggest that universal genome sequencing is inevitable. Such optimism can come with the presumption that (...) discussing the potential limits, cost, and downsides of widespread application of genomic technologies is pointless, excessively pessimistic, or overly cautious. We disagree. Given the pragmatic challenges associated with determining what sequencing data mean for the health of individuals, the economic costs associated with interpreting and acting on such data, and the psychosocial costs of predicting one's own or one's child's future life plans based on uncertain testing results, we think this hope and optimism deserve to be tempered.In the analysis that follows, we distinguish between two reasons for using sequencing: to diagnose individual infants who have been identified as sick and to screen populations of infants who appear to be healthy. We also distinguish among three contexts in which sequencing for either diagnosis or screening could be deployed: in clinical medicine, in public health programs, and as a direct‐to‐consumer service. Each of these contexts comes with different professional norms, policy considerations, and public expectations. Finally, we distinguish between two main types of genome sequencing: targeted sequencing, where only specific genes are sequenced or analyzed, and whole‐exome or whole‐genome sequencing, where all the DNA or all the coding segments of all genes are sequenced and analyzed.In a symptomatic newborn, targeted or genome‐wide sequencing can help guide other tests for diagnosis or for specific treatment that is urgently needed. Clinicians use the infant's symptoms (or phenotype) to interrogate the sequencing data. These same complexities and uncertainties, however, limit the usefulness of genome‐wide sequencing as a population screening tool. While we recognize considerable benefit in using targeted sequencing to screen for or detect specific conditions that meet the criteria for inclusion in newborn screening panels, use of genome‐wide sequencing as a sole screening tool for newborns is at best premature. We conclude that sequencing technology can be beneficially used in newborns when that use is nuanced and attentive to context. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to provide a critical examination of two aspects of culture and biomedicine that have helped to shape the meaning and practice of genetic testing for breast cancer. These are: the cultural construction of fear of breast cancer, which has been fuelled in part by the predominance of a ‘risk’ paradigm in contemporary biomedicine. The increasing elaboration and delineation of risk factors and risk numbers are in part intended to help women to contend with their (...) fear of breast cancer. However, because there is no known cure or foolproof prevention for breast cancer, risk designations bring with them recommendations for vigilant surveillance strategies and screening guidelines. We argue that these in effect exacerbate women’s fears of breast cancer itself. The volatile combination of discourses of fear, risk and surveillance have significant ethical and social consequences for women’s lives and well-being. Genetic testing decisions are made within this context; if nurses understand this context they can play an important role in helping women to cope with the anxiety and fear of breast cancer risk. (shrink)

The author introduces and critically analyzes two recent, curious findings and their accompanying explanations regarding how the folk intuits the capabilities of the dead and those in a persistent vegetative state. The dead are intuited to survive death, whereas PVS patients are intuited as more dead than the dead. Current explanations of these curious findings rely on how the folk is said to conceive of death and the dead: either as the annihilation of the person, or that person’s continuation as (...) a disembodied being. The author argues that these two conceptions are incompatible and inconsistent with each other and the evidence. Contrariwise, the author argues that the folk intuition about dead-survivors and the living dead are more easily explained by appealing to cross-culturally established concepts: the folk biological concept of death the existential concept of death, and the concept of social death. (shrink)

The covariant Klein-Gordon equation requires twice the boundary conditions of the Schrödinger equation and does not have an accepted single-particle interpretation. Instead of interpreting its solution as a probability wave determined by an initial boundary condition, this paper considers the possibility that the solutions are determined by both an initial and a final boundary condition. By constructing an invariant joint probability distribution from the size of the solution space, it is shown that the usual measurement probabilities can nearly be recovered (...) in the non-relativistic limit, provided that neither boundary constrains the energy to a precision near ℏ/t 0 (where t 0 is the time duration between the boundary conditions). Otherwise, deviations from standard quantum mechanics are predicted. (shrink)

J. L. Austin (1911-1960) exercised in Post-war Oxford an intellectual authority similar to that of Wittgenstein in Cambridge. Although he completed no books of his own and published only seven papers, Austin became through lectures and talks one of the acknowledged leaders in what is called ‘Oxford philosophy’ or ‘ordinary language philosophy’. Few would dispute that among analytic philosophers Austin stands out as a great and original philosophical genius. Three volumes of his writing, published after his death, have become classics (...) in analytical philosophy: Philosophical Papers ; Sense and Sensibilia ; and How to Do Things with Words . First published in 1969, this book is a collection of critical essays on Austin’s philosophy written by well-known philosophers, many of whom knew Austin personally. A number of essays included were especially written for this volume, but the majority have appeared previously in various journals or books, not all easy to obtain. (shrink)

A time-symmetric formulation of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is developed by applying two consecutive boundary conditions onto solutions of a time- symmetrized wave equation. From known probabilities in ordinary quantum mechanics, a time-symmetric parameter P0 is then derived that properly weights the likelihood of any complete sequence of measurement outcomes on a quantum system. The results appear to match standard quantum mechanics, but do so without requiring a time-asymmetric collapse of the wavefunction upon measurement, thereby realigning quantum mechanics with an important (...) fundamental symmetry. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to provide a critical examination of two aspects of culture and biomedicine that have helped to shape the meaning and practice of genetic testing for breast cancer. These are: (1) the cultural construction of fear of breast cancer, which has been fuelled in part by (2) the predominance of a ‘risk’ paradigm in contemporary biomedicine. The increasing elaboration and delineation of risk factors and risk numbers are in part intended to help women to contend (...) with their fear of breast cancer. However, because there is no known cure or foolproof prevention for breast cancer, risk designations bring with them recommendations for vigilant surveillance strategies and screening guidelines. We argue that these in effect exacerbate women’s fears of breast cancer itself. The volatile combination of discourses of fear, risk and surveillance have significant ethical and social consequences for women’s lives and well-being. Genetic testing decisions are made within this context; if nurses understand this context they can play an important role in helping women to cope with the anxiety and fear of breast cancer risk. (shrink)

Developing the Horizons of the Mind is a comprehensive book on Relational and Contextual Reasoning, a theory of the human mind which powerfully addresses key areas of human conflict such as the ideological conflict between nations, the conflict in close relationships and the conflict between science and religion. K. Helmut Reich provides a clear and accessible introduction to the fresh RCR way of thinking that encourages people to adopt an inclusive rather than an oppositional approach to conflict and problem-solving. Part (...) one outlines the key aspects of RCR theory and supporting empirical data and part two provides examples of its application in the world. RCR provides a stimulating and challenging tool to several disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, religious studies and education, and this book will be a valuable resource for cognitive scientists, psychotherapists, theologians, educators and all those involved in conflict resolution. (shrink)

I argue that there is a version of (quasi-Armstrongian) weak illusionism that intelligibly relates phenomenal concepts and introspective opacity, accounts for the (hard) problem intuitions Chalmers highlights (modal, epistemic, explanatory, and metaphysical), and undermines the most important arguments Chalmers deploys against type-B and type-C materialisms. If this is successful, we can satisfactorily account for the meta-problem of consciousness, mollify our hard problem intuitions, and remain genuine realists about phenomenal experience.

In mirror mark tests dolphins twist, posture, and engage in open-mouth and head movements, often repetitive. Because postures and an open mouth are also dolphin social behaviours, we used self-view television as a manipulatable mirror to distinguish between self-examination and social behavior. Two dolphins were exposed to alternating real-time self-view and playback of the same to determine if they distinguished between them. The adult male engaged in elaborate open-mouth behaviors in mirror mode, but usually just watched when playing back the (...) same material. Mirror mode behavior was also compared to interacting with real dolphins . Mark tests were conducted, as well as switches from front to side self-views to see if the dolphins turned. They presented marked areas to self-views to see if the dolphins turned. They presented marked areas to the self-view television and turned. The results suggest self-examination over social behavior. (shrink)

Written by leading researchers in educational and social psychology, learning science, and neuroscience, this edited volume is suitable for a wide-academic readership. It gives definitions of key terms related to motivation and learning alongside developed explanations of significant findings in the field. It also presents cohesive descriptions concerning how motivation relates to learning, and produces a novel and insightful combination of issues and findings from studies of motivation and/or learning across the authors' collective range of scientific fields. The authors provide (...) a variety of perspectives on motivational constructs and their measurement, which can be used by multiple and distinct scientific communities, both basic and applied. (shrink)