Lance Rips describes a unified theory of natural deductive reasoning and fashions a working model of deduction, with strong experimental support, that is capable of playing a central role in mental life.

This article considers the late 19th-century medical invention of the category of the homosexual in relation to homosexuality’s moment of deliverance from medicine in the 1970s, when it was removed as a category of mental aberration in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). With the rise of the AIDS pandemic in gay communities in the early 1980s, I argue that homosexuals were forcibly returned to the medical sphere, a process I call “the painful reunion.” Reading a collection of queer narratives (...) across the 20th century, I show that historical and contemporaneous medical events prompted the mobilization of seropositive and queer artists at century’s end to rehabilitate, revise, and offend the historiography of queer illness. Collectively, my conclusions redefine our understandings of queer theory and queer politics as distinctively 1990s projects invested in the present to ones that purposefully aim to challenge the past. (shrink)

"I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."Reduced to its most basic task, bioethics is about choices. What is the ethical or unethical decision at a particular biomedical moment? What is most just or unjust for a disabled or infirmed loved one? What feels like the morally right or wrong decision in a healthcare moment? "Should we or shouldn't we" at a medical impasse?Understandably, the question of choice has found an especially prominent and ethically contentious place (...) in disability discourses. Are disabled lives, disabled identities, and disabled bodies themselves best understood as "chosen"? As terminological variations on this theme, disability scholar Simi Linton has asked in the past... (shrink)

The clinic is a loaded space for LGBTQI persons. Historically a site of pathology and culturally a site of stigma, the contemporary clinic for queer patient populations and their loved ones is an ethically fraught space. This paper, which introduces the featured articles of this special issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry on “Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity,” begins by offering an analysis of scrutiny itself. How do we scrutinize? When is it apt for us to scrutinize? And what (...) are the benefits and perils of clinical and bioethical scrutiny? Bearing in mind these questions, the second half of this paper introduces the feature articles in this special issue in response to such forms of scrutiny. How, why, when, and in what ways to sensitively scrutinize LGBTQI persons in the clinic are the aims of this piece. (shrink)

I trust my lawyer more than I trust my doctor.—Shana Alexander, 1992 [The audience laughed.]1The Hippocratic Oath makes the physician invoke external supervision of her adherence to what she affirm...

In this commentary on a clinical ethics case pertaining to a same-sex couple that does not have explicit surrogate decision-making or hospital-visitation rights (in the face of objections from the family-of-origin of one of the queer partners), the authors invoke contemporary legal and policy standards on LGBTQ health care in the United States and abroad. Given this historical moment in which some clinical rights are guaranteed for LGBTQ families whilst others are in transition, the authors advocate for the implementation of (...) clinical ethics mediation as the soundest and most humane form of resolution in matters where there is a dispute between family members about an incapacitated loved one. They argue that clinical ethics mediation is an ideal alternative solution because it works toward consensus about outcome, even where consensus about values is not achievable. (shrink)

Recent research on the metaethical beliefs of ordinary people appears to show that they are metaethical pluralists that adopt different metaethical standards for different moral judgments. Yet the methods used to evaluate folk metaethical belief rely on the assumption that participants interpret what they are asked in metaethical terms. We argue that most participants do not interpret questions designed to elicit metaethical beliefs in metaethical terms, or at least not in the way researchers intend. As a result, existing methods are (...) not reliable measures of metaethical belief. We end by discussing the implications of our account for the philosophical and practical implications of research on the psychology of metaethics. (shrink)

The finding of the same language deficit in half the members of the KE family is taken as suggesting that a specific allele (FOXP2) is normally involved in the development of language. Recent studies, however, question the exclusivity of FOXP2, and it is argued that the finding of a gene that disrupts language should not be taken as strong evidence for the existence of genes that underlie it.

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I question the orthodox position that true belief is a fundamental epistemic value. I begin by raising a particularly epistemic version of the so-called “value problem of knowledge” in order to set up the basic explanandum and to motivate some of the claims to follow. In the second section, I take aim at what I call “bottom-up approaches” to this value problem, views that attempt to explain the added epistemic value of knowledge in terms of its relation (...) to a more fundamental value of true belief. The final section is a presentation of a value-theoretic alternative, one that explains the value problem presented in the first section while also doing justice to intuitions that may cause us to worry about bottom-up approaches. In short, knowledge and not mere true belief is a fundamental epistemic value as it is the constitutive goal of propositional inquiry. (shrink)

As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, threats to global public health continue to proliferate. New and novel risks to health have emerged consistently over the past 30 years. Moreover, our shrinking world now allows health threats to spread more quickly than ever before. Given these realities, efforts to protect and improve global health must be expansive, flexible, and able to take into account the variety of circumstances that may imperil good health. These efforts also must consider the multiple levels and (...) varying contexts in which laws, policies, and other factors govern global health and affect health outcomes. (shrink)

This study addresses a range of central topics in Anglo-American philosophy of language.

As the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And in the recent burst of clinical attention being paid to the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender patients, good intentions abound. But while this long‐overdue interest in LGBT health care aims to highlight important gaps and bring into relief serious issues in health care delivery for LGBT persons, such work can inadvertently reinforce both the marginalization of sexual minorities and the cultural norms related to sexuality, (...) gender identity, and the conventional family. To ensure that positive outcomes for LGBT patients are inextricably paired with those noble intentions, we advocate for a new, queer bioethics—a methodology of scholastic, bioethical, and critical scrutiny that not only addresses the needs of LGBT persons in health care settings but also considers the perspectives, histories, and feelings of such parties. (shrink)

The present study examined the effects of semantic structure on simple inductive judgments about category members. For a particular category, subjects were told that one of the species had a given property and were asked to estimate the proportion of instances in the other species that possessed the property. The results indicated that category structure—in particular, the typicality of the species—influenced subjects' judgments. These results were interpreted by models based on the following assumption: When little is known about the underlying (...) distribution of a property, subjects assume that the distribution mirrors that of better-known properties. For this reason, if subjects learn that an unknown property is possessed by a typical species, they are more likely to generalize than if the same fact had been learned about an atypical species. (shrink)

After a decades-long economic slump, the city of Flint, Michigan, struggled to address chronic issues of toxic water supply, malnutrition, and food security gaps among its residents. A community-engaged research project proposed a resilience assessment that would use panarchy theory to move the city toward a more sustainable food system. Flint is one of many examples that demonstrates how panarchy theory is being applied to understand and influence change in complex human-natural systems. Applied Panarchy, the much-anticipated successor to Lance (...) Gunderson and C.S. Holling's seminal 2002 volume Panarchy, documents the extraordinary advances in interdisciplinary panarchy scholarship and applications over the past two decades. Panarchy theory has been applied to a broad range of fields, from economics to law to urban planning, changing the practice of environmental stewardship for the better in measurable, tangible ways.Panarchy describes the way systems--whether forests, electrical grids, agriculture, coastal surges, public health, or human economies and governance--are part of even larger systems that interact in unpredictable ways. Although humans desire resiliency and stability in our lives to help us understand the world and survive, nothing in nature is permanently stable. How can society anticipate and adjust to the changes we see around us? Where Panarchy proposed a framework to understand how these transformational cycles work and how we might influence them, Applied Panarchy takes the scholarship to the next level, demonstrating how these concepts have been modified and refined. The book shows how panarchy theory intersects with other disciplines, and how it directly influences natural resources management and environmental stewardship.Intended as a text for graduate courses in environmental sciences and related fields, Applied Panarchy picks up where Panarchy left off, inspiring new generations of scholars, researchers, and professionals to put its ideas to work in practical ways. (shrink)

In this paper, we present and defend a modest anti-realist conception of aesthetic properties – e.g. being unified, moving, delicate, tragic, etc – in order to motivate a contextualist semantic view about aesthetic judgments. We argue that aesthetic properties are plausibly seen as viewpoint-dependent even though our epistemic access to the presence of aesthetic properties is decidedly more complicated than other, less controversial instances of viewpoint-dependent properties. On the basis of our anti-realist conception, we argue, utilizing the Kaplanian distinction between (...) character and content within a possible worlds semantic theory, that the contents expressed in aesthetic thought and language are sensitive to certain contextual features of a particular thinker’s or speaker’s situation. Finally, we address a number of formidable objections to our view, objections concerning certain context-sensitivity diagnostics, and sho... (shrink)

RésuméQue voulait dire Wittgenstein lorsqu'ilaremarqué: «Je ne suispas un homme religieux, maisje nepuis m'empecher de voir tout problème d'un point de me religieux»? La thèse de Malcom, c'est que cette remarque pointe du doigt les analogies entre la perspective philosophique de Wittgenstein et une vision religieuse de la vie. En revanche, Winch fait valoir que la remarque de Wittgenstein peut être interprétée comme ne faisant pas référence aux problèmes exclusivement philosophiques; Wittgenstein exprimait plutôt sa propre perspective quasi religieuse sur la (...) vie et soulignait l 'importance spirituelle de la clarté philosophique. Contrairement à Malcom et Winch, jefais valoir qu'il faut plutôt considérer que cette remarque signifie en gros: «Je ne suispas religieux moi-même, mais quand je réfléchis philosophiquement à ce que cela signifie pour quelqu'un de faire face à un certain type de problemes, par exemple les dilemmes moraux et autres décisions difficiles dans la vie, il importe de reconnoître la diversité des perspectives possibles d'oú ces problèmes peuvent être vus. Ce faisant, je nepuis m'empêcher d'imaginer comment de tels problèmes apparaîtraient depuis la perspective de quelqu'un de religieux.». (shrink)

This paper investigates the statistical association between teenage births and the physical growth path of these mothers. It draws on data on the height of ever-married women aged 15s National Family Health Survey in 1998rural residence, state of origin in India and age of the women.

This paper addresses the question of the existence of corporate philanthropy. It proposes a framework for analysing corporate philanthropy along the dimensions of business/society interest and primary/secondary stakeholder focus. The framework is then applied in order to understand business involvement with the arts in the U.K. A unique dataset of 60 texts which describe different firms' involvement with the Arts is analysed using formal content analysis to uncover the motivations for business involvement. Cluster analysis is then used in order to (...) identify motivational groupings. Two broad types of involvement are identified – advertisers and legitimators. Only in one case of the 60 is there the potential to observe pure altruism. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides a clear framework to understand the motivations for corporate giving and applies this using empirical data. Secondly, this research finds little evidence, if at all, of corporate philanthropy in the context of firms giving to the Arts in the U.K. (shrink)

A central aspect of people's beliefs about the mind is that mental activities—for example, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving—are interrelated, with some activities being kinds or parts of others. In common-sense psychology, reasoning is a kind of thinking and reasoning is part of problem solving. People's conceptions of these mental kinds and parts can furnish clues to the ordinary meaning of these terms and to the differences between folk and scientific psychology. In this article, we use a new technique for (...) deriving partial orders to analyze subjects' decisions about whether one mental activity is a kind or part of another. The resulting taxonomies and partonomies differ from those of common object categories in exhibiting a converse relation in this domain: One mental activity is a part of another if the second is a kind of the first. The derived taxonomies and partonomies also allow us to predict results from further experiments that examine subjects' memory for these activities, their ratings of the activities' importance, and their judgments about whether there could be "possible minds" that possess some of the activities but not others. (shrink)

This article considers how people judge the identity of objects (e.g., how people decide that a description of an object at one time, t₀, belongs to the same object as a description of it at another time, t₁). The authors propose a causal continuer model for these judgments, based on an earlier theory by Nozick (1981). According to this model, the 2 descriptions belong to the same object if (a) the object at t₁ is among those that are causally close (...) enough to be genuine continuers of the original and (b) it is the closest of these close-enough contenders. A quantitative version of the model makes accurate predictions about judgments of which a pair of objects is identical to an original (Experiments 1 and 2). The model makes correct qualitative predictions about identity across radical disassembly (Experiment 1) as well as more ordinary transformations (Experiments 2 and 3). (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 19-21, July 2012.

Neo-Sumerian Administrative Tablets from the Yale Babylonian Collection, Parts One and Two. By Marcel Sigrist and Tohru Ozaki. Biblioteca del Próximo Oriente Antiguo, vols. 6–7. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2009. Pp. 613, 601.

Many experiments with infants suggest that they possess quantitative abilities, and many experimentalists believe that these abilities set the stage for later mathematics: natural numbers and arithmetic. However, the connection between these early and later skills is far from obvious. We evaluate two possible routes to mathematics and argue that neither is sufficient: (1) We first sketch what we think is the most likely model for infant abilities in this domain, and we examine proposals for extrapolating the natural number concept (...) from these beginnings. Proposals for arriving at natural number by (empirical) induction presuppose the mathematical concepts they seek to explain. Moreover, standard experimental tests for children's understanding of number terms do not necessarily tap these concepts. (2) True concepts of number do appear, however, when children are able to understand generalizations over all numbers; for example, the principle of additive commutativity (a+b=b+a). Theories of how children learn such principles usually rely on a process of mapping from physical object groupings. But both experimental results and theoretical considerations imply that direct mapping is insufficient for acquiring these principles. We suggest instead that children may arrive at natural numbers and arithmetic in a more top-down way, by constructing mathematical schemas. (shrink)

Most theories of learning consider inferring a function f from either observations about f or, questions about f. We consider a scenario whereby the learner observes f and asks queries to some set A. If I is a notion of learning then I[A] is the set of concept classes I-learnable by an inductive inference machine with oracle A. A and B are I-equivalent if I[A] = I[B]. The equivalence classes induced are the degrees of inferability. We prove several results about (...) when these degrees are trivial, and when the degrees are omniscient. (shrink)

The National Council for the Social Studies position statement on “Curriculum Guidelines for Social Studies Teaching and Learning” provides a conceptual outline for contemporary social studies curriculum. The purported goal is to “promote civic competence” in order to “help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”1 The statement reaffirms the importance of social studies in the wake of No Child Left (...) Behind—the consequences of which, the statement acknowledges, have led to reduced class time spent on social studies instruction.The NCSS framework asserts that social studies... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy: Reading Tanabe Hajime and William Desmond by Takeshi MorisatoLance H. Gracy (bio)Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy: Reading Tanabe Hajime and William Desmond. By Takeshi Morisato. England: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Pp. viii + 269. Hardcover $116.00, isbn 978-1-350-09251-8.Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy: Reading Tanabe Hajime and William Desmond by Takeshi Morisato is an informative and (...) insightful read on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and relevant areas of interest. Morisato's stated objective in the introduction is (a) to investigate the possibility of comparative philosophy through William Desmond's metaxological way of thinking, and (b) to examine how the "absolute dialectic" in Tanabe Hajime's metanoesis can help us understand the relationship between one framework of thinking and another (p. 16). Morisato's book proceeds in five parts. Part One orients the reader to the scope of the project through an overview of comparative philosophy and its methodological frameworks--namely, the metaxological methodology of William Desmond, which deals importantly with the (modern) predicament of religion as expressed in the "transcendental univocity" of the Kantian system; and the metanoetic methodology of Tanabe Hajime, which deals importantly with the issue of "rational progress" in Hegelian dialectic. Yet each intellectual framework deals with both Kant's and Hegel's systems. Part Two addresses what the problem of religion in Kantian and Hegelian philosophy is in more detail. Part Three, "Metaxology and the Problems of the Philosophy of Religion," and Part Four, "Metanoetics and the Problems of the Philosophy of Religion," offer a more detailed account concerning how Desmond's and Tanabe's philosophies tackle conceptual problems in modern philosophy of religion. Morisato's conclusion follows from these along with an endnotes section, bibliography, and index.According to Morisato, overcoming the problem of comparative philosophy--i.e., the "philosophical problem of comparing two systems of thinking rooted in different cultural and intellectual contexts" (p. 22)--means, at least in part, clarifying the extent to which philosophers of different culturalintellectual contexts and backgrounds share, as "kindred spirits" or as "intellectual companions," a consonance of thought regarding their philosophical perspectives. Desmond and Tanabe represent just such a pair, whose consonance of thought, expressed by Morisato en passant and expressed more definitively in the conclusion, is unified in a struggle against hegemonic structures in the [End Page 1] philosophy of religion, specifically those of Kant's and Hegel's philosophies of religion. William Desmond (1951–present) is a Catholic philosopher who currently holds the David R. Cook Chair in Philosophy at Villanova University. He has worked extensively on metaphysics, ontology, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and German idealism. Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) was a Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto school and is perhaps most well-known for his Philosophy as Metanoetics. Morisato does a commendable job elucidating issues in modern systems of religion, which have undoubtedly been influenced by Kant's and Hegel's systems. As it concerns Kant, contemporary philosophy of religion still struggles with the claims of transcendental idealism, particularly its reduction of religious belief to mere postulates of practical reason. And as it concerns Hegel, what seems to be an unending, "progressive" self-return of dialectical monism has deeply influenced the way, and manner, in which religious adherents deal with societal views of the individual and individuals' views of society. By this token, Morisato's attempt to get beyond the so-called "extirpation" of the source of religious truth as the "creative power behind our understanding of reality and our existence" is refreshing, to say the least (p. 46). In what follows, I offer a relatively brief overview of Morisato's book and conclude with a reflection on the text.Morisato's critique of the Kantian and Hegelian systems begins with the argument that Kantian transcendental univocity implies that reason's autonomy, as dictates of the moral law as absolute duties, not only precedes divine legislation, but becomes one with it or else is reduced to it. In other words, for Kant, the rational-moral universal is divine law. However, reason's autonomy fails to comprehend the divine origination of finite particulars due to... (shrink)

Pragmatism has enjoyed a major resurgence in Anglo-American philosophy over the course of the last decade or two, and Robert Brandom’s work – particularly his 1994 tome Making it Explicit (MIE) – has been at the vanguard of this resurgence (Brandom 1994).2 But pragmatism comes in several surprisingly distinct flavours. Authors such as Hubert Dreyfus find their roots in certain parts of Heidegger and in phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and they privilege embodied, preconceptual skills as opposed to discursive practices as (...) the basic sites of meaning and agency (Dreyfus 1991; Dreyfus 1992; Todes 2001). With strong inheritances from Dewey and Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty has championed a pragmatism whose core emphasis is on the rejection of transcendental truth and high metaphysical theorizing (Rorty 1982), and this anti-theoretical banner has been taken up by several prominent ethicists, among others. For his part, Brandom, who purports to offer a systematic theory of language and meaning grounded on a foundation of pragmatic normative relationships between speakers, looks back instead to Sellars and Quine for his stripe of pragmatism. Near the start of MIE, he writes: The explanatory strategy pursued here is to begin with an account of social practices, identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. (Brandom 1994, xiii) Despite his professed pragmatism, Brandom is no foe of high theory or metanarratives, and he is vastly more interested in language and theoretical reason than in the rest of human bodily activity. For Brandom, inferentially articulated discourse forms an autonomous domain of normativity, while our bodily encounters with the world in perception and in action serve as language entry and exit points respectively.. (shrink)

In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.Every physician-patient encounter is a conflict of interest. Every physician-payer encounter is also a conflict of interest.Wide-spread criticism of the pharmaceutical industry’s extravagant marketing practices and some doctors’ undignified, even appalling eagerness to stuff themselves, their pockets and their offices with the industry’s “stuff,” prompted physician groups, the drug and device industry itself to institute reforms designed better to limit industry influence on physicians.But according to Troyen Brennan and his (...) coauthors, the reforms, while reducing some of the most egregious instances of industry influence peddling and physicians’ self-debasement, were doomed fundamentally, for three reasons. First, they were based on common sense but incorrect assumptions about the mechanism of industry influence and on myths about the efficacy of disclosure as an ethical disinfectant. Second, they relied on voluntary adherence and so failed to pinpoint responsibility for monitoring compliance and enforcement. (shrink)

Human rights play an integral role in the global governance of health. Recently, both structural and normative aspects of human rights have proliferated across multiple levels and within multiple contexts around the world. Human rights proliferation is likely to have a positive impact on the governance of health because it can expand the avenues through which a human rights framework or human rights norms may be used to address and improve health.