During early embryonic development in several metazoans, accurate DNA replication is ensured by high number of replication origins. This guarantees rapid genome duplication coordinated with fast cell divisions. In Xenopus laevis embryos this program switches to one with a lower number of origins at a developmental stage known as mid‐blastula transition (MBT) when cell cycle length increases and gene transcription starts. Consistent with this regulation, somatic nuclei replicate poorly when transferred to eggs, suggesting the existence of an epigenetic memory suppressing (...) replication assembly origins at all available sites. Recently, it was shown that histone H1 imposes a non‐permissive chromatin configuration preventing replication origin assembly on somatic nuclei. This somatic state can be erased by SSRP1, a subunit of the FACT complex. Here, we further develop the hypothesis that this novel form of epigenetic memory might impact on different areas of vertebrate biology going from nuclear reprogramming to cancer development. (shrink)

Much of the recent work on epistemology of inquiry defends two related theses. First, inquiry into a question rationally prohibits believing an answer to that question. Second, knowledge is the aim of inquiry. I develop a series of cases which indicate that inquiry is not as narrow as these views suggest. These cases can be accommodated if we take a broader approach and understand inquiry as aiming at epistemic improvement, described more generally. This approach captures a wider range of inquiring (...) phenomena because it accounts for forms of epistemic improvement that fall short of, or go beyond, coming to know the answer to a question. (shrink)

A puzzle arises when combining two individually plausible, yet jointly incompatible, norms of inquiry. On the one hand, it seems that one shouldn’t inquire into a question while believing an answer to that question. But, on the other hand, it seems rational to inquire into a question while believing its answer, if one is seeking confirmation. Millson (2021), who has recently identified this puzzle, suggests a possible solution, though he notes that it comes with significant costs. I offer an alternative (...) solution, which doesn’t involve these costs. The best way to resolve the puzzle is to reject the prohibition on inquiring into a question while believing an answer to it. Resolving the puzzle in this way makes salient two fruitful areas in the epistemology of inquiry which merit further investigation. The first concerns the nature of the inquiring attitudes and the second concerns the aim(s) of inquiry. (shrink)

If a state commits injustice, who is responsible for compensating its victims and safeguarding against future wrongdoing? Do the state’s citizens bear this responsibility? Do they all bear it equally? Avia Pasternak's and Holly Lawford-Smith's recent books address these pressing questions. Each book represents a thought-provoking attempt to derive an account of citizen responsibility for state wrongs from an account of state agency understood as group agency. Though the books demonstrate the promise of this approach to produce action-guiding advice for (...) real policymakers, they also demonstrate its limitations—in particular, its lack of attention to social structures. Here, I argue that Pasternak's and Lawford-Smith's views would be enriched by further engagement with the literature on structural injustice, which takes individuals’ perpetuation of social systems (not their implication in acts of group agency) as a central source of their remedial obligations. Through critical engagement with Pasternak and Lawford-Smith, I illustrate how a structural injustice framework could yield more attractive conclusions than a group agency framework in certain cases, better explain non-culpable forms of citizen responsibility, and allow us to theorize citizen responsibility for state action without making questionable claims about the metaphysics or social ontology of group agency. (shrink)

What is the relationship between inquiry and epistemology? Are epistemic norms the norms that guide us as inquirers—as agents in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding? Recently, there has been growing support for what I, following Friedman (Philosophical Review 129(4):501–536, 2020), will call the zetetic turn in epistemology, the view that all epistemic norms are norms of inquiry. This paper investigates the prospects of an inquiry-centered approach to epistemology and develops several motivations for resisting it. First, I argue that the (...) norms of inquiry are most plausibly seen as practical, not as distinctively epistemic. Second, I argue that a zetetically-grounded epistemology is unable to properly account for the rationality of belief. It fails to account for cases where intuitively irrational beliefs promote inquiry, or where intuitively rational beliefs are zetetically useless or counterproductive to inquiry. The main upshot is this: there must be a source of epistemic normativity that isn’t ultimately zetetic. (shrink)

This article develops a new approach for theorizing about hermeneutical injustice. According to a dominant view, hermeneutical injustice results from a hermeneutical gap: one lacks the conceptual tools needed to make sense of, or to communicate, important social experience, where this lack is a result of an injustice in the background social methods used to determine hermeneutical resources. I argue that this approach is incomplete. It fails to capture an important species of hermeneutical injustice which doesn’t result from a lack (...) of hermeneutical resources, but from the overabundance of distorting and oppressive concepts which function to crowd-out, defeat, or preempt the application of a more accurate hermeneutical resource. I propose a broader analysis that better respects the dynamic relationship between hermeneutical resources and the social and political contexts in which they are implemented. (shrink)

Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit’s Quest for the Soul of Tibet, by Donal S. Lopez Jr. and Thupten Jinpa. Harvard University Press, 2017. 320 pp. Hb and e-book. £23.95. ISBN- 13: 9780674659704.

Recent pragmatic accounts of slurs argue that the offensiveness of slurs is generated by a speaker's free choice to use a slur opposed to a more appropriate and semantically equivalent neutral counterpart. I argue that the theoretical role of neutral counterparts on such views is overstated. I consider two recent pragmatic analyses, Bolinger (Noûs, 51, 2017, 439) and Nunberg (New work on speech acts, Oxford University Press, 2018), which rely heavily upon the optionality of slurs, namely, that a speaker exercises (...) a deliberate lexical choice to use a slur when they could have easily used a neutral counterpart instead. Against such views, I argue that across a range of different offensive uses of slurs, a speaker's choice to use a slur opposed to a neutral counterpart plays little to no role in accounting for why the slur generates offence. Such cases cast serious doubt upon the explanatory depth of these pragmatic analyses, and raise more general concerns for views which draw upon the relationship between a slur and its neutral counterpart. The main upshot is this: theorists should exercise caution in assuming that neutral counterparts play any fundamental or systemic role in explaining why slurs are offensive. (shrink)

Rodolfo Sacco developed the idea of “mute behaviours” during his studies on mute law. The notion of “mute behaviours” denotes an action that is able to mould a legal relationship without any use of language. Certainly, this concept may give rise to some doubts in relation to the attribution—to a behaviour qualified as mute—of the capability to affect dynamics involving a plurality of people. Aiming to clarify the idea of “mute behaviours” by this point of view, the authors analysed the (...) semiotic terminology used by Sacco himself to explain this notion and the issue of its silent nature. Therefore, the terms “signifying signs” and “symptoms”, deemed by Sacco—respectively—incompatible and compatible with the theory of mute behaviours were considered. The former term was traced back to the notion of conventional and arbitrary sign, the notion of the latter was reconstructed linking it to the concept of signs based on signification and suggesting a possible framework in view of the idea of “presentative meanings” developed by the philosopher Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue. Clarified this dichotomy by a terminological analysis, the authors noticed—as affirmed by Rodolfo Sacco himself—the impossibility to ascribe the notion of gesture to the mute behaviour’s category, as some exegetes proposed. Consequently to this last remark, the authors tried to analyse the relationship between gestures and “mute behaviours”, identifying the category of “sema-pragmatic acts”, that includes gestures and may be seen as an intermediate phase between “mute behaviours” and legally relevant behaviours operated by speaking. (shrink)

Cultural code-switching concerns how we adjust our overall behaviours, manners of speaking, and appearance in response to a perceived change in our social environment. We defend the need to investigate cultural code-switching capacities in artificial intelligence systems. We explore a series of ethical and epistemic issues that arise when bringing cultural code-switching to bear on artificial intelligence. Building upon Dotson’s (2014) analysis of testimonial smothering, we discuss how emerging technologies in AI can give rise to epistemic oppression, and specifically, a (...) form of self-silencing that we call “cultural smothering.” By leaving the sociodynamic features of cultural code-switching unaddressed, AI systems risk negatively impacting already-marginalised social groups by widening opportunity gaps and further entrenching social inequalities. (shrink)

The emotional connotation of words is known to affect word and sentence processing. However, the when and how of the interaction between emotion and grammar are still up for debate. In this behavioural experiment, 35 female university students read noun phrases (NPs) composed by a determiner and a noun in their L1 (Spanish), and were asked to indicate if the NPs were grammatically correct (elmasc camareromasc) or not (*lafem tornillomasc; i.e. a gender agreement task). The type of gender (arbitrary/natural), the (...) emotionality (unpleasant/neutral), and the gender class (feminine/masculine) of the nouns were manipulated. We found an overall grammaticality effect, responses being faster in grammatically correct trials than in incorrect ones. However, the effects of emotionality and gender class varied depending on gender type. For arbitrary gender, the grammaticality effect was greater in feminine nouns than in masculine nouns and independent of emotionality. For natural gender, the grammaticality effect interacted with gender class and emotionality, this effect only emerging in unpleasant stimuli for feminine nouns. Our results reveal that it is possible to find emotional effects at the behavioural level in an intrinsically grammatical task. Yet, these effects depend on gender properties like the type of gender and the gender class. (shrink)

This paper describes a practice innovation: the addition of formal weekly discussions of patients with prolonged PICU stay to reduce healthcare providers’ moral distress and decrease length of stay for patients with life-threatening illnesses. We evaluated the innovation using a pre/post intervention design measuring provider moral distress and comparing patient outcomes using retrospective historical controls. Physicians and nurses on staff in our pediatric intensive care unit in a quaternary care children's hospital participated in the evaluation. There were 60 patients in (...) the interventional group and 66 patients in the historical control group. We evaluated the impact of weekly meetings to establish goals of care for patients with longer than 10 days length of stay in the ICU for a year. Moral distress was measured intermittently and reported moral distress thermometer scores fluctuated. "Clinical situations" represented the most frequent contributing factor to moral distress. Post intervention, overall moral distress scores, measured on the moral distress scale revised, were lower for respondents in all categories, and on three specific items. Patient outcomes before and after PEACE intervention showed a statistically significant decrease in PRISM indexed LOS, a statistically significant increase in both code status changes DNR, and in-hospital death, with no change in patient 30 or 365 day mortality. The addition of a clinical ethicist and senior intensivist to weekly inter-professional team meetings facilitated difficult conversations regarding realistic goals of care. The study demonstrated that the PEACE intervention had a positive impact on some factors that contribute to moral distress and can shorten PICU length of stay for some patients. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage vise à montrer que la question de la réflexion et de son éveil au sein de la vision occupe une place centrale dans la pensée de Maurice Merleau-Ponty et apparaît comme la source secrète d'une énigme et d'une interrogation fondamentales, à partir desquelles son oeuvre entière peut être relue et révéler une nouvelle cohérence. Mais qu'il s'agisse de la perception, de l'expression ou de la chair, c'est à chaque fois la question de la conscience et de son éveil (...) réflexif qui est repensée à nouveau frais et relancée comme un nouveau défi. De ce fait, cet ouvrage vise également à faire apparaître la nouvelle signification - ou configuration - que prend le commencement de la réflexion chez Merleau-Ponty, dans le dévoilement progressif d'une seule figure typique, composée par touches successives, à partir des différentes figurations qu'elle revêt dans son oeuvre. Elle trouve à s'incarner dans la figure, hautement évocatrice du peintre qui "pense le pinceau à la main", au moment "où sa vision se fait geste". [Source: 4e de couv.]. (shrink)

Given a space in an elementary submodel M of H, define XM to be X∩M with the topology generated by . It is established, using anti-large-cardinals assumptions, that if XM is compact and its regular open algebra is isomorphic to that of a continuous image of some power of the two-point discrete space, then X=XM. Assuming in addition, the result holds for any compact XM satisfying the countable chain condition.

Microhabitable is a study program resulting from the collaboration between Matadero Madrid, Serpentine Galleries and INLAND--Campo Adentro. It spans a monthly seminar from September to December 2019, a publication, a radio station and a residency program articulated around reflections focused on the scale factor from the fields of art and the politics of ecology.

Questa monografia è uno studio tematico dedicato alla trasmissione e alla ricezione del filosofo presocratico Eraclito di Efeso da parte di Filone di Alessandria, il maggior rappresentante del giudaismo ellenistico. I testi esegetici, filosofici e storico-apologetici di Filone con riferimento allo scritto e alla dottrina eraclitea sono analizzati in modo dettagliato ed esaustivo, prima di essere confrontati con quelli di fonti anteriori e posteriori da un lato, con quelli degli altri filosofi Presocratici dall'altro. Le testimonianze di Filone sono quindi utilizzate (...) per cogliere in modo più preciso il significato originario del discorso filosofico di Eraclito, rispetto alle diverse tradizioni interpretative che si succedono e si intrecciano nel corso della storia della filosofia antica. (shrink)

Sports are an excellent venue for demonstrating evolutionary principles to audiences not familiar with academic research. Team sports and sports fandom feature dynamics of in-group loyalty and intergroup competition, influenced by our evolved coalitional psychology. We predicted that reactions to expressions signaling mutual team/group allegiance would vary as a function of the territorial context. Reactions should become more prevalent, positive, and enthusiastic as one moves from the home territory to a contested area, and from a contested area to a rival’s (...) territory during active rival engagement. We also predicted that men would be more responsive than women based on sex differences in evolved coalitional psychology. The research team visited public places immediately prior to 2016–2017 collegiate football and basketball games. A male research confederate wore a sweatshirt displaying the logo of one of the competing university teams and vocalized the team’s most popular slogan when he saw a fan displaying similar logos. Observers followed 5 m behind, recording reactions and response positivity/enthusiasm. Reaction tone was most positive in the rival territory, least positive in the home territory, and intermediate in the periphery and contested territory. Rates of “no reaction” were lowest in the rival territory but were highest in the periphery. Men had higher reaction rates and more positive and enthusiastic reaction tones than women. Reactions generally followed predictions based on expected signal value. This project provides evidence that coalitional psychology influences dynamics related to university sports team rivalries and that context matters for expressions of alliance. (shrink)

Les explications de ce pourquoi mentir est mal sont toutes inadéquates. Leur problème commun se situe dans leur structure unitaire. Ces analyses présupposent que tous les mensonges sont mauvais pour la même raison unificatrice. Cette supposition ne rend cependant pas justice au phénomène du mensonge, et ce, parce qu’on peut s’objecter à l’acte de mentir de différentes façons. Ainsi je suggère qu’il faut un changement dialectique en direction d’un traitement pluraliste de ce qui est mauvais dans le mensonge. Il ne (...) faut pas forcer une unité sur la structure morale du mensonge lorsqu’il y a en fait pluralité. (shrink)

Moral distress is a well-documented phenomenon for health care providers (HCPs). Exploring HCPs’ perceptions of participation in moral distress interventions using qualitative and quantitative methods enhances understanding of intervention effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to measure and describe the impact of a two-phased intervention on participants’ moral distress. Using a cross-over design, the project aimed to determine if the intervention would decrease moral distress, enhance moral agency, and improve perceptions about the work environment. We used quantitative instruments and (...) explored participants’ perceptions of the intervention using semi-structured interviews. Participants were from inpatient settings, within three major hospitals of a large, urban healthcare system in the Midwest, United States. Participants included nurses (80.6%) and other clinical care providers. Using generalized linear mixed modeling we assessed the change in each of the outcome variables over time controlling for groups. Interviews were audiotaped and professionally transcribed. The written narratives were coded into themes. The change in scores on study instruments trended in the desired direction however did not meet statistical significance. Qualitative interviews revealed that intervention effectiveness was derived from a combination of learning benefits, psychological benefits, and building community that promoted moral agency. Findings demonstrate a clear link between moral distress and moral agency and suggest that Facilitated Ethics Conversations can enhance the work environment. Findings provide insight for developing evidenced-based approaches to address moral distress of hospital nurses. (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo intentará contribuir a la discusión teórica y filosófica política sobre la emancipación y la democracia en base a la producción intelectual reciente de Étienne Balibar y Jacques Rancière. Las nociones con las que ambos autores acompañan la idea de emancipación, por una parte, iluminan sobre otros modos posibles de pensar la política, las luchas y la transformación, y, por otra parte, permiten re-significar la filosofía y la política, así como la inclusión de la igualdad radical entre los (...) seres hablantes en el centro de la disputa teórica y política.This article will attempt to contribute to the theoretical and philosophical political discussion on emancipation and democracy based on the recent intellectual production of Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière. The notions with which both authors accompany the idea of emancipation, on the one hand, illuminate on other possible ways of thinking about politics, struggles and transformation, and, on the other hand, allow us to re-signify philosophy and politics, thus as the inclusion of radical equality between speaking beings at the center of the theoretical and political dispute. (shrink)

Universal por estar no direito e particular por estar fora do direito, o “sujeito” de referência deste trabalho é o “autista”. Esta escolha garantiu a definição do sistema social, que foi concebido segundo o modo como os autistas se viam ou eram vistos. O sistema teórico foi delimitado segundo tradições intelectuais que problematizam o “sujeito” de acordo com questões formuladas pelos campos empíricos. O esquema metodológico visa a conhecer o “sujeito” por dentro dos sistemas e entre eles. O objetivo teórico (...) é pensar o “sujeito” considerando que o universal do direito não resulta da pluralidade do “sujeito”. (shrink)