Through an analysis of two sets of writing in the British Medical Journal from the 1980s, this article explores relationships between unemployment and health. “Unemployment in My Practice,” published in 1981, was a series of nine short essays by general practitioners from across the United Kingdom. This was followed by “Occupationless Health” in 1985, made up of fourteen essays, composed by the assistant editor of the journal, Dr. Richard Smith. Both series demonstrate how deeply frustrating it was for doctors to (...) confront mass unemployment in light of the policy decisions of the Thatcher government. They present a call to medical practitioners to be aware of the health dimensions of unemployment and a growing sensitivity to the lives of working-class patients. Rich with perceptions about the relationships among work, gender, class, age, and health, these essays argue that unemployment was not just an economic problem, but one doctors needed to monitor. Doctors found their professional identities shaped in new ways by their broader economic and cultural contexts. (shrink)

The ICD-11 personality disorder model is the first fully dimensional assessment of personality pathology. It consists of a personality disorder dysfunction-severity dimension, which encompasses both self- and interpersonal dysfunction, and six optional qualifiers for five prominent personality traits—Negative Affectivity, Detachment, Dissociality, Disinhibition, and Anankastia —plus a borderline pattern that is defined by the criteria of DSM-IV borderline PD. This article reports on the development of a new self-report measure to assess self- and interpersonal dysfunction and the five trait qualifiers. It (...) is the first comprehensive measure of the ICD-11 PD model in that it is the only one to include both PD dysfunction-severity as well as trait scales and because it is based on the Clinical Description and Diagnostic Guidelines, which are more detailed than the “statistical” model description that is currently on the ICD-11 website. The authors wrote 992 items and then reduced the pool to 300 items by eliminating redundancy and selecting the consensus best few items for each subconstruct. Data were collected using an online sample of 383 Prolific workers. Using exploratory factor analysis, seven domain scales were developed, each of which contained two to four scales assessing components of the domain. These preliminary scales’ psychometrics were excellent, as were the domains’ and their components’ convergent and discriminant validity, with a few generally minor exceptions. Structural analyses at the component level revealed a three-factor structure consisting of two moderately correlated Internalizing factors, one centered on Self Dysfunction with two NA components and a DSN component and the other on Interpersonal Dysfunction with DET and ANK components; as well as an Externalizing factor with DSL and a DSN component that was uncorrelated with the other two factors. Two aspects of the results in particular are striking: ANK was not the opposite end of a DSN dimension, but rather contributed to an Internalizing Interpersonal Dysfunction dimension and DSN had both an Internalizing and an Externalizing component. Implications of the findings and study limitations are discussed. (shrink)

Desmond Clarke's remarks on “my” absurdity argument are puzzling. i) Although I do indeed still believe it to be a valid argument, I certainly would not claim credit for it. I believe that “Reducibility: Another Side Issue?” put the general problem of the reducibility of mind into a somewhat unorthodox context, but the particular claim Clarke is attacking forms only one very unoriginal step in the general argument of that essay. ii) Some points that Clarke makes I would certainly agree (...) to, and believe I have agreed to in some of the texts he cites, while others are far from anything I meant to convey. Under Clarke's, 1) of course the “antinomies” of the paper above referred to trade on ambiguities. That's one of the points of the paper. 2) in both “Reducibility … ” and “To Have A Mind …”, I have tried to specify the sense in which “mechanism” was being used. That I do not take such terms as self-explanatory should be clear, for instance, from the remarks in the latter paper that immediately follow the passage Clarke criticizes. 3) I have no idea how physics is to develop in the future, nor did I wish to suggest that I did. With the rest of Clarke's I entirely agree. As to his, I fail to see its relevance to my argument, unless it simply leads up to and, with which, again, I wholeheartedly concur. Nancy Maull's paper, which Clarke refers to, for example, seems to me to shed great light on what used to be thought the problem of reduction; I don't see how her argument conflicts with “mine.” iii) Clarke's two “interpretations” of “my” argument are even more puzzling. The first paragraph is clear, as far as it goes. But the second is entirely murky. Perhaps I may try to reconstruct it. “The question for the scientist of a reductivist disposition in this context,” Clarke writes, “is: would it be possible to construct an alternative theory which adequately explains the same phenomena as the human sciences?” Fair enough. But apparently one is not allowed to reflect about an answer to this question. One has to wait and see if such a theory does develop. And meantime to notice that any theory by its very nature is intentional: this is to use some part of the human sciences to establish the explanatory power of all the human sciences. Is that what is meant? If so, I would reply: that the claim that theories are inherently intentional is not a thesis of any “human science” but a philosophical thesis about the nature of intelligible discourse. If a wholly non-intentional theory of human action were stated it would invalidate itself as theory. Thus, to respond to the major accusation of, we would have an answer to Clarke's question such that the question could not have been asked. What we have, then, is not a petitio but a valid reductio ad absurdum. (shrink)

Richard Levins (1930-2016) was an outstanding ecologist, population geneticist, biomathematician, philosopher of science, complexity theorist, and Marxist. Key to all aspects of his work was a dialectical logic of process and change. His work provides a framework for the understanding of crises in environment and society and their analytic relationship with capitalism and imperialism, as well as the tools for the critique of biological determinist justifications for the existing structures of power. This anthology pays tribute to Levins by carrying forward (...) his work in the development of the understanding of the dialectics of nature and society. -/- The contributions are organized into four sections--Dialectics in Wholistic Research; Political Ecology and Health; Complex Systems; and Reminiscences and Tributes. The authors are as almost as hard to label as Levins; the fields they draw from range from biomathematics to NGO activism; environmental policy to island and aquatic ecology; eco-justice podcasting to biogeochemistry; reflective practice to science-in-society, agroecology to public health. (shrink)

1. Clark’s book is a detailed study of the nature of sensory representation. It is highly informed by empirical results in the psychology of perception, and philosophically rich and significant. I admire the book and learned a great deal from reading it. As it covers a wide range of topics, and as I have no overarching critique to present, in this commentary I will briefly address three issues that come up in the book: Clark’s relational type-identity thesis for (...) sensory qualities, his theory that sensory representations involve proto-singular terms referring to spatio-temporal regions in the subject’s environment, and his interesting proposal concerning color to treat it as “difference coding”. Some of my remarks will be critical, but others will just explore some of the implications of his view. 2. Clark distinguishes “phenomenal properties” from “qualitative properties”, the former being appearance properties of things in the world (their colors, shapes, tastes, odors, etc.) and the latter being the properties of sensations by virtue of which they are sensations of their corresponding phenomenal properties. So when I see a red ball I am “directly” aware of the ball’s redness and roundness - it appears red and round to me. This awareness of the ball’s redness and roundness is accomplished, however, by my having a visual experience with certain qualitative properties; those that are of the sort one has when seeing something as red and round. It is these latter qualitative properties that are the subject of his relational type-identity thesis. Before addressing that thesis, however, I want to quickly note and respond to another point Clark makes concerning the qualitative properties of sensory states. He.. (shrink)

I am very grateful to my commentators for their interest and their careful attention to A Theory of Sentience. It is particularly gratifying to find other philosophers attracted to the murky domain of pre-attentive sensory processing, an obscure place where exciting stuff happens. I can by no means answer all of their objections or counter-arguments, and some of the problems noted derive from failures in my original exposition. But a theory is a success if it helps spur the creation of (...) better successors. By those lights this one seems to be succeeding admirably. Would that every author could receive such commentaries! (shrink)

Marjorie Grene has argued in a number of contexts that any attempt to reduce the explanation of human actions to “mechanistic” explanations is doomed to failure in advance because it is absurd. “This argument examines the status of the reductivist thesis in its own terms and reduces it to absurdity …” ; “the attempt to reduce human purposive, or ‘intentional,‘ action to physiology and ultimately to physics and chemistry is an absurdity rather than simply a confusion”. I wish to (...) show that this argument is fallacious because it involves a petitio principii; and if Plato can be credited with introducing the same argument in the Theaetetus, as she suggests, so much the worse for Plato. (shrink)

This book is divided into two parts. The first is Earman's harsh critique of Hume's essay and its conclusions. The second part of the book contains selections from primary texts of Locke, Spinoza, Clarke, and others, along with the text "Of Miracles," recording changes that Hume made. There is little in the way of explanation, a single paragraph in the preface, as to why these texts have been selected. Presumably, Earman sees each of these as containing something significant to contribute (...) to the formulation of his theses in the first part of the book—especially his claim that Hume's arguments are largely derivative. (shrink)

It is often assumed that adaptation — a temporary change in sensitivity to a perceptual dimension following exposure to that dimension — is a litmus test for what is and is not a “primary visual attribute”. Thus, papers purporting to find evidence of number adaptation motivate a claim of great philosophical significance: That number is something that can be seen in much the way that canonical visual features, like color, contrast, size, and speed, can. Fifteen years after its reported discovery, (...) number adaptation’s existence seems to be nearly undisputed, with dozens of papers documenting support for the phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to offer a counterweight — to critically assess the evidence for and against number adaptation. After surveying the many reasons for thinking that number adaptation exists, we introduce several lesser-known reasons to be skeptical. We then advance an alternative account — the old news hypothesis — which can accommodate previously published findings while explaining various (otherwise unexplained) anomalies in the existing literature. Next, we describe the results of eight pre-registered experiments which pit our novel old news hypothesis against the received number adaptation hypothesis. Collectively, the results of these experiments undermine the number adaptation hypothesis on several fronts, whilst consistently supporting the old news hypothesis. More broadly our work raises questions about the status of adaptation itself as a means of discerning what is and is not a visual attribute. (shrink)

In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number (...) of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts. (shrink)

Illustrates the similarities between the enslavement of Black people and the enslavement of animals in both the past and the present.

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

Norwegian health professionals, elderly people and family members experience ethical problems involving end-of-life decision making for elders in the context of the values of Norwegian society. This study used ethical inquiry and qualitative methodology to conduct and analyze interviews carried out with 25 health professionals, six elderly people and five family members about the ethical problems they encountered in end-of-life decision making in Norway. All three participant groups experienced ethical problems involving the adequacy of health care for elderly Norwegians. Older (...) people were concerned about being a burden to their families at the end of their life. However, health professionals wished to protect families from the burden of difficult decisions regarding health care for elderly parents at the end of life. Strategies are suggested for dialogue about end-of-life decisions and the integration of palliative care approaches into health care services for frail elderly people. (shrink)

The visual system adapts to a wide range of visual features, from lower-level features like color and motion to higher-level features like causality and, perhaps, number. According to some, adaptation is a strictly perceptual phenomenon, such that the presence of adaptation licenses the claim that a feature is truly perceptual in nature. Given the theoretical importance of claims about adaptation, then, it is important to understand exactly when the visual system does and does not exhibit adaptation. Here, we take as (...) a case study one specific kind of adaptation: visual adaptation to size. Supported by evidence from four experiments, we argue that, despite robust effects of size adaptation in the lab, (1) size adaptation effects are phenomenologically underwhelming (in some cases, hardly appreciable at all), (2) some effects of size adaptation appear contradictory, and difficult to explain given current theories of size adaptation, and (3) prior studies on size adaptation may have failed to isolate size as the adapted dimension. Ultimately, we argue that while there is evidence to license the claim that size adaptation is genuine, size adaptation is a puzzling and poorly understood phenomenon. (shrink)

John Dupr argues that 'scientific imperialism' can result in 'misguided' science being considered acceptable. 'Misguided' is an explicitly normative term and the use of the pejorative 'imperialistic' is implicitly normative. However, Dupr has not justified the normative dimension of his critique. We identify two ways in which it might be justified. It might be justified if colonisation prevents a discipline from progressing in ways that it might otherwise progress. It might also be justified if colonisation prevents the expression of important (...) values in the colonised discipline. This second concern seems most pressing in the human sciences. (shrink)

This essay explores some relationships between social structures or systems and the internal psychological structures or systems of individuals. After defining evil, pastoral counseling, and structures or systems, I present examples of persons affected by social systems of power who have sought counseling. I present a form of counseling known as Internal Family System Therapy (IFS) and show with an extended example how I have worked with clients using this approach. In this process the client is guided to use "Self-leadership" (...) in healing and transforming inner conflict between various subpersonalities or "parts." I then compare the IFS approach to one used by mediators in community conflict transformation and peacebuilding. (shrink)

Extant research has shown that ordinary causal judgments are sensitive to normative factors. For instance, agents who violate a norm are standardly deemed more causal than norm-conforming agents in identical situations. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for the Norm Effect: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. According to the former, the Norm Effect arises because ordinary causal judgment is intimately intertwined with moral responsibility. According to the alternative view, the Norm Effect is the result of a (...) blame-driven bias. In a series of five preregistered experiments (N = 2688), we present evidence that predominantly favours the Bias View. In particular, and against predictions made by the Responsibility View, we show that participants deem agents who violate nonpertinent or silly norms – norms that do not relate to the outcome at hand – as more causal, and that this effect cannot be explained in terms of plausible mediators such as the agent’s foreknowledge and desire, or the foreseeability of harm. We close with a discussion regarding the implications of these findings, in as regards the just assessment of proximate cause in the law. (shrink)

This is another volume in the Modern Studies in Philosophy, a series of anthologies under the general editorship of Prof. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, which present contemporary interpretations and evaluations of the works of major philosophers. This volume, consisting of a collection of papers by an impressive gallery of scholars, offers a plurality of perspectives on Spinoza. Each interpretation conflicts with some other; yet each illuminates some aspect of the subject. All the papers reflect the "tensions" and "conflicts" which make for (...) very exciting and rewarding reading. Still the substantive puzzles remain and will continue to excite and fascinate successive generations of Spinoza's critics. (shrink)

Can an assessment of individuals’ narcissism help explain the quality of a respondent’s ethical judgment? How is the relationship between religiosity and ethical judgment moderated by the effects of narcissism? With a sample of 385 undergraduate business majors, this study uses a taxonomic approach to examine the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity as well as orthodox Christian beliefs on ethical judgment. Three distinct clusters were identified: Skeptics, Nominals, and Devouts. Surprisingly, of the three clusters, Nominals and Devouts were the (...) only groups impacted by narcissism, although Skeptics overall demonstrate the worst ethical judgment. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's ethics of embodiment, focusing upon care of the self, has motivated feminist scholars to pursue promising models of embodied resistance to disciplinary normalization. Cressida Heyes, in particular, has advocated that these projects adopt practices of “somaesthetics,” following a program of body consciousness developed by Richard Shusterman. In exploring Shusterman's somaesthetics proposal, I find that it does not account for the subjective challenges of resisting normalization. Based on narrative theories of subjectivity, the role narrative plays in normalization, and a (...) commitment to developing concrete, feminist practices of embodied ethics, I develop a model of “narrative somaesthetics” based on an updated consciousness-raising model that emphasizes group heterogeneity and narrative conflict that deals with these challenges. Through an analysis of interviews with self-identified femme lesbians and a “female to femme” transition support group featured in the documentary film, FtF: Female to Femme, I argue that narrative somaesthetics enables the analytical, genealogical work required to identify and weaken normalization's constraints on embodied feminist ethics. (shrink)

Infinite Awareness pairs Woollacott’s research as a neuroscientist with her self-revelations about the her mind’s spiritual power. Between the scientific and spiritual worlds, she breaks open the definition of human consciousness to investigate the existence of a non-physical mind.

The United States, unlike most developed countries, continues to use the marital couple as the taxable unit for its income tax. This continued use of the marital unit— like its original establishment —rests on cultural preferences. This Article suggests that the roles of marriage, religion and taxation in America are essential factors in America’s retention of the marital unit. Part I examines the distinctive contribution marriage — especially the traditional single-earner breadwinner marriage — makes to the political life of the (...) country. Part II explores the similar role of religion. Part III describes some congressional efforts over the past two decades to aid, ostensibly, married couples through the income tax. Part IV concludes that although these actions have not been the most effective or efficient means of helping married couples, they nevertheless serve an important expressive purpose. Tax has been the arena for many political issues since the founding of the nation. Consequently, congressional actions and rhetoric regarding the income tax’s "marriage penalty" reinforce the marital unit/joint return and reaffirm — even if only symbolically — a national commitment to marriage as instrumental to American democracy. (shrink)

La cohabitation avec la dialyse à domicile, ce lieu privé habituellement préservé de la maladie, invite à des questionnements sur la dynamique du couple au regard du nouveau rôle de soignant endossé par le conjoint et de celui de patient assigné au conjoint malade. Les auteurs, psychologues cliniciennes, interrogent ici les motivations conscientes et inconscientes qui conduisent à cette décision commune et leurs retentissements sur la dynamique du couple. Différentes configurations relationnelles observées dans notre clinique seront abordées. L’article, cas clinique (...) à l’appui, montre l’intérêt d’un groupe thérapeutique avec malades et conjoints pour mettre à jour les enjeux, au niveau de la relation de couple, d’une prise en charge à domicile. (shrink)

Analysis of an interview conducted by a white researcher with an African American nutritionist points to the significance of racial-ethnic dynamics in the conduct of qualitative research. Interviewers who follow the standard methodological rule—to let findings “emerge” from their data—may fail to hear the significance of race-ethnicity in the accounts of informants. Close analysis suggests that talk will sometimes reveal racial-ethnic dynamics even when these are not explicit topics and that active attention to such structured inequalities produces a more robust (...) analysis. Institutional ethnography and narrative analysis are discussed as alternatives to the grounded-theory approach to qualitative analysis. (shrink)

A central tenet of constructivist models of conceptual development is that children's initial conceptual level constrains how they make sense of new evidence and thus whether exposure to evidence will prompt conceptual change. Yet little experimental evidence directly examines this claim for the case of sustained, fundamental conceptual achievements. The present study combined scaling and experimental microgenetic methods to examine the processes underlying conceptual change in the context of an important conceptual achievement of early childhood—the development of a representational theory (...) of mind. Results from 47 children (M age = 3.7 years) indicate that only children who were conceptually close to understanding false belief at the beginning of the study, and who were experimentally exposed to evidence of people acting on false beliefs, reliably developed representational theories of minds. Combined scaling and microgenetic data revealed how prior conceptual level interacts with experience, thereby providing critical experimental evidence for how conceptual change results from the interplay between conceptions and evidence. (shrink)

With questions raised as to whether or not nursing knowledge should be developed from extant conceptual/theoretical models or from practice-based environments, this paper utilizes Kuhn's disciplinary matrix and Laudan's model of consensus formation to explore the changing nature of the discipline's structural matrix. Kuhn's notion that a discipline's structural matrix includes symbolic generalizations, models and exemplars, and Laudan's view that a maturing discipline embraces factual, methodological, and axiological (goals and aims) knowledge, and that context and discourse are also involved in (...) advancing a discipline is described as a means for reconciling the source of nursing knowledge. This paper posits that shared axiological goals connect both theorists and practitioners, and resolve potential conflicts as to viable sources of nursing knowledge. Through shared goals that include humanization, meaning, quality of life, caring, consciousness, transcendence, and presence, which bridge both theoretical and practice approaches, nursing's charge to contribute to the good of society is fulfilled. (shrink)

When the world's first face transplant was performed in France in 2005, the complex medical procedure and accompanying worldwide media attention sparked many ethical issues, including how the media covered the story. This study uses framing theory to examine what happens when media ethics intersect with bioethics by analyzing French, American, and British media coverage on the transplant and its aftermath. This study looks at how this story was framed and which bioethical issues were focused upon. The media ethical implications (...) of these findings are then discussed. By doing so, this article attempts to contribute to the debate on how complex medical stories with bioethical components can be reported in an ethical manner. (shrink)