Critical Qualitative Health Research seeks to deepen understandings of the philosophies, politics and practices shaping contemporary qualitative health related research. This accessible, lively, controversial introduction draws on current empirical examples and critical discussion to show how qualitative research undertaken in neoliberal healthcare contexts emerges and the complex issues qualitative researchers confront. This book provides readers with a critical, interrogative discussion of the histories and the legacies of qualitative research, as well as of the more recent calls for renewed criticality in (...) research to respond to global health concerns. Contributions further showcase a range of contemporary work engaging with these issues and the complex encounters with philosophies, politics and practices this involves; from seeking explicit engagements with posthuman ideas or detailed explorations of deeply engaged humanist approaches, to critical discussions of the politics and practices of emerging novel, digital and creative methods. This book offers postgraduate researchers, health researchers and students alike opportunities to engage more deeply with the emergent, complex and messy terrain of qualitative health related research. (shrink)

La pretensión de este artículo, presentado en un simposio sobre Teoríasde la verdad, es la de acercar unas breves pinceladas sobre lo que laantropología hace y puede decir, a otras disciplinas, en este casoconcreto, a la esfera del saber filosófico. El centro de todo el discurso que en adelante voy a realizar será un esfuerzo por dejar claro que elconocimiento no está fuera de la contextualización de un grupo socialdeterminado, y que por tanto, los universales que tantas teoríasepistemológicas nos han (...) mostrado a lo largo de la historia de la filosofíano son más que aplicables dentro de un esquema determinado cultural,pero no siempre y en todo lugar exportables o de aplicabilidad universal.Este es el motor interno que pretendo conseguir que se plasme en elinterior de la argumentación posterior. (shrink)

en el articulo “Crisis de la razón: crisis de la persona” se presenta la importancia de la trascendentalidad en el ser humano. El hombre ha perdido el sentido trascendental de su vida y esto ha ocurrido a causa, principalmente, de la errónea utilización de la razón y el progreso. Entender el progreso como facultad de perfeccionamiento y poder ilimitado implica graves consecuencias, entre las cuales se encuentra la pérdida de la trascendentalidad.

El estudio de la onomástica femenina de los Banū Marīn de Fez ha adolecido, por lo general, de un análisis profundo y monográfico, a pesar de la gran utilidad de dichos nombres para definir mejor distintos rasgos de la idiosincrasia de esta estirpe. El objetivo principal del presente trabajo es cubrir precisamente dicha laguna científica, ofreciendo un análisis tanto filológico como socio-cultural del amplio catálogo de nombres femeninos presentes en el árbol genealógico meriní, desde el rigor científico. Como se intentará (...) demostrar, tales denominaciones constituyen valiosos recursos para reconstruir la diversidad identitaria (étnica, geográfica, prosopográfica, cultural, etc.) no solo de este conjunto de mujeres, sino también de los soberanos con los que se relacionaron en distintas calidades familiares. Igualmente, tales nomenclaturas permiten identificar con una mayor precisión las estrategias de legitimación político-religiosa que esta estirpe diseñó tanto en el plano socio-cultural árabe como en el religioso islámico. (shrink)

Drawing from Goffman’s original observations on stigma and the consequences of interactions between the stigmatized and supportive or stigmatizing audiences, we conduct a 20-year review of the diverse literature on stigma to revisit the collective nature of stigmatization processes. We find that studies on stigma’s origins, responses, processes, and outcomes have diverged from Goffman’s relational view of stigma as they have overlooked important relational mechanisms explaining the processes of (de)stigmatization. We draw from those conclusions to justify the need to study (...) stigma as a collective phenomenon. We develop a relational perspective on stigma based on understanding how attributes are stigmatized (or not) by audiences in their interactions. We argue that to advance stigma research, it is necessary to build on Goffman’s theory to include the stigmatizers (i.e., the normal) and supporters (i.e., the wise); how they create, sustain, or remove stigma; and how they relate to the stigmatized (i.e., the targets). Accordingly, we provide a research agenda on stigma as a collective phenomenon that theorizes a relational perspective, proposes a typology of how audiences relate to stigmatization, and identifies patterns of relations between audiences. We thus offer a missing piece to existing accounts of stigma by focusing on the key role of audiences (i.e., stigmatizers or supporters of the stigmatized) rather than on the targets of stigma (i.e., the own). (shrink)

A complete, illustrated survey of Etienne-Jules Marey's work that investigates the far reaching effects of her inventions on stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian philosophy, and the art of cubists and futurists.

This paper examines a little studied type of perspective shift that I call protagonist projection, following Holton :625–628, 1997). PP is a way of describing the mental state of a protagonist that conveys, to some extent, her perspective. Similarly to its better known cousin free indirect discourse, the shift in perspective is achieved without an overt operator. Unlike FID, PP is not based on a presumed speech-act of a protagonist. Rather, it gives a linguistic form to pre-verbal perceptual content, sensations, (...) feelings or implicit beliefs. I propose to analyse PP in a bi-contextual framework, extending Eckardt’s approach to FID. Under the resulting analysis, FID and PP are two instances of a more general category of perspective shift. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to define a partial Propositional Type Theory. Our system is partial in a double sense: the hierarchy of (propositional) types contains partial functions and some expressions of the language, including formulas, may be undefined. The specific interpretation we give to the undefined value is that of Kleene’s strong logic of indeterminacy. We present a semantics for the new system and prove that every element of any domain of the hierarchy has a name in the (...) object language. Finally, we provide a proof system and a (constructive) proof of completeness. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente trabajo tiene por objetivo describir las estrategias semánticas o representaciones cognitivas que construyen los diarios chilenos El Mercurio y La Cuarta, acerca de la cultura mapuche, a propósito de la cobertura periodística otorgada a la huelga de hambre protagonizada por prisioneros de esta etnia. Para ello, estudiaremos las estrategias discursivas usadas por los diarios mencionados y su correlación con las macroestructuras periodísticas que las reflejan, para finalmente analizar la lexicalización en la configuración de la alteridad mapuche. Se (...) utiliza como metodología el Análisis Crítico del Discurso (ACD) -en relación con el cuadrado ideológico (Van Dijk, 1999) y la lexicalización- y el modelo de Velázquez (2011) para el estudio del discurso periodístico en cuanto a la superestructura y la macroestructura de la noticia. Se concluye que los diarios analizados utilizan estrategias semántico-cognitivas etnocéntricas y discriminadoras al dar forma al cuadrado ideológico y su polarización entre los Otros /Nosotros. Abstract: The objective of this paper is to describe the semantic strategies, or cognitive representations, that El Mercurio and La Cuarta, Chilean newspapers, create about mapuche culture, in relation to the press coverage given to the hunger strike organised by prisoners of this ethnic group. For this, the discursive strategies used by the newspapers mentioned before, and the representation of their interrelationship with the macrostructures in journalism, which finally aim to analyze the lexicalization in the configuration of the mapuche otherness, were studied. The methodology consists of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) -in relation to the ideological square (Van Dijk, 1999) and lexicalization- and the Velazquez’ model (2011) for the study of the journalist discourse related to the superstructure and macrostructure of news. As a conclusion, the newspapers analysed use semantic and cognitive strategies to discriminate based on ethnocentrism, giving it a specific ideological square and polarisation between Others and Us. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente trabajo tiene por objetivo describir las estrategias semánticas o representaciones cognitivas que construyen los diarios chilenos El Mercurio y La Cuarta, acerca de la cultura mapuche, a propósito de la cobertura periodística otorgada a la huelga de hambre protagonizada por prisioneros de esta etnia. Para ello, estudiaremos las estrategias discursivas usadas por los diarios mencionados y su correlación con las macroestructuras periodísticas que las reflejan, para finalmente analizar la lexicalización en la configuración de la alteridad mapuche. Se (...) utiliza como metodología el Análisis Crítico del Discurso (ACD) -en relación con el cuadrado ideológico (Van Dijk, 1999) y la lexicalización- y el modelo de Velázquez (2011) para el estudio del discurso periodístico en cuanto a la superestructura y la macroestructura de la noticia. Se concluye que los diarios analizados utilizan estrategias semántico-cognitivas etnocéntricas y discriminadoras al dar forma al cuadrado ideológico y su polarización entre los Otros /Nosotros. Abstract: The objective of this paper is to describe the semantic strategies, or cognitive representations, that El Mercurio and La Cuarta, Chilean newspapers, create about mapuche culture, in relation to the press coverage given to the hunger strike organised by prisoners of this ethnic group. For this, the discursive strategies used by the newspapers mentioned before, and the representation of their interrelationship with the macrostructures in journalism, which finally aim to analyze the lexicalization in the configuration of the mapuche otherness, were studied. The methodology consists of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) -in relation to the ideological square (Van Dijk, 1999) and lexicalization- and the Velazquez’ model (2011) for the study of the journalist discourse related to the superstructure and macrostructure of news. As a conclusion, the newspapers analysed use semantic and cognitive strategies to discriminate based on ethnocentrism, giving it a specific ideological square and polarisation between Others and Us. (shrink)

The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention (...) to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000). (shrink)

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Soft’ presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while ‘hard’ presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, and (...) question–answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts. (shrink)

Resumen: El trabajo se centrará en dar cuenta sobre la existencia de un territorio otro, invisibilizado por el logocentrismo y la historiografía tradicional del occidente moderno. Este territorio otro que denominamos territorios discursivos es una realidad que situamos en los discursos territoriales y que, dada su dimensión discursiva, puede ser develada mediante el análisis hermenéutico. Uno de los supuestos en que se basa esta investigación, es que los territorios discursivos actúan como el lugar desde el cual el discurso territorial llega (...) a ser el que es, a indicar una dirección y explicitar un sentido específico, en cualquiera de las formas institucionalizadas por una colectividad pero sin que se tenga plena conciencia o evidencia de éste. Por lo anterior, planteamos que los territorios discursivos se encuentran ligados a la imagen hologramática, condición que proponemos develar desde un trasfondo sociocultural y por medio de la interpretación hermenéutica de los discursos territoriales. (shrink)

Resumen: Los territorios discursivos se erigen mediante la conformación de dos dimensiones, una que atiende a sus componentes discursivos y la otra que responde a las características territoriales donde todo lo develado por medio del discurso se constituye en un holograma territorial-identitario. Esto significa que nos encontramos frente a un tipo de territorio tradicionalmente invisibilizado, en gran parte, por la subalternización de los discursos y la no consideración recursiva de los territorios. Por tanto, esta investigación pretende dar cuenta de los (...) componentes que hacen de los territorios discursivos una realidad territorial con sentidos reconocibles, tanto en sus aspectos simbólicos como materiales, desde un origen epistemológico que atiende a la naturaleza del fenómeno.: Discursive territories are created through the conformation of two dimensions, one that attends to its discursive components and the other that responds to the territorial characteristics where everything unveiled through discourse is constituted in a territorial-identity hologram. This means that we are facing a type of territory traditionally rendered invisible, in large part, by the subalternization of discourses and the recusal of territories. Therefore, this research aims to account for the components that make discursive territories a territorial reality with recognizable meanings, both in its symbolic and material aspects, from an epistemological origin that attends to the nature of the phenomenon. (shrink)

Resumen: El trabajo se centrará en dar cuenta sobre la existencia de un territorio otro, invisibilizado por el logocentrismo y la historiografía tradicional del occidente moderno. Este territorio otro que denominamos territorios discursivos es una realidad que situamos en los discursos territoriales y que, dada su dimensión discursiva, puede ser develada mediante el análisis hermenéutico. Uno de los supuestos en que se basa esta investigación, es que los territorios discursivos actúan como el lugar desde el cual el discurso territorial llega (...) a ser el que es, a indicar una dirección y explicitar un sentido específico, en cualquiera de las formas institucionalizadas por una colectividad pero sin que se tenga plena conciencia o evidencia de éste. Por lo anterior, planteamos que los territorios discursivos se encuentran ligados a la imagen hologramática, condición que proponemos develar desde un trasfondo sociocultural y por medio de la interpretación hermenéutica de los discursos territoriales.: This work focusses on giving an account of the existence of a territory other, made invisible by the logocentrism and the traditional historiography of the modern west. This territory other that we call discursive territories is a reality that we situate in territorial discourses and that, given its discursive dimension, can be revealed through hermeneutical analysis. One of the assumptions on which this research is based, is that the discursive territories act as the place from which the territorial discourse becomes what it is, to indicate a direction and to specify a specific meaning, in any of the forms institutionalized by a collectivity but without full awareness or evidence of it. Therefore, we propose that the discursive territories are linked to the hologram image, a condition that we suggest is revealed from a sociocultural background and through the hermeneutic interpretation of territorial discourses. (shrink)

Clinician gate-keeping is the process whereby healthcare providers prevent access to eligible patients for research recruitment. This paper contends that clinician gate-keeping violates three principles that underpin international ethical guidelines: respect for persons or autonomy; beneficence or a favourable balance of risks and potential benefits; and justice or a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of research. In order to stimulate further research and debate, three possible strategies are also presented to eliminate gate-keeping: partnership with professional researchers; collaborative research (...) design and clinician education. (shrink)

Husserl's two notions of "definiteness" enabled him to clarify the problem of imaginary numbers. The exact meaning of these notions is a topic of much controversy. A "definite" axiom system has been interpreted as a syntactically complete theory, and also as a categorical one. I discuss whether and how far these readings manage to capture Husserl's goal of elucidating the problem of imaginary numbers, raising objections to both positions. Then, I suggest an interpretation of "absolute definiteness" as semantic completeness and (...) argue that this notion does not suffice to explain Husserl's solution to the problem of imaginary numbers. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza la incorporación del soft power como elemento de la política exterior de China para América Latina. Sostenemos que China cuenta con soft power y ha desarrollado una estrategia para proyectarlo en el mundo a partir de su política exterior, basándose en su cultura milenaria, en la cooperación internacional hacia los países en desarrollo y en la promoción de su modelo de desarrollo. Asimismo, la inclusión de China del soft power como elemento de su política exterior en la (...) primera mitad de la década de 2000 tendrá efectos medibles en la intensificación de las relaciones con América Latina en la segunda mitad de esa década. (shrink)

The relationship between philosophy and science has always been complementary. Today, while science moves increasingly fast and philosophy shows some problems in catching up with it, it is not always possible to ignore such relationships, especially in some disciplines such as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and neuroscience. However, the methodological procedures used to analyze these data are based on principles and assumptions that require a profound dialogue between philosophy and science. Following these ideas, this work aims to raise the (...) problems that a classical connectionist theory can cause and problematize them in a cognitive framework, considering both philosophy and cognitive sciences but also the disciplines that are near to them, such as AI, computer sciences, and linguistics. For this reason, we embarked on an analysis of both the computational and theoretical problems that connectionism currently has. The second aim of this work is to advocate for collaboration between neuroscience and philosophy of mind because the promotion of deeper multidisciplinarity seems necessary in order to solve connectionism’s problems. In fact, we believe that the problems that we detected can be solved by a thorough investigation at both a theoretical and an empirical level, and they do not represent an impasse but rather a starting point from which connectionism should learn and be updated while keeping its original and profoundly convincing core. (shrink)

Cancer research is experiencing ‘paradigm instability’, since there are two rival theories of carcinogenesis which confront themselves, namely the somatic mutation theory and the tissue organization field theory. Despite this theoretical uncertainty, a huge quantity of data is available thanks to the improvement of genome sequencing techniques. Some authors think that the development of new statistical tools will be able to overcome the lack of a shared theoretical perspective on cancer by amalgamating as many data as possible. We think instead (...) that a deeper understanding of cancer can be achieved by means of more theoretical work, rather than by merely accumulating more data. To support our thesis, we introduce the analytic view of theory development, which rests on the concept of plausibility, and make clear in what sense plausibility and probability are distinct concepts. Then, the concept of plausibility is used to point out the ineliminable role played by the epistemic subject in the development of statistical tools and in the process of theory assessment. We then move to address a central issue in cancer research, namely the relevance of computational tools developed by bioinformaticists to detect driver mutations in the debate between the two main rival theories of carcinogenesis. Finally, we briefly extend our considerations on the role that plausibility plays in evidence amalgamation from cancer research to the more general issue of the divergences between frequentists and Bayesians in the philosophy of medicine and statistics. We argue that taking into account plausibility-based considerations can lead to clarify some epistemological shortcomings that afflict both these perspectives. (shrink)

Cases—be they real or fictional—are commonplace both in the medical ethics literature and in the public media. Cases take on a variety of forms: from streamlined to book length narratives. They also serve a variety of different purposes, from illustration, to decision making, and from debunking to heuristics. Drawing on the rhetorical analysis of « exemplum », I shall describe what cases are, and what their role is in the practice of clinical ethics. I identify two basic ways in which (...) cases can be brought to bear on ethical thinking and practice: a « tamed » and a « wild » way, and show how « wild cases » can serve a useful heuristic function despite their appeal to emotions and their unusual and striking character. In conclusion, I will argue that cases, both in their wild and their tamed form, are not only useful pedagogical tools, but can serve as a legitimate empirical basis for medical ethics. (shrink)

Two arguments are offered here for postulating individual essences of concrete individuals on top of their sortal essences. One is the explanatory gap argument, the other draws on the analogy with the individual essences of events presupposed in single causal explanations. These arguments support qualitative individual essences with explanatory goals as opposed to hybrid impure relational essences accounting for origin and numerical identity. It is highlighted why origin properties as parts of impure relational essences do not yield genuine de re (...) constructions. The distinction between the two types of individual essences is traced back to the ambiguity of the very notion of individuation. (shrink)