When learning a new math concept, should learners be first taught the concept and its associated procedures and then solve problems, or solve problems first even if it leads to failure and then be taught the concept and the procedures? Two randomized-controlled studies found that both methods lead to high levels of procedural knowledge. However, students who engaged in problem solving before being taught demonstrated significantly greater conceptual understanding and ability to transfer to novel problems than those who were (...) taught first. The second study further showed that when given an opportunity to learn from the failed problem-solving attempts of their peers, students outperformed those who were taught first, but not those who engaged in problem solving first. Process findings showed that the number of student-generated solutions significantly predicted learning outcomes. These results challenge the conventional practice of direct instruction to teach new math concepts and procedures, and propose the possibility of learning from one's own failed problem-solving attempts or those of others before receiving instruction as alternatives for better math learning. (shrink)

This paper reports on an ongoing ARC Discovery Project that is conducting design research into learning in collaborative virtual worlds (CVW).The paper will describe three design components of the project: (a) pedagogical design, (b)technical and graphics design, and (c) learning research design. The perspectives of each design team will be discussed and how the three teams worked together to produce the CVW. The development of productive failure learning activities for the CVW will be discussed and there will be (...) an interactive demonstration of the project's CVW. (shrink)

Japan is a country largely lacking supplies of many essential natural resources including petroleum, coal, and iron ore. As her industrial base and economy expanded during the 1920s and 1930s, Japan's dependence on imports of these resources became increasingly evident. The onset of the Depression in the 1930s further threatened Japan's lifeline, and, in an effort to become economically independent and self-sufficient in natural resources , Japan's militaristic government pursued a policy of territorial expansion. Beginning in 1937, Japan's military forces (...) swept out of Manchuria into China and then into Southeast Asia in search of strategic materials such as petroleum, coal, copper, zinc, and rubber. To achieve independence in petroleum, the Japanese developed a dual approach: they would acquire natural petroleum sources in Southeast Asia and at the same time establish a synthetic fuel industry for the conversion of coal to oil. Actually, the Japanese had begun research on synthetic fuel in the 1920s, only a few years after other countries, such as Germany and Britain, that lacked sources of natural petroleum. They did excellent laboratory research on the coal hydrogenation and Fischer-Tropsch conversion processes, but in their haste to construct large synthetic fuel plants they bypassed the intermediated pilot-plant stage and failed to make a successful transition from small- to large-scale production. Unable to synthesize liquid fuels from coal, they instead derived significant quantities from the technologically simpler coal carbonization and shale oil distillation processes. In the last year of World War II, the Japanese attempted to revive their synthetic fuel industry and entered into an agreement with IG Farben for technical assistance. Germany's defeat ended this final effort. The Japanese synthetic fuel industry presents a good case study of technological failure. It shows that high-quality basic scientific research does not necessarily translate into large-scale technological success. (shrink)

Failure is a central notion both in ethics of engineering and in engineering practice. Engineers devote considerable resources to assure their products will not fail and considerable progress has been made in the development of tools and methods for understanding and avoiding failure. Engineering ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with the moral and social aspects related to the causes and consequences of technological failures. But what is meant by failure, and what does it mean that (...) a failure has occurred? The subject of this paper is how engineers use and define this notion. Although a traditional definition of failure can be identified that is shared by a large part of the engineering community, the literature shows that engineers are willing to consider as failures also events and circumstance that are at odds with this traditional definition. These cases violate one or more of three assumptions made by the traditional approach to failure. An alternative approach, inspired by the notion of product life cycle, is proposed which dispenses with these assumptions. Besides being able to address the traditional cases of failure, it can deal successfully with the problematic cases. The adoption of a life cycle perspective allows the introduction of a clearer notion of failure and allows a classification of failure phenomena that takes into account the roles of stakeholders involved in the various stages of a product life cycle. (shrink)

This article makes first use of a set of databases that are authoritative, independent, and consistent to examine an old research question: do firms hurt their financial performance by damaging stakeholder interests? The databases are US government on-line listings of fines for environmental breaches, unsafe workplaces, fraudulent accounting standards, and product recalls. These measures are assumed to proxy for signals to stakeholders of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks in transacting with the firm and appear to have fewer biases (...) than conventional measures of stakeholder standards. Using a sample of all non-financial S& P 500 firms during the most recent 1998-2003 full cycle in the market, after controlling for firm-specific differences, sales margins of firms fell by 0.8% if they announced a product recall and by 0.4% if cited by OSHA for an unsafe workplace; and shareholder return was significantly reduced by an EPA or SEC prosecution. This study links the risk of transaction uncertainty, information signaling theory, and the resource-based view of the firm to company financial performance. Results support the normative assumption that a firm's sales margin will be damaged by unethical treatment of stakeholders as evidenced by ESG breaches, presumably because risk-averse customers and suppliers are alert to signals of counterparty risk. (shrink)

A world awash in little understood chemicals tragically harms adults and children alike. Laws keep health agencies in the dark about toxicants, slow, well motivated research hampers protections, and strenuous vested opposition exacerbates the harm. How science is used in the tort law can facilitate or frustrate redress of harm. This book recommends better approaches.

This chapter develops criteria of work and failure implicit within the Prisons Information Group (GIP). Reading the group’s documents in conjunction with the thought of Michel Foucault, the chapter asks: How did the GIP characterize work or attribute failure and how did Foucault understand both in this period? By analyzing these discursive practices together, the essay first identifies five criteria of failure: discursive, structural, systemic, deconstructive, and productive failure. Second, it tests the GIP against each (...) criterion, marking where it does and does not fail. The chapter therefore offers an internal assessment of the GIP, one that is sensitive to the movement’s own discourse and development. In closing, the chapter draws several implications from this analysis of failure for contemporary prison activism and analysis. (shrink)

Recent papers by a number of philosophers have been concerned with the question of whether natural selection is a causal process, and if it is, whether the causes of selection are properties of individuals or properties of populations. I shall argue that much confusion in this debate arises because of a failure to distinguish between causal productivity and causal relevance. Causal productivity is a relation that holds between events connected via continuous causal processes, while causal relevance is a relationship (...) that can hold between a variety of different kinds of facts and the events that counterfactually depend upon them. I shall argue that the productive character of natural selection derives from the aggregation of individual processes in which organisms live, reproduce and die. At the same time, a causal explanation of the distribution of traits will necessarily appeal both to causally relevant properties of individuals and to causally relevant properties that exist only at the level of the population. (shrink)

Several proof-theoretic notions of validity have been proposed in the literature, for which completeness of intuitionistic logic has been conjectured. We define validity for intuitionistic propositional logic in a way which is common to many of these notions, emphasizing that an appropriate notion of validity must be closed under substitution. In this definition we consider atomic systems whose rules are not only production rules, but may include rules that allow one to discharge assumptions. Our central result shows that Harrop’s rule (...) is valid under substitution, which refutes the completeness conjecture for intuitionistic logic. (shrink)

We investigate transfer of interpolation in such combinations of modal logic which lead to interaction of the modalities. Combining logics by taking products often blocks transfer of interpolation. The same holds for combinations by taking unions, a generalization of Humberstone's inaccessibility logic. Viewing first-order logic as a product of modal logics, we derive a strong counterexample for failure of interpolation in the finite variable fragments of first-order logic. We provide a simple condition stated only in terms of frames and (...) bisimulations which implies failure of interpolation. Its use is exemplified in a wide range of cases. (shrink)

“Challenging the utility of polygenic scores for social science” is a compelling but limited critique. Phenotypic development is sensitive to both initial conditions and all subsequent states – from conception to senescence. Thus, gene-centric analyses are misleading (and often meaningless) because gene products are transformed, and their phenotypic ‘effects' combined and attenuated with successive propagations from molecular and cellular contexts to organismal and social environments.

This commentary tests a methodology proposed by Munk et al. (2022) for using failed predictions in machine learning as a method to identify ambiguous and rich cases for qualitative analysis. Using a dataset describing actions performed by fictional characters interacting with machine vision technologies in 500 artworks, movies, novels and videogames, I trained a simple machine learning algorithm (using the kNN algorithm in R) to predict whether or not an action was active or passive using only information about the fictional (...) characters. Predictable actions were generally unemotional and unambiguous activities where machine vision technologies were treated as simple tools. Unpredictable actions, that is, actions that the algorithm could not correctly predict, were more ambivalent and emotionally loaded, with more complex power relationships between characters and technologies. The results thus support Munk et al.'s theory that failed predictions can be productively used to identify rich cases for qualitative analysis. This test goes beyond simply replicating Munk et al.'s results by demonstrating that the method can be applied to a broader humanities domain, and that it does not require complex neural networks but can also work with a simpler machine learning algorithm. Further research is needed to develop an understanding of what kinds of data the method is useful for and which kinds of machine learning are most generative. To support this, the R code required to produce the results is included so the test can be replicated. The code can also be reused or adapted to test the method on other datasets. (shrink)

Insurance markets have always relied on large amounts of data to assess risks and price their products. New data-driven technologies, including wearable health trackers, smartphone sensors, predictive modelling and Big Data analytics, are challenging these established practices. In tracking insurance clients’ behaviour, these innovations promise the reduction of insurance costs and more accurate pricing through the personalisation of premiums and products. Building on insights from the sociology of markets and Science and Technology Studies, this article investigates the role of economic (...) experimentation in the making of data-driven personalisation markets in insurance. We document a case study of a car insurance experiment, launched by a Belgian direct insurance company in 2016 to set up an experiment of tracking driving style behavioural data of over 5000 participants over a one-year period. Based on interviews and document analysis, we outline how this in vivo experiment was set-up, which interventions and manipulations were imposed to make the experiment successful, and how the study was evaluated by the actors. Using JL Austin’s distinction between happy and unhappy statements, we argue how the experiment, despite its failure not to provide the desired evidence, could be considered a ‘happy’ event. We conclude by highlighting the role of economic experiments ‘in the wild’ for the making of future markets of data-driven personalisation. (shrink)

Participation is an important but little understood concept in science and innovation. While participation promises the production of new knowledge, social justice, and economic growth, little research has been done on its contribution to innovation processes at the group level. The concept of imaginaries can provide a window into these processes. Adopting a micro-sociological perspective, we examined the interplay between imaginaries of participation and group development within a long-term ethnographic observation study of an initiative, Energy Avant-garde, as it pursued the (...) development of a decentralized, self-contained, and entirely renewable energy system in one German region. We scaled down the macrolevel concept of imaginaries to the group level. We found that group imaginaries are a resource for bringing order to a group and that a group is a resource for creating, operationalizing, revising, and sustaining imaginaries. We describe a “failure-through-success” story: while imaginaries initially promoted group cohesion, creativity, and productivity, in later stages, these effects were impeded by group dynamics. We therefore distinguish between process imaginaries and outcome imaginaries and conclude that, inherently, participation must be managed and employed at the appropriate stages to make valuable contributions. (shrink)

Drawing upon the theses of State racism, homo sacer, and safe citizenship, and fieldwork data collected from a multiethnic primary school in Xinjiang, this paper examines the way in which the state agencies of the local government, the school and mainstream citizens design citizenship for Uyghurs, and how Uyghurs interpret and act upon their citizenship. The findings show why, and how, designed citizenship by the mainstream system for Uyghurs has failed to produce a desirably productive force for the prosperity (...) of both the Uyghur community and society at large. The findings require re-consideration of what could be a win-win citizenship for both the state and the citizen. (shrink)

One of the major developments in cancer research in recent years has been the construction of models that treat cancer as a cellular population subject to natural selection. We expand on this idea, drawing upon multilevel selection theory. Cancer is best understood in our view from a multilevel perspective, as both a by-product of selection at other levels of organization, and as subject to selection at several levels of organization. Cancer is a by-product in two senses. First, cancer cells co-opt (...) signaling pathways that are otherwise adaptive at the organismic level. Second, cancer is also a by-product of features distinctive to the metazoan lineage: cellular plasticity and modularity. Applying the multilevel perspective in this way permits one to explain transitions in complexity and individuality in cancer progression. Our argument is a reply to Germain’s scepticism towards the explanatory relevance of natural selection for cancer. The extent to which cancer fulfills the conditions for being a paradigmatic Darwinian population depends on the scale of analysis, and the details of the purported selective scenario. Taking a multilevel perspective clarifies some of the complexities surrounding how to best understand the relevance of evolutionary thinking in cancer progression. (shrink)

Failure is seen as a problem in education. From failing schools, to failing students to rankings of universities, literacy or numeracy, the perception that one has failed to compete or to compare favourably with others has led to a series of policy initiatives internationally designed to ensure ‘success for all’. But when success is measured in comparison with others or against benchmarks or standards, then it is impossible to see how all could be successful given the parameters laid down. (...) What are the implications of a culture that values success and achievement? How difficult is it to become the kind of individual who is flourishing, autonomous and becomes ‘all she can be’, in particular under the precarious conditions of contemporary capitalism? Samuel Beckett was sceptical of the quest for progress, production and prestige. His philosophy invites another way of thinking about failure, not as something one is, but rather as something one does: the pain and fear of inadequacy that can mark educational relations and experiences is alleviated by a more renunciative, gentle philosophy of education. There are two interwoven strands in this article. One questions the emphasis on competition and achievement in contemporary education and explores its implications for our relationship to failure. The second, strongly influenced by Beckett, explores ways of reimagining our relationship to failure in such a way that allows us to reflect on what matters in life. (shrink)

Heidegger argues that modern technology is quantifiably different from all earlier periods because of a shift in ethos from in situ craftwork to globalised production and storage at the behest of consumerism. He argues that this shift in technology has fundamentally shaped our epistemology, and it is almost impossible to comprehend anything outside the technological enframing of knowledge. The exception is when something breaks down, and the fault ‘shows up’ in fresh ways. Stiegler has several important addendums to Heidegger’s thesis. (...) Firstly, that Heidegger fails to fully appreciate the early Greek myth of Prometheus, and the technological depth that fire offers all human societies. Secondly, the fall, or failure, which is doubled in the myth of Prometheus, and shows up in epistemology accordingly. Thirdly the acceleration of technology since the onset of Information Technology, and the way this is disorientating our Being. I argue the fall in both Heidegger and early Stiegler has encaptured their imagination. In later work, Stiegler argues that acceleration is fused with algorithmic pretensions, that are distorting and undermining the creative political imaginary, and making it difficult to revalue the values that underpin the nihilist Anthropocene. The overcoming of the Anthropocene engages politics, economics, power, physics, and ecology. (shrink)

This paper scrutinises the many ways in which ‘success’ is portrayed in representing assisted reproductive technology (ART) services and illuminates how these definitions differ from those held by participant couples. A qualitative approach informed by feminist perspectives guided this study and aimed to problematise the concept of ‘success’ by examining literature from ART clinics, government reports on ART, and by analysing narratives of couples who have accessed ART services. As many ART services have varying definitions of ‘success’ and as statistics (...) are manipulated to promote further patronage of ART services, the likelihood of ‘success’ is often overstated. This paper is concerned with the effects this promotion has on the participants. We suggest that this very mobilisation of statistical success changes the ability of those who access ART services to make productive decisions about themselves inside these treatment regimes, as the basis for decision‐making is hidden by the way numbers, objectivity and clinical reasoning operate to maintain participation in the program. In such an operation, the powerful mix of hope and technology kept participants enrolled far longer than they originally planned. Moreover, how success rates are manipulated raises ethical issues for all involved: clients, counsellors, and nursing and medical professionals. (shrink)

The main goal of the following article is to offer a Foucaultian reading of the economic governance structure of the European Union after the reforms passed and implemented over the last six years. The starting point is a reconstruction of Foucault’s analytical framework to scrutinize disciplinary power as well as the respective apparatuses and how this framework has been integrated into the more encompassing governmentality perspective. In the second section I provide a brief survey of the strategic terrain of the (...) European Union as a site of multi-level governance that poses unique challenges from a governing perspective. The following sections are structured according to some key characteristics of disciplinary/governmental power arrangements ation, prevention, normalizing judgement) which I try to identify in the context of the European Semester, the Six-Pack and the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure as elements of a broader disciplinary framework. The final section draws on Foucault’s famous point about the ‘productive failure’ of the prison as a disciplinary apparatus that ends up serving ends and purposes quite distinct from the ones officially declared and suggests that we should also consider the European regime of economic discipline and surveillance as one, which is ‘failing forward’, creating opportunity structures to pursue political projects that may differ markedly from those officially stated. (shrink)

The intellectual history of evolutionary theory really does not begin in earnest until the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. Prior to that, the idea that species might have evolved over time was not a serious possibility for most naturalists and philosophers. There is certainly no substantive debate in antiquity about evolution in the modern sense. There were really only two competing explanations for how living things came to have the parts they do: design or blind chance. Ancient Greek Atomism, for example, (...) taught that all composite bodies, including living things, are generated through the random collision of atoms as they rebel and move in the void. Plato and Aristotle both dismissed this possibility on the grounds that living things are too complex and too well-adapted to be products of chance. This eventually became the central premise in Galen’s own Argument from Design. That species forms might have gradually evolved over time by a process of natural selection was not seen as a plausible alternative. Of course, such a theory had been proposed by Empedocles in the fifth century BCE. But because his theory still relied heavily on chance, it was not taken seriously by any of the later ancient Greek or Roman thinkers. My aim in this paper is to investigate the reasons why evolutionary thinking failed to gain momentum in antiquity after its introduction by Empedocles. (shrink)

We provide an overview of the development of product placements within traditional and newer electronic media, followed by a critique of current regulations where they exist and highlight the challenges this form of brand promotion presents to regulators. We note the weaknesses in current theoretical perspectives on the way product placements impact more than awareness and argue that a failure to recognise the increasingly diverse nature of product placement within entertainment media content means that awareness campaigns and warnings regarding (...) the presence of product placements are unlikely to be effective in countering any negative effects of the practice on vulnerable groups such as children and young adults. While we focus on the impact of product placement activity on children and young adults, using primarily the examples of alcohol and tobacco products, we also raise concerns regarding a failure to act on the presence of a number of harmful products that fall beyond the current list of restricted products even in countries where some form of specific regulation exists. In order to aid those considering the necessity for, or scope of, any future restrictions on this form of marketing communication, it is important to determine not only what is known, but what also needs to be determined about the impact of product placements across the range of existing and evolving communication channels. (shrink)

Historians often feel that standard philosophical doctrines about the nature and development of science are not adequate for representing the real history of science. However, when philosophers of science fail to make sense of certain historical events, it is also possible that there is something wrong with the standard historical descriptions of those events, precluding any sensible explanation. If so, philosophical failure can be useful as a guide for improving historiography, and this constitutes a significant mode of productive (...) interaction between the history and the philosophy of science. I illustrate this methodological claim through the case of the Chemical Revolution. I argue that no standard philosophical theory of scientific method can explain why European chemists made a sudden and nearly unanimous switch of allegiance from the phlogiston theory to Lavoisier's theory. A careful re-examination of the history reveals that the shift was neither so quick nor so unanimous as imagined even by many historians. In closing I offer brief reflections on how best to explain the general drift toward Lavoisier's theory that did take place. (shrink)

As we become more aware of the various problems associated with technologically mediated meat production , we also confront a variety of technologically mediated potential fixes . Rather than comparing bad and good technologies in the context of meat, I want instead to explore the dynamics of the human-animal relationships expressed within specific approaches. This method, I suggest, illustrates the technological aspects of the relationships, which reflect an orientation to the world that mediates human interaction with the environment. It also (...) helps to show that the more we try to take responsibility for those bodies—in terms of knowledge, in terms of energy—the more we require the environment to reflect our conditions and the less tolerant we become of failure. (shrink)

The borderline between philosophy and literature is highly contested. Still, if literary theorists and philosophers agree on the occasional work’s ability to transcend border norms altogether, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is a piece of dramatic writing that amply deserves the distinction. My article attempts a symptomatic comparison between the existential condition of Endgame’s characters, on the one hand, and the philosophical predicament, on the other. The importance of failure – both as an obstacle and as a catalyst for regeneration – (...) provides a useful framework for this cross-disciplinary comparison. I draw inspiration from Stanley Cavell’s reading of Endgame, but I take Cavell’s analysis a step further. In ‘Ending the Waiting Game’ Cavell finds satisfaction in discovering what Beckett’s play can say about a specific school of philosophy – logical positivism. I treat this discovery as an invitation to consider the possibility of a broader conclusion. There is much in Endgame, in Cavell’s other writings, in the works of his and Beckett’s commentators and in Wittgenstein’s legacy that points to the existence and acceptance of philosophical infirmity. I see the recognition of this infirmity as a necessary step towards a better understanding of the play but also as a contribution to our general sense of the productive continuities between philosophy and literature. (shrink)

More and more well-documented failure of established companies which could not respond to rapid market changes, such as Kodak and Nokia, demonstrate the importance of transferring marketing information into real firm performance. While marketing strategy and management literature has long advocated the direct impact of strong firm market orientation (MO) on new product development (NPD) performance, limited research has discussed the mediating mechanism of this MO-NPD performance relationship. Using the traditional source–position–performance (SPP) framework, this study focuses on the innovation (...) ambidexterity perspective to investigate the mediating mechanism between MO and NPD performance. Then, this study proposed a conceptual framework and propositions to examine the MO - NPD performance relationship further. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are also discussed. (shrink)

One of the major themes of Steve Fuller's project of social epistemology is a reconciliation of the normative concerns of epistemologists with the empirical concerns of sociologists of knowledge. Fuller views social epistemologists as knowledge policy makers, who will provide direction for improvements in the cognitive division of labour. However, this paper argues that Fuller's conception of knowledge production and his approval of a panglossian approach to epistemology fail to provide the normative force he claims, and leave us unable to (...) identify anything epistemic about our knowledge-seeking practices. (shrink)

We give the natural topological model for $\neg$BD-${\mathbb N}$, and use it to show that the closure of spaces with the anti-Specker property under product does not imply BD-${\mathbb N}$. Also, the natural topological model for $\neg$BD is presented. Finally, for some of the realizability models known indirectly to falsify BD-$\mathbb{N}$, it is brought out in detail how BD-$\mathbb N$ fails.

Small batch manufacture dominates the manufacturing sector of a growing number of industrialised countries. The organisational structures and management methods currently adopted in such enterprises are firmly based upon historical developments which started with individual craftsmen. These structures and methods are primarily concerned with the co-ordination of human activities, rather than with the management of theknowledge process underlying the creation of products.This paper argues that it is the failure to understand this knowledge process and its effective integration at aKnowledge (...) Level which presents the real barrier to increased flexibility, not, as is presently perceived, a lack of suitableInformation Level integration. Potential techniques and methodologies for achievingKnowledge Level integration are beginning to emerge from Artificial Intelligence research. Realisation of full Knowledge Level integration will not only require further research into the AI techniques and methodologies involved, but also an understanding of the wider human aspects of their application. Some questions concerning the effective coupling of human and artificial intelligence to achieve Knowledge Level integration of the product creation process are presented. (shrink)

In recent years, there have been an increasing number of attempts by analytic philosophers to engage with key insights of Critical Theory. While this has had some success within feminist philosophy, and in epistemology, with the emergence of political epistemology as a significant and productive subfield, analytic political philosophers have generally not explored what lessons can be learnt from attempting to bridge the disciplinary divide. In this chapter, I provide what I take to be the clearest explanation for this, (...) namely the dominance of Rawlsianism within analytic political philosophy. Moreover, I argue that in its refusal to engage with core tenets of Critical Theory, Rawlsian political philosophy can be exploited as the mouthpiece of dominant ideologies. However, this is not a charge against analytic political philosophy in general, insofar as analytic political philosophers are willing to engage with Critical Theory, at the cost of dismissing Rawlsianism. -/- . (shrink)

This paper argues that ignorance, rather than being a result or representation of false beliefs or misinformation, is a compensatory epistemic adaptation of complex rhetoric systems. A rhetoric system is here defined as a set of interconnected rhetorical elements that cohere into a self-organized system that is thoroughly “about” its contexts—meaning that its own boundaries and relations are both constrained and enabled by the contexts in which it exists. Ignorance, as described here, is epistemic management that preserves the boundaries and (...) relations of a rhetoric system, and is a way of dealing with information that runs counter to one’s beliefs. Ignorance is also productive, in that it produces new knowledge that works to make rhetoric systems more resistant to potential destabilization. To elaborate these points, the paper examines discourse about the phenomenon of global climate change, which illustrates how individuals productively counter information as a way of preserving beliefs. As the paper argues, ignorance is neither a cognitive nor epistemological failure, but rather is a result of the dynamic and continuous process of enforcing epistemic and rhetorical boundaries. (shrink)

Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we used a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the mental lexicon. Network measures at different levels of analysis (degree, network distance, and closeness centrality) were used to investigate the influence of network structure on picture naming accuracy and errors by people with (...) Anomic, Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's aphasia. Our results reveal that word retrieval is influenced by the multiplex lexical network structure in at least two ways—(a) the accuracy of production and error type on incorrect productions were influenced by the degree and closeness centrality of the target word, and (b) error type also varied in terms of network distance between the target word and produced error word. Taken together, the analyses demonstrate that network science techniques, particularly the use of the multiplex lexical network to simultaneously represent semantic and phonological relationships among words, reveal how the structure of the mental lexicon influences language processes beyond traditionally examined psycholinguistic variables. We propose a framework for how the multiplex lexical network approach allows for understanding the influence of mental lexicon structure on word retrieval processes, with an eye toward a better understanding of the nature of clinical impairments, like aphasia. (shrink)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced recently that food products derived from some animal clones and their offspring are safe for human consumption. In response to criticism that it had failed to engage with ethical, social, and economic concerns raised by livestock cloning, the FDA argued that addressing normative issues prior to issuing a final ruling on animal cloning is not part of its mission. In this article, the authors reject the FDA's claim that its mission to protect (...) and advance public health can be accomplished without considering ethical issues or without making value judgments. The authors offer two arguments in support of their position. First, the agency's mission statement presupposes significant normative commitments and judgments. Second, the FDA's risk assessment of food products from cloned animals and their offspring is itself clearly shaped by a variety of normative commitments. (shrink)

The occurrence of poor patient care is emerging as one of the most significant, challenging, and critical issues confronting contemporary nursing and those responsible for the provision of health care more generally. Indeed, as a consequence of the increased recognition of the manner in which nurses can be implicated in the occurrence of poor patient care, there has been sustained critical debate that seeks to understand how such healthcare failings can occur and, in particular, why nurses seemingly fail to intervene, (...) raise concerns, and effectively respond to prevent the occurrence and continuation of such poor patient care. In seeking to contribute to this critical discussion, and in contrast to those “situational explanations” that maintain that the failure to raise concerns is a consequence of the contextual factors and challenging conditions to which nurses can be subject in the clinical setting, this paper will provide a resolutely philosophical analysis of that failure. In particular, it will draw upon the work of Jean‐Paul Sartre—the French philosopher generally regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century—in order to propose that his work can be productively recontextualized to provide a detailed, challenging, and provocative critical analysis of the occurrence and continuation of poor patient care and the role of individual nurse practitioners in such healthcare failings. (shrink)

The use of energy from wind has a multi-faceted relationship to visibility. Between 1973 and 1991, various actors in the West German environmental movement made assertions about the visibility of renewable sources of power, but wind energy took on a particular prominence. In this article, the question of how different actors have used knowledge and the materiality of wind turbines for competing purposes is explored. Environmentalists attempted to create visible signs of a valid alternative energy future by tinkering with small, (...) decentralized wind turbines, while the Federal Republic of Germany's Ministry of Research and established energy providers used the failure of the state-subsidized large-scale wind-energy project GROWIAN to criticize renewables and brand their application as misguided. In both cases, actors created new wind energy visibilities to convey their conflicting interests—pitting those advocating a new, environmentally friendly energy system against those who sought consolidation of the large-scale fossil-nuclear energy system. (shrink)

A misconception regarding the ultrastructural basis of myocardial failure has been observed in laboratory studies involving medical students and practicing physicians, in medical textbooks, and in clinical instruction of students. This misconception attributes heart failure to overextension of individual cardiac muscle fibres and their sarcomeres, resulting in a mechanically based decline in contractile force production. The basis of the misconception is a set of component misconceptions which interact in reciprocally supportive ways. The interlocking nature of the component misunderstandings (...) strengthens the overall misconception, making it difficult to undermine. A contributor to many aspects of the faulty account of heart failure is a tendency toward oversimplification of complex phenomena in learning, instruction, and scientific research. Implications for medical education are considered. Keywords: mental models, knowledge representation, reductionism, myocardium, heart failure, physiology CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Certain consequentialists have responded to deontological worries regarding personal projects or options and agent-centered restrictions or constraints by pointing out that it is consistent with consequentialist principles that people develop within themselves, dispositions to act with such things in mind, even if doing so does not lead to the best consequences on every occasion. This paper argues that making this response requires shifting the focus of moral evaluation off of evaluation of individual actions and towards evaluation of whole character traits (...) and patterns of behavior. However, this weds consequentialism to a sort of psychological determinism, with which it is incompatible, because it makes any sort of assessment in terms of right or wrong incoherent. The paper concludes by sketching an ethical theory that abandons right and wrong as its organizing concepts, but nevertheless preserves much of the spirit of consequentialism. Relationships between whole patterns of behavior and the production of good and bad consequences can be studied and analyzed, and this information can be used to improve society and ourselves, without it being required that any individual persons acts or dispositions to behave be evaluated as right or wrong. (shrink)

Stephen Mumford argues that positive aesthetic value is a by-product of both sport and art, and that the principal aim of the artist and the player or athlete could not be to produce positive aesthetic value. Three features of Mumford’s by-product argument are considered. It is argued that problems arise as a result of failure to appreciate Best’s distinction between the evaluative and conceptual uses of ‘aesthetic’, the nature of the descriptions Mumford gives of the intention of the artist (...) in making art and the necessary implicit premises in the argument. There is, therefore, reason to think that Mumford has not established that sport and art are in the same position in the ways in which their aims relate to aesthetic values, nor that the by-product argument can form part of a counter to Best’s position. (shrink)

A misconception regarding the ultrastructural basis of myocardial failure has been observed in laboratory studies involving medical students and practicing physicians, in medical textbooks, and in clinical instruction of students. This misconception attributes heart failure to overextension of individual cardiac muscle fibres and their sarcomeres, resulting in a mechanically based decline in contractile force production. The basis of the misconception is a set of component misconceptions which interact in reciprocally supportive ways. The interlocking nature of the component misunderstandings (...) strengthens the overall misconception, making it difficult to undermine. A contributor to many aspects of the faulty account of heart failure is a tendency toward oversimplification of complex phenomena in learning, instruction, and scientific research. Implications for medical education are considered. (shrink)

Medicines and medical devices containing animal-derived ingredients are frequently used on patients without their informed consent, despite a significant proportion of patients wanting to know if an animal-derived product is going to be used in their care. Here, I outline three arguments for why this practice is wrong. First, I argue that using animal-derived medical products on patients without their informed consent undermines respect for their autonomy. Second, it risks causing nontrivial psychological harm. Third, it is morally inconsistent to respect (...) patients’ dietary preferences and then use animal-derived medicines or medical devices on them without their informed consent. I then address several anticipated objections and conclude that the continued failure to address this issue is an ethical blind spot that warrants applying the principles of respect for autonomy and informed consent consistently. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

When a major engineering product failed, a failure investigation is often conducted to prevent similar failures in the future. In this dissertation, I propose an account of the epistemology and methodology of engineering failure investigations, based on a close examination of the documentations on five major plane crash investigations conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). -/- The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part consists of the five case studies arranged in chronological order: the (...) American Airlines Flight 191 accident in 1979; the United Flight 232 accident in 1989; the United Flight 585 accident in 1991; the USAir Flight 427 accident in 1994; and the TWA Flight 800 accident in 1996. In each case study, I summarize the entire investigation process, focusing on articulating the questions that arise and the evidential reasoning that helped resolve each question. -/- The second part of the dissertation examines how the investigators infer causes of failure events. The type of causal inference used in failure investigations typically proceeds from effects to causes, hence it is called reverse causal inference. This is in contrast with forward causal inference, where researchers start with an intervention and infer the effects of that intervention. I identify three types of reverse causal inference in engineering failure investigations: feature dependence, additional outcomes, and process tracing. -/- The third part of the dissertation examines how the investigators construct narratives of failure events. At the end of each failure investigation, the investigators come up with a narrative detailing the sequence of events leading to the outcome. This part of the dissertation examines how the investigators construct such narratives and support them with evidence. I argue that both the construction and the justification of a narrative of a failure event depend on the question-and-answer process in the investigation, which I call the question dynamics of the investigation. I examine three main components of the question dynamics: the resolution of questions, the significance of questions, and the arising of questions. I conclude the dissertation with an account of the coherence of narratives, which is a measure of the evidential status of narratives. My account of coherence relies on the question dynamics, and it captures the intuitive idea that the pieces of a coherent narrative “fit together” very well. (shrink)

The authors show. by means of a finitary version $\square_{\lambda D}^{fin}$ of the combinatorial principle $\square_\lambda^{h*}$ of [7]. the consistency of the failure, relative to the consistency of supercompact cardinals, of the following: for all regular filters D on a cardinal A. if Mi and Ni are elementarily equivalent models of a language of size $\leq \lambda$ , then the second player has a winning strategy in the Ehrenfeucht- $Fra\uml{i}ss\acute{e}$ game of length $\lambda^{+}$ on $\pi_{i} M_{i}/D$ and $\pi_{i} N_{i}/D$ (...) . If in addition $2^{\lambda} = \labda^{+}$ and i < $\lambda$ implies | $M_{i}$ | +| $N_{i}$ | $\leq$ \lambda^{+} this means that the ultrapowers are isomorphic. This settles negatively conjecture 18 in [2]. (shrink)

The practical failure to understand in conflicts, where participants routinely challenge each other’s attribution of meaning, undermines the key assumption of the Weberian interpretive project: that the subject acts meaningfully. This article revisits Weber’s concept of meaning as an object of understanding for a social scientist. Ascertaining the empirical fact of subjective attribution, as Weber advised, may not be sufficient when it comes to understanding action whose meaning is disputed. The article uses the example of E.P. Thompson’s interpretation of (...) eighteenth-century English food riots to show that the disputed empirical meaning is a product of rational understanding, which Weber would classify as dogmatic meaning. The social scientist fails to understand what the critic claims to: a failure to act meaningfully in cultural terms. Furthermore, because the subject acts meaningfully without fail, we close off the option of explaining conflict as a rational disagreement. (shrink)

This paper identifies and responds to four critiques of democratic contractarianism, as advocated in Democratic Justice and the Social Contract, to be found in this symposium. The first is that, as a contingent practice-dependent account of justice, democratic contractarianism lacks the capacity to explain civic cooperation. The second is that, despite its intentions, Democratic Justice does not lay out an authentic contractarian theory. The third is that the theory is incompatible with our considered judgements about justice. And the fourth is (...) that the ambition of Democratic Justice to use the empirical method to compensate for the failures of hypothetical contract theory fails because all social science needs interpretation. To each of these critiques, replies are offered, drawing attention to the way in which democratic contractarianism exemplifies a logic of social cooperation to mutual advantage that is compatible with justice provided the cooperation emerges from a bargaining situation of roughly equal power. (shrink)

Reports of ethical violations by upper level managers continue to multiply despite increasing attention being given to ethics by firms and business schools. Much of the analysis of these violations focuses on either these managers'lack of operational principles or their willingness to abandon principles in the face ofcompetitive pressures. Much of the attention by firms and business schools focuses either on the articulation of operational principles (a deontological approach) or on the training of managers to sort their way through subtle (...) ethical dilemmas in the face of competitive pressure (a utilitarian approach). While valuable, these approaches alone are incomplete.This paper suggests that many ethical violations by upper managers are the by-product ofsuccess — not of competitive pressures. Our research suggests that many managers are poorly prepared to deal with success. First, success often allows managers to becomecomplacent and to lose focus, diverting attention to things other than the management of their business. Second, success, whether personal or organizational, often leads toprivileged access to information, people or objects. Third, with success usually comes increasinglyunrestrained control of organizational resources. And fourth, success can inflate a manager's belief in his or her personalability to manipulate outcomes. Even individuals with a highly developed moral sense can be challenged (tempted?) by the opportunities resulting from the convergence of these dynamics. We label the inability to cope with and respond to the by-products of success the Bathsheba Syndrome, based on the account of the good King David (a story familiar in a variety of traditions). Recognition of this phenomenon implies that we change or broaden our approach to the teaching of business ethics. It also implies that organizations must re-evaluate and change structures, procedures, and practices which enhance the likelihood of managers falling victim to the Bathsheba Syndrome. (shrink)

The authors show, by means of a finitary version □finλ, D of the combinatorial principle □b*λ of [7], the consistency of the failure, relative to the consistency of supercompact cardinals, of the following: for all regular filters D on a cardinal λ, if Mi and Ni are elementarily equivalent models of a language of size ≤ λ, then the second player has a winning strategy in the Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé game of length λ+ on ∏i Mi/D and ∏i Ni/D. If in (...) addition 2λ=λ+ and i <λ implies |Mi|+|Ni|≤ λ+ this means that the ultrapowers are isomorphic. This settles negatively conjecture 18 in [2]. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article uses four historical case studies to address epistemological issues related to the animal model of human diseases and its use in medical research on human diseases. The knowledge derived from animal models is widely assumed to be highly valid and predictive of reactions by human organisms. In this contribution, I use three significant historical cases of failure (ca. 1890, 1960, 2006), and a closer look at the emergence of the concept around 1860/70, to elucidate core assumptions related (...) to the specific practices of animal-human knowledge transfer, and to analyze the explanations provided by historical actors after each of the failures. Based on these examples, I argue that the epistemological status of the animal model changed from that of a helpful methodological tool for addressing specific questions, but with precarious validity, to an obligatory method for the production of strong knowledge on human diseases. As a result, there now exists a culture of biomedical research in human disease that, for more than a century, has taken the value of this methodological tool as self-evident, and more or less beyond question. (shrink)

In this paper I put forward a new interpretation of the “Exordium” and “Eulogy for Abraham” sections in Fear and Trembling. It reads them in tension, as mutually incompatible approaches to the biblical narrative of Abraham. I argue this tension is productive insofar as it reveals and critiques the failure of each section to respond to Abraham as a religious exemplar of faith. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricœur, I argue that this failure consists in the (...) absence of the hermeneutical moment of refiguration, which takes up what is understood in the narrative in the lived experience of the reader. By enacting this irreconcilable contrast within his text, Silentio poses a hermeneutical critique of faith by highlighting the importance of narrative refiguration in the life of faith, that is, the lived experience of those who understand Abraham to be a religious exemplar. (shrink)