Theistic cosmologies have inspired many religious communities to alienate transgender individuals. While the growth in tolerance among congregations and institutions is important, there remains a pressing need to address the cosmologies at the root of intolerance. A re-examination of theological conceptions of God and the human person reveal not only acceptability, but significance, in the trans experience itself. Synthesizing gender studies with theology, this interdisciplinary article argues that God’s nature as deeply personal Love implies a sacredness in gender authenticity. The (...) human person is part of an evolution toward deeply personalized consciousness. Gender, when freed from rigid constraints, is a social expression of this personalized self in a common cultural language. As infinite Love, God actualizes in the universe in deeply personal love. Therefore, by personalizing knowledge of one another and enabling deeper love between human persons, gender authenticity, in its fluidity, ambiguity, and continuous newness, deepens God’s existence. Ultimately, I argue, expressing one’s authentic gender is a sacred act. (shrink)

You have a choice -- Decision-making steps -- What is a good choice? -- Identifying options -- Making predictions -- Pros and cons -- Weighing the consequences -- Values and motivations -- Thinking of others -- Choose wisely -- Glossary -- Index -- Primary source list -- Websites.

We calculate the complexity of Scott sentences of scattered linear orders. Given a countable scattered linear order L of Hausdorff rank $\alpha $ we show that it has a ${d\text {-}\Sigma _{2\alpha +1}}$ Scott sentence. It follows from results of Ash [2] that for every countable $\alpha $ there is a linear order whose optimal Scott sentence has this complexity. Therefore, our bounds are tight. We furthermore show that every Hausdorff rank 1 linear order has an optimal ${\Pi ^{\mathrm {c}}_{3}}$ (...) or ${d\text {-}\Sigma ^{\mathrm {c}}_{3}}$ Scott sentence and give a characterization of those linear orders of rank $1$ with ${\Pi ^{\mathrm {c}}_{3}}$ optimal Scott sentences. At last we show that for all countable $\alpha $ the class of Hausdorff rank $\alpha $ linear orders is $\boldsymbol {\Sigma }_{2\alpha +2}$ complete and obtain analogous results for index sets of computable linear orders. (shrink)

We define the Scott complexity of a countable structure to be the least complexity of a Scott sentence for that structure. This is a finer notion of complexity than Scott rank: it distinguishes between whether the simplest Scott sentence is $\Sigma _{\alpha }$, $\Pi _{\alpha }$, or $\mathrm {d-}\Sigma _{\alpha }$. We give a complete classification of the possible Scott complexities, including an example of a structure whose simplest Scott sentence is $\Sigma _{\lambda + 1}$ for $\lambda $ a limit (...) ordinal. This answers a question left open by A. Miller.We also construct examples of computable structures of high Scott rank with Scott complexities $\Sigma _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$ and $\mathrm {d-}\Sigma _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$. There are three other possible Scott complexities for a computable structure of high Scott rank: $\Pi _{\omega _1^{CK}}$, $\Pi _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$, $\Sigma _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$. Examples of these were already known. Our examples are computable structures of Scott rank $\omega _1^{CK}+1$ which, after naming finitely many constants, have Scott rank $\omega _1^{CK}$. The existence of such structures was an open question. (shrink)

The rules governing recovery for negligently inflicted psychiatric injury are among the most criticized of all of tort law. However, one area which, to date, has escaped with a minimum of judicial or academic scrutiny concerns the very threshold requirement for these actions: proof of a ‘recognized psychiatric illness’. This article critiques that longstanding requirement of English law from two perspectives. First, it is argued that the international classifications of psychiatric disorders (ICD-10 and DSM-IV) are being misapplied and misconstrued in (...) the English medico-legal context and that the role (and limitations) of these classifications are worthy of far greater judicial examination and critical scrutiny than has typically been the case to date. Secondly, it is contended that the insistence upon a recognized psychiatric illness, as a threshold requirement, is giving rise to inconsistencies and distortions in the law and that the requirement is neither legally nor medically supportable in the modern era. Instead, it is argued that the stage has been reached whereby something lesser than a recognized psychiatric illness should be sufficient to trigger a compensable injury in law. The article concludes by suggesting various legal avenues by which to feasibly and robustly ‘ring-fence’ the number of potential claims in negligence, should the reform-oriented approach of this article be adopted. (shrink)

Evidence exists that the UK National Health Service has had, over many years, persistent problems of negative and intimidating behaviour towards staff from other employees. The evidence also suggests the organisational responses to negative behaviour can be inadequate. A conceptual model of organisational dysfunction was proposed to assist in explaining those responses and the overall culture in the NHS. Through research this model has been tested. Based upon the findings, an extended and developed model of organisational dysfunction is presented. A (...) qualitative approach was taken to research the organisational responses to negative behaviour, and the reasons and motivations for those responses. Forty-three interviews and six focus groups were conducted. There seem to be “islands” and “pockets” with a positive culture; however, the generalised evidence suggests the NHS is systemically and institutionally deaf, bullying, defensive and dishonest, exhibiting a resistance to ‘knowing’, denial and “wilful blindness”; a dysfunctional, perverse and troubled organisation. Totalitarian and Kafkaesque characteristics are identified. The NHS could also be described as a coercive bureaucracy and under certain definitions, a corrupt entity. The NHS appears to be an organisation with a heart of darkness; a “self perpetuating dysfunctional system”. There may be widespread “learned helplessness”. It seems to be a “good news factory”, rejecting and hiding any “bad news”; retreating from reality. The NHS appears to have “lost its way” and its focus/purpose as an institution. The dysfunctional organisational behaviours manifest in the NHS need to be addressed urgently as there is a detrimental, sometimes devastating, impact on the wellbeing of both staff and patients. The NHS needs to embrace an identity of being a listening, learning and honest organisation, with a culture of respect. (shrink)

A recent report by Blumenthal et al.1 provides convincing evidence that at least 15% of Caenorhabditis elegans genes are co‐transcribed within over a thousand operons. Polycistronic transcription of gene clusters is very rare in eukaryotes. The widespread occurrence of operons in C. elegans thus raises some interesting questions about the origin and function of these multigenic transcriptional units. BioEssays 24:983–987, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Periodicals, Inc.

Face perception is a highly conserved process that directs our attention from infancy and is supported by specialized neural circuitry. Oxytocin can increase accuracy and detection of emotional faces, but these effects are mediated by valence, individual differences, and context. We investigated the temporal dynamics of oxytocin’s influence on the neural substrates of face perception using event related potentials (ERP). In a double blind, placebo controlled within-subject design, 21 healthy male adults inhaled oxytocin or placebo and underwent ERP imaging during (...) two face processing tasks. Experiment 1 investigated effects of oxytocin on neural correlates of fearful versus neutral facial expressions, and Experiment 2 manipulated point-of-gaze to neutral faces. In Experiment 1, we found that oxytocin reduced N170 latency to fearful faces. In Experiment 2, N170 latency was decreased when participant gaze was directed to the eyes of neutral faces; however, there were no oxytocin-associated effects in response to different facial features. Findings suggest oxytocin modulates early stages of social perception for socially complex information such as emotional faces relative to neutral. These results are consistent with models suggesting oxytocin impacts the salience of socially informative cues during processing, which leads to downstream effects in behavior. Future work should examine how oxytocin affects neural processes underlying basic components of social behavior (such as, face perception) while varying emotional expression of stimuli or comparing different characteristics of participants (e.g., gender, personality traits). (shrink)

Interest in universal basic income has risen recently as an alternative to existing exchequer-sourced social security methods, such as conditional cash transfers. This article presents a survey of multiple experiments investigating the impact of basic income cash transfers on recipients while presenting a meta-analysis of the results across nine categories. Many findings indicate successful outcomes across financial security, health, and educational dimensions. Children were amongst the strongest beneficiaries of the trials and observed a 4.5 % reduction in obesity, a 19.5 (...) % increase in their normal weight-for-age, a 30 % increase in female secondary school attendance, and an increase in the educational attainment of one year in response to the cash transfers. (shrink)

G. E. M. Anscombe’s Intention is a classic of twentieth-century philosophy. The work has been enormously influential despite being a dense and largely misunderstood text. It is a standard reference point for anyone engaging with philosophy of action and philosophy of psychology. In this Routledge Philosophy GuideBook, Rachael Wiseman: situates _Intention_ in relation to Anscombe’s moral philosophy and philosophy of mind considers the influence of Aquinas, Aristotle, Frege, and Wittgenstein on the method and content of _Intention_ adopts a structure (...) for assessing the text that shows how Anscombe unifies the three aspects of the concept of intention considers the influence and implications of the piece whilst distinguishing it from subsequent work in the philosophy of action Ideal for anyone wanting to understand and gain a perspective on Elizabeth Anscombe’s seminal work, this guide is an essential introduction, useful in the study of the philosophy of action, ethics, philosophy of psychology and related areas. (shrink)

A number of recent authors (Galles and Pearl, Found Sci 3 (1):151–182, 1998; Hiddleston, Noûs 39 (4):232–257, 2005; Halpern, J Artif Intell Res 12:317–337, 2000) advocate a causal modeling semantics for counterfactuals. But the precise logical significance of the causal modeling semantics remains murky. Particularly important, yet particularly under-explored, is its relationship to the similarity-based semantics for counterfactuals developed by Lewis (Counterfactuals. Harvard University Press, 1973b). The causal modeling semantics is both an account of the truth conditions of counterfactuals, and (...) an account of which inferences involving counterfactuals are valid. As an account of truth conditions, it is incomplete. While Lewis's similarity semantics lets us evaluate counterfactuals with arbitrarily complex antecedents and consequents, the causal modeling semantics makes it hard to ascertain the truth conditions of all but a highly restricted class of counterfactuals. I explain how to extend the causal modeling language to encompass a wider range of sentences, and provide a sound and complete axiomatization for the extended language. Extending the truth conditions for counterfactuals has serious consequences concerning valid inference. The extended language is unlike any logic of Lewis's: modus ponens is invalid, and classical logical equivalents cannot be freely substituted in the antecedents of conditionals. (shrink)

Diachronic Dutch book arguments seem to support both conditionalization and Bas van Fraassen's Reflection principle. But the Reflection principle is vulnerable to numerous counterexamples. This essay addresses two questions: first, under what circumstances should an agent obey Reflection, and second, should the counterexamples to Reflection make us doubt the Dutch book for conditionalization? In response to the first question, this essay formulates a new "Qualified Reflection" principle, which states that an agent should obey Reflection only if he or she is (...) certain that he or she will conditionalize on veridical evidence in the future. Qualified Reflection follows from the probability calculus together with a few idealizing assumptions. The essay then formulates a "Distorted Reflection" principle that approximates Reflection even in cases where the agent is not quite certain that he or she will conditionalize on veridical evidence. In response to the second question, the essay argues that contrary to a common misconception, not all Dutch books dramatize incoherence—some dramatize a less blameworthy sort of epistemic frailty that the essay calls "self-doubt." The distinction between Dutch books that dramatize incoherence and those that dramatize self-doubt cross-cuts the distinction between synchronic and diachronic Dutch books. The essay explains why the Dutch book for conditionalization reveals true incoherence, whereas the Dutch book for Reflection reveals only self-doubt. (shrink)

Metaphysicians are in the business of making and defending modal claims—claims about how things must, or could or could not be. Wittgenstein’s opposition to necessity claims, along with his various negative remarks about ‘metaphysical’ uses of language, makes it seem almost a truism that Wittgenstein was opposed to metaphysics. In this paper I want to make a case for rejecting that apparent truism. My thesis is that it is illuminating to characterize what Wittgenstein and Anscombe are doing in their philosophical (...) writing as metaphysics without manufactured necessities. Doing so helps to articulate a sharper, more interesting, critique of contemporary metaphysical practices than therapeutic or linguistic framings of Wittgenstein’s method make possible. It also allows us to place Anscombe in the context of a tradition of British metaphysics that emerged in the 1940s in an attempt to reverse the devastating impact on ethics of the new ‘analytical’ philosophy. (shrink)

There is a deep connection between Anscombe’s argument that ‘I’ is not a referring expression and Intention’s account of practical knowledge and knowledge without observation. The assumption that the so-called “no-reference thesis” can be resisted while the account of action set out in her book INTENTION is embraced is based on a misunderstanding of the argument of “The First Person” and the status of its conclusion; removing that misunderstanding helps to illuminate the concept of practical knowledge and brings into view (...) a novel account of the relation between self-consciousness, agency, and first-person thought. (shrink)

The meaning of intelligence has varied across time and place, with these varied constructions holding consequences for people and society at large. There is, however, little consensus around what intelligence actually means and how the construct should be applied. Educational discourses, including textbooks used to train teachers, have commonly been the site for the dissemination of ‘authoritative’ information surrounding intelligence. In this article, we present findings from a discourse analysis informed by discursive psychology of passages related to defining and measuring (...) intelligence taken from 10 educational psychology textbooks designed for university students studying to become teachers. Our research question was: How is the dilemmatic nature of the construct of intelligence managed in introductory educational psychology textbooks at the level of discourse? We discuss the function of sequencing and topic displays and how the textbook authors navigated the ideological dilemmas surrounding the construct of intelligence. We conclude by pointing to the implications for teacher training and the importance of social constructionist projects that place into question presumably ‘real’ psychological constructs. (shrink)

This volume contains the proceedings of the Social Ontology, Normativity, and Philosophy of Law conference, which took place on May 30–31, 2019 at the University of Glasgow. At the invitation of the Social Ontology Research Group, a panel of prominent scholars shed light on a range of key topics within social ontology, normativity, and philosophy of law from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The 1945 discovery of ancient documents at Nag Hammadi in Egypt would have great significance for New Testament scholars. But it would take decades, and one woman, to unleash their meaning to the public. In the 1960s, Elaine Pagels was part of a team at Harvard University, studying the Nag Hammadi scrolls; in 1979 her slim bookThe Gnostic Gospels put the formerly suppressed writings of early Christians into the hands of ordinary people.

Growing-Block theorists hold that past and present things are real, while future things do not yet exist. This generates a puzzle: how can Growing-Block theorists explain the fact that some sentences about the future appear to be true? Briggs and Forbes develop a modal ersatzist framework, on which the concrete actual world is associated with a branching-time structure of ersatz possible worlds. They then show how this branching structure might be used to determine the truth values of future contingents. They (...) point out three different ways of interpreting the logical connectives, which give rise to three different logics of the open future: one supervaluationist, one corresponding to Lukasiewicz's strong Kleene logic, and one intuitionist. (shrink)

We ask when, for a pair of structures $\mathcal {A}_1,\mathcal {A}_2$, there is a uniform effective procedure that, given copies of the two structures, unlabeled, always produces a copy of $\mathcal {A}_1$. We give some conditions guaranteeing that there is such a procedure. The conditions might suggest that for the pair of orderings $\mathcal {A}_1$ of type $\omega _1^{CK}$ and $\mathcal {A}_2$ of Harrison type, there should not be any such procedure, but, in fact, there is one. We construct an (...) example for which there is no such procedure. The construction involves forcing. On the way to constructing our example, we prove a general result on modifying Cohen generics. (shrink)

The historical figure of the cow as a symbol is treasured and ancient, yet simultaneously this animal in many societies exists de facto for people’s plates. The cow, like other animals, exists in parts: as treasured symbol, and as commodity. Looking at collections by contemporary Anglophone poets, Ariana Reines, and Selima Hill, I will consider how each writer’s self-reflexive critique of animal representation reorients the material subjects of their poems, intersecting these innovative poetries with contemporary thinkers on animal studies, to (...) realize the limits of a poetic perspective on animal bodies. Both writers work either against or deliberately within a lyric mode critiqued for its objectifying address in order to interrogate modes of rendering that position the animal’s existence as a resource. From Reines’s scatological slaughterhouse to Hill’s surreal landscapes I will explore how the symbolic and literal exploitation of an animal’s “flesh” in their poems is counteracted. (shrink)

We improve on and generalize a 1960 result of Maltsev. For a field F, we denote by $H(F)$ the Heisenberg group with entries in F. Maltsev showed that there is a copy of F defined in $H(F)$, using existential formulas with an arbitrary non-commuting pair of elements as parameters. We show that F is interpreted in $H(F)$ using computable $\Sigma _1$ formulas with no parameters. We give two proofs. The first is an existence proof, relying on a result of Harrison-Trainor, (...) Melnikov, R. Miller, and Montalbán. This proof allows the possibility that the elements of F are represented by tuples in $H(F)$ of no fixed arity. The second proof is direct, giving explicit finitary existential formulas that define the interpretation, with elements of F represented by triples in $H(F)$. Looking at what was used to arrive at this parameter-free interpretation of F in $H(F)$, we give general conditions sufficient to eliminate parameters from interpretations. (shrink)

Back in October 2015 I had the opportunity to chair the book launch for all three works discussed in this review essay. At the event, Shirley Anne Tate said, “Black feminist theory is the theory”. The comment referred to how it is not ‘just’ that Black feminist theory is typically marginalised within institutional contexts and academic scholarship, ‘even’ within critical, feminist and poststructural work, but also to highlight the capacity of Black feminist scholarship to unpick and destabilise the known and (...) knowable in ways that are profoundly ontological, and which offer potential routes to meaningful social change through the hard task of working across difference. The three books reviewed here by Shirley Anne Tate, Suryia Nayak and Shona Hunter are theoretically rich and complex in breadth, scope and range, drawing on extensive Black feminist scholarship, as well as critical race, critical feminist, psychosocial, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, decolonial and poststructural approaches. Each book is embedded in everyday practices and social processes, offering multi-layered movement across different spatial-social and affective scales in ways that allow ‘big’ insights to emerge from the locatedness and particularity of human experience. They are reviewed in turn and some concluding comments identify important commonalities across the texts. (shrink)

In recent years, the concept of evolvability has been gaining in prominence both within evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) and the broader field of evolutionary biology. Despite this, there remains considerable disagreement about what evolvability is. This article offers a solution to this problem. I argue that, in focusing too closely on the role played by evolvability as an explanandum in evo-devo, existing philosophical attempts to clarify the evolvability concept have been overly narrow. Within evolutionary biology more broadly, evolvability offers a (...) robust explanation for the evolutionary trajectories of populations. Evolvability is an abstract, robust, dispositional property of populations, which captures the joint causal influence of their internal features on the outcomes of evolution (as opposed to the causal influence of selection, which is often characterized as external). When considering the nature of the physical basis of this disposition, it becomes clear that the many existing definitions of evolvability at play within evo-devo should be understood as capturing only aspects of a much broader phenomenon. 1 Introduction2 The Problem of Evolvability3 The Theoretical Role of Evolvability in Evolutionary Biology3.1 The explanatory targets of evolutionary biology3.2 Selection-based explanations3.3 Lineage explanations3.4 Evolvability-based explanations3.5 What properties must evolvability have?4 What Evolvability Really Is4.1 Making sense of ft4.2 Making sense of x and b5 What of the Limbs? The Power of E6 Conclusion. (shrink)

Risk-weighted expected utility theory permits preferences which violate the Sure-Thing Principle. But preferences that violate the STP can lead to bad decisions in sequential choice problems. In particular, they can lead decision-makers to adopt a strategy that is dominated – i.e. a strategy such that some available alternative leads to a better outcome in every possible state of the world.

It is a platitude among decision theorists that agents should choose their actions so as to maximize expected value. But exactly how to define expected value is contentious. Evidential decision theory (henceforth EDT), causal decision theory (henceforth CDT), and a theory proposed by Ralph Wedgwood that this essay will call benchmark theory (BT) all advise agents to maximize different types of expected value. Consequently, their verdicts sometimes conflict. In certain famous cases of conflict—medical Newcomb problems—CDT and BT seem to get (...) things right, while EDT seems to get things wrong. In other cases of conflict, including some recent examples suggested by Andy Egan, EDT and BT seem to get things right, while CDT seems to get things wrong. In still other cases, EDT and CDT seems to get things right, while BT gets things wrong. It's no accident, this essay claims, that all three decision theories are subject to counterexamples. Decision rules can be reinterpreted as voting rules, where the voters are the agent's possible future selves. The problematic examples have the structure of voting paradoxes. Just as voting paradoxes show that no voting rule can do everything we want, decision-theoretic paradoxes show that no decision rule can do everything we want. Luckily, the so-called “tickle defense” establishes that EDT, CDT, and BT will do everything we want in a wide range of situations. Most decision situations, this essay argues, are analogues of voting situations in which the voters unanimously adopt the same set of preferences. In such situations, all plausible voting rules and all plausible decision rules agree. (shrink)

In ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Anscombe writes: ‘It is not profitable at present for us to do moral philosophy. It should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking’. In consideration of this Anscombe appeals to the relation of ‘brute-relative-to’ which holds between facts and descriptions of human affairs. This paper describes the reorientation in philosophy of action that this relation aims to effect and examines the claim that this (...) reorientation makes possible the sort of philosophy of psychology that can provide a starting point for ethics. (shrink)

In recent years, the concept of evolvability has been gaining in prominence both within evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) and the broader field of evolutionary biology. Despite this, there remains considerable disagreement about what evolvability is. This article offers a solution to this problem. I argue that, in focusing too closely on the role played by evolvability as an explanandum in evo-devo, existing philosophical attempts to clarify the evolvability concept have been overly narrow. Within evolutionary biology more broadly, evolvability offers a (...) robust explanation for the evolutionary trajectories of populations. Evolvability is an abstract, robust, dispositional property of populations, which captures the joint causal influence of their internal features on the outcomes of evolution (as opposed to the causal influence of selection, which is often characterized as external). When considering the nature of the physical basis of this disposition, it becomes clear that the many existing definitions of evolvability at play within evo-devo should be understood as capturing only aspects of a much broader phenomenon. 1 Introduction2 The Problem of Evolvability3 The Theoretical Role of Evolvability in Evolutionary Biology 3.1 The explanatory targets of evolutionary biology 3.2 Selection-based explanations 3.3 Lineage explanations 3.4 Evolvability-based explanations 3.5 What properties must evolvability have?4 What Evolvability Really Is 4.1 Making sense of ft 4.2 Making sense of x and b5 What of the Limbs? The Power of E6 Conclusion. (shrink)

I propose an account truthmaking that provides truthmakers for negative truths. The account replaces Truthmaker Necessitarianism with a "Duplication Principle", according to which a suitable entity T is a truthmaker for a proposition P just in case the existence of an appropriate counterpart of T entails the truth of P, where the counterpart relation is cashed out in terms of qualitative duplication. My account captures an intuitive notion of truthmakers as "things the way they are", validates two appealing principles about (...) entailment and containment proposed by David Armstrong, and invalidates the controversial Disjunction Thesis. (shrink)