Public participation is a prominent issue in the nanoethics literature. This paper analyses the emerging awareness of nanoscience and nanotechnology (nano S&T) in the Norwegian public sphere, as evidenced by newspaper coverage. In particular, attention is on representations of nano S&T and their relation to public participation. Three dominant representations are found; nano S&T as positive, nano S&T as important for the future and nano S&T as under control. It is argued that the prominence of these representations is unfortunate (...) because they can discourage public participation. The paper concludes by pointing to some broader questions about public participation as an instrument for governance of nano S&T. (shrink)

Scale is central to understanding nanotechnologies. These technologies are usually described as the understanding and control of matter at the nanoscale, with one nanometer being 10^-9 meter. At this scale, some materials gain new properties that can be used in the creation of new products. These properties may contribute to economic growth and social welfare but, conversely, they may also create negative effects, such as new risks to human health and the environment. As an emerging field whose consequences are still (...) uncertain, the meanings of nanotechnologies are hotly contested. (shrink)

Representations of science and technology, embodied as imaginaries, visions, and expectations, have become a growing focus of analysis. These representations are of interest to normative approaches to science and technology, such as Hermeneutic Technology Assessment and Responsible Innovation, because of their ability to modulate understandings of science and technology and to influence scientific and technological development. This article analyses the culture of participation underlying the NanoKOMIK project and the representations and meanings of (nano)science and (nano)technology communicated in the two nano-fiction (...) comic books created as part of the project: _Dayanne and Murillo. The power of nanoscience_ (2016) and _NanoKOMIK #2_ (2017). The article argues that despite NanoKOMIK’s efforts to engage the public with (nano)science and (nano)technology, it reproduces non-binding modes of public participation and transmits socio-technical meanings that are instrumental in the social legitimisation of (nano)technology. More specifically, the analysis shows that NanoKOMIK’s comic books, in addition to not problematising the risks and conveying an eminently positive view of nanotechnology, also communicate certain ‘myth-conceptions’ of scientific activity and its products. For example, they convey an individualistic and linear vision of research and innovation and an instrumentalist and neutral (or ‘value-free’) view of technology. These findings highlight the importance of critically analysing the ‘cultures of participation’ that characterise and reproduce ‘participatory’ or ‘collaborative’ projects and the representations of (nano)science and (nano)technology that they perpetuate. (shrink)

In recent years, in the UK and elsewhere, scientists and science policymakers have grappled with the question of how to reap the benefits of nanotechnologies while minimising the risks. Having recognised the importance of public support for future innovations, they have placed increasing emphasis on ‘engaging’ ‘the public’ during the early phase of technology development. Meaningful engagement suggests some common ground between experts and lay publics in relation to the definition of nanotechnologies and of their benefits and risks. However, views (...) on nanotechnologies are likely to vary according to where actors stand in the technology production/consumption/assessment cycle. Drawing on data from a recent UK-based study, this article examines how scientists (‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’) and policymakers portray the benefits and risks of nanotechnologies, particularly as they relate to two major areas of predicted application, namely medicine/public health and environmental sustainability. The findings reveal that, in the main, scientists and science policymakers held a positive conception of nanotechnologies and see imminent applications, although they acknowledged particular risks, including adverse public reaction. While definitions of ‘benefit’ and ‘risk’ varied, most saw the benefits as outweighing the risks and believed that the risks could be adequately regulated once they were assessed. The difficulties of assessing risk, however, were acknowledged. The study raises a number of questions that will need to be addressed if regulations are to be developed that not only protect people’s heath and wellbeing and the environment but also engender public trust in nanotechnologies. (shrink)

Images, ranging from visualizations of the nanoscale to future visions, abound within and beyond the world of nanotechnology. Rather than the contrast between imaging , i.e. creating images that are understood as offering a view on what is out there, and imagining , i.e. creating images offering impressions of how the nanoscale could look like and images presenting visions of worlds that might be realized, it is the entanglement between imaging and imagining which is the key to understanding what (...) images do. Three main arenas of entanglement of imag(in)ing and the tensions involved are discussed: production practices and use of visualizations of the nanoscale; imag(in)ing the future and the present; and entanglements of nanoscience and art. In these three arenas one sees struggles about which images might stand for nanotechnology, but also some stabilization of the entanglement of imag(in)ing, for example in established rules in the practices of visualizing the nanoscale. Three images have become iconic, through the combination of their wide reception and further circulation. All three, the IBM logo, the Foresight Institute’s Nanogear image, and the so-called Nanolouse, depict actual or imagined technoscientific objects and are thus seen as representing technoscientific achievements – while marking out territory. (shrink)

Research on the media representations of nanotechnology have flourished during the last decennium. However, most of the projects were focused on Western Europe and North America, especially the English speaking countries. This paper aims to move the focus towards Poland - a Central European country that has not been studied in this context before. This study looks at the frames, themes and tone used in the Polish coverage of nanotechnology between 2004 and 2009. Other issues, such as main (...) actors in the debate or articles’ geographical focus have also been considered. (shrink)

Expectations play a central role in understanding scientific and technological changes. Future-oriented representations are also central with regard to nanotechnologies as they can guide policy activities, provide structures and legitimation, attract different interests, focus policy-makers’ attention and foster investments for research. However, the emphasis on future scenarios tends to underrate the complexity of the challenges of the present market of nanotechnologies by flattening them under the needs and promises of scientific research. This is particularly apparent if we consider the viewpoint (...) of the regulator who faces two different ranges of problems with regard to the market and research and is expected, simultaneously, to manage two different types of regulatory instruments, pursuing at the same time the same goals. Instead, by favoring only the future scenarios, the regulator runs the risk of abruptly shifting from more flexible and elastic tools to forms of hard legislation, wasting, thus, the resources of the soft-regulation, in particular those of self-regulation. By referring primarily to the European context, human rights, also thanks to their normative structure of principles, can help in strengthening both the legislation needed for regulating the present market and the soft instruments needed for steering research and for fostering the stakeholders’ participation without sacrificing the coherence of the regulatory response. (shrink)

Textual representation of graphene in Sweden’s most circulated newspapers is analyzed in 229 articles from 2004 to 2018. What is and is not said about graphene is explored through systematically identifying the lexical and grammatical patterns of sentences using the word “graphene.” Graphene is said to be a super material with certain properties, to be an object of research, commercialization, and application, and to have societal significance. Given frequent classifications of graphene as a nanomaterial in scientific discourse, there is (...) notably limited reference to graphene as “nano” in the newspapers and only marginal reference to risk. This paper discusses the findings regarding this Swedish newspaper discourse on graphene in relation to its intertextuality, i.e., how texts draw upon and recontextualize other texts: the Swedish newspaper discourse on graphene echoes discourses of promise formulated elsewhere in society; it is not very diversified in terms of themes; it is dominated by positive and neutral representations rather than by risk; and it makes limited reference to the nano-discourse, even though, according to most definitions, graphene is a nanomaterial. (shrink)

As public attitude research evolves, often becoming more complex and variable, we are coming to understand that public attitudes are also more complex and variable than can often be captured by a single opinion poll, and more sophisticated forms of analyses are needed that look not just at a breadth of attitudes, but at a breadth of publics. The Australian Department of Industry undertook a public attitude study in 2012 that was not only longitudinal, looking at changes in attitudes towards (...) nanotechnologies, but also looking at the values or worldviews that influence attitudes. The findings allowed for a segmentation of the public, into four key segments, with distinct homogenous attitudes. This allows for not just a deeper understanding of the diversity of views that exist and the worldviews that influence them, but challenges engagement practitioners to ensure they have a broad representation of participants with different attitudes and do not favour one or two segments only. (shrink)

What does feminism have to do with nanotechnology? And how do mad scientists demonstrate the connections between the two? To explore this, I examine a case study of mad scientists in film, discussing first why mad scientist images arise and why nanotechnology, or the manipulation of matter on the atomic and molecular scales, may be particularly vulnerable to this kind of representation. National funding agencies are calling for the integration of ethics and societal implications into nanoscience and (...) technology research and the training of future scientists and engineers. This emphasis offers a powerful way to break down stereotypes about science and engineering that discourage the participation of some groups. (shrink)

The last 14 chapters of book 1 of Aristotle's "Prior Analytics" are concerned with the representation in the formal language of syllogistic of propositions and arguments expressed in more or less everyday Greek. In his commentary on those chapters, Alexander of Aphrodisias explains some of Aristotle's more opaque assertions and discusses post-Aristotelian ideas in semantics and the philosophy of language. In doing so he provides an unusual insight into the way in which these disciplines developed in the Hellenistic era. (...) He also shows a more sophisticated understanding of these fields than Aristotle himself, while remaining a staunch defender of Aristotle's emphasis on meaning as opposed to Stoics concern with verbal formulation. In his commentary on the final chapter of book 1 Alexander offers a thorough discussion of Aristotle's distinction between denying that something is, e.g., white and asserting that it is non-white. (shrink)

There are two primary camps in which nanotechnology today can be categorized normal nanotechnology and speculative nanotechnology. The birth of nanotechnology proper was conceived through discourses of speculative nanotechnology. However, current nanotech-nology research has detracted from its speculative promises in favour of more attainable material products. Nonetheless, normal nanotechnology has leveraged the popular support and consequential funding it needs to conduct research and development (R&D) as a result of popular conceptions of speculative nanotechnology (...) and its promises. Similarly, the scholarly literature has shifted its focus away from speculative nanofutures towards normal nanotech-nology R&D. This paper shows that there is an incongruence between the representation of nanotechnology in the media, scholarly journals and industry. (shrink)

The assessment of nanotechnology applications such as nanocarrier-based targeted drug delivery has historically been based mostly on toxicological and safety aspects. The use of nanocarriers for TDD, a leading-edge nanomedical application, has received little study from the angle of experts’ perceptions and acceptability, which may be reflected in how TDD applications are developed. In recent years, numerous authors have maintained that TDD assessment should also take into account impacts on ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and social issues in order to (...) lead to socially responsible innovation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with French and Canadian researchers and research trainees with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and involved in research related to emerging technologies. The interviews focussed on scenarios presenting two types of TDD nanocarriers in two contexts of use. Content and inductive analyses of interviews showed how facets of perceived impacts such as health, environment, social cohabitation, economy, life and death, representations of the human being and nature, and technoscience were weighed in acceptability judgments. The analyses also revealed that contextual factors related to device, to use, and to user influenced the weighting assigned to perceived impacts and thus contributed to variability in interviewees’ judgments of acceptability. Giving consideration to researchers’ perspective could accompany first steps of implementation and development of nanomedicine by producing a first, but wide, picture of the acceptability of nanocarrier-based TDD. (shrink)

The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is the most likely site where egocentric spatial relationships are represented in the brain. PPC cells receive visual, auditory, somaesthetic, and vestibular sensory inputs; oculomotor, head, limb, and body motor signals; and strong motivational projections from the limbic system. Their discharge increases not only when an animal moves towards a sensory target, but also when it directs its attention to it. PPC lesions have the opposite effect: sensory inattention and neglect. The PPC does not seem (...) to contain a “map” of the location of objects in space but a distributed neural network for transforming one set of sensory vectors into other sensory reference frames or into various motor coordinate systems. Which set of transformation rules is used probably depends on attention, which selectively enhances the synapses needed for making a particular sensory comparison or aiming a particular movement. (shrink)

Although many active scientists deplore the publicity about Drexler's futuristic scenario, I will argue that the controversies it has generated are very useful, at least in one respect. They help clarify the metaphysical assumptions underlying nanotechnologies, which may prove very helpful for understanding their public and cultural impact. Both Drexler and his opponents take inspiration from living systems, which they both describe as machines. However there is a striking contrast in their respective views of molecular machineries. This paper based on (...) semipopular publications is an attempt to characterize the rival models of nanomachines and to disentangle the worldviews underpinning the uses of biological reference on both sides. Finally, in an effort to point out the historical roots of the contrast in the concepts of nanomachines, I raise the question of a divide between two cultures of nanotechnology. (shrink)

An increasingly prevalent approach to studying human cognition is to construe the mind as optimally allocating limited cognitive resources among cognitive processes. Under this bounded rationality approach (Icard in Philos Sci 85(1):79–101, 2018; Simon in Utility and probability, Palgrave Macmillan, 1980), it is common to assume that resource-bounded cognitive agents approximate normative solutions to statistical inference problems, and that much of the bias and variability in human performance can be explained in terms of the approximation strategies we employ. In this (...) paper, we argue that this approach restricts itself to an unnecessarily narrow scope of cognitive models, which limits its ability to explain how humans flexibly adapt their representations to novel environments. We argue that more attention should be paid to how we form our cognitive representations in the first place, and advocate for pluralistic framework which jointly optimizes over both representations and algorithms for manipulating them. We identify several fundamental trade-offs that manifest in this joint optimization, and draw on recent work to motivate a unified formal framework for this analysis. We illustrate a simplified version of this analysis with a case study in social cognition, and outline several new directions for research that this approach suggests. (shrink)

Democracy has been a flawed hegemony since the fall of communism. Its flexibility, its commitment to equality of representation, and its recognition of the legitimacy of opposition politics are all positive features for political institutions. But democracy has many deficiencies: it is all too easily held hostage by powerful interests; it often fails to advance social justice; and it does not cope well with a number of features of the political landscape, such as political identities, boundary disputes, and environmental (...) crises. Although democracy is valuable it fits uneasily with other political values and is in many respects less than equal to the demands it confronts. In this volume prominent political theorists and social scientists present original discussions of such central issues. Democracy's Values deals with the nature and value of democracy, particularly the tensions between it and such goods as justice, equality, efficiency, and freedom. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Definitions and Scales The Origins of Nanotechnology The Current State of Nanotechnology The Future of Nanotechnology Nanotechnology in Nature and Applications.

This article examines the effect of material evidence upon historiographic hypotheses. Through a series of successive Bayesian conditionalizations, I analyze the extended competition among several hypotheses that offered different accounts of the transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age in Palestine and in particular to the “emergence of Israel”. The model reconstructs, with low sensitivity to initial assumptions, the actual outcomes including a complete alteration of the scientific consensus. Several known issues of Bayesian confirmation, including the problem of (...) old evidence, the introduction and confirmation of novel theories and the sensitivity of convergence to uncertain and disputed evidence are discussed in relation to the model’s result and the actual historical process. The most important result is that convergence of probabilities and of scientific opinion is indeed possible when advocates of rival hypotheses hold similar judgment about the factual content of evidence, even if they differ sharply in their historiographic interpretation. This speaks against the contention that understanding of present remains is so irrevocably biased by theoretical and cultural presumptions as to make an objective assessment impossible. (shrink)

This chapter is concerned with the representation of time and change in classical (i.e., non-quantum) physical theories. One of the main goals of the chapter is to attempt to clarify the nature and scope of the so-called problem of time: a knot of technical and interpretative problems that appear to stand in the way of attempts to quantize general relativity, and which have their roots in the general covariance of that theory. The most natural approach to these questions is (...) via a consideration of more clear cases. So much of the chapter is given over to a discussion of the representation of time and change in other, better understood theories, starting with the most straightforward cases and proceeding through a consideration of cases that lead up to the features of general relativity that are responsible for the problem of time. (shrink)

How should we oversee new and emerging technologies and their products? What lessons can we discern from existing regulatory examples and from past mistakes? How do these lessons learned translate into informed recommendations for adequate oversight for nanotechnology to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past? The investigators of this interdisciplinary project undertook this endeavor intending to answer these questions among others.In parallel with the project team putting together this symposium, another, very different process on the oversight of (...) class='Hi'>nanotechnology took place. An international coalition of non-governmental organizations formed to address the nanotech policy dialogue. The first goal of this NGO group was to agree upon and draft fundamental principles of oversight, which it completed in 2007-08. These principles close with a call for their adoption and/or internalization by all relevant actors and bodies. In effect, they serve a function in the policy dialogue similar to that of this project’s forthcoming recommendations. (shrink)

Much debate about scientific realism concerns the issue of whether it is compatible with theory change over time. Certain forms of ‘selective realism’ have been suggested with this in mind. Here I consider a closely related challenge for realism: that of articulating how a theory should be interpreted at any given time. In a crucial respect the challenges posed by diachronic and synchronic interpretation are the same; in both cases, realists face an apparent dilemma. The thinner their interpretations, the easier (...) realism is to defend, but at the cost of more substantial commitment. The more substantial their interpretations, the more difficult they are to defend. I consider this worry in the context of the Standard Model of particle physics. Examining some selective realist attempts at interpretation, I argue that realism is, in fact, compatible with different commitments on the spectrum of thinner to more substantial, thus mitigating the dilemma. (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different approaches (...) to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

Much recent cognitive neuroscientific work on body knowledge is representationalist: “body schema” and “body images”, for example, are cerebral representations of the body (de Vignemont 2009). A framework assumption is that representation of the body plays an important role in cognition. The question is whether this representationalist assumption is compatible with the variety of broadly situated or embodied approaches recently popular in the cognitive neurosciences: approaches in which cognition is taken to have a ‘direct’ relation to the body and (...) to the environment. A “direct” relation is one where the boundaries between the body and the head, or between the environment and the animal are not theoretically important in the understanding of cognition. These boundaries do not play a theoretically privileged role in cognitive explanations of behavior. But representationalism appears to put a representational veil between the locus of cognition and that which is represented, making cognitive relations to the body and to the environment be indirect, with a high associated computational load. For this reason, direct approaches have tried to minimize the use of internal representations (Suchman 1987; Barwise 1987; Agre and Chapman 1987; Brooks 1992; Thelen and Smith 1994; van Gelder 1995; Port and van Gelder 1995; Clark 1997, 1999; Rupert 2009, p. 180). Does a cognitive neuroscience committed to direct relations rule out a representationalist approach to body knowledge? Or is direct representationalism possible? (shrink)

This essay argues that nano-images would be best understood with an aesthetical approach rather than with an epistemological critique. For this aim, I propose a ‘techno-aesthetical’ approach: an enquiry into the way instruments and machines transform the logic of the sensible itself and not just the way by which it represents something else. Unlike critical epistemology, which remains self-evidently grounded on a representationalist philosophy, the approach developed here presents the advantage of providing a clear-cut distinction between image-as-representation and other (...) modes of existence of images, such as the one of ‘ imaginaction ’ that I draw from a comparison between far-field and near-field microscopies. Once this regime of imaginaction is distinguished from representation, I focus on nanotechnological percepts and argue that they follow a transmodal logic. I then draw the implications of this enquiry in terms of a new sensible condition that changes the way we think of non-living objects. Finally, I conclude that if techno-aesthetics dares to posit and articulate sensibility beyond the privileged sphere of subject/object relationships, it simultaneously engages us to consider the political character of our responsibilities towards the design of nano-engineered sensorial spaces. (shrink)

Good governance for nanotechnology and nanomaterials is predicated on principles of general good governance. This paper discusses on what lessons we can learn from the oversight of past emerging technologies in formulating these principles. Nanotechnology provides us a valuable opportunity to apply these lessons and a duty to avoid repeating past mistakes. To do that will require mandatory regulation, grounded in precaution, that takes into account the uniqueness of nanomaterials. Moreover, this policy dialogue is not taking place in (...) a vacuum. In applying the lessons of the past, nanotechnology provides a window to renegotiate our public's social contract on chemicals, health, the environment, and risks. Emerging technologies illuminate structural weaknesses, providing a crucial chance to ameliorate lingering regulatory inadequacies and provide much needed updates of existing laws. (shrink)

El gran zoo (1984), del poeta cubano Nicolás Guillén, ofrece distintas representaciones sobre el Caribe. El artículo argumenta que el texto de Nicolás Guillén se inscribe dentro del movimiento literario hispanoamericano de la neovanguardia. Luego, se examinan algunas características formales del texto, tomando como ejemplo los poemas “El sueño” y “Guitarra”. Otro poema que se estudia con más detenimiento es “El tenor”, el cual parodia la división entre la alta cultura y la cultura popular. Por último, se analizan varias alusiones (...) del poemario al contexto histórico de la Guerra Fría y la Carrera Espacial. (shrink)

Nanotechnologies are a controversial topic, as they seem promising but also cause concern. Previous research has highlighted the potential link between nanotechnologies and other hazardous technologies. The aim of this research was to analyse the discourse on this topic by three groups of participants: laypersons, scientists and environmentalists. Thirty-four people (13 laypersons, ten scientists and eleven environmentalists) were interviewed using a semi-structured interview. Lexical and thematic analyses showed that scientists engage in explanatory discourse and perceive fewer risks than laypersons and (...) environmentalists. The latter two groups describe applications and list the main actors in the development of nanotechnologies. Environmentalists are significantly more likely to make spontaneous associations with other technologies, such as electromagnetic waves, and perceive more risks than the other two groups. Contrary to our expectations, laypersons make fewer associations with biotechnologies than experts or environmentalists. The results are discussed in terms of the interest of a qualitative approach to uncovering new objects spontaneously associated with nanotechnologies, as well as in terms of a risk governance framework. (shrink)

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its (...) feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

Readers of Hobbes have often seen his Leviathan as a deeply paradoxical work. On one hand, recognizing that no sovereign could ever wield enough coercive power to maintain social order, the text recommends that the state enhance its power ideologically, by tightly controlling the apparatuses of public discourse and socialization. The state must cultivate an image of itself as a mortal god of nearly unlimited power, to overpower its subjects and instil enough fear to win obedience. On the other hand, (...) by drawing explicit attention to the ideological and partly illusory bases of the state’s power, Leviathan, itself construed as a political intervention designed to appeal to a broad English readership, appears to undermine the very program it recommends. Indeed, many have argued that Leviathan’s substantive political-philosophical doctrine is flatly at odds with the authority that Hobbes claimed for himself in order to advance that doctrine. The paradox, I argue, is only an apparent one. Precisely because Hobbes believed that in practice no one could ever become the mortal god that sovereignty requires, i.e., that the seat of sovereignty could never actually be securely occupied and fully represented by a mere mortal, he sought constantly to remind his readers of the precariousness of earthly sovereignty by pointing to its illusory basis. Far from seeking to undermine the sovereign, however, this reminder was designed to enhance readers’ fears, especially the fear that, despite the security they may enjoy today, the slightest misstep may lead them straight into the horrors of the state of nature. Hobbes’s purpose was, in other words, to enhance the sovereign’s power, not by enhancing our fear of him, but of his absence. Ironically, this is also in part why Hobbes insisted on the individual’s inalienable right of self-defence, an insistence that has puzzled many of his readers, given Hobbes’s obvious wish to defend absolute, unlimited sovereignty. Its political function is not to provide a covert justification for resistance theories. Rather, by reminding his readers of their right but doing so while addressing them as isolated atoms whose resistance would be hopeless, Hobbes sought to remind each one of the ultimate impossibility of securely filling the seat of sovereignty, without encouraging anyone actually to resist the most promising pretender. Like God-talk, Hobbes’s representations of sovereign power do not ultimately comprise descriptive propositions at all: they are expressions of praise and honour designed to help create the very thing they purport to describe. Hobbes was keenly aware that indivisible state sovereignty is an ideological construct whose terms are never ever fully realized in practice. (shrink)

Often philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians employ a notion of intended structure when talking about a branch of mathematics. In addition, we know that there are foundational mathematical theories that can find representatives for the objects of informal mathematics. In this paper, we examine how faithfully foundational theories can represent intended structures, and show that this question is closely linked to the decidability of the theory of the intended structure. We argue that this sheds light on the trade-off between expressive power (...) and meta-theoretic properties when comparing first-order and second-order logic. (shrink)

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. Because (...) proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/. (shrink)

The growing presence of the products of nanotechnology in the public domain raises a number of ethical questions. This paper considers whether existing environmental ethics can provide some guidance on these questions. After a brief discussion of the appropriateness of an environmental ethics framework for the task at hand, the paper identifies a representative environmental ethic and uses it to evaluate four salient issues that emerge from nanotechnology. The discussion is intended both to give an initial theoretical take (...) on nanotechnology from the perspective of environmental ethics and to provide a clear indication of the direction from which environmental resistance might come. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Ockham's critique of the species theory of cognition. As Ockham understands this theory, it says that the direct objects of cognition are mental representations, or species. According to many commentators, one of Ockham's main objections to this theory was that, if the direct objects of cognition are species rather than external objects, we will never be able to establish whether or not a given species is a veridical representation of the world. In this paper I argue (...) that this line of interpretation sits uneasily with Ockham's epistemology, and offer a new interpretation of Ockham's critique of species. (shrink)

The genetically manipulated organism crisis demonstrated that technological development based solely on the law of the marketplace and State protection against serious risks to health and safety is no longer a warrant of ethical acceptability. In the first part of our paper, we critique the implicitly individualist social-acceptance model for State regulation of technology and recommend an interdisciplinary approach for comprehensive analysis of the impacts and ethical acceptability of technologies. In the second part, we present a framework for the analysis (...) of impacts and acceptability, devised—with the goal of supporting the development of specific nanotechnological applications—by a team of researchers from various disciplines. At the conceptual level, this analytic framework is intended to make explicit those various operations required in preparing a judgement about the acceptability of technologies that have been implicit in the classical analysis of toxicological risk. On a practical level, we present a reflective tool that makes it possible to take into account all the dimensions involved and understand the reasons invoked in determining impacts, assessing them, and arriving at a judgement about acceptability. (shrink)

In this paper we consider persuasion in the context of practical reasoning, and discuss the problems associated with construing reasoning about actions in a manner similar to reasoning about beliefs. We propose a perspective on practical reasoning as presumptive justification of a course of action, along with critical questions of this justification, building on the account of Walton. From this perspective, we articulate an interaction protocol, which we call PARMA, for dialogues over proposed actions based on this theory. We outline (...) an axiomatic semantics for the PARMA Protocol, and discuss two implementations which use this protocol to mediate a discussion between humans. We then show how our proposal can be made computational within the framework of agents based on the Belief-Desire-Intention model, and illustrate this proposal with an example debate within a multi agent system. (shrink)

Representations of monadic MV -algebra, the characterization of locally finite monadic MV -algebras, with axiomatization of them, definability of non-trivial monadic operators on finitely generated free MV -algebras are given. Moreover, it is shown that finitely generated m-relatively complete subalgebra of finitely generated free MV -algebra is projective.

Although nanotechnology is often defined as operations on the 10-9 meters, the lack of charisma in the scale-bound definitions has been fortified by remarkable dreams and alluring promises that spark excitement for nanotechnology. The story of the rhetorical development of nanotechnology reveals how speculative claims are powerful constructions that create legitimacy in this emerging technological domain. From its inception, nanotechnology has been more of a dream than reality, more fiction than fact. In recent years, however, the (...) term nanotechnology has been actively drawn toward the present to begin to deliver on the fantastic expectations. This debate over time and timing is loaded with paradox. This work examines how future claims work to define what counts as nanotechnology and reveals dilemmas that accompany temporal disjunctures. Science and politics converge in debates about the future of technology as expectations serve to create and enforce power and legitimacy in the emerging area. (shrink)

This paper outlines some key issues that arise when agency and temporality are considered jointly, from the perspective of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, phenomenology, and action theory. I address the difference between time simpliciter and time as represented as it figures in phenomena like intentional binding, goal-oriented action plans, emulation systems, and ‘temporal agency’. An examination of Husserl’s account of time consciousness highlights difficulties in generalizing his account to include a substantive notion of agency, a weakness inherited by explanatory projects like (...) neurophenomenology. I conclude by sketching a project analogous to the projects in neurophenomenology, based on Thompson’s naïve action theory. (shrink)