Public debates depict Arabs as opposed to gender equality because of Islam. However, there may be substantial numbers of Arab Muslims who do support feminist issues and who do so while being highly attached to Islam. This study explains why certain Arabs support feminism while remaining strongly religious. We propose that some Arab citizens are more likely to subvert patriarchal norms, especially in societies that construct Islam and feminism as more compatible. Empirically, we apply three-level multinomial analyses to 51 Arab (...) Barometer and World Values Surveys, which include 57,000 Arab Muslims. Our results show that one in four Arab Muslims supports Muslim feminism—far more than those who support a more secularist version of feminism. Employed women, single people, people who distrust institutions, and more highly educated people support Muslim feminism more than do others—especially in societies that construct feminism and Islam as less contradictory, such as those with strong feminist movements. The presumption that Islam and feminism are necessarily opposed may hinder feminism. A more effective way to boost gender equality in the Arab region may be to embolden emancipatory religious interpretations. (shrink)

Much is said about Middle Eastern and North African publics opposing gender equality, often referring to patriarchal Islam. However, nuanced large-scale studies addressing which specific aspects of religiosity affect support for gender equality across the MENA are conspicuously absent. This study develops and tests a gendered agentic socialization framework that proposes that MENA citizens are not only passively socialized by religion but also have agency. This disaggregates the influence of religiosity, highlights its multifacetedness, and theorizes the moderating roles that gender (...) and sociocognitive empowerment play via gendered processes of agentic dissociations. Using 15 World Values Surveys and multilevel models, our analyses show that most dimensions of religiosity fuel opposition to gender equality. However, the salience of religion in daily life is found to increase women’s support for gender equality and cushion the negative impact of religious service attendance. Also, gender and education moderate the impacts of several religiosity dimensions; for instance, women’s support for gender equality more sharply declines with increased service attendance than men’s. Altogether, this study finds that religious socialization is multifaceted and gendered, and that certain men and women are inclined and equipped to deviate from dominant patriarchal religious interpretations. (shrink)

New fetal therapies offer important prospects for improving health. However, having to consider both the fetus and the pregnant woman makes the risk–benefit analysis of fetal therapy trials challenging. Regulatory guidance is limited, and proposed ethical frameworks are overly restrictive or permissive. We propose a new ethical framework for fetal therapy research. First, we argue that considering only biomedical benefits fails to capture all relevant interests. Thus, we endorse expanding the considered benefits to include evidence-based psychosocial effects of fetal therapies. (...) Second, we reject the commonly proposed categorical risk and/or benefit thresholds for assessing fetal therapy research. Instead, we propose that the individual risks for the pregnant woman and the fetus should be justified by the benefits for them and the study’s social value. Studies that meet this overall proportionality criterion but have mildly unfavorable risk–benefit ratios for pregnant women and/or fetuses may be acceptable. (shrink)

This paper discusses different ways of formulating regulation that takes into account a responsibility towards future generations in environmental issues. A rights-based or human-rights based approach, based on notions of intergenerational equity, can be problematic on a conceptual level, and implementation of rights for future generations is challenging. An alternative approach is based on the assignment of duties to present generations rather than rights of future generations. This approach, which is often used in regulation concerning sustainability, uses goal regulation to (...) avoid conceptual problems with rights of future generations while it still provides the opportunity to safeguard their interests and needs. (shrink)

Exponential-constructible functions are an extension of the class of constructible functions. This extension was formulated by Cluckers and Loeser in the context of semi-algebraic and sub-analytic structures, when they studied stability under integration. In this paper, we will present a natural refinement of their definition that allows for stability results to hold within the wider class of [Formula: see text]-minimal structures. One of the main technical improvements is that we remove the requirement of definable Skolem functions from the proofs. As (...) a result, we obtain stability in particular for all intermediate structures between the semi-algebraic and the sub-analytic languages. (shrink)

This brief essay examines emergent spaces for politics and emergent political actors. The particular concern here is with types of politics that do not run through the formal political system, one with shrinking options for a growing number of US citizens and immigrants. Informal political actors and street-level politics in cities are major instances of this. US cities have a long history of street-level politics. The contents, the purposes, the mobilizers and the enactors of these politics have changed over time. (...) Today’s global cities are a very specific type of place because they bring together both the most globalized sectors of capital and the new transnational professionals, on the one hand, and a growing number of immigrants and native minoritized groups in a single, complex space. (shrink)

In this paper, we first classify different types of second opinions and evaluate the ethical and epistemological implications of providing those in a clinical context. Second, we discuss the issue of how artificial intelligent could replace the human cognitive labour of providing such second opinion and find that several AI reach the levels of accuracy and efficiency needed to clarify their use an urgent ethical issue. Third, we outline the normative conditions of how AI may be used as second opinion (...) in clinical processes, weighing the benefits of its efficiency against concerns of responsibility attribution. Fourth, we provide a ‘rule of disagreement’ that fulfils these conditions while retaining some of the benefits of expanding the use of AI-based decision support systems in clinical contexts. This is because the rule of disagreement proposes to use AI as much as possible, but retain the ability to use human second opinions to resolve disagreements between AI and physician-in-charge. Fifth, we discuss some counterarguments. (shrink)

Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self‐assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the design evolves in an essentially random fashion or according to an overall heuristic. The results indicated a macrostructure in the evolution of the design, characterized by two (...) stages. For the majority of participants, the first stage is marked by the introduction and modification of novel objects and their local and global aspects; the second stage is characterized by changes in their global composition. The minority that showed the better designs has a different strategy, in which most global changes were made in the beginning. Although participants did not consciously apply these strategies, their self‐assessment scores reflect the stages of the process. (shrink)

Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self‐assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the design evolves in an essentially random fashion or according to an overall heuristic. The results indicated a macrostructure in the evolution of the design, characterized by two (...) stages. For the majority of participants, the first stage is marked by the introduction and modification of novel objects and their local and global aspects; the second stage is characterized by changes in their global composition. The minority that showed the better designs has a different strategy, in which most global changes were made in the beginning. Although participants did not consciously apply these strategies, their self‐assessment scores reflect the stages of the process. (shrink)

There is a remedy available for many of our ailments: Psychopharmacology promises to alleviate unsatisfying memory, bad moods, and low self-esteem. Bioethicists have long discussed the ethical implications of enhancement interventions. However, they have not considered relevant evidence from psychology and economics. The growth in autonomy in many areas of life is publicized as progress for the individual. However, the broadening of areas at one’s disposal together with the increasing individualization of value systems leads to situations in which the range (...) of options asks too much of the individual. I scrutinize whether increased self-determination and unbound possibilities are really in a person’s best interests. Evidence from psychology and economics challenges the assumption that unlimited autonomy is best in all cases. The responsibility for autonomous self-formation that comes with possibilities provided by neuro-enhancement developments can be a burden. To guarantee quality of life I suggest a balance of beneficence, support, and respect for autonomy. (shrink)

A philosophically comprehended account is given of the genesis and evolution of the concept of protein. Characteristic of this development were not shifts in theory in response to new experimental data, but shifts in the range of questions that the available experimental resources were fit to cope with effectively. Apart from explanatory success with regard to its own range of questions, various other selecting factors acted on a conceptual variant, some stemming from a competing set of research questions, others from (...) an altogether different field of inquiry, and still others from the external environment. These results are best explained on, hence support, an evolutionary model of the progress of experimental investigation, whose outlines are briefly discussed. (shrink)

The increased presence of medical AI in clinical use raises the ethical question which standard of explainability is required for an acceptable and responsible implementation of AI-based applications in medical contexts. In this paper, we elaborate on the emerging debate surrounding the standards of explainability for medical AI. For this, we first distinguish several goods explainability is usually considered to contribute to the use of AI in general, and medical AI in specific. Second, we propose to understand the value of (...) explainability relative to other available norms of explainable decision-making. Third, in pointing out that we usually accept heuristics and uses of bounded rationality for medical decision-making by physicians, we argue that the explainability of medical decisions should not be measured against an idealized diagnostic process, but according to practical considerations. We conclude, fourth, to resolve the issue of explainability-standards by relocating the issue to the AI’s certifiability and interpretability. (shrink)

In the first part of this article I investigated the Popperian roots of Lakatos's Proofs and Refutations, which was an attempt to apply, and thereby to test, Popper's theory of knowledge in a field—mathematics—to which it had not primarily been intended to apply. While Popper's theory of knowledge stood up gloriously to this test, the new application gave rise to new insights into the heuristic of mathematical development, which necessitated further clarification and improvement of some Popperian methodological maxims. In the (...) present part I analyze this second phase in the development of Lakatos's Popperian programme in mathematics, and its connection to the methodology of scientific research programmes. (shrink)

‘Authority’ is a term widely used in scholarly debate, including the history of philosophy. However, what is meant by this term is not always clear and the concept is not very well defined. One reason for this is certainly that the phenomenon itself is complex and the corresponding terms are used with a degree of latitude. This makes it difficult to adequately compare and connect the insights that various case studies have to offer. For historians of philosophy, it is thus (...) important to get a sufficient grasp of the concept of authority. This is even more urgent when one studies commentary traditions, in which secondary texts are written in virtue of the existence of texts clad with high authority. Our article combines historical textual research with insights from epistemology, thus providing a discussion of the concept of authority and its importance in textual traditions. We propose a descriptive model that can be used for examining epistemic authority in historical texts. An example from ancient Platonism serves to show both the complexity of the phenomenon and the clarifications that our approach may offer. (shrink)

The biggest contemporary challenge to democratic legitimacy gravitates around the crisis of democratic representation.

As individuals enter their 80s, they are inevitably confronted with the problem of neuronal loss in the brain. The incidence of the common movement disorder ‘mild parkinsonian signs’ (MPS) is approximately 50% over the age of 85 years. It has long been known that the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta is a neuropathological hallmark of Parkinson's disease (PD). Recently, two papers1,2 present clear evidence for a high burden of mitochondrial DNA deletions within substantia nigra neurons (...) in aged individuals and individuals with PD, pointing towards a common pathway inevitably leading to neuronal dysfunction and death. BioEssays 28: 963–967, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Pesquisa qualitativa : conceitos básicos -- Pesquisa qualitativa : apilcações nos estudos rurais -- Pesquisa qualitativa : apilcações nos estudos urbanos -- Pesquisa qualitativa : apilcações em outros estudos geográficos.

This paper examines a historical case of conceptual change in mathematics that was fundamental to its progress. I argue that in this particular case, the change was conditioned primarily by social processes, and these are reflected in the intellectual development of the discipline. Reorganization of mathematicians and the formation of a new mathematical community were the causes of changes in intellectual content, rather than being mere effects. The paper focuses on the French Revolution, which gave rise to revolutionary developments in (...) mathematics. I examine how changes in the political constellation affected mathematicians both individually and collectively, and how a new professional community—with different views on the objects, problems, aims, and values of the discipline—arose. On the basis of this account, I will discuss such Kuhnian themes as the role of the professional community and normal versus revolutionary development.Author Keywords: Carnot; Monge; Kuhn; Revolution; Conceptual change. (shrink)