Open peer commentary on the article “Making Sense and Meaning: On the Role of Communication and Culture in the Reproduction of Social Systems” by Raivo Palmaru. Upshot: The author addresses implications arising from socializing observer-dependent heuristics. Above all, Palmaru’s terminology is called into question since its conceptual deficiencies with regard to the relation between an observing system and its environments cause naturalistic fallacy. The author’s reply espouses a concise reanalysis of the complementary relations of fundamentally incomparable domains, namely the observer (...) and the social system. (shrink)

In light of developments within the field of media theory, a certain consensus has evolved in favour of approaches like mediatization and mediation. While these approaches above all focus on societal change from a media-dependent point of view, this article addresses the reverse side of these processes, asking about media users' appropriation of media in order to experience sociality that has only just been enabled by media-use. This awareness of medial terms and conditions is characterized as recipients' acknowledgment as well (...) as utilization of medial constraints, which is subsequently referred to as mediality. (shrink)

BackgroundThe expectation of pandemic-induced severe resource shortages has prompted authorities to draft and update frameworks to guide clinical decision-making and patient triage. While these documents differ in scope, they share a utilitarian focus on the maximization of benefit. This utilitarian view necessarily marginalizes certain groups, in particular individuals with increased medical needs.Main bodyHere, we posit that engagement with the disability critique demands that we broaden our understandings of justice and fairness in clinical decision-making and patient triage. We propose the capabilities (...) theory, which recognizes that justice requires a range of positive capabilities/freedoms conducive to the achievement of meaningful life goals, as a means to do so. Informed by a disability rights critique of the clinical response to the pandemic, we offer direction for the construction of future clinical triage protocols which will avoid ableist biases by incorporating a broader apprehension of what it means to be human.ConclusionThe clinical pandemic response, codified across triage protocols, should embrace a form of justice which incorporates a vision of pluralistic human capabilities and a valuing of positive freedoms. (shrink)

Objective To assess parental permission for a neonate's research participation using the MacArthur competence assessment tool for clinical research (MacCAT-CR), specifically testing the components of understanding, appreciation, reasoning and choice. Study Design Quantitative interviews using study-specific MacCAT-CR tools. Hypothesis Parents of critically ill newborns would produce comparable MacCAT-CR scores to healthy adult controls despite the emotional stress of an infant with critical heart disease or the urgency of surgery. Parents of infants diagnosed prenatally would have higher MacCAT-CR scores than parents (...) of infants diagnosed postnatally. There would be no difference in MacCAT-CR scores between parents with respect to gender or whether they did or did not permit research participation. Participants Parents of neonates undergoing cardiac surgery who had made decisions about research participation before their neonate's surgery. Methods The MacCAT-CR. Results 35 parents (18 mothers; 17 fathers) of 24 neonates completed 55 interviews for one or more of three studies. Total scores: magnetic resonance imaging (mean 36.6, SD 7.71), genetics (mean 38.8, SD 3.44), heart rate variability (mean 37.7, SD 3.30). Parents generally scored higher than published subject populations and were comparable to published control populations with some exceptions. Conclusions The MacCAT-CR can be used to assess parental permission for neonatal research participation. Despite the stress of a critically ill neonate requiring surgery, parents were able to understand study-specific information and make informed decisions to permit their neonate's participation. (shrink)

This section concerns the question of how best to understand the scientific status of mental health care in general and psychiatry in particular. On the assumption that psychiatry is based, in part at least, on natural science, what is the nature or the general shape of that science? Some of the chapters aim at shedding light on component parts of a scientific world view: causation, explanation, natural kinds, models of medicine, etc. Others concern potentially fruitful scientific approaches to mental health (...) care, drawing on brain imaging results, phenomenology, enactivism and what can be learnt from debate of the status of psychoanalysis. One overall lesson is that twenty-first-century psychiatry needs twenty-first-century philosophy of science. (shrink)

This Section examines several moral dilemmas and epistemological aporias in clinical practice and shows how clinicians can benefit from the introduction of philosophical methods and discourse. The authors develop these issues having in mind emblematic mental disorders and typical clinical situations. One important claim shared by the Authors is that a great effort has been made to ground psychiatry on evidence-based science, and to tie it to our growing understanding of the human brain. This is obviously an exceedingly important project, (...) but it would be a mistake to assume that the central questions of psychiatry can be completely resolved through scientific inquiry. Science offers guidance for clinical practice only in light of our concepts and normative judgments. (shrink)

In the editorial introduction the stage is set for the chapters in the section by a brief discussion of the relationship between the disciplines of philosophy and psychiatry. Then each chapter briefly is summarized or highlighted.

In this introduction to the Section II, the thrust of the component chapters is described. An important strand in the philosophy of psychiatry since its beginnings has been sociopolitical critiques: criticism which aims to improve and humanize psychiatric practice and mental health systems. From this standpoint, the introduction provides an overview of this tradition, including considerations of "postpsychiatry," value commitments in psychiatry, the recovery movement, racism and sexism in the field, and technology.

A cross-disciplinary discussion of the basis of interpersonal relating is of interest to philosophers and psychiatrists for several reasons. The development of successful clinical practice may depend, at least partly, on having an accurate understanding of the basic character of unimpaired interpersonal relating because such understanding can shed light on the nature and source of its disturbed forms. How we think about the basis of "mind-minding" competencies influences how we think about the prognosis and possible treatment of dysfunctional interpersonal relating. (...) Another reason is that philosophical frameworks influence the way we think about and evaluate possible psychiatric disorders and philosophical discussions may be of direct practical importance to psychiatry given that different theories suggest different potential ways of devising therapies. (shrink)

The editorial introduction sets the stage for the chapter by identifying the roles that concepts and categories play not just in the field of mental health medicine but in the human mind itself. Then, each chapter is summarized or highlighted.

Following on from Section IV on summoning concepts, this section of the Handbook presents theoretically informed descriptions of psychopathologies. The topics of the chapters range from anxiety, depression, and body image disorders, through emotion and affective disorders, to delusion, thought insertion, and the fragmentation of consciousness. These phenomena call, not only for assessment and diagnosis, but also for understanding on the part of both the engaged clinician and the philosophical commentator. They also provide case studies for general philosophical questions about (...) different levels of description and conceptualisation and the relationships between them, and about the contributions to psychological understanding that are made by phenomenology, clinical expert knowledge, and the sciences of the mind. (shrink)

In this introduction to Section VI, the thrust of the component chapters is described. The classification and diagnosis of mental disorders collects a number of philosophical challenges to the field that call for responses from a variety of philosophical resources: hermeneutics, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, narrative theory, philosophy of science, epistemology-to name a few. The authors in this section address the general challenges in the classification of psychopathology, as well as address particular kinds of mental disorders, including autism, dementia, mania, (...) psychotic disorders, and personality disorders. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry. Published in 2013, the centenary of Karl Jaspers' General Psychopathology, the chapter draws lessons from the last hundred years for the coming century. No predictions are made. Instead, five 'conditions for flourishing' are set out: 1) Particular Problems - the importance of focussing on well-defined particular problems rather than general theory building, 2) Product- orientation - remaining always responsibly product oriented in the specific sense that both sides (...) put in the work necessary to 'go deep' with each other's fields, 3) Partnership - working in partnerships of one kind or another, 4) Process - constant reflection on process based on peer review but leaving scope for the occasional rogue voice to cut innovatively against the grain, and 5) Q - a condition of a different kind, Q is an empirically derived measure of the balance between in-group cohesion and out-group openness required to support creativity. Illustrations are given of how these five conditions for flourishing have underpinned the rapid expansion of philosophy and psychiatry in the closing decades of the twentieth century, and, correspondingly, are also reflected in the Handbook as a whole. Overviews and commentaries on individual contributions to the Handbook are given in extended editorial introductions to each of its eight sections. (shrink)

Издание содержит: познание в контексте культуры; эпистемология социально-гуманитарного знания; история философии: опыт познания культуры и др.

© 2016 Regents of the University of California.The Review summarizes much of particle physics and cosmology. Using data from previous editions, plus 3,062 new measurements from 721 papers, we list, evaluate, and average measured properties of gauge bosons and the recently discovered Higgs boson, leptons, quarks, mesons, and baryons. We summarize searches for hypothetical particles such as supersymmetric particles, heavy bosons, axions, dark photons, etc. All the particle properties and search limits are listed in Summary Tables. We also give numerous (...) tables, figures, formulae, and reviews of topics such as Higgs Boson Physics, Supersymmetry, Grand Unified Theories, Neutrino Mixing, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Cosmology, Particle Detectors, Colliders, Probability and Statistics. Among the 117 reviews are many that are new or heavily revised, including those on Pentaquarks and Inflation. The complete Review is published online in a journal and on the website of the Particle Data Group. The printed PDG Book contains the Summary Tables and all review articles but no longer includes the detailed tables from the Particle Listings. A Booklet with the Summary Tables and abbreviated versions of some of the review articles is also available. (shrink)

The objectives of this study were to develop a high-density chromosome bin map of homoeologous group 7 in hexaploid wheat, to identify gene distribution in these chromosomes, and to perform comparative studies of wheat with rice and barley. We mapped 2148 loci from 919 EST clones onto group 7 chromosomes of wheat. In the majority of cases the numbers of loci were significantly lower in the centromeric regions and tended to increase in the distal regions. The level of duplicated loci (...) in this group was 24% with most of these loci being localized toward the distal regions. One hundred nineteen EST probes that hybridized to three fragments and mapped to the three group 7 chromosomes were designated landmark probes and were used to construct a consensus homoeologous group 7 map. An additional 49 probes that mapped to 7AS, 7DS, and the ancestral translocated segment involving 7BS also were designated landmarks. Landmark probe orders and comparative maps of wheat, rice, and barley were produced on the basis of corresponding rice BAC/PAC and genetic markers that mapped on chromosomes 6 and 8 of rice. Identification of landmark ESTs and development of consensus maps may provide a framework of conserved coding regions predating the evolution of wheat genomes. (shrink)

This is a collection of four essays by Tillich emphasizing in various ways the basic point that the future of man must involve the religious dimension and perspective. It includes his last public lecture, "The Significance of the History of Religions for the Systematic Theologian," in which he rejects the reductionism both of orthodoxy, which locates revelation only in its own religion, and of a theology of the secular, which has no room for the sacred. He favors instead a "dynamic-typological" (...) approach to the theology of the history of religions that discovers elements in the experience of the Holy in all religions, whose unity and telos will be in a "Religion of the Concrete Spirit." The three other lectures complement the thrust of this lecture. In "The Decline and Validity of the Idea of Progress," Tillich finds the proper perspective toward history and progress in kairoi, moments of partial but creative fulfillment. In "Frontiers" he speaks of crossing and reversing boundaries as the way to peace. And in "The Effects of Space Exploration on Man's Condition" he notes the emergence of a new ideal of human existence and affirms it doesn't change the divine-human relationship. The book also includes tributes by Jerald C. Brauer, Wilhelm Pauck, and Mircea Eliade, and a set of photographs by Archie Lieberman.--R. G. K. (shrink)

McCloskey presents a powerful case for the view, already well argued in briefer form by Mackie, Flew, McCloskey, and others, that the existence of evil—any and particularly actual evil-is, if not logically, morally incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-good creator. While he promises to "take up the challenge" of certain theists who claim no logical contradiction is implied in the position God and evil exist, aside from a few ad hominem arguments directed Plantinga’s way he seems finally (...) to concede their point. The early chapters are of a preliminary nature and aim at defining traditional and parallel forms of the problem of evil, describing the enormity of actual evil, and establishing, by way of assessing particular ethical and linguistic theories, the presuppositions required for the problem to appear as a real one. It is in the later chapters, however, that the author makes his case. Here he considers and rejects for numerous reasons the view that physical evil, pain and suffering, can be justified by the virtuous and other goods they make possible, and the view that they are justified theologically, as punishment for sin. The former view implies an ethic, unacceptable to McCloskey, in which evil befalling a person can be willed or approved as a means. The latter view fails in the case of undeserved suffering, e.g., animals and undeserving children. (shrink)

This report describes the rationale, approaches, organization, and resource development leading to a large-scale deletion bin map of the hexaploid wheat genome. Accompanying reports in this issue detail results from chromosome bin-mapping of expressed sequence tags representing genes onto the seven homoeologous chromosome groups and a global analysis of the entire mapped wheat EST data set. Among the resources developed were the first extensive public wheat EST collection. Described are protocols for sequencing, sequence processing, EST nomenclature, and the assembly of (...) ESTs into contigs. These contigs plus singletons were used for selection of distinct sequence motif unigenes. Selected ESTs were rearrayed, validated by 5′ and 3′ sequencing, and amplified for probing a series of wheat aneuploid and deletion stocks. Images and data for all Southern hybridizations were deposited in databases and were used by the coordinators for each of the seven homoeologous chromosome groups to validate the mapping results. Results from this project have established the foundation for future developments in wheat genomics. (shrink)

The attitudes of the Greeks, a Mediterranean population, to the issue of telling the truth to the patient have been studied. There is no clear answer to the question: 'Do the Greeks wish to be informed of the nature of their illness?'. The answer is: 'It depends'. It depends on age, education, family status, occupation, place of birth and residence and on whether or not they are religious people. However, it does not depend on their sex--men and women have similar (...) reactions to the issue of truth-telling. Although the present study shows lower percentages of those who wish to know the truth than studies on other populations, the conclusion is that, emphasising the need for good communication between doctors and patients, doctors should not lie, but should disclose to their patients the part of the truth they are ready to accept. (shrink)

A total of 1918 loci, detected by the hybridization of 938 expressed sequence tag unigenes from 26 Triticeae cDNA libraries, were mapped to wheat homoeologous group 4 chromosomes using a set of deletion, ditelosomic, and nulli-tetrasomic lines. The 1918 EST loci were not distributed uniformly among the three group 4 chromosomes; 41, 28, and 31% mapped to chromosomes 4A, 4B, and 4D, respectively. This pattern is in contrast to the cumulative results of EST mapping in all homoeologous groups, as reported (...) elsewhere, that found the highest proportion of loci mapped to the B genome. Sixty-five percent of these 1918 loci mapped to the long arms of homoeologous group 4 chromosomes, while 35% mapped to the short arms. The distal regions of chromosome arms showed higher numbers of loci than the proximal regions, with the exception of 4DL. This study confirmed the complex structure of chromosome 4A that contains two reciprocal translocations and two inversions, previously identified. An additional inversion in the centromeric region of 4A was revealed. A consensus map for homoeologous group 4 was developed from 119 ESTs unique to group 4. Forty-nine percent of these ESTs were found to be homoologous to sequences on rice chromosome 3, 12% had matches with sequences on other rice chromosomes, and 39% had no matches with rice sequences at all. Limited homology was found between wheat ESTs on homoeologous group 4 and the Arabidopsis genome. Forty-two percent of the homoeologous group 4 ESTs could be classified into functional categories on the basis of blastX searches against all protein databases. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making frameworks assist in identifying the issues at stake in a particular setting and thinking through, in a methodical manner, the ethical issues that require consideration as well as the values that need to be considered and promoted. Decisions made about the use, sharing, and re-use of big data are complex and laden with values. This paper sets out an Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research developed by a working group convened by the Science, Health and (...) Policy-relevant Ethics in Singapore Initiative. It presents the aim and rationale for this framework supported by the underlying ethical concerns that relate to all health and research contexts. It also describes a set of substantive and procedural values that can be weighed up in addressing these concerns, and a step-by-step process for identifying, considering, and resolving the ethical issues arising from big data uses in health and research. This Framework is subsequently applied in the papers published in this Special Issue. These papers each address one of six domains where big data is currently employed: openness in big data and data repositories, precision medicine and big data, real-world data to generate evidence about healthcare interventions, AI-assisted decision-making in healthcare, public-private partnerships in healthcare and research, and cross-sectoral big data. (shrink)