In bioethics as in the sciences, enormous discussions often concern the very small. Central to public debate over emerging reproductive and regenerative biotechnologies is the question of the moral status of the human embryo. Because news media have played a prominent role in framing the vocabulary of the debate, this study surveyed the use of language reporting on human embryo research in news articles spanning a two-year period. Terminology that devalued moral status—for example, the descriptors things, property, tissue, or experimental (...) material —was found to outnumber fivefold those that affirmed any degree of moral status above that of inanimate cellular matter; for example, living, human life, or human being. A quarter of the articles failed to note that the embryos under discussion were human. These findings confirm that even among scientific and philosophical experts a diversity of opinion exists on society's moral obligations to nascent human life. The skewed linguistic distribution also indicates a distinct bias. Concerned readers should take notice when any category of humanity becomes subject to prejudicial and disparaging language and the value of vulnerable human life is trivialized alongside sensational assertions of anticipated medical cures. The responsibility for holding the media to a higher standard of truth and fairness falls to us all. (shrink)

In bioethics as in the sciences, enormous discussions often concern the very small. Central to public debate over emerging reproductive and regenerative biotechnologies is the question of the moral status of the human embryo. Because news media have played a prominent role in framing the vocabulary of the debate, this study surveyed the use of language reporting on human embryo research in news articles spanning a two-year period. Terminology that devalued moral status - for example, the descriptors things, property, tissue, (...) or experimental material - was found to outnumber fivefold those that affirmed any degree of moral status above that of inanimate cellular matter ; for example, living, human life, or human being. A quarter of the articles failed to note that the embryos under discussion were human. These findings confirm that even among scientific and philosophical experts a diversity of opinion exists on society's moral obligations to nascent human life. The skewed linguistic distribution also indicates a distinct bias. Concerned readers should take notice when any category of humanity becomes subject to prejudicial and disparaging language and the value of vulnerable human life is trivialized alongside sensational assertions of anticipated medical cures. The responsibility for holding the media to a higher standard of truth and fairness falls to us all. (shrink)

Institutional review boards are almost universally considered to be overworked and understaffed. They also require substantial commitments of time and resources from their members. Although some surveys report average IRB memberships of 15 people or more, federal regulations require only five. We present data on IRB meetings at eight of the top 25 academic medical centers in the United States funded by the National Institutes of Health. These data indicate substantial contributions from primary reviewers and chairs during protocol discussions but (...) little from other members, which implies that it may be possible for smaller IRBs to accomplish the same tasks with no reduction in the quality of review. (shrink)

"Uprightness" was termed the "leitmotiv in the formation of the human organism" by Erwin Straus (1966, p. 139). He felt that without it the human being was certainly doomed to die. Yet, what happens with those who are deprived of their "uprightness" in either the literal or moral sense (as in "not to stoop to anything"), through becoming Dis-abled? Getting up, rising in opposition to the "other" (Allon) implies a moral dimension in the case of human Dis-ability which is tied (...) to the leitmotiv established by the upright posture of anthropos . The suggestion that there is a moral dimension to Disability is a radical notion in a culture whose health professionals have become very sensitive to any idea that suggests we are blaming those who through no fault of their own have become in some way disadvantaged as compared to the mainstream of society. Although the importance of rising in opposition to the world (Allon) was perhaps originally established upon the upright posture quite literally, because man is a sense-making and sense-giving creature, this primordial act which establishes our full humanity may itself be represented and re-enacted in a variety of ways which can and should become the central project of rehabilitation of the body, as opposed to the current emphasis on technique and technological innovation. It is in the changing physiognomy of the Dis-abled person's ruptured world that we may discover the phenomenological sense of Dis-ability. Keywords: Dis-Ability, Uprightness, Rehabilitation CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Office of Scientific IntegrityDavid P. Hamilton (bio)For most of the 1980s, the specter of scientific fraud popped into public view every few years, usually only to submerge again. Faced with several well-publicized cases of scientists who blatantly faked their data—among the best-known being Harvard cardiologist John Darsee (whose colleagues watched him forge data) (Broad and Wade 1982, p. 14) and Sloan-Kettering Institute immunologist William Summerlin (who painted (...) black spots on white mice to simulate tissue grafts) (Broad and Wade 1982, p. 155)—the scientific community as a whole tended to dismiss the phenomenon as the work of a few deviants. Called in 1981 to testify before then-Representative Albert Gore Jr.'s subcommittee on investigations and oversight, Philip Handler, then-president of the National Academy of Sciences, told the panel that science was perfectly capable of regulating itself, and that the problem of scientific fraud had been "grossly exaggerated" by the press (Broad and Wade 1982). The message was clear: Congress should stick to its knitting, and science would take care of itself.Now, however, scientists are faced with a very different situation: a permanent federal bureaucracy, known as the Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI), devoted to the investigation of alleged scientific wrongdoing. The transition from the days of laissez-faire, when universities were entrusted with all investigations unless they were handled so badly that the federal government was forced to take notice, has been an uncomfortable one for many researchers. Lately, this discomfort has taken shape as a vocal protest against OSI. Largely as a result of this protest, federal officials recently promoted a plan to restructure OSI and change some of its operating procedures, a move with unpredictable consequences for universities and researchers alike.OSI was born largely because of investigations by two influential congressmen: Representatives John Dingell of Michigan and Ted Weiss of New York. While both claimed they acted mainly to make sure taxpayer dollars were not spent on fraudulent research, both also maintained a strong interest in protecting "whistleblowers," the often vulnerable, and usually junior, scientists who first raise questions about bad research. And Dingell seemed to take special pleasure in pointing up the deficiencies of investigations run by universities and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) itself. (For reasons that are not well understood, [End Page 171] biomedical research seems far more prone to fraud than any other field of science. As a result, NIH, which funds most biomedical research in the United States, has held ultimate responsibility for most prominent cases of fraud.) Plagued as they often were by conflicts of interest, shoddy methodologies, and, in some cases, a willingness to believe any excuse by the accused, no matter how far-fetched, these investigations made easy targets. And the notion that science could "govern itself" grew harder to sustain.In late 1988, Dingell and other congressmen began circulating draft bills that would have created a new office for investigating scientific fraud. Dingell would have placed such an office under the aegis of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, raising the possibility that scientific fraud might be probed by the same criminal investigators who unravel Medicare fraud. Unsettled by this vision of the "science police," NIH officials moved quickly to pre-empt Congress. On March 16, 1989, they published a notice in the Federal Register announcing the creation of OSI, an office with responsibility for ensuring thorough university investigations of misconduct and the authority to conduct its own investigations when necessary.From the beginning, OSI took an unusual approach to its work. For one thing, the office had a broad mandate: Although located within NIH, it was responsible for research funded throughout the entire Public Health Service, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Alcohol, Drug, and Mental Health Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control. Furthermore, it was not restricted to scientific fraud. Departmental lawyers, wishing to avoid the legal connotations of the term "fraud"—in particular, a requirement that fraudulent actions not only mislead others but also cause them noticeable harm—decided instead to adopt the term "scientific misconduct," defined as "fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that deviate... (shrink)

Beliefs are freely attributed to God nowadays in Anglo–American philosophical theology. This practice undoubtedly reflects the twentieth–century popularity of the view that knowledge consists of true justified belief . The connection is frequently made explicit. If knowledge is true justified belief then whatever God knows He believes. It would seem that much recent talk of divine beliefs stems from Nelson Pike's widely discussed article, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’. In this essay Pike develops a version of the classic argument for (...) the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will in terms of divine forebelief. He introduces this shift by premising that ‘ A knows X ’ entails ‘A believes X ’. As a result of all this, philosophers have increasingly been using the concept of belief in defining ‘omniscience’. (shrink)

Introduction As the title indicates, the chief focus of this book is epistemic justification. But just what is epistemic justification and what is its place ...

William P. Alston. difference in the scope of the rule reflects the fact that I-rules exist for the sake of making communication possible. Whereas their cousins are enacted and enforced for other reasons. We could distinguish I-rules just by this ...

This paper defends cognitive neuroscience’s project of developing mechanistic explan- ations of cognitive processes through decomposition and localization against objections raised by William Uttal in The New Phrenology. The key issue between Uttal and researchers pursuing cognitive neuroscience is that Uttal bets against the possibility of decomposing mental operations into component elementary operations which are localized in distinct brain regions. The paper argues that it is through advancing and revising what are likely to be overly simplistic and incorrect decompositions (...) that the goals of cognitive neuroscience are likely to be achieved. (shrink)

Introduction i. Character of the Book The central thesis of this book is that experiential awareness of God, or as I shall be saying, the perception of God, ...

" In a book that seeks to shift the ground of debate within theory of knowledge, William P. Alston finds that the century-lo.

William P. Alston formulates and defends a realist conception of truth, which he calls alethic realism (from "aletheia", Greek for "truth").

Justification, or at least ‘justification’, bulks large in recent epistemology. The view that knowledge consists of true-justified-belief has been prominent in this century, and the justification of belief has attracted considerable attention in its own right. But it is usually not at all clear just what an epistemologist means by ‘justified’, just what concept the term is used to express. An enormous amount of energy has gone into the attempt to specify conditions under which beliefs of one or another sort (...) are justified; but relatively little has been done to explain what it is for a belief to be justified, what that is for which conditions are being sought. The most common procedure has been to proceed on the basis of a number of obvious cases of justified belief, without pausing to determine what property it is of which these cases are instances. Now even if there were some single determinate concept that all these theoriests have implicitly in mind, this procedure would be less than wholly satisfactory. For in the absence of an explicit account of the concept being applied, we lack the most fundamental basis for deciding between supposed intuitions and for evaluating proposed conditions of justification. And in any event, as philosophers we do not seek merely to speak the truth, but also to gain an explicit, reflective understanding of the matters with which we deal. We want to know not only when our beliefs are justified, but also what it is to enjoy that status. True, not every fundamental concept can be explicated, but we shall find that much can be done with this one. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes and interrelates a number of respects in which persons have been thought to be in a specially favorable epistemic position vis-A-Vis their own mental states. The most important distinction is a six-Fold one between infallibility, Omniscience, Indubitability, Incorrigibility, Truth-Sufficiency, And self-Warrant. Each of these varieties can then be sub-Divided as the kind of modality, If any, Involved. It is also argued that discussions of self-Knowledge have been hampered by a failure to recognize these distinctions.

In this clear and provocative account of the epistemology of religious experience, William P. Alston argues that the perception of God—his term for direct experiential awareness of God—makes a major contribution to the grounds of religious belief. Surveying the variety of reported direct experiences of God, Alston demonstrates that a person can be justified in holding certain beliefs about God on the basis of mystical experience.

1. The Naturalistic Turn in Philosophy of Science 2. The Framework of Mechanistic Explanation: Parts, Operations, and Organization 3. Representing and Reasoning About Mechanisms 4. Mental Mechanisms: Mechanisms that Process Information 5. Discovering Mental Mechanisms 6 . Summary.

What is it for a sentence to have a certain meaning? This is the question that the distinguished analytic philosopher William P. Alston addresses in this major contribution to the philosophy of language. His answer focuses on the given sentence's potential to play the role that its speaker had in mind, what he terms the usability of the sentence to perform the illocutionary act intended by its speaker. Alston defines an illocutionary act as an act of saying something with (...) a certain "content." He develops his account of what it is to perform such acts in terms of taking responsibility, in uttering a sentence, for the existence of certain conditions. In requesting someone to open a window, for example, the speaker takes responsibility for its being the case that the window is closed and that the speaker has an interest in its being opened. In Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, Alston expands upon this concept, creating a framework of five categories of illocutionary act and going on to argue that sentence meaning is fundamentally a matter of illocutionary act potential; that is, for a sentence to have a particular meaning is for it to be usable to perform illocutionary acts of a certain type. In providing detailed and explicit patterns of analysis for the whole range of illocutionary acts, Alston makes a unique contribution to the field of philosophy of language—one that is likely to generate debate for years to come. (shrink)

2. Daugman, J. G. Brain metaphor and brain theory 3. Mundale, J. Neuroanatomical Foundations of Cognition: Connecting the Neuronal Level with the Study of Higher Brain Areas.

Chapter INTRODUCTION i. The Problem Why suppose that sense perception is, by and large, an accurate source of information about the physical environment? ...

Can beliefs to the effect that god is manifesting himself in a certain way to the believer ("m-beliefs") be justified by its seeming to the believer that he experiences god doing that? the issue is discussed in the context of several concepts of justification. on a "normative" concept of justification the answer will depend on what one's intellectual obligations are vis-a-vis practices of belief formation. on a rigorous view of such obligations one is justified in forming a m-belief on the (...) basis of experience only if one has adequate reasons for taking that practice to be reliable. on a more permissive view of such obligations, one is justified only if one lacks adequate reasons for taking the practice to be unreliable. it is suggested that neither this practice nor, e.g., the practice of forming perceptual beliefs on the basis of sense perception passes the stronger test, but that they both pass the weaker test. (shrink)

Divine Nature and Human Language is a collection of twelve essays in philosophical theology by William P. Alston, one of the leading figures in the current renaissance in the philosophy of religion. Using the equipment of contemporary analytical philosophy, Alston explores, partly refashions, and defends a largely traditional conception of God and His work in the world a conception that finds its origins in medieval philosophical theology. These essays fall into two groups: those concerned with theological language and those (...) that deal with the nature, status, and activity of God. In Part 1, Alston develops a conceptual scheme for discussing the topic of theological language. He also argues that there is a core of literal talk about God and even a core of predicates univocally applicable to God and creatures. Furthermore, he shows that God can be referred to directly as well as descriptively. In Parts II and III, the author sketches out a middle way between a classical conception of God exemplified by Aquinas and the more recent “process” or “panentheist” conception exemplified by Hartshorne. Alston argues that such a God can act so as to have real effects in the world and can enter into genuine dialogue and otherwise interact with human beings. In addition, he defends the idea that God provides a foundation for morality. The first collection of Alston's ground breaking work in the philosophy of religion, Divine Nature and Human Language will be welcomed by scholars and students of the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, theology, and religious studies. (shrink)

1. A Historical Look at Unity 2. Field Guide to Modern Concepts of Reduction and Unity 3. Kitcher's Revisionist Account of Unification 4. Critics of Unity 5. Integration Instead of Unity 6. Reduction via Mechanisms 7. Case Studies in Reduction and Unification across the Disciplines.