Background: Expanded newborn screening generates incidental results, notably carrier results. Yet newborn screening programmes typically restrict parental choice regarding receipt of this non-health serving genetic information. Healthcare providers play a key role in educating families or caring for screened infants and have strong beliefs about the management of incidental results. Methods: To inform policy on disclosure of infant sickle cell disorder (SCD) carrier results, a mixed-methods study of healthcare providers was conducted in Ontario, Canada, to understand attitudes regarding result management (...) using a cross-sectional survey (N = 1615) and semistructured interviews (N = 42). Results: Agreement to reasons favouring disclosure of SCD carrier results was high (65.1%–92.7%) and to reasons opposing disclosure was low (4.1%–18.1%). Genetics professionals expressed less support for arguments favouring disclosure (35.3%–78.8%), and more agreement with arguments opposing disclosure (15.7%–51.9%). A slim majority of genetics professionals (51.9%) agreed that a reason to avoid disclosure was the importance of allowing the child to decide to receive results. Qualitatively, there was a perceived “duty” to disclose, that if the clinician possessed the information, the clinician could not withhold it. Discussion: While a majority of respondents perceived a duty to disclose the incidental results of newborn screening, the policy implications of these attitudes are not obvious. In particular, policy must balance descriptive ethics (ie, what providers believe) and normative ethics (ie, what duty-based principles oblige), address dissenting opinion and consider the relevance of moral principles grounded in clinical obligations for public health initiatives. (shrink)

Newborn bloodspot screening programs are some of the longest running population screening programs internationally. Debate continues regarding the need for parents to give consent to having their child screened. Little attention has been paid to how meanings of consent-related terminology vary among stakeholders and the implications of this for practice. We undertook semi-structured interviews with parents, healthcare professionals and policy decision makers in two Canadian provinces. Conceptions of consent-related terms revolved around seven factors within two broad domains, decision-making and information (...) attainment. Decision-making comprised: parent decision authority; voluntariness; parent engagement with decision-making; and the process of enacting choice. Information ascertainment comprised: professional responsibilities ; parent responsibilities; and the need for discussion and understanding prior to a decision. Our findings indicate that consent-related terms are variously understood, with substantive implications for practice. We suggest that consent procedures should be explained descriptively, regardless of approach, so there are clear indications of what is expected of parents and healthcare professionals. Support systems are required both to meet the educational needs of parents and families and to support healthcare professionals in delivering information in a manner in keeping with parent needs. (shrink)

When once-successful physical theories are abandoned, common wisdom has it that their characteristic theoretical entities are abandoned with them: examples include phlogiston, light rays, Newtonian forces, Euclidean space. But sometimes a theory sees ongoing use, despite being superseded. What should scientific realists say about the characteristic entities of the theories in such cases? The standard answer is that these ‘theoretical relicts’ are merely useful fictions. In this paper we offer a different answer. We start by distinguishing horizontal reduction (in which (...) a superseded theory approximates the successor theory) from vertical reduction (in which a higher-level theory abstracts away from the lower-level theory, but nonetheless can be constructed from it); these are usually regarded as having different ontological consequences. We describe a ‘verticalization’ procedure which transforms horizontal reductions into vertical reductions. The resulting verticalized theories are abstractions rather than approximations, with restricted domains. We identify a sense in which the higher-level theory describes distinct subject matters from the lower-level theory, enabling in certain cases the higher-level theory to retain distinctive explanatory power even in the presence of reduction. We suggest that theoretical entities from superseded theories should be retained in a scientific realist worldview just when, reinterpreted as higher-level abstractions, those theories and their characteristic entities continue to perform distinctive explanatory work in providing the best explanation for less-fundamental phenomena of interest. In slogan form: a good relict is an emergent relict. (shrink)

Most recent work on the nature of experiment in physics has focused on "big science"--the large-scale research addressed in Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks and Peter Galison's How Experiments End. This book examines small-scale experiment in physics, in particular the relation between theory and practice. The contributors focus on interactions among the people, materials, and ideas involved in experiments--factors that have been relatively neglected in science studies. The first half of the book is primarily philosophical, with contributions from Andrew Pickering, Peter (...) Galison, Hans Radder, Brian Baigrie, and Yves Gingras. Among the issues they address are the resources deployed by theoreticians and experimenters, the boundaries that constrain theory and practice, the limits of objectivity, the reproducibility of results, and the intentions of researchers. The second half is devoted to historical case studies in the practice of physics from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These chapters address failed as well as successful experimental work ranging from Victorian astronomy through Hertz's investigation of cathode rays to Trouton's attempt to harness the ether. Contributors to this section are Jed Z. Buchwald, Giora Hon, Margaret Morrison, Simon Schaffer, and Andrew Warwick. With a lucid introduction by Ian Hacking, and original articles by noted scholars in the history and philosophy of science, this book is poised to become a significant source on the nature of small-scale experiment in physics. (shrink)

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM: A GUIDE TO THE CURRENT DEBATE (EDITED BY RICHARD WARNER AND TA D E U S Z SZUBKA) contains recent essays by the key players in the the field of the Mind-Body problem: Searle, Fodor, Problem Honderich, Nagel, McGinn, Stich, Rorty and others. But there are a few interesting exceptions, for example Edelman, Popper, Putnam and Dennett. Nevertheless, these thinkers do get a mention here and there, and nearly all the exciting topical issues are dealt with, including (...) externalism, functionalism, intentionality, Turing computational models, and the relationship between these philosophical problems and psychology. I am particularly struck by the tendency to engage in an evasive stratagem when it comes to stating the physicalist thesis. Instead of a clear definitive position about what kind of physical science would achieve the hoped-for reduction, what I found was variations on Lewis's claim that the reduction would be effected by a "unified body of scientific theories of the sort we now accept". Materialism used to be a clear doctrine: a clockwork Universe of impenetrable particles. But materialism transcended itself. First through Hobbes' and Leibniz's criticisms of Descartes, then Newton's demolition of the Cartesian idea that matter was essentially extension by introducing gravity (action at a distance) and then through the field theories of Faraday and Maxwell, and more recently through Einstein's work, which undermined the "substance" view of matter, something that remained permanent while other changes occurred. I contrast the perspectives of the Churchlands with those of Donald T. Campbell, Karl Popper and other evolutionary and emergentist views. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reasons CountJohn Z. Sadler (bio)Keywordscriminality, mental disorder, responsibilityAs a fourth-year psychiatry resident many years ago, I encountered a patient on the psychiatric emergency service whom I have never forgotten, because my experience with him jelled a distinction about the importance of explaining violence. Brought in involuntarily by the police for being “dangerous,” he was a fearsome visage: six feet four, shaven head, angular jaw, the triangular build of an (...) athlete, a history of paranoid schizophrenia and violence. I’ll call him Mr. Big. His court order papers explained that he had threatened to kill his brother-in-law.Mr. Big’s story, in brief, was that he was a veteran on disability, and that he had purchased, some years ago, a small home using his wits and savings from his pension. Although he admitted that he could be, and had been, violent off his medications, he explained that he had been taking his medicines reliably for two years and had never had any trouble over that period—until now. His brother-in-law, according to Mr. Big, had moved in and appropriated his home while the patient was away on a trip to see a friend, and now refused to leave, to the chagrin of both the patient and his sister. Mr. Big had threatened to kill the brother-in-law in indignation with the in-law’s behavior. The brother-in-law never called or appeared. The sister, it turns out, corroborated the story, and after an examination revealed only minimal idiosyncrasies of thought and affect, the patient was referred for legal counseling, released, and the family was warned. We all hoped that justice could be found peacefully.Wilson and Adshead emphasize in their thoughtful discussion of violence and psychiatric symptoms that the explanation for the violent act is crucial to assessing its pertinence to mental disorder. What was elegant in Mr. Big’s case was that the motivation for threats of violence was proximate, morally comprehensible, corroborated by at least one other, insightful, and most of all, clear-cut. Although these features for distinguishing violence due to normative motivation versus violence due to mental disorder are addressed by Wilson and Adshead, they would agree that, unfortunately, these tools of proximity, comprehensibility, ordinariness of motivation, insight, and corroboration are often absent, unobtainable, or inadequate.But these considerations are helpful in ruling out violence as symptom, which is the lesson Mr. Big taught me—reasons count. Wilson and Adshead go on to critically consider the features that may be positive identifications for violence as symptom. With “deplorability,” they identify a feature of the violence that exceeds what I have termed “normative motivation,” which defies our empathic ability to understand the perpetrator’s point of view. However, deplorable events are perpetrated by soldiers and police in their socially approved work, so even deplorability has limits in its utility. Indeed, social psychologists’ research has shown, as Susan Fiske and colleagues put it, “Virtually anyone can be aggressive if sufficiently [End Page 73] provoked, stressed, disgruntled, or hot” (Fiske et al. 2004, 1482). Also, like “normative” motivation, deplorability is culture—and politically—relative, another limit to its utility.Even with complex causality, the INUS approach of Mackie’s offers a way to link symptoms to a more complex causal network while admitting that the social components of the causal network may exhibit particular moral and pragmatic interests. For medicine, the INUS approach is sensible and coherent with biomedicine’s intellectual culture of multifactorial causation of disease. However, criminal culpability in law is usually a dichotomous decision; any taint of choice links the offender to the whole culpability package (Sadler 2002).The conclusion one is left with is that no failsafe tools permit us to distinguish violence provoked by mental disorder versus normatively motivated violence. I tend to agree that, for some cases, we will never be able to broker the distinction between disordered violence versus nondisordered violence. My pessimism is based on the technical limitations of parsing mental life retrospectively in a way that will always allow for the kind of clear-cut distinction described in the case of Mr. Big (Sadler 2002). That is, how, after the... (shrink)

Incommensurability between successive scientific theories—the impossibility of empirical evidence dictating the choice between them—was Thomas Kuhn's most controversial proposal. Toward defending it, he directed much effort over his last 30 years into formulating precise conditions under which two theories would be undeniably incommensurable with one another. His first step, in the late 1960s, was to argue that incommensurability must result when two theories involve incompatible taxonomies. The problem he then struggled with, never obtaining a solution that he found entirely satisfactory, (...) was how to extend this initial line of thought to sciences like physics in which taxonomy is not so transparently dominant as it is, for example, in chemistry. This paper reconsiders incommensurability in the light of examples in which evidence historically did and did not carry over continuously from old laws and theories to new ones. The transition from ray to wave optics early in the nineteenth century, we argue, is especially informative in this regard. The evidence for the theory of polarization within ray optics did not carry over to wave optics, so that this transition can be regarded as a prototypical case of discontinuity of evidence, and hence of incommensurability in the way Kuhn wanted. Yet the evidence for classic geometric optics did carry over to wave optics, notwithstanding the fundamental conceptual readjustment that Fresnel's wave theory required. (shrink)

In the present work, the microstructure of the melt-spun Al 90 Ce 10 alloy has been characterized using X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy together with energy-dispersive spectrometry. It has been found that the microstructure of the melt-spun Al 90 Ce 10 alloy is composed of the amorphous phase, f -Al, f -Al 11 Ce 3 , Al 3 Ce and unidentified phases, quite different from that of the ingot-like alloy consisting of coarse primary f -Al- f -Al 11 Ce (...) 3 dendrites embedded in the f -Al- f -Al 11 Ce 3 eutectic matrix. Moreover, the amorphous phase is dominant in the melt-spun Al 90 Ce 10 alloy according to the XRD and TEM results. Al 3 Ce particles, less than 100 nm in size, are dispersed in the partial amorphous phase. Polygonal f -Al 11 Ce 3 crystals embedded in the f -Al matrix are also observed. The presence of the hexagonal, kite-like and petal-like intermetallic particles surrounded by the amorphous phase indicates that there exist micro-inhomogeneous structures in the Al 90 Ce 10 melt. These results demonstrate that the overheating of the melt has a significant effect on the amorphization of the Al 90 Ce 10 alloy. (shrink)

We wish to extend the concepts in Ray and Cooper’s (2024) article entitled “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments” to palliat...

This interview was conducted with one of the closest friends of the visual artist Ray Johnson, the late photographer and writer William S. Wilson. Johnson was a fixture of the New York downtown art scene in the late 1940, 1950s, and 1960s. He was influenced by Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists alike, but was a true original, widely considered to be the founder of “mail art” and also an important collagist and performance artist. Wilson helped Johnson to formulate (...) the idea of “mail art” as they exchanged correspondence, thoughts, ideas, experiences, and much else besides. In this interview, Wilson discusses Johnson's sexuality, sadomasochistic practice, and philosophy of friendship. He provides hitherto unknown details about Johnson's intimate relations with the artist Richard Lippold and life at Black Mountain College. Wilson also recounts details of Johnson's relation to women in terms of art, friendship, love, and sex. But more than anything, this interview captures the atmosphere of queer life in the middle decades of the twentieth century and Johnson's particular experiences of that era. (shrink)

Cosmic rays have been a standard if mysterious phenomenon in astrophysics since the 1930s when experimental physicists first began to detect charged particles with Wilson cloud chambers and with Geiger counters and other electronic detectors. They found that energetic particles were detected even when no radioactive sources were nearby and inferred from the angles of the tracks in the cloud chambers that these particles were coming from the sky.

Did Goethe devise an empirically viable theory of classical ray optics? Or can we at least make use of his ideas to propose one? And if so, does this confront us with an intriguing case of theory underdetermination? In this paper, which is mainly a comment on the recent work of Olaf Müller, I shall address these three questions and argue for ‘no, yes, no’. This is in contrast to Müller, who has recently launched a vivid defense of Goethe-style ray (...) optics :569–573, 2015b; Z Philos Forsch 69:588–598, 2015c; Br J Hist Philos 24:322–346, 2016). Müller aims to give an almost positive answer to all three questions: ‘perhaps, yes, yes’. My overall line of argument will be that the rather restricted regime of classical geometrical optics of spectral colors allows at best for a weak form of transient theory underdetermination that, in turn and more straightforwardly, also allows for a structuralist reading in terms of two structurally equivalent formulations of one and the same theory. However, extending any of the rivaling models of ray optics other than Newton’s beyond the mentioned regime and embedding them into physics in total—especially in view of thermodynamics—leads to a contradiction. Hence, Newton’s theory is confirmed as the only consistent theoretical interpretation of ray optics. (shrink)

Credences are beliefs about evidential probabilities. We give the view an assessment-sensitive formulation, show how it evades the standard objections, and give several arguments in support.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is perhaps the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most original in the entire Western tradition. Given the inaccessibility of his work, it is remarkable that he has inspired poems, paintings, films, musical compositions, titles of books -- and even novels. In his splendid biography, Ray Monk has made this very compelling human being come alive in a way that perfectly explains the fascination he has evoked. Wittgenstein's life was one of great moral (...) and spiritual depth. Although his work addresses problems of logic, language, mind, and knowledge, he often described it as having an ethical point, and once said that he "could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." In successfully bridging the gap assumed by many to exist between Wittgenstein's life and his work, Monk's biography helps to explain the interest in Wittgenstein's later philosophy on the part of Buddhist scholars. (shrink)

Examining one of the fundamental issues in cognitive psychology: How does our conscious experience come to be the way it is?

Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the "threat" of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning--characterized as the defining feature of human existence--from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging "post-analytic" consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and (...) skepticism, this book short-circuits both traditions by plugging eliminative materialism directly into speculative realism. (shrink)

“What is it that agitates you, my dear Victor? What is it you fear?” -/- “The monster now becomes more vengeful. He murders Victor’s friend Henry Clerval and his wife Elizabeth on the night of her wedding to Victor, and Victor sets out in pursuit of the friend across the icy Artic regions. The monster is always ahead of him, leaving tell tale marks behind and tantalizing his creator. Victor meets with his death in the pursuit of the monster he (...) had created with a noble objective.” [ http://philpapers.org/profile/112741] . (shrink)

Already hailed as a masterpiece, Foundations of Language offers a brilliant overhaul of the last thirty-five years of research in generative linguistics and related fields. "Few books really deserve the cliché 'this should be read by every researcher in the field'," writes Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, "but Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language does." Foundations of Language offers a radically new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the promise of early generative linguistics: (...) that language can be a valuable entrée into understanding the human mind and brain. The approach is remarkably interdisciplinary. Behind its innovations is Jackendoff's fundamental proposal that the creativity of language derives from multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components. This shift in basic architecture makes possible a radical reconception of mental grammar and how it is learned. As a consequence, Jackendoff is able to reintegrate linguistics with philosophy of mind, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. Among the major topics treated are language processing, the relation of language to perception, the innateness of language, and the evolution of the language capacity, as well as more standard issues in linguistic theory such as the roles of syntax and the lexicon. In addition, Jackendoff offers a sophisticated theory of semantics that incorporates insights from philosophy of language, logic and formal semantics, lexical semantics of various stripes, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches, and the author's own conceptual semantics. (shrink)

Wilson R. Bachelor was a Tennessee native who moved with his family to Franklin County, Arkansas, in 1870. A country doctor and natural philosopher, Bachelor was impelled to chronicle his life from 1870 to 1902, documenting the family's move to Arkansas, their settling a farm in Franklin County, and Bachelor's medical practice. Bachelor was an avid reader with wide-ranging interests in literature, science, nature, politics, and religion, and he became a self-professed freethinker in the 1870s. He was driven by (...) a concept he called "fiat flux," an awareness of the "rapid flight of time" that motivated him to treat the people around him and the world itself as precious and fleeting. (shrink)

According to proponents of the face-value account, a beliefreport of the form ‘S believes that p’ is true just in case the agentbelieves a proposition referred to by the that-clause. As againstthis familiar view, I argue that there are cases of true beliefreports of the relevant form in which there is no proposition that thethat-clause, or the speaker using the that-clause, can plausibly betaken as referring to. Moreover, I argue that given the distinctiveway in which the face-value theory of belief-reports (...) fails, there ispressure to give up the metaphysical thesis that belief is apropositional attitude. I conclude by suggesting that we allownon-propositional entities to be amongst the relata of thebelief-relation, and make some speculative remarks concerning whatsuch entities might be like. (shrink)

Presenting a landmark in linguistics and cognitive science, Ray Jackendoff proposes a new holistic theory of the relation between the sounds, structure, and meaning of language and their relation to mind and brain. Foundations of Language exhibits the most fundamental new thinking in linguistics since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965—yet is readable, stylish, and accessible to a wide readership. Along the way it provides new insights on the evolution of language, thought, and communication.

A study of the contribution semantics makes to the syntactic patterns of English: an intepretive theory of grammar.

For the Intentionalist, utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning-intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists, holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable. We discuss some ways in which some theorists have erred in trying to tame the “wild west” of pragmatics (...) and context-sensitivity -- including recent work that makes essential appeal to the information structure of a discourse -- and in so doing, offer a general recipe for defending the Particularist picture of utterance content and its recovery that we favor. (shrink)

How should physical entities be characterized? Physicalists, who have most to do with the notion, usually characterize the physical by reference to two components: 1. The physical entities are the entities treated by fundamental physics with the proviso that 2. Physical entities are not fundamentally mental (that is, do not individually possess or bestow mentality) Here I explore the extent to which the appeals to fundamental physics and to the NFM (“no fundamental mentality”) constraint are appropriate for characterizing the physical, (...) especially for purposes of formulating physicalism. Ultimately, I motivate and defend a version of an account incorporating both components: The physics-based NFM account: An entity existing at a world w is physical iff (i) it is treated, approximately accurately, by current or future (in the limit of inquiry, ideal) versions of fundamental physics at w, and (ii) it is not fundamentally mental (that is, does not individually either possess or bestow mentality). (shrink)

Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has received recent discussion (...) and critique, it remains underdeveloped and is often misrepresented by its critics (section 8). (shrink)

The coverage of the book is tailored for any introductory course in ethics.

Semantic Structures is a large-scale study of conceptual structure and its lexical and syntactic expression in English that builds on the theory of Conceptual...

This book emphasizes the role of semantics as a bridge between the theory of language and the theories of other cognitive capacities such as visual perception...

Ray Billington explores the spirituality of Eastern thought and its differences from and relationships with the Western religious tradition by presenting the main principles of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism and Confucianism. Billington discusses the central themes of religious philosophy, comparing Eastern and Western views of belief of God, the soul, moral decision-making, nature, faith and authority. He then challenges theism, particularly Christianity, with its belief in a personal God bestowing a certain version of "truth". He concludes that the universal mysticism (...) characteristic of Eastern thought provides a more realistic and rewarding path. (shrink)