I Conceptual Foundations Ethical problems emerging from modern medical technology have been evaluated on an issue-by-issue basis. ...

The results of empirical research in psychology and psychiatry are increasingly being used to formulate as well as understand problems at the interface of law and psychiatry. There has been a proliferation of studies, such as the determinants of individual competence or threat to self or others, the results of which are influencing policy and legislative decisions as well as buttressing holdings in court cases. In this article, I explore the issues of interpretation of epidemiological studies, particularly the role of (...) ideological positions on the design and results of empirical findings, the importance of the way data are interpreted, and the role of ideologies in the way research findings are presented to provide support for policy positions. Two levels of analysis are involved in determining the validity of a study. The first addresses the questions of whether the study meets the statistical and epidemiological requirements for reliable results. These include considerations such as the appropriateness of the study design and methods for gathering and interpreting data. The second focuses on the underlying framework of the study. This involves factors such as the perspectives and values of those conducting the study, the explicit and implicit dominating ideologies where they operate, and the extent to which the study is constructed to reaffirm specific ideologies. This level of analysis is essential for disclosing the influences of ideologies on the results of studies and the way in which data are interpreted. In this article, I try to demonstrate through critiques of selected studies that the first stage of analysis is insufficient without an examination of underlying preconceived values to establish the meaningfulness of results. (shrink)

Too many patients are injured in the course of medical care. This truth is as distressing now as it was four years ago when it began an article in this journal’s last similar symposium. Many or most injuries seem preventable. Yet today’s systems of care and of oversight of care too often fail to prevent them, despite generations of increasing legal intervention. Few injuries are litigated, even fewer addressed through medical peer review or state disciplinary authorities. The Institute of Medicine’s (...) landmark report To Err Is Human brought patient safety to national attention when released in late 1999. Half a decade later, significant reduction of injury remains a distant prospect, despite some apparent progress. (shrink)

Too many patients are injured in the course of medical care. This truth is as distressing now as it was four years ago when it began an article in this journal’s last similar symposium. Many or most injuries seem preventable. Yet today’s systems of care and of oversight of care too often fail to prevent them, despite generations of increasing legal intervention. Few injuries are litigated, even fewer addressed through medical peer review or state disciplinary authorities. The Institute of Medicine’s (...) landmark report To Err Is Human brought patient safety to national attention when released in late 1999. Half a decade later, significant reduction of injury remains a distant prospect, despite some apparent progress. (shrink)

This book offers a unique synthesis of past and current work on the structure, meaning, and use of negation and negative expressions, a topic that has engaged thinkers from Aristotle and the Buddha to Freud and Chomsky. Horn's masterful study melds a review of scholarship in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics with original research, providing a full picture of negation in natural language and thought; this new edition adds a comprehensive preface and bibliography, surveying research since the book's original publication.

This volume provides new insights on lying and (intentionally) misleading in and out of the courtroom, a timely topic for scholarship and society. Not all deceptive statements are lies; not every lie under oath amounts to perjury---but what are the relevant criteria? Taxonomies of falsehood based on illocutionary force, utterance context and speakers' intentions have been debated by linguists, moral philosophers, social psychologists and cognitive scientists. Legal scholars have examined the boundary between actual perjury and garden-variety lies. The fourteen previously (...) unpublished essays in this book apply theoretical and empirical tools to delineate the landscape of falsehood, half-truth, perjury, and verbal manipulation, including puffery, bluffing, and bullshit. The papers in this collection address conceptual and ethical aspects of lying vs. misleading and the correlation of this opposition with the Gricean pragmatic distinction between what is said and what is implicated. The questions of truth and lies addressed in this volume have long engaged the attention of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, organizational research, and the law, and researchers from all these fields will find this book of interest. (shrink)

For over four decades feminist linguists and philosophers of language have addressed the semantic, cognitive, and political factors associated with gender asymmetries in nominal and pronominal choice. The sociolinguistic spotlight has focused on the history, extent, and implications of the prescriptively sanctioned use of man and he for sex-neutral reference—he/man language in Martyna ’s term. Bare singular and simple indefinite man in exemplify this use, while the bare singulars in yield the male-specific meaning exhibited by the man or that man.

This book is the result of a retired judge's curiosity about the meaning of 'moral' and 'ethical,' two ambiguous terms that mean different things to different people. Following ten guidelines, the author concludes that the terms 'right' and 'wrong' provide a more practical standard of conduct.

The concept of meaning, since Frege initiated the linguistic turn in 1884, has been the subject of numerous theories, hypotheses, methodologies and distinctions. One distinction of considerable strategic value relates to the location of meaning: some aspects of meaning can be found in language and are modelled with semantic values of various kinds; some aspects of meaning can be found in communicative processes and are modelled with pragmatic inferences of one sort or another. One hypothesis of great heuristic utility concerns (...) the relationship that is assumed between the semantic and the pragmatic. This collection of especially commissioned papers examines current thinking on the plausible nature of the semantic, the possible character of the pragmatic and the mechanics of their intersection. (shrink)

Lepore and Stone seek to replace the rationality-based Gricean picture of coordination between speaker and hearer with one leaning more strongly on the roles of convention and speaker knowledge while doing away with conversational implicature. Focusing on the phenomena of indirect speech acts, asymmetric conjunction, and scalar inferencing, I argue that the case for abandoning implicature as an analytical tool is not ultimately compelling. I seek further to demonstrate the utility of the classical Gricean distinction between what is said and (...) what is implicated in the construction of an intuitively appealing approach to the perennial question of how to distinguish lying from misleading inside and outside the legal domain. (shrink)

This work, which questions the medical model of psychiatry as the basis of psychotherapy, seeks to help professionals return their field to an activity that is ...

Addresses issues that emerged as result of research in pragmatics proper and neighboring fields such as cognitive psychology, philosophy, bilingualism and communication. This book discusses theoretical and empirical work in these paradigms which directed attention to questions that warrant reexamination and revision of some tenets of the field.

This volume provides new insights on lying and (intentionally) misleading in and out of the courtroom, a timely topic for scholarship and society. Not all deceptive statements are lies; not every lie under oath amounts to perjury--but what are the relevant criteria? Taxonomies of falsehood based on illocutionary force, utterance context and speakers' intentions have been debated by linguists, moral philosophers, social psychologists and cognitive scientists. Legal scholars have examined the boundary between actual perjury and garden-variety lies. The fourteen previously (...) unpublished essays in this book apply theoretical and empirical tools to delineate the landscape of falsehood, half-truth, perjury, and verbal manipulation, including puffery, bluffing, and bullshit. The papers in this collection address conceptual and ethical aspects of lying vs. misleading and the correlation of this opposition with the Gricean pragmatic distinction between what is said and what is implicated. The questions of truth and lies addressed in this volume have long engaged the attention of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, organizational research, and the law, and researchers from all these fields will find this book of interest. (shrink)

Grice introduced generalized conversational implicatures with the following example: "Anyone who uses a sentence of the formX is meeting tz woman this evening would normally implicate that the person to be met was someone other than X’s wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend" (1975 : 37). Concerning this example, he suggested the following account: When someone, by using the form of expression an JQ implicates that the X does not belong to or is not otherwise closely connected (...) with some identifiable person, the implicature is present because the speaker has failed to be specific in a way in which he might have been expected to be specific. (Grice 1975: 38.) Grice went on to sketch an explanation as to why such an implicature should arise, involving the different ways in which we behave towards things that are closely related to.. (shrink)

This Article explores the relationship between the legitimacy of international courts and expansive judicial lawmaking. We compare lawmaking by three regional integration courts - the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Andean Tribunal of Justice, and the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice. These courts have similar jurisdictional grants and access rules, yet each has behaved in a strikingly different way when faced with opportunities to engage in expansive judicial lawmaking. The CJEU is the most activist, but its audacious (...) legal doctrines have been assimilated as part of the court’s legitimate authority. The ATJ and ECOWAS have been more cautious, but there is little to suggest that this caution has enhanced the legitimacy of either court. The ATJ has avoided serious challenges from governments, but its rulings have had little political impact. Conversely, the ECCJ’s circumspection has not shielded it from political opposition to its adjudication of clearly-established human rights. This pattern is at odds with the oft-voiced conventional wisdom that expansive judicial lawmaking undermines judicial legitimacy. Our modest goal in this Article is to problematize that claim and to posit an alternative hypothesis - that ICs spark legitimacy challenges due to the domestic political effects of their decisions, regardless of whether those decisions are expansionist. (shrink)

P-adic logarithms are used to translate localization sequences, involving multiplicative groups of units, to simpler additive descriptions of [italic]D([double-struck]Z[italic]G) and [bold]Wh′([italic]G) for the [italic]p-group [italic]G. The goal of this paper is to work out a procedure for using logarithms to translate the localization sequences in to sequences involving additive groups.

This book explores the impact of neuroscience research over the past 20 or more years on brain function as it affects moral decisions. Findings show that the mind and brain are very close, if not the same, and that the brain 'makes' the mind. This is bringing about a change of focus from examining mental activity to the physical activity of the brain to understand thinking and behavior. We are discovering that the physical features of the brain play the major (...) role in shaping our thoughts and emotions, including the way we deal with 'moral' issues. This book sets out the historical framework of the transition from 'mentalism' to 'physicalism', shows how the physical brain works in moral decisions and then examines three broad areas of moral decision-making - the brain in 'bad' acts, the brain in decisions involving sexual relations, and the brain in money decision-making. (shrink)

In her book Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum joins a chorus of American intellectuals who have criticized France and other European nations for their failure to embrace the concept of cultural pluralism. In Nussbaum's opinion, the meaning that the French attach to egalité has remained stuck in circumstances peculiar to the eighteenth century. The concept is outdated and has not in the contemporary world been able to protect cultural diversity (...) in general and religious diversity in particular. Her book takes to task what she terms “the French tradition of “coercive assimilation” that is insensitive to what George Washington stressed as the “‘delicacy and tenderness’ that is owed to other people's ‘conscientious scruples.’” The French refusal to allow Muslim schoolgirls to cover their heads with a foulard, however stylish it might be, is linked back to the French emancipation of Jews that required, in Nussbaum's analysis, a heavy requirement of cultural erasure. The French, like most Europeans, grew used to the idea “that citizens are all alike,” an idea that now haunts France as it tries to figure out what to do with its Muslim population. (shrink)

King Asoka and Buddhism. Historical and Literary Studies. Edited by Anuradha Seneviratna. Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy 1994. xi, 161 pp., with two maps. SL Rs 300, US$12.00.

The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha - A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Translated by Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi. Wisdom Publication, Boston, Mass., 1995. 1412 pp.. US$75.00. ISBN 0-86171-072-X.