The aim of the study was to determine the acceptance and perception of Nigerian patients to medical photography. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed among Nigerian patients attending oral and maxillofacial surgery and plastic surgery clinics of 3 tertiary health institutions. Information requested included patients' opinion about consent process, capturing equipment, distribution and accessibility of medical photographs. The use of non-identifiable medical photographs was more acceptable than identifiable to respondents for all purposes (P = 0.003). Most respondents were favourably disposed to (...) photographs being taken for inclusion in the case note, but opposed to identifiable photographs being used for other purposes most especially in medical websites and medical journals. Female respondents preferred non-identifiable medical photographs to identifiable ones (P = 0.001). Most respondents (78%) indicated that their consent be sought for each of the outline needs for medical photography. Half of the respondents indicated that identifiable photographs may have a negative effect on their persons; and the most commonly mentioned effects were social stigmatization, bad publicity and emotional/psychological effects. Most of the respondents preferred the use of hospital-owned camera to personal camera/personal camera-phone for their medical photographs. Most respondents (67.8%) indicated that they would like to be informed about the use of their photographs on every occasion, and 74% indicated that they would like to be informed of the specific journal in which their medical photographs are to be published. In conclusion, non-identifiable rather than identifiable medical photography is acceptable to most patients in the studied Nigerian environment. The use of personal camera/personal camera-phone should be discouraged as its acceptance by respondents is very low. Judicious use of medical photography is therefore advocated to avoid breach of principle of privacy and confidentiality in medical practice. (shrink)

Screening of newborns for permanent congenital or early-onset hearing impairment has emerged as an essential component of neonatal care in developed countries, following favourable outcomes from early intervention in the critical period for optimal speech and language development. Progress towards a similar programme in developing countries, where most of the world’s children with hearing impairment reside, may be impeded by reservations about the available level of support services and the possible effect of the prevailing healthcare challenges. Ethical justification for the (...) systematic introduction of screening programmes for hearing in newborns based on the limitations in current primary prevention strategies, lack of credible alternative early-detection strategies and the incentives for capacity-building for the requisite support services is examined. (shrink)

This case for discussion highlights some of the ethical difficulties that may arise in the use of molecular typing techniques in the control of infectious diseases. Molecular typing techniques offer evidence (stronger than regular epidemiological exploration of sources and contacts) for claims about infection routes. Such evidence will mean that public health authorities need to think about how to respond ethically to causal responsibility for contagion. In this context, questions are raised about the use of molecular typing methods for source (...) and contact tracing in the control of infectious diseases. (shrink)

Theories of autobiographical memory emphasise effortful, generative search processes in memory retrieval. However recent research suggests that memories are often retrieved directly, without effortful search. We investigated whether direct and generative retrieval differed in the characteristics of memories recalled, or only in terms of retrieval latency. Participants recalled autobiographical memories in response to cue words. For each memory, they reported whether it was retrieved directly or generatively, rated its visuo-spatial perspective, and judged its accompanying recollective experience. Our results indicated that (...) direct retrieval was commonly reported and was faster than generative retrieval, replicating recent findings. The characteristics of directly retrieved memories differed from generatively retrieved memories: directly retrieved memories had higher field perspective ratings and lower observer perspective ratings. However, retrieval mode did not influence recollective experience. We discuss our findings in terms of cue generation and content construction, and the implication for reconstructive models of autobiographical memory. (shrink)

This book contains papers from a colloquium held in 1973 at Kings College, Cambridge. The contributions deal with the number of questions on which a great deal of current linguistic research and writing focus. These include the problem of quantification and reference in natural language; the application of formal logic to natural language semantics; the semantics of non-declarative sentences; the relation between natural language semantics and programming languages; the relation between sentences and their contexts of use; discourse meaning; and the (...) relation between surface syntax and logical meaning. An adequate treatment of these issues requires the interaction of a number of different linguistic approaches. As one of the contributors to the volume points out, there recently have developed three major new developments in areas of research into linguistic phenomena: transformational grammar, formal logic, and speech act theory. Although no one of these are represented singly in this volume, a number of the problems which are discussed involve issues which depend on the interfaces between these various approaches. (shrink)

The question asked by the title of this book is certainly one which haunts much philosophical inquiry in this century. It is a question worth asking, and Hacking warns us not to expect to find some one, general answer to it. Instead of embarking on an abstract consideration of this issue, the author undertakes a series of case studies dealing with particular philosophers to see how they have approached language and its relation to philosophy. His inquiry falls into three main (...) parts: part A, entitled "The Heyday of Ideas," which deals with philosophical work done in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; part B, "The Heyday of Meaning," which deals with early twentieth century atomist/positivistic approaches to philosophy and language; and part C, "The Heyday of Sentences," which considers contemporary philosophers who study theory construction and sentential systems. There are many philosophers whom Hacking examines: part A includes a discussion of Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley, as well as the logic of the Port Royal school; part B discusses Chomsky, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ayer; and part C discusses Feyerabend and Davidson, as well as introducing some of the ideas of Quine and Popper. (shrink)

Edie has produced a thorough and lucid discussion of language from a phenomenological point of view. He locates a phenomenology of language historically and conceptually in relation both to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and to contemporary linguistics and analytic philosophy. He takes as the central problem in a phenomenology of language the relation between language and speech. The tension which exists between these two is utilized by him to explain the development of a phenomenological approach to language and to present a (...) distinctive theory of meaning and metaphor. (shrink)

In this monograph the author attempts to explain what speakers say in using language and how what they say is understood by developing a generative theory of illocutions. Such a theory consists of a finite set of rules and a finite vocabulary structured together in such a way that there is one and only one description produced of what is said by a speaker in each and every case in which what is said can be understood differently. The theory is (...) to mark all features of the utterance situation that produce these differences. In more conventional terms, Travis presents a kind of pragmatic theory for language use in which sentence-tokens can have characteristics in specific circumstances which are not features that belong to their sentence-types. In developing this model the author exploits features of transformational linguistic theory—specifically the notion of a generative description and the requirement that an adequate theory provides one and only one description of each distinct linguistic form. However, the author would not accept transformational theory itself as sufficient for a theory of illocutions because the former does not take into account contextual and nonlinguistic elements. (shrink)

Structuralism is a contemporary intellectual movement with both methodological and substantive implications. Nowhere has its impact been stronger than in poetics and literary criticism. Scholes book is designed to introduce English speaking audiences to structuralist developments in European literary thought. After detailing the background of structuralism in the work of Saussure and Jakobson and relating formalist and proto-structuralist modes of literary criticism to structuralist methods, the author examines specific micro and macropoetics of fiction. His object is to explain other’s theories, (...) but in a critical way. The fault he finds recurring in structuralists’ approaches to literature is that of arbitrariness—claiming in an ad hoc way features to be present in texts and generalizing those features when this is not sufficiently motivated by the material itself. His concluding chapter compares and draws connections between romantic and structuralist views of language and exhibits how structuralist modes of thought are embodied in contemporary fiction. (shrink)

This book surveys a wide range of structuralist theories, attempts to bring together features of those theories which are compatible with one another, and develops a general critique of the structuralist movement. Its analysis is not limited to a consideration of French structuralism, but includes earlier linguistic precursors and even Chomsky’s transformational theory. The author places his discussion of structuralism in a context which relates it to recent developments and discussions in the philosophy of science. The order of presentation is (...) not historical but conceptual, and for this reason some readers will be surprised to find Saussure and Chomsky, rather than Levi-Strauss, providing the basis for a structuralist model. (shrink)

This work joins a growing list of publications which are taking Chomsky’s conception of linguistics sharply to task. Such critical studies fall roughly into two groups: those that work out different transformational models of language ; and those that dissent from the entire generative approach to language. This book falls within the latter category. The dangers of the Chomskyan model are for Robinson that it will lead to a sharply restricted view of linguistics which on the one hand claims too (...) much for that field of study and on the other bases its claim on a narrowly conceived and dogmatically defended model. For philosophers, this book will be of interest because, although Robinson himself is a linguist, he is aware of and utilizes the philosophical tradition represented by Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin in his critique of Chomsky. (shrink)

This is a lively and spirited discussion—perhaps more appropriately called one side of a debate—by Feyerabend against traditional views in the philosophy of science associated with such persons as Carnap, Hempel, and Popper. The central issue is whether or not there exists a neutral method for the construction of scientific systems and whether, more specifically, there is within that method some uniform, rational evaluation measure for arbitrating between competing theoretical models. Traditional positions, whether they be of a verificationist, conformationist, or (...) falsificationist sort, presuppose that there is some rational method for analyzing and evaluating scientific theories. Feyerabend maintains most emphatically that there is not. He rejects the distinctions between contexts of discovery and contexts of justification, between experience and theory, and between observation terms and theoretical terms. In the clash between traditional philosophies of science and the more historical and sociological approaches associated with the names of Kuhn and Hanson, the author sides with the latter. He goes even farther, however, and maintains what he calls an "anarchistic theory of knowledge" in which "anything goes." Within his approach it is not canons of rationality and logic which have dominated or ought to dominate scientific discussions. Rather, a proponent of a new theory utilizes persuasion and cunning rather than appealing to or using objective conditions for guiding choices between competing theories. New paradigms within science do not triumph because they are more rational; they depend on utterly new criteria of rationality. (shrink)

This book exemplifies how current linguistic theory may be applied to traditional philosophical problems. It gives a defense of a traditional theory of concepts by basing that defense on arguments that can be found in transformational linguistic theory for concepts as theoretical entities. Concepts are regarded by the author as abstract entities, as ideas which play a role in thinking, and as universals in the sense of "shared" properties of particulars. Chapter one surveys the results of recent transformationally based semantic (...) theory, both in its Chomskyan and Generative Semantics forms, and identifies semantic markers and their structural interrelations as representing concepts. Chapter two is designed to analyze the structure of concepts both in their logical and grammatical form. The author assimilates concepts as semantic representations in linguistic theory to Frege’s notion of concepts and with this combination defends a concept of concept as the meaning of linguistic expressions which is predicative, transformational, and conceived of as a structure of concepts itself. Chapter three discusses the philosophical and psychological ramifications of this point of view. That chapter is mostly a philosophical critique of positions, particularly Quine’s, which argue against the existence and/or utility of concepts. The author also endeavors to make a case for the utilization of linguistics in the investigation of cognitive processes generally and in the concluding part of the chapter speaks briefly to the issue of reductionism. (shrink)

A study of phenomena familiar to us but largely overlooked in our everyday lives and in philosophy—the phenomena of sound. The author, in what is almost a meditative form of writing, wishes to disengage the reader from the predominant, visualist tradition in philosophy and western thought generally and to reintroduce listening and sound as autonomous realms of experience. What he develops is a phenomenology of sound which utilizes themes from the works of both Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl himself did not (...) completely escape the dominance of the visualist tradition in western thought. For him perceptual experience was primarily visual. However, according to Ihde, the emphasis on a description of experience in the phenomenological reduction provides categorical schema for understanding sound and a basis for surveying the auditory terrain and the "voices" of the world as independent phenomena. Husserl’s analysis of perceptual experience distinguishes between focus, fringe, horizon, and that which is absent or empty in experience, and Ihde applies this set of distinctions to a descriptive analysis of the auditory dimension. Roughly the first half of his book is given over to such a Husserlian description of the presence of sound. (shrink)

This book differs from a number of other volumes recently published on language in that its primary aim is not a description of sui generis linguistic structures, but an attempt to locate language in a larger context of human behavior. Emphasis should be placed on the second word in the title, "behavior," for that is its main object of analysis. When language itself is discussed it is presented as one form of systematic communicative behavior, and the thesis is defended that (...) reference in linguistic theory to minds and mental events needs to be analyzed in terms of behavioral criteria. Hence, this work represents an approach to the study of language which is decidedly anti-Chomskyan, and the author is also careful to distinguish his position from recent work by Quine, Davidson, and Ziff. The author adopts an explicit meaning-nominalistic program, which makes individual instances of meaning the origin of successful linguistic communication, rather than taking a theoretical model of linguistic structure as the basis for understanding individual instances of language use. (shrink)

An introduction for the non-specialist to Chomsky’s thought that explores some of its philosophical implications. Although this is a book about Chomsky, it is a good deal more: Leiber uses Chomsky’s linguistics to point to defects he perceives in Anglo-American analytical philosophy. He contends that a striking feature of Chomsky’s work has been his attempt to breakdown divisions between various spheres of knowledge and to show the interconnections between questions and answers within them which modern methods of scholarship have kept (...) separate. He maintains that most criticisms of Chomsky’s ideas are misguided because they separate his general theses in philosophy and psychology from technical results obtained within linguistics. Leiber holds that one must understand Chomsky’s specific proposals in linguistics before one can assess his positions in other areas. (shrink)

This book is an important study of the place of presuppositions in transformational linguistic theory. The author defends the standard theory of linguistic description found in Chomsky’s earlier work and in the semantic theories which are based on it against recent proposals by generative semanticists that presuppositions are part of semantics. She develops a systematic and sustained argument for the exclusion of presuppositions from semantics and their inclusion in a separate, pragmatic theory. It is the author’s contention that syntax and (...) semantics are two separate but related components of a linguistic theory, that deep structure is syntactic, that the information included within the semantic component of linguistic theory does not include referential and contextual conditions, and consequently, that presuppositional relations are not a proper subject of formal linguistics. Their inclusion in a formal linguistic theory, she maintains, will nullify its predictive power. (shrink)

This book has two objectives: to provide a comprehensive and consistent account of Peirce’s theory of signification; and to situate that theory at the center of a general semiotics. The author’s strategy is to identify Peirce’s three conditions for signification and to devote a chapter to the analysis of each. Greenlee accepts Peirce’s view that anything is potentially a sign and that an analysis of signification cannot be just "dynamic," i.e., causal, but he departs from Peirce on other matters. Whereas (...) Peirce argues for the division of signs into three kinds, Greenlee maintains that these are factors of signs rather than exclusive categories, so all signs can be viewed as symbols. Further, whereas the elements of the triad of signification are different in kind for Peirce, Greenlee treats them all as signs. In this manner the sign, the object, and the interpretant is each a kind of sign rather than a distinct kind of thing, and signs become explicable in terms of their relations to other signs. The triad then becomes polyadic and interpretation becomes a continuous process. One may question whether or not Peirce could accept all that this entails. (shrink)