Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 49-57, March‐April 2022.

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)

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are central to any educational system. The term started with the National Science Foundation as “SMET” and was changed to STEM at a later date due to phonetic reasons. The term was not widely used until Virginia Tech University began offering a “STEM education” degree in 2005 (Friedman 2005). The term STEM covers a broad spectrum of different disciplines. While, in general, STEM is used as an umbrella term for the natural sciences, engineering, (...) mathematics, and technology-related fields, there are some variations in its usage. For example, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) characterizes STEM as including chemistry, computers and information technology, engineering, geoscience, life sciences, mathematical sciences, physics and astronomy, psychology, social sciences, educational research, and STEM education (Gonzalez and Kuezi 2012). Whereas this approach considers the social sciences to be of central importance to STEM and the STEM workforce (Spalter-Roth 2004), in the United Kingdom, STEM is seen to include fields such as medicine, dentistry, and architecture but exclude the social sciences and education (United Kingdom, House of Lords, Science, and Technology, Committee 2012). (shrink)

A belief that high school students have the cognitive ability to analyze and assess moral choices and should be encouraged to do so but have rarely been helped to do so was the motivation for developing Exploring Bioethics, a six-module curriculum and teacher guide for grades nine through twelve on ethical issues in the life sciences. A multidisciplinary team of bioethicists, science educators, curriculum designers, scientists, and high school biology teachers worked together on the curriculum under a contract between the (...) National Institutes of Health and Education Development Center, a nonprofit research and development organization with a long history of innovation in science education. At the NIH, the Department of Bioethics within the Clinical Center and the Office of Science Education within the Office of the Director guided the project.Our overarching goal for Exploring Bioethics was to introduce students to bioethics as a field of inquiry and to enable them to develop ethical reasoning skills so they could move beyond “gut reactions” to more nuanced positions. (shrink)

This chapter describes the development of a workshop series focused on helping students develop research lab ethics guidelines. The workshop was developed through a National Science Foundation-funded project that situates ethics education within the research environment. Students in four departments at a private research university were recruited to join a Student Ethics Committee that collaboratively developed context-specific codes-of-ethics-based guidelines for their departments. These bottom-up developed guidelines were revised in an iterative process, including feedback from faculty, other graduate students, and the (...) original Student Ethics Committee. The goal of the workshops was to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up approach to developing context-specific guidelines and to identify factors that students consider relevant to the ethical conduct of research. After describing the workshop series, this chapter presents a qualitative content analysis of the guidelines. The guidelines developed by the Student Ethics Committees reflect the current culture of experimental labs in these departments and the ethical issues that students think are important. The content of these guidelines and the ethical issues the students focused on contrast in some key ways with what ethical issues faculty who head research groups saw as paramount. The chapter describes the first two iterations of the ethics education workshop module, a qualitative analysis of the first draft of these guidelines, and finally reflects on future work in this area of in situ ethics education. (shrink)

Millions of children who were born during the first decade after the Islamic revolution in Iran are now reaching the age of marriage and childbearing. Short spacing between marriage and the birth of the first child has the potential to cause an excessive and costly increase in the growth of population in Iran. Research into the motivations for the birth of first child among newly married couples can create a knowledge base that will enable health centres to help these couples (...) make better decisions about the timing of their first pregnancy. Using a consecutive sampling technique and administering Miller’s Childbearing Questionnaire, data were gathered regarding the childbearing motivations and desires of 300 couples who had been referred to the Shiraz Health Center for premarital counselling. The Childbearing Questionnaire, with some minor modifications, was found to be a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the childbearing motivations of newly married couples of Shiraz County, Fars Province, Iran. The utility of these findings for counselling in health centres is discussed. Based on the results, a longitudinal study is being designed that will allow the development of models for predicting the time of first pregnancy after marriage. (shrink)

Background It has been suggested that researchers are obliged to offer summary findings to research participants to demonstrate respect for persons, and that this may increase public trust in, and awareness of, the research enterprise. Yet little research explores researchers' attitudes and practices regarding the range of initiatives that might serve these ends. Methods Results of an international survey of 785 eligible authors of genetics research studies in autism or cystic fibrosis are reported. Results Of 343 researchers who completed the (...) survey (44% response rate), the majority agreed that their team should (i) inform participants of summary findings (90.7%) and (ii) ensure they gain an awareness of developments in the field (86.9%). Additionally, the majority reported that in practice, their team (i) informs participants of summary findings (69.4%) and (ii) provides other types of relevant non-results information (eg, state of science in the field, opportunities for research participation) (67.9%). Conclusion Researchers endorsed the obligation of communicating with research participants by providing summary findings and other research-related information in equal measure. In light of these findings, it is suggested that while the provision of summary results may contribute to efforts to discharge the obligation of respect for persons, it may be neither a necessary nor a sufficient means to this end. (shrink)

Primary progressive aphasia is a clinical syndrome in which patients progressively lose speech and language abilities. Three variants are recognized: logopenic, associated with phonology and/or short-term verbal memory deficits accompanied by left temporo-parietal atrophy; semantic, associated with semantic deficits and anterior temporal lobe atrophy; non-fluent associated with grammar and/or speech-motor deficits and inferior frontal gyrus atrophy. Here, we set out to investigate whether the three variants of PPA can be dissociated based on error patterns in a single language task. We (...) recruited 21 lvPPA, 28 svPPA, and 24 nfvPPA patients, together with 31 healthy controls, and analyzed their performance on an auditory noun-to-verb generation task, which requires auditory analysis of the input, access to and selection of relevant lexical and semantic knowledge, as well as preparation and execution of speech. Task accuracy differed across the three variants and controls, with lvPPA and nfvPPA having the lowest and highest accuracy, respectively. Critically, machine learning analysis of the different error types yielded above-chance classification of patients into their corresponding group. An analysis of the error types revealed clear variant-specific effects: lvPPA patients produced the highest percentage of “not-a-verb” responses and the highest number of semantically related nouns ; in contrast, svPPA patients produced the highest percentage of “unrelated verb” responses and the highest number of light verbs. Taken together, our findings indicate that error patterns in an auditory verb generation task are associated with the breakdown of different neurocognitive mechanisms across PPA variants. Specifically, they corroborate the link between temporo-parietal regions with lexical processing, as well as ATL with semantic processes. These findings illustrate how the analysis of pattern of responses can help PPA phenotyping and heighten diagnostic sensitivity, while providing insights on the neural correlates of different components of language. (shrink)

As an alternative to universalism and particularism, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics proposes "intermedialities" as a new model of social relations and intercultural dialogue. The concept of "intermedialities" stresses the necessity of situating debates concerning social relations in the divergent contexts of new media and avant-garde artistic practices as well as feminist, political, and philosophical analyses.

Define z to be the smallest cardinality of a function f: X → Y with X. Y ⊆ 2ω such that there is no Borel function g ⊇ f. In this paper we prove that it is relatively consistent with ZFC to have b < z where b is, as usual, smallest cardinality of an unbounded family in ωω. This answers a question raised by Zapletal. We also show that it is relatively consistent with ZFC that there exists X ⊆ (...) 2ω such that the Borel order of X is bounded but there exists a relatively analytic subset of X which is not relatively coanalytic. This answers a question of Mauldin. (shrink)

We consider effective versions of two classical theorems, the Lebesgue density theorem and the Denjoy–Young–Saks theorem. For the first, we show that a Martin-Löf random real z ∈ [0, 1] is Turing incomplete if and only if every effectively closed class.

The burden of this theorem, stated informally, is that when a hypothesis h is maximally independent of the evidence — that is, it goes wholly beyond the evidence —, then the probability p(h, e) increases when the evidence e is weakened; and hence, the weaker is the evidence, the greater is the probabilistic support.

The notation and terminology of this paper follow [2], and are dual to those of [6] and [7]. If L is a language in the narrow sense, Cn may be any consequence operation on sets of sentences of L that includes classical sentential logic. Henceforth when we talk of the language L we intend to include reference to some fixed, though unspecified, operation Cn. X is a deductive system if X = Cn(X). Sentences x, z that are logically equivalent with (...) respect to Cn – that is x ∈ Cn({z}) and z ∈ Cn({x}) – are identified. If X and Z are systems we often write X x instead of x ∈ X and Z X instead of X ⊆ Z. If X = Cn({x}) for some sentence x, X is (finitely) axiomatizable. The set theoretical intersection of X and Z has the logical force of disjunction, and is written X ∨ Z; Cn(X ∪ Z), the smallest system to include both X and Z, is written XZ. If K is a family of systems, [K] and [K] may be defined in an analogous way. The logically strongest system S is the set of all sentences of L; the weakest system T is defined as Cn(∅). The autocomplement Z of Z is defined to be the strongest system to complement T, namely the system [{Y : Y ∨ Z = T}]. More generally we may define X − Z as [{Y : X Y ∨ Z}]. In terms of this operation to remainder, Z is identical with T − Z. The class of all deductive systems forms a distributive lattice under the operations of concatenation and ∨; and indeed a Brouverian algebra (a relatively authocomplemented lattice with unit) under concatenation, ∨ – and T. (shrink)

Over the past several decades environmental ethics has grown markedly, normative ethics having provided essential grounding in assessing human treatment of the environment. Even a systematic approach, such as Paul Taylor’s, in a sense tells the environment how it is to be treated, whether that be Earth’s ecosystem or the universe itself. Can the environment, especially the ecosystem, as understood through the study of ecology, in turn offer normative and applied ethics any edification? The study of ecology has certainly increased (...) awareness of the fact that it is not possible for a moral agent within the ecosystem to step outside its intricate mesh of actions and events, of causes and effects. That is, absolutely everything that an agent can do can have some, often unforeseeable, outcome in the environment. An incompletely snuffed-out match tossed out a car window can cause a forest fire, which causes biome destruction, which causes x, y, and z. In sum, the ecosystem can edify ethics in terms of the scope of ethics, which remains an unsettled, if too-often ignored, matter. By such an inclusive view of moral scope, as derived in part from ecology and as presented here, the scope of moral behavior would include—whether or not adventitiously—every action an agent may do. By this view, moral scope is, in essence, unlimited. The article offers some ramifications of this view of moral scope. (shrink)

This collection of five essays, dedicated to the memory of Robert Daniel Miller, deserves more notice than it has hitherto received. Each of the papers represents some one "facet" of Plato's thought, and most make a provocative, if not always convincing, contribution to their subjects.

Here we prove that if T and T′ are strongly minimal theories, where T′ satisfies a certain property related to triviality and T does not, and T′ is model complete, then there is no computable embedding of Mod(T) into Mod(T′). Using this, we answer a question from [4], showing that there is no computable embedding of VS into ZS, where VS is the class of infinite vector spaces over Q, and ZS is the class of models of Th(Z, S). Similarly, (...) we show that there is no computable embedding of ACF into ZS, where ACF is the class of algebraically closed fields of characteristic 0. (shrink)

ARTHUR PRIOR BEQUEATHED US the perceptive advice that "it is always a useful exercise, when told that something was possible, that is, could have happened, to ask 'When was it possible?' 'When could it have happened?'" Illustrating his point by considering whether it was possible for God to have "launched Julius Caesar into being, or arranged his coming into being, at a different time and under different circumstances," Prior's reply was "I doubt it." What God certainly could have done was (...) to launch into being some man with precisely those properties that Caesar did subsequently have; but what He could not have done, says Prior, was to "launch Caesar" or "create Caesar" in any sense "in which, He having said 'Let there be a man, with properties X to Z,' and there then starting to be a man with those properties, one could intelligibly ask 'But was this the man you wanted?' or intelligibly say 'This--and no other--was the man God intended.'". (shrink)

For a ring R, Hilbert’s Tenth Problem $HTP$ is the set of polynomial equations over R, in several variables, with solutions in R. We view $HTP$ as an enumeration operator, mapping each set W of prime numbers to $HTP$, which is naturally viewed as a set of polynomials in $\mathbb {Z}[X_1,X_2,\ldots ]$. It is known that for almost all W, the jump $W'$ does not $1$ -reduce to $HTP$. In contrast, we show that every Turing degree contains a set W (...) for which such a $1$ -reduction does hold: these W are said to be HTP-complete. Continuing, we derive additional results regarding the impossibility that a decision procedure for $W'$ from $HTP$ can succeed uniformly on a set of measure $1$, and regarding the consequences for the boundary sets of the $HTP$ operator in case $\mathbb {Z}$ has an existential definition in $\mathbb {Q}$. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Discussions PARMENIDES THE PROPHET~ The latest word on Parmenides comes from a recent and exhaustive study by Leonardo Tar~n. 1 Among other illuminating and novel interpretations, Tarhn argues that Parmenides was not, after all, guilty of the confusion between the existential and copulative senses of "to be," that he did not identify thinking with Being, and that he had no conception of atemporal reality.~ In these and (...) other respects Tar~n's volume makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Parmenides. One might judge, however, that Tars work is unusually insensitive to the religious element in Parmenides' poem, and in this respect his analysis seems to echo Reinhardt's unfortunate judgment which calls Parmenides "einen Denker, der keinen Wunsch kennt als Erkenntnis, keine Fessel ffihlt als Logik, den Gott und Geffihl gleichgiiltig lassen." s This inadequacy of TarAn's approach to Parmenides is evident in his treatment of the poem in general, and especially the prologue. The prologue to Parmenides' poem has always been a source of debate. After exploring and rejecting the allegorical interpretation of Sextus (the main source for the proem), Tar~n then systematically examines and rejects the modern interpretations which (among others) make it out to be a shamanistic rapture (Diels, Cornford), Orphic apocalypse (Burnet), religious revelation (Jaeger, Bowra), and mystical experience (Verdenius).4 TarAn judges that Parmenides did not intend his journey to be taken as a reality in any sense, largely on the grounds (1) that Parmenides speaks of his journey as a repeated experience. To take seriously the iterative expressions of the prologue (e.g. fr. 1, lines 1, 3, 8) is incompatible with interpretations which construe it to refer to a specific occasion.6 He supports the conclusion that the proem is nothing more than a literary device with the observations (2) that symbolic interpretations are incongruous with the fact that the goddess expounds her doctrine without symbols, and (3) that the appeal is to Logos, the rational, critical faculty; (4) that the goddess remains anonymous shows that she stands for no religious figure at all ("the 'revelation' is the truth discovered by Parmenides himself"); and (5) that Parmenides could hardly expect us to take seriously the reality of the goddess and other elements in the proem, the reality of which would be entirely incompatible with the thesis of the poem, viz. that reality is One and that all multiplicity and distinction is unreal. ~ z Parmenides: A Text with Translation, Commentary, and Critical Essays (Princeton, 1965). See my review of this work in The Classical Journal, LXII (1967),232ff. aParmenides und die Geschiehtc der griechischen Philosophic (Bonn, 1916),p. 256. 4TarGn,p. 17ft.Guthrie believes that Parmenides recognized an affinity between his search for truth, and his religious activity and mystical experience, and that he reflected this in his mystical-allegorical prologue (History of Greek Philosophy [Cambridge, 1965],II, 13). Guthrie was not, apparently, aware of Ta~n's work when he wrote his second volume; and on the matter of the prologue he favors the work of Mansfeld (Offenbarung des Parmenides und die menschlichc Welt [Assen, 1964],chap. IV), and Bowra ("The Proem of Parmenides," Classical Philology, XXXII [1987],97ff). Tar~n, p. 30. * P. 30f. [67] 68 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY It is probably true that interpretations which find all sorts of religious elements in the proem (and the poem as a whole) go too far. On the other hand, Tar~n gives the impression that Parmenides was nothing more than a pedantic academician, and in this respect he tends to sin in the opposite direction. First, the possible religious significance of the prologue does not depend on its being taken to refer to a literal experience; but even if it did, it need not refer to a specific event; and even if that were so, it is a little forced to exclude a specific event in view of the iterative expressions which may be no more than a function of poetic style. As for his second charge, Tar~n seems unaware that the main part of the poem hardly lends itself to symbolic expression, and afortiori the prologue, with its symbolism, sets the religious mood for... (shrink)

The example can be generalized. Suppose that ϕ and ψ are suffi- ciently different functions of an independent variable t. We may show that whenever X’s predictions for ϕ and ψ lie (weakly) between Z’s predictions and T’s predictions (the true values), then there are other quantities, interdefinable with ϕ and ψ, that reverse the ordering.

David Miller v pracích Critical Rationalism a Out of Error se jako jeden z mála Popperových žáků snaží nejen o vysvětlení a obhájení Popperova kritického racionalismu, ale zároveň i o jeho další rozvinutí. Millerovo znovunastolení kritického racionalismu ovšem předpokládá, že k racionálnímu jednání není třeba žádných „dobrých důvodů“, ale jen argumentů. Uvedená stať se zaměřuje právě na tuto otázku existence tzv. „dobrých důvodů“ ve spojení s racionalitou a racionálním rozhodováním a ukazuje, že Millerův požadavek neexistence „dobrých důvodů“ je nejen (...) příliš radikální, ale i nepřijatelný z hlediska Popperova nebo Musgravova pojetí kritického racionalismu. (shrink)

This Introduction introduces readers to the concepts of political philosophy: authority, democracy, freedom and its limits, justice, feminism, multiculturalism, and nationality. Accessibly written and assuming no previous knowledge of the subject, it encourages the reader to think clearly and critically about the leading political questions of our time. THe book first investigates how politcial philosophy tackles basic ethical questions such as 'how should we live together in society?' It furthermore looks at political authority, discusses the reasons society needs politics in (...) the first place, explores the limitations of politics, and asks if there are areas of life that shouldn't be governed by politics. Moreover, the book explores the connections between political authority and justice, a constant theme in political philosophy, and the ways in which social justice can be used to regulate rather than destroy a market economy. In his travels through this realm, Miller covers why nations ar the natural units of government and wonders if the rise of multiculturalism and transnational co-operation will change all this, and asks in the end if we will ever see the formation of a world government. (shrink)

This chapter outlines the main ideas of my book National responsibility and global justice. It begins with two widely held but conflicting intuitions about what global justice might mean on the one hand, and what it means to be a member of a national community on the other. The first intuition tells us that global inequalities of the magnitude that currently exist are radically unjust, while the second intuition tells us that inequalities are both unavoidable and fair once national responsibility (...) is allowed to operate. This conflict might be resolved either by adopting a cosmopolitan theory of justice (which leaves no room for national responsibility) or by adopting a ?political? theory of justice (which denies that questions of distributive justice can arise beyond the walls of the sovereign state). Since neither resolution is satisfactory, the chapter defends the idea of national responsibility and proposes a new theory of global justice, whose main elements are the protection of basic human rights worldwide, and fair terms of interaction between independent political communities. (shrink)

Platonists and nominalists disagree about whether mathematical objects exist. But they almost uniformly agree about one thing: whatever the status of the existence of mathematical objects, that status is modally necessary. Two notable dissenters from this orthodoxy are Hartry Field, who defends contingent nominalism, and Mark Colyvan, who defends contingent Platonism. The source of their dissent is their view that the indispensability argument provides our justification for believing in the existence, or not, of mathematical objects. This paper considers whether commitment (...) to the indispensability argument gives one grounds to be a contingentist about mathematical objects. (shrink)

Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers is a contingent fact, and researchers may reach a consensus for all kinds of reasons, such as fighting a common foe or sharing a common bias. Scientific consensus, by itself, does not necessarily indicate the existence of shared knowledge among (...) the members of the consensus community. I address the question of under what conditions it is likely that a consensus is in fact knowledge based. I argue that a consensus is likely to be knowledge based when knowledge is the best explanation of the consensus, and I identify three conditions—social calibration, apparent consilience of evidence, and social diversity, for knowledge being the best explanation of a consensus. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Barry Loewer attempts to defend Humeanism about laws of nature from a charge that Humean laws are not adequately explanatory. Central to his defense is a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations: even if Humeans cannot offer further metaphysical explanations of particular features of their “mosaic,” that does not preclude them from offering scientific explanations of these features. According to Marc Lange, however, Loewer’s distinction is of no avail. Defending a transitivity principle linking scientific explanantia to (...) their metaphysical grounds, Lange argues that a charge of explanatory inadequacy resurfaces once this intuitive principle is in place. This paper surveys, on behalf of the Humean, three strategies for responding to Lange’s criticism. The ready availability of these strategies suggests that Lange’s argument may not bolster anti-Humean convictions, since the argument rests on premises that those not antecedently sharing these convictions may well reject. The three strategies also correspond to three interesting ways of thinking about relations of grounding linking Humean laws and their instances, all of which are consistent with theses of Humean supervenience, and some of which have been heretofore overlooked. (shrink)

People increasingly form beliefs based on information gained from automatically filtered Internet ‎sources such as search engines. However, the workings of such sources are often opaque, preventing ‎subjects from knowing whether the information provided is biased or incomplete. Users’ reliance on ‎Internet technologies whose modes of operation are concealed from them raises serious concerns about ‎the justificatory status of the beliefs they end up forming. Yet it is unclear how to address these concerns ‎within standard theories of knowledge and justification. (...) To shed light on the problem, we introduce a ‎novel conceptual framework that clarifies the relations between justified belief, epistemic responsibility, ‎action, and the technological resources available to a subject. We argue that justified belief is subject to ‎certain epistemic responsibilities that accompany the subject’s particular decision-taking circumstances, ‎and that one typical responsibility is to ascertain, so far as one can, whether the information upon which ‎the judgment will rest is biased or incomplete. What this responsibility comprises is partly determined by ‎the inquiry-enabling technologies available to the subject. We argue that a subject’s beliefs that are ‎formed based on Internet-filtered information are less justified than they would be if she either knew how ‎filtering worked or relied on additional sources, and that the subject may have the epistemic ‎responsibility to take measures to enhance the justificatory status of such beliefs.‎. (shrink)

A startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers, the book chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.