We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

The inflation of Type I error rates is thought to be one of the causes of the replication crisis. Questionable research practices such as p-hacking are thought to inflate Type I error rates above their nominal level, leading to unexpectedly high levels of false positives in the literature and, consequently, unexpectedly low replication rates. In this article, I offer an alternative view. I argue that questionable and other research practices do not usually inflate relevant Type I error rates. I begin (...) with an introduction to Type I error rates that distinguishes them from theoretical errors. I then illustrate my argument with respect to model misspecification, multiple testing, selective inference, forking paths, exploratory analyses, p-hacking, optional stopping, double dipping, and HARKing. In each case, I demonstrate that relevant Type I error rates are not usually inflated above their nominal level, and in the rare cases that they are, the inflation is easily identified and resolved. I conclude that the replication crisis may be explained, at least in part, by researchers’ misinterpretation of statistical errors and their underestimation of theoretical errors. (shrink)

In relation to education, there is in Foucault's approach a double emphasis which constitutes an ordering principle for this work.

The idea of a double-aspect approach to a philosophical conundrum is familiar in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and has been recently introduced as well into epistemology. As a class, double-aspect theories attempt, as it might be put, reconciliation by reorientation. Matter and mind, for double-aspect theorists, are not independent substances, whose co-presence in a single entity such as a human person might be deeply mysterious; they are different aspects of a single substance — a person (...) in modest versions of the theory like Strawson's, the universe as a whole in Spinoza's more ambitious case. Similarly, according to Susan Haack, the epistemic justification of a belief of a given subject is not something conceptually isolated from a causal explanation of its presence, but rather epistemic justification has two aspects, a causal one concerned with what a subject's evidence for a belief is, and an evaluative one concerned with how good the subject's evidence is. (shrink)

A standard illustration' of this situation in this: let M~ be a theory of mechanics employing mass points as basic objects and let Mz be similar yet with only extended objects as its primitive elements. Let M> postulate that mass points come only in dense collections. Granted reasonable assumptions about the further details of Mq and M2, we can define the extended objects of Mz in M~ as dense sets of mass points whereas the latter can be defined in Mz (...) as nested sets of the former. Both theories offer equivalent descriptions of the world in the sense that any claim of Mq can be systematically translated into a theorem of Mz and conversely. (shrink)

The Greek term mártyras carries the double meaning of witness and martyr. This paper invites an exploration of the relationship between these two concepts in the contexts of first century and contemporary Africa using the life of St Mark as a historical lens. The paper suggests that many Western authored histories of the Christian movement are distorted by a lack of attention to the Eastern and African expansion of the Church in the early centuries and that contemporary African Christians (...) have erroneously bought into this emaciated history and the theology to which it has given rise. Through an examination of various themes in the life, witness and death of St Mark, and the relationship between martyrdom and witness in African Christian history, the paper encourages a reappraisal of the African roots of Christianity as a rich source for contemporary discipleship in Africa and the universal Church. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Punctured History Cultural Meaning Individual Meaning Self‐Expression and Double Skin Inescapable Seriousness.

Machine generated contents note: -- Notes on Contributors -- Preface; R.Dallos -- Carving Nature at its Joints? DSM and the Medicalization of Everyday Life; M.Rapley, J.Moncrieff&J.Dillon -- Dualisms and the Myth of Mental Illness; P.Thomas&P.Bracken -- Making the World Go Away, and How Psychology and Psychiatry Benefit; M.Boyle -- Cultural Diversity and Racism: An Historical Perspective; S.Fernando -- The Social Context of Paranoia; D.J.Harper -- From 'Bad Character' to BPD: The Medicalization of 'Personality Disorder'; J.Bourne -- Medicalizing Masculinity; S.Timimi -- (...) Can Traumatic Events Traumatise People? Trauma, Madness and 'Psychosis'; L.Johnstone -- Children Who Witness Violence at Home; A.Vetere -- Discourses of Acceptance and Resistance: Speaking Out About Psychiatry; E.Speed -- The Personal Is the Political; J.Dillon -- 'I'm Just, You Know, Joe Bloggs': The Management of Parental Responsibility for First-Episode Psychosis; C.Coulter&M.Rapley -- The Myth of the Antidepressant: An Historical Analysis; J.Moncrieff -- Antidepressants and the Placebo Response; I.Kirsch -- Why Were Doctors so Slow to Recognise Antidepressant Discontinuation Problems?; D.Double -- Toxic Psychology; C.Newnes -- Psychotherapy: Illusion With No Future?; D.Smail -- The Psychologization of Torture; N.Patel -- What Is To Be Done?; J.Moncrieff, J.Dillon&M.Rapley -- Figure: Papers Using Term 'Antidepressant' On Medline 1957-1965 -- Index. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider three arguments for the irrelevance of the doctrine of double effect in end-of-life decision making. The third argument is our own and, to that extent, we seek to defend it. The first argument is that end-of-life decisions do not in fact shorten lives and that therefore there is no need for the doctrine in justification of these decisions. We reject this argument; some end-of-life decisions clearly shorten lives. The second is that the doctrine of (...) double effect is not recognized in UK law ; therefore, clinicians cannot use it as the basis for justification of their decisions. Against this we suggest that while the doctrine might have dubious legal grounds, it could be of relevance in some ways, e.g. in marking the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable practice in relation to the clinician's duty to relieve pain and suffering. The third is that the doctrine is irrelevant because it requires there to be a bad effect that needs justification. This is not the case in end-of-life care for patients diagnosed as dying. Here, bringing about a satisfactory dying process for a patient is a good effect, not a bad one. What matters is that patients die without pain and suffering. This marks a crucial departure from the double-effect doctrine; if the patient's death is not a bad effect then the doctrine is clearly irrelevant. A diagnosis of dying allows clinicians to focus on good dying and not to worry about whether their intervention affects the time of death. For a patient diagnosed as dying, time of death is rarely important. In our conclusion we suggest that acceptance of our argument might be problematic for opponents of physician-assisted death. We suggest one way in which these opponents might argue for a distinction between such practice and palliative care; this relies on the double-effect doctrine's distinction between foresight and intention. (shrink)

Detained immigrants awaiting deportation after criminal convictions have often complained that they are being subjected to double jeopardy since they've already served their sentences. But the truth is their treatment does not even rise to that level: double jeopardy implies being tried twice for the same crime. The immigrants have been tried only once __ and punished twice. The U.S. deports people to countries where they don't even speak the language, having left as young children. And back in (...) Portugal, or Nigeria, or Haiti, or El Salvador, they are often stigmatized as "criminal deportees" __ sometimes, as in Jamaica, publicly and within days of their arrival . A deportee's "alien file" is literally handed from the ICE agent on board the plane to, for example, the security agent at the Lagos airport. Penal and punishment have etymological roots in pain as well as fine, which is the ending of an obligation. For asylum_seekers and established residents, deportation is often not an end at all, but the start of a new and ongoing punishment. (shrink)

This chapter reflects on the existential import of thinking about politics. It proposes that the existential import of thinking about politics is a double confrontation with the nothing. In short: for Arendt, politics is the relating of human beings to one another around the space of the world—the empty center of the polis—and hence a confrontation with the nothing. Thinking itself is engaging in the activity of dissolving, and—particularly in modern times—a dwelling in the gap between past and future, (...) and hence itself a confrontation with the nothing. Thinking about politics carries with it this double negative, which gives it its meaning, or existential import. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the beginnings of an answer to the question of the meaning of thinking about politics lead back to Kant and to the negativity that belongs to his thought: the refusal of absolutes tied to the embrace of the absolute. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that a complex model that includes Toulmin's functional account of argument, the pragma-dialectical stage analysis of argumentation offered by the Amsterdam School, and criteria developed in critical thinking theory, can be used to account for the normativity and field-dependence of argumentation in science. A pragma-dialectical interpretation of the four main elements of Toulmin's model, and a revised account of the double role of warrants, illuminates the domain specificity of scientific argumentation and the restrictions (...) to which the confrontation and opening stages of scientific critical discussions are subjected. In regard to the argumentation stage, examples are given to show that a general account of argumentation, as advocated by informal logicians, is not applicable to arguments in science. Furthermore, although patterns of inference differ in various scientific practices, deductive validity is argued to be a crucial notion in the assessment of scientific arguments. Finally, some remarks are made concerning the burden of proof and the concluding stage of scientific argumentation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Otherwise than Laïcité? Toward an Agonistic Secularism in LevinasMark Cauchi (bio)Levinas and SecularismAlong with the so-called “return of the religious” in contemporary Western philosophy and politics, there has been a renewed effort in recent years to rethink secularism, the political doctrine of the separation of religion and politics.1 It would not be difficult to show that Emmanuel Levinas has been a substantial force in the resurgence of interest in (...) religion among philosophers, but his impact on thinking about secularism is less evident. Part of the reason for this uncertainty, and part of the reason it is not taken up by scholars, is doubtless the fact that Levinas’s conception of secularism is difficult to discern.2 Although he often discusses religion, politics, and even their relationship, he rarely addresses the question of secularism directly. He certainly uses the term laïcité, and, especially in Difficult Freedom, often discusses both the place of Judaism in secular society and what he calls the “Christian atmosphere” of modernity, but he never articulates, either here or elsewhere, a complete account of the concept.In addition to the paucity of Levinas’s writings on secularism, a further difficulty is that what Levinas does say about secularism can often seem contradictory and unclear. Consider, for example, his view [End Page 187] of the most basic issue of secularism: the separation of church and state. Is such a separation wholly compatible with Levinas’s thinking? On the one hand, Levinas is unambiguous about his endorsement of the separation. He writes in “How Is Judaism Possible?” (1959) that the separation “is the citadel that protects us [French Jews] against injustice,” and therefore that “we must beware of tampering with it.” And yet, as he will immediately add, the “luminous and incontestable formula” separating church and state must be given “its best content,” as if in its common understanding it does not possess its best meaning (DF 245). This specific double move, where he simultaneously endorses and criticizes the separation of church and state, is indicative of Levinas’s more general attitude from the 1950s onward toward the whole of the standard liberal conception of secularism.What I mean by the latter conception will be fleshed out in the following sections, but it can be defined now, in a preliminary fashion, as the entire liberal enterprise of creating a culturally neutral state and public sphere for the sake of protecting the rights and liberties of the individual citizen. Because the individual citizen is defined as possessing the right to, or liberty of, thought, expression, and association—all of which together, in effect, produce freedom of religion, whether explicitly proclaimed or not—the state and public sphere must be constituted in particular ways to guarantee these liberties; in particular, they must be culturally neutralized so that any citizen, from whichever cultural background, can participate in public institutions without bias and thus without the violation of their liberties. Such neutralization is achieved by the reciprocal move wherein participants in these institutions—that is to say, individual citizens—are not allowed to bring their cultural frameworks with them into the constitutions and operations of these institutions, leading to the so-called privatization of religion.Because Levinas criticizes this model of secularism while seeming to endorse some notion of it, what I would like to do in this essay is to determine what is precisely Levinas’s criticism of secularism and, in addition, what a “Levinasian secularism” might be. My central contention will be that the latter (Levinasian secularism) is not equivalent [End Page 188] to the former (his stated views about secularism). The reason for this discrepancy is that Levinas critiques standard liberal secularism on the basis of his more general philosophy of ethical alterity, but then reinstates liberal secularism (or an unspecified version of it) as the best way to protect institutionally ethical alterity. This double movement raises the question, how can ethical alterity at once be consistent and inconsistent with liberal secularism? The question is naturally related to the much-discussed one about the relation of ethics and politics in Levinas’s thinking. Levinas’s approach to the latter relation is consistently... (shrink)

Peter Singer has argued that there are good utilitarian reasons for rejecting the prospect of superlongevity: developing technology to double (or more) the average human lifespan. I argue against Singer's view on two fronts. First, empirical research on happiness indicates that the later years of life are (on average) the happiest, and there is no reason to suppose that this trend would not continue if superlongevity were realized. Second, it is argued that there are good reasons to suppose that (...) there will be a certain amount of self-selection: the happiest are more likely to adopt superlongevity technology. This means that the adoption of superlongevity technology will have the effect of raising the level of aggregate utility. (shrink)

Conceptual integration, or "blending," is a basic mental operation with constitutive and governing principles. It underlies human mental singularities and is at the heart of human invention and creativity. "Double-scope" blending is the highest form of conceptual integration and the hallmark of human higher-order cognition. A double-scope conceptual integration network has inputs with different (and often clashing ) organizing frames and an organizing frame for the blend that includes parts of each of those organizing frames and has emergent (...) structure of its own. In such networks, both organizing frames make central contributions to the blend, and their sharp differences offer the possibility of rich clashes. Far from blocking the construction of the network, such clashes offer challenges to the imagination and the resulting blended frames can turn out to be highly creative. This paper illustrates the mechanisms of frame blending with central examples from linguistics, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Cognitively modern human beings have language, art, science, religion, refined tool use, advanced music and dance, fashions of dress, and mathematics. Blue jays, border collies, dolphins, and bonobos do not. Only human beings have what we have, and this discontinuity in Life, this perspicuous Grand Difference, presents us with the most abiding and compelling scientific riddle of all. In The Way We Think, Gilles FauconnieRAnd I put forward the hypothesis that The Grand Difference arose in the following way . The (...) basic mental operation of conceptual integration, also known as ‘blending’, has been present and evolving in various species foRA long time, probably since early mammals, and there is no reason to doubt that many mammalian species aside from human beings have the ability to execute rudimentary forms of conceptual integration. Human beings evolved not an entirely different kind of mind, but instead the capacity for the strongest form of conceptual integration, known as ‘double- scope’ blending. Human beings are thus on a gradient with other species, but what a difference an extra step makes. Double-scope blending is the hallmark of cognitively modern human beings, and The Grand Difference is the product of double-scope blending. What is blending and why is it so important? As an illustration, consider our perception of a seal. The eyes of a seal are remarkably like the eyes of a human being. When we see a seal at the seashore, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that we and the seal share a category. Compelling and evident analogies leap out at us, between the seal’s appearance and ours, between the seal’s motion and ours. Our human eyes align toward an object as our limbs propel our bodies toward it, and it seems to be no different for the seal. Working from such analogies, we immediately forge a mental blend of ourselves and the seal. The result is a conception of a seal that has not only all of the seal’s appearance and motion but additionally a feature we know only of ourselves the possession of a mind . . (shrink)

The TRUTH is announced to creation by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth. Here, when the consciousness rises above “the double bound of space and time” and enters into eternity, here at this moment of annunciation, the One Who announces the Truth and the Truth Announced coincide completely. In the appearance of the Spirit of Truth, i.e., in the light of Tabor, the form and the content of the Truth are one (Florensky, 1997, p. 106).

Unhappy with a recent submission of mine, a referee for a journal specialising in the history of philosophy wagged a finger at what he or she called my ‘hermeneutical principles’. Though I am no stranger to the collegial woodshed, my initial reaction was nonetheless one of surprise. For had I then been asked about interpretive methodology I would have scoffed. The construer’s best course, I would have said, is to nose about the texts until some rough shape begins to emerge (...) from the murk, and to inch forward in an effort to block in details, frequently doubling back for more nosing about. Isn’t this —fill, back, adjust, refill, back again, re-adjust—a counsel of anti-method? (shrink)

Unhappy with a recent submission of mine, a referee for a journal specialising in the history of philosophy wagged a finger at what he or she called my ‘hermeneutical principles’. Though I am no stranger to the collegial woodshed, my initial reaction was nonetheless one of surprise. For had I then been asked about interpretive methodology I would have scoffed. The construer’s best course, I would have said, is to nose about the texts until some rough shape begins to emerge (...) from the murk, and to inch forward in an effort to block in details, frequently doubling back for more nosing about. Isn’t this —fill, back, adjust, refill, back again, re-adjust—a counsel of anti-method? (shrink)

Unhappy with a recent submission of mine, a referee for a journal specialising in the history of philosophy wagged a finger at what he or she called my ‘hermeneutical principles’. Though I am no stranger to the collegial woodshed, my initial reaction was nonetheless one of surprise. For had I then been asked about interpretive methodology I would have scoffed. The construer’s best course, I would have said, is to nose about the texts until some rough shape begins to emerge (...) from the murk, and to inch forward in an effort to block in details, frequently doubling back for more nosing about. Isn’t this —fill, back, adjust, refill, back again, re-adjust—a counsel of anti-method? (shrink)

This issue of the journal sees a number of exchanges on significant ethical problems. ‘Nudges’ have attracted a good deal of attention recently in the context of the ethics of public health interventions. Martin Wilkinson writes a guest editorial introducing important debate on Yashar Saghai's featured article, Salvaging the concept of nudge . Also, Timothy Murphy locks horns with Katrien Devolder and Ezio Di Nucci on the doctrine of double effect as it applies to research on embryos.One of the (...) exchanges published here involves the legitimacy of research ethics review. Murray Dyck and Gary Allen claim that only in a small minority of cases is research ethics review warranted and that, in the main, responsibility for the ethical conduct of research should lie with the researchers themselves.However, David Hunter Mark Israel (see …. (shrink)

OSNE is an annual forum for new work in normative ethical theory. Leading philosophers advance our understanding of a wide range of moral issues and positions, from analysis of competing normative theories to questions of how we should act and live well. OSNE will be an essential resource for scholars and students working in moral philosophy.

OSNE is an annual forum for new work in normative ethical theory. Leading philosophers advance our understanding of a wide range of moral issues and positions, from analysis of competing normative theories to questions of how we should act and live well. OSNE will be an essential resource for scholars and students working in moral philosophy.

This paper describes a “double move“ made by Maimonides, Kant, and Hermann Cohen when they simultaneously dismiss and resolve the cosmological problem of the origin of the universe in time in order to represent creation as a moral issue. Maimonides claims to lack a compelling metaphysical argument regarding creation. However, a reading of Maimonides inspired by the views of Hermann Cohen finds him to be a Platonist who accepts creation from absolute privation so as to establish a moral world (...) in which revelation establishes a correlation between humans and God. For Kant, metaphysics also cannot address the origin of the universe, but he positively describes the regress towards the origin as indeterminately large to derive the unconditioned ideal of reason that supports the regulative use of reason. Cohen, therefore, follows the precedents set by Maimonides and Kant when he claims that the Jewish concept of creation is an ethical and logical problem rather than a cosmological one, even though his account of creation presupposes his era's dominant scientific model of the eternity of the universe. (shrink)

The series Studien zur deutschen Literatur (Studies in German Literature) presents outstanding analyses of German-speaking literature from the early modern period to the present day. It particularly embraces comparative, cultural and historical-epistemological questions and serves as a tradition-steeped forum for innovative literary research. All submitted manuscripts undergo a double peer-review process. Please contact the editor Marcus Böhm (marcus.boehm [at] degruyter.com) for further information regarding manuscript submission and subsidies.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.1 (2004) 92-95 [Access article in PDF] Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique. Ed. Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Pp. 227. $23.95, paperback. Not long ago at a gathering of arts and humanities scholars, I found myself introduced to a group of people as someone interested in the work of Theodor Adorno, whose name led one member of (...) the group to groan, "Not that old chestnut!" Such has been an ambient attitude in cultural studies toward not just the work of Adorno but many of the scholars who came to be known collectively in the 1960s as the Frankfurt School, thanks to their affiliation with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Rethinking the Frankfurt School, a deceptively slim volume that manages to cover a lot of ground in a dozen densely packed essays edited by Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr, counters the conventional cultural studies wisdom regarding the Frankfurt School, debunking along the way not just the facile dismissal of some of the school's members for their "mandarin elitism," but also the notion that the scholars who arguably pioneered the critical study of mass culture have lost their relevance for cultural studies.The association of the Frankfurt School with a cranky and outdated variant of bourgeois proto-Marxism—what Lukacs once dismissed as self-indulgent despair cultivated in the comfort of "the Grand Hotel Abyss"—was at least in part a legacy of the rediscovered cultural and political optimism of the late 1960s. This optimism came to characterize those strands of cultural studies that countered the gloomy assessments of the Frankfurt School with the potential of what the collection's editors disparagingly describe as "subversive consumption." From the perspective of the new millennium it's no longer the Frankfurt scholars who look misguided. In a turning of the tables, the outdated figure of this volume is not Adorno, the pointy-headed pessimist, but rather those who helped dismiss him as such. In particular, Simon During, who edited the 1993 version of the cultural studies canon, The Cultural Studies Reader, comes in for a double dose of implicit criticism (thanks in part to what seems to be an editing oversight) for his critique of Horkheimer and Adorno's failure to take into account [End Page 92] the "opportunities for all kinds of individual collective creativity and decoding" provided by the culture industries (3, 62). If, as During suggested, the 1960s represented a time in which the mass media had become more variegated and presumably more flexible and porous than in the period treated by Horkheimer and Adorno, this collection suggests the renewed relevance of the Frankfurt School might in part be explained by the "unprecedented consolidation within the multinational 'infotainment' industry" during the 1990s (5). The triumphal resuscitation and consolidation of monopoly capitalism triggers, on this account, the rehabilitation of its most scathing critics.The more compelling argument advanced in this volume, however, is that the ostensibly outdated character of much of the work of the Frankfurt School was as much a result of superficial and dismissive readings as of changing historical conditions. As contributor Evan Watkins suggests in his discussion of Adorno, the dominant tendency in culture studies has been to contradict disparaging claims about mass culture (claims which earned Adorno and Horkheimer the sticky moniker of elitists) rather than to take seriously an approach that explored the intricate connections between mass culture and the social relations of production and consumption. Only in the abstract can the consumption of ostensibly counter-hegemonic texts be figured as subversive politics, especially during a time when "The Times They Are A-Changin' " can become a jingle for a bank commercial.Against the theoretical backdrop of the Frankfurt School, the very attempt to isolate culture as a sphere of resistance unto itself becomes a symptom of reification. As Imre Szeman puts it, perhaps the most important lesson of the Frankfurt School for cultural studies "can be summarized by a negative maxim: don't fetishize culture" (74... (shrink)

This work tests two conflicting views about double standards: whether they reflect evolved sex differences in behavior or a manipulative morality serving male interests. Two questionnaires on jealous reactions to mild (flirting) and serious (cheating) sexual transgressions were randomly assigned to 172 young women and men. One questionnaire assessed standards for appropriate behavior and perceptions of how young women and men usually react. The second asked people to report how they had reacted or, if naive, how they would react. (...) The questions concerned anger at and blame of partner and rival and the self-oriented responses of loss of self-esteem, feelings of hurt, and fear of losing the partner. As predicted by the idea of manipulative morality, both sexes advanced sets of double standards that serve the interests of their own sex at the expense of the opposite sex. Much of the data contradict the idea of a match between double standards and evolved sex differences. First, subjects who set self-serving double standards did not perceive gender differences in jealous reactions. Second, there were few gender differences in judgments regarding jealous responses. Third, in contrast with the familiar double standard, women were more aggressively reactive to a flirting rival than men. Fourth, self-reports of the strength of aggressive jealous reactions suggest that women’s behavior is stronger than the prescriptions for it. These data suggest that double standards represent a communication strategy which assists men’s control of women. The data on jealous reactions were interpreted in terms of the degree of threat to fitness posed by infidelity in different situations. (shrink)

This concise monograph argues that experiments on patients who have had radical commissurotomies disconnecting their right and left cerebral hemispheres do not show that such patients, or nonpatients in general, are not unified persons. For Marks "the split-brain patient has one mind and is one person, although he has on occasion, a disunified consciousness. The experimental results pose no special threat to our concept of the unity of a person". Marks's position relies on three sources: the Wittgensteinian view that philosophical (...) problems are often created by philosophers' seduction by inept metaphors where careful attention to language is needed; the functionalist view that the mind just is that which the most satisfactory scientific explanation of human behavior postulates; and a burden-of-proof attack against his opponent. (shrink)

Meaning construction through language requires advanced mental operations also necessary for other higher-order, specifically human behaviors. Biological evolution slowly improved conceptual mapping capacities until human beings reached the level of double-scope blending, perhaps 50 to 80 thousand years ago, at which point language, along with other higher-order human behaviors, became possible. Languages are optimized to be driven by the principles and powers of double-scope blending.

Current precursors in the development of lethal, autonomous systems (LAS) point to the use of biometric devices for assessing, identifying, and verifying targets. The inclusion of biometric devices entails the use of a probabilistic matching program that requires the deliberate targeting of noncombatants as a statistically necessary function of the system. While the tactical employment of the LAS may be justified on the grounds that the deliberate killing of a smaller number of noncombatants is better than the accidental killing of (...) a larger number, it may nonetheless contravene a reemerging conception of right intention. Originally framed by Augustine of Hippo, this lesser-known formulation has served as the foundation for chivalric code, canon law, jus in bello criteria, and the law of armed conflict. Thus it serves as a viable measure to determine whether the use of lethal autonomy would accord with these other laws and principles. Specifically, examinations of the LAS through the lenses of collateral damage, the principle of double effect, and the principle of proportionality, reveal the need for more attention to be paid to the moral issues now, so that the promise of this emerging technology—that it will perform better than human beings—might actually come to pass. (shrink)

The past hypothesis is that the entropy of the universe was very low in the distant past. It is put forward to explain the entropic arrow of time but it has been suggested. The emperor’s new mind. London:Vintage Books; Penrose, R.. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 571, 249–264; Price, H.. In S. F. Savitt, Times’s arrows today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Price, H.. Time’s arrow and Archimedes’ point. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Price, H.. In C. Hitchcock, Contemporary (...) debates in philosophy of science. Oxford: Blackwell]) that it is itself in need of explanation. It has also been suggested that cosmic inflation could provide the explanation, but Price raises a serious objection to this suggestion, which has otherwise received very little attention in the philosophical literature. Price points out that the standard inflationary explanation involves a double standard: although the evolution of the universe described by the inflationary model seems natural from the standard temporal perspective it looks highly unnatural from the reversed temporal perspective. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a novel form of the inflationary explanation that avoids this objection. It is argued that the inflationary model would not involve a double standard if we construct the model with a global “boundary” condition instead of a conventional boundary condition: if we assume that the universe is as generic as possible overall, rather than as generic as possible at some given point as is assumed in the standard inflationary model. This novel form of the inflationary explanation is then compared with Price’s 1996 preferred explanation, a version of the so-called “Weyl hypothesis”. (shrink)

In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s book Technics and Time. Stiegler is internationally known as the inheritor of another French philosopher whose work is currently being rediscovered worldwide: Gilbert Simondon. In Stiegler’s work, this Simondonian heritage plays itself out in the domain of continental philosophy. The thesis maintained here will be the following: there is another relation to Simondon that is possible, one that also takes up the major problems we’ve inherited (...) from the continental philosophical tradition. The double fundamental philosophical problem raised in Stiegler’s debate with Simondon is the following: A) On the one hand .. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introducing persons and the psychology of personhood Jack Martin and Mark H. Bickhard; Part I. Philosophical, Conceptual Perspectives: 2. The person concept and the ontology of persons Michael A. Tissaw; 3. Achieving personhood: the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology Charles Guignon; Part II. Historical Perspectives: 4. Historical psychology of persons: categories and practice Kurt Danziger; 5. Persons and historical ontology Jeff Sugarman; 6. Critical personalism: on its tenets, its historical obscurity, and its future prospects James T. (...) Lamiell; Part III. Social-Developmental Perspectives: 7. Conceiving of self and others as persons: evolution and development John Barresi, Chris Moore and Raymond Martin; 8. Position exchange theory and personhood: moving between positions and perspectives within physical, sociocultural and psychological space and time Jack Martin and Alex Gillespie; 9. The emergent ontology of persons Mark H. Bickhard; 10. Theorising personhood for the world in transition and change: reflections from a transformative activist stance on human development Anna Stetsenko; Part IV. Narrative Perspectives: 11. Identity and narrative as root metaphors of personhood Amia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson; 12. Storied persons: the double triad of narrative identity Mark Freeman. (shrink)

This paper brings about a conversation between Schumpeterian and Polanyian perspectives on markets and their central role in the capitalist economy. For Schumpeter, markets were critical to the process of selftransformation of economic activity, but in his vision, markets as such were largely taken for granted. Markets enabled the introduction of new processes and products equally as well as rendering economic activities obsolete, with the entrepreneur and firm as agents of change, generating new combinations of activities and driven by the (...) creative power of knowledge. Innovation and markets are jointly the engines of endogenous growth. For Karl Polanyi, by contrast, although markets were the central feature of the capitalist economy from the beginning of the nineteenth century, his main interest is the constant impulse for markets as institutions to expand into every aspect of social life and the countermovement of regulation to restrain what he sees as their essentially destructive nature. His focus is therefore on markets as instituted economic processes, driven by the double movement of regulation and de-regulation. He scarcely considers innovation in production or consumption, concentrating on institutions of exchange and distribution. The paper explores the two perspectives in order to ask the question that their confrontation raises: What is the relation between intra-market endogenous change and marketframework institutional change? To test out each perspective, a schematic “long-duration” empirical account of the United Kingdom food distribution markets is subjected to a Schumpeterian and Polanyian reading, and each is exposed for complementary deficits. A broader explanatory framework is sketched that proposes analysis of innovation in market institutions--especially processes exchange and distribution-- in combination with innovation in production and consumption. It is suggested that to explore the constant change of capitalist economies, these four economic domains each involve different orders of innovation and transformation that have complex feedbacks and interactions with each other. Rather than according primacy to one or other order of change, we require a complex causal account embracing multiple instituted economic processes.Cet article discute de la vision des marchés et de leur rôle central dans l’économie capitaliste selon Schumpeter et Polanyi. Pour Schumpeter, les marchés sont essentiels au processus d’auto transformation de l’activité économique, mais dans son approche il présuppose l’existence des marchés. Les marchés permettent l’introduction de nouveaux processus et produits et rendent en même temps les activités économiques obsolètes. Les marchés, avec l’entrepreneur et la firme comme agents du changement, créent de nouvelles combinaisons d’activités et sont dynamisés par le pouvoir créatif de la connaissance. L’innovation et les marchés sont conjointement les moteurs de la croissance endogène. Chez Karl Polanyi, en revanche, bien que les marchés soient un élément central de l’économie capitaliste dès le début du 19ème siècle, l’attention se porte sur le mouvement permament des marchés-institutions à s’étendre à tous les domaines de la vie sociale ainsi que sur le contre-mouvement de la régulation à limiter ce que Polanyi considère comme la nature destructrice des marchés. Son interêt se porte ainsi aux marchés comme des processus économiques établis, conduits par un double mouvement de régulation et de dérégulation. Il ne considère que rarement l’innovation de production ou de consommation, et se concentre sur les institutions de l’échange et de la distribution.L’article explore les deux visions afin de sinterroger sur ce que la confrontation des approches soulève comme question: Quelle est la relation entre les changements endogènes intra marché et les changements institutionnels de la structure de marché? Pour tester chacune des visions, un compte-rendu empirique sur longue période de la distribution alimentaire au Royaume-Uni est soumis à une lecture Schumpeterienne et Polanyienne.Un cadre explicatif plus large est esquissé et suggère une analyse de l’innovation des institutions de marché - particulièrement des processus d’échange et de distribution - conjointement à l’innovation de production et de consommation. Il est suggéré que pour analyser le changement permanent des économies capitalistes, il faut considérer les ordres d’innovation et de transformation de ces quatres domaines économiques qui connaissent des “effets de retour” ainsi des interactions. Au lieu d’accorder la primauté à un des ordres de changement, il est nécessaire de rendre compte d’une causalité complexe qui prend en compte des processus économiques multiples. (shrink)

This is a short editorial to introduce the double issue of Applied Ontology that celebrates the journal's tenth anniversary. At a time when information technology of all kinds depends on the use of explicit ontologies, our journal addresses the modeling issues that underlie the next generation of computational systems. As the editors of Applied Ontology, we are excited by how far we have come in the past decade and by the opportunities that await our research community.

The stratum-specific treatment effect function is a random variable giving the average treatment effect (ATE) for a randomly drawn stratum of potential confounders a clinician may use to assign treatment. In addition to the ATE, the variance of the stratum-specific treatment effect function is fundamental in determining the heterogeneity of treatment effect values. We offer a non-parametric plug-in estimator, the targeted maximum likelihood estimator (TMLE) and the cross-validated TMLE (CV-TMLE), to simultaneously estimate both the average and variance of the stratum-specific (...) treatment effect function. The CV-TMLE is preferable because it guarantees asymptotic efficiency under two conditions without needing entropy conditions on the initial fits of the outcome model and treatment mechanism, as required by TMLE. Particularly, in circumstances where data adaptive fitting methods are very important to eliminate bias but hold no guarantee of satisfying the entropy condition, we show that the CV-TMLE sampling distributions maintain normality with a lower mean squared error than TMLE. In addition to verifying the theoretical properties of TMLE and CV-TMLE through simulations, we highlight some of the challenges in estimating the variance of the treatment effect, which lack double robustness and might be biased if the true variance is small and sample size insufficient. (shrink)

Substantial medical evidence shows that about half of ovarian cancers originate in the fallopian tube. Some medical organizations and clinical articles have suggested opportunistic salpingectomy to reduce the risk of ovarian cancer in patients at average risk of developing it. This entails removing the fallopian tubes at the same time as another procedure that would occur anyway. The authors argue that the principles of totality and double effect can justify such salpingectomies, even though there is a low incidence of (...) ovarian cancer. Since screening tools for ovarian cancer are ineffective and treatment options are poor, the good effect of reducing the risk of death from this type of ovarian cancer can be proportionate to the bad effects of the minor increase in surgical risk over the other procedure, the unintended side effect of infertility, and the removal of normally functioning tissue. The authors conclude that it is within the purview of a patient and physician to determine whether the benefits are proportionate to the risks in a particular case. (shrink)

Studies on transposable elements of the Ac family have led to different models for excision gap repair in either plants or Drosophila. Excision products generated by the plant transposable elements Ac and Tam3 imply a more or less straightforward ligation of broken ends; excision products of the Drosophila P element indicate the involvement of ‘double‐strand break’ (DSB) repair. Recent findings that excision products of Ac and Tam3 can also contain traces of the element ends indicate, however, that DSB repair (...) might be an alternative repair mechanism in plants. A functional DSB repair mechanism in plants can also be deduced from the observed rapid increases of Ac copy number during plant development and from the involvement of Ac in the generation of internal Ac deletions. On the other hand, alternative repair mechanisms may also be functional in Drosophila, because some of the ‘footprints’ generated upon P excision can be explained by a mechanism that has been postulated for excision gap repair in plants. It is concluded that plants and Drosophila can use similar repair mechanisms, but that the predominance of a certain repair mechanism is determined by the host. (shrink)

In 2002, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) published the report of an independent panel of experts into maintaining standards at Advanced Level (A-Level). One of its recommendations was for: 'limited experimental double marking of scripts in subjects such as English to determine whether the strategy would significantly reduce errors of measurement' (p. 24). This recommendation provided the impetus for this paper which reviews the all but forgotten literature on double marking and considers its relevance now.

This article explores the ways in which Nietzsche’s conception of subjectivity, as rehearsed in The Birth of Tragedy, draws close to other modern models of split subjectivity as described by Hegel, Freud, or Althusser. Although the subjectivity depicted by Nietzsche is constituted in the tension between reaffirming and dissolving its boundaries, and this tension may seem to put the possibility of identity at risk, in effect individuation and dissolution function as symmetrical contraries. Rather than disrupting the boundaries of reason, the (...) Dionysian contributes to Apollonian equilibrium by temporarily destroying Apollonian rigidity, so that the polis can periodically overcome limitations, assimilate its others and gather new strength. Identity is thus seemingly reinforced through the controlled illusion of its shattering: it is protected from the irruption of real otherness. Unlike Nietzsche’s dialectical dramaturgy, Greek tragedy depicts an incipient rationality wounded by contradictions, institutionalizing conflict. Because of the ambiguity of the Greek tragic world, the fissures of its organizing powers and the ambivalent agency of tragic subjects, a parallel between Attic tragedy and modern subjectivity may illuminate the latter. (shrink)

This paper deals with the question of the logicality of modal logics from a proof-theoretic perspective. It is argued that if Dos̆en’s analysis of logical constants as punctuation marks is embraced, it is possible to show that all the modalities in the cube of normal modal logics are indeed logical constants. It will be proved that the display calculus for each displayable modality admits a purely structural presentation based on double-line rules which, following Dos̆en’s analysis, allows us to claim (...) that the corresponding modal operators are logical constants. (shrink)

The case of Félida X and her ‘doubled personality’ served in the last quarter of the 19th century as a proving ground for a distinctively French form of psychology that bore the stamp of physiology, including the comparative term normal state. Debates around Félida’s case provided the occasion for reflection about how that term and its opposites could take their places in the emerging discursive field of psychopathology. This article centres its analysis on Eugène Azam’s 1876–77 study of Félida, and (...) the ways his framing of the case was adopted or critiqued by subsequent researchers. Azam initially deployed the label normal state in a routine manner, in contrast to his use of condition seconde to designate Félida’s other state; this pairing served, I argue, to anchor the scientific legitimacy of Félida’s extraordinary psychological manifestations. Unpacking the conceptual associations of Azam’s use of normal state, we find it marked as qualitatively distinct, temporally fixed, and most of all individualized; this without becoming normative. It was only through responses to and criticism of Azam’s study that there emerged a more generalized sense of normality against which pathological (hysteric) subjects’ comportment could be contrasted. Félida’s case itself constitutes a highly individualized reconfiguration of the concept of a normal state, while the subsequent framing of doubled mental states provides a valuable vantage point from which to consider the articulations between the language of emerging French psychology and its evolving subjects of enquiry. (shrink)

Bioethics should update its conception of the geneThe 25th of April marks the 50th anniversary of the publication in Nature of the letter by James Watson and Francis Crick announcing their solution to the structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid .1 By that time, much was known about the role of chromosomes in inheritance, the contribution of DNA to chromosome structure, and the chemistry of DNA.2 The gene concept itself was also well established by then; the principal scientific problem became to (...) specify what genes were in molecular terms and how they functioned in the cell during ordinary function and cell division.The importance of the solution of the structure of DNA was twofold. First, it gave insight into finding a mechanism for DNA replication, as the authors recognised in this famous sentence:"It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a copying mechanism for the genetic material.3 … ". (shrink)