Social and neurocognitive research suggests that thinking about one’s own thinking and thinking about the thinking of others—termed ‘mindreading’, ‘metacognition’, ‘social cognition’ or ‘mentalizing’ are not identical activities. The ability though to think about thinking in the first person is nevertheless related to the ability to think about other’s thoughts in the third person. Unclear is how these phenomena influence one another. In this review, we explore how self-reflection and autobiographical memory influence the capacity to think about the thoughts and (...) emotions of others. We review studies suggesting that the more individuals are able to reflect on and retrieve episodes from their life narratives, the more they are likely to grasp others’ thoughts and emotions. We discuss evidence supporting this possibility including studies of the neurocognitive bases of empathy and self-awareness and how different aspects of self-reflection may impact on mindreading. We also draw from clinical reports how improved self-reflection may result in a more nuanced mindreading, namely persons suffering from schizophrenia and narcissistic personality disorder. We finally discuss the implications for research and practice and consider whether there are conditions in which the reverse is true, where self-reflection might impair mindreading or in which mindreading may facilitate self-reflection. (shrink)

Self-reflection plays a key role in healthy human adaptation. Self-reflection might involve different capacities which may be impaired to different degrees relatively independently of one another. Variation in abilities for different forms of self-reflection are commonly seen as key aspects of many adult mental disorders. Yet little has been written about whether there are different kinds of deficits in self-reflection found in mental illness, how those deficits should be distinguished from one another and how to characterize the extent to which (...) they are interrelated. We review clinical and experimental literature and suggest four different forms of deficits in self-reflection: sense of ownership of one’s own thoughts and actions, emotional awareness, distinction between fantasy and reality and the integration of a range of different views of oneself and others. We propose how these different impairments in self-reflection are linked with one another. (shrink)

While many with schizophrenia experience deficits in metacognition it is unclear whether those deficits are related to other features of illness. To explore this issue, the current study classified participants with schizophrenia as possessing a deficit in both awareness of their own emotions and those of others , aware of their own emotions but unaware of the emotions of others and aware of their own emotions and of other’s emotions . Groups were compared on assessments of neurocognitive function, symptoms, and (...) history of sexual trauma. ANCOVA controlling for education found that the group unaware of their own emotions and those of others demonstrated poorer verbal memory, processing speed, executive function, less emotional discomfort and higher levels of disorganization symptoms relative to the other groups. The group aware of their own emotions but not those of others had a significantly higher report of childhood sexual abuse. (shrink)

Social scientists and computer scientist are divided by small differences in perspective and not by any significant disciplinary divide. In the field of text analysis, several such differences are noted: social scientists often use unsupervised models to explore corpora, whereas many computer scientists employ supervised models to train data; social scientists hold to more conventional causal notions than do most computer scientists, and often favor intense exploitation of existing algorithms, whereas computer scientists focus more on developing new models; and computer (...) scientists tend to trust human judgment more than social scientists do. These differences have implications that potentially can improve the practice of social science. (shrink)

Under the influence of groundbreaking work by John Meyer and Brian Rowen, as well as Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, over the last 30 years research in the new sociological institutionalism has focused on processes of isomorphism. I argue that this is a one-sided focus that leaves out many insights from other institutional and macrosociological approaches and does not do justice to actual social change because it overlooks the role played by divergent institutional development. While the suggestion of (...) divergent trends is not new, there have been few attempts to integrate divergence into the theoretical premises of the new sociological institutionalism. Based on the typology proposed by DiMaggio and Powell, I show that the mechanisms identified by them as sources of isomorphic change can support processes of divergent change as well. The theoretical challenge is to identify conditions under which these mechanisms push institutional change toward homogenization or divergence. (shrink)

Despite having worked in higher education for over twenty years, I am still, first and foremost, a practicing nurse. My employer requires me to be a nurse and my regulator regards what I do as nursing. My practice is regulated by the Code and informed by nursing ethics. If I am nurse, practicing nursing, does that mean that my students are my patients? This paper considers how the relationship that I have with my students can be informed by the ethics (...) of the nurse/patient relationship. After some initial theoretical preparation concerning argument from analogy, the paper identifies some areas for comparison between the two relationships. Areas of similarity and difference identify two areas of concern: Nurse education and educators regularly engage in coercion and surveillance in an attempt to increase student success, both of which would be considered outside nursing ethics. It is concluded that these coercive practices are not conducive to an environment where character is cultivated. Despite current financial and workforce pressures, nurse lecturers and more especially their managers would do well to return to the professional ethics of nursing to question and guide their practice. (shrink)

Early in World War I, Virginia Woolf wrote these words: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be […]’. It is tempting to assume that darkness simply hides the unknown and the threatening. It is more challenging to think of it as Woolf did: rich with possibility in even the most desperate times.We live in what many would readily describe as dark times. These times have brought (among much else) a once-in-a-century public (...) health crisis, the continued redemption of toxic white supremacy, declining trust in and support for public institutions, and growing evidence of impending climate devastation. ‘Dark Futures’ will consider some of the scenes of this devastation and mine them for insights into our predicaments and our prospects. (shrink)

This book is the authorized political biography of Kenneth Waltz. The theoretical work of Kenneth Neal Waltz (June 8, 1924 - May 12, 2013) during the last half of the twentieth century in international relations theory is known by virtually everyone in this scholarly field. He is among the few likely still to be cited in the last half of the twenty-first century. Then, as now, he no doubt has followers within the realist camp who see him as an earlier (...) luminary as well as his critics drawn to the lightning-rod quality of his work. Paul Viotti identifies the intellectual sources and experiences leading to the ideas that underlie Waltz's theoretical work. Viotti has been granted unfettered access to Waltz's files at Columbia, in his residences in Manhattan and Maine, and in archives at Oberlin, and uses these documents to paint a thorough, insightful biography bolstered by some of Waltz's previously-unexplored work. Through a series of interviews with Waltz about his life-starting with his German great-grandparents' immigration to the US in the 19th century-this biography produces personal insights into the development of his theoretical and policy-based contributions. (shrink)

On 10 September 2008, amid much fanfare, the Great Collider run by CERN in Geneva was turned on. The Collider was supposed to fire protons around a seventeen-mile loop of tunnels, causing them to crash into one another at close to the speed of light and break into even tinier particles. Nine days later the Collider broke down and had to be switched off, the accelerator temporarily silenced, the reckless search for 'God's particle' put on hold. At the same time (...) the speeded-up markets of global finance, with screens of multi-coloured numbers designating the rapid flows of capital, are suddenly thrown into confusion when news spreads that the great Titan of Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, has filed for bankruptcy. Investors panic, share prices plunge and the accelerated markets of global finance seize up. -- Publisher description. (shrink)

Educators are central to the implementation of Britain’s Prevent Strategy, through the ‘Prevent duty’. This mandatory reporting responsibility, shared with professional practitioners in health and welfare, requires educators to spot and refer individual students potentially ‘vulnerable to’ or ‘at risk’ of radicalisation. The Prevent duty explicitly instructs educators and educational institutions to understand this responsibility as ‘safeguarding’ and to operationalise it through existing safeguarding paradigms and mechanisms, an approach mirrored by other Western countries. This framing of terrorism prevention as ‘safeguarding’ (...) within education, health and welfare has come under strong criticism from scholars who see it both as a perversion and as a securitisation of ‘traditional’ safeguarding. There has been too little consideration of what ‘safeguarding’ represents within modern education and how coherently, therefore, terrorism prevention approaches such as the Prevent duty fit. The article contributes to addressing this deficit, arguing that safeguarding within modern education is a form of anticipatory security, an approach of ‘new public management’, which sees anticipating and preventing risk to students as a core responsibility for all professionals. In this way, the article argues that counter-terrorism prevention responsibilities for educators, such as Britain’s Prevent duty, are entirely consistent with broader, pre-existing safeguarding paradigms within education. (shrink)

Thompson provides commentary and reaction to other chapters in the book. It is organized as sections identified by the names of chapter authors. Thompson responds to chapters advancing new ideas in agriculture by indicating how he understands the authors’ analysis with respect to his own work. Chapters that address more philosophical dimensions of Thompson’s writings are addressed by clarifying the pragmatist orientation of Thompson’s thought. Michel Foucault’s metaethics is used as a basis for explaining pragmatist ethical pluralism.

Four strands of research in the philosophy of technology have made important contributions to environmental philosophy. First, critical theory of technology emphasizes the environmentally exploitative tendencies of capitalist technological innovation. Second, phenomenologyhas examined how technologies shapeperception and orientation to the world with implications for our treatment of and regard for nature. Third, concurrent with the environmental movement itself, an empirical turn in philosophy of technology resulting in philosophers focusing their attention on particular tools and techniques. Empirical studies have emphasized environmentally (...) significant technologies. Finally, work inspired by philosophy of science has adopted scientific reasoning and methods in environmental policy with tools such as risk analysis and environmental impact assessment. These four strands of work have often merged with the work of sociologists, geographers, and political theorists interested in the connections between science and democracy. (shrink)

Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more (...) virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith, and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy. (shrink)

The authors investigated the ontological argument computationally. The premises and conclusion of the argument are represented in the syntax understood by the automated reasoning engine PROVER9. Using the logic of definite descriptions, the authors developed a valid representation of the argument that required three non-logical premises. PROVER9, however, discovered a simpler valid argument for God's existence from a single non-logical premise. Reducing the argument to one non-logical premise brings the investigation of the soundness of the argument into better focus. Also, (...) the simpler representation of the argument brings out clearly how the ontological argument constitutes an early example of a ?diagonal argument? and, moreover, one used to establish a positive conclusion rather than a paradox. (shrink)

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is usually taken to express a limitation of operational possibilities imposed by quantum mechanics. Here we demonstrate that the full content of this principle also includes its positive role as a condition ensuring that mutually exclusive experimental options can be reconciled if an appropriate trade-off is accepted. The uncertainty principle is shown to appear in three manifestations, in the form of uncertainty relations: for the widths of the position and momentum distributions in any quantum state; for the (...) inaccuracies of any joint measurement of these quantities; and for the inaccuracy of a measurement of one of the quantities and the ensuing disturbance in the distribution of the other quantity. Whilst conceptually distinct, these three kinds of uncertainty relations are shown to be closely related formally. Finally, we survey models and experimental implementations of joint measurements of position and momentum and comment briefly on the status of experimental tests of the uncertainty principle. (shrink)

The determination of the past and the future of a physical system are complementary aims of measurements. An optimal determination of the past of a system can be achieved by an informationally complete set of physical quantities. Such a set is always strongly noncommutative. An optimal determination of the future of a physical system can be obtained by a Boolean complete set of quantities. The two aims can be reconciled to a reasonable degree with using unsharp measurements.

Researchers are regularly faced with ethical dilemmas, both prior to and during the collection of data in the field. In this book, Brown, Wild, and their contributing colleagues, outline various et...

Epistemic Analysis, as I conceive of it, is concerned with the analysis of knowledge. The precincts of my concern have, however, been determined by the ...

This addresses criticisms of minimalism that have been raised by Anil Gupta, Mark Richard, Donald Davidson, Crispin Wright, Scott Soames, Michael Dummett, Paul Boghossian, and Michael Devitt.

In their highly topical paper, Grahamet alargued that Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are not actually about trust because they reduce or remove ‘…the need for trust in the use and sharing of patient health data’. We believe this is fundamentally mistaken. TREs mitigate or remove some risks, but they do not address all public concerns. In this regard, TREs provide evidence for people to decide whether the bodies holding and using their data can be trusted. TREs may make it easier (...) for people to trust but there is still a need for that trust. (shrink)

Abstract3′ untranslated regions (3′ UTRs) of mRNAs have many functions, including mRNA processing and transport, translational regulation, and mRNA degradation and stability. These different functions require cis‐elements in 3′ UTRs that can be either sequence motifs or RNA structures. Here we review the role of secondary structures in the functioning of 3′ UTRs and discuss some of the trans‐acting factors that interact with these secondary structures in eukaryotic organisms. We propose potential participation of 3′‐UTR secondary structures in cytoplasmic polyadenylation in (...) the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. Because the secondary structures of 3′ UTRs are essential for post‐transcriptional regulation of gene expression, their disruption leads to a wide range of disorders, including cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Trans‐acting factors, such as STAU1 and nucleolin, which interact with 3′‐UTR secondary structures of target transcripts, influence the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases and tumor metastasis, suggesting that they are possible therapeutic targets. (shrink)

Vorrangig als der "strengste Methodenfanatiker und Logizist" der Marburger Schule des Neukantianismus bekannt, trat Natorp jedoch genau an diesem Punkt mit der selbständigen Form seines späten Philosophierens hervor: der Überschreitung der Methode in der Idee einer allgemeinen Logik. Unter allgemeiner Logik versteht er die streng einheitliche logische Grundlegung der Gegenstandssetzung, ja aller irgendwie logisch erfaßlichen Setzung. Damit war ein Zugang geschaffen zu der von Natorp angestrebten Erkenntnis des Geistigen in seiner Ureinheit, aus der erst die Besonderungen hervorgehen.

L'actualité des Chiens de garde, nous aurions préféré ne pas en éprouver la robuste fraîcheur. Nous aurions aimé qu'un même côté de la barricade cessât de réunir penseurs de métier et bâtisseurs de ruines. Nous aurions voulu que la dissidence fût devenue à ce point contagieuse que l'invocation de Nizan au sursaut et à la résistance en parût presque inutile. Car nous continuons à vouloir un autre monde. L'entreprise nous dépasse? Notre insuffisance épuise notre persévérance? Souvenons-nous alors de ce passage (...) par lequel Sartre a résumé l'appel aux armes de son vieux camarade : "Il peut dire aux uns : vous mourez de modestie, osez désirer, soyez insatiables, ne rougissez pas de vouloir la lune : il nous la faut. Et aux autres : dirigez votre rage sur ceux qui l'ont provoquée, n'essayez pas d'échapper à votre mal, cherchez ses causes et cassez-les." Serge Hamili Extrait de la préface. (shrink)

Science and the History of the Sciences. Conceptual Innovations Through Historicizing Science in the Eighteenth Century. The historical reconstruction of science is linked to philosophical discussions of the eighteenth century in many ways. The historiography of philosophy and the historiography of science share the conceptual problem to assemble the multitude of scientific and philosophical practices under general concepts. The historical analysis of scientific progress offers a clue by problematizing definitions of “science” and “sciences” as well as the system of sciences (...) as a whole. By analyzing these conceptual problems and the typology of historical enterprises of the eighteenth century, this paper will discuss the close interrelations which existed between philosophical and historical discourses of eighteenth‐century reflection on science. (shrink)

In a recent article in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Frank Chervenak et al. argue that home birth is less safe than hospital birth, and that physicians have a dual duty to avoid any collaboration with home birth midwives and to make hospital birth more psychologically and socially supportive to accommodate women who want more choices during labor. The assertion that home birth is significantly less safe than hospital birth has been responded to by Howard Minkoff and Jeffrey (...) Ecker and by a recent large observational study of home birth outcomes in America. Minkoff and Ecker argue that the evidence supports, at most, a minimal increased.. (shrink)

DNA double‐strand breaks (DSBs) are extremely hazardous lesions for all DNA‐bearing organisms and the mechanisms of DSB repair are highly conserved. In the eukaryotic mitotic cell cycle, DSBs are often present following DNA replication while, in meiosis, hundreds of DSBs are generated as a prelude to the reshuffling of the maternally and paternally derived genomes. In both cases, the DSBs are repaired by a process called homologous recombinational repair (HRR), which utilises an intact DNA molecule as the repair template. Mitotic (...) and meiotic HRR are managed by ‘checkpoints’ that inhibit cell division until DSB repair is complete. Here we attempt to summarise the substantial recent progress in understanding the checkpoint management of HRR in mitosis (focussing mainly on mammals) and then go on to use this information as a framework for understanding the presumed checkpoint management of HRR in mammalian meiosis. BioEssays 29:974–986, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This is an entry to the Compendium of Quantum Physics, edited by F Weinert, K Hentschel and D Greenberger, to be published by Springer-Verlag.