This paper argues that many ethical issues in neuroeducational research cannot be appropriately addressed using the principles and guidance available in one of these areas alone, or by applying these in simple combination. Instead, interdisciplinary and public dialogue will be required to develop appropriate normative principles. In developing this argument, it examines neuroscientific and educational perspectives within three broad categories of ethical issue arising at the interface of cognitive neuroscience and education: issues regarding the carrying out of interdisciplinary research, the (...) scrutiny and communication of findings and concepts, and the application of research and associated issues of policy likely to arise in the future. To help highlight the need for interdisciplinary and public discussion, we also report the opinions of a group of educators (comprising trainee teachers, teachers and head teachers) on the neuroeducational ethics of cognitive enhancing drugs, infant screening, genetic profiling and animal research. (shrink)

There is increasing interest in research that combines neuroscientific and educational perspectives on learning, but significant philosophical issues divide these perspectives. This article examines the value of such neuroeducational research and how concepts from different perspectives may be interrelated through a ‘level of actions’ model. This model, which encourages a multiperspective approach, may be helpful in avoiding some of the worst transgressions of sense-making in constructing concepts that span neuroscience and education. Application of the model is explored in the context (...) of teaching strategies intended to foster creativity, and its affordances and limitations are discussed. (shrink)

This article examines how discussions around the new interdisciplinary research area combining neuroscience and education have brought into sharp relief differences in the philosophies of learning in these two areas. It considers the difficulties faced by those working at the interface between these two areas and, in particular, it focuses on the challenge of avoiding 'non-sense' when attempting to include the brain in educational argument. The paper relates common transgressions in sense-making with dualist and monist notions of the mind-brain relationship. (...) It then extends a brain-mind-behaviour model from cognitive neuroscience to include a greater emphasis on social interaction and construction. This creates a tool for examining the potentially complex interrelationships between the different learning philosophies in this emerging new field. (shrink)

Medicine is often thought of as a science of the body, but it is also a science of data. In some contexts, it can even be asserted that data drive health. This article focuses on a key piece of data technology central to contemporary practices of medicine: the medical record. By situating the medical record in the perspective of its history, we inquire into how the kinds of data that are kept at sites of clinical encounter often depend on informational (...) requirements that originate well outside of the clinic, in particular in health insurance records systems. Although this dependency of today's electronic medical records on billing requirements is widely lamented by clinical providers, its history remains little studied. Following the archaeology of medicine developed by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic and expanding his methodology in light of more recent contributions to the field of media archaeology, this article excavates some of the underexplored technological conditions that help constitute today's electronic medical record. If in some contexts, it is true that data drive health, then an archaeology of medical records helps reveal how health insurance records often impact clinical care and, by extension, health and disease. (shrink)

Howard Van Till has long been a critic of interventionist conceptions of God's creative activity, and he places the “intelligent design” position in that category. Yet certain lines of reasoning in Van Till's own work can best be understood as arguing for design. It is likely that this reasoning will eventually bring Van Till into conflict with an increasingly naturalistic scientific community.

The present research was designed to test whether the subjective experience of more effort related to more reward valuation as measured by a neural response. This prediction was derived from the theory of cognitive dissonance and its effort justification paradigm. Young adult participants (n = 82) engaged in multiple trails of a low or high effort task that resulted in a loss or reward on each trial. Neural responses to the reward (loss) cue were measured using EEG, so that the (...) event-related potential known as the Reward Positivity (RewP) could be assessed. Results revealed no significant differences between low and high effort conditions on the RewP. However, within the high effort condition, a more subjective experience of effort was associated with a larger RewP. This research extends past research on the effort justification paradigm of cognitive dissonance theory by suggesting that effort justification is associated with an implicit measure of reward valuation. It therefore challenges recent perspectives on dissonance processes that posit that these evaluative changes should only occur on explicit but not implicit measures. (shrink)

Mounting evidence suggests that endorsement of psychological continuity and the afterlife increases with age. This developmental change raises questions about the cognitive biases, social representations, and cultural input that may support afterlife beliefs. To what extent is there similarity versus diversity across cultures in how people reason about what happens after death? The objective of this study was to compare beliefs about the continuation of biological and psychological functions after death in Tanna, Vanuatu, and the United States. Children, adolescents, and (...) adults were primed with a story that contained either natural or supernatural cues. Participants were then asked whether or not different biological and psychological processes continue to function after death. We predicted that across cultures individuals would be more likely to endorse the continuation of psychological processes over biological processes and that a theistic prime would increase continuation responses regarding both types of process. Results largely supported predictions; U.S. participants provided more continuation responses for psychological than biological processes following both the theistic and non-theistic primes. Participants in Vanuatu, however, provided more continuation responses for biological than psychological processes following the theistic prime. The data provide evidence for both cultural similarity and variability in afterlife beliefs and demonstrate that individuals use both natural and supernatural explanations to interpret the same events. (shrink)

Ever want to be famous? They didn't. It just sorta happened. Playing for friends at a pizzeria one day - full-on, massive world tour the next. Insane to a power of ten. Then, right in the middle the madness, they crash and burn. The reality of life is - stuff happens... Now, their fans are asking - what is it going to take to get pop music's latest 'phenomenon' back together? Can it even be done? In the fast paced, high-pressure (...) world that is pop music, will their passion be enough to ensure that our five accidental superstars will find their way back to doing what they were so amazingly good at? This is a story of unimaginable gain, devastating loss, and the remarkable ability of five friends, to overcome it all... (shrink)

Humankind : a limited company? -- From volume to point: 1. Philosophy, 2. Religion -- Science : specialised but not special -- Cosmic hierarchies -- Consciousness -- Cognition -- In theory -- Back to Genesis -- The beautiful union.

A botanical study of crop processing was undertaken on the semi-arid, southern Aegean islands of Karpathos and Amorgos. The present article provides details of the crop processing activities, and some contextual information concerning the wider agricultural economy. Attention is drawn to three aspects of this wider economy which are of particular significance for understanding both recent ‘traditional’ and ancient farming practice in the region. Amorgos is discussed in greater detail as the period of fieldwork was longer.

This volume is a collection which includes the text of papers presented at the September 2008 Cambridge Symposium on Archaeology and Linguistics in the Andes. The Cambridge symposium sought to bring together the disciplines of linguistics and archaeology, in order to dispel a number of popular myths about the language history of the Andes. This introductory chapter first sets out the structure of the book and introduces its component chapters. Thereafter it clarifies briefly a number of principles from historical linguistics (...) that are indispensable to an understanding of how language data can inform us about prehistory at all, as a general methodological background to the chapters that follow. Next, it reviews the traditional model for associating the linguistic and archaeological records in the Andes, and the problems that attend it. Finally, it looks at one particular cross-disciplinary proposal that has commanded much attention worldwide, but precious little hitherto in the Andes: the ‘farming/language dispersal’ hypothesis. (shrink)

In 1945–46, representatives of the U.S. government made similar discoveries in both Germany and Japan, unearthing evidence of unethical experiments on human beings that could be viewed as war crimes. The outcomes in the two defeated nations, however, were strikingly different. In Germany, the United States, influenced by the Canadian physician John Thompson, played a key role in bringing Nazi physicians to trial and publicizing their misdeeds. In Japan, the United States played an equally key role in concealing information about (...) the biological warfare experiments and in securing immunity from prosecution for the perpetrators. The greater force of appeals to national security and wartime exigency help to explain these different outcomes. (shrink)

Moral psychology studies the features of cognition, judgement, perception and emotion that make human beings capable of moral action. Perspectives from feminist and race theory immensely enrich moral psychology. Writers who take these perspectives ask questions about mind, feeling, and action in contexts of social difference and unequal power and opportunity. These essays by a distinguished international cast of philosophers explore moral psychology as it connects to social life, scientific studies, and literature.

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

For many people the existence of God is by no means a sufficiently clear feature of reality. This problem, the fact of divine hiddenness, has been a source of existential concern and has sometimes been taken as a rationale for support of atheism or agnosticism. In this collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers of religion explore the question of divine hiddenness in considerable detail. The issue is approached from several perspectives including Jewish, Christian, atheist and agnostic. There is (...) coverage of the historical treatment of divine hiddenness as found in the work of Maimonides, St. John of the Cross, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard, and various Biblical writers. A substantial introduction clarifies the main problems of and leading solutions to divine hiddenness. Primarily directed at philosophers of religion, theologians, and scholars of religious studies, this collection could also serve as a textbook for upper-level courses in philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This chapter sums up the new state of the cross-disciplinary art in Andean prehistory, as collectively represented by the foregoing chapters. Progress and new perspectives are explored first on key individual questions. Who, for instance, were the Incas, and whence and when did they come to Cuzco? How and when did Quechua, too, reach Cuzco, as well as its furthest-flung outposts in north-west Argentina, Ecuador, and northern Peru? The scope is then broadened to overall scenarios for how the main Andean (...) language families might correlate in time and space with archaeological horizons that could best account for their dispersals. Four basic hypotheses have emerged, whose respective strengths and weaknesses are assessed in turn: a traditional ‘Wari as Aymara’ model, revised and defended; alternative proposals of ‘Wari as both Aymara and Quechua’, or ‘both Chavín and Wari as Quechua’; and the most radical new departure, ‘Wari as Quechua, Chavín as Aymara’. (shrink)

This chapter proposes a new and more coherent interdisciplinary prehistory of the Andes, based firstly on a long overdue re-examination of the relationships between the various regional ‘dialects’ within the Quechua language family; and secondly on a more satisfactory correlation with the archaeological record. The founding principle is that language families necessarily reflect past expansive processes, whose traces should also be clear in the archaeological record. It provides a logic by which to assess correspondences between archaeological and linguistic patterns, on (...) the three levels of when, where, and why particular language expansions occurred. In the Andes, the horizons thus offer the most natural explanations for the major Quechua and Aymara dispersals. With the Incas too late for the time-depth of either family, the Wari Middle Horizon emerges as the most plausible candidate for the first major expansion of Quechua, and not of the Aymara family, here tentatively associated with the Early Horizon instead. (shrink)

In this paper we examine attempts to reframe the ethics of nature-society relations. We trace a postmodern turn which reflects a distrust of overarching moral codes and narratives and points towards a more nuanced understanding of how personal moral impulses are embedded within, and inter-subjectively constituted by, contextual configurations of self and other. We also trace an ethical turn which reflects a critique of anthropocentrism and points towards moves to non-anthropocentric frames in which the othernesses and ethics of difference are (...) shaped by an acknowledgement that human and non-human agency are relationally bound and assembled in networks and places. These turns suggest the need for a more sensitive 'ethical mindfulness' which is grounded in particular space-time contexts. Throughout the paper we draw on research we have conducted on the interconnections between trees and places, and in particular we describe three specific tree-places - an urban square, an urban cemetery and an orchard - which provide grounded contexts of encounter and potential for ethical mindedness. We conclude that notions of intrinsicality, otherness, enchantment and hybridity are helpful in configuring the search for grounded ethical mindfulness, both for and in nature. (shrink)

Scientific authorship serves to identify and acknowledge individuals who “contribute significantly” to published research. However, specific authorship norms and practices often differ within and across disciplines, labs, and cultures. As a consequence, authorship disagreements are commonplace in team research. This study aims to better understand the prevalence of authorship disagreements, those factors that may lead to disagreements, as well as the extent and nature of resulting misbehavior. Methods include an international online survey of researchers who had published from 2011 to (...) 2015. Of the 6673 who completed the main questions pertaining to authorship disagreement and misbehavior, nearly half reported disagreements regarding authorship naming; and discipline, rank, and gender had significant effects on disagreement rates. Paradoxically, researchers in multidisciplinary teams that typically reflect a range of norms and values, were less likely to have faced disagreements regarding authorship. Respondents reported having witnessed a wide range of misbehavior including: instances of hostility, undermining of a colleague’s work during meetings/talks, cutting corners on research, sabotaging a colleague’s research, or producing fraudulent work to be more competitive. These findings suggest that authorship disputes may contribute to an unhealthy competitive dynamic that can undermine researchers’ wellbeing, team cohesion, and scientific integrity. (shrink)

The Fraenkel-Mostowski method has been widely used to prove independence results among weak versions of the axiom of choice. In this paper it is shown that certain statements cannot be proved by this method. More specifically it is shown that in all Fraenkel-Mostowski models the following hold: 1. The axiom of choice for sets of finite sets implies the axiom of choice for sets of well-orderable sets. 2. The Boolean prime ideal theorem implies a weakened form of Sikorski's theorem.

Identities ascribed to research staff in face-to-face encounters with participants have been raised as key ethical challenge in transnational health research. ‘Misattributed’ identities that do not just deviate from researchers' self-image, but obscure unequivocal aspects of researcher identity – e.g. that they are researchers – are a case of such ethical problem. Yet, the reasonable expectation of unconcealed identity can conflict with another ethical premise: confidentiality; this poses challenges to staff visiting participants at home. We explore these around a case (...) study of ‘follow-up’ staff, observed during an ethnographic study of a Kenyan HIV ‘trial community’, which included participant observation, conversations, and interviews with staff (n = 79) and participants (n = 89). We found that because of the need to maintain confidentiality and because of some suspicions towards researchers, research staff drew upon alternative identities – presenting themselves to non-participants as relatives or friends, rather than as researchers. Several staff experienced this as necessary but uncomfortable. Simultaneously, staff and participants forged close relations in line with their fictional identities, which however also posed challenges because they entailed personal responsibilities that were difficult to live up to, due to limited resources, and the trial's limited duration. Similar challenges may arise in transnational HIV treatment programmes and should be explored further in that context. (shrink)

Howard W. Jones, Jr.'s Personhood Revisited chronicles reproductive technology's debate-evoking history meanwhile exploring the ongoing moral dilemmas of the twenty-first century, including: personhood, in vitro fertilization, conjugal love, eugenics, cloning, stem cell research, and more. Balanced readings on each reproductive topic represent conflicting viewpoints from legal, religious, and scientific perspectives. And Jones' personal experiences, such as meetings with the Vatican, add a unique look into the highly political yet benevolent world of reproductive medicine. Author Howard W. (...) Jones, Jr., alongside Robert Edwards (winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine 2010), fertilized the first human eggs in vitro. Jones and his wife, Georgeanna Seegar Jones, established the first in vitro fertilization program in the United States, which went on to develop America's first test tube baby in 1981. Book jacket. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that short-term fasting in healthy individuals is associated with changes in risky decision-making. The current experiment was designed to examine the influence of short-term fasting in healthy individuals on four types of impulsivity: reflection impulsivity, risky decision-making, delay aversion, and action inhibition. Participants were tested twice, once when fasted for 20 hours, and once when satiated. Participants demonstrated impaired action inhibition when fasted; committing significantly more errors of commission during a food-related Affective Shifting Task. Participants also (...) displayed decreased reflection impulsivity when fasted, opening significantly more boxes during the Information Sampling Task (IST). There were no significant differences in performance between fasted and satiated sessions for risky decision-making or delay aversion. These findings may have implications for understanding eating disorders such as Bulimia Nervosa (BN). Although BN has been characterised as a disorder of poor impulse control, inconsistent findings when comparing individuals with BN and healthy individuals on behavioural measures of impulsivity question this characterisation. Since individuals with BN undergo periods of short-term fasting, the inconsistent findings could be due to differences in the levels of satiation of participants. The current results indicate that fasting can affect performance on the IST, a measure of impulsivity previously studied in BN, whilst performance on other impulsivity measures were unaffected. However, the results from the IST were contrary to the original hypothesis and should be replicated before specific conclusions can be made. (shrink)

In set theory without the Axiom of Choice we prove that the assertion “For every metric space (_X_, _d_) with a Borel measure \(\mu \) such that the measure of every open ball is positive and finite, (_X_, _d_) is separable.’ is implied by the axiom of choice for countable collections of sets and implies the axiom of choice for countable collections of finite sets. We also show that neither implication is reversible in Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory weakend to permit the (...) existence of atoms and that the second implication is not reversible in Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. This gives an answer to a question of Dybowski and Górka (Arch Math Logic 62:735–749, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00153-023-00868-4 ). (shrink)

We show that it is not possible to construct a Fraenkel-Mostowski model in which the axiom of choice for well-ordered families of sets and the axiom of choice for sets are both true, but the axiom of choice is false.

The volume is a collection of essays devoted to the analysis of scientific change and stability. It explores the balance and tension that exist between commensurability and continuity on the one hand, and incommensurability and discontinuity on the other. Moreover, it discusses some central epistemological consequences regarding the nature of scientific progress, rationality and realism. In relation to these topics, it investigates a number of new avenues, and revisits some familiar issues, with a focus on the history and philosophy of (...) physics, and an emphasis on developments in cognitive sciences as well as on the claims of “new experimentalists”. The book constitutes fully revised versions of papers which were originally presented at the international colloquium held at the University of Nancy, France, in June 2004. (shrink)