Withdrawal of artificially delivered nutrition and hydration (ANH) from patients in a permanent vegetative state (PVS) requires judicial approval in England and Wales, even when families and healthcare professionals agree that withdrawal is in the patient9s best interests. Part of the rationale underpinning the original recommendation for such court approval was the reassurance of patients’ families, but there has been no research as to whether or not family members are reassured by the requirement for court proceedings or how they experience (...) the process. The research reported here draws on in-depth narrative interviews with 10 family members (from five different families) of PVS patients who have been the subject of court proceedings for ANH-withdrawal. We analyse the empirical evidence to understand how family members perceive and experience the process of applying to the courts for ANH-withdrawal and consider the ethical and practice implications of our findings. Our analysis of family experience supports arguments grounded in economic and legal analysis that court approval should no longer be required. We conclude with some suggestions for how we might develop other more efficient, just and humane mechanisms for reviewing best interests decisions about ANH-withdrawal from these patients. (shrink)

On some occasions of self-reference there can be two equally viable forms available to speakers: individual self-reference and collective self-reference. This means that selection of one or the other in talk-in-interaction can — akin to the selection of terms for reference to non-present persons — be guided by such considerations as recipient design and action formation. As a strategy for investigating the selection of self-reference terms, this article examines repairs to self-reference that change the form of reference from individual to (...) collective and vice versa. We first identify two repair operations found in the domain of self-reference: aggregation and extraction and then we track the use of both operations across a range of positions in the repair initiation opportunity space. Finally we consider some of the interactional uses of aggregation and extraction repairs in resolving sources of troubles associated with speaker epistemic authority and responsibility for described actions. (shrink)

Some brain injured patients are left in a permanent vegetative state, i.e., they have irreversibly lost their capacity for consciousness but retained some autonomic physiological functions, such as breathing unaided. Having discussed the controversial nature of the permanent vegetative state as a diagnostic category, we turn to the question of the patients’ ontological status. Are the permanently vegetative alive, dead, or in some other state? We present empirical data from interviews with relatives of patients, and with experts, to support the (...) view that the ontological state of permanently vegetative patients is unclear: such patients are neither straightforwardly alive nor simply dead. Having defended this view from counter-arguments we turn to the practical question as to how these patients ought to be treated. Some relatives and experts believe it is right for patients to be shifted from their currently unclear ontological state to that of being straightforwardly dead, but many are concerned or even horrified by the only legally sanctioned method guaranteed to achieve this, namely withdrawal of clinically assisted nutrition and hydration. A way of addressing this distress would be to allow active euthanasia for these patients. This is highly controversial; but we argue that standard objections to allowing active euthanasia for this particular class of permanently vegetative patients are weakened by these patients’ distinctive ontological status. (shrink)

This article briefly considers the convergence and divergence between Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis, in relation to cognition in talk-in-interaction. It explores the possibilities for research that begins from, rather than argues for, a post-cognitive perspective. Drawing in particular on an analysis of a single fragment of conversation, I suggest three analytic areas for researchers concerned both with talk-in-interaction and with cognition: i) the social organization of cognitive displays and embodiments; ii) the production of taken-for-granted culture through ‘internalized social norms’; (...) iii) cognitions made manifest in interaction, as the cognitive infrastructure upon which talk-in-interaction depends. After post-cognitivism, research in these areas can contribute both to scholarly understanding of cognition, and to the emerging discipline of CA. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Is feminism compatible with psychology or therapy? This text suggests alternatives to the dangers offered by the many practitioners of psychology. The authors offer in-depth information on traditional theories alongside an encyclopaedic knowledge of therapy praxis on both sides of the Atlantic.

Identifying a range of key concerns related to representation and difference, Representing the Other offers a provocative agenda for the future development of feminist theory and practice. The book's contributors, including many key international researchers in women's studies, draw on personal experiences of speaking "for" and "about" others in their research, professional practice, academic writing, or political activism. They highlight problems of representing the Other with an ethnic or cultural background different from one's own and extend discussions of "Othering" to (...) representations of children, prostitutes, infertile women, fat women, gay men with HIV/AIDS, and people with disabilities. The reader, which includes articles and discussions from four issues of the journal Feminism & Psychology, also features new pieces and an extensive editorial introduction. Representing the Other will be integral reading for students and academics in women's studies, gender studies, and feminist theory across a range of social science disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, social policy, and political science. (shrink)

Should we regard Jennifer Lackey’s ‘Creationist Teacher’ as understanding evolution, even though she does not, given her religious convictions, believe its central claims? We think this question raises a range of important and unexplored questions about the relationship between understanding, factivity and belief. Our aim will be to diagnose this case in a principled way, and in doing so, to make some progress toward appreciating what objectual understanding—i.e., understanding a subject matter or body of information—demands of us. Here is the (...) plan. After some ground clearing in §1, §2 outlines and motivates a plausible working model—moderate factivity—for characterising the sense in which objectual understanding should be regarded as factive. §3 shows how the datum that we can understand false theories can, despite initial suggestions to the contrary, be assimilated straightforwardly within the moderate factivity model. §4 highlights how the inverse kind of case to that explored in §3—viz., a variant of Lackey’s creationist teacher case—poses special problems for moderate factivity. With reference to recent work on moral understanding by Hills, §5 proposes a solution to the problem, and §6 attempts to diagnose why it is that we might originally have been led to draw the wrong conclusion. (shrink)

This article explores the links between our roles as academics, advocates, and activists, focusing on our research on treatment decisions for patients in vegetative and minimally conscious states. We describe how our work evolved from personal experience through traditional social science research to public engagement activities and then to advocacy and activism. We reflect on the challenges we faced in navigating the relationship between our research, advocacy, and activism, and the implications of these challenges for our research ethics and methodology—giving (...) practical examples of how we worked with research participants, wrote up case studies and developed interventions into legal debates. We also address the implications of the impact agenda—imposed by the British Research Excellence Framework— for our actions as scholar‐activists. Finally, we ask how practicing at the borders of academia, advocacy, and activism can inform research—helping to contextualize, sensitize, and engage theory with practice, leading to a more robust analysis of data and its implications, and helping to ensure a dialogue between research, theory, lived experience, front‐line practice, law, and public policy. (shrink)

In this introduction to the special issue of Discourse Studies on `Referring to Self and Others in Conversation' we briefly survey the history of conversation analytic work on reference to persons from Sacks and Schegloff's pioneering seven-page paper to the most recently published work. We then introduce the contributions to the special issue.

Sheila Kitzinger describes pain and its control throughout the various stages of childbirth. She stresses the value of antenatal preparation as well as the need for a supportive environment during the labour stages. All concerned--the porspective parents, doctors, midwives and any other personnel in a maternity unit should be educated to be able to provide such an environment.

This paper responds to Maria Wowk’s (Human Studies, 30, 131–155, 2007) critique of “Kitzinger’s feminist conversation analysis”, corrects her misrepresentation of it, and rebuts her claim to have cast doubt on whether it is “genuinely identifiable” as conversation analysis (CA). More broadly, it uses Wowk’s critique as a springboard for continuing the development of feminist conversation analysis through: (i) discussion of appropriate methods of data collection and analysis; (ii) clarification of CA’s turn-taking model and an illustrative deployment of it (...) in the analysis of a single case and of a collection (of if/then compound TCUs); (iii) exposition of a feminist CA understanding of “participants’ orientations”, and of the relevance of the distinction between participants’ and analysts’ orientations for feminist work. Finally, I suggest that feminist work in CA makes important contributions to the development of CA as a discipline. (shrink)

Speakers of English have available a set of terms dedicated to doing individual self-reference: `I' and its grammatical variants, `me', `my', `mine', etc. Speaker selection of other than these dedicated terms may invite special attention for what has prompted their use. This article draws on field recordings of talk-in-interaction in which speakers use `third-person' reference forms when speaking about themselves. We show that third-person forms are recurrently used for representing the views of someone else. We also show how — by (...) drawing on resources such as the distinction between recognitional and non-recognitional person reference forms, and on category bound attributes — the particular third-person term selected can be fitted to and thereby contribute to the action a speaker is implementing through their turn at talk. (shrink)

Protagoras, of all the ancient philosophers, has perhaps attracted the most interest in modern times. His saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’ caused Schiller to adopt him as the patron of the Oxford pragmatists, and has generally earned him the title of the first humanist. Yet the exact delineation of his philosophcal position remains a baffling task. Neumann, writing on Die Problematik des ‘Homo-mensura’ Satzes in 1938,2 concludes that no certainty whatever can be reached on the meaning of (...) the dictum, since ‘man’, ‘measure’, and ‘things’ are all ambiguous, nor can we tell which of the three is the predicate. The time is past when it was believed that a man's philosophy could be understood apart from the events of his life and the circumstances of his age: yet in the case of Protagoras the historical method of approach has hardly been attempted, although the impact of environment was perhaps more decisive in the formation of philosophical concepts in the Greek world than anywhere else. The reality about which the Greek philosopher spoke had three aspects: it was either the one universe of physics, or the political unity, or God. For example, the book of Heracleitus Περ φσεως was divided into three chapters or logoi, About the Whole, a political, and a theological. Neither physics nor theology supplies from its own subject-matter the form in which this reality was described. (shrink)

The achievements of the textile industry in Roman Britain are often underestimated as a result of the meagreness of our available evidence. The Edict on maximum prices issued by Diocletian in A.D. 301 shows that British capes commanded high prices on the markets of the Empire, and that in the late third century A.D. British rugs were the best in the world. In view of the competition from the traditional centres of rug manufacture in the East, this is an astonishing (...) achievement. (shrink)

The received translation and interpretation of many of the technical terms current in the textile industry of the Roman Empire are inaccurate, because lexicographers have either fought shy of being precise, or have thought that they recognized in the ancient world technical processes which originated at a much later date. The evidence is often equivocal or insufficient, but may still yield details that have been overlooked. The textile expression scutulatus, to take an example, deserves more attention than Blümner has devoted (...) to it. When it refers to the appearance of a garment, Lewis and Short, s.v. scutulatus, translate ‘diamond or lozenge-shaped, checkered’. It seems worth while to attempt a more precise translation, and, if possible, to estimate the significance in context of the goods so designated. (shrink)

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

In this article I try to refute the so-called "libertarian" theory of free will, and to examine how our conclusion ought to modify our common attitudes of praise and blame. In attacking the libertarian view, I shall try to show that it cannot be consistently stated. That is, my dscussion will be an "analytic-philosophic" one. I shall neglect what I think is in practice an equally powerful method of attack on the libertarian: a challenge to state his theory in such (...) a way that it will fit in the modern biology and psychology, which are becoming increasingly physicalistic. (shrink)

Living out of silence, out of a fully functioning, lovingly attentive mind, and not just out of thought, out of a partially functioning mind, is requisite for depth or profundity in living or relating. A fully attentive, truly silent or meditative mind sees that there is real dualism of time and the timeless and that time and the timeless each has its own unique value. The timeless, or real silence, that which alone can make for depth in one's living and (...) relating, can be there only when, in one's awareness, time and all that is related to time, have come to an end. An examination of a wide variety of statements made by writers, both past and present, shows that these understandings are seldom there in contemporary writings, just as they were not there in writings that have come down to us from the past. 'Living beyond the One and the Many' invites readers to consider the possibility that what is presented in it can bring deep meaning to one's way of living in the world"--Publisher's description, back cover. (shrink)

Telling a patient that the outcome of his illness is not good, or even hopeless, requires sensitivity and the ability to communicate with him in the setting of a hospital which is an unnatural environment divorced from family and friends. It is a task which must be taught and learned by doctors and nurses.

This book provides a showcase for a wide range of discourse analytical work in psychology from a feminist perspective. It constitutes a thorough critical evaluation of this approach for the feminist project of intellectual, social and political change. Leading researchers explore the benefits and contradictions of discourse analysis and consider its value for feminist psychology. The first part of the book illustrates the application of discourse analysis to four key topics of feminist concern: adolescent knowledge about menstruation; sexual harassment; gendered (...) representations of childhood; and anorexia nervosa. The second part contains five assessments of the usefulness of discourse analysis - both as theory and as method. (shrink)

Radical feminism has critiqued heterosexuality both as a primary means through which people are constituted as women and as men, and as inherently oppressive for women. Two recent developments challenge this critique: the concept of “virgin” heterosexuality, a form of heterosexuality in which the performance of heterosexual sex, with or without sexual intercourse, is voluntarily chosen, and “queer” heterosexuality, a concept derived from postmodernist and queer theory, which does not only reinscribe, but also actively subverts and disrupts, oppressive categories of (...) gender and sexual orientation. This article analyzes the attempts made in “virgin” and “queer” theory to rehabilitate heterosexuality, and finds both fundamentally flawed from a radical feminist perspective. It ends by considering why such rehabilitatory attempts are currently being made, and what they reveal about heterosexuality. (shrink)

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)