Scientific models typically contain idealizations, or assumptions that are known not to be true. Philosophers have long questioned the nature of idealizations: Are they heuristic tools that will be abandoned? Or rather fictional representations of reality? And how can we reconcile them with realism about knowledge of nature? Immanuel Kant developed an account of scientific investigation that can inspire a new approach to the contemporary debate. Kant argued that scientific investigation is possible only if guided by ideal assumptions—what he calls (...) “regulative ideas”. These ideas are not true of objects of nature, and yet they are not heuristic tools or fictional represen- tations. They are necessary rules governing the construction and assessment of scientific explanations. In this paper, I suggest that some idealizations can be interpreted as having necessary regulative value and as being compatible with scientific realism. I first analyze the puzzle of the nature of idealization and present the main approaches to this topic in the literature. Second, I reconsider the puzzle vis-a-vis a restricted, Kantian definition of idealization and a novel characterization of the relation between idealization and truth. Finally, I discuss in detail an example of idealization (the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium) along the suggested Kantian lines. (shrink)

What is it to share the same concept? The question is an important one since sharing the same concept explains our ability to non-accidentally coordinate on the same topic over time and between individuals. Moreover, concept identity grounds key logical relations among thought contents such as samesaying, contradiction, validity, and entailment. Finally, an account of concept identity is crucial to explaining and justifying epistemic efforts to better understand the precise contents of our thoughts. The key question, then, is what psychological (...) and social facts could play these roles? Elsewhere, we have argued for a specific relational model of concept identity, the connectedness model (e.g. Schroeter 2012, Schroeter and Schroeter 2014, 2015). Our aim in this chapter is to further explain the motivations behind that account, to address worries about transitivity and vagueness, and to contrast our approach with closely related accounts of concept identity developed by François Recanati and Simon Prosser. -/- What’s distinctive of our approach is that we seek to vindicate the first-person epistemic perspective of concept users. Concepts, on our account, play a crucial normative role in setting regulative ideals for the representational practices in which individual subjects participate. This focus on the normative role of concepts – as opposed to a purely causal explanatory role – motivates our approach to concept identity and our toleration of vagueness and borderline cases. (shrink)

Appeals to intersectionality serve to remind us that social categories like race and gender cannot be adequately understood independently from each other. But what, exactly, is the intersectional thesis a thesis about? Answers to this question are remarkably diverse. Intersectionality is variously understood as a claim about the nature of social kinds, oppression, or experience ; about the limits of antidiscrimination law or identity politics ; or about the importance of fuzzy sets, multifactor analysis, or causal modeling in social science.

This discussion aims to give a normative theoretical basis for a “best judgment” model of surrogate decision making rooted in a regulative ideal of love. Currently, there are two basic models of surrogate decision making for incompetent patients: the “substituted judgment” model and the “best interests” model. The former draws on the value of autonomy and responds with respect; the latter draws on the value of welfare and responds with beneficence. It can be difficult to determine which of these (...) two models is more appropriate for a given patient, and both approaches may seem inadequate for a surrogate who loves the patient. The proposed “best judgment” model effectively draws on the values incorporated in each of the traditional standards, but does so because these values are important to someone who loves a patient, since love responds to the patient as the specific person she is. (shrink)

Moral philosophy has long been dominated by the aim of understanding morality and the virtues in terms of principles. However, the underlying assumption that this is the best approach has received almost no defence, and has been attacked by particularists, who argue that the traditional link between morality and principles is little more than an unwarranted prejudice. In Principled Ethics, Michael Ridge and Sean McKeever meet the particularist challenge head-on, and defend a distinctive view they call "generalism as a (...) class='Hi'>regulative ideal.". (shrink)

The traditional debate about moral dilemmas concerns whether there are circumstances in which an agent is subject to two obligations that cannot both be fulfilled. Realists maintain there are. Irrealists deny this. Here I defend an alternative, methodologically-oriented position wherein the denial of genuine moral dilemmas functions as a regulative ideal for moral deliberation and practice. That is, moral inquiry and deliberation operate on the implicit assumption that there are no genuine moral dilemmas. This view is superior to both (...) realism and irrealism in accounting for moral residue and other crucial phenomenological dimensions of our experience of moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Eugene Wigner's several general discussions of symmetry and invariance principles are among the canonical texts of contemporary philosophy of physics. Wigner spoke from a position of authority, having pioneered for recognition of the importance of symmetry principles from nuclear to molecular physics. But perhaps recent commentators have not sufficiently stressed that Wigner always took care to situate the notion of invariance principles with respect to two others, initial conditions and laws of nature. Wigner's first such general consideration of invariance principles, (...) an address presented at Einstein's 70th birthday celebration, held in Princeton on 19 March 1949, began by laying out just this distinction, and in a way that seems to suggest that the three notions arise through abstraction in an analysis of the general problem of cognition in the natural sciences: The world is very complicated and it is clearly impossible for the human mind to understand it completely. Man has therefore devised an artifice which permits the complicated nature of the world to be blamed on something which is called accidental and thus permits him to abstract a domain in which simple laws can be found. The complications are called initial conditions; the domain of regularities, laws of nature. the underlying abstraction is probably one of the most fruitful the human mind has made. It has made the natural sciences possible. (shrink)

The paper proposes that taking the notion of “community of inquiry” as a regulative ideal is a valuable working tool for the refinement and improvement of the practice of Philosophy for Children (P4C). Reed (1996) and Sprod (1997) have already drawn attention to this, stating that the community of inquiry is more a regulative idea than a typical occurrence. Building on these claims, we will show that taking the notion of community of inquiry as such gives new light (...) to many of the items and aspects of the description of what constitutes a community of inquiry. Consequently, it provides ways to identify important moments in the philosophical practice that consolidate the community of inquiry, and a working tool to grasp and handle some of the crucial moves that the facilitator, as well as other participants, do to install and strengthen the community in the sessions. (shrink)

The paper proposes that taking the notion of “community of inquiry” as a regulative ideal is a valuable working tool for the refinement and improvement of the practice of Philosophy for Children (P4C). Reed (1996) and Sprod (1997) have already drawn attention to this, stating that the community of inquiry is more a regulative idea than a typical occurrence. Building on these claims, we will show that taking the notion of community of inquiry as such gives new light (...) to many of the items and aspects of the description of what constitutes a community of inquiry. Consequently, it provides ways to identify important moments in the philosophical practice that consolidate the community of inquiry, and a working tool to grasp and handle some of the crucial moves that the facilitator, as well as other participants, do to install and strengthen the community in the sessions. (shrink)

A review article: In their book Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal McKeever and Ridge address arguments in the debate between moral particularism and moral generalism. The first part of the book presents a systematic discussion of moral particularism, especially a critical evaluation of arguments in its favour. In the second part authors defend a version of generalism which they label generalism as a regulative ideal. The heart of the debate between particularism and generalism is the question (...) of acceptability of a principled approach to morality – the question whether universal, exceptionless moral principles govern morality. Recognizing the need for a systematic justification of true moral principles and their role in morality, McKeever and Ridge defend such a generalist approach to morality, without committing themselves to any special normative structure or to any specific principles. They offer an impressive and persuasive set of arguments for their position, based on the starting presupposition of moral knowledge in particular cases – this presupposition being the common ground in the debate between generalism and particularism. The book is a defense of generalism and moral principles in their various characteristics – form their functioning as moral standards to their role in guiding our decisions and behaviour, serving as a basis for moral progress, avoiding the danger of special pleading. (shrink)

James’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” sheds light not only on his views on ethics but also on his general approach to objectivity. Indeed, the paper is most interesting not for the ethical theory it defends but for its general openness to the possibility of our ethical claims lacking objective truth conditions at all. James will turn out to have a very demanding account of what it would take to construct something like objective ethical norms out of more (...) naturalistically respectable material such as our evaluative practices, but in doing so, he also faces up to the possibility that this objectivity is something we may fail to achieve. This comparatively pessimistic prospect in turn explains his surprising pivot toward the divine at the end of the “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (MPML) James’s appeal to the divine is characteristically idiosyncratic, however, and this paper will attempt to explain how it fits in with the more generally naturalistic framework that dominates the rest of the paper. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship in Kant between transcendental laws and empirical laws (focusing on causal laws), and then brings a particular interpretation of that issue to bear on familiar puzzles concerning the status of the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. It is argued that the 'indeterminate objective validity' possessed by the regulative maxims derives ultimately from strictly constitutive demands of understanding.

In this essay, an attempt is made to re-present African Communitarianism as a discursive formation between the individual and community. It is a view which eschews the dominant position of many Africanist scholars on the primacy of the community over the individual in the ‘individual-community' debate in contemporary Africanist discourse. The relationship between the individual and community is dialogical for the identity of the individual and the community is dependent on this constitutive formation. The individual is not prior to the (...) community and neither is the community prior to the individual. Contemporaneity explains this dialogic relationship and to argue otherwise threatens the individual's subjectivity to a vanishing point, or simply, to deny the individual a presence. On this trajectory, the politics of common good within the African value system can neither be described nor represented through consensus or unanimity but through a realist perspectivism or a worldview not held in abstraction from living traditions, cultures, and values that characterize the people of sub-Saharan Africa. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 27 2008: pp. 386-399. (shrink)

The aim of interpretation is to capture the past in the future: to capture, not to recapture, first, because the iterative prefix suggests that meaning, which was once manifest, must now be found again. But the postulated author dispenses with this assumption. Literary texts are produced by very complicated actions, while the significance of even our simplest acts is often far from clear. Parts of the meaning of a text may become clear only because of developments occurring long after its (...) composition. And though the fact that an author means something may be equivalent to the fact that a writer could have meant it, this is not to say that the writer did, on whatever level, actually mean it.Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, has written articles on ancient Greek philosophy, literary theory, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann. (shrink)

According to legal tradition, the ideal judge is entirely dispassionate. Affective science calls into question the legitimacy of this ideal; further, it suggests that no judge could ever meet this standard, even if it were the correct one. What judges can and should do is to learn to effectively manage—rather than eliminate—emotion. Specifically, an emotion regulation perspective suggests that judicial emotion is best managed by cognitive reappraisal and, often, disclosure; behavioral suppression should be used sparingly; and suppression of emotional experience (...) is rarely helpful. We argue that the dispassionate-judge ideal presents a barrier to achieving the flexibility necessary for adaptive judicial emotion regulation. We suggest a new ideal, that of the emotionally well-regulated judge, and propose several directions for future research to strengthen ties between law and psychology, with particular attention to the study of emotion. (shrink)

How should billions of species observations worldwide be shared and made reusable? Many biodiversity scientists assume the ideal solution is to standardize all datasets according to a single, universal classification and aggregate them into a centralized, global repository. This ideal has known practical and theoretical limitations, however, which justifies investigating alternatives. To support better community deliberation and normative evaluation, we develop a novel conceptual framework showing how different organizational models, regulative ideals and heuristic strategies are combined to form (...) shared infrastructures supporting data reuse. The framework is anchored in a general definition of data pooling as an activity of making a taxonomically standardized body of information available for community reuse via digital infrastructure. We describe and illustrate unified and pluralistic ideals for biodiversity data pooling and show how communities may advance toward these ideals using different heuristic strategies. We present evidence for the strengths and limitations of the unification and pluralistic ideals based on systemic relationships of power, responsibility and benefit they establish among stakeholders, and we conclude the pluralistic ideal is better suited for biodiversity data. (shrink)

This paper introduces the thesis that ‘society’ plays the role of a regulative ideal for sociology: society is an impossible but necessary object of knowledge. This thesis of society’s regulative ideal in sociology emerges from the critique of the methodological nationalism with which the social sci..

It is rather intriguing that we will often try to persuade people of what we find beautiful, even though we do not believe that they may subsequently base their judgement of taste on our testimony. Typically, we think that the experience of beauty is such that we cannot leave it to others to be had. Moreover, we are often aware of the contingency of our own judgements’ foundation in our own experience. Nevertheless, we do think that certain aesthetic, evaluative conceptions (...) do relate to specific experiences in a non-trivial way, especially that of aesthetic excellence. Now certain analytical aestheticians ascribe truth values to aesthetic judgements of various kinds. Such ascription would evidently have a bearing on the problem of aesthetic experience’s relevance for evaluation, as we may in the end be better off neglecting the experiential altogether in virtue of treating aesthetic values in objectivist ways, as natural properties, or as reducible to such properties, descriptions of which will then indeed be true or false.1 However, I think that it is too early yet to bury subjectivism. So let us instead defend it and try to get a better grasp on its suppositions. In this we may profit from ideas advanced by David Wiggins, who neither denies the role played by objective properties, nor neglects the subjective import. According to him, aesthetic values are somehow kinds of relations, which are established by an elaborate process of criticism and refinement of perceptions of, and feelings toward specific natural properties.2 The argument in this paper suggests that the analysis of a paradigmatic pair regarding ‘aesthetic excellence’ provides us with inter-. (shrink)

: The question of Kant’s relation to Spinozist thought has been virtually ignored over the years. I analyze Kant’s pre-critical ‘possibility-proof’ of God’s existence, elaborated in the Beweisgrund, as well as the echoes that this proof has in the first Critique, in beginning to uncover the connection between Kant’s thought and Spinoza’s. Kant’s espousal of the Principle of Sufficient Reason [PSR] for the analysis of modality during the pre-critical period committed him, I argue, to Spinozist substance monism. Much textual evidence (...) suggests that he was aware of this commitment. However, by transforming the PSR into a regulative principle the critical Kant has transformed his pre-critical proof into a regulative ideal. He is thereby committed, I argue, to regulative Spinozism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that liberal democratic communities are justified in regulating the activities of their members because of the inevitable existence of conflicting conceptions of what is considered as morally right. This will often lead to tension and disputes, and in such circumstances, reliance on peaceful or orderly co‐existence will not normally suffice. In such pluralistic societies, the boundary between permissible and impermissible activities will be unclear; and this becomes a particular concern in controversial issues which raise (...) specific anxieties and uncertainty. One context that has repeatedly raised issues in this regard is that of biotechnology and, in particular, the recent stem cell debate, on which this paper concentrates. While such developments have the potential to make significant improvements to therapeutic progress, we should also be sceptical because predicting the impact of these developments remains uncertain and complex. For the sake of socio‐political stability, it will therefore be necessary to enact and enforce rules which limit these competing claims in public policy but which may not be compatible with what individual moral commitments ideally permit. One way to achieve this is to establish procedural frameworks to resolve potential disputes in the public sphere about what is right, wrong, or permissible conduct. I argue that for one to commit to authoritative regulation, an idea of harm prevention through state intervention is necessary; and that this requires optimum mechanisms of procedure which allow the individual the opportunity to compromise and yet to continue to oppose or fight for changes as demanded by his or her moral position. (shrink)

Emotions are foremost self-regulating processes that permit rapid responses and adaptations to situations of personal concern. They have biological bases and are shaped ontogenetically via learning and experience. Many situations and events of personal concern are social in nature. Thus, social exchanges play an important role in learning about rules and norms that shape regulation processes. I argue that (a) emotions often are actively auto-regulating—the behavior implied by the emotional reaction bias to the eliciting event or situation modifies or terminates (...) the situation; (b) certain emotion components are likely to habituate dynamically, modifying the emotional states; (c) emotions are typically intra- and interpersonal processes at the same time, and modulating forces at these different levels interact; (d) emotions are not just regulated—they regulate. Important conclusions of my arguments are that the scientific analysis of emotion should not exclude regulatory processes, and that effortful emotion regulation should be seen relative to a backdrop of auto-regulation and habituation, and not the ideal notion of a neutral baseline. For all practical purposes unregulated emotion is not a realistic concept. (shrink)

Feminist legal scholars and health care lawyers have long engaged with law's responses to the female reproductive body, especially on what the legal regulation of women's reproductive lives can tell us about the broader relationship between law and gender. Acknowledging this work and building upon it, Endowed considers the interaction of law and ideas of male reproductivity. In particular, it seeks to uncover what these regulatory moments can tell us about contemporary ideas and ideals of masculinity and the male (...) sexed body. Spanning topics such as male circumcision and the regulation of state access to Viagra, the book uncovers recurring motifs that define masculinity and the male body in the legal imagination. In looking to these understandings the book engages with broader questions regarding the relationship between law and gender and between masculinity and social organization. (shrink)

A regulative norm for permissible defense distinguishes the conditions under which we will hold defenders to be innocent of any wrongdoing from those in which we hold them responsible for assault or manslaughter. The norm must strike a fair balance between defenders' security, on the one hand, and other agents’ legitimate claim to live without fear of suffering mistaken defensive harm, on the other. Since agents must make defensive decisions under high pressure and on only partial information, they will (...) sometimes make mistakes. We have reason to want a norm that considers a mistake permissible when it was highly likely on the evidence that defense was proportionate and necessary to avert a threat. However, adopting an evidentialist norm under non-ideal conditions is treacherous business. I briefly survey empirical data suggesting that the type and extent of bias prevalent in the US renders a straightforward evidentialist norm unjust, and thus since the legal practice in the US relies on such a norm, we must explore avenues for reform. Preferably this will take the form of adopting a modified evidential norm, and I explore some promising options. If this proves impossible, however, then we have to accept a strict regulative norm (which does not consider any mistakes permissible), as the sole just alternative. (shrink)

While the debate on values in science focuses on normative questions on the level of the individual (e.g. should researchers try to make their work as value free as possible?), comparatively little attention has been paid to the institutional and professional norms that researchers are expected to follow. To address this knowledge gap, we conduct a content analysis of leading national codes of conduct for research integrity of European countries, and structure our analysis around the question: do these documents allow (...) for researchers to be influenced by “non-epistemic” (moral, cultural, commercial, political, etc.) values or do they prohibit such influence in compliance with the value-free ideal (VFI) of science? Our results return a complex picture. On the one hand, codes of conduct consider many non-epistemic values to be a legitimate influence on the decision-making of researchers. On the other, most of these documents include what we call _VFI-like positions_: passages claiming that researchers should be free and independent from any external influence. This shows that while many research integrity documents do not fully endorse the VFI, they do not reject it and continue to be implicitly influenced by it. This results in internal tensions and underdetermined guidance on non-epistemic values that may limit some of the uses of research integrity codes, especially for purposes of ethical self-regulation. While codes of conduct cannot be expected to decide how researchers should act in every instance, we do suggest that they acknowledge the challenges of how to integrate non-epistemic values in research in a more explicit fashion. (shrink)

This commentary examines the laws and policies on reproduction adopted in New China since 1949 and reflects on how they have regulated womanhood and whether they have promoted gender equality. By doing so, it also demonstrates how the regulation of reproduction constructs the notion of an ideal womanhood in order to justify the state’s enforcement of the population policy and its exercise of control over women’s fertility.

This article examines the regulation of Latina youth sexualities in the context of sexual and reproductive health care provision. In-depth interviews with health care providers working in two Latino-serving community health centers are analyzed for how they interpret and respond to the sexual and reproductive practices of their low-income Latina teen patients. The author finds that providers emphasize teenage pregnancy as a social problem among this population to the exclusion of other dimensions of youth sexualities and encourage Latina girls’ adherence (...) to a life course trajectory that conforms to middle-class, heteronormative ideals as a solution to this problem. By relying on such understandings, providers construct meanings of sexual citizenship that require participation in bourgeois heteronormativity. These findings suggest that Latino-serving community health centers, their providers, and their teen patients could benefit from questioning the assumptions that inform providers’ appraisals of Latina youth and developing a more inclusive approach to Latina youth sexualities beyond a discourse of pregnancy prevention. Such efforts could allow community health centers to actively participate in disrupting the structural inequalities that shape their young patients’ lives. (shrink)

This paper critiques the version of the argument that the regulation of hateful speech by the state undermines its democratic legitimacy made by Ronald Dworkin and James Weinstein. It argues that in some cases the harmful effects of hateful speech on the democratic process outweigh those of restriction. It does not challenge the central premise of the Legitimacy Argument, that a wide-ranging right to freedom of expression is an essential political right in a liberal democracy. Instead, it uses ideal and (...) nonideal theory as a framework for judgements about the regulation of hate speech. The mistake underpinning the Legitimacy Argument is that it assumes that other conditions pervade that make an ideal democratic procedure possible when they do not. In reality the state can be put in a position where, whatever course of action it takes with regard to the regulation or non-regulation of hate speech, some citizens will not be able to participate fully in political deliberation. Under such conditions there remain strong pro tanto reasons not to regulate hate speech on democratic grounds, but they are not all-things-considered reasons, and there are also pro tanto reasons to regulate hate speech that might outweigh them in some cases. This leads to the cautious conclusion that while there might be a normative justification for the regulation of hate speech in individual instances, the debate is best understood as one between competing pro tanto reasons, and must be approached on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that liberal democratic communities are justified in regulating the activities of their members because of the inevitable existence of conflicting conceptions of what is considered as morally right. This will often lead to tension and disputes, and in such circumstances, reliance on peaceful or orderly co‐existence will not normally suffice. In such pluralistic societies, the boundary between permissible and impermissible activities will be unclear; and this becomes a particular concern in controversial issues which raise specific (...) anxieties and uncertainty. One context that has repeatedly raised issues in this regard is that of biotechnology and, in particular, the recent stem cell debate, on which this paper concentrates. While such developments have the potential to make significant improvements to therapeutic progress, we should also be sceptical because predicting the impact of these developments remains uncertain and complex.For the sake of socio‐political stability, it will therefore be necessary to enact and enforce rules which limit these competing claims in public policy but which may not be compatible with what individual moral commitments ideally permit. One way to achieve this is to establish procedural frameworks to resolve potential disputes in the public sphere about what is right, wrong, or permissible conduct. I argue that for one to commit to authoritative regulation, an idea of harm prevention through state intervention is necessary; and that this requires optimum mechanisms of procedure which allow the individual the opportunity to compromise and yet to continue to oppose or fight for changes as demanded by his or her moral position. (shrink)

Following Quine, Davidson, and Dennett, I take mental states and linguistic meaning to be individuated with reference to interpretation. The regulative principle of ideal interpretation is to maximize rationality, and this accounts for the distinctiveness and autonomy of the vocabulary of agency. This rationality-maxim can accommodate empirical cognitive-psychological investigation into the nature and limitations of human mental processing. Interpretivism is explicitly anti-reductionist, but in the context of Rorty's neo-pragmatism provides a naturalized view of agents. The interpretivist strategy affords a (...) less despondent view of constructive philosophical activity than Rorty's own. (shrink)

The ideal city of Plato could only come true if three great and unlikely changes were made in the state. Neither Plato's contemporaries nor later generations have been able to breast the second of these ‘waves,’ which brings in a new order of marriage for guardians. The scheme is condemned as not only not good or possible—the Platonic tests—but as inconsistent with itself and with the account given in the Timaeus. The parts under censure are the so-called table of prohibited (...) affinities and the sanction of infanticide. It would be strange to find discrepancies in a proposal so important for Plato's state that details cannot well be left to some Damon, and I hope to show that difficulties arise only when critics do not place themselves exactly at Plato's point of view. He conceived a certain problem with sharp outlines, and his answer is precisely adapted to that. The first wave left the guardians as a family of men and women living in common. How was it possible to preserve this communal life and provide for the future of the guardian class? If the rulers failed to choose aright here, an oracle foretold the decay of the city. Therefore Plato's rigid preoccupation in the second wave is to secure for the archons entire control over the birth of guardian children. Otherwise the community will sink into mere promiscuity and the stock will degenerate. In short, Plato tries to ensure that, apart from the necessary getting of children for the state, the guardians shall be friends and not lovers. Our special problems arise from the two questions—πως παδοποιήσονtαι, καì γεκομÉνους πως θρÉψουσι;. Let us begin with the first of these. (shrink)

The focus of this article is on the place of the limited-liability joint stock corporation in a satisfactory account of social justice and, more specifically, the question of how such corporations should be regulated and taxed in order to secure social justice. -/- Most discussion in liberal political philosophy looks at state institutions, on the one hand, and individuals, on the other hand, without giving much attention to intermediate institutions such as corporations. This is in part a consequence of a (...) certain degree of idealization in terms of the background model of society with which such theories operate. Intermediate institutions are in an important sense optional or discretionary, and one would be hampering an account of justice if it built-in from the start particular kinds of institutions which we could imagine doing without. The only non-state institution that has received adequate attention in political philosophy is the nuclear family, in part because of its pervasiveness and resilience. But the corporation is probably second only to the family in its significance, in terms of its effects on the lives of individuals, and yet has been left without adequate attention. (shrink)

Organelles transported along microtubules are normally moved to precise locations within cells. For example, synaptic vesiceles are transported to the neruronal synapse, the Golgi apparatus is generally found in a perinuclear location, and the membranes of the endoplasmic reticulum are actively extended to the cell periphery. The correct positioning of these organelles depends on microtubules and microtubule motors. Melanophores provide an extreme example of organized organelle transport. These cells are specialized to transport pigment granules, which are coordinately moved towards or (...) away from the cell center, and result in the cell appearing alternately light or dark. Melanophores have proved to be an ideal system for studying the mechanisms by which the cell controls the direction of its organelle transport. Pigment granule dispersion (the movement away from the cell center) requires protein phosphorylation, while pigment aggregation (the movement towards the cell center) requires protein dephosphorylation. The target of this phosphorylation and dephosphorylation event is a protein that interacts with the microtubule motor protein, kinesin. Thus, the direction of organelle transport along microtubules may be regulated by controlling the activity of a microtubule motor. (shrink)

In contemporary Western societies, birthing is framed as transformative for mothers; however, it is also a site for the regulation of women and the exercise of power relations by health professionals. Nursing scholarship often frames migrant mothers as a problem, yet nurses are imbricated within systems of scrutiny and regulation that are unevenly imposed on ‘other’ mothers. Discourses deployed by New Zealand Plunket nurses (who provide a universal ‘well child’ health service) to frame their understandings of migrant mothers were analysed (...) using discourse analysis and concepts of power drawn from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, read through a postcolonial feminist perspective. This research shows how Plunket nurses draw on liberal feminist discourses, which have emancipatory aims but reflect assimilatory practices, paradoxically disempowering women who do not subscribe to ideals of individual autonomy. Consequently, the migrant mother, her family and new baby are brought into a neoliberal project of maternal improvement through surveillance. This project – enacted differentially but consistently among nurses – attempts to alter maternal and familial relationships by ‘improving’ mothering. Feminist critiques of patriarchy in maternity must be supplemented by a critique of the implicitly western subject of maternity to make empowerment a possibility for all mothers. (shrink)

Since approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, it has been widely and repeatedly claimed that the GDPR will legally mandate a ‘right to explanation’ of all decisions made by automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems. This right to explanation is viewed as an ideal mechanism to enhance the accountability and transparency of automated decision-making. However, there are several reasons to doubt both the legal existence and the feasibility of such a right. In contrast to the (...) right to explanation of specific automated decisions claimed elsewhere, the GDPR only mandates that data subjects receive meaningful, but properly limited, information (Articles 13-15) about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of automated decision-making systems, what we term a ‘right to be informed’. Further, the ambiguity and limited scope of the ‘right not to be subject to automated decision-making’ contained in Article 22 (from which the alleged ‘right to explanation’ stems) raises questions over the protection actually afforded to data subjects. These problems show that the GDPR lacks precise language as well as explicit and well-defined rights and safeguards against automated decision-making, and therefore runs the risk of being toothless. We propose a number of legislative and policy steps that, if taken, may improve the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making when the GDPR comes into force in 2018. (shrink)