In this paper, we propose a novel medium for interactions based on an interpersonal psychological approach referred to as ‘naïve psychology’. We adopt the visual assessment of clustering tendency (VAT) to naïve psychology for the visual understanding of other people. The VAT algorithm produces a visual display that can be used to assess clustering tendencies in a set of persons (notions) by reconstructing a digital image representation of a square relational dissimilarity matrix for its set. This algorithm clearly represents two (...) types of imbalanced situations in naïve psychology: crisp and fuzzy. The visual image of a balanced or imbalance situation is useful for a deeper human understanding. (shrink)

This paper proposes deep and fundamental structures of communication among persons in a “coexistential” setting. The basic framework for this formalization of communication structures is Leibnizian notions of space and time together with the notion of the Existential Graph by C. S. Peirce and that of the Petri net, more precisely, the occurrence net. The fundamental structures of coexistential communication are then formalized as co-creation of Leibnizian space and time in such a manner that they are used to link the (...) communicated messages, thus establishing the “coexistential atmosphere and field” (“Ba” in Japanese) among the individuals. This framework is then applied to the analysis of theater play communication. Finally, the framework of information edaphology is also introduced to discuss the growth processes of individuals and communities through coexistential communication. (shrink)

AbstractThe Belmont Report continues to be held in high regard, and most bioethical analyses conducted in recent years have presumed that it affects United States federal regulations. However, the assessments of the report’s creators are sharply divided. Understanding the historic reputation of this monumental report is thus crucial. We first recount the historical context surrounding the creation of this report. Subsequently, we review the process involved in developing ethical guidelines and describe the report’s features. Additionally, we analyze the effect of (...) unfolding events on the subsequent creation of federal regulations, especially on gene therapy clinical trials. Moreover, throughout this paper we evaluate the ethical principles outlined in this report and describe how they overlap with the issue of protecting socially vulnerable groups. Based on the analysis, we conclude that the features of the Belmont Report cannot be considered as having affected the basic sections of the federal regulations for ethical reviews that were made uniform in 1981. Nevertheless, regarding the regulations on gene therapy clinical trials—which were at first expected to be applicable to research involving children—in addition to implementing policies regarding the public review of protocols that passed ethical review, this report’s principles are clearly reflected in the key notes that should have been referred to when the report was created. (shrink)

ポストモダン思想は教育学に何をもたらしたのか。戦後から現在に至る教育学の変遷と、ポストモダン以後の教育思想・教育哲学の新動向を描き出し、教育と教育学の未来を展望する。.

Informed consent, decision-making styles and the role of patient-physician relationships are imperative aspects of clinical medicine worldwide. We present the case of a 74-year-old woman afflicted with advanced liver cancer whose attending physician, per request of the family, did not inform her of her true diagnosis. In our analysis, we explore the differences in informed-consent styles between patients who hold an "independent" and "interdependent" construal of the self and then highlight the possible implications maintained by this position in the context (...) of international clinical ethics. Finally, we discuss the need to reassess informed-consent styles suitable to the needs of each patient regardless of whether he or she resides in the United States or in Japan. (shrink)

In political philosophy, reflective equilibrium is a standard method used to systematically reconcile intuitive judgments with theoretical principles. In this paper, we propose that survey experiments and a model selection method—i.e., the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC)-based model selection method—can be viewed together as a methodological means of satisfying the epistemic desiderata implicit in reflective equilibrium. To show this, we conduct a survey experiment on two theories of distributive justice, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism. Our experimental test case and AIC-based model selection method (...) demonstrate that the refined sufficientarian principle, a widely accepted principle of distributive justice, is no more plausible than the prioritarian principle. This tells us that some changes of certain intuitions revolving around sufficientarianism should be examined (separately) based on the findings of the survey experiment and AIC model selection. This shows the potential of our approach—both practically and methodologically—as a novel way of applying reflective equilibrium in political philosophy. (shrink)

The pervasive use of distributional semantic models or word embeddings for both cognitive modeling and practical application is because of their remarkable ability to represent the meanings of words. However, relatively little effort has been made to explore what types of information are encoded in distributional word vectors. Knowing the internal knowledge embedded in word vectors is important for cognitive modeling using distributional semantic models. Therefore, in this paper, we attempt to identify the knowledge encoded in word vectors by conducting (...) a computational experiment using Binder et al.'s (2016) featural conceptual representations based on neurobiologically motivated attributes. In an experiment, these conceptual vectors are predicted from text‐based word vectors using a neural network and linear transformation, and prediction performance is compared among various types of information. The analysis demonstrates that abstract information is generally predicted more accurately by word vectors than perceptual and spatiotemporal information, and specifically, the prediction accuracy of cognitive and social information is higher. Emotional information is also found to be successfully predicted for abstract words. These results indicate that language can be a major source of knowledge about abstract attributes, and they support the recent view that emphasizes the importance of language for abstract concepts. Furthermore, we show that word vectors can capture some types of perceptual and spatiotemporal information about concrete concepts and some relevant word categories. This suggests that language statistics can encode more perceptual knowledge than often expected. (shrink)

In Japan, modern biomedical ethics emerged in the early 1980s. One of the main triggers was the nationwide debate on organ transplantation and brain death. A lengthy process of academic, religious, and political discussion concerning organ transplantation, lasting well over a few decades, resulted in the enactment of the Organ Transplantation Law in 1997.1 The defining of death and other bioethical issues, including death with dignity and euthanasia, were also stimulating topics throughout the latter end of the twentieth century. For (...) instance, the death-with-dignity movement, which started around the late 1960s, developed into a hospice/palliative-care movement by the end of the 1980s. (shrink)

This book provides a systematic exposition of mathematical economics, presenting and surveying existing theories and showing ways in which they can be extended. One of its strongest features is that it emphasises the unifying structure of economic theory in such a way as to provide the reader with the technical tools and methodological approaches necessary for undertaking original research. The author offers explanations and discussion at an accessible and intuitive level providing illustrative examples. He begins the work at an elementary (...) level and progessively takes the reader to the frontier of current research. This second edition brings the reader fully up to date with recent research in the field. (shrink)

Recent metaphor research has revealed that metaphor comprehension involves both categorization and comparison processes. This finding has triggered the following central question: Which property determines the choice between these two processes for metaphor comprehension? Three competing views have been proposed to answer this question: the conventionality view (Bowdle & Gentner, 2005), aptness view (Glucksberg & Haught, 2006b), and interpretive diversity view (Utsumi, 2007); these views, respectively, argue that vehicle conventionality, metaphor aptness, and interpretive diversity determine the choice between the categorization (...) and comparison processes. This article attempts to answer the question regarding which views are plausible by using cognitive modeling and computer simulation based on a semantic space model. In the simulation experiment, categorization and comparison processes are modeled in a semantic space constructed by latent semantic analysis. These two models receive word vectors for the constituent words of a metaphor and compute a vector for the metaphorical meaning. The resulting vectors can be evaluated according to the degree to which they mimic the human interpretation of the same metaphor; the maximum likelihood estimation determines which of the two models better explains the human interpretation. The result of the model selection is then predicted by three metaphor properties (i.e., vehicle conventionality, aptness, and interpretive diversity) to test the three views. The simulation experiment for Japanese metaphors demonstrates that both interpretive diversity and vehicle conventionality affect the choice between the two processes. On the other hand, it is found that metaphor aptness does not affect this choice. This result can be treated as computational evidence supporting the interpretive diversity and conventionality views. (shrink)

BackgroundMost medical schools in Japan have incorporated mandatory courses on medical ethics. To this date, however, there is no established means of evaluating medical ethics education in Japan. This study looks 1) To develop a brief, objective method of evaluation for moral sensitivity and reasoning; 2) To conduct a test battery for the PIT and the DIT on medical students who are either currently in school or who have recently graduated (residents); 3) To investigate changes in moral sensitivity and reasoning (...) between school years among medical students and residents.MethodsQuestionnaire survey: Two questionnaires were employed, the Problem Identification Test (PIT) for evaluation of moral sensitivity and a portion of the Defining Issues Test (DIT) for moral reasoning. Subjects consisted of 559 medical school students and 272 residents who recently graduated from the same medical school located in an urban area of Japan.ResultsPIT results showed an increase in moral sensitivity in 4th and 5th year students followed by a decrease in 6th year students and in residents. No change in moral development stage was observed. However, DIT results described a gradual rising shift in moral decision-making concerning euthanasia between school years. No valid correlation was observed between PIT and DIT questionnaires.ConclusionThis study's questionnaire survey, which incorporates both PIT and DIT, could be used as a brief and objective means of evaluating medical students' moral sensitivity and reasoning in Japan. (shrink)

Today Asia is attracting attention in the area of bioethics. In fact, the potential of bioethics is beginning to be discussed seriously at academic centers across Asia. In Japan, this discussion began a decade ago with the publication The book is one of the principal explorations of biomedical ethics involving Japan to date. Tom Beauchamp, an author of one of the book's chapters, compares Japanese and American standards of informed consent and refutes relativistic positions, concluding that.

In this article, we address the problem of how people understand predicative metaphors such as “The rumor flew through the office,” and argue that predicative metaphors are understood as indirect (or two-stage) categorizations. In the indirect categorization process, the verb (e.g., fly) of a predicative metaphor evokes an intermediate entity, which in turn evokes a metaphoric category of actions or states (e.g., “to spread rapidly and soon disappear”) to be attributed to the target noun (e.g., rumor), rather than directly evoking (...) a metaphoric category as argued by CitationGlucksberg's (2001) categorization theory. We test our argument using two experiments, namely, offline comprehension and online priming. The offline comprehension experiment showed that interpretation of predicative metaphors had greater overlap with words indirectly associated with the verb than those directly associated with the verb. The online priming experiment demonstrated that indirectly associated words were activated during predicative metaphor comprehension, but directly associated words were not. These results provide convergent evidence for our argument, and thus the psychological validity of two-stage categorization as a process of predicative metaphor comprehension was confirmed. (shrink)

In Japan, discussion concerning advance directives (ADs) has been on the rise during the past decade. ADs are one method proposed to facilitate the process of communication among patients, families and health care providers regarding the plan of care of a patient who is no longer capable of communicating. In this paper, we report the results of the first in-depth survey on the general population concerning the preferences and use of ADs in Japan. A self-administered questionnaire was sent via mail (...) to a stratified random sampling of 560 residents listed in the residential registry of one district of Tokyo, Japan (n = 165,567). Association between correlating factors and specific preferences toward ADs was assessed using contingency table bivariate analysis and multivariate regression model to estimate independent contribution. Of the 560 questionnaires sent out, a total of 425 participants took part in the survey yielding a response rate of 75.9 %. The results of the present study indicate that: 1) the most important components to be addressed are the specifics of medical treatment at the end of life stage and disclosure of diagnosis and prognosis; 2) the majority of participants found it suitable to express their directives by word to family and/or physician and not by written documentation; 3) there is no strong need for legal measures in setting up an AD; 4) it is permissible for family and physician to loosely interpret one's directives; 5) the most suitable proxy is considered to be a family member, relative, or spouse. Multivariate analysis found the following five factors as significantly associated with preferences: 1) awareness regarding living wills, 2) experience with the use of ADs, 3) preferences for end-of-life treatment, 4) preferences for information disclosure, and 5) intentions of creating a will. Written ADs might be useful in the Japanese setting when the individual either wishes: 1) to not provide a lot of leeway to surrogates and/or caregivers, and/or 2) to ensure his or her directives in the cases of terminal illness, brain death, and pain treatment, as well as regarding information disclosure. (shrink)

Interleukin 5 (IL‐5) is a kind of peptide hormone released from T lymphocytes of mammals infected with microorganisms or parasites. It is an acidic glycoprotein with a molecular mass of 40 to 50 kDa that consists of a homodimer of polypeptides. It controls hematopoiesis so that it increases natural immunity. In the mouse, IL‐5 acts on committed B cells to induce differentiation into Ig‐producing cells and on common progenitors for CD5+ pre‐B cells and CD5+ macrophages to support their survival. The (...) antibodies secreted by CD5+ B cells seem to be responsible for the primary protection against the infection with microorganisms or parasites. It also supports the growth and/or differentiation of eosinophil precursor and mature eosinophils, which can be effective for the removal of parasites in combination with the antibodies against them. Murine IL‐5 receptor (IL‐5R) consists of two different polypeptide chains; αL chain and β chain. The IL‐5R α chain is 60 kDa protein that binds IL‐5 with low affinity. The IL‐5R β chain is a 130 kDa protein which does not bind IL‐5 by itself but is necessary to form the high affinity IL‐5R. The β chain was identified by using one of the anti‐IL‐5R mAb and anti‐IL‐3R mAb as the IL‐3R homologue. This β chain is also used as the β chain of GM‐CSF receptor. This fact suggests that there is a common signaling mechanism among these cytokines and efficient cooperation among them. At the same time, these findings may explain the overlapping role of these cytokines in the development of granulocytes. (shrink)

We examined the ethical justification for a national policy governing public funding for the induced pluripotent stem cell stock project in Japan and argue that the initiation of the iPSC stock project in 2012, when no clinical trial using iPSC-derived products had yet succeeded, was premature and unethical. Our analysis considers a generally accepted justice criterion and shows it fails to justify public funding of the iPSC stock project. We also raise concerns related to the massive amounts of public funding (...) at stake and the absence of evidence supporting claimed success rates. We conclude that the iPSC stock project should be re-considered and deferred until a substantial number of clinical trials using iPSC-derived products are deemed successful. This analysis should benefit others worldwide as they consider their own public funding policies. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 370-394, September 2022.

It is often argued that relational egalitarianism has a fundamental problem with intergenerational justice when compared to other theories of justice such as utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and luck egalitarianism. Recently, Timothy Sommers argued that there is no such comparative disadvantage for relational egalitarianism. His argument is quite modest: it merely aims to reject the claim that there could be no way to extend relational egalitarianism to intergenerational justice. This may be called the ‘No Comparative Disadvantage Thesis’. The present article challenges Sommers’s (...) argument in two ways. First, I show that Sommers fails to provide a reasonable constraint on causal efficacy, which is crucial to his argument for our relation (not relationship) to future generations. Second, I show that the chain-relatedness problem casts a shadow over Sommers’s argument for the No Comparative Disadvantage Thesis. More specifically, compared to the other theories of justice, relational egalitarianism (as it stands) can less easily justify that present persons have duties to future others. This is because relational egalitarianism cannot appeal to a specific principle in regard to the duties in question, because its principle is sensitive to current context and practice. I conclude that the No Comparative Disadvantage Thesis does not hold much promise. (shrink)

Assessing learners’ individual differences helps identify students who need teacher support in classrooms. Previous studies have examined second language achievement based on reading anxiety because reading is an input-based activity essential for successful L2 learning. This study applied a latent rank model to identify L2 learners who are likely to be struggling or successful in classrooms according to their L2 reading anxiety symptoms. Moreover, a psychometric function was developed to determine the cutoff anxiety scores that discriminate against their substantial differences. (...) The model was applied to responses from the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale provided by 335 Japanese learners of English. The results showed that the FLRAS classified students into three ranked groups with ordinal information regarding L2 reading anxiety. Rank 1 exhibited good conditions in L2 reading anxiety. Rank 2 reported high anxiety toward unfamiliar grammar during L2 reading. Rank 3 had even higher anxiety levels, especially for vocabulary and grammatical knowledge deficits and reading difficulty. The cutoff anxiety scores estimated by the model detected students who failed their L2 class with 79% accuracy. Theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical issues in language anxiety were discussed in terms of diagnosis and different approaches to teaching L2 reading. (shrink)

of (from Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy).

This paper aims to specify the precise conditions under which an agent is responsible for inequalities. Admittedly, the careful examination of the conditions in question has been the main focus of contemporary egalitarianism. As a matter of fact, contemporary political philosophers take responsibility to be a core conception which in principle justifies inequalities. In particular, they tend to flesh out the conception of responsibility in terms of choice, in such a way that we should hold individuals responsible for chosen inequalities (...) but not for unchosen inequalities. This core idea is intuitively appealing because, on the one hand, alleviation of inequalities that people do not choose would thereby be encouraged, and on the other hand, it avoids an egalitarian ‘moral hazard’: the situation in which people need care nothing for the consequences (economic or otherwise) of their own choice. G. A. Cohen thus goes so far as to say that egalitarianism successfully incorporates “within it the most powerful idea in the arsenal of the anti-egalitarian right: the idea of choice and responsibility.”. (shrink)

Myhill-Shepherdson property in recursive function theory states that extensional effective program transformations determine continuous operations on partial functions. Case showed that this property fails to characterize acceptability of numberings of partial recursive functions. In this note we present a higher type analogue to Myhill-Shepherdson property. Our purpose is to show that higher type Myhill-Shepherdson property characterizes weak acceptability under a natural condition.

Every acceptable numbering of an effective domain is complete. Hence every effective domain admits the 2nd recursion theorem of Eršov[1]. On the other hand for every effective domain, the 1st recursion theorem holds. In this note, we establish that for effective domains, the 2nd recursion theorem is strictly more general than the 1st recursion theorem, a generalization of an important result in recursive function theory.

Background Ethics committees and their system of research protocol peer-review are currently used worldwide. To ensure an international standard for research ethics and safety, however, data is needed on the quality and function of each nation's ethics committees. The purpose of this study was to describe the characteristics and developments of ethics committees established at medical schools and general hospitals in Japan. Methods This study consisted of four national surveys sent twice over a period of eight years to two separate (...) samples. The first target was the ethics committees of all 80 medical schools and the second target was all general hospitals with over 300 beds in Japan (n = 1457 in 1996 and n = 1491 in 2002). Instruments contained four sections: (1) committee structure, (2) frequency of annual meetings, (3) committee function, and (4) existence of a set of guidelines for the refusal of blood transfusion by Jehovah's Witnesses. Results Committee structure was overall interdisciplinary. Frequency of annual meetings increased significantly for both medical school and hospital ethics committees over the eight years. The primary activities for medical school and hospital ethics committees were research protocol reviews and policy making. Results also showed a significant increase in the use of ethical guidelines, particularly those related to the refusal of blood transfusion by Jehovah's Witnesses, among both medical school and hospital ethics committees. Conclusion Overall findings indicated a greater recognized degree of responsibilities and an increase in workload for Japanese ethics committees. (shrink)