Aurora P. Jackson and Richard Scheines. Single Mother's Efficacy, Parenting in the Home Environment, and Children's Development in a Two-Wave Study.

Research on ethical, legal and social aspects of life sciences and new technologies has mainly been focused on impacts and consequences, while the emerging framework of Responsible Research and Innovation focuses rather on increased involvement and reflexivity in research processes to foster science and technology that better answers the needs of society. I argue that philosophy of science should be a central feature of RRI and demonstrate how the philosophy of science can contribute in this sense. I show how investigating (...) basic assumptions in research, here exemplified by reductive assumptions in causal modeling, can have important ethical and societal implications. (shrink)

Lynch et al. (Biol Philos 34:62, 2019) employ stability, specificity, and proportionality as criteria for evaluating microbiome causal explanations. Although these causal characteristics signify relevant differences between causal roles, I suggest that they should not be used as general criteria for strong or good causal explanations.

The method in human genetics of ascribing causal responsibility to genotype by the use of heritability estimates has been heavily criticized over the years. It has been argued that these estimates are rarely valid and do not serve the purpose of tracing genetic causes. Recent contributions strike back at this criticism. I present and discuss two opposing views on these matters represented by Richard Lewontin and Neven Sesardic, and I suggest that some of the disagreement is based on differing concepts (...) of genetic causation. I use the distinction of structuring and triggering causes to help clarifying the basis for the opposing views. (shrink)

Synthetic biology research is often described in terms of programming cells through the introduction of synthetic genes. Genetic material is seemingly attributed with a high level of causal responsibility. We discuss genetic causation in synthetic biology and distinguish three gene concepts differing in their assumptions of genetic control. We argue that synthetic biology generally employs a difference-making approach to establishing genetic causes, and that this approach does not commit to a specific notion of genetic program or genetic control. Still, we (...) suggest that a strong program concept of genetic material can be used as a successful heuristic in certain areas of synthetic biology. Its application requires control of causal context, and may stand in need of a modular decomposition of the target system. We relate different modularity concepts to the discussion of genetic causation and point to possible advantages of and important limitations to seeking modularity in synthetic biology systems. (shrink)

(2002). Missing twins. Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 13-17.

The phenomenon of cheating in higher education is of overwhelming importance in that the students engaging in these acts are unlikely to have the skills necessary for their future professional life. Despite its relevance, the empirical evaluation of cheating in universities has been almost exclusively focused on the US context. Little is known about cheating at the European level, let alone in Portugal. Even less is explored at the regional level. In this paper we present evidence on the perception of (...) cheating by Portuguese undergraduate students of economics/business degrees. We undertake a large-scale survey, involving 2675 students from all Portuguese mainland public universities. We found that copying-favourable environments are associated with a higher propensity to cheat. Moreover, in universities where ‘codes of honour’ exist, this propensity tends to be lower. Finally, the propensity to copy seems to be highly influenced by the cultural systems and socially-related factors of different regions. (shrink)

A wide range of gene knockout experiments shows that functional stability is an important feature of biological systems. On this backdrop, we present an argument for higher‐level causation based on counterfactual dependence. Furthermore, we sketch a metaphysical picture providing resources to explain the metaphysical nature of functional stability, higher‐level causation, and the relevant notion of levels. Our account aims to clarify the role empirical results and philosophical assumptions should play in debates about reductionism and higher‐level causation. It thereby contributes to (...) the development of a philosophical foundation for systems biology. †To contact the authors, please write to: CSMN/IFIKK, University of Oslo, Box 1020 Blindern, N‐0315, Oslo, Norway; e‐mail: [email protected] , gry.oftedal@ifikk.uio.no. (shrink)

Therapeutic alliance is a central concept in psychotherapeutic work. The relationship between the therapist and the patient plays an important role in the therapeutic process and outcome. In this article, we investigate how therapists work with disaffiliation resulting from enduring disagreement while maintaining an orientation to the psychotherapeutic project at hand. Data come from a total of 18 sessions of two dyads undergoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy and is analyzed with conversation analysis. We found that collaborative moves deployed amidst enduring disagreement can (...) assist the therapist in furthering the disagreement as part of the ongoing psychotherapeutic project. Relying on their collaborative format, therapists utilize collaborative moves to temporarily mend the disaffiliation without necessarily changing their position and re-affiliating with the patient. We show how the relation between the therapist and the patient gets transformed in the moment-by-moment work accomplished in the psychotherapeutic talk. (shrink)

Dans cet article, je soutiens que les métaphores « missile » et « ciblage » dans la recherche sur les médicaments à base de nanoparticules jouent différents rôles. Je soutiens que le « missile » joue un rôle scientifique marginal et un rôle plus central dans la communication, tandis que le « ciblage» est devenu une métaphore organisatrice dans le domaine de la recherche. La raison, je le suggère, est que le ciblage est l’explanandum principal du domaine et que cette (...) métaphore continue d’être pertinente même lorsque la nanomédecine mûrit pour s’attaquer à des problèmes plus complexes. Enfin, je discute des suggestions récentes de nouvelles métaphores axées sur la complexité, et je suggère que le rôle significatif des modèles simplificateurs et le besoin réel de tels modèles peuvent expliquer pourquoi les métaphores de complexité n’ont pas retenu l’attention des chercheurs. (shrink)

Dans cet article, je soutiens que les métaphores « missile » et « ciblage » dans la recherche sur les médicaments à base de nanoparticules jouent différents rôles. Je soutiens que le « missile » joue un rôle scientifique marginal et un rôle plus central dans la communication, tandis que le « ciblage» est devenu une métaphore organisatrice dans le domaine de la recherche. La raison, je le suggère, est que le ciblage est l’explanandum principal du domaine et que cette (...) métaphore continue d’être pertinente même lorsque la nanomédecine mûrit pour s’attaquer à des problèmes plus complexes. Enfin, je discute des suggestions récentes de nouvelles métaphores axées sur la complexité, et je suggère que le rôle significatif des modèles simplificateurs et le besoin réel de tels modèles peuvent expliquer pourquoi les métaphores de complexité n’ont pas retenu l’attention des chercheurs. (shrink)

Dans cet article, je soutiens que les métaphores « missile » et « ciblage » dans la recherche sur les médicaments à base de nanoparticules jouent différents rôles. Je soutiens que le « missile » joue un rôle scientifique marginal et un rôle plus central dans la communication, tandis que le « ciblage» est devenu une métaphore organisatrice dans le domaine de la recherche. La raison, je le suggère, est que le ciblage est l’explanandum principal du domaine et que cette (...) métaphore continue d’être pertinente même lorsque la nanomédecine mûrit pour s’attaquer à des problèmes plus complexes. Enfin, je discute des suggestions récentes de nouvelles métaphores axées sur la complexité, et je suggère que le rôle significatif des modèles simplificateurs et le besoin réel de tels modèles peuvent expliquer pourquoi les métaphores de complexité n’ont pas retenu l’attention des chercheurs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reclaiming the Works of Early Modern Women Authorship, Gender, and Interpretation in the Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames de ce temps (1635)1Aurora Wolfgang (bio) and Sharon Diane Nell (bio)Reclaiming the forgotten texts of women writers has been a major feminist undertaking of the last half-century. Indeed, believing in the importance of this sort of work, we have each spent much of our careers studying the women writers absent (...) from our own graduate-school education. What follows, however, is a cautionary tale about discovery and reclamation: first, our discovery of what we thought was a hitherto-neglected text by eminent seventeenth-century writer Madeleine de Scudéry—her Lettres amoureuses de divers auteurs de ce temps (1641); second, our discovery that the text was not (even as indexed in Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History microfilm collection) authored by Scudéry but was written instead by a Franciscan priest, Jacques Du Bosc. Clearly, our second discovery pointed out both our own rush to judgment as well as that of other literary scholars interested in the tenuous project of historical reclamation. In this essay, we seek to explore the implications of attribution and authorship for our cautionary tale. Does the fact that a work is not Scudéry’s Lettres amoureuses but instead Du Bosc’s Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames de ce temps (1635) diminish its importance to the history of women’s letters?The First DiscoveryWe became interested in Scudéry’s Lettres amoureuses because of a brief description of the text in Joan DeJean’s Tender Geographies, a pioneering study of women novelists of the seventeenth century. DeJean describes a one-volume work that constituted the first publication of one of the most important writers of the seventeenth century, Madeleine de Scudéry. This work was a reversal of and “forceful response to” the so-called Ovidian model of epistolary fiction in which a “seduced and abandoned” woman complains in letter form about the infidelity of her male lover. In Scudéry’s text, however, men wrote long letters complaining about the women who did not reciprocate their love (DeJean, Tender Geographies 79).We obtained a copy of the Lettres amoureuses from the Women’s History microfilm collection, which was created in the 1970s (published 1983) in order to make available [End Page 1] an extensive array of texts and documents relating to women’s lives. We were surprised to see that all of the letters in the Lettres amoureuses were written by women—not men. Moreover, most of the letters were written by women to other women. No letters by men were included at all. Our copy of Lettres amoureuses contained letters and responses written between women, meant to show the excellence of women’s writing skill. The letters discussed and debated a wide variety of topics of interest to seventeenth-century French women; more strikingly, however, they reflected a close-knit homosocial world of women who openly expressed love, devotion, desire, and longing for each other’s company.Given the differences between our copy of Lettres amoureuses and the text described by DeJean, we wondered if we were looking at the same book. Was our collection the one to which DeJean referred? Yes and no. In another DeJean article about the Lettres amoureuses, we discovered that DeJean had used a particular copy of the text, one found in the holdings of Harvard’s Houghton Library. Upon first obtaining a microfilm copy of the Houghton volume, and later examining the physical book itself in Houghton’s rare books room, we saw that it (unlike our own copy) did indeed contain only letters by men who complain about their female beloveds. At this point, we thought we had discovered a second volume to Scudéry’s work: it seemed clear to us that the Lettres amoureuses had been halved at some point in the last several centuries and that we had a chance to reunite the volumes. After all, the preface in the Houghton volume tells the reader, “Si vous receuez fauorablement ce volume, ie vous en prepare un second” [“If you receive this volume favorably, I will prepare a second one... (shrink)

This book examines the controversies surrounding biomedical research in the twenty-first century from a human rights perspective, analyzing the evolution and ...

In appearance, Husserl’s writings seem not to have had any influence on linguistic research, nor does what the German philosopher wrote about language seem to be worth a place in the history of linguistics. The purpose of the paper is exactly to contrast this view, by reassessing both the position and the role of Husserl’s early masterpiece — the Logical Investigations — within the history of linguistics. To this end, I will focus mainly on the third (On the theory of (...) wholes and parts) and fourth (The distinction between independent and non-independent meanings) Investigations, paying special attention to Husserl’s mereology and to the idea of a general pure grammar. The paper tries to situate the third and fourth Logical Investigation within the general context of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century linguistics and furthermore attempts to show the historical and theoretical importance of the Logical Investigations for the birth and the development of one of the most important linguistic “schools” of the twentieth century, namely structural linguistics. (shrink)

Causal selection and priority are at the heart of discussions of the causal parity thesis, which says that all causes of a given effect are on a par, and that any justified priority assigned to a given cause results from causal explanatory interests. In theories of causation that provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of causal claims, status as cause is an either/or issue: either a given cause satisfies the conditions or it does not. Consequently, assessments of causal (...) parity and priority require more resources, which can either be additional or part of the causal analysis itself. While adding resources in terms of a theory of causal explanation has been standard, here we develop a unified conceptual analysis that includes a range of different precise causal concepts that allows for assessments of causal priority in terms of different kinds of causal relevance. (shrink)

The paper’s purpose consists in pointing out the importance of the notion of “territory”, in its different accepted meanings, for the development of a theory and a practice of subjectivity both in deleuzean and canettian thought. Even though they start from very different perspectives and epistemic levels, they indeed produce similar philosophical effects, which strengthen their “common” view and the model of subjectivity they try to shape. More precisely, the paper focuses on the deleuzean triad of territorialisation, deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation, with (...) regard to the role it plays in the forming of the subject and in connection with the fundamental deleuzean notion of difference; it furthermore concentrates on the characterization of the notion of territory in Canetti’s work, also in the light of the mentioned deleuzean categories and with reference to the crucial canettian concept of transformation. Finally, the paper analyses both the political consequences of the “nomadic subjectivity” Deleuze and Canetti deal with and the critical and problematic aspects it involves. (shrink)

This particular roundtable falls at the end of a four-year networking project (COST Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’) and reflects upon the genealogies of new materialism and how these flow into the individual working practices of participants. The texts below were contributed remotely via email by members of the group, following face-to-face meetings in Barcelona, Maribor, Warsaw, Liverpool, Paris and Utrecht. Authors were unaware of each other’s responses and in this way the (...) dialogue has unfolded a little like a game of Exquisite Corpse or Consequences, with questions acting like a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Accordingly, the text is the product of a partially bounded experimental system ‘designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able to clearly ask’ (Rheinberger 1997: 28). Thus, it both ruminates upon work to date and is intended to generate novel responses from authors and readers alike. (shrink)

In many biological experiments, due to gene-redundancy or distributed backup mechanisms, there are no visible effects on the functionality of the organism when a gene is knocked out or down. In such cases there is apparently no counterfactual dependence between the gene and the phenotype in question, although intuitively the gene is causally relevant. Due to relativity of causal relations to causal models, we suggest that such cases can be handled by changing the resolution of the causal model that represents (...) the system. By decreasing the resolution of our causal model, counterfactual dependencies can be established at a higher level of abstraction. By increasing the resolution, stepwise causal dependencies of the right kind can serve as a sufficient condition for causal relevance. Finally, we discuss how introducing a temporal dimension in causal models can account for causation in cases of non-modular systems dynamics. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to show the relevancy of Aron Gurwitsch’s transcendental-phenomenological theory of the field of consciousness for semiotics and the theory of meaning. After a brief biographical introduction, the paper will focus upon the key theoretical points that define Gurwitsch’s theory of the field of consciousness and will consider some of Gurwitsch’s reflections on linguistic and semiotic issues. Finally, it will be shown that the latter are strictly connected with Gurwitsch’s general philosophical framework and, accordingly, that (...) it is possible (and fruitful) to provide a semiotic understanding of Gurwitsch’s phenomenology. (shrink)

The paper argues that ecology should not be understood as a sectoral issue, i.e. as the object of specific scientific disciplines such as environmental sociology, geology or biology; on the contrary, it is by very nature that ecology should be regarded as a large-scale matter consisting first and foremost in philosophical and political questions. It is the paper’s main objective to claim that there is no way out from the ecological crisis without a critical reconsideration of the dominant socio-economic structures (...) and of the cultural and philosophical background underpinning them. To this end, the present paper resorts to the concept of “social metabolism”. By applying it to various “immaterial elements”, and notably to philosophical systems, the essay investigates their ecological impact. As the paper aims to show, the metabolic analysis of the philosophical system implies adopting and advocating for a renewed transcendental approach. (shrink)

There are very few (published) accounts of editorial misconduct, and those that do exist are almost exclusively focused on medicine-related areas. In the present article we detail a case of editorial misconduct in a rather underexplored domain, the social sciences. This case demonstrates that although legal systems provide different instruments of protection to avoid, compensate for, and punish misconduct on the part of journal editors, the social and economic power unbalance between authors and publishers suggests the importance of alternative solutions (...) before or instead of bringing a lawsuit to court. It puts forward strong arguments in favour of the need for effective regulatory bodies so as to achieve and maintain a culture of research integrity by all involved in the process. (shrink)

En este artículo se da noticia de la existencia de un opúsculo gramatical anónimo en los fondos árabes de la Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial; sobre el citado opúsculo no hay información en los catálogos que hicieron tanto M. Casiri como H. Derenbourg. Esta omisión queda subsanada con esta publicación, en la que se presenta la descripción codicológica del manuscrito, contenido y diversas particularidades del mismo.