Cognitive control constrains retrieval processing and so restricts what comes to mind as input to the attribution system. We review evidence that older adults, patients with Alzheimer's disease, and people with traumatic brain injury exert less cognitive control during retrieval, and so are susceptible to memory misattributions in the form of dramatic levels of false remembering.

The value of any kind of data is greatly enhanced when it exists in a form that allows it to be integrated with other data. One approach to integration is through the annotation of multiple bodies of data using common controlled vocabularies or ‘ontologies’. Unfortunately, the very success of this approach has led to a proliferation of ontologies which itself creates obstacles to integration. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) consortium has set in train a strategy to overcome this problem. Existing (...) OBO ontologies, including the Gene Ontology, are undergoing a process of coordinated reform and new ontologies being created on the basis of an evolving set of shared principles governing ontology development. The result is an expanding family of ontologies designed to be interoperable, logically well-formed, and to incorporate accurate representations of biological reality. We describe the OBO Foundry initiative, and provide guidelines for those who might wish to become involved. (shrink)

A fundamental tenet of the process philosophy founded by alfred north whitehead and charles hartshorne is that god's causal agency in the world is solely "persuasive," in contradistinction to much of traditional christian theism which portrays a more "coercive" god. The article, However, Seeks to show that hartshorne's God would appear to be somewhat coercive, E.G., In the imposition of the natural laws which are the limits to creaturely freedom and in the "luring" of creaturely actualizations of novel possibilities within (...) those limits. Divine coercion seems to be both a fact and a necessity in hartshorne's metaphysics, Despite his explicit denials. (shrink)

Consent remains a crucial, yet challenging, cornerstone of clinical practice. The ethical, legal and professional understandings of this construct have evolved away from a doctor-centred act to a patient-centred process that encompasses the patient’s values, beliefs and goals. This alignment of consent with the philosophy of shared decision-making was affirmed in a recent high-profile Supreme Court ruling in England. The communication of information is central to this model of health care delivery but it can be difficult for doctors to gauge (...) the information needs of the individual patient. The aim of this paper is to describe ‘core information sets’ which are defined as a minimum set of consensus-derived information about a given procedure to be discussed with all patients. Importantly, they are intended to catalyse discussion of subjective importance to individuals. The model described in this paper applies health services research and Delphi consensus-building methods to an idea orginally proposed 30 years ago. The hypothesis is that, first, large amounts of potentially-important information are distilled down to discrete information domains. These are then, secondly, rated by key stakeholders in multiple iterations, so that core information of agreed importance can be defined. We argue that this scientific approach is key to identifying information important to all stakeholders, which may otherwise be communicated poorly or omitted from discussions entirely. Our methods apply systematic review, qualitative, survey and consensus-building techniques to define this ‘core information’. We propose that such information addresses the ‘reasonable patient’ standard for information disclosure but, more importantly, can serve as a spring board for high-value discussion of importance to the individual patient. The application of established research methods can define information of core importance to informed consent. Further work will establish how best to incorporate this model in routine practice. (shrink)

Since Hartshorne rejects Whitehead's doctrine of eternal objects, this seems to deny Hartshorne's God any causal influence via providing initial subjective aims to the world's creatures. If there are no specific eternal objects as possibilities to be actualized by creatures, there can be no specific initial aims. Hartshorne's metaphysics, however, can be rendered coherent at this point by interpreting the initial aims as hierarchies of indeterminate possibilities which are not specific until rendered so by creatures. Such an interpretation is coherent (...) with his doctrine of possibility understood as a hierarchy of indeterminate potentiality. A further issue remains, nevertheless, in regard to Hartshorne's claim that the possibilities offered by God to creatures are both infinite and yet limited. It is difficult to see how they can be both. (shrink)

Liberal political theory is widely believed to be an inadequate source of civic commitment and thus of civic education primarily because of its commitment to what is perceived as a pervasive individualism. In this paper, I explore the possibility that John Rawls’s later political philosophy may provide a response to this belief. I first articulate a conception of liberal politics derived from Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium that generates an overlapping consensus about political principles among those who hold a wide (...) variety of cultural and personal conceptions of the good. Next I develop the aims for civic education in a society that employs such a politics. Then I suggest the elements of the public school curriculum appropriate for such a civic education, including a robust multicultural education, intellectual reflection on the society’s history, and philosophical training that enables children to understand the events and policies of their nation as following from general political principles. I also consider the kinds of classroom practice that seem necessary to provide the motivation to engage in the process of the emergence of an overlapping consensus, including opportunities to develop and to reflect on the principles that may be included in the current consensus and to understand the way in which those principles relate to children’s developing conceptions of the good. Finally, I compare this conception of civic education to those of other liberal theorists. (shrink)

Barry L. Gan's Violence and Nonviolence: An Introduction introduces readers to myths about the violence taken for granted in our daily lives, and advocates for more principled, nonviolent action on moral, ethical and philosophical grounds.

Open Judaism is an invitation to the spiritually seeking Jew; a clarion call for a pluralistic, inclusive Judaism; and a dynamic comparison of the remarkably wide array of thought within Judaism today.

Language, like other human traits, could only have evolved during one or more stages of development. We enlist the theoretical framework of human life history to account for certain aspects of linguistic evolution, with special reference to initial phases in the process. It is hypothesized that selection operated at several developmental stages, the earlier ones producing new behaviors that were reinforced by additional, and possibly more powerful, forms of selection during later stages, especially adolescence and early adulthood. Peer commentaries have (...) provided opportunities to explain human life history more comprehensively, and to add details to our account of spoken language. We made no attempt to explain syntax in the target article, but we propose here that selection for “vocal plumage” may have increased our species’ capacity for utterance complexity, a development that would have benefited all levels of language. (shrink)

Educational opportunity has rarely been truly equal in any society, although modern societies have made enormous efforts to assure greater equality. Inequality in education is most often a consequence of existing social differences which structure opportunity. Those individuals with greater financial resources tend to have a wider range of educational choices and access to a higher standard of educational opportunities than those people with lesser financial means. This situation has become increasingly apparent in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. This (...) paper discusses those inevitable differences which have exacerbated inequality during this pandemic. Such inequities are examined internationally. (shrink)

Since the global political events of the early 1990’s Marxian philosophy has faced significant challenges. This essay attempts to reinterpret Marx’s theory of alienation in light of contemporary social issues. In particular, Marx claims that labor is alienated because workers lose control over the process of production, its outcomes and effects. In order to support my argument that alienation of labor is still a relevant concept to post-modem, post-industrial social critique, I examine the contemporary proliferation of credit (especially in the (...) form of credit cards) in the United States. I demonstrate that the preponderance and reliance on credit in American culture serves as an excellent example of Marxian alienation. (shrink)

Scholars studying the ethical, legal, and social issues associated with emerging technologies maintain the importance of considering these issues throughout the research and development cycle, even during the earliest stages of basic research. Embedding these considerations within the scientific process requires communication between ELSI scholars and the community of physical scientists who are conducting that basic research. We posit that this communication can be effective on a broad scale only if it links societal issues directly to characteristics of the emerging (...) technology that are relevant to the physical and natural scientists involved in research and development. In this article, we examine nano-ELSI literature from 2003 to 2010 to discern the degree to which it makes these types of explicit connections. We find that, while the literature identifies a wide range of issues of societal concern, it generally does so in a non-specific manner. It neither links societal issues to particular forms or characteristics of widely divergent nanotechnologies nor to any of the many potential uses to which those nanotechnologies may be put. We believe that these kinds of specificity are essential to those engaged in nano-scale research. We also compare the literature-based findings to observations from interviews we conducted with nanoscientists and conclude that ELSI scholars should add technical- and application-related forms of specificity to their work and their writings to enhance effectiveness and impact in communicating with one important target audience—members of the nanoscale science community. (shrink)

After decades of service to The Acorn, editor Barry Gan--who received the journal from founding editor Ha Poong Kim--has passed the responsibility along. We are happy to announce that the editorial and business office of The Acorn has found a new home at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of Texas State University. For more than a decade, The Acorn has been affiliated with a society that we have recently renamed the Gandhi, King, Chavez, Addams Society (GKCAS). The (...) new name adds Cesar Chavez and Jane Addams to the short list of role models that the society seeks to honor through scholarly study, but the short list is not intended to be exclusive. As a result of reorganization and transition we are adopting a new subtitle of the journal as follows, The Acorn: Philosophical Studies in Pacifism and Nonviolence. (shrink)

In The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler presents five key interventions to the field of nonviolence philosophy: (1) a critique of social contract theory for the way it imagines human beings as independent, (2) an approach to nonviolence based in the preservation of life within a context of social action, (3) the advancement of Butler’s alternative framework of equal grievability, (4) the claim that violence is difficult to define independently of social context, and (5) a Freudian analysis of the death (...) drive that offers a strategy for disrupting violence. In response to each of these interventions, this article argues that: (1) social contract theory is a heuristic for justifying the existence of a state, (2) Gandhi’s concept of truth provides a more comprehensive approach to nonviolence that concerns the whole self and all beings, (3) a concept of function would make a better guide to human responsibility, (4) violence can be defined independently of social framework, and (5) without reliance on the concept of a death drive, there are nonviolent remedies for social attitudes of aggression as found in the work of Jane Addams and William James. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to consider whether standards-based school reform is an acceptable strategy for achieving a politically legitimate school system according to a principle of personal liberty. First, it briefly describes the purpose and implementation of standards-based school reform in the U.S. It then considers the ramifications of the principle of personal liberty for the conduct of public schooling, arguing that it requires children’s access to and appreciation of a variety of liberty-consistent cultures in their society coupled (...) with the development of children’s ability to think critically about those cultures and their meaning as possibilities for their own lives. Third, it considers whether some standards for public education might be consistent with this purpose of education and finds that certain outcome and process standards may be appropriate. Finally, it considers whether these kinds of standards are included in standards-based reform as it is currently practiced or proposed in the U.S. and concludes that they are not. (shrink)