Who carries the burden of proof in analytic philosophical debates, and how can this burden be satisfied? As it turns out, the answer to this joint question yields a fundamental challenge to the very conduct of metaphysics in analytic philosophy. Empirical research presented in this book indicates that the vastly predominant goal pursued in analytic philosophical dialogues lies not in discovering truths or generating knowledge, but merely in prevailing over one’s opponents. Given this goal, the book examines how most effectively (...) to allocate and discharge the burden of proof. It focuses on premises that must prudently be avoided because a burden of proof on them could never be satisfied, and in particular discusses unsupportable bridge premises across inference barriers, like Hume’s barrier between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, or the barrier between the content of our talk or thought, and the world beyond such content. Employing this content/world barrier for a critical assessment of mainstream analytic philosophical methods, this book argues that we must prudently avoid invoking intuitions or other content of thought or talk in support of claims about the world beyond content, that is, metaphysically significant claims. Yet as content-located evidence is practically indispensable to metaphysical debates throughout analytic philosophy, from ethics to the philosophy of mathematics, this book reaches the startling conclusion that all such metaphysical debates must, prudently, be terminated. (shrink)

Both von Neumann and Wiener were outsiders to biology. Both were inspired by biology and both proposed models and generalizations that proved inspirational for biologists. Around the same time in the 1940s von Neumann developed the notion of self reproducing automata and Wiener suggested an explication of teleology using the notion of negative feedback. These efforts were similar in spirit. Both von Neumann and Wiener used mathematical ideas to attack foundational issues in biology, and the concepts they articulated had lasting (...) effect. But there were significant differences as well. Von Neumann presented a how-possibly model, which sparked interest by mathematicians and computer scientists, while Wiener collaborated more directly with biologists, and his proposal influenced the philosophy of biology. The two cases illustrate different strategies by which mathematicians, the “professional outsiders” of science, can choose to guide their engagement with biological questions and with the biological community, and illustrate different kinds of generalizations that mathematization can contribute to biology. The different strategies employed by von Neumann and Wiener and the types of models they constructed may have affected the fate of von Neumann’s and Wiener’s ideas – as well as the reputation, in biology, of von Neumann and Wiener themselves. (shrink)

The notion of structure of evolution is proposed to capture what it means to say that two situations exhibit the same or similar constellations of factors affecting evolution. The key features of holobiont evolution and the hologenome theory are used to define a holobiont structure of evolution. Finally, Cultural Group Selection, a set of hypotheses regarding the evolution of human cognition, is shown to match the holobiont structure closely though not perfectly.

In this illustrated choose-your-own-ending book, Margo must choose between cleaning her room or putting it off to do something fun. Readers make choices for Margo and read what happens next, with each story path leading to different consequences. Includes four different endings and discussion questions.

The poetry of Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass was called ôthe secular Scripture of the United Statesö by literary critic Harold Bloom, is a sublime source of contemporary inspiration.

The effects of psycholinguistic variables on reading development are critical to the evaluation of theories about the reading system. Although we know that the development of reading depends on both individual differences (endogenous) and item-level effects (exogenous), developmental research has focused mostly on average-level performance, ignoring individual differences. We investigated how the development of word recognition in Chinese children in both Chinese and English is affected by (a) item-level, exogenous effects (word frequency, radical consistency, and curricular grade level); (b) subject-level, (...) endogenous individual differences (orthographic awareness and phonological awareness); and (c) their interactive effect. We tested native Chinese (Putonghua)-speaking children (n = 763) in grades 1 to 6 with both Chinese character and English word identification (lexical) decision tasks. Our findings show that (a) there were effects of both word frequency and age of acquisition in both Chinese and English, but these item-level effects generally weakened with increasing age; (b) individual differences in phonological and orthographic awareness each contributed to successful performance; and (c) in Chinese, item-level effects were weaker for more proficient readers. We contend that our findings can be explained by theoretical models that incorporate cumulative learning as the basis for development of item-level effects in the reading system. (shrink)

Using information collected from a convenience sample of graduate and undergraduate students affiliated with a Midwestern university in the United States, this study determined the extent to which gender (defined as sex differences) is related to consumers' moral philosophies and ethical intentions. Multivariate and univariate results indicated that women were more inclined than men to utilize both consequence-based and rulebased moral philosophies in questionable consumption situations. In addition, women placed more importance on an overall moral philosophy than did men, and (...) women had higher intentions to behave ethically. The marketing and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and the limitations of the research are presented along with several suggestions for future inquiry, which could advance current understanding of consumer ethics. (shrink)

Using information collected from a convenience sample of graduate and undergraduate students affiliated with a Midwestern university in the United States, this study determined the extent to which gender is related to consumers’ moral philosophies and ethical intentions. Multivariate and univariate results indicated that women were more inclined than men to utilize both consequence-based and rule-based moral philosophies in questionable consumption situations. In addition, women placed more importance on an overall moral philosophy than did men, and women had higher intentions (...) to behave ethically. The marketing and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and the limitations of the research are presented along with several suggestions for future inquiry, which could advance current understanding of consumer ethics. (shrink)

Adaptive immunity provides the unique ability to respond to a nearly infinite range of antigenic determinants. Given the inherent plasticity of the adaptive immune system, a series of tolerance mechanisms exist to reduce reactivity toward self. While this reduces the probability of autoimmunity, it also creates an important gap in adaptive immunity: the ability to recognize microbes that look like self. As a variety of microbes decorate themselves in self‐like carbohydrate antigens and tolerance reduces the ability of adaptive immunity to (...) react with self‐like structures, protection against molecular mimicry likely resides within the innate arm of immunity. In this review, we will explore the potential consequences of microbial molecular mimicry, including factors within innate immunity that appear to specifically target microbes expressing self‐like antigens, and therefore provide protection against molecular mimicry. (shrink)

In this illustrated choose-your-own-ending picture book, Dahabo must decide whether to keep working on her science fair project or quit. Readers make choices for Dahabo and read what happens next, with each story path leading to different consequences. Includes four different endings and discussion questions.

We review three possible theoretical mechanisms for the placebo effect: conditioning, expectancy and endogenous opiates and consider the implications of the first two for clinical research and practice in the area of pain management. Methodological issues in the use of placebos as controls are discussed and include subtractive versus additive expectancy effects, no treatment controls, active placebo controls, the balanced placebo design, between- versus within-group designs, triple blind methodology and the double expectancy design. Therapeutically, the possibility of shaping negative placebo (...) responses through placebo sag, overservicing and the use of placebos on their own are explored. Suggestions for using conditioned placebos strategically in conjunction with nonplacebos are made and ways of maximizing the placebo component of nonplacebo treatments are examined. Finally, the importance of investigating the placebo effect in its own right is advocated in order to better understand the long-neglected psychological aspects of the therapeutic transaction. (shrink)

In a digital era that neglects handwriting, the current study is significant because it examines the mechanisms underlying this process. We recruited 9- to 10-year-old Chinese children, who were at an important period of handwriting development, and adult college students, for both behavioral and electroencephalogram experiments. We designed four learning conditions: handwriting Chinese, viewing Chinese, drawing shapes followed by Chinese recognition, and drawing shapes followed by English recognition. Both behavioral and EEG results showed that HC facilitated visual word recognition compared (...) to VC, and behavioral results showed that HC facilitated visual word recognition compared to drawing shapes. HC and VC resulted in a lateralization of the N170 in adults, but not in children. Taken together, the results of the study suggest benefits of handwriting on the neural processing and behavioral performance in response to Chinese characters. The study results argue for maintaining handwriting practices to promote the perception of visual word forms in the digital age. (shrink)

Signed utterances are densely packed with pointing signs, reaching a frequency of one in six signs in spontaneous conversations . These pointing signs attain a wide range of functions and are formally highly diversified. Based on corpus analysis of spontaneous pointing signs in Kata Kolok, a rural signing variety of Bali, this paper argues that the full meaning potentials of pointing signs come about through the integration of a varied set of linguistic and extralinguistic cues. Taking this hybrid nature of (...) pointing phenomena into account, it is argued that pointing signs may become an intrinsic aspect of sign language grammars through two mechanisms: morphemization and syntactic integration. Although not entailed in this research, this approach could implicate that some highly systematized pointing systems of speaking communities may to a degree be grammatical as well. (shrink)

Dialogical egalitarianism is the thesis that any proposition asserted in dialogue, if questioned, must be supported or else retracted. Dialogical foundationalism is the thesis that some propositions are privileged over this burden of proof, standing in no need of support unless and until support for their negation is provided. I first discuss existing arguments for either thesis, dismissing each one of them. Absent a successful principled argument, I then examine which thesis it is pragmatically more advantageous to adopt in analytic (...) philosophical dialogue. This requires identifying the goal of such dialogue, to the attainment of which the thesis would be so advantageous. To identify this goal, I draw on Douglas Walton’s typology of dialogues for an analysis of the types of dialogue of 110 representatively selected journal articles in current analytic philosophy. 95% of articles are found to instantiate persuasion dialogue. In light of the thus prevalent goal of persuading one’s opponent, I argue that the adoption of dialogical egalitarianism in analytic philosophical dialogue is pragmatically inescapable. (shrink)

We examined participants' reading and recall of informed consent documents presented via paper or computer. Within each presentation medium, we presented the document as a continuous or paginated document to simulate common computer and paper presentation formats. Participants took slightly longer to read paginated and computer informed consent documents and recalled slightly more information from the paginated documents. We concluded that obtaining informed consent online is not substantially different than obtaining it via paper presentation. We also provide suggestions for improving (...) informed consent-in both face-to-face and online experiments. (shrink)

There has been neglect of systematic conceptual development and empirical investigation within consumer ethics. Scenarios have been a long-standing tool yet their development has been haphazard with little theory guiding their development. This research answers four questions relative to this gap: Do different scenario decision frames encourage different moral reasoning styles? Does the way in which framing effects are measured make a difference in the measurement of the relationship between moral reasoning and judgment by gender? Are true framing effects likely (...) to vary with the situation? and Are true framing effects likely to vary by gender? The conclusions reached were that (1) different scenario frames encourage both types of reasoning, but rule based moral reasoning is dominant regardless of frame, (2) accounting for formal equivalency in the measurement of true framing effects is likely to enhance the interpretation of studies in moral reasoning and judgment, (3) True framing effects are more likely to occur in situations with low to moderate perceived ethicality, and (4) true framing effects are not likely to vary by gender. Explanations as to why these results occurred are discussed. (shrink)

Accounts of deep disagreements can generally be categorized as optimistic or pessimistic. Pessimistic interpretations insist that the depth of deep disagreements precludes the possibility of rational resolution altogether, while optimistic variations maintain the contrary. Despite both approaches’ respective positions, they nevertheless often, either explicitly or implicitly, agree on the underlying assumption that argumentation offers the only possible rational resolution to deep disagreements. This paper challenges that idea by, first, diagnosing this argument-only model of arriving at rational resolutions, second, articulating a (...) competing but undertheorized Hegelian-informed approach, and third, attending briefly to some of the challenges of such an approach. (shrink)

On the traditional view, moral distress arises only in cases where an individual believes she knows the morally right thing to do but fails to perform that action due to various constraints. We seek to motivate a broader understanding of moral distress. We begin by presenting six types of distress that fall outside the bounds of the traditional definition and explaining why they should be recognized as forms of moral distress. We then propose and defend a new and more expansive (...) definition of moral distress and examine how it can enable the development of a taxonomy of moral distress. (shrink)

Connie Wang ABSTRACT: Accounts of deep disagreements can generally be categorized as optimistic or pessimistic. Pessimistic interpretations insist that the depth of deep disagreements precludes the possibility of rational resolution altogether, while optimistic variations maintain the contrary. Despite both approaches’ respective positions, they nevertheless often, either explicitly or implicitly, agree on the underlying assumption that...

Adapter molecules in a variety of signal transduction systems link receptors to a limited number of commonly used downstream signaling pathways. During T‐cell development and mature T‐cell effector function, a multichain receptor (the pre‐T‐cell antigen receptor or the T‐cell antigen receptor) activates several protein tyrosine kinases. Receptor and kinase activation is linked to distal signaling pathways (PLC‐γ1 activation, Ca2+ influx, PKC activation and Ras/Erk activation) via the adapter protein LAT (Linker for Activation of T cells). Structure/function studies of LAT including (...) expression of selected LAT point mutations in vivo reveals that these multiple pathways are integrated at the level of the LAT adapter. These studies suggest that similar levels of control may be found in other systems where adapter molecules are known to have important functions. BioEssays 26:61–67, 2004. Published 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The goal of the current study is to investigate the effects of the distractive textual information on the activation of predictive inference online, and how the readers with high or low working memory capacity differ in their online activation and text memory. To test the two hypothesis of attentional competition and semantic integration, we conducted three experiments to investigate whether a local prediction and a global prediction, both of which could be derived from the description of a critical event, are (...) generated in the mind of the reader, and how this generation process is influenced by contextual and cognitive factors of the reader. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 suggest that the elaboration of the global aspects in the narrative reduces the local prediction, but makes the global prediction more salient to occur. The evidence from Experiment 3 confirms the hypothesis that even automatic processes are constrained by distant contextual factors, in combination with differences in working memory, and examines how referentially local and global predictions are intertwined in text comprehension. Overall, these data support the immediate integration hypothesis across sentence boundaries at different representation levels, as well as interaction assumptions of different processing levels within referentially local and referentially global processing contexts. (shrink)

The single greatest challenge facing managers in the developed countries of the world is to raise the productivity of knowledge and service workers. This challenge, which will dominate the management agenda for the next several decades, will ultimately determine the competitive performance of companies. Even more important, it will determine the very fabric of society and the quality of life of every industrialized nation. … Unless this challenge is met, the developed world will face increasing social tensions, increasing polarization, increasing (...) radicalization, possibly even class war. (shrink)

I end with another parable, but it is also a true story. Harvey Gushing, the famous surgeon after whom the Gushing Lectures are named, made an international reputation in his allegiance to quality. He badgered his profession to a higher standard of self-effacement and railed against the debasement of clinical skills and overemphasis on research and pursuit of personal gain. We honor him to this day because those were, and remain, important points. Yet, Harvey Gushing served as a surgeon during (...) World War I and at Ypres. Although the Allied mortality was as much as 50,000 soldiers a day, not counting the wounded, Gushing refused to operate on any more than two patients each day, arguing that to do so would have lowered his standard of care for his patients a – standard that made sense in one time but that became strikingly insensitive, and I suggest even unethical, in another when confronted with a different reality. (shrink)

On elective students may not always be clear about safeguarding themselves and others. It is important that placements are safe, and ethically grounded. A concern for medical schools is equipping their students for exposure to and response to uncomfortable and/or unfamiliar requests in locations away from home, where their comfort and safety, or that of the patient, may be compromised. This can require legal, ethical, and/or moral reasoning on the part of the student. The goal of this article is to (...) establish what students actually encounter on elective, to inform better preparing students for safe and ethical medical placements. We discuss the implications of our findings, which are arguably applicable to other areas of graduate training, e.g. first medical roles post-qualification. An anonymised survey exploring clinical and ethical dilemmas on elective was issued across 3 years of returning final year elective medical students. Questions included the prevalence and type of potentially unsafe scenarios encountered, barriers to saying ‘no’ in unsafe situations, perceived differences between resource poor and developed world settings and the degree to which students refused or consented to participation in events outside of the ‘norms’ of their own training experience. Three hundred seventy-nine students participated. 45% were asked to do something “not permissible” at home. 27% were asked to do something they felt “uncomfortable” with, often an invasive clinical task. Half asked to do something not usually permissible were “comfortable”. 48% felt it more acceptable to bypass guidelines in developing settings. 27% refused an offer outside their experience. Of interest are reasons for “going along with” uncomfortable invitations, e.g. “emergency”, self-belief in ‘capability’ and being ‘more qualified’ than host-personnel. This “best pair of hands available” merits scrutiny. Adverse scenarios were not exclusive to developing settings. We discuss preparing students for decision-making in new contexts, and address whether ‘home’ processes are too inflexible to prepare students for ‘real’ medical life? Ethical decision-making and communicating reluctance should be included in elective preparation. (shrink)

Proponents of numerous recent theories of a person's good hold that a plausible account of the good for a person must satisfy existence internalism. Yet little direct defense has been given for this position. I argue that the principal intuition behind internalism supports a stronger version of the thesis than it might appear--one that effects a "double link" to motivation. I then identify and develop the main arguments that have been or might be given in support of internalism about a (...) person's good, showing how these arguments support this stronger version of internalism. (shrink)

The literature regarding social and environmental sustainability of business focuses primarily on rationales for adopting sustainability strategies and operational practices in support of that goal. In contrast, we examine sustainability from a perspective that has received far less research attention—attitudes that inform managerial decision-making. We develop a conceptual model that identifies six elemental categories of attitudes that can be held independently or aggregated to yield a meta-attitude representing the legitimacy of sustainability. Our model distinguishes among three types of internally held (...) attitudes and externally perceived subjective norms: pragmatic, moral, and cognitive. We propose a refinement of Ajzen's (In: Kuhl J, Beckmann J (eds) Action control: from cognition to behavior, 1985; Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 50:179-211, 1991) Theory of planned behavior (TPB) that incorporates these sub-categories of personal attitudes and subjective norms. Practical implications are discussed including how organizations considering adopting sustainability programs might use the model as a conceptual tool to help achieve and assess program success. (shrink)