v. 1. The beginnings of philosophy.--v. 2. The Eleatics and pluralists.

Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in nature and thus analogous to the truth operators of formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives and their negations: conjunction _and_ and (inclusive) disjunction _or_. Linguistic connectives exhibit a truth-conditional component as part of their meaning (their semantics), but their use in context can give rise to various implicatures and presuppositions (the domain of pragmatics) as well as to inferences that go beyond semantic/pragmatic properties (...) (the result of reasoning processes). We provide a comprehensive review of the role of the logical connectives in language and argue that three sets of factors—semantic, pragmatic, and those related to reasoning—are separate and separable, though some details may differ cross-linguistically. As a way to showcase the argument, we present two experiments in language comprehension in Spanish wherein pragmatic content was minimised and reasoning processes neutered, thus potentially highlighting what might be the default meanings of the connectives under study. In Experiment 1 we show that the conjunctive reading of inclusive disjunction is available in positive contexts other than in syntactically intricate cases such as downward entailing and free choice contexts, contrary to what has been claimed in the literature. In Experiment 2 we show that negated conjunctions and disjunctions in Spanish can easily receive the same interpretation when contrasted against the same context and, moreover, that these interpretations match those available in English, despite claims from the literature that linguistic connectives and local negation interact differently in English and Romance languages. (shrink)

The diploblastic Cnidaria form one of the most ancient metazoan phyla and thus provide a useful outgroup for comparative studies of the molecular control of development in the more complex, and more often studied, triploblasts. Among cnidarians, the reef building coral Acropora is a particularly appropriate choice for study. Acropora belongs to the Anthozoa, which several lines of evidence now indicate is the basal class within the phylum Cnidaria, and has the practical advantages that its reproduction is predictable, external and (...) accessible and that the base content of its genome is not strongly biased. The Acropora system has already provided insights into ancestral linkages of homeobox genes and the evolution of the Pax genes, and has the potential to provide further new perspectives on the age, role in development, and evolution of these and other gene families. BioEssays 22:291–296, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages have typically lexicalised only two of the possible 16 binary connectives from formal logic to express compound thoughts—namely, the coordinatorsandandor—some of the remainder appear to be entertainable in a non-verbal, conceptual representational system—alanguage of thought—and this suggests a theoretical split between the “lexicalisation” of the connectives and the (...) “learnability” of invented words corresponding to unlexicalised connectives. In avisual worldexperiment aimed at tracking comprehension-related as well as reasoning-related aspects of the capacity to represent compound thoughts, we found that participants are capable of learning and interpreting a made-up word standing for logic's NAND operator, a result that indicates that unlexicalised logical connectives are not only conceptually available, but can also be mapped onto new function words, as in the case of coordinators, or connectives, a class of words that do not usually admit new coinages. (shrink)

Regulation of the cytoplasmic stability of mRNAs has recetly been identified as a major control mechanism which governs mRNA levels in a variety of eukaryotic systems. In this review we discuss what is known about several experimental systems that exhibit regulated mRNA stability, describe the mechanisms that cells may use to achieve control of mRNA degradation, and suggest areas of future investigation likely to provide new insights into this process.

This paper argues that the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) policy for health and wellness apps is ethically problematic. Currently, the FDA does not regulate health and wellness apps that are not intended for medical use. As a result of this hands‐off policy, preventing harm to consumers is left primarily to developers and app marketplaces. We argue that the FDA’s duties to prevent harm and maintain accountability to the American public require that they play a much stronger role. We also (...) discuss concerns about efficiency and fostering innovation, and argue that while they should help shape FDA regulation of health and wellness apps, they do not justify complete absence of FDA involvement. -/- . (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus is a clinically effective tool for treating medically refractory Parkinson’s disease, but its neural mechanisms remain debated. Previous work has demonstrated that STN DBS results in evoked potentials in the primary motor cortex, suggesting that modulation of cortical physiology may be involved in its therapeutic effects. Due to technical challenges presented by high-amplitude DBS artifacts, these EPs are often measured in response to low-frequency stimulation, which is generally ineffective at PD symptom management. This (...) study aims to characterize STN-to-cortex EPs seen during clinically relevant high-frequency STN DBS for PD. Intraoperatively, we applied STN DBS to 6 PD patients while recording electrocorticography from an electrode strip over the ipsilateral central sulcus. Using recently published techniques, we removed large stimulation artifacts to enable quantification of STN-to-cortex EPs. Two cortical EPs were observed – one synchronized with DBS onset and persisting during ongoing stimulation, and one immediately following DBS offset, here termed the “start” and the “end” EPs respectively. The start EP is, to our knowledge, the first long-latency cortical EP reported during ongoing high-frequency DBS. The start and end EPs differ in magnitude and latency, and the end, but not the start, EP magnitude has a significant relationship to ongoing high gamma power during the EP. These contrasts may suggest mechanistic or circuit differences in EP production during the two time periods. This represents a potential framework for relating DBS clinical efficacy to the effects of a variety of stimulation parameters on EPs. (shrink)

Recognition that biological systems are stabilized far from equilibrium by self-organizing, informed, autocatalytic cycles and structures that dissipate unusable energy and matter has led to recent attempts to reformulate evolutionary theory. We hold that such insights are consistent with the broad development of the Darwinian Tradition and with the concept of natural selection. Biological systems are selected that re not only more efficient than competitors but also enhance the integrity of the web of energetic relations in which they are embedded. (...) But the expansion of the informational phase space, upon which selection acts, is also guaranteed by the properties of open informational-energetic systems. This provides a directionality and irreversibility to evolutionary processes that are not reflected in current theory.For this thermodynamically-based program to progress, we believe that biological information should not be treated in isolation from energy flows, and that the ecological perspective must be given descriptive and explanatory primacy. Levels of the ecological hierarchy are relational parts of ecological systems in which there are stable, informed patterns of energy flow and entropic dissipation. Isomorphies between developmental patterns and ecological succession are revealing because they suggest that much of the encoded metabolic information in biological systems is internalized ecological information. The geneological hierarchy, to the extent that its information content reflects internalized ecological information, can therefore be redescribed as an ecological hierarchy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction1 The Problem Arguments Against Materialism Type‐A Materialism Type‐B Materialism15 The Two‐Dimensional Argument Against Type‐B Materialism Type‐C Materialism Interlude Type‐D Dualism Type‐E Dualism Type‐F Monism Conclusions.

In his contribution, the author discusses the deep and surprising similarities between the philosophies of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche. The author argues that these stem from their shared conception of naturalism. Their naturalism is primarily an explanatory one and primarily aimed at explaining human thought and practice. In Nietzsche, this form of naturalism is expressed in his adoption of a genealogical approach to various topics, most famously that of morality. The author shows that Hume’s naturalism is similarly genealogical. (...) The author also argues that their conceptions of morality and the self are closer than popular images of the two philosophers might have it. (shrink)

For over half a century there have been concerns about increases in the occurrence of academic misconduct by higher education students and this is now claimed to have reached crisis proportions (e.g. Mostrous & Kenber, 2016a ). This study explores the extent to which multi-national faculty judge the effectiveness of higher education institutions in dealing with such misconduct. A survey of multi-national higher education faculty was conducted to explore the perceived barriers to the implementation of academic integrity processes. It asked (...) faculty how likely some hypothetical scenarios of failures of such processes were to occur in the real world of higher education institutions. 63% of our participants perceived there to be institutional and/or faculty barriers to effectively dealing with academic misconduct. Mostly, they blamed the higher education model for this which, in the interests of mass education, has come to prioritise the need for institutions to focus more on their quantity of output as corporate business enterprises than on the integrity of their output as educators. In discussing participants’ comments, about the relationship of faculty to their employing institutions, Schein and Scheins’ ( 2016 ) theory of three levels of organisational culture was used. Participants’ comments suggested that, at the deepest level of organisational culture i.e. basic underlying taken-for-granted assumptions about beliefs and values, inadequate integrity measures have tended to become normalised. Despite the often considerable, efforts of the institutions, organisational barriers were noted which mitigate against faculty behaving professionally i.e. from doing a ‘good job’ in respect of student academic misconduct. Some blame was also placed on faculty. We argue that apparent institutional inability to effectively manage the integrity process, has potentially significant consequences for wider society. We discuss ways in which this situation might be improved including a recommendation that governments regulate this aspect of the corporate social responsibility of higher education institutions as they do other aspects, requiring that it be managed effectively. (shrink)

Suicide has been condemned in our culture in one way or another since Augustine offered theological arguments against it in the sixth century. More recently, theological condemnation has given way to the view that suicidal behavior must always be symptomatic of emotional disturbance and mental illness. However, suicide has not always been viewed so negatively. In other times and cultures, it has been held that circumstances might befall a person in which suicide would be a perfectly rational course of action, (...) in the same sense that any other course of action could be rational: that it could be sensible, i.e., defensible by good reasons, or that it could be in keeping with the agent's fundamental interests. Indiscriminate use of modern life-sustaining technologies has renewed interest in the possibility of rational suicide. Today proponents of rational suicide tend to equate the rationality of suicide with the competence of the decision to commit suicide. (shrink)

We prove various results connected together by the common thread of computability theory.First, we investigate a new notion of algorithmic dimension, the inescapable dimension, which lies between the effective Hausdorff and packing dimensions. We also study its generalizations, obtaining an embedding of the Turing degrees into notions of dimension.We then investigate a new notion of computability theoretic immunity that arose in the course of the previous study, that of a set of natural numbers with no co-enumerable subsets. We demonstrate how (...) this notion of $\Pi ^0_1$ -immunity is connected to other immunity notions, and construct $\Pi ^0_1$ -immune reals throughout the high/low and Ershov hierarchies. We also study those degrees that cannot compute or cannot co-enumerate a $\Pi ^0_1$ -immune set.Finally, we discuss a recently discovered truth-table reduction for transforming a Kolmogorov–Loveland random input into a Martin-Löf random output by exploiting the fact that at least one half of such a KL-random is itself ML-random. We show that there is no better algorithm relying on this fact, in the sense that there is no positive, linear, or bounded truth-table reduction which does this. We also generalize these results to the problem of outputting randomness from infinitely many inputs, only some of which are random.Abstract prepared by David J. Webb.E-mail: [email protected]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.05659.pdf. (shrink)

This paper is an edited transcription of a talk at the 1997 Montreal symposium on "Consciousness at the Frontiers of Neuroscience". There's not much here that isn't said elsewhere, e.g. in "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" and "How Can We Construct a Science of Consciousness?"]].

Medical school curricula, although traditionally and historically dominated by science, have generally accepted, appreciated, and welcomed the inclusion of literature over the past several decades. Recent concerns about medical professional formation have led to discussions about the specific role and contribution of literature and stories. In this article, we demonstrate how professionalism and the study of literature can be brought into relationship through critical and interrogative interactions based in the literary skill of close reading. Literature in medicine can question the (...) meaning of “professionalism” itself, thereby resisting standardization in favor of diversity method and of outcome. Literature can also actively engage learners with questions about the human condition, providing a larger context within which to consider professional identity formation. Our fundamental contention is that, within a medical education framework, literature is highly suited to assist learners in questioning conventional thinking and assumptions about various dimensions of professionalism. (shrink)

Activation of gene transcription in vivo is accompanied by an alteration of chromatin structure. The specific binding of transcriptional activators disrupts nucleosomal arrays, suggesting that the primary steps leading to transcriptional initiation involve interactions between activators and chromatin. The affinity of transcription factors for nucleosomal DNA is determined by the location of recognition sequences within nucleosomes, and by the cooperative interactions of multiple proteins targeting binding sites contained within the same nucleosomes. In addition, two distinct types of enzymatic complexes facilitate (...) binding of transcription factors to nucleosomal DNA. These include type A histone acetyltransferases (e.g. GCN5/ADA transcriptional adaptor complex) and ATP‐driven molecular machines that disrupt histone‐DNA interactions (e.g. SWI/SNF and NURF complexes). These observations raise the important question of what happens to the histones during chromatin remodeling. We discuss evidence supporting the retention of histones at transcription factorbound sequences as well as two alternative pathways of histone loss from gene control elements upon transcription factor binding: histone octamer sliding and histone dissociation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:A wide range of research uses patterns of genetic variation to infer genetic similarity between individuals, typically referred to as genetic ancestry. This research includes inference of human demographic history, understanding the genetic architecture of traits, and predicting disease risk. Researchers are not just structuring an intellectual inquiry when using genetic ancestry, they are also creating analytical frameworks with broader societal ramifications. This essay presents an ethics framework in the spirit of virtue ethics for these researchers: rather than focus on (...) rule following, the framework is designed to build researchers’ capacities to react to the ethical dimensions of their work. The authors identify one overarching principle of intellectual freedom and responsibility, noting that freedom in all its guises comes with responsibility, and they identify and define four principles that collectively uphold researchers’ intellectual responsibility: truthfulness, justice and fairness, anti-racism, and public beneficence. Researchers should bring their practices into alignment with these principles, and to aid this, the authors name three common ways research practices infringe these principles, suggest a step-by-step process for aligning research choices with the principles, provide rules of thumb for achieving alignment, and give a worked case. The essay concludes by identifying support needed by researchers to act in accord with the proposed framework. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychologists sometimes suggest that "an evolutionary view of life can shed light on psyche" by revealing the "latent" psychology that underlies our "manifest" psychological image. At such moments, which become more frequent in popular works, explanations trade freely in subconscious motives whose goal is inclusive fitness. While some evolutionary psychologists explicitly deny that their aim is to uncover latent motivation, references to subconscious motives are nonetheless frequent in evolutionary psychology (and are even made by those explicitly denying postulation of (...) subconscious motives). These explanatory references to subconscious motives pose a dilemma. On the one hand, if they are literal, evolutionary psychology is vulnerable to a criticism frequently leveled against sociobiology: if subconscious motives toward inclusive fitness are the true determinants of human behavior, our behavior should more closely approximate full satisfaction of those motives (i.e. increased fitness) than it does. On the other hand, if references to subconscious motives are merely figurative -- like talk of "selfish" genes -- it must be explained how they are to be literally interpreted. Either way it is necessary to "deFreud" evolutionary psychology. I will thus provide an account of evolutionary psychological explanation, and how it functions, when purged of reference to subconscious motives. (shrink)

This is a “bottom-up” paper in the sense that it draws lessons in defining disciplinary categories under study from a series of empirical studies of interdisciplinarity. In particular, we are in the process of studying the interchange of research-based knowledge between Cognitive Science and Educational Research. This has posed a set of design decisions that we believe warrant consideration as others study cross-disciplinary research processes.

The ease with which genotyping technologies generate tremendous amounts of data on research participants has been well chronicled, a feat that continues to become both faster and cheaper to perform. In parallel to these advances come additional ethical considerations and debates, one of which centers on providing individual research results and incidental findings back to research participants taking part in genetic research efforts. In 2006 the Industry Pharmacogenomics Working Group offered some ‘Points-to-Consider’ on this topic within the context of the (...) drug development process from those who are affiliated to pharmaceutical companies. Today many of these points remain applicable to the discussion but will be expanded upon in this updated viewpoint from the I-PWG. The exploratory nature of pharmacogenomic work in the pharmaceutical industry is discussed to provide context for why these results typically are not best suited for return. Operational challenges unique to this industry which cause barriers to returning this information are also explained. (shrink)

Millikan and Wilson argue, for different reasons, that the essential reference to the environment in adaptationist explanations of behavior makes (psychological) individualism inconsistent with evolutionary psychology. I show that their arguments are based on misinterpretations of the role of reference to the environment in such explanations. By exploring these misinterpretations, I develop an account of explanation in evolutionary psychology that is fully consistent with individualism. This does not, however, constitute a full-fledged defense of individualism, since evolutionary psychology is only one (...) explanatory paradigm among many in psychology. (shrink)

We report on the small-scale (0.5 13 h - 1M, a large-scale bias of ~2.0 and a satellite fraction of 12 ± 2 per cent. Thus, these galaxies occupy haloes with average masses in between those of the higher redshift BOSS CMASS sample and the original SDSS I/II luminous red galaxy sample © 2012 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society © doi:10.1093/mnras/sts314.