David Lewis's influential work on the epistemology and metaphysics of objective chance has convinced many philosophers of the central importance of the following two claims: First, it is a serious cost of reductionist positions about chance (such as that occupied by Lewis) that they are, apparently, forced to modify the Principal Principle--the central principle relating objective chance to rational subjective probability--in order to avoid contradiction. Second, it is a perhaps more serious cost of the rival non-reductionist position that, unlike reductionism, (...) it can give no coherent explanation for why the Principal Principle should hold. I argue that both of these claims are fundamentally mistaken. (shrink)

The legacy of Nisbett and Wilson’s classic article, Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes , is mixed. It is perhaps the most cited article in the recent history of consciousness studies, yet no empirical research program currently exists that continues the work presented in the article. To remedy this, we have introduced an experimental paradigm we call choice blindness [Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. . Failure to detect mismatches between intention (...) and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116–119.]. In the choice blindness paradigm participants fail to notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. In this article, we use word-frequency and latent semantic analysis to investigate a corpus of introspective reports collected within the choice blindness paradigm. We contrast the introspective reasons given in non-manipulated vs. manipulated trials, but find very few differences between these two groups of reports. (shrink)

"A Rose Hill book"--P. [4] of cover. Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The Foundations is for the general reader who possesses 'common rational knowledge of morality' but lacks a philosophical theory of it."--Translator's introduction.

Developments in the field of neuroscience, according to its proponents, offer the prospect of an enhanced understanding and treatment of addicted persons. Consequently, its advocates consider that improving public understanding of addiction neuroscience is a desirable aim. Those critical of neuroscientific approaches, however, charge that it is a totalising, reductive perspective–one that ignores other known causes in favour of neurobiological explanations. Sociologist Nikolas Rose has argued that neuroscience, and its associated technologies, are coming to dominate cultural models to the extent (...) that 'we' increasingly understand ourselves as 'neurochemical selves'. Drawing on 55 qualitative interviews conducted with members of the Australian public residing in the Greater Brisbane area, we challenge both the 'expectational discourses' of neuroscientists and the criticisms of its detractors. Members of the public accepted multiple perspectives on the causes of addiction, including some elements of neurobiological explanations. Their discussions of addiction drew upon a broad range of philosophical, sociological, anthropological, psychological and neurobiological vocabularies, suggesting that they synthesised newer technical understandings, such as that offered by neuroscience, with older ones. Holding conceptual models that acknowledge the complexity of addiction aetiology into which new information is incorporated suggests that the impact of neuroscientific discourse in directing the public's beliefs about addiction is likely to be more limited than proponents or opponents of neuroscience expect. (shrink)

Indigenous communities have always cultivated social studies learning that is interactive, dynamic, and integrated with traditional knowledges. To confront the assimilative and deculturalizing education that accompanied European settlement of the Americas, Montana has adopted Indian Education for All (IEFA). This case study evaluates the Digital Storywork Partnership (DSP), which strives to advance the goals of IEFA within and beyond the social studies classroom through community-centered research and filmmaking. Results demonstrate the potential for DSP projects to advance culturally revitalizing education, community (...) connectedness, and identity-development. The DSP offers a model for social studies education that is not only culturally affirming and revitalizing for Indigenous communities, but also holds potential for use in all communities. We conclude with recommendations for educators, scholars, and community members engaged in similar efforts. (shrink)

Why are some patients with Parkinson's disease unhappy about the outcome of deep brain stimulation (DBS)? Meccaci and Haselager (2014) attempt to answer this question by analyzing the seminal case...

Open Education explores the disruption of the traditional university as a result of the increasingly widespread provision of free online open education.

We study conditions for a topological space to be metrizable, properties of metrizable spaces, and the role the axiom of choice plays in these matters.

The goal of this small book and accompanying DVD is to help you to have a better experience in your laboratory by getting you to step back and take a global look at what is involved in making progress in the laboratory.

History, more than other subjects, is confronted with the need to understand the nature of social time. Braudel, representing the objectivist approach, argued that there exists a universal objective world-time permeated by diverse tempi and rhythms. Althusser criticized this view by stating that each level within society has its own set of temporal relations. However, Althusser's argument requires not the rejection, but the further understanding of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In order for his concepts to have meaning, they must be based (...) on the meaningful intersubjective relationships of the participants. There is a gap between the philosophical concept of subjective meaning and historical practice. Four phenomenological ideal types of time&endash;synchronic, diachronic, specific, and eternal&endash;can be used to replace objective history with a "history" of times. (shrink)

Nanotechnology, as with many technologies before it, places a strain on existing legislation and poses a challenge to all administrative agencies tasked with regulating technology-based products. It is easy to see how statutory schemes become outdated, as our ability to understand and affect the world progresses. In this article, we address the regulatory problems that nanotechnology posses for the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) classification structure for ‘‘drugs’’ and ‘‘devices.’’ The last major modification to these terms was in 1976, with (...) the enactment of the Medical Device Amendments. There are serious practical differences for a classification as a drug or device in terms of time to market and research. Drugs are classified, primarily, as acting by ‘‘chemical action.’’ We lay out some legal, philosophic, and scientific tools that serve to provide a useful, as well as legally and scientifically faithful, distinction between drugs and devices for the purpose of regulatory classification. These issues we raise are worth the consideration of anyone who is interested in the regulation of nano-products or other novel technologies. (shrink)

A working hypothesis of computationalism is that Mind arises, not from the intrinsic nature of the causal properties of particular forms of matter, but from the organization of matter. If this hypothesis is correct, then a wide range of physical systems (e.g. optical, chemical, various hybrids, etc.) should support Mind, especially computers, since they have the capability to create/manipulate organizations of bits of arbitrarily complexity and dynamics. In any particular computer, these bit patterns are quite physical, but their particular physicality (...) is considered irrelevant (since they could be replaced by other physical substrata). (shrink)

Despite recognition of the importance of family in health‐care and progress in family theory development, there has been limited transfer of family theory to acute care nursing practice. We argue that this family theory–practice gap results from a persistent lack of conceptual clarity in family nursing and other barriers. Lack of conceptual clarity takes the form of conceptual overlap and semantic inconsistency, as well as the complexity of language found in the family nursing literature. Barriers include practice contexts, relational problems, (...) and knowledge types. Our exploration begins with a brief discussion of the intimate link between nursing theory and practice followed by an overview of some issues associated with the family nursing theory–practice gap. Based on a synthesis of family nursing literature, problems associated with conceptual clarity in family nursing theory are explored. We conclude with recommendations for family nursing research to develop concepts grounded in nursing practice. (shrink)

This essay explores some relationships between social structures or systems and the internal psychological structures or systems of individuals. After defining evil, pastoral counseling, and structures or systems, I present examples of persons affected by social systems of power who have sought counseling. I present a form of counseling known as Internal Family System Therapy (IFS) and show with an extended example how I have worked with clients using this approach. In this process the client is guided to use "Self-leadership" (...) in healing and transforming inner conflict between various subpersonalities or "parts." I then compare the IFS approach to one used by mediators in community conflict transformation and peacebuilding. (shrink)

Experiments on choice blindness support von Hippel & Trivers's (VH&T's) conception of the mind as fundamentally divided, but they also highlight a problem for VH&T's idea of non-conscious self-deception: If I try to trick you into believing that I have a certain preference, and the best way is to also trick myself, I might actually end up having that preference, at all levels of processing.

Rho, a member of the Ras superfamily of small GTPases, has multiple biological roles: it regulates signal trasduction pathways linking extracellular growth factors to the assembly of actin stress fibres and focal adhesion complexes; it is required for G1 progression and activates the SRF transcription factor when quiescent fibroblasts are stimulated to grow; and it plays a role later in the cell cycle during cytokinesis. Two groups have recently succeeded in identifying downstream effectors of Rho that may mediate some of (...) these biological effects. One protein identified by both groups is protein kinase N (PKN), a serine/threonine kinase whose catalytic domain is closely related to that of protein kinase C(1,2). (shrink)

The opioid epidemic demands the development, implementation, and evaluation of innovative, research-informed practices such as diversion programs. Aritürk et al. have articulated important bioethical considerations for implementing diversion programs in resource-constrained service environments. In this commentary, we expand and advance Aritürk et al.’s discussion by discussing existing resources that can be utilized to implement diversion programs that prevent or otherwise minimize the issues of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice identified by Aritürk et al.

The early literature on base of the pyramid strategies argued that multinational enterprises can contribute significantly to poverty alleviation of the poorest population in the world. An emergent perspective suggests that the solution to poverty lies within the BOP itself. Here, entrepreneurship within the BOP population is seen as the more credible solution to poverty. In this Special Issue introduction, we briefly present how the literature has further shifted the discussion of BOP strategies toward issues such as innovation, networks, business (...) models, and sustainability at the BOP. This analysis signals a gap in our knowledge related to the success factors in business models of BOP entrepreneurs, with attention to economic, social, and environmental impacts. We present the five articles accepted for publication in this Special Issue, of which three contribute to our knowledge of BOP business models and two to our knowledge of sustainability at the BOP. In conclusion, we propose several avenues for future research. (shrink)

The naturalism versus interpretivism debate the in philosophy of social science is traditionally framed as the question of whether social science should attempt to emulate the methods of natural science. I show that this manner of formulating the issue is problematic insofar as it presupposes an implausibly strong unity of method among the natural sciences. I propose instead that what is at stake in this debate is the feasibility and desirability of what I call the Enlightenment ideal of social science. (...) I argue that this characterization of the issue is preferable, since it highlights the central disagreement between advocates of naturalism and interpretivism, makes connections with recent work on the topics of causal inference and social epistemology, while avoiding unfruitful comparisons between the social and natural sciences. (shrink)

Centralized, democratic rules are often asserted as a superior basis for rationing than individualized physician discretion. This article counters this prevailing wisdom by exploring the deficiencies of rule-based rationing. Rules are too imprecise to accurately reflect all the nuances of physical and mental impairment and the complexity of medical science, particularly considering the widely varying personal values that different patients attach to medical risk and benefit. Rule-based rationing also suffers from the biasing effects of interest group pressure on political processes (...) and the tendency to absolve physicians from any moral responsibility for the rationing decisions they implement. Internalizing cost constraints is a more socially and professionally acceptable means of rationing and, in any event, it is inevitable since even a preponderance of rule-based rationing will leave considerable areas of discretion for physician judgment in the implementation and interpretation of the rules. As a consequence, despite the flaws of bedside rationing, it is foolhardy to dispense with it entirely in favor of an exclusively rule-based system. Keywords: Bedside rationing, cost-constraints, rule-based rationing CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The history of the physics of pendular motion rightly begins with Galileo's discovery of the isochronous character of that motion. There is, however, a ‘pre-history’ of the pendulum, centering on its initial recognition as a significant special case requiring explanation. This occurred in the writings of Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme in the middle of the fourteenth century. Earlier works that might have been construed as discussing pendular motion are considered, as are the explanations for the scholastic ‘discovery’ of pendular (...) motion put forth by Thomas Kuhn and Piero Ariotti. In contrast to these writers, this paper seeks to account for the pendulum's emergence with reference to an imaginary experiment concerning a body moving past the earth's center, medieval theories of impetus, and the proximate physical model of pendular motion, the late medieval heavy suspended church bell. (shrink)

This review provides a current perspective on the insertion of genes into plants. Some of the knowledge on the structure and control of plant genes gained recently from genetic engineering approaches is described, together with developments that can be expected to emerge from further exploitation of gene transfer techniques.

We study statements about countable and well-ordered unions and their relation to each other and to countable and well-ordered forms of the axiom of choice. Using WO as an abbreviation for “well-orderable”, here are two typical results: The assertion that every WO family of countable sets has a WO union does not imply that every countable family of WO sets has a WO union; the axiom of choice for WO families of WO sets does not imply that the countable union (...) of countable sets is WO. (shrink)

Does context and context-dependence belong to the research agenda of semantics - and, specifically, of formal semantics? Not so long ago many linguists and philosophers would probably have given a negative answer to the question. However, recent developments in formal semantics have indicated that analyzing natural language semantics without a thorough accommodation of context-dependence is next to impossible. The classification of the ways in which context and context-dependence enter semantic analysis, though, is still a matter of much controversy and some (...) of these disputes are ventilated in the present collection. This book is not only a collection of papers addressing context-dependence and methods for dealing with it: it also records comments to the papers and the authors' replies to the comments. In this way, the contributions themselves are contextually dependent. In view of the fact that the contributors to the volume are such key figures in contemporary formal semantics as Hans Kamp, Barbara Partee, Reinhard Muskens, Nicholas Asher, Manfred Krifka, Jaroslav Peregrin and many others, the book represents a quite unique inquiry into the current activities on the semantics side of the semantics/pragmatics boundary. (shrink)

This book offers a rich collection of voices from diverse settings and illustrates ways in which lectio divina as a contemplative practice can transform teaching and learning. Drawing on holistic education and embodied learning, lectio divina empowers teachers and roots students in their own meaning making.