We examine the ethical, social, and regulatory barriers that may hinder research on therapeutic potential of certain controversial controlled substances like marijuana, heroin, or ketamine. Hazards for individuals and society and potential adverse effects on communities may be good reasons for limiting access and justify careful monitoring of these substances. Overly strict regulations, fear of legal consequences, stigma associated with abuse and populations using illicit drugs, and lack of funding may, however, limit research on their considerable therapeutic potential. We review (...) the surprisingly sparse literature and address the particular ethical concerns pertinent to research with illicit and addictive substances, such as undue inducement, informed consent, therapeutic misconception, and risk to participants, researchers, and institutions. We consider the perspectives of key research stakeholders and explore whether they may be infected with bias. We conclude by proposing an empirical research agenda to provide an evidentiary basis for ethical reasoning. (shrink)

Do children have a theory of mind? If they do, at what age is it acquired? What is the content of the theory, and how does it differ from that of adults? The Child's Theory of Mind integrates the diverse strands of this rapidly expanding field of study. It charts children's knowledge about a fundamental topic - the mind - and characterizes that developing knowledge as a coherent commonsense theory, strongly advancing the understanding of everyday theories as well as the (...) commonsense theory of mind. Wellman presents evidence that children as young as age three do possess a commonsense theory of mind - that they grasp the distinction between mental constructs and physical entities and that they have an understanding of the relationship between individuals' mental states and their overt actions. He delves in detail into questions about the nature of adults' commonsense theories of mind and about the nature of commonsense theories. Wellman then examines the content of the three-year-old's theory of mind, the nature of children's notions of mind before age three, the changes in the theory during subsequent development from ages three to six, and the young child's conception of mind in comparison with those of older children and adults. Henry M. Wellman is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. (shrink)

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking. The Scientific Method tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once (...) taught as a natural process. Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to John Dewey's vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century-but their organic account was not to last. Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful. This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science's power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question. (shrink)

It used to be thought that, just as word-initialfl… and fr… behaved likepl…, pr…, tr…, etc., in not producing a long syllable when following a word-final short vowel, just so word-internal …fl… and …fr… allowed both the short and, except for the pre-classical scenic poets, the long scansion. It was implied that these clusters oscillated with the same degree of freedom which is the well-known characteristic of the stop-and-liquid clusters. The difficulty is, of course, that evidence can be no more (...) than minimal since in truly Latin material f occurs only at the beginning of words or after a compounding seam. In fact, the argument, explicit or implicit, has turned on Horace, Sat. 1.2.98: custodes lectica ceniflones parasitae; Horace, Sat. 2.2.131: ilium aut nequities aut uafri inscitia iuris; Ov. Ars 3.332: cuiue pater uafri luditur arte Getae; Martial 6.64.26: stigmata nec uafra delebit Cinnamus arte; 12.66.3: arte sed emptorem uafra corrumpis Amoene; Phaedrus 2.6.14: inducta uafris aquila monitis paruit; Silius 8.566: et quos aut Rufrae quos aut Aesernia quosue, and Martial 4.71.1: quaero diu totam Safroni Rufe per urbem. (shrink)

A reply to contemporary skepticism about intuitions and a priori knowledge, and a defense of neo-rationalism from a contemporary Kantian standpoint, focusing on the theory of rational intuitions and on solving the two core problems of justifying and explaining them.

The practice of evidence based medicine has changed the role of the physician from information dispenser to gatherer and analyser. Studies and controlled trials that may contain unknown errors, or uncertainties, are the primary sources for evidence based decisions in medicine. These sources may be corrupted by a number of means, such as inaccurate statistical analysis, statistical manipulation, population bias, or relevance to the patient in question. Regardless of whether any of these inaccuracies are apparent, the uncertainty of their presence (...) in physician information should be disclosed to the patient. These uncertainties are not, however, shared by physicians with patients, and have caused a direct increase in patient responsibilities and mistrust. Only when disclosure of uncertainty becomes commonplace in medical practice will the physician/patient relationship evolve to a level of greater understanding and satisfaction for both the physician and patient. (shrink)

Young children's early understanding of emotion was investigated by examining their use of emotion terms such as happy, sad, mud, and cry. Five children's emotion language was examined longitudinally from the age of 2 to 5 years, and as a comparison their reference to pains via such terms as burn, sting, and hurt was also examined. In Phase 1 we confirmed and extended prior findings demonstrating that by 2 years of age terms for the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, (...) and fear are commonly used by children as are terms for such related states as crying and hurting. At this early age children produce such terms to refer to self and to others, and to past and future as well as to present states. Over the years from 2 to 5 children's emotion vocabulary expands, their discussion of hypothetical emotions gets underway, and the complexity of their emotion utterances increases. In Phase 2 our analyses go beyond children's production of emotion terms to analyses of their conception of emotion. We focus especially on when children use emotion terms to refer to subjective experiential states of persons. From their earliest uses of these terms in our data children. (shrink)

Selection bias? Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9490-4 Authors Henry M. Cowles, Program in History of Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

History is a potential tool for cognitive scientists interested in metacognitive categories like “creativity” and “innovation.” As a way of thinking, history suggests alternative accounts of the development of innovation and growth, for example. Life History Theory is one such account, but its roots in the Industrial Revolution make it a problematic tool for telling the history of that period.

There is no descriptive science of the stream of consciousness in the literature of the social sciences, and as a result, we do not have an empirical understanding of the nature of the healthy human mind.This paper will:(1)demonstrate that an empirically valid theory of the healthy mind must be a theory that isderived from a descriptive science ofthe stream of consciousness (2) present the rationale and methodology for doing interviews with a specific group ofTibetan lamas who have been using meditation (...) for over ten and a half centuries todevelop a descriptive science/if the streamofconsciousnessand (3) present briefexcerpts from some ofthe interviews I have been doing with these lamas. In these interviews, the lamas discuss their experiences of their own mind in meditation for the purpose of: (1) developing a descriptive science ofthe stream of consciousness and (2) using that descriptive science to discuss and describe the defining characteristics ofthe healthy human mind. (shrink)