This article discusses a case study that explored the potential of nonfiction graphic novels to develop pre-service teachers’ understanding of agency in a social studies methods course. White pre-service teachers were aske'd to read one graphic novel and then add frames, re-narrate frames, and reflect on their decisions. The positionalities of researchers, who are White males, and participants were part of our analysis. The researchers found that pre-service teachers made revisions to the graphic novels to change the historical actors’ decisions: (...) within the constraints of the historical situation's circumstances; to better fit their own ethical framework; and to critique the author's interpretation of the historical event and the amount of agency assigned to certain historical actors. We also reported findings related to shifts in understanding related to positionality. The pre-service teachers’ revisions demonstrated their understanding of historical actors’ ability to make choices; however, for most pre-service teachers those decisions were limited by, and insignificant in comparison to, the constraints of societal structures. Most pre-service teachers viewed these structures as operating outside of the realm of ethics that they used to articulate and identify agency, and thus, these structures were not responsive to changes in individual or collective agency. Implications are provided for social studies teacher educators. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

The co-occurrence of stress-induced posttraumatic stress disorder and obesity is common, particularly among military personnel but the link between these conditions is unclear. Individuals with comorbid PTSD and obesity manifest other physical and psychological problems, which significantly diminish their quality of life. Current understanding of the pathways connecting stress to PTSD and obesity is focused largely on behavioral mediators alone with little consideration of the biological regulatory mechanisms that underlie their co-occurrence. In this work, we leverage prior knowledge to systematically (...) highlight such bio-behavioral mechanisms and inform on the design of confirmatory pilot studies. We use natural language processing to extract documented regulatory interactions involved in the metabolic response to stress and its impact on obesity and PTSD from over 8 million peer-reviewed papers. The resulting network describes the propagation of stress to PTSD and obesity through 34 metabolic mediators using 302 documented regulatory interactions supported by over 10,000 citations. Stress jointly affected both conditions through 21 distinct pathways involving only two intermediate metabolic mediators out of a total of 76 available paths through this network. Moreover, oxytocin, Neuropeptide-Y, and cortisol supported an almost direct propagation of stress to PTSD and obesity with different net effects. Although stress upregulated both NPY and cortisol, the downstream effects of both markers are reported to relieve PTSD severity but exacerbate obesity. The stress-mediated release of oxytocin, however, was found to concurrently downregulate the severity of both conditions. These findings highlight how a network-informed approach that leverages prior knowledge might be used effectively in identifying key mediators like OXT though experimental verification of signal transmission dynamics through each path will be needed to determine the actual likelihood and extent of each marker’s participation. (shrink)

According to Jones & Love (J&L), Bayesian theories are too often isolated from other theories and behavioral processes. Here, we highlight examples of two types of isolation from the field of word learning. Specifically, Bayesian theories ignore emergence, critical to development theory, and have not probed the behavioral details of several key phenomena, such as the effect.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 29, Number 1, April 2003, pp. 89-98 Another "Curious Legend" about Hume's An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature MARK G. SPENCER I In 1938, J. M. Keynes and P. Sraffa edited and introduced for Cambridge University Press a reprinting of An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature.1 The Abstract they claimed in their subtitle was "A Pamphlet hitherto unknown by DAVID HUME." (...) Arguing against a number of nineteenth and early-twentieth -century scholars who attributed authorship of an abstract of the Treatise to Adam Smith, Keynes and Sraffa convincingly documented in their introductory essay many solid reasons for thinking that the pamphlet being reprinted was Hume's.2 Sixty years on, their account dispelling this "curious legend" of Smith's authorship has now become the received opinion. T.E. Jessop accepted Keynes and Sraffa's argument (having seen it in proof before the edition was published) in his bibliography of 1938, and Norman Kemp Smith gave their version an early supportive review.3 E.C. Mossner, in his well-known biography of Hume, accepted wholeheartedly Keynes and Sraffa's findings.4 When in 1978 the Selby-Bigge's edition of Hume's Treatise saw its second edition the text of the Abstract was appended and a note gave P.H. Nidditch's opinion that "Hume's authorship is overwhelmingly likely."5 More recently Mark G. Spencer is Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of History, University of Toronto. Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George St., Toronto, Ontario MSS 3GS, Canada. spencer@uwo.ca 90 Mark G. Spencer in the pages of this journal, Jeff Broome, David Raynor, and David Fate Norton have all helped buttress the case for Hume's authorship, as did R. W. Connon and M. Pollard elsewhere.6 Despite an occasional dissenting voice,7 the Abstract is now widely, and rightly (or so it seems to this author), thought to have been Hume's. But with all of this scholarly attention focused on confirming Hume's authorship, another much more contentious aspect of Keynes and Sraffa's interpretation has gone largely unnoticed. Keynes and Sraffa's billing of the Abstract as "A Pamphlet hitherto unknown by DAVID HUME," suggested that before 1938 the Abstract had not been attributed publicly to Hume and that the contents of the pamphlet also had been completely unknown. "Students of Hume have known that an abstract of the Treatise was made and intended for publication," wrote a reviewer of Keynes and Sraffa, "[b]ut no copy of this abstract was known to exist: indeed it was usually supposed that the abstract had never been printed at all."8 Relying on Keynes and Sraffa it would be easy to suppose that the Abstract was never publicly ascribed to Hume and even that the contents of the pamphlet had been overlooked entirely until Keynes and Sraffa came along. One of the purposes of the present short essay is to dispel, once and for all, that misunderstanding about the Abstract. Norman Kemp Smith went part of the way toward that end in 1938 when he reviewed Keynes and Sraffa's edition. But in the process Kemp Smith introduced another "curious legend" that has slipped into scholarly acceptance with little comment and no debate. We will see that it is a mistake to argue, as Kemp Smith did, that Hume's authorship of a sixpenny pamphlet was known to readers of An universal biographical and historical dictionary, published in 1800. There is no discussion of Hume's Abstract in that book. However, the Abstract was discussed in print in at least three different publications between 1818 and 1827, long after its initial publication in 1740 and long before Keynes and Sraffa brought it to the attention of their audience in 1938. While pre-1938 Hume scholars had overlooked the Abstract, at least one of Hume's early nineteenth-century critics knew of the Abstract's existence, attributed the work to Hume, and even quoted extensively from Hume's "Preface." Most interesting of all, Hume's authorship of the Abstract was interpreted in ways that are telling of the historical reception of... (shrink)

We show that for random bit strings, Up, with probability, image, the first order quantifier depth D) needed to distinguish non-isomorphic structures is Θ, with high probability. Further, we show that, with high probability, for random ordered graphs, G≤,p with edge probability image, D)=Θ, contrasting with the results for random graphs, Gp, given by Kim et al. [J.H. Kim, O. Pikhurko, J. Spencer, O. Verbitsky, How complex are random graphs in first order logic? Random Structures and Algorithms 26 119–145] (...) of D)=log1/pn+O. (shrink)

We show that for random bit strings, Up, with probability, image, the first order quantifier depth D) needed to distinguish non-isomorphic structures is Θ, with high probability. Further, we show that, with high probability, for random ordered graphs, G≤,p with edge probability image, D)=Θ, contrasting with the results for random graphs, Gp, given by Kim et al. [J.H. Kim, O. Pikhurko, J. Spencer, O. Verbitsky, How complex are random graphs in first order logic? Random Structures and Algorithms 26 119–145] (...) of D)=log1/pn+O. (shrink)

Neologicists have sought to ground mathematical knowledge in abstraction. One especially obstinate problem for this account is the bad company problem. The leading neologicist strategy for resolving this problem is to attempt to sift the good abstraction principles from the bad. This response faces a dilemma: the system of ‘good’ abstraction principles either falls foul of the Scylla of inconsistency or the Charybdis of being unable to recover a modest portion of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with its intended generality. This article (...) argues that the bad company problem is due to the ‘static’ character of abstraction on the neologicist's account and develops a ‘dynamic’ account of abstraction that avoids both horns of the dilemma. 1 Introduction2ion Reconstructed3 From Bad to Worse4 Abstraction Reconceived5 Bad Company Made GoodA AppendixA.1SemanticsA.2LogicA.3ConsistencyA.4Strength. (shrink)

What does being money consist in? We argue that something is money if, and only if, it is typically acquired in order to realise the reduction in transaction costs that accrues in virtue of agents coordinating on acquiring the same thing when deciding what thing to acquire in order to exchange. What kinds of things can be money? We argue against the common view that a variety of things (notes, coins, gold, cigarettes, etc.) can be money. All monetary systems are (...) best interpreted as implementing the same basic protocol. Money, i.e. the thing that we coordinate on acquiring in order to lower our transaction costs, is, in all cases, a set of positions on an abstract mathematical object, namely a relative ratio scale. The things that we ordinarily call ‘money’ are merely records of positions on such a scale. (shrink)

Contemporary discussion concerning institutions focus on, and mostly accept, the Searlean view that institutional objects, i.e. money, borders and the like, exist in virtue of the fact that we collectively represent them as existing. A dissenting note has been sounded by Smit et al. (Econ Philos 27:1–22, 2011), who proposed the incentivized action view of institutional objects. On the incentivized action view, understanding a specific institution is a matter of understanding the specific actions that are associated with the institution and (...) how we are incentivized to perform these actions. In this paper we develop the incentivized action view by extending it to institutions like property, promises and complex financial organisations like companies. We also highlight exactly how the incentivized action view differs from the Searlean view, discuss the method appropriate to such study and discuss some of the virtues of the incentivized action view. (shrink)

Objectives: To determine the effects of risk and payment on subjects’ willingness to participate, and to examine how payment influences subjects’ potential behaviours and risk evaluations.Methods: A 3 × 3 , between subjects, completely randomised factorial design was used. Students enrolled at one of five US pharmacy schools read a recruitment notice and informed consent form for a hypothetical study, and completed a questionnaire. Risk level was manipulated using recruitment notices and informed consent documents from hypothetical biomedical research projects. Payment (...) levels were determined using the payment models evaluated by Dickert and Grady as a guide. Five dependent variables were assessed in the questionnaire: willingness to participate, willingness to participate with no payment, propensity to neglect to tell about restricted activities, propensity to neglect to tell about negative effects, and risk rating.Results: Monetary payment had positive effects on respondents’ willingness to participate in research, regardless of the level of risk. However, higher monetary payments did not appear to blind respondents to the risks of a study. Payment had some influence on respondents’ potential behaviours regarding concealing information about restricted activities. However, payment did not appear to have a significant effect on respondents’ propensity to neglect to tell researchers about negative effects.Conclusions: Monetary payments appear to do what they are intended to do: make subjects more willing to participate in research. Concerns about payments blinding subjects to risks could not be substantiated in the present study. However, the findings do raise other concerns—notably the potential for payments to diminish the integrity of a study’s findings. Future research is critical to make sound decisions about the payment of research subjects. (shrink)

Background: Ethics consultation is used regularly by some doctors, whereas others are reluctant to use these services.Aim: To determine factors that may influence doctors to request or not request ethics consultation.Methods: A survey questionnaire was distributed to doctors on staff at the University Community Hospital in Tampa, Florida, USA. The responses to the questions on the survey were arranged in a Likert Scale, from strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat agree to strongly agree. Data were analysed with (...) the Wilcoxon test for group comparisons, the χ2 test to compare proportions and a logistic regression analysis.Results: Of the 186 surveys distributed, 121 were returned, giving a 65% response rate. Demographic data were similar between the groups saying yes and no . No statistically significant differences were observed between the user and non-user groups in terms of opinions about ethics consultants having extensive training in ethics or participating in ethics educational opportunities. On the issue “Ethics committee members or consultants cannot grasp the full picture from the outside”, the non-users were neutral, whereas the users somewhat disagreed . Even more significant was the difference between surgeons and non-surgeons, where, by logistic regression analysis, surgeons who believed that ethics consultants could not grasp the full picture from the outside were highly likely to not use . Non-users of ethics consultations thought that it was their responsibility to resolve issues with the patient or family . Users of ethics consultation believed in shared decision making or the importance of alternate points of view .Implications: Ethics consultations are used by doctors who believe in shared decision making. Doctors who did not use ethics consultation tended to think that it was their responsibility to resolve issues with patients and families and that they were already proficient in ethics. (shrink)

The ‘decapitation gambit’ holds that, if physical decapitation normally entails the death of the human being, then physiological decapitation, evident in cases of total brain failure, entails the death of the human being. This argument has been challenged by Franklin Miller and Robert Truog, who argue that physical decapitation does not necessarily entail the death of human beings and that therefore, by analogy, artificially sustained human bodies with total brain failure are living human beings. They thus challenge the current neurological (...) criterion for determining death and argue for a return to the traditional criterion of the irreversible loss of circulation and respiration. In this paper, I defend the decapitation gambit and total brain failure as a criterion for determining death against Miller and Truog's criticism. (shrink)

Moral conflicts occur in theories that involve more than one principle. I examine basic ways of dealing with moral dilemmas in medical ethics and in ethics generally, and propose a different approach based on a principle I call the "mutuality principle". It is offered as an addition to Tom Beauchamp and James Childress' principlism. The principle calls for the mutual enhancement of basic moral values. After explaining the principle and its strengths, I test it by way of an examination of (...) three responses—in the recent Festschrift for Dr Raanon Gillon—to a case involving parental refusal of a blood transfusion. The strongest response is the one that comes closest to the requirements of the mutuality principle but yet falls short. I argue that the mutuality principle provides an explicit future orientation in principlism and gives it greater moral coherence. (shrink)

Philosophy is experiencing a resurgence of property (PD) and generic substance dualism (SD). One important argument for SD that has played a role in this resurgence is some version of a modal argument. Until recently, premise (3) of the argument (Possibly, I exist, and no wholly physical objects exist.) has garnered most of the attention by critics. However, more recently, the focus has also been on (2) (Wholly physical objects are essentially, wholly, and intrinsically physical and wholly spiritual substances are (...) essentially, wholly, and intrinsically immaterial.). Andrew Bailey has provided one of the best criticisms of (2) on offer. In what follows, I present and clarify one form of the argument and defend premise (2) by responding to important defeaters proffered by Andrew Bailey and his contingent physicalism. (shrink)

Voluntary active euthanasia and physician assisted suicide should not be legalised because too much that is important about living and dying will be lostIn the first of this two part series, I unpack the historical philosophical distinction between killing and allowing a patient to die in order to clear up the confusion that exists. Historically speaking the two kinds of actions are morally distinct because of older notions of causality and human agency. We no longer understand that distinction primarily because (...) we have shifted our notions of causality from a traditional formulation to a modern formulation of causality and thus of moral assessment that focuses on the effects of an action. In this essay, I prepare the ground for a companion essay by showing that the traditional formulation allows us to maintain notions of meaning and purpose to human living and dying that are precluded in the efficiency paradigm of modernity. Taken together with the companion essay, I am claiming that voluntary active euthanasia and physician assisted suicide should not be legalised because too much that is important about dying and living will be lost.TWO LIESIt would be naïve to think that euthanasia, in either the VAE sense, or in the more passive sense of PAS, does not happen. It would even be naïve to think that it does not occur in a non-voluntary form. It would be equally naïve, however, to think it could be controlled through governmental regulation. The real question with regard to PAS/VAE, put so eloquently by Martha Minow, is which lie do you countenance: the lie that euthanasia does not already happen, or the lie that it can be controlled without having repercussions well beyond the limits of procedural mastery?1 With this two part paper series, I will argue that the …. (shrink)

Graham Oppy had criticized my argument for God from consciousness (AC) in my recent book ’Consciousness and the Existence of God’ (N.Y.: Routledge, 2008). In this article I offer a rejoinder to Oppy. Specifically, I respond to his criticisms of my presentation of three forms of AC, and interact with his claims about theism, consciousness and emergent chemical properties.

While most philosophers agree that libertarian agency and naturalism are incompatible, few attempts have been offered to spell out in some detail just why this is the case. My purpose in this article is to fill this gap in the literature by expanding on and clarifying the connection between naturalism as it is widely understood today and the rejection of libertarian agency. To accomplish this end I begin by clarifying different forms of libertarian agency and identity the key philosophical components (...) that constitute libertarian agency per se. Second, three different aspects of contemporary scientific naturalism are analyzed and the relations among them clarified: the naturalist epistemic attitude, etiology, and ontology. This is followed by a presentation of six arguments for the claim that libertarian agency should be rejected by advocates of scientific naturalism. Finally, I criticize a recent attempt by Randolf Clarke to reconcile libertarian agency and scientific naturalism. (shrink)

We construct models of the integers, to yield: witnessing, independence and separation results for weak systems of bounded induction.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation is a technique that may aid researchers in their attempts to elucidate the underlying brain functions involved in consciousness. By employing TMS along with other neuroimaging methods and case studies, researchers may be aided in addressing their various hypotheses. Employing the ‘brain as mobile’ analogy, it may be possible to determine the individual contributions of single elements of the brain without upsetting the overall balance.

Traditional descriptivism and Kripkean causalism are standardly interpreted as rival theories on a single topic. I argue that there is no such shared topic, i.e. that there is no question that they can be interpreted as giving rival answers to. The only way to make sense of the commitment to epistemic transparency that characterizes traditional descriptivism is to interpret Russell and Frege as proposing rival accounts of how to characterize a subject’s beliefs about what names refer to. My argument relies (...) on a development of the distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. (shrink)