Obtaining informed consent is a cornerstone of biomedical research, yet participants comprehension of presented information is often low. The most effective interventions to improve understanding rates have not been identified.

Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially. Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of (...) core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of childrens cognitive development. Carey shows how developmental cognitive science resolves aspects of long-standing philosophical debates about the existence, nature, content, and format of innate knowledge. She also shows that understanding the processes of conceptual development in children illuminates the historical process by which concepts are constructed, and transforms the way we think about philosophical problems about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought. (shrink)

This article explores the ethical challenges of providing Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in a paediatric setting. More specifically, we focus on the theoretical questions that came to light when we were asked to develop a policy for responding to MAID requests at our tertiary paediatric institution. We illuminate a central point of conceptual confusion about the nature of MAID that emerges at the level of practice, and explore the various entailments for clinicians and patients that would flow from different (...) understandings. Finally, we consider the ethical challenges of building policy on what is still an extremely controversial social practice. While MAID is currently available to capable patients in Canada who are 18 years or older—a small but important subsection of the population our hospital serves—we write our policy with an eye to the near future when capable young people may gain access to MAID. We propose that an opportunity exists for MAID-providing institutions to reduce social stigma surrounding this practice, but not without potentially serious consequences for practitioners and institutions themselves. Thus, this paper is intended as a road map through the still-emerging legal and ethical landscape of paediatric MAID. We offer a view of the roads taken and considered along the way, and our justifications for travelling the paths we chose. By providing a record of our in-progress thinking, we hope to stimulate wider discussion about the issues and questions encountered in this work. (shrink)

Cornelius Nepos’ Life of Atticus shows its author as living a life of deliberate withdrawal from politics. This paper compares that life to other models of political withdrawal in Greco-Roman thought and finds that it does not cohere very closely with any of them. Nepos, the paper proposes, deviates from these existing models in showing Atticus as avoiding politics not out of a desire to transcend human life, to reorder politics, or to create a substitute politics of his own, but (...) rather to live what the paper calls ‘social life.’ Atticus embraces human interdependence while rejecting the civic forms in which that interdependence was traditionally expressed in Greece and Rome. (shrink)

Aquinas and Hume view miracles in starkly contrasting ways, as Thomas Carey here explains.

Psychological ownership may be judged differently or similarly for self and others. Potential differences in how ownership is evaluated by actors and observers raise important questions about the concept of ownership (what is Mine, Ours, and Theirs) and how to resolve conflicting perceptions.

Epistemic Modality Epistemic modality is the kind of necessity and possibility that is determined by epistemic constraints. A modal claim is a claim about how things could be or must be given some constraints, such as the rules of logic, moral obligations, or the laws of nature. A modal … Continue reading Epistemic Modality →.

Panentheism is the position that the world is in some sense ‘in’ God, and God ‘in’ the world, without the world being identical to God. Thus, it tries, like what I call mainstream theism and against pan- theism, to protect the transcendence of God, while giving greater emphasis to his immanence in creation than the former. I aim to explicate an approach that I call Orthodox Panentheism. The word ‘orthodox’ is to be read in two ways. First, the picture is (...) derived from the writings of some of the most important figures in Eastern Christian thought, so that it is Orthodox in the ‘big “O” sense’. Second, I hope to show that it is a legitimate Christian picture of the God–world relation which is both distinctive and worthy of being called ‘panentheism’ – an orthodox panentheism in the ‘little “o” sense’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 350-353 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing, The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing, by Eva T. H. Brann; xviii & 249 pp. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, $35.00. This, the third of Eva Brann's trilogy on imagination, time, and naysaying respectively, is described by one of her colleagues as her (...) "cradle-to-grave book" (p. xvi). The word "naysaying" plays felicitously on the sound of the English word "nay" and the cognate Indo-European root "ne," which gives Brann a convenient starting-point for discerning what various forms of naysaying have in common. Note that this is saying rather than thinking, being, or doing, although the relations among these acts are a recurring concern in her discussion. Unlike some "postmoderns," Brann does not regard language as a self-contained arena with no reference outside of itself. Rather, for her, language is a convenient medium for thinking about what is extralinguistic, whether in the mind or elsewhere.Nor does she think that a word must necessarily have some underlying unity beneath its various meanings. In fact, heeding Wittgenstein's warning, she admits that "it is a pathologically bad craving to want a word to have one ultimate meaning, worse to look for one meaning over many words, and worst to assume that such a meaning may apply to a something beyond the realm of language." Nevertheless, she suggests, "this craving to look for one truth behind many appearances may be simply irradicable, being nothing less than the philosophical impulse" (p. xiv).Where does her "philosophical impulse" focus, on texts or on things? She explicitly tells us that texts are indispensable (at least for her) to get very far with the things themselves (p. 2). And so, in the course of her investigation, she attends to Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Bergson, Frege, Meinong, Russell, Whitehead, Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, among others. Nonetheless, she begins by noticing a sort of willful denial that is pre-linguistic and "speechless" (the contrariness of an infant), and she ends with the nothingness that is void of all language and everything else. These two topics, expressed by the words "No" (Chapter One) and "Nothing" (Chapter Six) respectively, "frame" her inquiry (p. 42). Along the way she always has an eye to what lies behind or beyond language, in the world or in the mind, with a chapter each for "Not," "Nonexistence," "Nonbeing," and "Negativity." She [End Page 350] says that Chapter Four, concerning "Nonbeing," is the center and philosophic focus of her study. Brann's chapters thus represent the six big divisions for organizing her observations. Indeed, for Brann, the plurality of naysayings "seems to fall naturally" into her sixfold division (p. xiv).Thoughtfully pondering this structure takes the reader a long way toward understanding the work (in both senses of "work": the thought itself and the text which records that thought). The chapter divisions progress from the willful, through the logical, the imaginative, the philosophic, and the dialectical, to end, as we noted, in the absolute Nothing, the "antagonist of Being." For instance, the distinction between the first two--the willful and the logical--is the distinction between the personal (denial) and the impersonal (negation). In considering willful denial, Brann understands the will to be a "willingness, inclination, readiness"--usually "determinate," "focused and active" (p. 7). Likewise, negation also has a personal origin: "Negation arises from the human desire and ability to make distinctions; it is (most likely) grounded in the opposition and polarities that belong to beings (of which the first... is surely that of thinking itself to its object, be it ideal or real)" (p. 29f.). Thus, although logical negation seems to originate in the personal subject there is something quite detachable and impersonal about logical formulations, so that Heraclitus "bids people hear his truth 'not listening to me but to the logos,' the cosmic collecting and distinguishing power" (p. 128). So the logos that begins for us as "reason manifested in... (shrink)

This paper explores auto-photography as a form of research practice in the area of identity and self-esteem research. It allows researchers to capture and articulate the ways identity guides human action and thought. It involves the generation and examination of the static images that participants themselves believe best represent them. Auto-photography is an important tool for building bridges with marginalized groups in the research process, since it offers researchers a way to let participants speak for themselves. Furthermore, by using this (...) method researchers can avoid exclusive reliance on survey questionnaires and other such research instruments that may be culturally biased. I present two research projects using auto-photography: one involving adolescent Latina girls and one involving Indian women. Based on the experience of these projects, I discuss auto-photography's importance in identity and self-esteem research. Finally, I discuss some of the benefits and challenges of working with this method. (shrink)

Book reviewed: Michael Martin, Atheism, Morality and Meaning, 2002, Prometheus Books, 330pp, price £21.00 pb.

The practice of viticulture in Israelite culture is the focus of Walsh's investigation. Viticulture, no less than drinking, marked the social sphere of Israelite practitioners, and so its details were often enlisted to describe social relations in the Hebrew Bible.

This chapter presents an account of the life and work of Francis Hutcheson. It charts his career from its beginnings in Dublin to the attempt to cement his place in British intellectual life that was his posthumously published A System of Moral Philosophy. Hutcheson’s ideas were not universally welcomed and acclaimed. Religious conservatives constantly challenged him even after he was elected to the Glasgow chair of moral philosophy. The chapter describes the rationalist critique of Hutcheson’s moral sense theory, the criticism (...) levelled at his conception of natural benevolence by those who remained attached to philosophical egoism, and the complaints of those who, under the influence often of Joseph Butler, believed that Hutcheson’s ethics needed to be supplemented by a more substantial account of moral obligation. (shrink)

This research examined how and why group membership diminishes the attribution of mind to individuals. We found that mind attribution was inversely related to the size of the group to which an individual belonged . Mind attribution was affected by group membership rather than the total number of entities perceived at once . Moreover, mind attribution to an individual varied with the perception that the individual was a group member. Participants attributed more mind to an individual that appeared distinct or (...) distant from other group members than to an individual that was perceived to be similar or proximal to a cohesive group . This effect occurred for both human and nonhuman targets, and was driven by the perception of the target as an entitative group member rather than by the knowledge that the target was an entitative group member. (shrink)

Every individual event, qua individual, is unique. THought renders events non-unique through classification and generalization. Historical explanation demands understanding causal connections, in turn requiring the use of generalizations. History is a consumer of established laws which introduce a locus of non-uniqueness into history. Also, history is a producer of limited generalizations, covering temporally confined structual patterns which constitute the locus of uniqueness in history. It is the temporal limitation of these patterns, and not the chronological description of facts, which gives (...) history its character of uniqueness. (shrink)

Masculinities vary by organizational context, demonstrating that organizational culture shapes the gendering of work even within the same occupation. The author draws on comparative and ethnographic data collected in two retail environments to understand how a common organizational culture is differently gendered by the organization of work. In these music stores, organizational culture is driven by masculinist fantasies of the rock musician lifestyle. As the products and knowledge of the rock musician lifestyle are made popularly accessible and retail work is (...) deskilled, a style of masculinity based on fraternization and competition takes the place of formal knowledge and experience—reaffirming rock musician as a populist, but exclusively male identity. The article concludes with a consideration of how the de-skilling of retail work reproduces gendered interactions that affirm men’s control over work and its products, even as retail work is presumed to be feminizing. (shrink)

Are human beings linked by a common nature, one that makes them see the world in the same moral way? Or are they fragmented by different cultural practices and values? These fundamental questions of our existence were debated in the Enlightenment by Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. Daniel Carey provides an important new historical perspective on their discussion. At the same time, he explores the relationship between these founding arguments and contemporary disputes over cultural diversity and multiculturalism. Our own conflicting (...) positions today reflect long-standing differences that emerged during the Enlightenment. (shrink)

In their summary and critique, Gamble, Gamble, and Pruski mischaracterise both the central arguments and the primary objectives of our original paper. Our paper does not provide an ethical justification for paediatric Medical Assistance in Dying by comparing it with other end of life care options. In fact, it does not offer arguments about the permissibility of MAID for capable young people at all. Instead, our paper focuses on the ethical questions that emerged as we worked to develop a policy (...) for responding to MAID requests at our tertiary paediatric institution. Following the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decriminalisation of MAID, our hospital needed to answer immediate on-the-ground questions such as: ‘What are we going to do if an 18-year-old patient in our care requested MAID today, as is now their legal right? How should we protect their privacy? What is the best way to ensure patients are informed when making these decisions?’ On these important questions, Gamble, Gamble, and Pruskiare silent. (shrink)

Separating wheat from chaff in regard to the hyperbole surrounding media coverage about genes for violence, born killers, et cetera provides a launch pad for two experienced behavioral geneticists who have conducted research on aggression and crime with twins, families, and adoptees to provide an essay on the facts and limitations of current knowledge; they conclude that any current threats to jurisprudence lie in perception rather than in empirical facts.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 281-282 [Access article in PDF] Matthew B. Ostrow. Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Dialectical Interpretation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 175. Paper, $20.00. This contribution to the new readings of the early Wittgenstein presents in detail how one might read the Tractatus as a sustained attack on Frege's and Russell's philosophical and logical conceptions while at the same time (...) presuming Wittgenstein to have always been in some sense a "late Wittgensteinian," that is, already embarked on the therapeutic task of setting down "the way of release" from philosophical confusion and "ensnarement of thought" (1). Taking seriously the passage in the Tractatus (6.54) in which Wittgenstein assesses his "elucidations" as "nonsensical," Ostrow places himself among those readers who infer that straightforward theory-making was not Wittgenstein's aim, but differs from them in his original and challenging account of how the propositions of the Tractatus are nonsense.Wittgenstein, Ostrow contends, employed such (apparent) doctrines as the picture theory, the showing doctrine, the notion of tautology, and so forth dialectically, that is, as self-detonating attempts to expose philosophical nonsense in situ which were not themselves intended to be argued pro or con as philosophical assertions or theories. Wittgenstein's purpose in speaking in the Tractatus in avowedly though not patently nonsensical ways is, the author argues, to encourage us instead to see philosophical nonsensicality as "given in and through" the process of making such philosophical assertions, and in seeing how they "change their character, how they undermine their initial presentation as straightforward truth claims" (12). Thus the "central notions" and propositions in the Tractatus, according to Ostrow, "only have their life in relation to the philosophical temptations that the book aims to eradicate" (43).Such a reading involves the author (and his readers) in a task that is both detailed and delicate. Ostrow's work is detailed because he reads Wittgenstein as engaged in a systematic attempt to expose philosophical theories as nonsense case-by-particular-case, that is, by "working through philosophy from the inside, without making appeal to any kind of fixed criteria of sense and nonsense" (99). It is for this reason that Wittgenstein's articulation of the many structures in the Tractatus is necessary, and Ostrow's work, which he views as largely descriptive, must trace the same path.Ostrow's task is a delicate one because he must explore the themes in Wittgenstein's Tractatus (pictures, significant propositions, logical propositions, etc.) without appearing to contradict his position that the Tractatus offers no general doctrines meant to be taken as they stand. Thus, for instance, when Ostrow argues that for Wittgenstein pictorial form is constituted by a picture's application to reality and not an independent entity, he must remind the reader that he is not attributing to Wittgenstein a doctrine of "constitution of form" offered up as a philosophical alternative. Just as we are not to make pictorial form and its emergence in the Tractatus into a substantive theory in its own right but rather see it as having a role only in Wittgenstein's battle to expose such shibboleths (44), so too for all other parts of the Tractarian structure. Thus Wittgenstein's apparent explanation of the [End Page 281] possibility of depiction in terms of isomorphism is said to aim at showing that as an explanation, "talk of an isomorphism is empty" (39); Wittgenstein's show/say distinction is taken as a foil used to expose the logician's desire to get at essence (42), and so forth. Even the notion of tautology is, according to Ostrow, "as dialectical a move as any other," not one "put forth as a self-standing claim, an attempt to offer an overarching characterization of truth" (105).This book engages in its daunting task very ably and in fluid, confident prose. The author is clearly aware of the various challenges he is likely to meet and suggests ways of doing battle with them. To cite one case, Ostrow examines Wittgenstein's later comments on his... (shrink)

Epistemic Modality Epistemic modality is the kind of necessity and possibility that is determined by epistemic constraints. A modal claim is a claim about how things could be or must be given some constraints, such as the rules of logic, moral obligations, or the laws of nature. A modal … Continue reading Epistemic Modality →.

Much of the literature on the epistemology of disagreement focuses on the rational responses to disagreement, and to disagreement with an epistemic peer in particular. The Equal Weight View claims that in cases of peer disagreement each dissenting peer opinion is to be given equal weight and, in a case of two opposing equally-weighted opinions, each party should adopt the attitude which ‘splits the difference’. The Equal Weight View has been taken by both its critics and its proponents to have (...) quite drastic skeptical ramifications given contingent empirical facts that we are aware of regarding disagreements in philosophy, religion, science, and politics. In this paper,we begin by clarifying the central claims of the Equal Weight View (Section 2) and then examine two routes from the Equal Weight View to skepticism about such matters that have been explored in the literature. The first claims that our awareness of peers or experts who disagree with us about such issues requires that we abandon our beliefs on these issues (Section 3). The second claims that our awareness of merely possible peers or experts who disagree with us requires us to abandon our beliefs (Section 4). We find both routes from the Equal Weight View to a form of skepticism defective. However, there are nearby considerations, explored in Sections 5 and 6,which (for better or worse) do lead to at least some skeptical consequences for the Equal WeightView, albeit for different reasons. (shrink)

Edgar Morin proposed that knowledge construction is best enacted via a complex and circular approach between both the part and the whole, while never enacting a strictly reductionistic or strictly holistic approach. It is the ability to connect and unite the parts within the whole via a dynamic circular process between the parts and whole that frees us from fragmented knowledge and helps us to bridge the gap between our seemingly disparate-competing nursing paradigms. This article examines the benefits of utilizing (...) Morin's complexity theory, the dialogical, and circular processes in creating a liberating structural framework or paradigm for nursing education. (shrink)

A theory of conceptual development must specify the innate representational primitives, must characterize the ways in which the initial state differs from the adult state, and must characterize the processes through which one is transformed into the other. The Origin of Concepts (henceforth TOOC) defends three theses. With respect to the initial state, the innate stock of primitives is not limited to sensory, perceptual, or sensorimotor representations; rather, there are also innate conceptual representations. With respect to developmental change, conceptual development (...) consists of episodes of qualitative change, resulting in systems of representation that are more powerful than, and sometimes incommensurable with, those from which they are built. With respect to a learning mechanism that achieves conceptual discontinuity, I offer Quinian bootstrapping. TOOC concludes with a discussion of how an understanding of conceptual development constrains a theory of concepts. (shrink)

Teleological explanations (TEs) account for the existence or properties of an entity in terms of a function: we have hearts because they pump blood, and telephones for communication. While many teleological explanations seem appropriate, others are clearly not warranted-for example, that rain exists for plants to grow. Five experiments explore the theoretical commitments that underlie teleological explanations. With the analysis of [Wright, L. (1976). Teleological Explanations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press] from philosophy as a point of departure, we examine (...) in Experiment 1 whether teleological explanations are interpreted causally, and confirm that TEs are only accepted when the function invoked in the explanation played a causal role in bringing about what is being explained. However, we also find that playing a causal role is not sufficient for all participants to accept TEs. Experiment 2 shows that this is not because participants fail to appreciate the causal structure of the scenarios used as stimuli. In Experiments 3-5 we show that the additional requirement for TE acceptance is that the process by which the function played a causal role must be general in the sense of conforming to a predictable pattern. These findings motivate a proposal, Explanation for Export, which suggests that a psychological function of explanation is to highlight information likely to subserve future prediction and intervention. We relate our proposal to normative accounts of explanation from philosophy of science, as well as to claims from psychology and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

When conducting research on sensitive topics, it is challenging to use new methods of data collection given the apprehensions of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). This is especially worrying because sensitive topics of research often require novel approaches. In this article a brief personal history of navigating the IRB process for conducting sex communication research is presented, along with data from a survey that tested the assumptions long held by many IRBs. Results support some of the assumptions IRBs hold about sex (...) communication research, but do not support some other assumptions. (shrink)

While endorsing Gopnik's proposal that studies of the emergence and modification of scientific theories and studies of cognitive development in children are mutually illuminating, we offer a different picture of the beginning points of cognitive development from Gopnik's picture of "theories all the way down." Human infants are endowed with several distinct core systems of knowledge which are theory-like in some, but not all, important ways. The existence of these core systems of knowledge has implications for the joint research program (...) between philosophers and psychologists that Gopnik advocates and we endorse. A few lessons already gained from this program of research are sketched. (shrink)

A theory of conceptual development must provide an account of the innate representational repertoire, must characterize how these initial representations differ from the adult state, and must provide an account of the processes that transform the initial into mature representations. In Carey, 2009 (The Origin of Concepts), I defend three theses: 1) the initial state includes rich conceptual representations, 2) nonetheless, there are radical discontinuities between early and later developing conceptual systems, 3) Quinean bootstrapping is one learning mechanism that (...) underlies the creation of new representational resources, enabling such discontinuity. I also claim that the theory of conceptual development developed in The Origin of Concepts addresses two of Fodor's challenges to cognitive science; namely, to show how learning could possibly lead to an increase in expressive power and to defeat Mad Dog Nativism, the thesis that all concepts lexicalized as mono-morphemic words are innate. A recent article by Georges Rey (Mind & Language, 29.2, 2014) argues that my responses to Fodor's challenges fail, because, he says, I fail to distinguish concept possession from manifestation and I do not confront Goodman's new riddle of induction. My response is to show that, and how, new primitives in a language of thought can be learned, that there are easy routes and hard ones to doing so, and that characterizing the learning mechanisms involved is the key to understanding both concept possession and constraints on induction. (shrink)