New research demonstrates that mechanics can serve as a means of information propagation in developing embryos. Historically, the study of embryonic development has had a dichotomy between morphogens and pattern formation on the one hand and morphogenesis and mechanics on the other. Secreted signals are the preeminent means of information propagation between cells and used to control cell fate, while physical forces act downstream or in parallel to shape tissue morphogenesis. However, recent work has blurred this division of function by (...) demonstrating that mechanics can serve as a means of information propagation. Adhesive or repulsive interactions can propagate through a tissue as a wave. These waves are rapid and directional and can be used to control the flux of cells through a developmental trajectory. Here, two examples are reviewed in which mechanics both guides and mediates morphogenesis and two examples in which mechanics intertwines with morphogens to regulate cell fate. (shrink)

Infants are endowed with a proclivity to acquire language, whether it is presented in the auditory or visual modality. Moreover, in the first months of life, listening to language supports fundamental cognitive capacities, including infants’ facility to form object categories. Recently, we have found that for English-acquiring infants as young as 4 months of age, this precocious interface between language and cognition is sufficiently broad to include not only their native spoken language, but also sign language. In the current study, (...) we take this work one step further, asking how “sign-naïve” infants—hearing infants with no prior exposure to sign language—deploy their attentional and social strategies in the context of episodes involving either spoken or sign language. We adopted a now-standard categorization task, presenting 4- to 6-month-old infants with a series of exemplars from a single category. Each exemplar was introduced by a woman who appeared on the screen together with the object. What varied across conditions was whether this woman introduced the exemplar by speaking or signing. We coded infants’ visual attentional strategies and their spontaneous vocalizations during this task. Infants’ division of attention and visual switches between the woman and exemplar varied as a function of language modality. In contrast, infants’ spontaneous vocalizations revealed similar patterns across languages. These results, which advance our understanding of how infants allocate attentional resources and engage with communicative partners across distinct modalities, have implications for specifying our theories of language acquisition. (shrink)

Anxiety patients over-generalize fear, possibly because of an incapacity to discriminate threat and safety signals. Discrimination trainings are promising approaches for reducing such fear over-generalization. Here we investigated the efficacy of a fear-relevant vs. a fear-irrelevant discrimination training on fear generalization and whether the effects are increased with feedback during training. Eighty participants underwent two fear acquisition blocks, during which one face, but not another face, was associated with a female scream. During two generalization blocks, both CSs plus four morphs (...) were presented. Between these generalization blocks, half of the participants underwent a fear-relevant discrimination training with or without feedback and the other half a fear-irrelevant discrimination training with or without feedback. US expectancy, arousal, valence ratings, and skin conductance responses indicated successful fear acquisition. Importantly, fear-relevant vs. fear-irrelevant discrimination trainings and feedback vs. no feedback reduced generalization as reflected in US expectancy ratings independently from one another. No effects of training condition were found for arousal and valence ratings or SCR. In summary, this is a first indication that fear-relevant discrimination training and feedback can improve the discrimination between threat and safety signals in healthy individuals, at least for learning-related evaluations, but not evaluations of valence or arousal. (shrink)

Recent studies :98–144, 2002; Weismann, J Bus Ethics 88:615–66, 2009) revealed that in the first 28 years of its existence, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was not enforced by the federal government. The Weismann study further concluded that the FCPA, designed by Congress as a self-regulatory model of corporate governance, failed to achieve the regulatory goal of deterring global bribery by U.S. companies. The current article addresses the reasons that the FCPA remains an ineffective measure to control bribery as a (...) global market entry strategy despite the highly publicized 2006 Department of Justice initiative to increase prosecutions and tighten enforcement efforts. The failure arises out of both the increased use of informal dispositions of case prosecutions,, which has made “getting caught” merely an increased “cost of doing business” and the failure to close the regulatory gaps in the statute that permit violators to slip through the enforcement net. The article updates and compiles the case prosecution data for every reported case prosecuted between 1977 and 2011. That data are then compared to the results of a 2010 integrity risk survey performed by Deloitte Financial Advisory Services and Forbes which reveal a widely held global business perception that compliance and integrity risks appear to be rising sharply and that the FCPA is ineffective in deterring bribery and corruption in foreign markets. The article aims to serve as a predictive tool for policy makers and business professionals in assessing risk in the global markets, particularly as commerce intensifies in the BRIC countries, notable for bribery and corruption. (shrink)

The persistent educational challenges that fractions pose call for developing novel instructional methods to better prepare students for fraction learning. Here, we examined the effects of a 24-session, Cuisenaire rod intervention on a building block for symbolic fraction knowledge, continuous and discrete non-symbolic proportional reasoning, in children who have yet to receive fraction instruction. Participants were 34 second-graders who attended the intervention (intervention group) and 15 children who did not participate in any sessions (control group). As attendance at the intervention (...) sessions was irregular (median = 15.6 sessions, range = 1–24), we specifically examined the effect of the number of sessions completed on their non-symbolic proportional reasoning. Our results showed that children who attended a larger number of sessions increased their ability to compare non-symbolic continuous proportions. However, contrary to our expectations, they also decreased their ability to compare misleading discretized proportions. In contrast, children in the Control group did not show any change in their performance. These results provide further evidence on the malleability of non-symbolic continuous proportional reasoning and highlight the rigidity of counting knowledge interference on discrete proportional reasoning. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to describe a problem for calibrationism: a view about higher order evidence according to which one's credences should be calibrated to one's expected degree of reliability. Calibrationism is attractive, in part, because it explains our intuitive judgments, and provides a strong motivation for certain theories about higher order evidence and peer disagreement. However, I will argue that calibrationism faces a dilemma: There are two versions of the view one might adopt. The first version, I (...) argue, has the implausible consequence that, in a wide range of cases, calibrationism is the only constraint on rational belief. The second version, in addition to having some puzzling consequences, is unmotivated. At the end of the paper I sketch a possible solution. (shrink)

Citing of previous publications is an important factor in knowledge development. Because of the great amount of publications available, only a selection of studies gets cited, for varying reasons. If the selection of citations is associated with study outcome this is called citation bias. We will study determinants of citation in a broader sense, including e.g. study design, journal impact factor or the funding source of the publication. As a case study we assess which factors drive citation in the human (...) literature on phthalates, specifically the metabolite mono phthalate. A systematic literature search identified all relevant publications on human health effect of MEHP. Data on potential determinants of citation were extracted in duplo. Specialized software was used to create a citation network, including all potential citation pathways. Random effect logistic regression was used to assess whether these determinants influence the likelihood of citation. 112 Publications on MEHP were identified, with 5684 potential citation pathways of which 551 were actual citations. Reporting of a harmful point estimate, journal impact factor, authority of the author, a male corresponding author, research performed in North America and self-citation were positively associated with the likelihood of being cited. In the literature on MEHP, citation is mostly driven by a number of factors that are not related to study outcome. Although the identified determinants do not necessarily give strong indications of bias, it shows selective use of published literature for a variety of reasons. (shrink)

: In this essay, Miriam argues for a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to the radical feminist theory of sex-right and compulsory heterosexuality. Against critics of radical feminism, she argues that when understood from a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective, such theory does not foreclose female sexual agency. On the contrary, men's right of sexual access to women and girls is part of our background understanding of heteronormativity, and thus integral to the lived experience of female sexual agency.

Eilers Miriam, Gru¨ber Katrin, and Rehmann-Sutter Christoph’s latest edited volume, The Human Enhancement Debate and Disability: New Bodies for a Better Life, may at first seem to be just another book about human enhancement, on which there is a significant detailed literature. But, in fact, this book provides a novel16 perspective to the human enhancement debate by observing it through the disability lens, even as it gathers contributions from various experts from diverse fields. This interdisciplinary approach shows how disability (...) and human enhancement are tightly correlated in the debate on the latter. (shrink)

In recent years, permissivism—the claim that a body of evidence can rationalize more than one response—has enjoyed somewhat of a revival. But it is once again being threatened, this time by a host of new and interesting arguments that, at their core, are challenging the permissivist to explain why rationality matters. A version of the challenge that I am especially interested in is this: if permissivism is true, why should we expect the rational credences to be more accurate than the (...) irrational ones? My aim is to turn this challenge on its head and argue that, actually, those who deny permissivism will have a harder time responding to such a challenge than those who accept it. (shrink)

For this Clarendon Paperback, Dr Griffin has written a new Postscript to bring the original book fully up to date. She discusses further important and controversial questions of fact or interpretation in the light of the scholarship of the intervening years and provides additional argument where necessary. The connection between Seneca's prose works and his career as a first-century Roman statesman is problematic. Although he writes in the first person, he tells us little of his external life or of the (...) people and events that formed its setting. Miriam Griffin addresses the problem by first reconstructing Seneca's career using only outside sources and his de Clementia and Apocolocyntosis, whose political purposes are undisputed. In the second part of the book she studies Seneca's treatment of subjects of political significance, including his views on slavery, provincial policy, wealth, and suicide. On the whole, the word of the philosopher is found to illuminate the work of the statesman, but notable exceptions emerge, and the links that are revealed vary from theme to theme and rarely accord with traditional autobiographical interpretations of Seneca's works. (shrink)

The paper uses tropes culled from several of Hannah Arendt's works, as well as Rebecca Schneider's performance-theoretical considerations on "reenactment", to analyze the work of artist Miriam Shenitzer, specifically a show of drawings, captions, and objects called "A Putative Life of Hannah Arendt." The essay probes this "putative life" as construed from the artist's own memory fragments, as well as from faux-artifacts that constitute a "collection" without claim to representing an actual past. With access to history denied and a (...) heritage claimed "without testament," the artist opens a space "between past and future," a moment of contemplation on the borders between private and public lives. (shrink)

Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) developed from the work of clinical epidemiologists at McMaster University and Oxford University in the 1970s and 1980s and self-consciously presented itself as a "new paradigm" called "evidence-based medicine" in the early 1990s. The techniques of the randomized controlled trial, systematic review and meta-analysis have produced an extensive and powerful body of research. They have also generated a critical literature that raises general concerns about its methods. This paper is a systematic review of the critical literature. It (...) finds the description of EBM as a Kuhnian paradigm helpful and worth taking further. Three kinds of criticism are evaluated in detail: criticisms of procedural aspects of EBM (especially from Cartwright, Worrall and Howick), data showing the greater than expected fallibility of EBM (Ioaanidis and others), and concerns that EBM is incomplete as a philosophy of science (Ashcroft and others). The paper recommends a more instrumental or pragmatic approach to EBM, in which any ranking of evidence is done by reference to the actual, rather than the theoretically expected, reliability of results. Emphasis on EBM has eclipsed other necessary research methods in medicine. With the recent emphasis on translational medicine, we are seeing a restoration of the recognition that clinical research requires an engagement with basic theory (e.g. physiological, genetic, biochemical) and a range of empirical techniques such as bedside observation, laboratory and animal studies. EBM works best when used in this context. (shrink)

In this essay, Miriam argues for a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to the radical feminist theory of sex-right and compulsory heterosexuality. Against critics of radical feminism, she argues that when understood from a phenomenological’ hermeneutic perspective, such theory does not foreclose female sexual agency. On the contrary, men's right of sexual access to women and girls is part of our background understanding of heteronormativity, and thus integral to the lived experience of female sexual agency.

A defense of imprecise credences (and other imprecise doxastic attitudes).

The year before his death, Hume asked his publisher to affix an advertisement to all existing and future editions of his works. In this advertisement, Hume disavows the Treatise and directs all criticism to his later work. Hume himself is relatively clear as to why he preferred this later work. In his autobiography, when discussing the poor public reception given his Treatise, Hume says, ‘I had always entertained a Notion, that my want of Success in publishing the Treatise of human (...) nature, had proceeded more from the manner than the matter; and that I had been guilty of a very usual Indiscretion, in going to the Press too early.’ In a letter to Gilbert Elliot, written in 1751, Hume says that ‘The philosophical Principles are the same in both’ the Treatise and the first Enquiry. (shrink)

Embodied approaches in cognitive science hold that the body is crucial for cognition. What this claim amounts to, however, still remains unclear. This paper contributes to its clarification by confronting three ways of understanding embodiment—the sensorimotor approach, extended cognition and enactivism—with Locked-in syndrome. LIS is a case of severe global paralysis in which patients are unable to move and yet largely remain cognitively intact. We propose that LIS poses a challenge to embodied approaches to cognition requiring them to make explicit (...) the notion of embodiment they defend and its role for cognition. We argue that the sensorimotor and the extended functionalist approaches either fall short of accounting for cognition in LIS from an embodied perspective or do it too broadly by relegating the body only to a historical role. Enactivism conceives of the body as autonomous system and of cognition as sense-making. From this perspective embodiment is not equated with bodily movement but with forms of agency that do not disappear with body paralysis. Enactivism offers a clarifying perspective on embodiment and thus currently appears to be the framework in embodied cognition best suited to address the challenge posed by LIS. (shrink)

The year before his death, Hume asked his publisher to affix an advertisement to all existing and future editions of his works. In this advertisement, Hume disavows the Treatise and directs all criticism to his later work. Hume himself is relatively clear as to why he preferred this later work. In his autobiography, when discussing the poor public reception given his Treatise, Hume says, ‘I had always entertained a Notion, that my want of Success in publishing the Treatise of human (...) nature, had proceeded more from the manner than the matter; and that I had been guilty of a very usual Indiscretion, in going to the Press too early.’ In a letter to Gilbert Elliot, written in 1751, Hume says that ‘The philosophical Principles are the same in both’ the Treatise and the first Enquiry. (shrink)

Music is part of the cultural practice and, at the same time, is interwoven with biology through its effects on the brain and its likely evolutionary origin. Studies on music, however, are traditionally based on the humanities and often carried out in a purely historical context, without much input from neuroscience and biology. Here, we argue that lullabies are a particularly suited test case to study the biological versus cultural aspects of music.

Solutions to word problems are moderated by the semantic alignment of real-world relations with mathematical operations. Categorical relations between entities are aligned with addition, whereas certain functional relations between entities are aligned with division. Similarly, discreteness vs. continuity of quantities is aligned with different formats for rational numbers. These alignments have been found both in textbooks and in the performance of college students in the USA and in South Korea. The current study examined evidence for alignments in Russia. Textbook analyses (...) revealed semantic alignments for arithmetic word problems, but not for rational numbers. Nonetheless, Russian college students showed semantic alignments both for arithmetic operations and for rational numbers. Since Russian students exhibit semantic alignments for rational numbers in the absence of exposure to examples in school, such alignments likely reflect intuitive understanding of mathematical representations of real-world situations. (shrink)

Conflicts of interest in health and medicine have been the source of considerable public and professional debate. Much of this debate has focused on financial, rather than non-financial COI, which is a significant lacuna because non-financial COI can be just as influential as financial COI. In an effort to explore the nature and effects of non-financial, as well as financial COI, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eleven Australian medical professionals regarding their experiences of, and attitudes towards, COI. We found that (...) this group of medical professionals saw non-financial interests—most notably the pursuit of status and respect and the avoidance of stigma—as potentially conflicting with other important interests. (shrink)

: The traditional "doctrinal" approach to interpreting Plato's dialogues has been criticized in recent literature on grounds that it can neither account for the structural complexities of the dialogues nor resolve conflicts within or between dialogues. Accordingly, a non-doctrinal, dramatic approach has been offered in its place. In response to this literature, I argue that, though the doctrinal approach is flawed, the non-doctrinal, dramatic approach does not provide a viable alternative. Instead, I offer a revised doctrinal approach based upon Socrates' (...) discussion of "summoners" in Republic 522e–525a and supported by the Meno. (shrink)

This article explores how ‘biology’ — in the sense that bodies are increasingly understood in biological terms, from the molecular to the species level — is becoming more central in the recognition of political worth, and I argue that humanitarians are key players in producing this reality. I focus on the role biology plays in the politics of immigration. Combining ethnographic research with undocumented immigrants in Paris and asylum claimants in the US, I examine how biology has become a central (...) tool in the ability to travel. How did pathology or violations of anatomy become the ‘best’ ways to get papers as an undocumented immigrant — better than selling one’s labor power? I suggest that biological evidence — of illness, of torture, of immunity levels — are used as key measurements of suffering, which justifies humanitarian exceptions, in this case, for papers. My argument is that there is a dual regime of truth at work, where the multiple ontologies of biology get reduced to one epistemology of biology as ‘fixed’ when it concerns immigrants and refugees, due to the role of humanitarianism in the politics of immigration. This is explored in the context of profound inequalities between those in the global North and South, asking how the hope offered by biological evidence takes on different meanings and consequences depending on one’s position in the global matrix of wealth and poverty, race and gender. (shrink)

REVIEW ESSAY The minimal self needs a social update Self and other: Exploring subjectivity, empathy, and shame, by Dan Zahavi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, 304 pp.

While quantum theory cannot be described by a local hidden variable model, it is nevertheless possible to construct such models that exhibit features commonly associated with quantum mechanics. These models are also used to explore the question of \-ontic versus \-epistemic theories for quantum mechanics. Spekkens’ toy theory is one such model. It arises from classical probabilistic mechanics via a limit on the knowledge an observer may have about the state of a system. The toy theory for the simplest possible (...) underlying system closely resembles stabilizer quantum mechanics, a fragment of quantum theory which is efficiently classically simulable but also non-local. Further analysis of the similarities and differences between those two theories can thus yield new insights into what distinguishes quantum theory from classical theories, and \-ontic from \-epistemic theories. In this paper, we develop a graphical language for Spekkens’ toy theory. Graphical languages offer intuitive and rigorous formalisms for the analysis of quantum mechanics and similar theories. To compare quantum mechanics and a toy model, it is useful to have similar formalisms for both. We show that our language fully describes Spekkens’ toy theory and in particular, that it is complete: meaning any equality that can be derived using other formalisms can also be derived entirely graphically. Our language is inspired by a similar graphical language for quantum mechanics called the ZX-calculus. Thus Spekkens’ toy bit theory and stabilizer quantum mechanics can be analysed and compared using analogous graphical formalisms. (shrink)