IntroductionAs part of a unifying theory of autism, Ben Shalom (2009) proposed that while procedural, perceptual and semantic memory functions are intact in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the more integrative level of episodic memory is impaired. According to Ben Shalom, this reduced integration may be due to the reduced function of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which may also explain the reduced integration found in motor, sensory-perceptual and emotional processes in ASD. The present review examines this hypothesis, by focusing on (...) evidence regarding autobiographical memory (AM) episodes in ASD – arguably the highest form of memory integration processes. Most research on memory in ASD thus far has focused on memory for experimentally-presented stimuli (Lind, 2010;Boucher et al., 2012). The present paper builds on this literature to examine the rich evidence that has recently accumulated from in-depth, systematic studies of autobiographical memory in ASD – memories of personally-related events that are naturalistically accumulated over a person’s lifetime. Of note, research on AM is limited in its focus on memories that cannot be as readily verified (but see Bruck et al., 2007), and in its reliance on high-functioning verbal individuals. Nonetheless, studies of AM provide us with an unparalleled perspective on the naturalistic process of memory integration in ASD. Specifically, this review aims to determine how well memory episodes are integrated in ASD; which elem... (shrink)

Strohminger gives a lively and accurate critique of McGinn’s book but is somewhat inaccurate herself in describing the current theoretical state of the science on disgust. My comment primarily focuses on the issues I have with McGinn’s and Strohminger’s discussions and briefly offers a possible unifying account of the function and meaning of disgust.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased demand for physicians, leading to widespread redeployment of specialty physicians to care for patients with COVID-19. These redeployments highlight an important question: How do physicians balance competing obligations to their own health, their own patients, and society during a public health crisis? How can physicians, specifically subspecialists, navigate this tension? In this article, we analyse a clinical scenario in which an orthopaedic sports surgeon is redeployed to care for patients with COVID-19. This case raises questions (...) about physicians’ obligations to their own patients compared with society at large, the relative value of specialty physicians during a global pandemic, and the ethical permissibility of compulsory redeployment. Using the orthopaedic surgery specialty as a model, we build a redeployment framework for surgical specialists that is both ethical and equitable. We argue that although orthopaedic surgeons have a moral obligation to participate in physician redeployment schemes, the scope of this obligation is limited and contingent on the following conditions: (1) the number of local COVID-19 cases is high; (2) obligations to their own patients or orthopaedic patients requiring urgent or emergency care have been fulfilled; (3) their value as physicians exceeds their value as specialists because of the pandemic climate; (4) voluntary redeployments are exhausted before compulsory redeployments are implemented; and (5) redeployment would not put the physicians at unreasonable risk of harm. (shrink)

The human capacity for intersubjective engagement is present, even when one is limited in speaking, pointing, and coordinating gaze. This paper examines the everyday social interactions of two differently-disposed actors—a non-speaking autistic child and his speaking, neurotypical mother—who participate in shared attention through dialogic turn-taking. In the collaborative pursuit of activities, the participants coordinate across multiple turns, producing multi-turn constructions that accomplish specific goals. The paper asks two questions about these collaborative constructions: 1) What are their linguistic and discursive structures? (...) 2) How do embodied actions contribute to these constructions? Findings show that the parent and child repeatedly co-produced multi-turn constructions that had consistent structures, implying a sophisticated ability to anticipate the completion of action trajectories. Examining the embodied actions of interactants revealed that the child often accommodated to the parent’s demands for participation. Nonetheless, the child occasionally pursued his own goals by improvising with and within multi-turn constructions. He launched constructions to redirect parental attention, and otherwise produced surprising actions within the turn-taking structure of these constructions. The paper concludes that multi-turn constructions in the midst of activities are a primordial site in which to begin observing the competencies of non-speaking autistic children for intersubjective engagement. (shrink)

BackgroundThe Pacific Islander population is the second fasting growing population in the United States and Arkansas is home to the largest Marshallese population in the continental US. The Marshal...

Entomophagy—the practice of eating insects—has been touted as a means to combat undernutrition and food insecurity globally. Insects offer a nutritious, environmentally friendly alternative to resource-intensive livestock. But the benefits of edible insects cannot be realized if people do not choose to eat them. We therefore examine the social acceptability of edible insects in rural Zambia, where entomophagy is common but underexplored. Through a village case study, we show that edible insects are not valued equally, are understood socially, and seem (...) to reflect and reinforce social values. We utilize grounded theory and ethnographic methods, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and observation to examine collective entomophagy beliefs. While we expected to see differentiation in perceptions across groups based on kinship, we demonstrate that social values related to class, urbanism, gender, and age emerge as more germane explanations for entomophagy perceptions, reflecting their social weight. By expanding on current apperception of entomophagy behavior, our findings inform future research and efforts to promote entomophagy through minilivestock farming. Systems designed to maximize output, minimize labor, and highlight benefits are more likely to be widely accepted. We do not anticipate tribal association will be the primary limitation on minilivestock adoption in this context. (shrink)

Logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia is a neurodegenerative language disorder primarily characterized by impaired phonological processing. Sentence repetition and comprehension deficits are observed in lvPPA and linked to impaired phonological working memory, but recent evidence also implicates impaired speech perception. Currently, neural encoding of the speech envelope, which forms the scaffolding for perception, is not clearly understood in lvPPA. We leveraged recent analytical advances in electrophysiology to examine speech envelope encoding in lvPPA. We assessed cortical tracking of the speech envelope (...) and in-task comprehension of two spoken narratives in individuals with lvPPA and age-matched controls. Despite markedly reduced narrative comprehension relative to controls, individuals with lvPPA had increased cortical tracking of the speech envelope in theta oscillations, which track low-level features, but not delta oscillations, which track speech units that unfold across a longer time scale. This neural signature was highly correlated across narratives. Results indicate an increased reliance on acoustic cues during speech encoding. This may reflect inefficient encoding of bottom-up speech cues, likely as a consequence of dysfunctional temporoparietal cortex. (shrink)

This article illustrates how a collaborative research process can successfully engage an underserved minority community to address health disparities. Pacific Islanders, including the Marshallese, are one of the fastest growing US populations. They face significant health disparities, including extremely high rates of type 2 diabetes. This article describes the engagement process of designing patient‐centered outcomes research with Marshallese stakeholders, highlighting the specific influences of their input on a randomized control trial to address diabetes. Over 18 months, an interdisciplinary research team (...) used community‐based participatory principles to conduct patient‐engaged outcomes research that involved 31 stakeholders in all aspects of research design, from defining the research question to making decisions about budgets and staffing. This required academic researcher flexibility, but yielded a design linking scientific methodology with community wisdom. (shrink)

The possible integration of genomic sequencing (including whole‐genome and whole‐exome sequencing) into the three contexts addressed in this special report—state‐mandated screening programs, clinical care, and direct‐to‐consumer services—raises related but distinct legal issues. This essay will outline the legal issues surrounding the integration of genomic sequencing into state newborn screening programs, parental rights to refuse and access sequencing for their newborns in clinical and direct‐to‐consumer care, and privacy‐related legal issues attending the use of sequencing in newborns.

If funding allocation is an indicator of a field’s priorities, then the priorities of the field of bioethics are misaligned because they perpetuate injustice. Social justice mandates priority for the factors that drive systematic disadvantage, which tend not to be the areas supported by funding within academic bioethics. Current funding priorities violate social justice by overemphasizing technologies that aim to enhance the human condition without addressing underlying structural inequalities grounded in racism, and by deemphasizing areas of inquiry most frequently pursued (...) by Scholars of Color. This lack of attention to upstream determinants of health in bioethics research perpetuates a gap in the resources needed to understand the experiences of communities disproportionately experiencing poor health, which is itself a form of epistemic injustice. Both social and epistemic injustices are apparent in the impact of these funding priorities on people of color, both in the public and in the bioethics community. (shrink)

In this book, Rachel Zuckert provides the first overarching account of Johann Gottfried Herder's complex aesthetic theory. She guides the reader through Herder's texts, showing how they relate to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy of art, and focusing on two main concepts: aesthetic naturalism, the view that art is natural to and naturally valuable for human beings as organic, embodied beings, and - unusually for Herder's time - aesthetic pluralism, the view that aesthetic value takes many diverse and culturally (...) varying forms. Zuckert argues that Herder's theory plays a pivotal role in the history of philosophical aesthetics, marking the transition from the eighteenth-century focus on aesthetic value as grounded in human nature to the nineteenth-century focus on art as socially significant and historically variable. Her study illuminates Herder's significance as an innovative thinker in aesthetics, and will interest a range of readers in philosophy of art and European thought. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children’s (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity. Further experiments probed the sources of younger children’s difficulty by comparing children’s performance placing a target object in a hole, on a 2-dimensional form, or atop another (...) solid object. Together, the findings suggest that some factors limiting adults’ object representations, including the difficulty of comparing the shapes of positive and negative spaces and of representing shapes in 3 dimensions, contribute to young children’s errors in manipulating objects. (shrink)

Rachel Cohon offers an original interpretation of the moral philosophy of David Hume, focusing on two areas.

How to engage farmers that have limited formal education is at the foundation of environmentally-sound and equitable agricultural development. Yet there are few examples of curricula that support the co-development of knowledge with farmers. While transdisciplinary and participatory techniques are considered key components of agroecology, how to do so is rarely specified and few materials are available, especially those relevant to smallholder farmers with limited formal education in Sub-Saharan Africa. The few training materials that exist provide appropriate methods, such as (...) compost making, but do not explain relationships and synergies between nutrition, social inequalities, climate change and agroecology. Some food sovereignty and agroecology courses aim at popular political education for those with more formal education. Here we describe the process of development of an innovative curriculum, which integrates agroecology, nutrition, climate change, gender and other dimensions of social equity across 2 weeks of training explicitly for smallholders in southern Africa with limited formal education. The curriculum is highly participatory; we use concepts in popular education, transformative and experiential-based learning, and theatre. It is also integrative; we link agroecology with climate change, human and soil nutrition, gender, and related components of social equity. Developed in partnership with Malawian farmers, community development experts and academics from five countries, the curriculum was piloted with 520 smallholder farming households in Malawi and Tanzania, and evaluated using qualitative techniques. Clashes of language, cultural norms, and terminology were as great of a challenge as agreeing on and conveying technical information, to weave into a coherent whole. However, farmers who participated in the curriculum training demonstrated high interest, comprehension of material and interest in immediate application to their lives. (shrink)

Kant’s account of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment has been extremely influential, prompting extensive discussion of the psychology, affect, moral significance, and relevance to artistic representation of the sublime on his provocative view. I focus instead on Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime in connection to his theoretical critical project, namely his attempt to characterize human cognitive powers and to limit human pretensions to knowledge of the supersensible. I argue, first, that his account of the psychology of the (...) sublime is designed to explain not just its affective character, but also to address challenges concerning the coherence of an experience of something as transcending one’s cognitive abilities. Thereby, I argue moreover, Kant provides an alternative, demystifying account of mystical experiences, in which humans might take themselves to intuit that which is beyond human understanding or reason, and thus to claim that they have special cognitive access to the supersensible, transcending the limits Kant claims to establish for human cognition. Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime is not merely so reductive of mystical experience, however; it also, I suggest, describes the aesthetic of Kantian critique itself. (shrink)

Through engagement with key informants and review of ethical theories applicable to refugee policy, this paper examines the ethical and policy considerations that policy-level stakeholders believe should factor into setting the refugee resettlement ceiling. We find that the ceiling traditionally has been influenced by policy goals, underlying values, and practical considerations. These factors map onto several ethical approaches to resettlement. There is significant alignment between U.S. policy interests and ethical obligations toward refugees. We argue that the refugee ceiling should be (...) restored to historical norms, and that there exists a corresponding obligation to counter negative public perceptions about refugees and the costs of resettlement. (shrink)

Rachel Zuckert - The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 599-622 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism Rachel Zuckert In the "critique of aesthetic judgment," Kant claims that when we find an object beautiful, we are appreciating its "purposive form." Many of Kant's readers have found this claim one of his (...) least interesting and most easily criticized claims about aesthetic experience. Detractors hold up his aesthetics as a paradigmatic case of narrow formalism; and even many admirers of Kant's aesthetics take Kant's claims about form to be problematic, but argue that they are inessential to his aesthetics . Though these critics come to differing evaluations of Kant's aesthetics as a whole, they agree on two points. First, interpretively: that when Kant claims that it is the "form" of an object we find beautiful, he means that in aesthetic appreciation, we find certain spatial and/or temporal properties aesthetically pleasing—and that such properties are exclusively responsible for an object's beauty. Second, evaluatively: that Kant is wrong, at least about this. In this paper, I shall propose that we need not endorse either claim. I shall argue that one may interpret Kant's.. (shrink)

The comorbidity of chronic pain and opioid addiction is a serious problem that has been growing with the practice of prescribing opioids for chronic pain. Neuroimaging research has shown that chronic pain and opioid dependence both affect brain structure and function, but this is the first study to evaluate the neurophysiological alterations in patients with comorbid chronic pain and addiction. Eighteen participants with chronic low back pain and opioid addiction were compared with eighteen age- and sex-matched healthy individuals in a (...) pain-induction fMRI task. Unified structural equation modeling (SEM) with Lagrange multiplier (LM) testing yielded a network model of pain processing for patient and control groups based on 19 a priori defined regions. Tests of differences between groups on specific regression parameters were determined on a path-by-path basis using z-tests corrected for the number of comparisons. Patients with the chronic pain and addiction comorbidity had increased connection strengths; many of these connections were interhemispheric and spanned regions involved in sensory, affective, and cognitive processes. The affected regions included those that are commonly altered in chronic pain or addiction alone, indicating that this comorbidity manifests with neurological symptoms of both disorders. Understanding the neural mechanisms involved in the comorbidity is crucial to finding a comprehensive treatment, rather than treating the symptoms individually. (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Judgment has often been interpreted by scholars as comprising separate treatments of three uneasily connected topics: beauty, biology, and empirical knowledge. Rachel Zuckert's book interprets the Critique as a unified argument concerning all three domains. She argues that on Kant's view, human beings demonstrate a distinctive cognitive ability in appreciating beauty and understanding organic life: an ability to anticipate a whole that we do not completely understand according to preconceived categories. This ability is necessary, moreover, for (...) human beings to gain knowledge of nature in its empirical character as it is, not as we might assume it to be. Her wide-ranging and original study will be valuable for readers in all areas of Kant's philosophy. (shrink)

We discuss a case where clinical genomic investigation of muscle weakness unexpectedly found a genetic variant that might (or might not) predispose to kidney cancer. We argue that despite its off-target and uncertain nature, this variant should be discussed with the man who had the test, not because it is medical information, but because this discussion would allow the further clinical evaluation that might lead it to becoming so. We argue that while prominent ethical debates around genomics often take ‘results’ (...) as a starting point and ask questions as to whether to look for and how to react to them, the construction of genomic results is fraught with ethical complexity, although often couched as a primarily technical problem. We highlight the need for greater focus on, and appreciation of, the ethical work undertaken daily by scientists and clinicians working in genomic medicine and discuss how public conversations around genomics need to adapt to prepare future patients for potentially uncertain and unexpected outcomes from clinical genomic tests. (shrink)

Background: Falls in older adults are a major public health problem. White matter hyperintensities are highly prevalent in older adults and are a risk factor for falls. In the absence of a cure for WMHs, identifying potential strategies to counteract the risk of WMHs on falls are of great importance. Physical activity is a promising countermeasure to reduce both WMHs and falls risk. However, no study has yet investigated whether PA attenuates the association of WMHs with falls risk. We hypothesized (...) that PA moderates the association between WMHs and falls risk.Methods: Seventy-six community-dwelling older adults aged 70–80 years old were included in this cross-sectional study. We indexed PA using the Physical Activity Score for the Elderly Questionnaire. Falls risk was assessed using the Physiological Profile Assessment, and WMH volume was determined by an experienced radiologist on T2-weighted and PD-weighted MRI scans. We first examined the independent associations of WMH volume and PASE score with PPA. Subsequently, we examined whether PASE moderated the relationship between WMH volume and PPA. We plotted simple slopes to interpret the interaction effects. Age, sex, and Montreal Cognitive Assessment score were included as covariates in all models.Results: Participants had a mean age of 74 years and 54 were female. Forty-nine participants had a Fazekas score of 1, 19 had a score of 2, and 6 a score of 3. Both PASE and WMH volume were each independently associated with PPA score. The interaction model indicated that PASE score moderated the association between WMH volume and PPA, whereby higher PASE score attenuated the association between WMHs and falls risk.Conclusion: PA is an important moderator of falls risk. Importantly, older adults with WMH can reduce their risk of falls by increasing their PA. (shrink)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had extraordinary successes in classifying photographic images of objects and are often described as the best models of biological vision. This conclusion is largely based on three sets of findings: (1) DNNs are more accurate than any other model in classifying images taken from various datasets, (2) DNNs do the best job in predicting the pattern of human errors in classifying objects taken from various behavioral datasets, and (3) DNNs do the best job in predicting (...) brain signals in response to images taken from various brain datasets (e.g., single cell responses or fMRI data). However, these behavioral and brain datasets do not test hypotheses regarding what features are contributing to good predictions and we show that the predictions may be mediated by DNNs that share little overlap with biological vision. More problematically, we show that DNNs account for almost no results from psychological research. This contradicts the common claim that DNNs are good, let alone the best, models of human object recognition. We argue that theorists interested in developing biologically plausible models of human vision need to direct their attention to explaining psychological findings. More generally, theorists need to build models that explain the results of experiments that manipulate independent variables designed to test hypotheses rather than compete on making the best predictions. We conclude by briefly summarizing various promising modeling approaches that focus on psychological data. (shrink)

This study offers a ckomprehensive new interpretation of one of Plato's dialogues, the _Cratylus_. Throughout, the book combines analysis of Plato's arguments with attentiveness to his philosophical method.

One reason Darwin's letters and journals are such a pleasure to read is that in them we meet a modest, decent man who commands our respect, and even our affection. He was not only a great scientist; he was an exemplary human being. Yet there was one famous episode in Darwin's life in which he and his friends acted badly. Perhaps because he was so admirable a man, historians have tended to gloss over this moral lapse, sometimes even to the (...) point of misrepresenting the facts. I refer, of course, to the celebrated episode involving Alfred Russel Wallace, who "scooped" Darwin by independently discovering the theory of natural selection. The standard accounts suggest that Darwin and his friends treated Wallace honorably. A closer look at what happened leaves a different impression: it is a lamentable story of human weakness, in which some good men treated another good man disgracefully. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 (2006) 599-622 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic FormalismRachel ZuckertIn the "critique of aesthetic judgment," Kant claims that when we find an object beautiful, we are appreciating its "purposive form." Many of Kant's readers have found this claim one of his least interesting and most easily criticized claims about aesthetic experience. Detractors hold up his (...) aesthetics as a paradigmatic case of narrow formalism; 1 and even many admirers of Kant's aesthetics take Kant's claims about form to be problematic, but argue that they are inessential to his aesthetics (which includes more interesting, defensible claims). 2 Though these critics come to differing evaluations of Kant's aesthetics as a whole, they agree on two points. First, interpretively: that when Kant claims that it is the "form" of an object we find beautiful, he means that in aesthetic appreciation, we find certain spatial and/or temporal properties (such as proportion, line, shape) aesthetically pleasing—and that such properties are exclusively responsible for an object's beauty. Second, evaluatively: that Kant is wrong, at least about this.In this paper, I shall propose that we need not endorse either claim. I shall argue that one may interpret Kant's formalism as a claim that in aesthetic experience 3 [End Page 599] we appreciate the object as an individual, as comprising all (or indeterminately many) of its sensible properties as inextricably interrelated or unified to make the object what it is; in other words, we appreciate what has been called an object's 'individual form.' This reading, I shall suggest, allows us not only to understand Kant's aesthetics as intimately connected to his project in the Critique of Judgment (hereafter, CJ) as a whole, but also to see Kant's aesthetics, in general, as providing a richer, more plausible description of our aesthetic engagement with an object, or as less narrowly subjectivist than is frequently believed.I shall proceed by presenting Kant's claims about form, and the standard criticisms thereof, and then turn to defend this alternative reading. Before I do so, however, I wish to make some preliminary remarks about aesthetic formalism in general. Contemporary discussion of formalism often takes aesthetic formalism to be instantiated by the views of the twentieth-century art critics, Clive Bell and Roger Fry, 4 and Kant's formalism is often implicitly equated with theirs (or the kind of position attributed to them). I wish to resist that equation in this essay; to that end, I start here by giving a wider sense of what formalism might be, drawing especially on historical positions that were available to Kant. 5Broadly speaking, "formalism" is the view that, in aesthetic appreciation of an object (usually a work of art), we do and ought to pay attention not to the object's representational content, emotional expressiveness, historical, institutional, or social context (whether conditions for the production of the object or its effects), but only to its form. Formalism is characterized in some sense, then, by what it excludes, viz. considerations taken to be external to the object. But it does specify positively (if vaguely) that the form of an object is what makes it beautiful. 6'Form,' however, can mean a number of different things, all of which (in some sense) are the design or arrangement of an object's parts, often of its sensible properties. I wish to draw attention to three somewhat distinct ways in which one may understand such form or arrangement of properties, which I shall call 'property-formalism,' 'kind-formalism,' and 'whole-formalism.' Property-formalism is the view that the form of an object can be described in terms of a set of specific spatial or temporal properties that characterize the relations that hold among different parts of the object, and that these properties are responsible for the beauty of the object. Hogarth's view that the serpentine line is the most beautiful line, responsible... (shrink)

It is quite standard, even banal, to describe Kant's project in the Critique of Pure Reason [KrV] as a critical reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism, most directly expressed in Kant's claim that intuitions and concepts are two distinct, yet equally necessary, and necessarily interdependent sources of cognition. Similarly, though Kant rejects both the rationalist foundation of morality in the concept of perfection and that of the empiricists in feeling or in the moral sense, one might broadly characterize Kant's moral philosophy (...) as an attempt to reconcile the apriori universality and necessity of rationalist ethics with empiricist or sentimentalist strictures concerning the distinction between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’, between third personal knowledge of the good and first personal motivation. (shrink)

Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume, Voltaire, and Diderot, criticized religious doctrines not only because (or when) such doctrines comprised unfounded claims to knowledge, but also because they inspired fanaticism, ensuing in sectarian violence, persecution, torture, and war. In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct Kant’s position, as part of this Enlightenment project: he too repeatedly and pejoratively characterizes various forms of belief in or behavior guided by religious (or other) conceptions (...) of the supersensible as “fanaticism” (Schwärmerei). By comparison to many Enlightenment figures, Kant’s understanding of the relation between the human presumption to knowledge of the supersensible and the deliverances of reason is more sympathetic to the claims of religious belief and more qualified in advocating the corrective power of reason against it. I argue that Kant’s conception of fanaticism – its origins, motivations, and the nature of its error – reflects this more qualified endorsement of reason. I suggest that by contrast to many of his predecessors and contemporaries Kant does not treat fanaticism as expressing or originating wholly from sensible emotions or interests, opposed to and “overpowering” reason. Rather, though sensibility (including emotional sensibility) is central to his account of fanaticism, Kant holds that the problematic fanatical stance incorporates and depends on rational projections or aspirations, particularly those of practical reason. Moreover, Kant’s distinction between theoretical and practical reason generates an interesting, dual account of fanaticism: theoretical fanaticism, a kind of cognitive error, and practical fanaticism, a specifically practical error in our relation to the supersensible. (shrink)