The paper intends to analyse developing of the literary representation of women in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, forming an integral part of female authorship during this period. However, instead of taking aim at the male poetic tradition, the genius of Wroth is to absorb it and use it for her own ends. Reclaiming the virtues of the woman through constancy, she upends the conventional views of the woman. Thus, Wroth strengthens the autonomy of the woman by allowing her (...) to make the decision to accept a role subordinate to man. (shrink)

In _Michael Polanyi and His Generation_, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political (...) events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare. At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science. (shrink)

Hempel's qualitative criteria of converse consequence and special consequence for confirmation are examined, and the resulting paradoxes traced to the general intransitivity of confirmation. Adopting a probabilistic measure of confirmation, a limiting form of transitivity of confirmation from evidence to predictions is derived, and it is shown to what extent its application depends on prior probability judgments. In arguments involving this kind of transitivity therefore there is no necessary "convergence of opinion" in the sense claimed by some personalists. The conditions (...) of application of the limiting transitivity theorem are most perspicuously described in terms of De Finetti's notion of exchangeability, which leads to a suggested revaluation of the function of theories in relation to confirmation and explanation. (shrink)

Children show increasing control of emotions and behavior during their early years. Our studies suggest a shift in control from the brain’s orienting network in infancy to the executive network by the age of 3—4 years. Our longitudinal study indicates that orienting influences both positive and negative affect, as measured by parent report in infancy. At 3—4 years of age, the dominant control of affect rests in a frontal brain network that involves the anterior cingulate gyrus. Connectivity of brain structures (...) also changes from infancy to toddlerhood. Early connectivity of parietal and frontal areas is important in orienting; later connectivity involves midfrontal and anterior cingulate areas related to executive attention and self-regulation. (shrink)

In C.S. Lewis's science fiction parable Perelandra was a planet which had no solid ground. At all times the floating landscape was continually swirling and moving, chasms would appear where a minute before there had been safe standing. The rational beings who lived there hopped nimbly on to another little island when the one on which they stood disappeared under their feet. They were used to it and took it for granted that nothing was certain. The visitor from our planet (...) had to learn a completely new way of existence. But where did he get his idea of certainty in a fixed environment? It is more plausible that uncertainty is normal and the whole idea of certainty an illusion. Today gives an opportunity to reflect on how people deal with skepticism, doubt and uncertainty.The questions apply to a current debate in the UK on risk. Opinion polls constantly reveal that the public lacks trust in government, and particularly it does not trust the government to reveal the information needed to assess important risks. From which the risk analysts conclude that the government should grant access to information more freely and encourage enquiry. They believe that openness would foster a better understanding on the part of the public which at present does not know what to believe. More information would create certainty, more certainty and the public would trust its spokesmen, unreasonable fears would be calmed. This is the advice of an expert enquiry.Certainty is not a mood, or a feeling, it is an institution: this is my thesis. Certainty is only possible because doubt is blocked institutionally: most individual decisions about risk are taken under pressure from institutions. If we recognize more uncertainty now, it will be because of things that have happened to the institutional underpinning of our beliefs. And that is what we ought to be studying. In my student days the hottest controversies in anthropology were about why `other people' — that is people not living in advanced capitalist society — had certainty about their absurd beliefs.When trying to explain their misfortunes, why did they neglect the physical and scientific evidence, and draw instead on their beliefs in spirits, magic, and taboos? How could they be so obstinate in error? Anthropologists spent their energies on defending the allegedly irrational beliefs of other people, and I shall continue the tradition. (shrink)

Developing and implementing artificial intelligence (AI) systems in an ethical manner faces several challenges specific to the kind of technology at hand, including ensuring that decision-making systems making use of machine learning are just, fair, and intelligible, and are aligned with our human values. Given that values vary across cultures, an additional ethical challenge is to ensure that these AI systems are not developed according to some unquestioned but questionable assumption of universal norms but are in fact compatible with the (...) societies in which they operate. This is particularly pertinent for AI research and implementation across Africa, a ground where AI systems are and will be used but also a place with a history of imposition of outside values. In this paper, we thus critically examine one proposal for ensuring that decision-making systems are just, fair, and intelligible—that we adopt a principle of explicability to generate specific recommendations—to assess whether the principle should be adopted in an African research context. We argue that a principle of explicability not only can contribute to responsible and thoughtful development of AI that is sensitive to African interests and values, but can also advance tackling some of the computational challenges in machine learning research. In this way, the motivation for ensuring that a machine learning-based system is just, fair, and intelligible is not only to meet ethical requirements, but also to make effective progress in the field itself. (shrink)

The relationship between Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) functional structures (f-structures) for sentences and their semanticinterpretations can be formalized in linear logic in a way thatcorrectly explains the observed interactions between quantifier scopeambiguity, bound anaphora and intensionality.Our linear-logic formalization of the compositional properties ofquantifying expressions in natural language obviates the need forspecial mechanisms, such as Cooper storage, in representing thescoping possibilities of quantifying expressions. Instead, thesemantic contribution of a quantifier is recorded as a linear-logicformula whose use in a proof will establish the (...) scope of thequantifier. Different proofs can lead to different scopes. In eachcomplete proof, the properties of linear logic ensure thatquantifiers are properly scoped. (shrink)

This paper shows that species are individuals with respect to evolutionary theory in the sense that the laws of the theory deal with species as irreducible wholes rather than as sets of organisms. 'Species X' is an instantiation of a primitive term of the theory. I present a sketch of a proof that it cannot be defined within the theory as a set of organisms; the proof relies not on details of my axiomatization but rather on a generally accepted property (...) of speciation; hence the same argument should work for any axiomatization which captures this generally accepted property of speciation. (shrink)

A long-standing tradition presents economic activity in terms of the flow of fluids. This metaphor lies behind a small but influential practice of hydraulic modelling in economics. Yet turning the metaphor into a three-dimensional hydraulic model of the economic system entails making numerous and detailed commitments about the analogy between hydraulics and the economy. The most famous 3-D model in economics is probably the Phillips machine, the central object of this paper.

In the preface to the Principia (1687) Newton famously states that “geometry is founded on mechanical practice.” Several commentators have taken this and similar remarks as an indication that Newton was firmly situated in the constructivist tradition of geometry that was prevalent in the seventeenth century. By drawing on a selection of Newton's unpublished texts, I hope to show the faults of such an interpretation. In these texts, Newton not only rejects the constructivism that took its birth in Descartes's Géométrie (...) (1637); he also presents the science of geometry as being more powerful than his Principia remarks may lead us to believe. (shrink)

The part anger plays in motivating political action is frequently noted, but less is said about ways in which anger continues to be a part of how people do politics. This article critically assesses approaches to emotions that emphasize managing anger in accordance with ‘feeling rules’. It reflects on the utility of Marxist notions of conflict as the engine of change for the understanding of how anger operates in political life. This involves understanding the ambivalence of anger and its operation (...) within particular power relations. Shifting sets of conventions have had some continuity in discouraging women in Western nations (particularly white and middle-class women) from showing anger. But clearly, women do get angry and feminists have drawn on anger in acting politically. New Zealand feminist writings from the ‘second wave’ are taken as illustrative of the common difficulties Western feminists faced in dealing with anger. These difficulties were due to trying to juggle social conventions about femininity, the political ideal of sisterhood, and the realities of dealing with other women in often new and experimental political processes. Anger could be personalized and hurtful, but in certain cases its expression was constructive in producing more respectful relations. Exploring these cases makes it clear how anger produces, and is produced by, relations with others. (shrink)

Personalised medicine has been discussed as a medical paradigm shift that will improve health while reducing inefficiency and waste. At the same time, it raises new practical, regulatory, and ethical challenges. In this paper, we examine PM strategies epistemologically in order to develop capacities to address these challenges, focusing on a recently proposed strategy for developing patient-specific models from induced pluripotent stem cells so as to make individualised treatment predictions. We compare this strategy to two main PM strategies—stratified medicine and (...) computational models. Drawing on epistemological work in the philosophy of medicine, we explain why these two methods, while powerful, are neither truly personalised nor, epistemologically speaking, novel strategies. Both are forms of correlational black box. We then argue that the iPSC models would count as a new kind of black box. They would not rely entirely on mechanistic knowledge, and they would utilise correlational evidence in a different way from other strategies—a way that would enable personalised predictions. In arguing that the iPSC models would present a novel method of gaining evidence for clinical practice, we provide an epistemic analysis that can help to inform the practical, regulatory, and ethical challenges of developing an iPSC system. (shrink)

Conscientious objection has become a divisive topic in recent bioethics publications. Discussion has tended to frame the issue in terms of the rights of the healthcare professional versus the rights of the patient. However, a rights-based approach neglects the relational nature of conscience, and the impact that violating one’s conscience has on the care one provides. Using medical assistance in dying as a case study, we suggest that what has been lacking in the discussion of conscientious objection thus far is (...) a recognition and prioritising of the relational nature of ethical decision-making in healthcare and the negative consequences of moral distress that occur when healthcare professionals find themselves in situations in which they feel they cannot provide what they consider to be excellent care. We propose that policies that respect the relational conscience could benefit our healthcare institutions by minimising the negative impact of moral distress, improving communication among team members and fostering a culture of ethical awareness. Constructive responses to moral distress including relational cultivation of moral resilience are urged. (shrink)

Here is Lukcs among his friends, lovers, and peers in those important years before 1918, when he converted to Communism and Marxism at the age of thirty-nine.

Universals are a class of mind independent entities, usually contrasted with individuals, postulated to ground and explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals. Individuals are said to be similar in virtue of sharing universals. An apple and a ruby are both red, for example, and their common redness results from sharing a universal. If they are both red at the same time, the universal, red, must be in two places at once. This makes universals quite different from individuals, (...) and controversial. (shrink)

Little is known about how certain patient characteristics can affect the timing of an ethics consultation, which has been hypothesized to affect patient length of stay. This study assessed how specific patient characteristics affect the timing of an ethics consultation, namely, age (over 65 years), race, Medicaid status, the presence of a living will, the presence of a health care proxy, and the absence of decisional capacity. Moving beyond the typical case-series evaluation of an ethics consultation service, this study used (...) an innovative approach to model how predisposing, enabling, and need factors affect health behavior and subsequently affect health outcomes for patients who received an ethics consultation at a Catholic health care system in Oklahoma. (shrink)

Fifteen to twenty years ago one might have been forgiven for thinking that both the philosophy and history of science constituted specialized academic backwaters, far removed from debates in the forefront of either philosophic or public attention. But times have changed; science and technology have in many ways and in many guises become central foci of public debate, whether through concern over nuclear safety, the massive price to be paid for continued research in areas such as high energy physics, the (...) cost of high technology medicine, the spectre of genetic engineering, or the wonders of information processing and the computer revolution. At the same time that there is public questioning of the authority of expert scientific pronouncements and debate about the wisdom of courses of action proposed in the name of technology and progress, there is political pressure to direct eduction in an increasingly scientific and technological direction. But even so, in this country, the history and philosophy of science remain peripheral disciplines, not only in relation to the total academic scene but even in relation to philosophy, which is itself being academically marginalized. (shrink)

Demonstrates the dramatic interplay of elements that comprise the concepts of norm, bisexuality, and development.

The fairness of agricultural markets is frequently invoked, especially by farmers. But fairness is difficult to define and measure. In this paper we link fairness and power with the concept of constrained choice to develop a framework for assessing fairness in agricultural markets. We use network exchange theory to define power from the dependencies that exist in agricultural networks. The structure of agricultural networks and the options that agricultural producers have to participate in agricultural networks affect the degree to which (...) they are dependent on others within the network. Dependency, in turn, affects the choices that agricultural producers have. We consider both the number and nature of these choices. We argue that constraining or limiting choices—both in number and type—violates principles of justice. Importantly, network exchange theory provides a method for assessing constraints in choices and, hence, the fairness of agricultural markets. Such an assessment could potentially lead to new policies that safeguard the liberties of marketplace participants. We present a brief case to illustrate how this framework can inform on the fairness of agricultural markets and conclude with considerations of what this means for policy, particularly in the arena of anti-trust. (shrink)

Drawing on interviews with women and men musicians, this study examines women's overrepresentation in an instrumental specialty, the electric bass, in alternative rock music. Structurally, this phenomenon may be explained by the instrument's greater ease of learning and lesser attractiveness to men, yet women bassists frequently advance an alternative theory of “womanly” affinity. The entrance of women into rock bands via the bass may provide them with new opportunities and help legitimate their presence in a male-dominated site of artistic production, (...) yet it may simultaneously work to reconstruct a gendered division of labor and reproduce dominant gender ideologies. (shrink)

Evidence in medicine can come from more or less trustworthy sources and be produced by more or less reliable methods, and its interpretation can be disputed. As such, it can be unclear when disagreements in medicine result from different, but reasonable, interpretations of the available evidence and when they result from unreasonable refusals to consider legitimate evidence. In this article, we seek to show how assessments of the relevance and implications of evidence are typically affected by factors beyond that evidence (...) itself, such as our beliefs about the credibility of the speaker or source of the evidence. In evaluating evidence, there is thus a need for reflective awareness about why we accept or dismiss particular claims. (shrink)

When I first became acquainted with the thought of the American philoso pher Josiah Royce, two factors particularly intrigued me. The first was Royce's claim that the notion of community was his main metaphysical tenet; the second was his close association with the two American pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Regarding the first factor, I was struck by the fact that a philosopher who died in 1916 should emphasize a topic of such contemporary significance not only in philosophy (...) but in so many other vital fields as well (sociology, psychology, politics, theology - to name only a few). Regarding the second, I was curious as to whether the pragmatism of Peirce and James might have influenced Royce during the course of their professional and personal contacts. Similarly, I wondered whether the idealism of Royce might have affected the thought of Peirce and James. To have appeased my curiosity in regard to all three thinkers, however, would have required (at least) three books. As a start I have now appeased it in regard to one. In researching the writings of Royce I found my way to the Houghton Library and to the Archives of Harvard University at Cambridge, Massa chusetts, where the unpublished manuscripts of Royce are preserved. (No editing job has yet been done on this bulk of material, though such would certainly be a welcome contribution to American philosophy. (shrink)

Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin discovered in 1857 that they had a fundamental disagreement about biological classification. Darwin believed that the natural system should express genealogy while Huxley insisted that classification must stand on its own basis, independent of evolution. Darwin used human races as a model for his view. This private and long-forgotten dispute exposes important divisions within Victorian biology. Huxley, trained in physiology and anatomy, was a professional biologist while Darwin was a gentleman naturalist. Huxley agreed with (...) John Stuart Mill's rejection of William Whewell's sympathy for Linnaeus. The naturalists William Sharp Macleay, Hugh Strickland, and George Waterhouse worked to distinguish two kinds of relationship, affinity and analogy. Darwin believed that his theory could explain the difference. Richard Owen introduced the distinction between homology and analogy to anatomists, but the word homology did not enter Darwin's vocabulary until 1848, when he used the morphological concept of archetype in his work on Cirripedia. Huxley dropped the word archetype when Richard Owen linked it to Plato's ideal forms, replacing it with common plan. When Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species that the word plan gives no explanation, he may have had Huxley in mind. Darwin's preposterous story in the Origin about a bear giving birth to a kangaroo, which he dropped in the second edition, was in fact aimed at Huxley. (shrink)