The aim of this work is threefold. First, it is an attempt to revisit the doctrine of God’s general revelation in conversation of dogmatic and biblical theology. Beyond the classical twofold categorizations of revelation, as natural and supernatural or general and special, in this work we argue for a threefold understanding of God’s general revelation: revelation in history, revelation in conscience and revelation in creation. Second, we intend to affirm that the foundation for this threefold conception of general revelation is (...) the doctrine of the Trinity and the perichoretic relationships between the three divine Persons in internal life of the Trinity as well as in their activity in creation and salvation. Therefore, history is a space of the Triune God’s revelation, the revelation in conscience is a trinitarian activity, and revelation in creation is unfolding the Father, who creates through the Son in the Spirit. Third, we aim to affirm that there could be possible to elaborate a perichoretic model of God’s general revelation. Being rooted in the perichoretic understanding of Trinity, such a model pressuposes the fact that the three forms of God’s general revelation are indisolubly connected, without contradiction, separation or confusion. (shrink)

Research on emotion and emotion regulation is expected to improve our understanding of psychopathology. However, achieving this understanding requires overcoming several obstacles, including the paucity of objective markers of specific emotions or psychiatric diagnoses, and the fact that emotion regulation is a concept that can be difficult to operationalize. We review affective neuroscience research that has addressed these issues by focusing on psychological and neural mechanisms implicated in approach and avoidance behaviors, as revealed by studies of fear, anxiety, and reward (...) processing. Dysfunction in these mechanisms may serve as risk markers for psychopathology, while emotion regulation research demonstrates that some of them are susceptible to volitional control. The conclusion acknowledges limitations of affective neuroscience and highlights goals for future work. (shrink)

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 109 of Psychological Review. Due to circumstances that were beyond the control of the authors, the studies reported in "Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic," by Daniel G. Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer overlap with studies reported in "The Recognition Heuristic: How Ignorance Makes Us Smart," by the same authors and with studies reported in "Inference From Ignorance: The Recognition Heuristic". In addition, Figure 3 in the Psychological Review (...) article was originally published in the book chapter and should have carried a note saying that it was used by permission of Oxford University Press.] One view of heuristics is that they are imperfect versions of optimal statistical procedures considered too complicated for ordinary minds to carry out. In contrast, the authors consider heuristics to be adaptive strategies that evolved in tandem with fundamental psychological mechanisms. The recognition heuristic, arguably the most frugal of all heuristics, makes inferences from patterns of missing knowledge. This heuristic exploits a fundamental adaptation of many organisms: the vast, sensitive, and reliable capacity for recognition. The authors specify the conditions under which the recognition heuristic is successful and when it leads to the counter-intuitive less-is-more effect in which less knowledge is better than more for making accurate inferences. (shrink)

The Giving Voice to Values pedagogy and curriculum is described as an example of a powerful leverage point in the integration of business ethics and values-driven leadership across the business curriculum. GVV is post-decision-making in that it identifies an ethical course of action and asks practitioners to identify who are the parties involved and what’s at stake for them; what are the main arguments to be countered; and what levers that can be used to influence those who are in disagreement. (...) The internalization of GVV’s constructs allows faculty to comfortably raise and endorse ethics as part of the natural order of business decision-making because the stakes of doing so have been normalized. Methods for introducing and using GVV in undergraduate through MBA courses are given. An illustration is given for economics courses. (shrink)

I argue against the tendency in the philosophy of science literature to link abduction to the inference to the best explanation (IBE), and in particular, to claim that Peireean abduction is a conceptual predecessor to IBE. This is not to discount either abduction or IBE. Rather the purpose of this paper is to clarify the relation between Peireean abduction and IBE in accounting for ampliative inference in science. This paper aims at a proper classification—not justification—of types of scientific reasoning. In (...) particular, I claim that Peireean abduction is an in-depth account of the process of generating explanatory hypotheses, while IBE, at least in Peter Lipton's thorough treatment, is a more encompassing account of the processes both of generating and of evaluating scientific hypotheses. There is then a two-fold problem with the claim that abduction is IBE. On the one hand, it conflates abduction and induction, which are two distinct forms of logical inference, with two distinct aims, as shown by Charles S. Peirce; on the other hand it lacks a clear sense of the full scope of IBE as an account of scientific inference. (shrink)

Bigotry distractions are strategic invocations of racism, transphobia, or negative stigma toward other marginalized groups to shape political discourse. Although the vast majority of Americans agree on large policy issues ranging from reducing air pollution to prosecuting corporate crime, bigotry distractions divert attention from areas of agreement toward divisive identity issues. This article explores how the nefarious targeting of identity groups through bigotry distractions may be the tallest barrier to health reform, and social change more broadly. The discussion extends the (...) literature on dog whistles, strategic racism, and scapegoating. (shrink)

in their book American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, contemporary philosophers Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt identify "living in a context of difference" as the central philosophical issue in the history of the United States. They credit W. E. B. Du Bois with having identified racial difference as one particular version of this general issue: "Du Bois once declared that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line—the problem of the coexistence of differences (...) that figure in our existence as members of communities". For McKenna and Pratt, this continues to be the central philosophical problem in the United States, and perhaps globally, today: "From the... (shrink)

The present paper analyzes how the semantic and pragmatic functions of closed class categories, or grammatical morphemes (i.e., inflections and function words), organize discourse processing. Grammatical morphemes tend to express a small set of conceptual distinctions that organize a wide range of objects and relations, usually expressed by content or open class words (i.e., nouns and verbs), into situations anchored to a discourse context. Therefore, grammatical morphemes and content words cooperate in guiding the construction of a situation model during discourse (...) comprehension by specifying complementary aspects of described situations. The paper reviews and extends analytical and empirical evidence for this grammatical‐conceptual correspondence, and suggests that the correspondence developed in response to the cognitive demands of discourse processing. Thus the distinction between open and closed linguistic categories is interpreted in terms of a fundamental correspondence between conceptual and linguistic structure that helps organize discourse processing. (shrink)

: C.S. Peirce defines mathematics in two ways: first as "the science which draws necessary conclusions," and second as "the study of what is true of hypothetical states of things" (CP 4.227–244). Given the dual definition, Peirce notes, a question arises: Should we exclude the work of poietic hypothesis-making from the domain of pure mathematical reasoning? (CP 4.238). This paper examines Peirce's answer to the question. Some commentators hold that for Peirce the framing of mathematical hypotheses requires poietic genius but (...) is not scientific work. I propose, to the contrary, that although Peirce occasionally seems to exclude the poietic creation of hypotheses altogether from pure mathematical reasoning, Peirce's position is rather that the creation of mathematical hypotheses is poietic, but it is not merely poietic, and accordingly, that hypothesis-framing is part of mathematical reasoning that involves an element of poiesis but is not merely poietic either. Scientific considerations also inhere in the process of hypothesis-making, without excluding the poietic element. In the end, I propose that hypothesis-making in mathematics stands between artistic and scientific poietic creativity with respect to imaginative freedom from logical and actual constraints upon reasoning. (shrink)

We have synthesized a 582,970-base pair Mycoplasma genitalium genome. This synthetic genome, named M. genitalium JCVI-1.0, contains all the genes of wild-type M. genitalium G37 except MG408, which was disrupted by an antibiotic marker to block pathogenicity and to allow for selection. To identify the genome as synthetic, we inserted "watermarks" at intergenic sites known to tolerate transposon insertions. Overlapping "cassettes" of 5 to 7 kilobases (kb), assembled from chemically synthesized oligonucleotides, were joined by in vitro recombination to produce intermediate (...) assemblies of approximately 24 kb, 72 kb ("1/8 genome"), and 144 kb ("1/4 genome"), which were all cloned as bacterial artificial chromosomes in Escherichia coli. Most of these intermediate clones were sequenced, and clones of all four 1/4 genomes with the correct sequence were identified. The complete synthetic genome was assembled by transformation-associated recombination cloning in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, then isolated and sequenced. A clone with the correct sequence was identified. The methods described here will be generally useful for constructing large DNA molecules from chemically synthesized pieces and also from combinations of natural and synthetic DNA segments. 10.1126/science.1151721. (shrink)

There is a fairly long-standing distinction between what are called the ideographic as opposed to nomothetic sciences. The nomothetic sciences, such as physics, offer explanations in terms of the laws and regular operations of nature. The ideographic sciences, such as natural history, cast explanations in terms of narratives. This article offers an account of what is involved in offering an explanatory narrative in the historical sciences. I argue that narrative explanations involve two chief components: a possibility space and an explanatory (...) causal mechanism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOne of the most powerful claims of disability theology is that the rejection of persons with disabilities somehow correlates with a rejection of God. This ‘correlative rejection’ is, however, frequently just stated rather than explored in detail, something this article therefore seeks to remedy by examining one example of the correlative rejection that draws together the ethical concerns of theologians writing on intellectual disability with Meister Eckhart’s teaching on the human relationship with God. Here, the correlative rejection is exposed as (...) an inevitable result of the narrow emphasis on autonomy and rationality in human self-perception which shape the habituated, even ritualised ways that we try to know persons with intellectual disabilities and God. By contrast, truly knowing and relating to persons with intellectual disabilities, God, and finally also ourselves, relies on a reconciliation with the dependence, vulnerability, and non-rational forms of exchange that a narrow attachment to a... (shrink)

This paper aims to position the birth of the Medical Humanities movement in a greater historical context of twentieth century American medical education and to paint a picture of the current landscape of the Medical Humanities in medical training. It first sheds light on the model of medical education put forth by Abraham Flexner through the publishing of the 1910 Flexner Report, which set the stage for defining physicians as experimentalists and rooting the profession in research institutions. While this paved (...) the way for medical advancements, it came at the cost of producing a patriarchal approach to medical practice. By the late 1960s, the public persona of the profession was thus devoid of humanism. This catalyzed the birth of the Medical Humanities movement that helped lay the framework for what has perpetuated as the ongoing incorporation of humanistic subjects into medical training. As we enter a time in medicine in which rates of burnout are ever-increasing and there are growing concerns about a concomitant reduction in empathy among trainees, the need for instilling humanism remains important. We must consequently continue to consider how to ensure the place of the Medical Humanities in medical education moving forward. (shrink)

Giving Voice To Values (GVV) serves as a framework to teach individuals methods to speak up when they witness actions that are contrary to their professional and personal values. This essay illustrates how GVV serves as a catalyst to advance both research and teaching activities.

Henry David Thoreau’s discussion of the highest value of wild apples and my own reflection upon my experience, interacting with the sea and enjoying its products during my Central American upbringing, motivate this discussion of how human beings may apprehend nature’s highest worth. I propose that in order to apprehend nature’s highest value it is necessary to understand the complete transaction between human beings and nature—an active transaction that requires from the human being a continuous movement along experience, reflection, and (...) responsible action. I argue that the economic valuation of natural products—via the contemporary economic concepts of utility, use-value, existence-value, and willingness-to-pay—is insufficient to comprehend the full worth of nature because it reduces the human being-nature transaction to mere economic terms. Hence, a reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature provides insight into the services—commodity, beauty, language, and discipline—that the human being receives, as part of the transaction, from nature. In turn, a reading of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac complements the Emersonian position by considering the human being’s position as a member of a natural community. Finally, I propose that in order to apprehend the worth of nature, it is further necessary to move from the reflective understanding of the human being-nature transaction into necessary action, that is, into the assumption of responsibility towards nature. (shrink)

We experimentally assess the ethics of the U.S. government’s indirect bailout of the bank counterparties of American International Group during the 2008 financial crisis. When the indirect bailout is jointly compared with a counterfactual where the government directly bails out the banks, subjects judge the indirect bailout to be far more unethical. On the other hand, when the two scenarios are judged separately, subjects consider a direct bailout of banks to be more unethical. This suggests that ethical judgments of indirect (...) versus direct action exhibit a type of preference reversal that is dependent upon whether the evaluation mode is joint or separate. The pedagogical and policy implications of this preference reversal are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the relationship between the production and the value of Big Data. In particular I examine the concept of social media ‘prosumption’—which has predominantly been theorized from a Marxist, political economic perspective—to consider what other forms of value Big Data have, imbricated with their often speculative economic value. I take the example of social media firms in their early stages of operation to suggest that, since these firms do not necessarily generate revenue, data collected through user (...) contributions do not always realize economic value, at least in a Marxist sense, and that, in addition to their speculative value, these data have value beyond an economic valence. Instead I argue that in addition to their function as systems for accumulation, social media and their associated data have an affective value, related closely to their economic value, and demonstrate the efficacy of social media as systems designed for the appropriation and circulation of user attention. (shrink)

This paper describes KRL, a Knowledge Representation Language designed for use in understander systems. It outlines both the general concepts which underlie our research and the details of KRL‐0, an experimental implementation of some of these concepts. KRL is an attempt to integrate procedural knowledge with a broad base of declarative forms. These forms provide a variety of ways to express the logical structure of the knowledge, in order to give flexibility in associating procedures (for memory and reasoning) with specific (...) pieces of knowledge, and to control the relative accessibility of different facts and descriptions. The formalism for declarative knowledge is based on structured conceptual objects with associated descriptions. These objects form a network of memory units with several different sorts of linkages, each having well‐specified implications for the retrieval process. Procedures can be associated directly with the internal structure of a conceptual object. This procedurul attachment allows the steps for a particular operation to be determined by characteristics of the specific entities involved.The control structure of KRL is based on the belief that the next generation of intelligent programs will integrate data‐directed and goal‐directed processing by using multiprocessing. It provides for a priority‐ordered multiprocess agenda with explicit (user‐provided) strategies for scheduling and resource allocation. It provides procedure directories which operate along with process frameworks to allow procedural parameterization of the fundamental system processes for building, comparing, and retrieving memory structures. Future development of KRL will include integrating procedure definition with the descriptive formalism. (shrink)

One important difference between adaptive and nonadaptive explanations can be found in the evolutionary sequence of structural and functional modifications. Phylogenetic analysis (cladistics) provides a powerful methodology for distinguishing exaptation from adaptation, by indicating whether character traits have predated, accompanied, or followed evolution of particular functions. Such analysis yields falsifiable hypotheses that can help to distinguish causal relationships from mere correlation.

This study examines the deliberations of professional MBA students when presented with a dilemma that weighs the difference between commitments to profit-maximization against concerns for fired workers who would need to seek a new job during a recession. Using content analysis, accounting, economic, and ethically based rationales that differ from the profit-maximizing recommendation are categorized. Results also show that those who make non-profit-maximizing recommendations consider, but ultimately reject the profit-maximizing approach to layoffs.

Here I look to some work in the historical sciences in order to draw out some of the epistemic benefits of “speculative narratives,” which bears on some more general epistemic benefits of speculative reasoning. Due to the contingent nature of much historical evidence, some degree of speculative reasoning is necessary to get the epistemological ball rolling in the historical sciences, and I argue that speculative narratives provide the necessary sort of frameworking apparatus for doing precisely this. I use contemporary work (...) on the first peopling of the Americas (the “Clovis First Debate”) for illustration. (shrink)

The 1980s witnessed a dramatic increase in hostile takeovers in the United States. Proponents argue that well- planned mergers enhance the value of the firm and the value of the firm to society. Critics typically argue that undesired takeovers ultimately harm society due to external costs not borne by the acquiring firm. To be socially responsible, the manager must consider the effects of the merger/acquisition on all stakeholders. Different traditional ethical frameworks for decision making are proposed and reviewed. A model (...) is proposed. (shrink)

Used appropriately, reliance on science distinguishes public health from policymaking driven more by theory and opinion and enhances trust in public health interventions. Evidence-based vaccine policymaking aims to control communicable disease by urging decision makers to base policies on the best available evidence rather than politics or personal views. The results of this approach, such as smallpox eradication, have been dramatic. Historically, mandatory childhood vaccination has been perhaps the most successful evidence-based tool in combating many epidemics. Philosophically, vaccination mandates correspond (...) to the legal system’s dual role in codifying what society deems undesirable behavior and declaring beneficial social norms and values consistent with understandings of the social contract. Despite their effectiveness and philosophical grounding, vaccination mandates present serious legal and ethical questions. Public health policymakers have a continuing responsibility to rely on evidence not only as a basis for generating policy, but also for evaluating and improving elements of its legal design. (shrink)

This article discusses the issue of migration from various vantage points: political, economic, linguistic, legal, philosophical, and ethical. It is shown that although migration touches upon many areas of human life, it is in reality a straightforward issue. It is basically about human beings in search for a more dignified life. The author critiques the operative dualisms that characterize the migration debate, in doing so undermining the dehumanizing thinking that gives birth to such rhetoric, and suggests an approach to the (...) issue that fosters a transformation rooted in authentic human and spiritual development. (shrink)