We use a result due to Rolin, Speissegger, and Wilkie to show that definable sets in certain o-minimal structures admit definable parameterizations by mild maps. We then use this parameterization to prove a result on the density of rational points on curves defined by restricted Pfaffian functions.

Ecological developmental biology (eco‐devo) explores the mechanistic relationships between the processes of individual development and environmental factors. Recent studies imply that some of these relationships have deep evolutionary origins, and may even pre‐date the divergences of the simplest extant animals, including cnidarians and sponges. Development of these early diverging metazoans is often sensitive to environmental factors, and these interactions occur in the context of conserved signaling pathways and mechanisms of tissue homeostasis whose detailed molecular logic remain elusive. Efficient methods for (...) transgenesis in cnidarians together with the ease of experimental manipulation in cnidarians and sponges make them ideal models for understanding causal relationships between environmental factors and developmental mechanisms. Here, we identify major questions at the interface between animal evolution and development and outline a road map for research aimed at identifying the mechanisms that link environmental factors to developmental mechanisms in early diverging metazoans.Also watch the Video Abstract. (shrink)

The author attends to various ways students can become involved participants in philosophical activity within courses. Instead of students taking on the role of passive spectators of ideas in introductory courses, the author proposes that instructors treat students as “public learners.” The author utilizes past experiences in combination with guided reflections on the beginnings of the philosophical tradition, particularly the figure of Socrates, to compile a classroom curriculum based upon the Apprentice model. The author proposes a teaching method that assimilates (...) philosophical activities to a “public model” in which students are seen as apprentices, which is an individualized approach to teaching. This teaching model also prescribes a way that apprenticeships can be implemented in the curriculum without consuming an excessive amount of the instructor’s time. (shrink)

There has long been interest in identifying and studying ‘‘successful psychopaths.” This study sampled psychologists with an interest in law, attorneys, and clinical psychology professors to obtain descriptions of individuals considered to be psychopaths who were also successful in their endeavors. The results showed a consistent description across professions and convergence with descriptions of traditional psychopathy, though the successful psychopathy profile had higher scores on conscientiousness, as measured within the five-factor model (FFM). These results are useful in documenting the existence (...) of successful psychopathy, demonstrating the potential benefit of informant methodology, and providing an FFM description that distinguishes successful psychopaths from unsuccessful psychopaths studied more routinely within prison settings. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

These essays by some of the most prominent figures in linguistics, artificial intelligence, and psychology explore the problems involved in creating a general cognitive science that will treat language, thought, and behavior in an integrated fashion. They address the fundamental questions of the relations between linguistic structures and cognitive processes, between cognitive processes and language behavior, and between language behavior and linguistic structure. Contents: Introduction, Thomas G. Bever (Columbia University), John M. Carroll and Lance A. Miller (IBM (...) class='Hi'>Thomas J. Watson Research Center). "Philosophy and "Linguistics: An Outline of Platonist Grammar, Jerrold J. Katz (CUNY). Sense and Reference in a Psychologically Based Semantics, Ray Jackendoff (Brandeis University). Some Thoughts on the Boundaries and Components of Linguistics, Charles J. Fillmore (University of California, Berkeley). Psychology: Approaches to the Study of the Psychology of Language, Walter Kintsch (University of Colorado). Toward An Abstract Performance Grammar, Charles E. Osgood (University of Illinois). Upgrading a Mind, David Premack (University of Pennsylvania). Computational "Models: "Memory, Meaning, and Syntax, Roger Schank (Yale University) and Lawrence Birnbaum (Yale University). Some Inadequate Theories of Human Language Processing, Mitchell P. Marcus (AT&T Bell Laboratories). (shrink)

BackgroundIn the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds (CAHHM) cohort, participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, heart, and abdomen, that generated incidental findings (IFs). The approach to managing these unexpected results remain a complex issue. Our objectives were to describe the CAHHM policy for the management of IFs, to understand the impact of disclosing IFs to healthy research participants, and to reflect on the ethical obligations of researchers in future MRI studies.MethodsBetween 2013 and 2019, 8252 participants (...) (mean age 58 ± 9 years, 54% women) were recruited with a follow-up questionnaire administered to 909 participants (40% response rate) at 1-year. The CAHHM policy followed a restricted approach, whereby routine feedback on IFs was not provided. Only IFs of severe structural abnormalities were reported.ResultsSevere structural abnormalities occurred in 8.3% (95% confidence interval 7.7–8.9%) of participants, with the highest proportions found in the brain (4.2%) and abdomen (3.1%). The majority of participants (97%) informed of an IF reported no change in quality of life, with 3% of participants reporting that the knowledge of an IF negatively impacted their quality of life. Furthermore, 50% reported increased stress in learning about an IF, and in 95%, the discovery of an IF did not adversely impact his/her life insurance policy. Most participants (90%) would enrol in the study again and perceived the MRI scan to be beneficial, regardless of whether they were informed of IFs. While the implications of a restricted approach to IF management was perceived to be mostly positive, a degree of diagnostic misconception was present amongst participants, indicating the importance of a more thorough consent process to support participant autonomy.ConclusionThe management of IFs from research MRI scans remain a challenging issue, as participants may experience stress and a reduced quality of life when IFs are disclosed. The restricted approach to IF management in CAHHM demonstrated a fair fulfillment of the overarching ethical principles of respect for autonomy, concern for wellbeing, and justice. The approach outlined in the CAHHM policy may serve as a framework for future research studies.Clinical trial registrationhttps://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/nct02220582. (shrink)

Athens or Jerusalem? By Tertullian.--Philosophy the handmaid of theology, by Clement of Alexandria.--Faith in search of understanding, by St. Augustine.--Revelation and analogy, by St. Thomas Aquinas.--The mystic way, by M. Eckhart.--The darkened intellect, by J. Calvin.--The reasons of the heart, by B. Pascal.--Faith, reason, and enthusiasm, by J. Locke.--Miracles and the skeptic, by D. Hume.--The limits of reason, by I. Kant.--Truth and subjectivity, by S. Kierkegaard.--In justification of faith, by W. James.--Religion as poetry, by G. Santayana.--Faith and symbols, by (...) P. Tillich.--Three parables on falsification, by A. Flew, R. M. Hare, and B. Mitchell.--For further reading (p. 233-235). (shrink)

In this issue, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin G. Miller argue that what makes killing wrong, when it is wrong, is not that it ends life, but that it causes complete and irreversible disability—what they call total disability. They hold that the wrongness of killing should be explained by reference to the harm that killing causes to the person who dies. And the only harm of this sort that killing causes, they argue, is the harm of being totally disabled: once (...) one is totally disabled, there is no further harm to one in losing one's life. It is no worse to be dead, and thus totally disabled, than it is to be totally disabled but alive.In fact, Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller concede that the story may be more complicated than this. For example, it may be that what makes killing wrong, when it is wrong, is not that it causes harm, but that it is intended to do so, or that it violates a right which protects against harm. But either way, harm plays a crucial role in explaining the wrongness of killing, and the relevant harm, they claim, is the harm of being disabled, not that of losing one's life.The Authors’ argument has important implications for medical ethics. Their view implies that killing a person need not be wrong when that person is already completely and irreversibly disabled. This suggests, for example, that the dead donor rule in organ donation is mistaken. Contrary to the rule, it could be morally permissible to harvest organs from a living donor provided that the donor is totally disabled. Harvesting organs will kill the donor, but it will not disable her, since the donor has no abilities left to lose.Four …. (shrink)

This collection of thirteen essays, when viewed together, offers a unique perspective on the history of American philosophy. It illuminates for the first time in book form, how thirteen major American philosophical thinkers viewed a problem of special interest in the American philosophical tradition: the relationship between experience and reflection. Written by well-known authorities on the figure about which he or she writes, the essays are arranged chronologically to highlight the changes and developments in thought from Puritanism to Pragmatism to (...) Process Philosophy. While Doctrine and Experience will be of particular interest to specialists in American Philosophy, there is also much to offer anyone interested in the intellectual and cultural history of the United States. In order of appearance, the essays are: "Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening" by John E. Smith "Heart and Head: The Mind of Thomas Jefferson" by Andrew J. Reck"Emerson and the American Future" by Robert C. Pollock"Chauncey Wright and the Pragmatists" by Edward Madden"Charles S. Peirce: Action Through Thought – The Ethics of Experience" by Vincent G. Potter"Life Is in the Transitions’: Radical Empiricism and Contemporary Concerns" by John J. McDermott"John Dewey and the Metaphysics of American Democracy" by Ralph W. Sleeper"Individualization and Unification in Sartre and Dewey" by Thelma Z. Levine"Josiah Royce: Anticipator of European Existentialism and Phenomenology" by Jacqueline Ann K. Kegley"The Transcendence of Materialism and Idealism in American Thought" by John Lachs"C. I. Lewis and the Pragmatic Tradition in American Philosophy" by Sandra Rosenthal"The Social Philosophy of George Herbert Mead" by David Miller"Existence as Transaction: A Whiteheadian Study of Causality" by Elizabeth Kraus. (shrink)

This piece is a book review of Bever, Carroll and Miller's "Talking Minds".

This is the 8th edition of the book, with eight new essays to the volume. Table of contents: Are We Having Sex Now or What? (Greta Christina); Sexual Perversion (Thomas Nagel); Plain Sex (Alan Goldman); Sex and Sexual Perversion (Robert Gray); Masturbation and the Continuum of Sexual Activities (Alan Soble); Love: What’s Sex Got to Do with It? (Natasha McKeever); Is “Loving More” Better? The Values of Polyamory (Elizabeth Brake); What Is Sexual Orientation? (Robin Dembroff); Sexual Orientation: What Is (...) It? (Kathleen Stock); Asexuality (Luke Brunning and Natasha McKeever); LGBTQ ... Z? (Kathy Rudy); How to Be a Pluralist About Gender Categories (Katharine Jenkins); The Negotiative Theory of Gender Identity and the Limits of First-Person Authority (Burkay Ozturk); Racial Sexual Desires (Raja Halwani); Sex and Technology: The Ethics of Virtual Connection (Neil McArthur); A Realist Sexual Ethics (Micah Newman); Sexual Morality and the Concept of Using Another Person (Thomas Mappes); Sexual Use (Alan Soble); Dark Desires (Seiriol Morgan); The Harms of Consensual Sex (Robin West); Casual Sex, Promiscuity, and Objectification (Raja Halwani); Is Prostitution Harmful? (Ole Martin Moen); BDSM (Shaun Miller); Two Views of Sexual Ethics: Promiscuity, Pedophilia, and Rape (David Benatar); Sexual Gifts and Sexual Duties (Alan Soble); A Bibliography of the Philosophy of Sex . (shrink)

Modern thinkers long have been troubled by everyday talk. For example, one nineteenth-century Tory critic observes, “General small-talk” is any exchange “in mixed society, where men and women, young and old, wise and foolish, are all mingled together.” However available the occasion or obvious the topics, chatting is easy for the talented but awkward for the ungifted. On the other hand, “special, or professional small talk” is an exchange of words between persons of “the same mode of life, as between (...) two apothecaries, two dissenters, two lawyers, two beggars, two reviewers, two butlers, two statements, two thieves, &c.&c.&c.; in short all conversations which are tinctured with the art, craft, mystery, occupation... (shrink)

This paper argues that the choice of backing to certify the authority of a warrant requires a legitimation inference. When brought into question, such an inference becomes a claim defended by showing sound reasons for the selection of backing pertinent to a shared context. Legitimation controversies ensue when an attributed consensus meets objection. It is argued that attention to legitimation controversies renders the Toulmin model a more useful critical paradigm for investigating the development and risks of communicative reasoning in a (...) public forum. The nomination of John Tower as Secretary of Defense is employed to illustrate how critical analysis of legitimation controversies reflexively expands the domain of inquiry for informal reasoning. (shrink)

Disability studies can be of great value to medical education first, by placing the medical paradigm in the broad context of a sequence of ways of understanding and responding to disability that have emerged in the last two thousand years or so; second, by reminding medical professionals that people with disabilities have suffered as well as profited from medical treatment in the last two hundred years; finally, by providing access to a distinctive point of view from which the experience of (...) disability looks very different than it may from the outside. (shrink)

A critical theory of controversy would require the integration ofthe normative study of argumentation with critical studies of practices. Jiirgen Habermas has made a substantial contribution to such a project by embedding argumentation in a theory of communication, while critically engaging academic and public debates. This essay explicates core concepts in Habermas's theory of argumentation, including his distinction between theory and practice, the different validity requirements for argumentation in general, the norms of moral and ethical-political argumentation and of bargaining. Argument (...) predicaments are posited as ways to discover and assess different types of validity claims competing as "the force ofthe better argument". Habermas's criticism of "administrative power" and "communicative power" illustrates a potential yield of critical inquiry into social controversy. (shrink)

New Institutional Theory is used to explain the context for argumentation in modern practice. The illustration of Direct to Consumer Drug advertising is deployed to show how communicative argument between a doctor and patient is influenced by force exogenous to the practice of medicine. The essay shows how strategic maneuvering shifts the burden of proof within institutional relations.

Anecdotal reports obtained from three individuals with prosopagnosia, all of whom have participated in an investigation, capture the essence of their impairment. This article focuses on the contrast between two prominent forms of prosopagnosia, one of which results from an acquired brain insult in an otherwise premorbidly normal individual and a second which appears to be lifelong and occurs in the absence of any obvious brain damage, at least as evident on conventional brain imaging. It reviews two central issues: the (...) first concerns the similarities and differences in the psychological representations of faces in acquired prosopagnosia and congenital prosopagnosia, and the second concerns the nature of the underlying neural representations of faces in these two populations. Some well-established overlapping behavioral characteristics are identified. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Reflection, and Emancipation: Farrell and Habermas on the Critical Studies of CommunicationG. Thomas GoodnightThere are moments in history that appear to be alive with emancipatory possibilities. Such were the years moving toward the end of the long twentieth century. In spring 1989, students protested the communist regime in China; the Tiananmen Square massacre initiated an episode of opposition and commenced China’s modern journey toward global reengagement. Revolutions (...) in Europe that autumn were more peaceful. On August 23 two million Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian citizens held hands and announced the Baltic Way as a departure from Soviet rule. Transitions rapidly followed in Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, culminating in the Velvet Revolution where on November 17 student protests were beaten back by police in Prague only to be followed three days later by an assembly of 200,000 demanding the transfer of power from the Communist Party. On December 3, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly announced an imminent end to the fifty-year-old Cold War. During this time of hopeful transition, two scholars were at work refiguring the philosophical mission of the Frankfurt school, transforming critique from its early totalizing posture into the critical study of communication.Thomas B. Farrell and Jürgen Habermas were trained in different traditions but adjacent disciplines, communication and sociology. Their works [End Page 421] share a commitment to philosophical inquiry directed toward critique and understanding the cultural, social, and linguistic constitution of communication. As a rhetorician and as a philosopher, these scholars share an evident passion for scholarly argument and for engagement with the controversies of public culture. In different ways, both were at work during the portentous years of transition from the Cold War to new democracies and incipient globalization. Each constructed a guarded program of hope in the possibilities of communicative reflection and reasoning. In the post-World War II era, such a broad, positive vision took long to develop. After the brutal realities of the Holocaust became publicly known in the late 1940s, “the generous faith in rationality and the possibilities of human progress which underlay much of earlier historical thought seems discredited today” (Katznelson 2003, 2). The Enlightenment possibilities for reason had been invested in the technical efficiency of modern institutions that produced the capacity to kill systematically without constraints. Ira Katznelson points to a generation of scholars—including individuals at Chicago, Columbia, the New School, and others—who began in the 1950s to engage in a project that would “shade the Enlightenment’s philosophical anthropology, thicken its defenses against evil, deepen its capacity to reason, and restore” an Enlightenment more critical and less susceptible to co-optation by the excesses of nationalism, ideology, and evil (2003, 2). The work of Farrell and Habermas belongs to the extended post-Holocaust moment, where the possibilities of reflective reason in ethical and moral deliberations were set carefully on a road to personal and collective emancipation.Max Horkheimer saw in the modern, postwar welfare state little reason for optimism. Writing in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War, he concluded: “Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society” (1974, 22). “Salestalk” by “the surrogates of culture” creates an “illusory triumph of democratic progress that consumes the intellectual substance on which democracy has lived” (Horkheimer 1974, 31). Scientifically engineered propaganda renders public opinion as “a substitute for reason.” With such tools, the forces of barbarism are always waiting in the wings to seize power. Early on, Habermas shared these views. His thesis, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989a), tracks the opening possibilities of communicative reasoning in the liminal spaces of eighteenth-century coffeehouses where frank talk replaced hierarchically driven politeness, the development of these talks into the practices of deliberative democracy, and the decline of deliberative democracy with the union of the state and mass media in producing spectacles in [End Page 422] support of rituals of legitimation. Habermas broke with Horkheimer over the dissertation, however. A thesis of decline, by itself, leaves open only the route of totalizing critique. While never far from critique of institutional practices, Habermas spent his career in opening a positive... (shrink)

B. L. Ware and Wil Linkugel (1973) identified apologia as a rhetorical genre. Ever since, argumentation scholars have spent an enormous energy analyzing speeches of self-defense as well as public relations efforts to deny charges. Much less attention has been accorded to the act that prompts such contention, accusation. Argumentation in Political Interviews takes up a special case: discussions between journalists and politicians where charges of inconsistency arise and are uttered, disputed, and dispatched. The practice is common. The stakes are (...) high. “Flip-flopping” is an undesirable term for a politician who cannot get his thinking straight. Thus, journalists prize catching up a politician in contradictions; politicians wish to escape the clutches of contradiction and to appear reasonable.Corina Andone explains the dialectical structures and the rhetorical contexts for contemporary practices in the United Kingdom.Argumentation in Political Interviews extends pragma-dialectics general. (shrink)

From early modernity, philosophers have engaged in skeptical discussions concerning knowledge of the existence, state, and standing of other minds. The analogical move from self to other unfolds as controversy. This paper reposes the problem as an argumentation predicament and examines analogy as an opening to the study of rhetorical cognition. Rhetorical cognition is identified as a productive process coming to terms with an other through testing sustainable risk. The paper explains how self-sustaining risk is theorized by Aristotle’s virtue ethics (...) in the polis. Moral hazard is identified as a threat to modern argument communities. (shrink)

Based on the proceedings of a 1985 conference held in the U.K., this volume embraces most of the important concerns in AI today, emphasizing common techniques and methodologies rather than applications. Topics covered include building efficient computational logic, planning and design, the representation of uncertain knowledge, user modelling, and psychological and philosophical issues. Papers on perception, theorem proving, expert systems, robotics, and data bases are also included. Each section is preceded by an introduction which draws comparisons between various papers.

This thoughtful, learned, well-written, extensively illustrated, and heavily documented study deserves to be regarded as a landmark in art history. Traditional art history has dealt for the most part with the “fine arts” (chiefly painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture), whereas other human creations that take physical form (such as furniture, ceramics, textiles, and metal and glass items), whether utilitarian or decorative (or both at once), are considered “craft” or “applied art” and are studied by folklorists, anthropologists, and archaeologists and often (...) displayed in different museums. Cooke wishes to break down this “hierarchical taxonomy,” this “fragmented, hierarchical field,” that emerged from Western Europe's “misunderstanding of art,” which valued “the cerebral over the manual.” His goal, in other words, is to outline “a more inclusive human history of art”— “a connected art history.” This phrase from his subtitle refers not simply to connecting “fine art” with “applied art” but also to crossing temporal and regional boundaries. Still another act of connecting is to examine all parts of an object's life history, and thus the three main divisions of the book deal with the making of objects, their circulation from one person and place to another (and “their ability to transmit ideas” in the process), and their meaning for the persons who possessed or encountered them.Over the years I have repeatedly said that all objects made by human beings are worthy of preservation and study because they bring us into direct contact with the past and, as part of our surroundings, affect our thoughts in the present. Every object, I have argued, including copies of a single printed edition of a book (so-called duplicates), is an independent witness to the past. I am particularly pleased, therefore, to welcome a major book that explores in detail, with a wealth of examples from many centuries and cultures, the place of objects in human history. Cooke's pursuit is “object-driven,” beginning with the nature of the materials and finally coming to “the inherent power of the object itself to influence human thought and action.” (Compare the subtitle of Sherry Turkle's 2007 anthology Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.) Cooke's refusal to separate “materials” from “people,” or “technologies” from “values,” reminds me of John Szarkowski's approach to photographs. In Photography until Now (1989), Szarkowski points out that histories of photography generally treat technical matters separately from artistic ones—a split between the “empirical” and the “intuitive” that he finds indefensible, for “these two ways of knowing meet in the process of making things.” He adds, “The meeting can be cordially symbiotic or aggressively competitive, but its resolution defines the character and meaning of the thing that is made.” This statement has been a favorite of mine as an elegant characterization of the nature of art, and it is one that Cooke would clearly agree with.Cooke does not discuss photography, but he makes clear that he is not attempting a “comprehensive history that charts the complete ebb and flow of objects over time.” Rather, his book is meant to be a “suggestive guide” to the “principles of material literacy,” a “kit of tools for future complex constructions of history.” Even so, I find some of the omissions puzzling. Why, for example, are glass objects not taken up, when he so thoroughly deals with other common materials? More serious, in my opinion, is the exclusion of the fine arts. (Of the 215 illustrations, five are of oil paintings and one is of a Japanese print, but they are present only as the sources for information drawn from their pictorial content; one Hogarth engraving is shown because its image was often reproduced on punch bowls; and there is a very brief passage on the “uneasy relationship” between sculpture and material culture, but no sculptures are illustrated or used as examples for discussion.) Presumably Cooke felt it was unnecessary for his book to encompass the fine arts after demonstrating that functional objects are just as sophisticated artistically and culturally as products of the fine arts are. Yet those products also belong to the universe of “entangled objects” (How could they not?), and it would have been illuminating to see them adduced among the examples Cooke cites. One could argue that by excluding them—and by referring to the makers of the objects he does discuss as “artisans” and “craftspeople”—he comes close to reinforcing the division he wishes to eliminate.Less easy to explain is Cooke's omission of books, for they have been one of the largest and most widely circulated classes of utilitarian objects. Most people never think about books as objects, treating them only as disposable receptacles for transmitting verbal texts in tangible form (which is why so many books are destroyed when their texts supposedly become available in another form). Such people do not realize that texts have connections with their physical embodiments. (For example, books, whether manuscript or printed, often contain clues revealing how their texts were affected by the production process; and readers’ attitudes toward texts can be influenced by their presentation.) Cooke, however, with his deep understanding of the way objects function and his impressive knowledge of the scholarship, cannot be one of these uninformed people. He would obviously be aware of the vast literature devoted to leather and cloth bookbindings and their decoration, as well as to the myriad styles of letters and the varieties of paper and parchment; he would also know how letterforms and binding designs reflect a complex interplay of social, political, and artistic forces. Bibliographers have long studied books as Cooke advocates studying other objects: “working from the inside out,” beginning with the evidence in books themselves for reconstructing the routines that were followed in their creation. And book historians are recognizing the necessity for an international approach like Cooke's, since many of the books circulating in one country originated in other countries. Books would have been a prolific additional source for illustrating Cooke's analyses.My admiration for Cooke's book is not altered by these few disappointments. Even without discussions of paintings, sculptures, and books, it is still exhilarating in its scope and depth. One hopes that art and material-culture historians will pay attention to it. But it ought to have a wider audience, for the daily lives of all of us would be enriched by a greater appreciation of the objects that make up a significant part of our environment. (shrink)

It has been demonstrated that death certificates do not accurately record the actual cause of death in up to one-fourth of cases, as determined from subsequent autopsy findings. The purpose of this study was to explore the use of natural language autopsy data bases as an automated quality assurance mechanism. We translated the account of the major process leading to death, or the primary diagnosis, from all 45,564 narrative autopsy reports obtained at The Johns Hopkins Hospital between May 28, 1889, (...) and June 30, 1987, into the hierarchical system of Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) titles. We obtained a total of 125,772 MeSH title translations, 1,563 of them distinct (average 2.8 per case), ranging in frequency from 6,029 occurrences of LUNG to 1 occurrence apiece of 357 MeSH titles. The natural-language-to-MeSH translations showed expected trends over the past century: fewer infectious diseases; more cardiovascular and neoplastic disease among adults; and more respiratory diseases and congenital malformations in the pediatric age group. The greater availability of autopsy documents in electronic form should increase the value of this resource for quality assurance. (shrink)

This essay offers, as a counterpart to pragma-dialectical argument, a “new rhetoric” produced in the situated discourse of a public forum when a community addresses matters of common urgency and undertakes informed action. Such a rhetoric takes the principles of discourse ethics as its informing dialectic by identifying an interlocutor as one who is obligatedboth to argue effectively,and also to hold open, even reinforce, norms of communicative reason. Implications concerning the study of fallacies and theethos obligations of communicative reasoning are (...) discussed. (shrink)