The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) concept is a knowledge assembly and communication tool to facilitate the transparent translation of mechanistic information into outcomes meaningful to the regulatory assessment of chemicals. The AOP framework and associated knowledgebases (KBs) have received significant attention and use in the regulatory toxicology community. However, it is increasingly apparent that the potential stakeholder community for the AOP concept and AOP KBs is broader than scientists and regulators directly involved in chemical safety assessment. In this paper we (...) identify and describe those stakeholders who currently—or in the future—could benefit from the application of the AOP framework and knowledge to specific problems. We also summarize the challenges faced in implementing pathway-based approaches such as the AOP framework in biological sciences, and provide a series of recommendations to meet critical needs to ensure further progression of the framework as a useful, sustainable and dependable tool supporting assessments of both human health and the environment. Although the AOP concept has the potential to significantly impact the organization and interpretation of biological information in a variety of disciplines/applications, this promise can only be fully realized through the active engagement of, and input from multiple stakeholders, requiring multi-pronged substantive long-term planning and strategies. (shrink)

[Wilfrid Hodges] During the last forty or so years it has become popular to offer explanations of logical notions in terms of games. There is no doubt that many people find games helpful for understanding various logical phenomena. But we ask whether anything is really 'explained' by these accounts, and we analyse Paul Lorenzen's dialogue foundations for constructive logic as an example. The conclusion is that the value of games lies in their ability to provide helpful metaphors and representations, (...) rather than in any true conceptual analysis. In fact some of the standard explanations of logical notions in terms of competitive games simply don't work. /// [Erik C. W. Krabbe] In an attempt to redeem the Lorenzen-type dialogues from their detractors, it is perhaps best first to provide a survey of the various benefits these dialogues have been supposed to yield. This will be done in Section I. It will not be possible, within the confines of this paper, to scrutinize them all, but in Section II we shall delve deeper into the capacity of this type of dialogue to yield a model for the immanent criticism of philosophical positions. Section III will extend the concept of a dialogue in such a way as to conform better with our intuitive conceptions of what a rational discussion of a position should contain. This will be followed up by a concept of 'winning a dialogue' that takes position midway between the old conception of 'winning one play' and that of the full-fledged presentation of a winning strategy. Concepts of 'rational discussion' are thus shown to be, plausibly, more fundamental than those of proof. In Section IV, I shall discuss the specific problems about dialogical foundations put forward by Wilfrid Hodges. (shrink)

BackgroundMoral distress (MD) is an emotional and psychological response to morally challenging dilemmas. Moral distress is experienced frequently by nurses in the intensive care unit (ICU) and can result in emotional anguish, work dissatisfaction, poor patient outcomes, and high levels of nurse turnover. Opportunities to discuss ethically challenging situations may lessen MD and its associated sequela.ObjectiveThe purpose of this project was to develop, implement, and evaluate the impact of nursing ethics huddles on participants’ MD, clinical ethics knowledge, work satisfaction, and (...) patient care among ICU nurses.Sample and SettingThe sample, 32 nurses from three ICU settings in an 800-bed tertiary academic medical center, participated in six nursing ethics huddles over a two-month period.MethodsAlvita K. Nathaniel’s Theory of Moral Reckoning guided development of the nursing ethics huddle process.1 The Moral Distress Thermometer was administered at three data points: baseline level of MD, and pre- and post-huddle to determine changes in the subjects’ level of MD.2 Focused content analysis was used to analyze qualitative responses from questionnaires about the subjects’ perception of the effect of the huddles on work satisfaction and patient care. Knowledge attainment was evaluated via open-ended short-answer questions.ResultsOverall, use of nurse-ethicist-led nursing ethics huddles was associated with improved quality of work life, patient care, and clinical ethics knowledge. The change in pre- and post-nursing ethics huddles MD scores was statistically significant (p < 0.0001). (shrink)

We describe a logic which is the same as first-order logic except that it allows control over the information that passes down from formulas to subformulas. For example the logic is adequate to express branching quantifiers. We describe a compositional semantics for this logic; in particular this gives a compositional meaning to formulas of the 'information-friendly' language of Hintikka and Sandu. For first-order formulas the semantics reduces to Tarski's semantics for first-order logic. We prove that two formulas have the same (...) interpretation in all structures if and only if replacing an occurrence of one by an occurrence of the other in a sentence never alters the truth-value of the sentence in any structure. (shrink)

In Baghdad in the mid twelfth century Abū al-Barakāt proposes a radical new procedure for finding the conclusions of premise-pairs in syllogistic logic, and for identifying those premise-pairs that have no conclusions. The procedure makes no use of features of the standard Aristotelian apparatus, such as conversions or syllogistic figures. In place of these al-Barakāt writes out pages of diagrams consisting of labelled horizontal lines. He gives no instructions and no proof that the procedure will yield correct results. So the (...) reader has to work out what his procedure is and whether it is correct. The procedure turns out to be insightful and entirely correct, but this paper may be the first study to give a full description of the procedure and a rigorous proof of its correctness. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that first-order linguistic activities are better understood in terms of ecological, values-realizing dynamics rather than in terms of rule-governed processes. Conversing, like other perception-action skills is constrained by multiple values, heterarchically organized. This hypothesis is explored in terms of three broad approaches that contrast with models of language which view it as a cognitive system: conversing as a perceptual system for exploring dialogical arrays ; conversing as an action system for integrating diverse space-time scales ; (...) and conversing as a caring system for embodying the context-sensitivity and interdependency necessary to realize values. Approaching language as a caring action-perception system leads to a reconsideration of cognitive dimensions of linguistic activities, including consciousness, pragmatics, suffering, and hope. (shrink)

The origin of my article lies in the appearance of Copeland and Proudfoot's feature article in Scientific American, April 1999. This preposterous paper, as described on another page, suggested that Turing was the prophet of 'hypercomputation'. In their references, the authors listed Copeland's entry on 'The Church-Turing thesis' in the Stanford Encyclopedia. In the summer of 1999, I circulated an open letter criticising the Scientific American article. I included criticism of this Encyclopedia entry. This was forwarded to Prof. Ed Zalta, (...) editor of the Encyclopedia, and after some discussion he invited me to submit an entry on ' Alan Turing.'. (shrink)

This paper uses some recent ideas in biology as starting point to explore analogous concepts and tendencies in semiotics and biology, leading to reflections on interdisciplinarity itself within the framework of theories of chaos and complexity. It sees affinities between the biological concept of species and the semiotic category of discipline. It finds many suggestive parallels with semiotics from the recently emerging synthesis of evolution and development, built around the discovery of ‘homeobox’ genes which are present in many very different (...) lineages, opening up possibilities for ‘deep’ homologies between species, and providing a powerful model for semiotic homology. (shrink)

Aristotle's distinction between the practical life and the contemplative life has been of central importance in fixing the sort of justification that is required for engineering activity. As practical it must be justified by its products, while intellect's activity claims intrinsic worth. Most philosophers of technology accept this model of justification. However, engineering is not essentially practical in the relevant sense. To claim that it is overlooks a distinction between "structuring ends" and "products" which when made allows engineering to lay (...) claim to the same sort of value as intellectual activity. The final conclusion is that both have intrinsic worth but that does not free either from the obligation to look to their consequences. (shrink)

This article reviews the history of medical and research abuses experienced by American Indians since European colonization. This article examines the unethical research of American Indians/Alaska Natives in light of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Literature citations indicate that significant unethical research and medical care incidents occurred both before and after the Tuskegee Syphilis Study among American Indians/Alaska Natives. The majority of these unethical abuses were committed by the federal government and within the historical context (...) of a long-term contentious relationship between American Indians and the federal government. Although President Clinton issued a highly visible public apology to the African American survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1997, American Indians have yet to experience such visible federal acknowledgment. To ensure ethical research in which benefits outweigh risks and findings are not value-laden or misrepresented, tribes have instituted their own Institutional Review Boards coupled with community-participatory activities. (shrink)

We reconstruct as much as we can the part of al-Fārābī's treatment of modal logic that is missing from the surviving pages of his Long Commentary on the Prior Analytics. We use as a basis the quotations from this work in Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd and Maimonides, together with relevant material from al-Fārābī's other writings. We present a case that al-Fārābī's treatment of the dictum de omni had a decisive effect on the development and presentation of Ibn Sīnā's modal logic. (...) We give further evidence that the Harmonisation of the Opinions of Plato and Aristotle was not written by al-Fārābī. (shrink)

Investigations of iconicity in language, whereby interactants coordinate meaningful bodily actions to create resemblances, are prevalent across the human communication sciences. However, when it comes to analysing and comparing iconicity across different interactions and modes of communication, it is not always clear we are looking at the same thing. For example, tokens of spoken ideophones and manual depicting actions may both be analysed as iconic forms. Yet spoken ideophones may signal depictive and descriptive qualities via speech, while manual actions may (...) signal depictive, descriptive, and indexical qualities via the shape, movement, and placement of the hands in space. Furthermore, each may co-occur with other semiotics articulated with the face, hands, and body within composite utterances. The paradigm of iconicity as a single property is too broad and coarse for comparative semiotics, as important details necessary for understanding the range of human communicative potentialities may be masked. Here, we draw on semiotic approaches to language and communication, including the model of language as signalled via describing, indicating and/or depicting and the notion of non-referential indexicality, to illustrate the multidimensionality of iconicity in co-present interactions. This builds on our earlier proposal for analysing how different methods of semiotic signalling are combined in multimodal language use. We discuss some implications for the language and communication sciences and explain how this approach may inform a theory of biosemiotics. (shrink)

This article examines nanotechnology within the context of the public interest. It notes that though nanotechnology research and development investment totalled US$9.6 billion in 2005, the public presently understands neither the implications nor how it might be best governed. The article maps a range of nanotechnology dialogue activities under way within the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and Australia. It explores the various approaches to articulating public interest matters and notes a shift in the way in which these governments, (...) on the whole, appear to be attempting to manage nanotechnology “risks.” It argues that open and transparent policy deliberations and extensive public discourse will be pivotal to protecting the public interest, gaining public trust and acceptance of nanotechnologies. The article concludes that though governing emerging technologies in the public interest is not a new concept, nanotechnology does present additional challenges that must be addressed by the guardians of the public interest. (shrink)

From this starting point, and assuming no previous knowledge of logic, Wilfrid Hodges takes the reader through the whole gamut of logical expressions in a ...

Bioethics committees have issued guidelines that medical interventions should be permissible only in cases of clinically verifiable disease, deformity, or injury. Furthermore, once the existence of one or more of these requirements has been proven, the proposed therapeutic procedure must reasonably be expected to result in a net benefit to the patient. As an exception to this rule, some prophylactic interventions might be performed on individuals “in their best interests” or with the aim of averting an urgent and potentially calamitous (...) public health danger. In order to invoke these exceptions, a stringent set of criteria must first be satisfied. Additionally, where the proposed prophylactic intervention is intended for children, who are unlikely to be able to provide a meaningfully informed consent, a heightened scrutiny of any such measures is required. We argue that children should not be subjected to prophylactic interventions “in their best interests” or for public health reasons when there exist effective and conservative alternative interventions, such as behavioural modification, that individuals could employ as competent adolescents or adults to avoid adverse health outcomes. Applying these criteria, we consider the specific examples of prophylactic mastectomy, immunisations, cosmetic ear surgery, and circumcision. (shrink)

The author argues for three interconnected theses which provide a cognitive account for why humans intuitively believe that others survive death. The first thesis, from which the second and third theses follow, is that the acceptance of afterlife beliefs is predisposed by a specific, and already well-documented, imaginative process - the offline social reasoning process. The second thesis is that afterlife beliefs are social in nature. The third thesis is that the living imagine the deceased as socially embodied in such (...) a way as to continue to fulfill on-going social obligations with others. The author further suggests six reasons why the fantasy/reality distinction breaks down for the imaginer such that the continued existence of the decedent in the afterlife is believed to be real. Finally, the author suggests avenues for further research which would support this cognitive account. (shrink)

Ibn Sīnā proposed an analysis of arguments by reductio ad absurdum. His analysis contains, perhaps for the first time, a workable method for handling the making and discharging of assumptions in a formal proof. We translate the relevant text of Ibn Sīnā and put his analysis into the context of his general approach to logic.

The author introduces and critically analyzes two recent, curious findings and their accompanying explanations regarding how the folk intuits the capabilities of the dead and those in a persistent vegetative state. The dead are intuited to survive death, whereas PVS patients are intuited as more dead than the dead. Current explanations of these curious findings rely on how the folk is said to conceive of death and the dead: either as the annihilation of the person, or that person’s continuation as (...) a disembodied being. The author argues that these two conceptions are incompatible and inconsistent with each other and the evidence. Contrariwise, the author argues that the folk intuition about dead-survivors and the living dead are more easily explained by appealing to cross-culturally established concepts: the folk biological concept of death the existential concept of death, and the concept of social death. (shrink)

An acute hospital environment is a confusing place for many patients requiring admission, especially when they are presenting as acutely unwell. This can be particularly difficult for people living with dementia. As cognition changes it is not uncommon for people living with dementia to have difficulties with their ability to orientate to time, place and person. These disorientating moments can lead to personal distress, and at times behavioural changes. As well as being distressing for the person living with dementia, it (...) can also be emotionally and ethically challenging for acute hospital staff, including nurses. One area found to be particularly challenging is the concept of whether actively engaging with a person living with dementia's living truth is deceitful. This raises further questions of what forms of nurse responses to temporal disorientation might be constituted as lying, colluding, or alternatively validating. This article uses autoethnography as a research methodology with which to explore a mental health nurse's lived experience of the challenges of responding truthfully to disorientation and distress in an acute hospital. This article is not attempting to offer conclusive answers to these challenging ethical questions. It is instead re‐opening and re‐visiting the discourse of what is truth in dementia from a personal and professional nurse perspective through a lived narrative. The conclusion to the concept of truth in dementia is complex, nuanced and individualized. However, it is essential that a nurse's response to disorientation and distress is always person and living present focused, and not lie focused. (shrink)

Various claims have been made, recently, that Darwin's argumentation in the Origin instantiates and so supports some general philosophical proposal about scientific theorizing, for example, the "semantic view". But these claims are grounded in various incorrect analyses of that argumentation. A summary is given here of an analysis defended at greater length in several papers by the present author. The historical and philosophical advantages of this analysis are explained briefly. Darwin's argument comprises three distinct evidential cases on behalf of natural (...) selection, cases, that is, for its existence, its adequacy and its responsibility. Theorizing, today, about evolution by natural selection involves a similar structure of evidential and explanatory concerns. (shrink)

This essay locates Jean-Luc Nancy's analyses, developed in relation to three invented terms, expeausition, excription, sexistence, in a threefold context: between Immanuel Kant on experience and Heidegger on existence; with Derrida on rethinking life and death ( lavielamort); and as a response to the alteration in phenomenology consequent on a transposition of key themes out of the German speaking context of the analyses of Husserl and Heidegger into the French language context of the French reception. An intensification ( survie) of (...) life forces may arrive in a ‘living on’ ( survivre) where thought processes only partially brought to expression in the lifetimes of their originators acquire precision and definition in moments of extremity, danger and horror, adding a fourth dimension to the initial three. (shrink)

Heidegger and ethics is a contentious conjunction of terms. Martin Heidegger himself rejected the notion of ethics, while his endorsement of Nazism is widely seen as unethical. This major new study examines the complex and controversial issues involved in bringing them together. By working backwards through his work, from his 1964 claim that philosophy has been completed to _Being and Time_, his first major work, Joanna Hodge questions Heidegger's denial that his enquires were concerned with ethics. She discovers a form (...) of ethics in Heidegger's thinking which elucidates his important distinction between metaphysics and philosophy. Against many contemporary views, she proposes therefore that ethics can be retrieved and questions the relation between ethics and metaphysics that Heidegger had made so pervasive. (shrink)

§1. Introduction. I dedicate this essay to the two-dozen-odd people whose refutations of Cantor's diagonal argument have come to me either as referee or as editor in the last twenty years or so. Sadly these submissions were all quite unpublishable; I sent them back with what I hope were helpful comments. A few years ago it occurred to me to wonder why so many people devote so much energy to refuting this harmless little argument—what had it done to make them (...) angry with it? So I started to keep notes of these papers, in the hope that some pattern would emerge.These pages report the results. They might be useful for editors faced with similar problem papers, or even for the authors of the papers themselves. But the main message to reach me is that there are several points of basic elementary logic that we usually teach and explain very badly, or not at all.In 1995 an engineer named William Dilworth, who had published a refutation of Cantor's argument in the Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, sued for libel a mathematician named Underwood Dudley who had called him a crank. (shrink)

This article presents arguments and evidence that run counter to the widespread assumption among scholars that humans are intuitive Cartesian substance dualists. With regard to afterlife beliefs, the hypothesis of Cartesian substance dualism as the intuitive folk position fails to have the explanatory power with which its proponents endow it. It is argued that the embedded corollary assumptions of the intuitive Cartesian substance dualist position (that the mind and body are diff erent substances, that the mind and soul are intensionally (...) identical, and that the mind is the sole source of identity) are not compatible with cultural representations such as mythologies, funerary rites, iconography and doctrine as well as empirical evidence concerning intuitive folk reasoning about the mind and body concerning the afterlife. Finally, the article suggests an alternative and more parsimonious explanation for understanding intuitive folk representations of the afterlife. (shrink)

The naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin ranks as one of the most influential scientific thinkers of all time. In the nineteenth century his ideas about the history and diversity of life - including the evolutionary origin of humankind - contributed to major changes in the sciences, philosophy, social thought and religious belief. This volume provides the reader with clear, lively and balanced introductions to the most recent scholarship on Darwin and his intellectual legacies. A distinguished team of contributors examines Darwin's (...) main scientific ideas and their development; Darwin's science in the context of its times; the influence of Darwinian thought in recent philosophical, social and religious debate; and the importance of Darwinian thought for the future of naturalist philosophy. New readers will find this a most convenient and accessible guide to Darwin. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Darwin. (shrink)

Hodges explores Santayana’s doctrine of matter. Interpreting the realm of matter as the irrational, ineffable counterpart to the realm of essence, he elucidates the function and profound moral significance of materialism in Santayana’s system of philosophy.

Previous research with video game play and moral development with adolescents, found both positive and negative relationships. This study aimed to extend this research to explore moral development and video game play with University students. One hundred and thirty-five undergraduate students (M = 20.29 SD = 2.70) took part in an online survey. The results suggested higher moral reasoning for participants who described themselves as gamers and those which do not players, compared to the those who play but do not (...) identify as gamers. It was suggested that males had higher moral scores and more mature reasoning than females. The results of a regression analysis suggested that there were no significant predictors for moral development from either game play or the demographic variables. The findings suggest that moral development could be less influenced by sex, age, and video game play factors such as video game content and amount of game play, than was previously thought. (shrink)

In his Confessions, Augustine says that he achieved great intellectual insight from what he cryptically calls the “books of the Platonists.” Prior to reading these books, he was a corporealist and was unable to conceive of incorporeal beings. Because of the insurmountable philosophical problems corporealism caused for the Christian belief he was seeking, Augustine claims that this was the greatest intellectual barrier he faced in converting to Christianity. As such, the specific contents and effects of these Platonist books are of (...) great biographical and philosophical interest. Heretofore, the explanation of the contents and effects of these books has not been forthcoming. This essay aims to supply it. I argue that Augustine learned the mereological distinction between pertensive and entensive presence in the books of the Platonists. This distinction is required for properly conceiving of incorporeal beings. In support of this thesis, I show that Augustine himself says that he learned this very distinction, that the distinction is present in Platonist texts that scholars agree were among “the books of the Platonists,” that the distinction is present in one of Augustine’s earliest works, and that this distinction is uniquely capable of resolving the philosophical difficulties he faced as a corporealist. (shrink)

Low mean fundamental frequency (F 0) in men’s voices has been found to positively influence perceptions of dominance by men and attractiveness by women using standardized speech. Using natural speech obtained during an ecologically valid social interaction, we examined relationships between multiple vocal parameters and dominance and attractiveness judgments. Male voices from an unscripted dating game were judged by men for physical and social dominance and by women in fertile and non-fertile menstrual cycle phases for desirability in short-term and long-term (...) relationships. Five vocal parameters were analyzed: mean F 0 (an acoustic correlate of vocal fold size), F 0 variation, intensity (loudness), utterance duration, and formant dispersion (D f , an acoustic correlate of vocal tract length). Parallel but separate ratings of speech transcripts served as controls for content. Multiple regression analyses were used to examine the independent contributions of each of the predictors. Physical dominance was predicted by low F 0 variation and physically dominant word content. Social dominance was predicted only by socially dominant word content. Ratings of attractiveness by women were predicted by low mean F 0, low D f , high intensity, and attractive word content across cycle phase and mating context. Low D f was perceived as attractive by fertile-phase women only. We hypothesize that competitors and potential mates may attend more strongly to different components of men’s voices because of the different types of information these vocal parameters provide. (shrink)

Montaigne’s “Apology” is a lengthy work the overarching theme of which is the relationship between epistemology, virtue, and vice. It is a commentary on the thesis that science or knowledge “is the mother of all virtue and that all vice is produced by ignorance.” Montaigne’s response is radical and unequivocal: there is no idea more harmful; its consequences are no less than the destruction of inward contentment and the undermining of societal peace and stability. Indeed, Montaigne sees the Protestant Reformation (...) as the instantiation of this terrible thesis, with all of the attendant trouble it had and continued to cause in France. So Montaigne inverts the thesis: ignorance begets virtue and (presumption of) knowledge vice. Out of this inversion he draws many conservative social and political consequences, and this is one of the most interesting and yet underexplored aspects of the text. Montaigne exhibits the conservatism of the Counterreformation in the “Apology,” and I intend to draw more attention to this theme. I show that Montaigne’s main target in the “Apology” was not dogmatism as such, but Protestantism as a species of dogmatism. I then show that, by using a few elementary epistemic concepts, Montaigne launches a withering skeptical attack on the Reformation. Out of this criticism I draw some important conservative themes that have important implications for our understanding of Montaigne’s social and political thought, as well as for conservative political theory and its intellectual history. (shrink)

Tarski's model-theoretic truth definition of the 1950s differs from his 1930s truth definition by allowing the language to have a set of parameters that are interpreted by means of structures. The paper traces how the model-theoretic theorems that Tarski and others were proving in the period between these two truth definitions became increasingly difficult to fit into the framework of the earlier truth definition, making the later one more or less inevitable. The paper also maintains that neither recursiveness nor satisfaction (...) are essential features of the truth definition . The recursive form was a ‘practical’ step towards the explicit definition that was Tarski's target. There are model-theoretic languages for which satisfaction is provably too crude a notion for expressing those properties of formulas that are needed for determining the truth of sentences. (shrink)