This article focuses on contemporary work on public knowledge of, information about, and public images and judgments of law and courts. It begins with a brief digression on the nature of the scholarship on public opinion and the operation of courts and postulates that courts are political institutions. In order to highlight the importance of judicial knowledge, democratic theory is explained in the article. The theory of judicial influence is a theory of individual-level attitude change. A great deal more research, (...) however, must be conducted before the hypothesis of attitude change can be accepted. Legitimacy is one of the most highly valued forms of political capital. Available evidence indicates that national high courts differ greatly in the legitimacy they have acquired. Future research should focus on the processes through which courts become salient to ordinary people and how interactions with courts, especially judicial symbols, contribute to institutional legitimacy. (shrink)

This article focuses on contemporary work on public knowledge of, information about, and public images and judgments of law and courts. It begins with a brief digression on the nature of the scholarship on public opinion and the operation of courts and postulates that courts are political institutions. In order to highlight the importance of judicial knowledge, democratic theory is explained in the article. The theory of judicial influence is a theory of individual-level attitude change. A great deal more research, (...) however, must be conducted before the hypothesis of attitude change can be accepted. Legitimacy is one of the most highly valued forms of political capital. Available evidence indicates that national high courts differ greatly in the legitimacy they have acquired. Future research should focus on the processes through which courts become salient to ordinary people and how interactions with courts, especially judicial symbols, contribute to institutional legitimacy. (shrink)

While the Web Ontology Language (OWL) provides a mechanism to import ontologies, this mechanism is not always suitable. Current editing tools present challenges for working with large ontologies an...

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Much research in the field of emotions has shown that people differ in the cues that they use to perceive their own emotions. People who are more responsive to personal cues (personal cuers) make use of cues arising from their own bodies and behavior; people who are less responsive to personal cues (situational cuers) make use of cues arising from the world around them. An evolutionary explanation of this well-documented phenomenon is that it occurs because of the operation of a (...) cognitive module designed to enable the organism to predict its own impending behavior. This theory suggests that situational cuers would be people for whom external factors are the best source of information about their own future behavior, whereas personal cuers are people for whom cues about themselves are the best source of information about their own future behavior. Such a view is founded in the New Realist philosophy of the early twentieth century, a philosophy that affected psychology through the work of E. C. Tolman and J. J. Gibson. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to propose a method for analyzing the ideo­logical content of video games while taking into account the agency of the players. The interactivity of video games as a medium has been attracting the attention of researchers for many years, raising, in particular, the ques­tion of how this unique property serves to broadcast certain ideologies. The ability of games to make ideological statements was discussed by Bogost, Frasca, Aarseth, and many other pioneers of game studies. (...) Video games were analyzed both in the context of older media forms that promoted certain ideas through plots, visuals, and other traditional means, and as unique types of objects that can make statements through rules. I aim to introduce the player — as a subject who is able to transform and conceptual­ize the game based on their own cultural background — to this discussion. Using James Gibson’s theory of affordances, I want to acknowledge the player’s freedom of interpretation, the potential to assign one or another ideology to the game in each playthrough. On the one hand, the player acts as a consumer of content; on the other hand, they are a co-author who will use the tools offered by the video game to produce their own state­ments, to be interpreted independently. This leaves the final decision about the ideology of the game to the consumer; thus, game studies need an ap­proach that allows the analysis of the ideological content of specific games. It is especially important in the light of more and more games prioritizing player freedom and not providing any clear plot or even victory conditions. Of course, research can still proclaim, and rightfully so, that the specific rules in such games bear traces of certain ideological systems — capitalism or secularism, for example. But individual players could undermine such interpretations both at the level of reading the game as a “text”, and at the level of interactive actions inspired by those readings. (shrink)

Context: The dominant approach to the study of perception is representational/computational, with an emphasis on the achievements of the brain and the nervous system, which are taken to construct internal models of the world. Alternatives include ecological, embedded, embodied, and enactivist approaches, all of which emphasize the centrality of action in understanding perception. Problem: Despite sharing many theoretical commitments that lead to a rejection of the classical approach, the alternatives are characterized by important contrasts and points of divergence. Here we (...) focus on the enactive and ecological approaches, in particular, on how they construe the status of the environment and the content of perception. Method: We begin with a review of James Gibson’s ecological psychology, highlighting it as a psychology for all organisms not just humans. Against this backdrop, we consider enactivist arguments against direct perception - a central assertion of the ecological approach - and in favor of interpreting the activity of perceptual agents as a kind of construction of a perceptually meaningful world. Results: We assess the merits of this interpretation and we conclude that it cannot be grounded on fundamental principles such as thermodynamics and organism-environment mutuality. Implications: As a consequence, enactivism remains close to representationalism and entails a form of dualism. Constructivist content: We advance a criticism of the constructivist foundations of the enactive approach to perception. Perception-action mutuality at the heart of enactivism does not require mental construction; indeed, perception-action mutuality obviates construction. (shrink)

This paper is part of a series in which we had worked in the last 6 months, and, specifically, intend to investigate the notion of timbre through the ecological perspective proposed by James Gibson in his Theory of Direct Perception. First of all, we discussed the traditional approach to timbre, mainly as developed in acoustics and psychoacoustics. Later, we proposed a new conception of timbre that was born in concepts of ecological approach. The ecological approach to perception proposed (...) by Gibson (1966, 1979) presupposes a level of analysis of perceptual stimulated that includes, but is quite broader than the usual physical aspect. Gibson suggests as focus the relationship between the perceiver and his environment. At the core of this approach, is the notion of affordances, invariant combinations of properties at the ecological level, taken with reference to the anatomy and action systems of species or individual, and also with reference to its biological and social needs. Objects and events are understood as relates to a perceiving organism by the meaning of structured information, thus affording possibilities of action by the organism. Event perception aims at identifying properties of events to specify changes of the environment that are relevant to the organism. The perception of form is understood as a special instance of event perception, which is the identity of an object depends on the nature of the events in which is involved and what remains invariant over time. From this perspective, perception is not in any sense created by the brain, but is a part of the world where information can be found. Consequently, an ecological approach represents a form of direct realism that opposes the indirect realist based on predominant approaches to perception borrowed from psychoacoustics and computational approach. (shrink)

This paper examines the prospects for an expressivist theory of prudential thought and discussion, or thought and discussion about what is good for us or what makes our lives go well. It is becoming increasingly common to view prudential thought and discussion as a kind of normative thought and discussion. If this is right, then expressivism, like any other meta-normative view, must be able to explain prudential thought and discussion. However, existing expressivist theories offer no such explanation and lack the (...) resources to construct one. I argue that the best strategy for expressivists is to adopt a fitting attitudes account of prudential concepts. More specifically, I propose that expressivists adopt the rational care theory of well-being, according to which claims about what is good for a person are equivalent to claims about what it is rational to want for that person insofar as one cares for them. In doing so, I defend the rational care theory against its most pressing objection and argue that the view provides an independently attractive account of prudential thought and discussion that fits well with the expressivist’s aim to explain normative thought and discussion in terms of its distinctive practical function. (shrink)

Over the past quarter century, organ donation after the circulatory determination of death (DCD) has grown in acceptance and prevalence throughout the world (Domínguez-Gil et al. 2021). Notwithstan...

In this interview, James L. McClelland responds to questions regarding connectionist models of cognition, a theory inspired by information processing in the brain. McClelland explains the distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic processing for a better understanding of mental processes. He argues that connectionist models can perform the computations which we know the brain can perform. In addition, he responds to several general questions on the perspectives of computational models of cognition.

Conspicuous consumption associated with status reinforcement behavior can be explained in terms of costly signaling, or strategic handicap theory, first articulated by Zahavi and later formalized by Grafen. A theory is introduced which suggests that the evolutionary raison d’être of status reinforcement behavior lies not only in its effects on lifetime reproductive success, but in its positive effects on the probability of survival through infrequent, unpredictable demographic bottlenecks. Under some circumstances, such “wasteful” displays may take the form of displays of (...) altruistic behavior and generosity on the part of high status individuals, in that is signals the ability to bear the short-term costs of being generous or “cooperative,” while at the same time reinforcing the long-term benefits of higher status. (shrink)

Despite the popularity, success, and growth of programs of organ donation after the circulatory determination of death (DCDD), a long‐standing controversy persists over whether the organ donor is truly dead at the moment physicians declare death, usually following five minutes of circulatory and respiratory arrest. Advocates of the prevailing death determination standard claim that the donor is dead when declared because of permanent cessation of respiration and circulation. Critics of this standard argue that while the cessation of respiration and circulation (...) may be permanent, it may not be irreversible at the moment death is declared because, if cardiopulmonary resuscitation were performed, it might succeed. And because irreversibility of cessation of respiration and circulation is required by both the statute and the biological concept of death, the donor must be alive. Who is correct?Making two related distinctions clarifies the cause of the disagreement over whether the DCDD donor is dead and points to a possible resolution. First, in a determination of death, there is an important distinction between the permanent and the irreversible cessation of circulation and respiration—two associated phenomena that are often confounded. Second, there is an important distinction between the medical practice standard for death determination, in which physicians certify the permanent cessation of vital functions as sufficient for death declaration, and the underlying biological concept of death that requires the irreversible cessation of vital functions because death, by definition, is an irreversible event. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the spiritually formative experiences of fifteen female seminary spouses who participated in a phenomenological research study. Graduate theological education is not limited to married, male students. Seminaries are diverse educational institutions that equip married and single students, as well as men and women from every country in the world for gospel ministry. Because of this broad population in theological education, the qualitative proposals in this essay are not generalizable to all schools, students, (...) and settings equally, but the perspectives of these seminary spouses are useful in cultivating a robustly holistic education for students who are married during their academic pursuits. It is the intent here to explore how theology can crossover from the academy to the home so that it is experienced in marriage. The goal then is to equip students, professors, and administrators to actively nurture the faith formation of the second-person of the ministry dyad. In order for these stakeholders to understand how to nurture this faith formation of the seminary spouse, we must first hear and understand the experiences of these wives as they share their reflections on these formational years as a part of their husband's education. (shrink)

Nair-Collins and Joffe (2023) highlighted the noncongruence between the language of the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) and the accepted brain death bedside testing standard by showing th...

Notwithstanding these wise pronouncements, my project here is to characterize the biological phenomenon of death of the higher animal species, such as vertebrates. My claim is that the formulation of “whole- brain death ” provides the most congruent map for our correct understanding of the concept of death. This essay builds upon the foundation my colleagues and I have laid since 1981 to characterize the concept of death and refine when this event occurs. Although our society's well-accepted program of multiple (...) organ procurement for transplantation requires the organ donor first to be dead, the concept of brain death is not merely a social contrivance to permit us to obtain the benefits of organ procurement. Rather, the concept of whole- brain death stands independently as the most accurate biological representation of the demise of the human organism. (shrink)

The identification of a set of mutually exclusive and exhaustive propositions concerning the states of quantum systems is a corner stone of the information-theoretic foundations of quantum statistics; but the set which is conventionally adopted is in fact incomplete, and is customarily deduced from numerous misconceptions of basic quantum mechanical principles. This paper exposes and corrects these common misstatements. It then identifies a new set of quantum state propositions which is truly exhaustive and mutually exclusive, and which is compatible with (...) the foundations of quantum theory. (shrink)

This portion of the essay concludes a two-part paper, Part I of which appeared in an earlier issue of this Journal. Part II begins with a careful study of the quantum description of real experiments in order to motivate a proposal that two distinct quantum theoretical measurement constructs should be recognized, both of which must be distinguished from the concept of preparation. The different epistemological roles of these concepts are compared and explained. It is then concluded that the only possible (...) type of "quantum measurement theory" is one of little metaphysical interest and that quantum measurement seems problematical only when viewed from an overly narrow classical perspective. (shrink)

I consider the role of cognitive modeling in cognitive science. Modeling, and the computers that enable it, are central to the field, but the role of modeling is often misunderstood. Models are not intended to capture fully the processes they attempt to elucidate. Rather, they are explorations of ideas about the nature of cognitive processes. In these explorations, simplification is essential—through simplification, the implications of the central ideas become more transparent. This is not to say that simplification has no downsides; (...) it does, and these are discussed. I then consider several contemporary frameworks for cognitive modeling, stressing the idea that each framework is useful in its own particular ways. Increases in computer power (by a factor of about 4 million) since 1958 have enabled new modeling paradigms to emerge, but these also depend on new ways of thinking. Will new paradigms emerge again with the next 1,000‐fold increase? (shrink)

In a seminal 1977 article, Rumelhart argued that perception required the simultaneous use of multiple sources of information, allowing perceivers to optimally interpret sensory information at many levels of representation in real time as information arrives. Building on Rumelhart's arguments, we present the Interactive Activation hypothesis—the idea that the mechanism used in perception and comprehension to achieve these feats exploits an interactive activation process implemented through the bidirectional propagation of activation among simple processing units. We then examine the interactive activation (...) model of letter and word perception and the TRACE model of speech perception, as early attempts to explore this hypothesis, and review the experimental evidence relevant to their assumptions and predictions. We consider how well these models address the computational challenge posed by the problem of perception, and we consider how consistent they are with evidence from behavioral experiments. We examine empirical and theoretical controversies surrounding the idea of interactive processing, including a controversy that swirls around the relationship between interactive computation and optimal Bayesian inference. Some of the implementation details of early versions of interactive activation models caused deviation from optimality and from aspects of human performance data. More recent versions of these models, however, overcome these deficiencies. Among these is a model called the multinomial interactive activation model, which explicitly links interactive activation and Bayesian computations. We also review evidence from neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies supporting the view that interactive processing is a characteristic of the perceptual processing machinery in the brain. In sum, we argue that a computational analysis, as well as behavioral and neuroscience evidence, all support the Interactive Activation hypothesis. The evidence suggests that contemporary versions of models based on the idea of interactive activation continue to provide a basis for efforts to achieve a fuller understanding of the process of perception. (shrink)

Among the old and new controversies over brain death, none is more fundamental than whether brain death is equivalent to the biological phenomenon of human death. Here, I defend this equivalency by offering a brief conceptual justification for this view of brain death, a subject that Andrew Huang and I recently analyzed elsewhere in greater detail. My defense of the concept of brain death has evolved since Bernard Gert, Charles Culver, and I first addressed it in 1981, a development that (...) paralleled advances in intensive care unit treatment. The century‐old concept of the organism as a whole provides the fundamental justification for the equivalency of brain death and human death. In our technological age, in which increasing numbers of components and systems of an organism can be kept alive, and for longer intervals, the permanent cessation of functioning of the organism as a whole is the phenomenon that best corresponds to its death. (shrink)

Anthropology is a complex, wide-ranging, and ever changing field. Yet, despite its diversity, certain major themes do occur in the understandings of the world that anthropologists have offered. In this clear, coherent, and well-crafted book, James L. Peacock spells out the central concepts, distinctive methodologies, and philosophical as well as practical issues of cultural anthropology. Designed to supplement standard textbooks and monographs, the book focuses on the premises that underlie the facts that the former kinds of works generally present. (...) Free from unnecessarily abstract theoretical language and based on compelling concrete anecdote and engaging illustration, it is written in terms understandable to the anthropological novice, as well as being of value to the professional. The book's three main concerns are the substance, method, and significance of anthropology. In his discussion of substance, method, and significance of anthropology, such as the concept of culture, as well as holism. In writing about method, he explores the distinctive character of ethnographic fieldwork and raises questions of interpretation and comparison. Finally, he considers the relevance of anthropology with respect to both its practical application and what it contributes to understanding of human affairs. Using the photographic metaphors of 'harsh light' and 'soft focus', Peacock characterizes the anthropological worldview as consisting of two elements: on the one hand, a concern with the basic reality of the human condition, free of cultural influence; on the other, a broadly based holism that attempts to grasp all aspects of that condition, including its relation to the anthropologist. His book will appeal widely to readers interested in anthropology, at all levels. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Veterans Affairs National Center for Clinical EthicsJames L. Bernat (bio)The veterans health administration is the largest health care system in the United States and, indeed, is larger that the health care system of many foreign countries. In February 1991 the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) in Washington, D.C. awarded a contract to the clinical ethics group at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont to (...) establish the V.A. National Center for Clinical Ethics. In this article I describe the organizational context, mission, operation, and future direction of the Center, which William A. Nelson, Ph.D., and I co-direct.The Veterans Health AdministrationThe Department of Veterans Affairs operates 171 hospitals providing services ranging from primary, secondary, and tertiary medical care to psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and nursing homes. The V.A. also provides outpatient services at all hospitals and at dozens of free-standing outpatent clinics. V.A. medical centers employ over 14,000 physicians and serve approximately 4.5 million veteran patients (Hollingsworth and Bondy 1990; Mirvis 1990).The V.A. serves an important educational function, providing training sites for medical students, postgraduate physicians, and trainees in other health-related fields. Approximately 78 percent of V.A. medical centers are affiliated with medical schools. Over one-third of all American medical students and over 40 percent of interns and residents spend a portion of their training in V.A. medical centers. More than 100,000 students in all health-related fields train in V.A. facilities annually (Hollingsworth and Bondy 1990).Research is another mission of the V.A. Many academic physicians and scientists derive their research and salary funding from V.A contracts and awards. The V.A. Research Career Development Program provides the means for many medical school faculty members to achieve successful careers as scientists and clinical investigators. Although research accounts for only slightly more than 1 percent of the V.A. medical budget, two V.A. researchers have been awarded the Nobel Prize (Hollingsworth and Bondy 1990). [End Page 385]In comparison to other medical care settings, the average V.A. patient is likely to be older, poorer, male, less well-educated, more chronically ill, and more expensive to care for. Many patients first patronize the V.A. system after they have been bankrupted by the costs of a major illness. Unlike young, healthy patients ideally favored by health maintenance organizations, these patients immediately require large expenditures for hospitalizations, medications, and other treatments. Additional burdens have been placed on V.A. facilities by a record of chronic federal underfunding over the past decade, despite expanded patient censuses at every facility.Bioethical issues arise in V.A. facilities with great frequency for several reasons. Older and poorer patients are often sicker, have fewer home-support resources, and have completed fewer advance directives for health care. Chronic operational underfunding requires explicit health care rationing systemwide. Academic physicians within the V.A. system have multiple professional duties that have the potential for conflict. Although their primary duty is to their patients, they also must serve the federal government and their medical school academic supervisors. The practice of medical care rationing pits the physician's professional duty to his patient against his duty to the system (Mirvis 1990).The V.A. has responded to these bioethical demands with several initiatives. Hospital ethics advisory committees have been developed in nearly every V.A. medical center. The V.A. National Bioethics Committee has been empaneled to encourage uniform policies across the V.A. system concerning bioethical issues. Most recently, funds were provided for the V.A. National Center for Clinical Ethics.Functions of the National Center for Clinical Ethics (NCCE)The NCCE has a fourfold mission: 1) to enhance the quality of clinical ethics programs at all 171 V.A. medical centers nationwide; 2) to staff the V.A. National Bioethics Committee; 3) to assist administrators and planners in the V.A. Central Office on policy development concerning bioethical issues; and 4) to study, organize, and coordinate clinical, educational, and research bioethics programs throughout the system.Enhancing the quality of clinical ethics programs at V.A. medical centers is largely an... (shrink)

Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...) with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)