Feminist epistemology has often been understood as the study of feminine "ways of knowing." But feminist epistemology is better understood as the branch of naturalized, social epistemology that studies the various influences of norms and conceptions of gender and gendered interests and experiences on the production of knowledge. This understanding avoids dubious claims about feminine cognitive differences and enables feminist research in various disciplines to pose deep internal critiques of mainstream research.

Repression is one of the most haunting concepts in psychology. Something shocking happens, and the mind pushes it into some inaccessible corner of the unconscious. Later, the memory may emerge into consciousness. Repression is one of the foundation stones on which the structure of psychoanalysis rests. Recently there has been a rise in reported memories of childhood sexual abuse that were allegedly repressed for many years. With recent changes in legislation, people with recently unearthed memories are suing alleged perpetrators for (...) events that happened 20, 30, even 40 or more years earlier. These new developments give rise to a number of questions: (a) How common is it for memories of child abuse to be repressed? (b) How are jurors and judges likely to react to these repressed memory claims? (c) When the memories surface, what are they like? and (d) How authentic are the memories? (shrink)

Introspective and phenomenological methods are once again being used to support the use of subjective reports, rather than objective behavioural measures, to investigate and measure consciousness. Objective measures are often seen as useful ways of investigating the range of capacities subjects have in responding to phenomena, but are fraught with the interpretive problems of how to link behavioural capacities with consciousness. Instead, gathering subjective reports is seen as a more direct way of assessing the contents of consciousness. This article explores (...) three different ways of gathering subjective reports that have been discussed in recent literature on consciousness, including immediate retrospection (Schwitzgebel [2007]) and two types of introspective training (Overgaard et al. [2004]; Schwitzgebel [2008]). Although not an exhaustive survey of the range of introspective methods now used, the discussion below highlights a range of general methodological problems with introspective methods, many identified up to a century ago. It is argued that none of the methodological problems established in earlier criticisms of the use of subjective reports have been dealt with, yet are still valid criticisms. Given that this is not the first time proponents of introspective, subjective measures of conscious have failed to answer these criticisms, this raises the question of whether the goal of providing a measure of consciousness is a methodological muddle worth pursuing. (shrink)

A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers’ language, accent, and race on children’s social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intelligibility of the speech, as children found the accented speech to be comprehensible, and did not make social distinctions between foreign-accented and foreign-language speakers. Finally, children chose (...) same-race children as friends when the target children were silent, but they chose other-race children with a native accent when accent was pitted against race. A control experiment provided evidence that children’s privileging of accent over race was not due to the relative familiarity of each dimension. The results, discussed in an evolutionary framework, suggest that children preferentially evaluate others along dimensions that distinguished social groups in prehistoric human societies. (shrink)

Energy has an ambivalent status in social theory, variously figuring as a driver or an outcome of social and institutional change, or as something that is woven into the fabric of society itself. In this article the authors consider the underlying models on which different approaches depend. One common strategy is to view energy as a resource base, the management and organization of which depends on various intersecting systems: political, economic and technological. This is not the only route to take. (...) The authors develop an alternative approach, viewing energy supply and energy demand as part of the ongoing reproduction of bundles and complexes of social practice. In articulating and comparing these two positions they show how social-theoretical commitments influence the ways in which problems like those of reducing carbon emissions are framed and addressed. Whereas theories of practice highlight basic questions about what energy is for, these issues are routinely and perhaps necessarily obscured by those who see energy as an abstract resource that structures or that is structured by a range of interlocking social systems. (shrink)

Papers on nanotechnology in the Scientific Electronic Library Online database were studied bibliometrically. The terms ‘nanotechnology’, ‘nanoparticle’, ‘graphene’, ‘fullerene’, ‘nanotube’ and ‘quantum dot’ were used for the search in their singular and plural forms in three languages, and a total of 1205 papers were selected for the study to assess the frequency rates of the study variables. The results of the study are presented in this article focusing on gender differences.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ContingenciesElizabeth RottenbergAnalysis does precious little, but the little it does is precious.—Therese BenedekI’d like to begin with an anecdote of a slightly confessional nature. If I mention this anecdote, it’s because it came to me by chance as an association to what French analyst and philosopher Monique David-Ménard, in her introduction to Éloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle, calls “positive contingency” or the “positive aspect of chance” (David-Ménard (...) 2011, 19–20), what in colloquial English we call a “happy accident.”So here’s the association. For reasons I cannot fully explain, the therapist I was seeing in graduate school encouraged me to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test (the MMPI, as it’s called), a widely used and researched psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology. The test involved hundreds of simple, inoffensive questions, questions such as, “Do you read all the editorials in the newspaper every day?”1 and it took me hours to complete. A week or so after taking the test, I met with my therapist and we went over the results together. According to the test (which, interestingly, takes into account the performative aspects of test taking), I had answered all the questions in such a way as to appear neither excessively good nor excessively bad, that is, I had answered all the questions honestly and consistently. And as far as psychopathology was concerned, my answers showed few signs of hypochondriasis, hysteria, psychopathy, schizophrenia, or hypomania. On the other hand, when it came to depression, paranoia, psychasthenia, and social introversion, my scores were a little higher, and a shockingly high percentage of my answers [End Page 128] reflected “stereotypical masculine interests/behaviors.” None of this seemed to worry my therapist in the least. The only thing she pointed to were my “odd answers” (the MMPI also has a special category for odd answers—presumably the answers of academics). She wondered about my answer to this question in particular: “Do you see people or animals or things that other people don’t see?” “You answered ‘true’ to that question,” she said. “I don’t understand. Why would you answer ‘true’? You’re not psychotic.” I explained that I had read the “or”—do you see people OR animals OR things that other people don’t see—as a disjunctive rather than a conjunctive OR. “So, yes, it’s true, when I read texts, sometimes I see things that other people don’t see.” At the time, of course, I wasn’t thinking of Deleuze’s “contingent reason” or of Monique’s discussion of the inventive power of disjunctive synthesis in her Deleuze et la psychanalyse (2005). And I certainly wasn’t thinking that my figurative reading of seeing, my misreading of seeing, was indicative of the essential and indeterminable contingencies of reading. No, I was only giving what I took to be a perfectly accurate description of the déformation professionnelle that is ours and that belongs to anyone who is a stickler for grammar... a positive déformation, I might add.But this association immediately leads me to another (contingent) association, this time one that is intimately related to Monique’s discussion of Torricelli’s law and to Claude Bernard’s discovery of the exocrine function of the pancreas. My association is to Freud and to Freud’s astonishment before the transformative power of Jean-Martin Charcot’s dazzling, clinical insight. In Freud’s description of his teacher, Charcot is someone who sees things that other people don’t see:[Charcot]... had the nature of an artist—he was, as he himself said, a “visuel,” a seer. Here is what he himself told us about his method of working. He used to look again and again at the things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by day, till suddenly [plötzlich] an understanding of them dawned on him.... He might be heard to say that the greatest satisfaction a [person] could have was to see something new—that is, to recognize it as new; and he remarked again and again on the difficulty and value of this kind of... (shrink)

As we know from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and the first four of Freud’s Introductory Lectures (1916 [1915]), nothing in the mind is arbitrary or undetermined. As Freud demonstrates again and again in hundreds of examples of parapraxes, the accident (Unfall) is no accident for the analyst who is able to recognize and interpret an unconscious purpose behind an apparently random event. So how does chance (Zufall, Zufälligkeit) operate in an economy of psychical determinism? How are we to (...) think chance together with analysis’s hermeneutic drive, that is to say, with its compulsion to make the accident unhappen? (shrink)

Pragmatism may be the aspect of William James’s thought for which he is best known; but, at the same time, James’s pragmatism may be among the most misunderstood doctrines of the past century. There are many meanings of word “pragmatism,” even within James’s own corpus. Not a single unified doctrine, pragmatism may be better described as a collection of positions which together form a coherent philosophical system. This paper examines three interrelated uses of the term: (1) pragmatism as a temperament, (...) (2) pragmatism as a philosophical method, and (3) pragmatism as a “humanistic” and “concrete” theory of knowledge and truth. Some critics infer that pragmatist truth is relative or subjective. This paper concludes with a consideration of James’s responses to such critics. Though James maintains truth is something both “made” and “satisfying,” he just as clearly affirms that as it develops, truth is ever constrained by the elements of extramental reality as well as previously vetted truths. This pragmatist truth is not a function of personal caprice, and the pragmatist is certainly not one who denies an objective order or bends the world to his wishes. (shrink)

Four-month-old infants can perceive bimodally speciiied events. They respond to relationships between the optic and acoustic stimulation that carries information about an object. Infants can do this by detecting the temporal synchrony of an object’s sounds and its optically specified impacts. They are sensitive both to the common tempo and to the simultaneity of such sounds and visible impacts. These findings support the view that intermodal perception depends at least in part on the detection of invariant relationships in patterns of (...) light and sound. (shrink)

The Exchange of Words, by MoranRichard. Oxford: OUP, 2018. Pp. 254.

Walker Percy was both a medical doctor and a serious Catholic—a scientist and a religious believer. He thought, however, that science had become hegemonic in the twentieth century and that it was incapable of answering the most fundamental needs of human beings. He thus leveled a critique of the scientific method and its shortcomings in failing to address the individual person over against the group. In response to these shortcomings Percy postulates a religious understanding of human life, one in which (...) man's life is understood as a pilgrimage or a search. The person who searches may not find the “object” of his search during his earthly life, but it is likely that he will come to a better understanding of himself by means of it. (shrink)

Thirty-six 1-year-old middle-class children with fathers who spent differential time with them at home were observed in two experimental contexts separated by 2 weeks. In the first, each infant was shown six to eight repetitions of three different nonsocial events followed by a change in..

Mature representations of number are built on a core system of numerical representation that connects to spatial representations in the form of a ‘mental number line’. The core number system is functional in early infancy, but little is known about the origins of the mapping of numbers onto space. Here we show that preverbal infants transfer the discrimination of an ordered series of numerosities to the discrimination of an ordered series of line lengths. Moreover, infants construct relationships between individual numbers (...) and line lengths that vary positively, but not between numbers and lengths that vary inversely. These findings provide evidence for an early developing predisposition to relate representations of numerical magnitude and spatial length. A central foundation of mathematics, science and technology therefore emerges prior to experience with language, symbol systems, or measurement devices. (shrink)

Sea of Troubles shows teachers how literature and informational texts can work together to enhance each other and, by extension, enhance students’ abilities to critically think and respond to the sea of troubles that pervades society.

Pharmacists with religious or ethical objections to prescribing emergency contraception won the latest round in the fight over conscience clauses in a case that could have broader implications for attempts to restrict access to contraception. In Stormans, Inc. v. Selecky, a federal District Court in Washington State granted an injunction to block the enforcement of regulations that would have forbidden pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception on the grounds of religious or ethical objections. In its decision, the court applied (...) Supreme Court abortion precedent without explicitly ruling whether emergency contraception should be legally categorized as a form of abortion or as contraception. However, the legal status of emergency contraception affects the strength of the defendants’ claims that the law was justified on the grounds of preventing sex discrimination. In neglecting to rule one way or the other, the court not only failed to adequately consider the sex discrimination claim but also may have opened the door to more restrictive regulation on contraceptives generally. (shrink)

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"An examination of the writings on virtues and ethics of eighteenth-century Puritan Jonathan Edwards"--Provided by publisher.

Six experiments investigated 7-month-old infants’ capacity to learn about the self-propelled motion of an object. After observing 1 wind-up toy animal move on its own and a second wind-up toy animal move passively by an experimenter’s hand, infants looked reliably longer at the former object during a subsequent stationary test, providing evidence that infants learned and remembered the mapping of objects and their motions. In further experiments, infants learned the mapping for different animals and retained it over a 15-min delay, (...) providing evidence that the learning is robust and infants’ expectations about self-propelled motion are enduring. Further experiments suggested that infants’ learning was less reliable when the self-propelled objects were novel or lacked faces, body parts, and articulated, biological motion. The findings are discussed in relation to infants’ developing knowledge of object categories and capacity to learn about objects in the first year of life. (shrink)

How lovely to see an article co-authored by a person with schizophrenia and his psychiatrist! For hundreds of years, the perspectives of people receiving services was never published in medical/psychiatric journals. Then, some journals had a special section for "voices of lived experience" where people receiving services could write short, personal pieces—often they told dark and negative stories about all the pain they have experienced. Later, people with lived experience were on research teams and people with mental health challenges would (...) be co-authors. Then research projects were designed and led by people with mental health challenges (Sweeney, Beresford, Faulkner, Nettle, &... (shrink)

This article considers the interplay between intellectual property rights and classic property rights raised by Hoffman v. Monsanto (2005) and advances the idea that intellectual property law can serve as an autonomous source of liability for intellectual property owners. The article develops the conceptual advantages of demarcating physical and intellectual properties and allocating rights and responsibilities based on the respective property sphere. It introduces a theoretical Hohfeldian framework, in which the grant of a positive limited-term monopoly right entails a corresponding (...) duty, to establish intellectual property law as a source of internal limits on intellectual property rights. The article is a prolegomena to a detailed matrix of those rights and duties within intellectual property law. This matrix could support patentee duties that go beyond public disclosure of the invention and could establish patent law as an alternative legal framework to tort law to address harms caused by inventions. (shrink)

This article examines the responses of Parisian noble women to campaigns for women's rights in France of the early Third Republic. The methodology of the article is based on the works of Pierre Bourdieu. His concept of the habitus is used to analyse the effects of class and gender in noble women's attitudes to French feminisms before the First World War. The conditioning of Parisian noble women explains their resistance, indeed often outspoken opposition, to feminists' demands. These female aristocrats supported (...) their own oppression within a social order governed by the state, the scientific and medical establishments, the expectations of family, and the Catholic Church of the time. (shrink)

My investigation into the cognitive aspects of landscape description takes as its focus the landscapes that the poet evokes on the Shield of Achilles. Drawing on studies in cognitive psychology I note the extent to which an audience might derive a ‘spatial mental model’ from the topographical or ‘locative’ indicators that the Homeric poet offers. Then I consider the ‘non-locative’ information that the poet conveys about the landscapes of the Shield. In this connection I develop Barbara Tversky's notion of landscape (...) representation as a ‘cognitive collage’. What makes the scenes on the Shield vivid, however, is human presence. Finally, therefore, I draw on enactivist theories of cognition, recently introduced into Classics, which offer a valuable supplementary approach to ‘reading’ and enjoying landscape descriptions in Homer. (shrink)