In this response to Pieter Lemmens’ post-autonomist evaluation of the liberatory potential of digital network technologies, Kate Milberry finds the concept of pharmakon as a diagnostic to uncover what ails the worker in technocapitalism wanting. Through an exploration of Marxian concepts and critical theory of technology, she explores ways to augment political responses to capitalist exploitation in the digital age. Milberry concludes that it is not possible to change the sociotechnical foundation of contemporary life until we fundamentally (...) alter the capitalist social relations concretized in technology. This can only be done through adopting an ethic of care, that is to say: only through love. (shrink)

Today, DIY -- do-it-yourself -- describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways and to repurpose corporate content in order to offer political counternarratives. This book examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, exploring the diverse forms of political participation and "critical making" that have emerged in recent years. The authors and artists in this collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging and video production to knitting (...) and the creation of community gardens. Contributors examine DIY activism, describing new modes of civic engagement that include Harry Potter fan activism and the activities of the Yes Men. They consider DIY making in learning, culture, hacking, and the arts, including do-it-yourself media production and collaborative documentary making. They discuss DIY and design and how citizens can unlock the black box of technological infrastructures to engage and innovate open and participatory critical making. And they explore DIY and media, describing activists' efforts to remake and reimagine media and the public sphere. As these chapters make clear, DIY is characterized by its emphasis on "doing" and making rather than passive consumption. DIY citizens assume active roles as interventionists, makers, hackers, modders, and tinkerers, in pursuit of new forms of engaged and participatory democracy. _Contributors_Mike Ananny, Chris Atton, Alexandra Bal, Megan Boler, Catherine Burwell, Red Chidgey, Andrew Clement, Negin Dahya, Suzanne de Castell, Carl DiSalvo, Kevin Driscoll, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Joseph Ferenbok, Stephanie Fisher, Miki Foster, Stephen Gilbert, Henry Jenkins, Jennifer Jenson, Yasmin B. Kafai, Ann Light, Steve Mann, Joel McKim, Brenda McPhail, Owen McSwiney, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Graham Meikle, Emily Rose Michaud, Kate Milberry, Michael Murphy, Jason Nolan, Kate Orton-Johnson, Kylie A. Peppler, David J. Phillips, Karen Pollock, Matt Ratto, Ian Reilly, Rosa Reitsamer, Mandy Rose, Daniela K. Rosner, Yukari Seko, Karen Louise Smith, Lana Swartz, Alex Tichine, Jennette Weber, Elke Zobl. (shrink)

How social media and DIY communities have enabled new forms of political participation that emphasize doing and making rather than passive consumption. Today, DIY—do-it-yourself—describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways and to repurpose corporate content in order to offer political counternarratives. This book examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, exploring the diverse forms of political participation and “critical making” that have emerged in recent years. The authors and artists (...) in this collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging and video production to knitting and the creation of community gardens. Contributors examine DIY activism, describing new modes of civic engagement that include Harry Potter fan activism and the activities of the Yes Men. They consider DIY making in learning, culture, hacking, and the arts, including do-it-yourself media production and collaborative documentary making. They discuss DIY and design and how citizens can unlock the black box of technological infrastructures to engage and innovate open and participatory critical making. And they explore DIY and media, describing activists' efforts to remake and reimagine media and the public sphere. As these chapters make clear, DIY is characterized by its emphasis on “doing” and making rather than passive consumption. DIY citizens assume active roles as interventionists, makers, hackers, modders, and tinkerers, in pursuit of new forms of engaged and participatory democracy. Contributors Mike Ananny, Chris Atton, Alexandra Bal, Megan Boler, Catherine Burwell, Red Chidgey, Andrew Clement, Negin Dahya, Suzanne de Castell, Carl DiSalvo, Kevin Driscoll, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Joseph Ferenbok, Stephanie Fisher, Miki Foster, Stephen Gilbert, Henry Jenkins, Jennifer Jenson, Yasmin B. Kafai, Ann Light, Steve Mann, Joel McKim, Brenda McPhail, Owen McSwiney, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Graham Meikle, Emily Rose Michaud, Kate Milberry, Michael Murphy, Jason Nolan, Kate Orton-Johnson, Kylie A. Peppler, David J. Phillips, Karen Pollock, Matt Ratto, Ian Reilly, Rosa Reitsamer, Mandy Rose, Daniela K. Rosner, Yukari Seko, Karen Louise Smith, Lana Swartz, Alex Tichine, Jennette Weber, Elke Zobl. (shrink)

We all know that speech can be harmful. But how? Mary Kate McGowan argues that speech constitutes harm when it enacts a norm that prescribes that harm. She investigates such harms as oppression, subordination, and discrimination in such forms of speech as sexist remarks, racist hate speech, pornography, verbal triggers, and micro-aggressions.

I here present two different models of oppressive speech. My interest is not in how speech can cause oppression, but in how speech can actually be an act of oppression. As we shall see, a particular type of speech act, the exercitive, enacts permissibility facts. Since oppressive speech enacts permissibility facts that oppress, speech must be exercitive in order for it to be an act of oppression. In what follows, I distinguish between two sorts of exercitive speech acts (the standard (...) exercitive and the covert exercitive) and I argue that each such exercitive affords a distinct model of oppressive speech. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new (i.e., previously overlooked) breed of exercitive speech act (the conversational exercitive). I establish that any conversational contribution that invokes a rule of accommodation changes the bounds of conversational permissibility and is therefore an (indirect) exercitive speech act. Such utterances enact permissibility facts without expressing the content of such facts, without the speaker intending to be enacting such facts and without the hearer recognizing that it is so. Because of the peculiar nature ofthe rules (...) of accommodation that generate them, conversational exercitives have importantly different felicity conditions and therefore constitute a new breed ofexercitive speech act. (shrink)

This paper argues that an addressee's failure to recognize a speaker's authority can constitutes another form of silencing.

This paper argues that racist speech in public places ought to be regulable even with teh strict free speech protections of the First Amendment. McGowan argues that the same justification for regulating the hanging of a 'Whites Only' sign applies to racist utterances in public spaces.

It has often been argued that charitable donations are not a sufficient response to global poverty; individuals need to address structural injustice. Proponents of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement have raised two main problems with this focus on structural injustice. In this paper, we respond to these concerns. The first problem raised by EA proponents is that focusing on structural injustice absolves individuals of any responsibility other than political ones. In response, we argue that discharging this duty requires more commitment (...) than EA defenders think, and we do so by framing individual responsibility in global structural injustice through the lens of Robin Zheng’s Role-Ideal Model (RIM). The second response given by EA proponents is that a focus on structural injustice does not provide concrete ways for any given individual to discharge such duties. To address this worry, we argue that RIM can be complemented with the Rawlsian account of moral maturation. This new framework makes it clear how individuals can form the right concept of justice and become responsible citizens who act in accordance with RIM. (shrink)

The rapid rise of generative AI, including LLMs, has prompted a great deal of concern, both within and beyond academia. One of these concerns is that generative models embed, reproduce, and therein potentially perpetuate all manner of bias. The present study offers an alternative perspective: exploring the potential of LLMs to detect bias in human generated text. Our target is genetic essentialism in obesity discourse in Australian print media. We develop and deploy an LLM-based classification model to evaluate a large (...) sample of relevant articles (n=26,163). We show that our model detects genetic essentialist biases as reliably as human experts; and find that, while genes figure less prominently in popular discussions of obesity than previous work might suggest, when genetic information is invoked, it is often presented in a biased way. Implications for future work are discussed. (shrink)

This volume draws on a range of approaches in order to explore the problem and determine what ought to be done about allegedly harmful speech.Most liberal societies are deeply committed to a principle of free speech. At the same time, however, there is evidence that some kinds of speech are harmful in ways that are detrimental to important liberal values, such as social equality. Might a genuine commitment to free speech require that we legally permit speech even when it is (...) harmful, and even when doing so is in conflict with our commitment to values like equality? Even if such speech is to be legally permitted, does our commitment to free speech allow us to provide material and institutional support to those who would contest such harmful speech? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, which kinds of speech are harmful in ways that merit response, either in the form of legal regulation or in some other form? This collection explores these and related questions. Drawing on expertise in philosophy, sociology, political science, feminist theory, and legal theory, the contributors to this book investigate these themes and questions. By exploring various categories of speech (including pornography, hate speech, Holocaust denial literature, 'Whites Only' signs), and attending to the precise functioning of speech, the essays contained here shed light on these questions by clarifying the relationship between speech and harm. Understanding how speech functions can help us work out which kinds of speech are harmful, what those harms are, and how the speech in question brings them about. All of these issues are crucially important when it comes to deciding what ought to be done about allegedly harmful speech. (shrink)

The Ethical Matrix was developed to help decision-makers explore the ethical issues raised by agri-food biotechnologies. Over the decade since its inception the Ethical Matrix has been used by a number of organizations and the philosophical basis of the framework has been discussed and analyzed extensively. The role of tools such as the Ethical Matrix in public policy decision-making has received increasing attention. In order to further develop the methodological aspects of the Ethical Matrix method, work was carried out to (...) study the potential role of the Ethical Matrix as a decision support framework. When considering which frameworks to apply when analyzing the ethical dimensions of the application of agri-food biotechnologies, it is important to clarify the substantive nature of any prospective framework. In order to further investigate this issue, reflections on the neologism “ethical soundness” of an ethical framework are presented here. This concept is introduced in order to provide more structured evaluations of a range of ethical tools, including ethical frameworks such as the Ethical Matrix. As well as examining the philosophical dimensions of the method, theoretical analysis and literature studies were combined with stakeholder engagement exercises and consultations in order to review the Ethical Matrix from a user perspective. This work resulted in the development of an Ethical Matrix Manual, which is intended to act as a guide for potential user groups. (shrink)

This paper argues that linguistic oppression is coherent; speech can oppress. Moreover, even though oppression is a structural phenomenon, a single utterance can nevertheless be an act of oppression. This paper also argues that ordinary utterances can oppress. That is, speakers do not need to have and be exercising authority in order for their speech to be oppressive. Furthermore, ordinary speech can oppress even though the speakers do not intend to oppress, even though the hearers do not take it to (...) oppress, even though the oppressed do not hear it, and even though the oppressed are unaware of being oppressed. On the account offered here, linguistic oppression is sneaky, hidden, and surprisingly widespread. (shrink)

The aim of this virtual special issue is to bring together philosophical and historical perspectives to address long-standing issues in the interpretation, utility, and impacts of quantitative genetics methods and findings. Methodological approaches and the underlying scientific understanding of genetics and heredity have transformed since the field's inception. These advances have brought with them new philosophical issues regarding the interpretation and understanding of quantitative genetic results. The contributions in this issue demonstrate that there is still work to be done integrating (...) old and new methodological and conceptual frameworks. In some cases, new results are interpreted using assumptions based on old concepts and methodologies that need to be explicitly recognised and updated. In other cases, new philosophical tools can be employed to synthesise historical quantitative genetics work with modern methodologies and findings. This introductory article surveys three general themes that have dominated philosophical discussion of quantitative genetics throughout history: (1) how methodologies have changed and transformed our knowledge and interpretations; (2) whether or not quantitative genetics can offer explanations relating to causation and prediction; and (3) the importance of defining the phenotypes under study. We situate the contributions in this virtual special issue within a historical framework addressing these three themes. (shrink)

Philosophers of science discuss whether theory selection depends on aesthetic judgments or criteria, and whether these putatively aesthetic features are genuinely extra-epistemic. As examples, judgments involving criteria such as simplicity and symmetry are often cited. However, other theory selection criteria, such as fecundity, coherence, internal consistency, and fertility, more closely match those criteria used in art contexts and by scholars working in aesthetics. Paying closer attention to the way these criteria are used in art contexts allows us to understand some (...) evaluative and developmental practices in scientific theory selection as genuinely aesthetic, enlarging the scope of the goals of science. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Nellie Wieland argues that silencing in the sense put forward by Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby has the unpalatable consequence of diminishing a rapist's responsibility for the rape. We argue both that Wieland misidentifies Langton and Hornsby's conception of silencing, and that neither Langton and Hornsby's actual conception, nor the one that Wieland attributes to them, in fact generates this consequence.

Clinical ethics consultants (CECs) are not moral authorities. Standardization of CECs’ professional role does not confer upon them moral authority. Certification of particular CECs does not confer upon them moral authority (nor does it reflect such authority). Or, so we will argue. This article offers a distinctly Orthodox Christian response to those who claim that CECs—or any other academically trained bioethicist—retain moral authority (i.e., an authority to know and recommend the right course of action). This article proceeds in three parts. (...) First, we discuss recent movements toward the certification of CECs in the United States, focusing primarily on proposals and programs put forth by the American Society for Humanities and Bioethics (ASBH). Second, we outline two secular reasons to be concerned about the relevant trends toward certification. For one thing, certification is currently being advanced via political dominance, rather than gaining authority by reliance on rigorous philosophical argument or reason. For another, the trends operate on the assumption that there exists a secular, content-full, canonical, morality. There is no such morality. Next, we argue that Orthodox Christians should resist the current trends toward certification of CECs. Specifically, we unpack ways in which the ASBH’s certification program (and those like it) conflict with Orthodox claims about moral authority and the moral life more generally. We conclude that Orthodox Christians should resist the current certification trends. (shrink)

Doing research with young children can be challenging for many reasons, but this book provides clear guidance on how to engage in appropriate methods. Focusing on researching through play, careful consideration is given to: · the founding principles of playful research · understanding young children's perspectives · prioritising the rights of the child and the voice of the child · examples of innovative research methods Real life examples and research projects are presented, to enable common challenges to be anticipated and (...) to showcase successful creative approaches, and to inspire new paths in research. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that to properly understand our commitment to a principle of free speech, we must pay attention to what should count as speech for the purposes of such a principle. We defend the view that ‘speech’ here should be a technical term, with something other than its ordinary sense. We then offer a partial characterization of this technical sense. We contrast our view with some influential views about free speech , and show that our view has (...) distinct advantages. Finally, we consider racist hate speech. Here, we argue that if certain theorists are right about what some racist hate speech does, then such speech should fall outside the scope of the free speech principle, and so, should be as regulable as any non-speech action. (shrink)

Defining quality of life is a difficult task as it is a subjective and personal experience. However, for the elderly, this definition is necessary for making complicated healthcare-related decisions. Commonly these decisions compare independence against safety or longevity against comfort. These choices are often not made in isolation, but with the help of a healthcare team. When the patient’s concept of quality of life is miscommunicated, there is a risk of harm to the patient whose best interests are not well (...) understood. In order to bridge this gap in understanding and unite seniors with their caretakers as a cohesive team, we need to establish a definition of quality of life. In this paper, my personal experiences with the elderly will be analysed along with five essays on the topic of ageing. These sources provide clear evidence that quality of life for seniors is majorly determined by the ability to preserve one’s lifelong identity. When making difficult decisions in geriatric healthcare, this greater understanding of the determinants of life quality will allow treatments to best serve the elderly. Defining quality of life allows healthcare providers to shift the focus from minimising disability toward maximising ability. I believe this shift would provide seniors with better health outcomes and properly enhance the quality of their years. (shrink)

This article is the author's response to critical essays by Luvell Anderson, Claire Horisk, and Lori Watson. The legal concept of discrimination, the sneaky communicative functioning of joke-telling, and the phenomenon of hepeating are each discussed.

Changes in government policy over the last two decades have seen the traditional goals of criminal justice, namely prosecution and punishment, being replaced by an emphasis on prevention, fear reduction, security and harm reduction. During this time domestic abuse has gained a place on the political agenda, which has resulted in legislative initiatives in the form of civil protection orders across the U.K. which primarily focus on prevention but have also more recently begun to rely on the traditional criminal justice (...) responses should they fail to prevent further abuse. Drawing on international evaluations and a recent study conducted in Scotland (the Scottish study), the article examines whether legislation in the form of civil protection orders has the effect of curtailing the actions of abusers and if not, what occurs when the traditional criminal justice response comes into play. The strengths of civil protection orders and some explanations for the weaknesses of these orders are considered alongside the question of whether there is any value in women continuing to engage with the law in response to domestic abuse. (shrink)

This article explores the idea that there is a spectrum of individuals who feel compelled to dwell in the past, either due to psychological or social conditions. I analyze both conditions respectively by critically examining two cases: post-traumatic stress disorder and racialized oppression. I propose that individuals with PTSD can feel psychologically compelled to dwell in the past in a dually negative sense: the individual lives in the past but also broods on it, causing them to feel “stuck” in the (...) past. This kind of “dwelling” can cause individuals to suffer disruptions to their sense of self and intersubjectivity. After exploring the psychological case of dwelling in the past, I explore the social sense in which individuals can dwell in the past due to oppressive social structures by examining the case of racialized oppression. The case of racialization is philosophically stimulating because of its intersubjective dimensions—it subverts the idea that dwelling in the past is simply a psychological phenomenon by capturing that others can help or hinder us with maintaining a sense of self and future-directed intentionality. By putting the phenomenological work of Al-Saji into conversation with recent phenomenological research on incarceration, I propose that racialization can be similarly disruptive to one’s sense of self and intersubjectivity. The proposed account is suggestive that traumatic and oppressive experiences may amplify and compound each other in ways not yet well elucidated in the literature. If this account is taken to be persuasive, it is indicative that both psychological and social conditions mediate one’s temporality and well-being. (shrink)

This study investigated the relative contribution of perception/cognition and language-specific semantics in nonverbal categorization of spatial relations. English and Korean speakers completed a video-based similarity judgment task involving containment, support, tight fit, and loose fit. Both perception/cognition and language served as resources for categorization, and allocation between the two depended on the target relation and the features contrasted in the choices. Whereas perceptual/cognitive salience for containment and tight-fit features guided categorization in many contexts, language-specific semantics influenced categorization where the two (...) features competed for similarity judgment and when the target relation was tight support, a domain where spatial relations are perceptually diverse. In the latter contexts, each group categorized more in line with semantics of their language, that is, containment/support for English and tight/loose fit for Korean. We conclude that language guides spatial categorization when perception/cognition alone is not sufficient. In this way, language is an integral part of our cognitive domain of space. (shrink)

Expanding buprenorphine access in the United States requires evidence-based decision-making that considers both the drug's potential dangers and its potential benefits. Risks associated with buprenorphine misuse and diversion highlight the need for careful, ongoing evaluation during each stage of increased access.

ABSTRACTBuilding trust between researchers and communities involved in research is one goal of community engagement. This paper examines the implications of community engagement for trust within communities, including trust among community volunteers who assist with research and between these volunteers and other community members. We describe the experiences of two groups of community volunteers recruited as part of an HIV and TB intervention trial in Malawi: cluster representatives, recruited both to act as key informants for TB suspects and mortality reporting (...) and to identify and report community concerns, and community counsellors, recruited to provide semi-supervised HIV self-testing. We examine tensions experienced due to playing multiple roles, and the implications of volunteer responsibilities for short- and long-term community relationships. Data was collected through a workshop, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with volunteers and community members. While the volunteer system init... (shrink)

Regenerative agriculture is an approach that places soil conservation at the center of its practices. As part of this approach, regenerative agriculture seeks to address concerns related to environmental and socio-economic dimensions of food production through the promotion of a range of best management practices. While regenerative agriculture has received support at various levels in many countries, including Canada, adoption remains low. Systems thinking strength has been recognized as facilitating farmer adoption of several regenerative agricultural practices including rotational grazing (RG). (...) However, few approaches have examined multiple types of systems thinking nor the breadth of a system which may underlay the diverse ways that systems thinking influences agricultural practice adoption and persistence. Furthermore, few studies have taken a quantitative approach into understanding how different systems are emphasized by adopters of RG within the context of systems thinking. Using survey data from program participants in a national producer training program, we explored the use of two measures of systems thinking, systems thinking strength and diversity of a system in RG adopters. Our research highlights how the inclusion of the breadth of systems farmers consider can help us better understand RG adopters and support efforts to recruit new adopters. Furthermore, our results suggest that adopters are not homogenous in the types of systems they emphasize in their farming nor in the strength of their systems thinking. Future training programs can utilize these insights to leverage existing system emphases of RG producers and integrate them in the development of training programs to attract potential adopters. (shrink)

Causation has multiple distinct meanings in genetics. One reason for this is meaning slippage between two concepts of the gene: Mendelian and molecular. Another reason is that a variety of genetic methods address different kinds of causal relationships. Some genetic studies address causes of traits in individuals, which can only be assessed when single genes follow predictable inheritance patterns that reliably cause a trait. A second sense concerns the causes of trait differences within a population. Whereas some single genes can (...) be said to cause population-level differences, most often these claims concern the effects of many genes. Polygenic traits can be understood using heritability estimates, which estimate the relative influences of genetic and environmental differences to trait differences within a population. Attempts to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying polygenic traits have been developed, although causal inference based on these results remains controversial. Genetic variation has also recently been leveraged as a randomizing factor to identify environmental causes of trait differences. This technique—Mendelian randomization—offers some solutions to traditional epidemiological challenges, although it is limited to the study of environments with known genetic influences. (shrink)

This is the Q&A portion of the roundtable that focuses on the crucial issues of individual and collective guilt of the intellectual class in the face of war. The participants address the stratification of Russian society, possibilities and obstacles of dissent, and the eschatological tendencies of history by engaging with each other’s claims and ideas and seeking answers to direct questions.

This conversational opinion article between two parties – Kate, a disability performance scholar and Sarah, an interdisciplinary artist-scholar with lived experience of disability – considers the dancing body as redeemer in the specific case of a dancer experiencing ‘chemo fog’, or Chemotherapy-Related Cognitive Impairment (CRCI) after undergoing oncological treatments for Hodgkin Lymphoma. This work draws on Pini’s own lived experience of illness (Pini & Pini, 2019) in dialogue with Maguire-Rosier’s study of dancers with hidden impairments (Gibson & Maguire-Rosier, 2020). (...) In an exploratory account based on an interview with one another, the authors ask: when our senses and perceptions of ourselves and the world we become are obfuscated, what is the nature of the new relationship between the performing self and its absent body/mind/world? How can we shape our narrative and articulate who we are, what we are doing or where we are going, if we are moving in the ‘fog’? Our discussion reveals how Pini’s dancing body elucidates healing, while recovering an agentic perspective in her experience of alienation and frustration tied to chemo fog and related impairments. With this work we offer an original perspective on how a dancing body can resist theoretical diagnosis. (shrink)

In what follows, I motivate and clarify the controversy over metaphysical realism (the claim that there is a single objective way that the world is) by defending it against two objections. A clear understanding of why these objections are misguided goes a considerable distance in illuminating the complex and controversial nature of m-realism. Once the complex thesis is defined, some objections to it are considered. Since m-realism is such a complex and controversial thesis, it cannot legitimately be treated as inevitable (...) unless, of course, there are no viable alternatives to it. For this reason, a brief defense of non-realist metaphysics is offered. Since m-realism is both controversial and substantive, a commitment to it requires both explicit recognition and sustained defense. (shrink)

The Mental Capacity Act (2005) was designed to protect and empower patients with impaired capacity. Despite an estimated 40% of medical inpatients lacking capacity, it is unclear how many patients undergo capacity assessments and treatment under the Act. We audited the number of capacity assessments on the general medical wards of an English-teaching hospital. A total of 95 sets of case notes were reviewed: the mean age was 78.6 years, 57 were female. The most common presenting complaints were feeling ‘unwell’ (...) (n = 25) and confusion (n = 24). In all, 52 patients had conditions, such as delirium (n = 26) and dementia (n = 15), which often impair capacity. Capacity was assessed in seven (7.4%) patients, all of whom disagreed with the medical team about their treatment. The number of documented assessments fell short of the estimated rate of incapacity, suggesting that some means of improving capacity assessment in busy medical environments is required. (shrink)

This commentary analyzes the extent to which the incommensurability problem can be resolved through the proposed alternative method of integrative experiment design. We suggest that, although one aspect of incommensurability is successfully addressed (dimensional incommensurability), the proposed design space method does not yet alleviate another major source of discontinuity, which we call conceptual incommensurability.

In humans, there are two skeletal muscle α‐actinins, encoded by ACTN2 and ACTN3, and the ACTN3 genotype is associated with human athletic performance. Remarkably, approximately 1 billion people worldwide are deficient in α‐actinin‐3 due to the common ACTN3 R577X polymorphism. The α‐actinins are an ancient family of actin‐binding proteins with structural, signalling and metabolic functions. The skeletal muscle α‐actinins diverged ∼250–300 million years ago, and ACTN3 has since developed restricted expression in fast muscle fibres. Despite ACTN2 and ACTN3 retaining considerable (...) sequence similarity, it is likely that following duplication there was a divergence in function explaining why α‐actinin‐2 cannot completely compensate for the absence of α‐actinin‐3. This paper focuses on the role of skeletal muscle α‐actinins, and how possible changes in functions between these duplicates fit in the context of gene duplication paradigms. (shrink)

This study examines the relationship between teachers' beliefs and their practices at Key Stage 2 (ages 7-11) in relation to the use of questioning. Data were collected from interviewing and observing Key Stage 2 teachers at four schools in the West of England. A Straussian approach to grounded theory is followed broadly in order to analyse the data. In contrast to the findings of previous studies, which suggested a mismatch between teachers' beliefs and practices in that teachers, in certain respects, (...) do less than they claim, the research revealed that teachers use a variety of skills during their teaching that they may not always be aware of. It is also argued that teachers do not share researchers' language to express the way they teach. (shrink)

The idea that the world is human construction is fairly familiar and generally disparaged. One version of this claim is partially defendedhere. This subjectivist thesis concerns a debate about the objectivityof rightness of categorization. A problem about the discriminatoryrole of properties is both presented and motivated. The subjectivistthesis is articulated and defended against two powerful objections.Finally, this thesis is shown to be conceptually independent ofboth verificationism and empirical idealism.

This article clarifies the motivations for and commitments of metaphysical realism and shows that it is compatible with various kinds of referential indeterminacy.

A textbook anthology of important works of political thought revealing the development of ideas from the 12th to the 15th centuries. It includes new translations of both well-known and ignored writers, and an introductory overview.

Chemical visualizations and models are special kinds of situated, inductive arguments. In this paper, I examine several historical case studies—an archive of images from museums, special collections, and popular magazines—as examples of emergent practices of physical modeling as theoretical play which became the basis for molecular biology and structural chemistry. Specifically, I trace a legacy of visualization tools that starts with Archibald Scott Cooper and Friedrich Kekulé in the late 1800s, crystallizes as material manipulatives in Kekulé’s student Jacobus Henricus Van’t (...) Hoff and his folded paper “toys,” is legitimized in the California lab of Linus Pauling, and is glorified in the popular imaginary with James Watson and Francis Crick’s model of DNA. My tracing then follows several threads into contemporary modeling practices. I ultimately argue that modeling play, originally outside of the boundary of deductive, positivist science, is now an accepted mode of inductive reasoning in these related chemical fields. (shrink)

This paper clarifies the legal right to free speech, identifies ways that speech can be harmful, and discusses pornography hate speech, and lies. It is also written for a non-technical audience.

Heralded as revolutionary in their potential to improve efficiency, transparency, and sustainability, blockchain technologies promise new forms of large-scale coordination between actors that do not necessarily trust each other. This paper examines blockchain imaginaries and associated metaphors. Our analysis focuses on bitcoin and ethereum, today’s most prominent blockchains that use the proof-of-work consensus mechanism. We identify three principles that organise blockchain imaginaries: substantial, morphological, and structural. These principles position blockchain as an enabler of economic, political and epistemological practices, respectively. Blockchain (...) infrastructure and protocols rely on substantial metaphors (e.g. gold, gas) to govern resource allocation, morphological metaphors (e.g. work, trust) to generate consensus and structural metaphors (e.g. chain, transaction) to establish shared knowledge. Those imaginaries rely on metaphorical displacements of meaning that make blockchain technology relevant and intelligible while simultaneously shaping the direction of technological development and positing these technologies as new forms of economic, political and epistemological organisation. They are not merely descriptive but performative. We conclude by showing how these principles partially overlap with three symbolically generalized media: money, power and truth. Money organises scarcity within the economic system, power organises consensus within the political system, and truth organises knowledge within the science system. (shrink)