The Ethical Responsibilities of Journalism Vis-à-Vis the Economics of News Earlier this year, Dr. Ryan Thomas reached out to me about a potential topic for the Trends section of the journal. He had...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Horizons of Grace:Marilynne Robinson and Simone WeilKaty RyanThe sorrow is that every soul is put out of house.Marilynne Robinson1All of us, even the youngest, are in a situation like Socrates' when he was awaiting death in prison and learning to play the lyre.Simone Weil2Marilynne Robinson's first novel Housekeeping (1980) is a meditative and lyrical reflection on old themes: abandonment, loss, grief, renewal, hope, memory—what the narrator Ruth Stone calls (...) the "sad and outcast state of revelation" (p. 184). The novel returns in its opening pages to the suicide of Ruth's mother, Helen, and concludes with a bridge crossing, misinterpreted by other characters as intentional death. Critical responses to the novel usefully explore its nineteenth-century American literary impulses (Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville), its reworking of female subjectivity, its quiet insistence on the transience of all things and the unmaking of boundaries.3 Words on suicide are scarce. In this inattention, critics may be following the lead of the novel, which, among novels containing acts of self-destruction,is exceptional in its almost total reticence on the subject. Not one character asks why Helen kills herself, and little emerges from the narrative to shed light on the unasked question.Structurally, the function of the mother's suicide seems obvious. Helen's death creates two orphans—that preferred status in literature that frees characters up for adventure and self-discovery. It also appears to be the cause, or at least a leading cause, of Ruth's sadness. Ruth's aunt Sylvie assumes this to be true. After the deaths of their mother and [End Page 349] grandmother, Ruth and her sister Lucille are passed off by their overwhelmed great aunts to Sylvie, a woman who has been wandering the country, hopping trains, getting by. When the concerned women in the town of Fingerbone attempt to determine how best to keep Ruth from following in Sylvie's uncivil footsteps, to keep her "safely within doors" one of them remarks on how sad Ruth always looks.And Sylvie replied, "Well, she is sad." Silence. Sylvie said, "She should be sad." She laughed. "I don't mean she should be, but, you know, who wouldn't be?" Again, silence.(p. 185)The unsaid is met with repeated silence. Sylvie proposes that anyone who had survived what Ruth has survived, understood to be her mother's death, would be sad, should be sad. A long silence also greets Sylvie's discomforting observation that Ruth is "'like another sister to me. She's her mother all over again'" (p. 182).The generating absence of the mother sets the stage for Ruth's spiritual exile and eventual communion, the moment when a "word so true" comes home to her. Ruth does not, in fact, become "her mother all over again."Born of people falling to their deaths (Ruth's mother and grandfather), Housekeeping ends with a counter-image, an image of crossing over a bridge (horizontality) rather than falling from it (verticality). One way to think about the philosophical movement in the novel is provided by Simone Weil's writing, which relies of tropes of gravity. I am particularly interested in connections between Housekeeping and Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace (1952) and Waiting for God (1992). These texts explore the nature of suffering by focusing on the inevitability of waiting, the practice of attention, and the necessity of detachment.Although Weil wrote movingly and persuasively about industrial labor, war, and other forms of political oppression, here I emphasize her spiritual writings. In his introduction to First and Last Notebooks, Richard Rees writes of Weil, "One may say that two of her chief preoccupations were, first, how to organize a society so that suffering should be reduced to a minimum, and, second, how to ensure that the (large) irreducible minimum should not be valueless" (p. viii). Housekeeping dramatizes this second concern. The novel also provides a needed fictional example of decreation, Weil's difficult name for the [End Page 350] process by which something created can be transformed into something uncreated, or "the act of allowing moments empty of meaning to remain 'unfilled.'"4 The suicide... (shrink)

BackgroundIt is increasingly recognised that the success of artificial intelligence-based clinical decision support (AI/CDS) tools will depend on physician and patient trust, but factors impacting patients’ views on clinical care reliant on AI have been less explored.ObjectiveThis pilot study explores whether, and in what contexts, detail of explanation provided about AI/CDS tools impacts patients’ attitudes toward the tools and their clinical care.MethodsWe designed a Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial vignette web-based survey. Participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk were presented with (...) hypothetical vignettes describing health concerns and were sequentially randomised along three factors: (1) the level of detail of explanation regarding an AI/CDS tool; (2) the AI/CDS result; and (3) the physician’s level of agreement with the AI/CDS result. We compared mean ratings of comfort and confidence by the level of detail of explanation using t-tests. Regression models were fit to confirm conditional effects of detail of explanation.ResultsThe detail of explanation provided regarding the AI/CDS tools was positively related to respondents’ comfort and confidence in the usage of the tools and their perception of the physician’s final decision. The effects of detail of explanation on their perception of the physician’s final decision were different given the AI/CDS result and the physician’s agreement or disagreement with the result.ConclusionsMore information provided by physicians regarding the use of AI/CDS tools may improve patient attitudes toward healthcare involving AI/CDS tools in general and in certain contexts of the AI/CDS result and physician agreement. (shrink)

In epistemology and the philosophy of science, there has been an increasing interest in the social aspects of belief acquisition. In particular, there has been a focus on the division of cognitive labor in science. This essay explores several different models of the division of cognitive labor, with particular focus on Kitcher, Strevens, Weisberg and Muldoon, and Zollman. The essay then shows how many of the benefits of the division of cognitive labor flow from leveraging agent diversity. The essay concludes (...) by examining the benefits and burdens of diversity, particularly in the evaluative diversity that can be found in interdisicplinary science. (shrink)

Viruses are major drivers of global biogeochemistry and the etiological agents of many diseases. They are also the winners in the game of life: there are more viruses on the planet than cellular organisms and they encode most of the genetic diversity on the planet. In fact, it is reasonable to view life as a viral incubator. Nevertheless, most ecological and evolutionary theories were developed, and continue to be developed, without considering the virosphere. This means these theories need to be (...) to reinterpreted in light of viral knowledge or we need to develop new theory from the viral point-of-view. Here we briefly introduce our viral planet and then address a major outstanding question in biology: why is most of life viral? A key insight is that during an infection cycle the original virus is completely broken down and only the associated information is passed on to the next generation. This is different for cellular organisms, which must pass on some physical part of themselves from generation to generation. Based on this premise, it is proposed that the thermodynamic consequences of physical information (e.g., Landauer’s principle) are observed in natural viral populations. This link between physical and genetic information is then used to develop the Viral Information Hypothesis, which states that genetic information replicates itself to the detriment of system energy efficiency (i.e., is viral in nature). Finally, we show how viral information can be tested, and illustrate how this novel view can explain existing ecological and evolutionary theories from more fundamental principles. (shrink)

In 1984, Harvard University asked Italo Calvino to deliver the next Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. After working obsessively for a year, Calvino died the day before he was to travel to Boston. Fortunately, Calvino had already written out all but one of the six planned lectures, which were framed as meditations on Lucretius. These are the titles of the five completed lectures: (1) “Lightness,” (2) “Quickness,” (3) “Exactitude,” (4) “Visibility,” (5) “Multiplicity.” The last lecture - worked out but unwritten - (...) was entitled: (6) “Consistency.” These are the names of concepts that fill Deleuze’s oeuvre. Our essay follows the structure of Calvino’s lectures - each section corresponding to each of Calvino’s titles - in order to offer one take on minor ethics. As the title of Calvino’s lectures is Six Memos for the Next Millennium, we now begin A Memorandum for Past Millennia. (shrink)

Dans la Partie X des Dialogues sur la religion naturelle, Philon, le sceptique, rejoint Demea, le défenseur de l’orthodoxie chrétienne, en dressant un catalogue effrayant des peines et des misères qui marquent la condition humaine. Cet article tend à démontrer que la source principale de leurs arguments est le débat à trois voix entre Bayle, Leibniz et William King sur la question de savoir si le bien ou le mal prédomine dans la vie humaine. De plus, nous suggérons que Philon, (...) intentionnellement et non sans malveillance, exagère la prévalence de la misère et de la souffrance afin de souligner la ressemblance entre l’orthodoxie chrétienne et les sceptiques religieux comme Bayle. (shrink)

This paper explores the space of possibilities for public justification in morally diverse communities. Moral diversity is far more consequential than is typically appreciated, and as a result, we need to think more carefully about how our standard tools function in such environments. I argue that because of this diversity, public justification can be divorced from any claim of determinateness. Instead, we should focus our attention on procedures—in particular, what Rawls called cases of pure procedural justice. I use a modified (...) form of the procedure “I cut, you choose” to demonstrate how perspectival diversity can make what looks like a simple procedure quite complex in practice. I use this to reframe disputes between classical liberal and contemporary liberal approaches to questions of public morality, arguing that classically liberal procedures, such as a reliance on the harm principle, can generate rather illiberal-looking outcomes when used in a morally diverse community. A seemingly less-principled approach, which simply balances burdens, appears to generate outcomes that look closer to what we would expect from classical liberalism. However, since both approaches are based on pure procedures that we can justify without reference to outcomes, it remains indeterminate which we ought to choose. (shrink)

In On Liberty, Mill introduced the concept of . I will provide an account of what Mill saw to be the basic problem he was addressing – the extensive pressure to fit in with the crowd, and how this bred mediocrity. I connect this to worries about public reason models of justification. I argue that a generalized version of Mill's argument offers us a better path to political justification stemming from experimentation. Rather than grounding political justification on shared political reasons, (...) we justify our political culture on our ability to reject consensus views and try alternatives. (shrink)

As scientists begin to study increasingly complex questions, many have turned to computer simulation to assist in their inquiry. This methodology has been challenged by both analytic modelers and experimentalists. A primary objection of analytic modelers is that simulations are simply too complicated to perform model verification. From the experimentalist perspective it is that there is no means to demonstrate the reality of simulation. The aim of this paper is to consider objections from both of these perspectives, and to argue (...) that a proper understanding and application of robustness analysis is able to resolve them. ‡The author would like to thank Cristina Bicchieri, Michelle Foa, Paul Humphreys and Michael Weisberg for their helpful comments and suggestions. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, 433 Logan Hall, 249 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6304; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

The philosophy of René Descartes has been attacked by environmental ethicists for supposedly being pivotal in preventing the formulation of proper environmental concerns and attitudes. Yet, Descartes’ philosophy if read charitably is, in fact, effective in developing a proper environmental ethic. He believed God created two kinds of substances, mental and physical; humans are composed of a mental and physical substance, plants and animals of only a physical substance. He argued that humans, animals, and plants, despite their difference in substance, (...) share the same status of creatures and interact with one another. Morally, Descartes argued that humans properly serving God receive theistic pleasure from promoting the welfare of their communities. Humans, animals, and plants exist in an ecological community with one another. Thus, Descartes’ philosophy naturally develops a theo-ecocentric environmental ethic as humans will receive theistic pleasure in promoting the welfare of ecological communities. (shrink)

Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contributions. We propose that mother-daughter co-residence during this period affords targeted grandmaternal effort during a period of heightened vulnerability (...) and appreciable impact. We conducted two focus groups and 37 semi-structured interviews with Himba women. Interviews focused on experiences from their first and, if applicable, their most recent birth and included information on social support, domains of teaching and learning, and infant feeding practices. Our qualitative findings reveal three domains in which grandmothers contribute: learning to mother, breastfeeding support, and postnatal health and well-being. We show that informational, emotional, and instrumental support provided to new mothers and their neonates during the perinatal period can aid in the establishment of the mother-infant bond, buffer maternal energy balance, and improve nutritional outcomes for infants. These findings demonstrate that the role of grandmother can be crucial, even when alloparenting is common and breastfeeding is frequent and highly visible. Situated within the broader anthropological and clinical literature, these findings substantiate the claim that humans have evolved in an adaptive sociocultural perinatal complex in which grandmothers provide significant contributions to the health and well-being of their reproductive-age daughters and grandchildren. (shrink)

The philosophical tradition of liberal political thought has come to see tolerance as a crucial element of a liberal political order. However, while much has been made of the value of toleration, little work has been done on individual-level motivations for tolerant behavior. In this article, we seek to develop an account of the rational motivations for toleration and of where the limits of toleration lie. We first present a very simple model of rational motivations for toleration. Key to this (...) model is an application of David Ricardo’s model of trade to thinking about toleration. This model supports the claim that we always have reasons to be as tolerant as possible. We then explore why we do not always see tolerant attitudes in the actual world, and point to some potential preconditions for toleration that the initial model does not capture. Subsequently, we examine a more detailed model that allows us to investigate more carefully the conditions under which tolerant behavior can be rewarded. We conclude by arguing that a consideration of self-interested motivations for toleration is essential to the success of a robust theory of toleration for a diverse society, but that even this approach has its limitations. (shrink)

In December 2004, at the age of 91, my father was told that his congestive heart failure had worsened and that his kidneys were functioning poorly. At best, the prognosis was that he had perhaps another year; at 86, my father had had a succession of three heart attacks before having surgery to place a stent in his coronary artery. The cardiologist who treated him then said he would get five or six good years from the stent, for which my (...) father was grateful. Now, he believed that his time had come, and he wanted to see his grandchildren one last time.My family and I quickly made arrangements to travel 1,200 miles to make this last visit. We arrived late in the evening, and my mother answered the doorbell with the... (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 3 Seiten: 427-453.

In this article, I use a Marxist feminist methodology to map the organisation of migrant sex workers’ socially reproductive paid and unpaid labour in one city and country of arrival, London, UK. I argue that unfree and ‘free’ labour exists on a continuum of capitalist relations of production, which are gendered, racialised, and legal. It is within these relations that various actors implement, and migrant sex workers contest, unfree labour practices not limited to the most extreme forms. My analysis reveals (...) that many migrant sex workers have very limited ‘freedom’. This is in stark contrast to the classical liberal claim of sex worker rights activists and academics that the vast majority of migrant sex workers are free, and therefore not coerced, exploited or trafficked. I then consider whether the emerging labour approach to trafficking could help achieve ‘freedom’ for migrant sex workers. Advocates argue that anti-trafficking efforts must, and can, be refocused on extending minimum labour and social protections to all vulnerable workers. I argue that this approach is disconnected from material interests and history. Rather, migrant sex workers, sex worker rights activists, and all migrant and citizen workers and activists globally must collectively organise against ‘labour unfreedom’ and hence for meaningful control over their labour and lives. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay follows the recent discourse on two phenomena: the tendency of hegemony to incorporate subversive cultures, and the digital reanimation of prominent dead people. At the intersection of these phenomena lies what we call “cultural necromancy,” a special case of hegemonic incorporation that aesthetically manipulates the physical presence of a deceased figure in the service of power. This essay explores historical analogues to cultural necromancy and how the digital age has accelerated the process through examples ranging from medieval saints (...) to Lenin’s mausoleum to the Tupac hologram. It then examines cultural necromancy’s implications for counterculture and resistance. (shrink)

Little attention has been given to the integral relationship between character strengths and spirituality (the search for or communing with the sacred to derive meaning and purpose). The science of character strengths has surged in recent years with hundreds of studies, yet with minimal attention to spirituality or the literature thereof. At the same time, the science of spirituality has steadily unfolded over the last few decades and has offered only occasional attention to select strengths of character (e.g., humility, love, (...) and forgiveness) or the universal typology of the VIA classification of character strengths and virtues. In this exploration, we argue that there is a robust synergy of these sciences and practices revealing that spirituality is vitally concerned with promoting character strengths. At the same time, character strengths can enhance and deepen spiritual practices, rituals, and experiences. We elaborate on how character strengths and spirituality come together in the context of the psycho-spiritual journey toward wholeness. By wholeness, we are referring to a way of being in the world that involves a life-affirming view of oneself and the world, a capacity to see and approach life with breadth and depth and the ability to organize the life journey into a cohesive whole. We further discuss six levels by which spirituality can be integrated within the VIA Classification, including a meta-perspective in which wholeness represents a meta-strength or superordinate virtue. We frame two pathways of integration: the grounding path, in which character strengths offer tangibility and thereby deepen and enhance spirituality, and the sanctification path, in which spirituality elevates character strengths. Finally, we turn to research-based practices and examine how character strengths might facilitate and contribute to spiritual practices and, conversely, how spirituality might enhance character strength practices. Such multifaceted integration offers insight and wisdom to both areas of study and opens up new directions for psycho-spiritual research and practices to deepen and broaden our understanding of what it means to be human. (shrink)

Hume believes that distinctively moral sentiments can only be felt from a disinterested perspective. While much scholarly attention has been paid to the question of how Hume believes we “correct” our moral sentiments to form a coherent moral language, less has been paid to the question of why we first adopt this disinterested vantage point. Answering this question involves determining what, for Hume, enables our disinterested point of view to influence us despite the fact that the sentiments produced by our (...) parochial vantage points are originally stronger. I term this the “influence question.” I contend that Hume has two answers to this question: one in the Treatise and one in the second Enquiry. While the former is based upon our ability to share sentiments with others via sympathy, the latter holds that our disinterested vantage point enables us to found the “party of humankind” upon the universal principle of humanity. I argue that Hume saw this latter answer as rectifying a certain deficiency in his Treatise explanation and that his later answer supports Hume’s aim of demonstrating that morality is a fundamentally social phenomenon. (shrink)

This article presents an empirical investigation into the construction of obedience in letters of applications mailed to National Socialist authorities for the position of executioner between the years 1933 and 1945. To this end, a corpus of 178 letters of application was compiled, annotated, and analyzed using the corpus analysis toolkits Antconc and Lancsbox. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus was conducted. The findings were related to and interpreted from the perspectives of applied legal linguistics, stylistics, and legal (...) history. The project aims to explore the construction of a shared discourse of obedience and how this discourse is operative in the letters of application. Drawing on an explorative interdisciplinary framework, this project seeks to answer the following research questions: Is obedience a construct in applicants’ letters of motivation? Which linguistic devices and discursive strategies are used by the executioners to express submission to officials of the National Socialist state? Are there variants of the construction of submission by applicants? (shrink)

Scholars have typically regarded Confucius as an ethical thinker broadly construed and not as an epistemological thinker. This chapter seeks to overturn that view and, in doing so, has three basic goals. The first goal is to make the case that Confucian thought is of epistemological significance. Goal two is to locate the significance of Confucian thought within epistemology while accounting for the past overlooking of this significance. The third goal is to show that Confucian thought is not only of (...) epistemological significance, but that it can make a contribution to progressing contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

The project is to traverse with quite novel questions, and as though with new eyes, the enormous, distant, and so well hidden land of morality—of morality that has actually existed, actually been lived.This essay offers a contribution to the consilience of the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences in accord with naturalism (in a spirit closer to Slingerland 2008 than Wilson 1998). Human beings have a shared nature produced by evolutionary history and modified by culture, where 'culture' refers to "information (...) capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission" (Richerson and Boyd 2005, p. 5). .. (shrink)

Hedwig Dohm is a radical German feminist whose work critically engages Nietzsche's writings. In this article, I develop and draw out the implications of a Dohmian critique of Nietzschean nihilism by looking closely at Dohm's novella Become Who You Are!. In this novella, Dohm provides an extended case study of two distinct types of Nietzschean nihilism common to women living in Germany in the late nineteenth century. And Dohm's writings illuminate a double standard in Nietzsche's theory of nihilism: Overcoming nihilism (...) is going to require greater effort for a woman than it will for a man. Dohm emphasizes the challenges that women face in overcoming nihilism. Women must first throw off the shackles of oppressive systems of social norms and institutions in order to reveal a new or different way of interpreting themselves and their world. (shrink)

Experimental tests about cross-cultural differentiation of cognitive style conclude that East Asian and Western cognition differ. Tendencies described as East Asian include holism, non-linearity, expectation of change, relationalism, field dependence, causal pluralism, dialecticism, and a tolerance of contradiction. Cross-cultural psychologists generally refrain from discussing the intellectual history or cultural evolution of these differences, preferring to explain results on cognitive scales in terms of results on social scales assessed using present-day participants. The present article attempts to partially close this explanatory gap (...) through detailed discussion of tendencies of East Asian cognitive style as represented in what is probably the most influential book in the history of East Asia, The Book of Changes. This study purports to show that the content of the Yijing 易經 and its commentaries is best described in terms of the cognitive tendencies just mentioned, that reading the Yijing activated those cognitive tendencies, and that the Yijing attained prodigious influence on subsequent Chinese and East Asian cultures through four known mechanisms of cultural transmission. Informed by this case study, researchers of cross-cultural cognition may be positioned to develop a richer appreciation of the cultural representation and evolution of East Asian cognitive style in historical context. (shrink)

As an arts-based research approach, poetic enquiry has been theorised and applied recently in the social sciences and in education. In this article, I extend its usage to eco-critical studies of Australian flora and fauna. The Southwest corner of Western Australia affords opportunities to deploy arts-based methodologies, including field poetry, for celebrating the natural heritage of a region of distinguished biodiversity. I suggest that lyric practices in places such as Lesueur National Park and Anstey-Keane Damplands in southern Perth can catalyse (...) embodied engagements with flora. The outcome of these practices is the invocation of the multiple senses— including the proximities of touch and taste—towards senses of place involving physical interactions with plants and their habitats. I will discuss poetic enquiry in relation to the limitations of landscape aesthetics. Visual aesthetic modes tend to frame botanical environments as a succession of images. In contrast, an embodied aesthetics closes visual distance towards sensory intimacies and experiences of ecological processes as sensations. Throughout the article, I use an interlude structure that shifts between theoretical elaborations, narrative vignettes that contextualise the poetic practice, and the poems themselves initiated in the field. A continuum between visuality and multi-sensoriality emerges and potentially deepens human appreciation of flora. Poetic enquiry into flora is a means for exploring this continuum towards an understanding of what intimacy with plants in a place entails. (shrink)

This article discusses Nietzsche's response in The Birth of Tragedy to what he calls the wisdom of Silenus, that “the very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is to die soon.” I begin by analyzing the view that Silenus expresses a proto-Schopenhauerian truth about the world as “Will.” I then review Bernard Reginster's interpretation of the wisdom of Silenus as an early (...) form of Nietzschean nihilism. As an alternative to these readings, I argue that, for Nietzsche, Silenus's wisdom addresses a crucial, existential dimension of ancient Greek tragic culture. I conclude by pointing out that, in BT, Nietzsche locates nihilism not in the wisdom of Silenus, but in the advent of Socratism. (shrink)

The rise of populism and nationalism in the West have raised concerns about the fragility of liberal political values, chief among them tolerance. But what alternative social resources exist for cultivating the interpersonal relationships and mutual goodwill necessary for sustainable peace? And how might the lived practices of religious communities carry potential to reinterpret or re-circuit these interpersonal tensions and transform the relationship with the cultural "other" (Fremde) from "foe" (Feind) to "friend" (Freund)? This volume contributes a unique analysis of (...) this shifting discourse by viewing the contemporary socio-political upheaval through the lens of Friedrich Schleiermacher's theology, with a focus on the themes of friendship, interpersonal subjectivity, and sociability as a path beyond mere tolerance. Each of the essays of the volume is written by an internationally recognized scholar in the field, and the volume examines Schleiermacher's novel reflections across multiple social contexts, including North America, Great Britain, western Europe, and South Africa. As these essays demonstrate, the implications of this conversation continue to resound in contemporary religious communities and political discourse. (shrink)

As with other areas of the social world, academic research in the contemporary healthcare setting has undergone adaptation and change. For example, research methods are increasingly incorporating citizen participation in the research process, and there has been an increase in collaborative research that brings academic and industry partners together. There have been numerous positive outcomes associated with both of these growing methodological and collaborative processes; nonetheless, both bring with them ethical considerations that require careful thought and attention. This paper addresses (...) the ethical considerations that research teams must consider when using participatory methods and/or when working with industry and outlines a novel informed consent matrix designed to maintain the high ethical standard to which academic research in the healthcare arena has traditionally adhered. (shrink)

This study aimed to examine the number of latent classes of criminal social identity that exist among male recidivistic prisoners. Latent class analysis was used to identify homogeneous groups of criminal social identity. Multinomial logistic regression was used to interpret the nature of the latent classes, or groups, by estimating the associationsto number of police arrests, recidivism, and violent offending while controlling for current age. The best fitting latent class model was a five-class solution: ‘High criminal social identity’, ‘High Centrality, (...) Moderate Affect, Low Ties’, ‘Low Centrality, Moderate Affect, High Ties’,‘Low Cognitive, High Affect, Low Ties’, and ‘Low criminal social identity’. Each of the latent classes was predicted by differing external variables. Criminal social identity is best explained by five homogenous classes that display qualitative and quantitative differences. (shrink)