Thought-intrusions, automatic inferences, and other unintended thought are beginning to play an important role in the study of psychiatric disease as well as normal thought processes. We examine one method for study of task-unrelated imagery and thought . TUIT likelihood was shown to be reliably measured over a wide range of vigilance tasks, to have high short-term and long-term test-retest reliability, and to be sensitive to information processing demands. Likelihood of TUITs was shown to be different as a function of (...) aging, hyperactivity, time of day, and level of depression. Thus, we now can reliably measure the influence of endogenous and exogenous influences on TUITs. In addition, TUIT measurement was proposed as a minimally interfering and natural second task for determining resource utilization in a primary task. Finally, this method was offered as a reliable approach to quantification of such mental states as obsessions and drug craving and addiction. (shrink)

Can Rawlsian public reason sufficiently justify public policies that regulate or restrain controversial medical and technological interventions in bioethics (and the broader social world), such as abortion, physician aid-in-dying, CRISPER-cas9 gene editing of embryos, surrogate mothers, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of eight-cell embryos, and so on? The first part of this essay briefly explicates the central concepts that define Rawlsian political liberalism. The latter half of this essay then demonstrates how a commitment to Rawlsian public reason can ameliorate (not completely resolve) (...) many of the policy disagreements related to bioethically controversial medical interventions today. The goal of public reason is to reduce the size of the disagreement by eliminating features of the disagreement that violate the norms of public reason. The norms of public reason are those norms that are politically necessary to preserve the liberal, pluralistic, democratic character of this society. What remains is reasonable disagreement to be addressed through normal democratic deliberative processes. Specific issues addressed from a public reason perspective include personal responsibility for excessive health costs, the utility of a metaphysical definition of death for organ transplantation, and the moral status of excess embryos generated through IVF and/or their use in medical research. (shrink)

Abstract:Because the demand for intensive care unit (ICU) beds exceeds the supply in general, and because of the formidable costs of that level of care, clinicians face ethical issues when rationing this kind of care not only at the point of admission to the ICU, but also after the fact. Under what conditions—if any—may patients be denied admission to the ICU or removed after admission? One professional medical group has defended a rule of “first come, first served” in ICU admissions, (...) and this approach has numerous moral considerations in its favor. We show, however, that admission to the ICU is not in and of itself guaranteed; we also show that as a matter of principle, it can be morally permissible to remove certain patients from the ICU, contrary to the idea that because they were admitted first, they are entitled to stay indefinitely through the point of recovery, death, or voluntary withdrawal. What remains necessary to help guide these kinds of decisions is the articulation of clear standards for discontinuing intensive care, and the articulation of these standards in a way consistent with not only fiduciary and legal duties that attach to clinical care but also with democratic decision making processes. (shrink)

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It is shown that all those theses of traditional logic which were rejected by Russell in terms of a preferred interpretation of 'all' and 'some', in fact lead to inconsistency in any formal system of traditional logic satisfying certain minimal conditions. Hence, Russell's refutation is ultimately independent of his interpretation. Further, the derivation of each of the refutable theses depends crucially on the Bochenski/Lukasiewicz postulate 'Some _A are _A'. If this postulate is removed, the theses which remain are exactly those (...) which translate into theses of quantification theory. (shrink)

Galasso calls for “the actualization of the public health potential of precision medicine….as the best realistic contribution to health equity” (Galasso 2024, 83). Unfortunately, this is wishful th...

Park and Davies (2024) address the question of whether vaccine status can be an ethically legitimate criterion for the allocation of scarce medical resources, such as access to an ICU bed and venti...

We consider a proportional-prize contest to forecast future events, and show that, in equilibrium, this mechanism possesses perfect forecasting ability for any group size when the contestants share common knowledge about the probabilities by which future events realize. Data gathered in a laboratory experiment confirm the performance invariance to group size. By contrast, when realization probabilities are not common knowledge, there are some differences across group sizes. The mechanism operates marginally better with three or four compared to two players. However, (...) this effect is mainly driven by players’ behavior rather than by differences in the beliefs they form about the realization probabilities. (shrink)

Are DRGs just? This is the primary question which this essay will answer. But there is a prior methodological question that also needs to be addressed: How do we go about rationally (non-arbitrarily) assessing whether DRGs are just or not? I would suggest that grand, ideal theories of justice (Rawls, Nozick) have only very limited utility for answering this question. What we really need is a theory of “interstitial justice,” that is, an approach to making justice judgments that is suitable (...) to assessing the social practices and institutions that comprise the interstices of our social life as opposed to its basic structure. Rawls's appeal to “our considered moral judgments” provides us with a useful starting point for this task, which we shall discuss in the first part of this essay. In the second part, we shall actually assess DRGs from the perspective of interstitial justice. What we shall show is that DRGs violate a large number of our considered judgments regarding a just approach to financing health care for the elderly in a cost-effective manner. This is true to such an extent that efforts to reform DRGs and make them fairer, such as the recent effort by Robert Veatch, should be abandoned. In the concluding section of the essay we discuss one especially pernicious feature of DRGs, namely, that they represent an invisible approach to rationing access to health care. In the minds of many this is one of the virtues of DRGs. That claim needs critical examination. (shrink)

Lawlor discusses major theoretical trends in the work of these philosophers -- immanence, difference, multiplicity, and the overcoming of metaphysics.

In the study of human thought there could hardly be a more fundamental con cern than language and reasoning. In the tradition of Western philosophy, humans are distinguished by their ability to speak and to think rationally. And language is often considered a prerequisite for rational thought. If psycholoQists, then, are ever to discover what is truly human about their species, they will have to discover how language is produced and understood, and how it plays a role in reasoning and (...) other forms of rational thought. Within psychology there has been an imperative to study language and rea soning together. Since Wundt, psychologists have succeeded in building a the oretical foundation for both language and reasoning. What has become clear from these beginnings is that the two are inextricably bound to each other. Like the two players ina chess game, take away one of them and the game no longer exists. On the one hand, producing and understanding speech re quires an intricate process of reasoning. Speakers must rationally choose sentences that will affect their listeners in ways they intend, and listen ers must infer what speakers could conceivably have meant in selecting the sentences they did. Reasoning, inference, and rational thought lie at the very center of speaking and listening. On the other hand, logical reasoning begins with, and is influenced by, the language in which a problem is stated. (shrink)

This paper compares the views of Hegel and Schelling regarding the problem of individuation, i.e. the question of what makes an individual (a) numerically distinct from others and (b) the very individual it is. My focus is on how Hegel approaches this problem in his metaphysics and how that relates to Schelling’s views as articulated in his ‘negative philosophy’. While Hegelians like Robert Stern and Karen Ng are optimistic that Hegel can solve the problem of individuation, I argue that Schelling (...) puts forward an objection that both challenges Hegel’s account and provides a rationale for taking seriously Schelling’s own insistence on a pre-logical dimension of being. (shrink)