Ionizing radiation is present in various situations in the contemporary world. Defining the quantities and units for this field is a complex scientific task, especially the quantities used in radiological protection (RP) to estimate the damage caused to individuals exposed to radiation (detriment). This article highlights the lack of consensus in the scientific RP community regarding the quantities and units employed in practice from the perspective of the philosophy of science. The basic concepts related to the system of quantities are (...) presented, followed by the problems and criticisms addressed by experts in the field. Several reasons for these problems are identified. The article discusses the scant interest on the part of philosophy of science in RP. The philosophy of science is still dominated by an analytical–conceptual perspective that pays little attention to the actual influence of certain structures better understood when considered from the institutional viewpoint, which is here exemplified by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). (shrink)

Ionizing radiation is present in various situations in the contemporary world. Defining the quantities and units for this field is a complex scientific task, especially the quantities used in radiological protection (RP) to estimate the damage caused to individuals exposed to radiation (detriment). This article highlights the lack of consensus in the scientific RP community regarding the quantities and units employed in practice from the perspective of the philosophy of science. The basic concepts related to the system of quantities are (...) presented, followed by the problems and criticisms addressed by experts in the field. Several reasons for these problems are identified. The article discusses the scant interest on the part of philosophy of science in RP. The philosophy of science is still dominated by an analytical–conceptual perspective that pays little attention to the actual influence of certain structures better understood when considered from the institutional viewpoint, which is here exemplified by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). (shrink)

O artigo pretende analisar e sugerir uma saída para o paradoxo democrático, o dilema moral constitutivo entre a soberania nacional do Estado democrático liberal e o reconhecimento dos direitos humanos dos estrangeiros, apontado por Donatella Di Cesare. Para isso, serão reconstruídos o referido paradoxo, a partir das críticas da autora a Michael Walzer e David Miller, e a solução apontada por ela, que envolve a superação da ordem estadocêntrica e a criação de uma comunidade política que não seja centrada na (...) identidade nacional. Em seguida, serão sucessivamente analisadas as posições de tais autores, mostrando-se que as críticas feitas por Di Cesare não correspondem aos trabalhos desenvolvidos por eles sobre comunidade política e identidade nacional. Por fim, será sugerido que há congruências entre esses três autores que poderiam ajudar na construção conceitual de um conceito de comunidade política capaz de oferecer uma direção inicial de saída do paradoxo democrático. (shrink)

Soccer players inescapably live under stress during the sportive career, and many real-life aspects of soccer situations operate in the ongoing performance. This study’s main objective was to elaborate the List of Stressors in Professional Indoor and Field Soccer, a self-report instrument designed to measure the impact of 77 soccer situations upon the sport performance. Participants were 138 indoor and field soccer players from the Brazilian Premier League. Each situation was evaluated on a 7-point scale, ranging from the most negative (...) to the most positive. Data were analyzed according to the players’ perception of the items: distress or eustress and its intensity, and after that, situations perceived as plus −1 and +1 were compared by time in which they were experienced and distributed among five categories established by the literature: Expectations about the Performance, Personal Factors, Competition Aspects, Training Demands, and Relationship with Significant People. Narratives of athletes’ experiences were also used to discuss the results. An Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling using Bi-factorial was employed to assess the factor structure. For the total participants, 49 situations were perceived as distress and 28 as eustress. Using the criteria established a priori, the distribution was among the five categories in the remaining 32 situations. Differences in perception between less and more experienced players were found in 11 situations. The results revealed that Brazilian professional soccer players experience various stressful situations. These events are important representations of environmental demands and could predict the performance as they are perceived as eustress or distress. Some of these stressful situations are inherent in sport and others adjacent to the sports system or environment. Coach pressure to win and conflicts with teammates are examples of stressors in-sport, family problems and disputes with press or fans are examples of stressors external to the team, also called peripheral opponents, and showed the relative social influence of significant others in soccer performance. We can conclude that the knowledge of the direction of a given stress situation has important practical implications in preparing athletes and helping them face the performance stressors that are part of soccer daily life. (shrink)

Background Record linkage is a useful tool for health research. Potential benefits aside, its use raises discussions on privacy issues, such as whether a written informed consent for access to health records and linkage should be obtained. The authors aim to systematically review studies that assess consent proportions to record linkage. Methods 8 databases were searched up to June 2011 to find articles which presented consent proportions to record linkage. The screening, eligibility and inclusion of articles were conducted by two (...) independent reviewers. The authors carried out meta-regression, subgroup and sensitivity analyses to assess heterogeneity. Results Of the 141 studies identified, only 11 presented empirical consent proportions and were included in the systematic review. The consent proportion varied widely from 39% to 97%. Seven studies presented consent proportions of 88% or higher, one of 72%, and only three presented consented proportion equal to or lower than 53%. None of the studies' characteristics evaluated explained heterogeneity. Conclusion The results of this review show that, in general, individuals tend to consent to the use of their data for record linkage, with exceptions in specific populations or minorities. The authors believe that this, as well as the cited literature, lends support to policies that, while keeping relevant ethical controls in place, do not require individual informed consent for each and every study that relies on secondary data. (shrink)

Proximity and interpersonal contact are prominent components of social connection. Giving affective touch to others is fundamental for human bonding. This brief report presents preliminary results from a pilot study. It explores if exposure to bonding scenes impacts the activity of specific muscles related to physical interaction. Fingers flexion is a very important component when performing most actions of affectionate contact. We explored the visuo-motor affective interplay by priming participants with bonding scenes and assessing the electromyographic activity of the fingers (...) flexor muscle, in the absence of any overt movements. Photographs of dyads in social interaction and of the same dyads not interacting were employed. We examined the effects upon the electromyographical activity: during the passive exposure to pictures, and during picture offset and when expecting the signal to perform a fingers flexion task. Interacting dyads compared to matched non-interacting dyads increased electromyographic activity of the fingers flexor muscle in both contexts. Specific capture of visual bonding cues at the level of visual cortex had been described in the literature. Here we showed that the neural processing of visual bonding cues reaches the fingers flexor muscle. Besides, previous visualization of bonding cues enhanced background electromyographic activity during motor preparation to perform the fingers flexion task, which might reflect a sustained leakage of central motor activity downstream leading to increase in firing of the respective motor neurons. These data suggest, at the effector level, an implicit visuo-motor connection in which social interaction cues evoke intrinsic dispositions toward affectionate social behavior. (shrink)

A série de textos que ora apresentamos constituem um dossiê que é resultado dos trabalhos do II Colóquio de Ontologia e Metafísica, realizado pelo Departamento de Filosofia da UFU, entre os dias 16 a 19 de novembro de 2011, nas dependências da Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Campus Santa Mônica. O evento foi uma realização do Núcleo de Estudos em Filosofia e Humanidades e contou com o patrocínio da Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais , entre (...) outros. Para este evento foram convidados eminentes pesquisadores de universidades brasileiras que proferiram conferências sobre o tema “Física e Metafísica no pensamento antigo e medieval”. (shrink)

Machery argues that concepts do not constitute a natural kind. We argue that this is a mistake. When appropriately construed, his discussion in fact bolsters the claim that concepts are a natural kind.

We show how to interpret intuitionistic propositional logic into a predicative second-order intuitionistic propositional system having only the conditional and the universal second-order quantifier. We comment on this fact. We argue that it supports the legitimacy of using classical logic in a predicative setting, even though the philosophical cast of predicativism is nonrealistic. We also note that the absence of disjunction and existential quantifications allows one to have a process of normalization of proofs that avoids the use of "commuting conversions.".

In "'Yes" and "No'" (2000), Ian Rumfitt proposed bilateralism--a use-based account of the logical words, according to which the sense of a sentence is determined by the conditions under which it is asserted and denied. One of Rumfitt's key claims is that bilateralism can provide a justification of classical logic. This paper raises a techical problem for Rumfitt's proposal, one that seems to undermine the bilateralist programme.

This paper examines the influence of internal barriers on the relationship between the organizational capability of stakeholder integration and proactive environmental strategies. We adopt a moderate hierarchical regression model to test the hypotheses using data from a sample of 73 managers in the business education industry. The paper contributes to stakeholder theory by showing that stakeholder integration positively influences the development of proactive environmental strategies when managers perceive internal barriers to the development of such strategies. This article also explores an (...) ethical dilemma—managers may use the stakeholder integration capability to support their own interests rather than to benefit stakeholders. (shrink)

We define a notion of realizability, based on a new assignment of formulas, which does not care for precise witnesses of existential statements, but only for bounds for them. The novel form of realizability supports a very general form of the FAN theorem, refutes Markov's principle but meshes well with some classical principles, including the lesser limited principle of omniscience and weak König's lemma. We discuss some applications, as well as some previous results in the literature.

It is well known that Frege's system in the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is formally inconsistent. Frege's instantiation rule for the second-order universal quantifier makes his system, except for minor differences, full (i.e., with unrestricted comprehension) second-order logic, augmented by an abstraction operator that abides to Frege's basic law V. A few years ago, Richard Heck proved the consistency of the fragment of Frege's theory obtained by restricting the comprehension schema to predicative formulae. He further conjectured that the more encompassing Δ₁¹-comprehension (...) schema would already be inconsistent. In the present paper, we show that this is not the case. (shrink)

The understanding of a wide array of practices related to fraud, bribery, corruption, and more widely, illicit practices have been capturing the attention of practitioners and management researchers worldwide. A substantial portion of the extant research has used university students to measure their actual or intended cheating behaviours and often studies have tested for variations across countries and cultures. We highlight some major concerns in this stream of inquiry and discuss both the definition and some inconclusive results in prior studies, (...) namely those deriving from differences in cheating behaviour across different cultural contexts. We suggest the need to examine intentionality, and further advance that intentionality may assume a reactive or a proactive essence. Depending on the social and formal contexts of different countries, both reactive and proactive intentions lead to distinct moral concerns, which we name in this work omorality (meaning ‘our morality’) or immorality (in the traditional sense). (shrink)

Using the format of the assignment itself, we describe an assignment we have been using for the past seven years: Change Making Letter. Students are asked to pick an issue which directly affects them, identify a specific problem, think of a possible solution, as well as anticipate objections and respond to them. This letter should be about something the student genuinely cares about and has personal experience with, not a big national or international issue. While arguing for the importance of (...) the change making letter, we describe the advantages of this assignment, how the assignment is structured, and how faculty can modify it to meet a variety of classes and pedagogical goals. (shrink)

In biology and philosophy of biology, discussing the notion of interaction leads to an examination of interactionism, which is, broadly speaking, the view that rejects gene-centrism and gene determinism and instead emphasizes the fact that traits of organisms are always the result of genes and environments. It has long been asserted that the nature-nurture problem requires an interactionist solution of sorts, the so-called interactionist consensus. This consensus, however, has been deemed insufficient and challenged by several authors triggering an extension of (...) the debate among contestants and defenders. Unfortunately, part of the problem is that the views on causation that would ground claims about interactionism are not always made explicit in this debate, which renders those views somewhat complicated to assess. Moreover, it seems to be assumed that causal complexity excludes the possibility of characterizing, distinguishing, or comparing among causal contributions. By turning to a detailed survey of the origin of the debate and to some developments in the philosophy of causation, we will contend that this view is unwarranted, and that much of the debate around interactionism is based on the drawing of this conclusion. We also examine implications of this analysis for the project to develop a framework based on the notion of inter-identities. (shrink)

In this issue ofJME, Watsonet alcall for research evaluation of government health programmes and identify ethical guidance, including the Ottawa Statement on the ethical design and conduct of cluster randomised trials, as a hindrance. While cluster randomised trials of health programmes as a whole should be evaluated by research ethics committees (RECs), Watsonet alargue that the health programme per se is not within the researcher’s control or responsibility and, thus, is out of scope for ethics review. We argue that this (...) view is wrong. The scope of research ethics review is not defined by researcher control or responsibility, but rather by the protection of research participants. And the randomised evaluation of health programmes impacts the liberty and welfare interests of participants insofar as they may be exposed to a harmful programme or denied access to a beneficial one. Further, Watsonet al’s claim that ‘study programmes … would occur whether or not there were any … research activities’ is incorrect in the case of cluster randomised designs. In a cluster randomised trial, the government does not implement a programme as usual. Rather, researchers collaborate with the government to randomise clusters to intervention or control conditions in order to rigorously evaluate the programme. As a result, equipoise issues are triggered that must be addressed by the REC. (shrink)

The mental model theory claims that the ability to falsify is at the core of human rationality. We assume that cognitive conflicts (CCs) and socio-cognitive conflicts (SCCs) induce falsification, and thus improve syllogistic reasoning performance. Our first study assesses adults’ ability to reason in two different conditions in a single experimental session. In both conditions the participants are presented with conclusions alternative to their own. In the CC condition they are told that these conclusions are casual, in the SCC condition (...) they are told they have been produced by another individual. The second study is analogous to the first, with the exception that the participants deal with the two conditions in two different experimental sessions. The overall results reveal that falsification is enhanced by conflicts experienced at the cognitive level. The results also reveal that learning to reason occurs in adults, when tested in two distinct experimental periods. (shrink)

The practice of research is full of ethical challenges, many of which might be addressed through the teaching of responsible conduct of research . Although such training is increasingly required, there is no clear consensus about either the goals or content of an RCR curriculum. The present study was designed to assess community standards in three domains of research practice: authorship, collaboration, and data management. A survey, developed through advice from content matter experts, focus groups, and interviews, was distributed in (...) November 2010 to U.S. faculty from 50 graduate programs for each of four different disciplines: microbiology, neuroscience, nursing, and psychology. The survey addressed practices and perceived standards, as well as perceptions about teaching and learning. Over 1,300 responses yielded statistically significant differences in responses to nearly all questions. However the magnitude of these differences was typically small, leaving little reason to argue for community consensus on standards. For nearly all questions asked, the clear finding was that there was nothing approaching consensus. These results may be useful not so much to teach what the standards are, but to increase student awareness of the diversity of those standards in reported practice. (shrink)

Food choices are a key determinant of dietary intake, with brain regions, such as the mesolimbic and prefrontal cortex maturing at differential rates into adulthood. More needs to be understood about developmental changes in healthy and unhealthy food perceptions and preference. We investigated how food perceptions and preference vary as a function of age and how food attributes impact age-related changes. One hundred thirty-nine participants completed computerized tasks to rate high-calorie and low-calorie food cues for taste, health, and liking, followed (...) by 100 binary food choices based on each participant’s ratings. Dietary self-control was considered successful when the healthier food was chosen. Self-control success ratio was the proportion of success trials over total number of choices. Beta-weights for health and taste were calculated as each attribute’s influence on food preference. Adiposity measurements included BMI z-score and waist-to-height ratio. High-calorie foods were rated more tasty and less healthy with increasing age. Older participants liked high-calorie foods more, and β-taste was associated with age. Significant age-by-WHtR interactions were observed for health and taste ratings of high-calorie foods, β-taste, and marginally for preference of high-calorie foods. Stratifying by WHtR, we found age-related increases in taste and preference ratings of high-calorie foods in the high WHtR group alone. In contrast, age-related decreases in health ratings of high-calorie foods were significant in the low WHtR group alone. Age and β-taste were significantly associated in the high WHtR group and only marginally significant with low WHtR. Although participants rated low-calorie foods as less tasty and less healthy with increasing age, there was no association between age and preference for low-calorie foods. Participants made faster food choices with increasing age regardless of WHtR, with a significant age-by-WHtR interaction on reaction time. There were no age-related effects in self-control success ratio and β-health. These results suggest that individual differences in age and central adiposity play an important role in preference for high-calorie foods, and a higher importance of food tastiness in food choice may contribute to greater preference for high-calorie foods with increasing age. (shrink)

Edward Nelson published in 1986 a book defending an extreme formalist view of mathematics according to which there is an impassable barrier in the totality of exponentiation. On the positive side, Nelson embarks on a program of investigating how much mathematics can be interpreted in Raphael Robinson's theory of arithmetic Q. In the shadow of this program, some very nice logical investigations and results were produced by a number of people, not only regarding what can be interpreted in Q but (...) also what cannot be so interpreted. We explain some of these results and rely on them to discuss Nelson's position. (shrink)

Freud held complex and fascinating views on the question of mental causation. In this chapter, I propose an interpretation of Freud's views on this question, bringing together ideas from psychoanalysis, philosophy of psychoanalysis, and philosophy of mind. Faced with the impasse of the problem of how the mind interacts with the body, Freud created a two-dimensional picture of mental causation, with one dimension involving mechanistic causes and the other involving intentional causes. My thesis is that Freud's best-developed picture of mental (...) causation thesis describes mental causes as intentional causes using psychological vocabulary. I analyze three moments in Freud's work with a focus on mental causation. In the first topography, Freud uses a hybrid vocabulary, describing the mind in terms of both mechanistic causes and intentional causes. In his second topography, the mind increasingly assumes an intentional description. The third moment is Freud’s theory of anxiety, in which the arational cause of the unconscious drives, initially presented as a motor of the mind, gives rise to anxiety as an affective state that forces the self to find a solution for its mental conflicts. In the last part, I argue that Freud’s theory gradually moves from a reductionist approach to the mind-body problem on which mental causation is understood in terms of physical mechanisms, to a non-reductionist view where the mental becomes causally efficacious in its own right. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar a instabilidade dupla da tolerância liberal, uma ligada à necessária provisoriedade de sua adequação e outra derivada da insuficiência da sua justificação, a fim de defender a desejabilidade da primeira e propor uma superação da segunda. Para isto, será apresentada uma noção da tolerância como ideal moral, diferenciando-a das noções fronteiriças indiferença, aceitação e intolerância. Em seguida, será mostrado como a tolerância deixa de ser a resposta adequada a certos casos, em que se mostrará (...) mais apropriado adotar uma daquelas três possibilidades. Por último, nos casos em que a resposta liberal apropriada continuar sendo a tolerância, será sugerida a necessidade de justificá-la através de um cesto de justificações, epistemológicas, prudenciais e morais, que fracassam isoladas, mas podem funcionar reunidas. (shrink)

O Estado Novo, apesar de ser uma ditadura, consagrou, na Constituição, a realização de eleições presidenciais, legislativas e para as Juntas de Freguesia, uma vez que só o voto popular podia fornecer a legitimação interna e externa de que necessitava. Todavia, os resultados eleitorais sempre foram controlados de modo a garantir a vitória do candidato ou da lista da União Nacional e todas as eleições foram fraudulentas. As eleições presidenciais de 1949 e 1958 foram dois desses momentos importantes para Portugal, (...) em que o povo teria podido votar e decidir o futuro do país mas em que a opressão, a censura, a violência e a fraude marcaram a campanha eleitoral e determinaram a votação, garantindo a vitória dos candidatos da Situação e a derrota dos da Oposição, apesar destes terem, inequivocamente, o apoio da maioria da população. Notwithstanding the fact that it was a dictatorship, the Estado Novo consecrated in the Constitution the realisation of presidential and legislative elections and also elections to the Juntas de Freguesia , given that only the popular vote could provide it with the internal and external legitimisation it needed. However, the electoral results were always controlled in order to guarantee the victory of União Nacional's candidate or list and all the elections were fraudulent. The presidential elections of 1949 and 1958 were two of these important moments to Portugal, in which the people could have voted and decided the country's future, but instead oppression, censorship, violence and fraud marked the electoral campaign and determined the voting, guaranteeing the victory of the Situation candidates and the defeat of the Opposition ones, despite the fact that the latter had, unequivocally, the support of the majority of the population. (shrink)

The inclusive churches arise from the need of a minority and excluded group of conventional churches to practice their religiosity in a free and accepted sexual way. Then, we need to ask what the models of institutional structuration in these inclusive churches are, and also the extent to which the ecclesiastical structures can propitiate the ‘mission’ of ‘welcome’ gays, lesbians, transvestite and transsexuals. The research was proposed from bibliographical sources, visiting the cults of Comunidade Cristã Nova Esperança, and the interviews (...) with church leaders and members of this Church. The organizational structure of CCNE is quite similar of the traditional church hindering the welcoming of the church members. (shrink)