Redundant publication in biomedical sciences is the presentation of the same information or data set more than once. Forms of redundant publication include “salami slicing”, in which similar text accompanies data presented in disaggregated fashion in different publications and “duplicate or multiple publication” in which identical information is presented with a virtually identical text. Estimates of prevalence of the phenomenon put it at 10 to 25% of published literature. Redundant publication can be considered (...) unethical, or fraudulent, when the author(s) attempt to conceal the existence of duplicate publication from editors and readers. Redundant publication in the area of clinical trials is potentially dangerous as it tends to overestimate the effects of interventions. The scientific community at large and governments should take urgent steps to safeguard the public from the possible effects of fraudulent multiple publications. (shrink)

Objectives: To examine the perspectives of journal editors and authors on overlapping and redundant publications in clinical research.Design: Pretested cross-sectional survey, containing both forced choice and open ended questions, administered by mail to the senior editors and one randomly selected author from all journals in the Abridged Index Medicus that published clinical research.Main measurements: The views of editors and authors about the extent of redundant publications, why they occur, how to prevent and respond to cases, and when the (...) publication of overlapping manuscripts is justified.Results: Seventy two per cent of editors and 65% of authors completed the survey. There was consensus between both groups that redundant publications occur because authors feel the pressure to publish and journals do not do enough to publicise, criticise, and punish cases, and that the publication of most types of overlapping articles is unacceptable. Sixty seven per cent of authors but only 31% of editors felt, however, that it was justified to publish an overlapping article in a non-peer reviewed symposium supplement, and 68% of editors but 39% of authors supported imposing restrictions on guilty authors’ future submissions. In written comments, 15% to 30% of both groups emphasised that it was justified to publish overlapping articles when there were different or non-English-speaking audiences, new data, strengthened methods, or disputed findings.Conclusions: Editors, authors, and other academic leaders should together develop explicit guidelines that clarify points of contention and ambiguity regarding overlapping manuscripts. (shrink)

Please note that a commentary recently published in this journal (Heng; Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2007, 2:3) includes substantial duplication of Letters to the Editor published in Developing World Bioethics (Heng; Developing World Bioethics 2007, 7:49) and Human Fertility (Heng; Human Fertility 2007, 10: 129-130).

We discuss prior publication and redundancy in contemporary science in the context of changing perceptions of originality in the communication of research results. These perceptions have been changing in the publication realm, particularly in the last 15 years. Presenting a brief overview of the literature, we address some of the conflicts that are likely to arise between authors and editors. We illustrate our approach with conference presentations that are later published as journal articles and focus on a recent (...) retraction of an article that had been previously published as a conference proceedings. Although we do not make definitive pronouncements on the matter—as many concepts are evolving—we do argue that conference papers that contain sufficient details for others to attempt a replication and are indexed in scientific databases such as PubMed, challenge some currently held assumptions of prior publication and originality in the sciences. Our view is that these important issues are in need of further clarification and harmonization within the science publishing community. This need is more evident when we consider current notions of research integrity when it comes to communication to peers. Revisiting long-standing views about what constitutes prior publication and developing a clearer set of guidelines for authors and editors to follow should reduce conflicts in the research environment, which already exerts considerable pressure, especially on newcomers in academia. However, while clearer guidelines are timely, developing them is only part of the challenge. The present times seem to call for deeper changes in the research and publication systems. (shrink)

The similarity of documents in a large database of published Fractals articles was examined for redundancy. Three different text matching techniques were used on publisheds to identify redundancy candidates, and predictions were verified by reading full text versions of the redundancy candidate articles. A small fraction of the total articles in the database was judged to be redundant. This was viewed as a lower limit, because it excluded cases where the concepts remained the same, but the text was altered (...) substantially.Far more pervasive than redundant publications were publications that did not violate the letter of redundancy but rather violated the spirit of redundancy. There appeared to be widespread publication maximization strategies. Studies that resulted in one comprehensive paper decades ago now result in multiple papers that focus on one major problem, but are differentiated by parameter ranges, or other stratifying variables. This ‘paper inflation’ is due in large part to the increasing use of metrics (publications, patents, citations, etc) to evaluate research performance, and the researchers’ motivation to maximize the metrics. (shrink)

Publication ethics is an important aspect of both the research and publication enterprises. It is particularly important in the field of biomedical science because published data may directly affect human health. In this article, we examine publication ethics policies in biomedical journals published in Central and Eastern Europe. We were interested in possible differences between East European countries that are members of the European Union (Eastern EU) and South-East European countries (South-East Europe) that are not members of (...) the European Union.The most common ethical issues addressed by all journals in the region were redundant publication, peer review process, and copyright or licensing details. Image manipulation, editors’ conflicts of interest and registration of clinical trialswere the least common ethical policies. Three aspects were significantly morecommon in journals published outside the EU: statements on the endorsement of international editorial standards, contributorship policy, and image manipulation.On the other hand, copyright or licensing information were more prevalent in journals published in the Eastern EU. The existence of significant differences amongbiomedical journals’ ethical policies calls for further research and active measuresto harmonize policies across journals. On the other hand, copyright or licensing information were more prevalent in journals published in the Eastern EU. The existence of significant differences among biomedical journals’ ethical policies calls for further research and active measures to harmonize policies across journals. (shrink)

The similarity of documents in a large database of published Fractals articles was examined for redundancy. Three different text matching techniques were used on published Abstracts to identify redundancy candidates, and predictions were verified by reading full text versions of the redundancy candidate articles. A small fraction of the total articles in the database was judged to be redundant. This was viewed as a lower limit, because it excluded cases where the concepts remained the same, but the text was (...) altered substantially.Far more pervasive than redundant publications were publications that did not violate the letter of redundancy but rather violated the spirit of redundancy. There appeared to be widespread publication maximization strategies. Studies that resulted in one comprehensive paper decades ago now result in multiple papers that focus on one major problem, but are differentiated by parameter ranges, or other stratifying variables. This ‘paper inflation’ is due in large part to the increasing use of metrics (publications, patents, citations, etc) to evaluate research performance, and the researchers’ motivation to maximize the metrics. (shrink)

The similarity of documents in a large database of published Fractals articles was examined for redundancy. Three different text matching techniques were used on published Abstracts to identify redundancy candidates, and predictions were verified by reading full text versions of the redundancy candidate articles. A small fraction of the total articles in the database was judged to be redundant. This was viewed as a lower limit, because it excluded cases where the concepts remained the same, but the text was (...) altered substantially. Far more pervasive than redundant publications were publications that did not violate the letter of redundancy but rather violated the spirit of redundancy. There appeared to be widespread publication maximization strategies. Studies that resulted in one comprehensive paper decades ago now result in multiple papers that focus on one major problem, but are differentiated by parameter ranges, or other stratifying variables. This ‘paper inflation’ is due in large part to the increasing use of metrics (publications, patents, citations, etc) to evaluate research performance, and the researchers’ motivation to maximize the metrics. (shrink)

Queen Mary, University of London, School of Law, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK. Tel: +442078825126, Fax: +442089818733, Email: r.ashcroft{at}qmul.ac.uk ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Recent doctrine in both national and international organisations concerned with public health planning and resource allocation has it that direct ethical justification of substantive decisions is so difficult as to be impossible. Instead, we should agree on criteria of procedural justice and reach decisions whose justification lies in how (...) they are arrived at, rather than any direct ethical justification on the ground of substantive moral principles. In this polemical article, I argue that this amounts to a serious dereliction of intellectual duty on the part of the bioethics community. Our role in these settings is to produce and defend the best substantive arguments we can. Failing to do this makes bioethicists at best redundant and at worst leads us to seriously defective conclusions. The argument is illustrated by analysis of the ethical frameworks for resource allocation under the UNAIDS ‘3 by 5’ programme and for pandemic influenza planning. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

More recent advancements in digital technologies have significantly alleviated the dissemination of new scientific ideas as well as the storing, searching and retrieval of large amounts of published research findings. While not denying the benefits of this novel ‘economy of memory,’ this paper endeavors to shed light on the ways in which the use of digital technologies may be linked to a distortion of the system of formal publications that facilitates the effective dissemination and collaborative building of scientific knowledge. Through (...) combining three different strands of discussion that are often left separate – those pertaining to the cognitive effects of new technological memory systems, those pertaining to citation and publishing practices, and those regarding the effects of formalizing modes of research governance – it is also shown that this distortion is not merely a consequence of technological developments alone. Rather, such a distortion is inseparable from and potentially aggravated by the spreading of increasingly dysfunctional, formalizing research governance mechanisms. It is argued that these mechanisms run the risk of fostering the proliferation of knowledge practices that are characterized by an increasing degree of superficiality as well as the strategic publication of research that is of a decreasing degree of originality. If left unaddressed, this may pose a serious threat to the efficiency and effectiveness of the formal record of scientific knowledge as a tool for the dissemination of original research. By extension, this may in the long run seriously undermine the capacity of the publicly funded research system more generally. (shrink)

Background: Breaches of publication ethics such as plagiarism, data fabrication and redundant publication are recognised as forms of research misconduct that can undermine the scientific literature. We surveyed journal editors to determine their views about a range of publication ethics issues. Methods: Questionnaire sent to 524 editors-in-chief of Wiley-Blackwell science journals asking about the severity and frequency of 16 ethical issues at their journals, their confidence in handling such issues, and their awareness and use of guidelines. (...) Results: Responses were obtained from 231 editors (44%), of whom 48% edited healthcare journals. The general level of concern about the 16 issues was low, with mean severity scores of <1 (on a scale of 0–3) for all but one. The issue of greatest concern (mean score 1.19) was redundant publication. Most editors felt confident in handling the issues, with <15% feeling “not at all confident” for all but one of the issues (gift authorship, 22% not confident). Most editors believed such problems occurred less than once a year and >20% of the editors stated that 12 of the 16 items never occurred at their journal. However, 13%–47% did not know the frequency of the problems. Awareness and use of guidelines was generally low. Most editors were unaware of all except other journals’ instructions. Conclusions: Most editors of science journals seem not very concerned about publication ethics and believe that misconduct occurs only rarely in their journals. Many editors are unfamiliar with available guidelines but would welcome more guidance or training. (shrink)

One curious phenomenon of several social groups is that they are ‘redundant’ in the sense that they contain more cooperators than strictly needed to complete certain group tasks, such as foraging. Redundancy is puzzling because redundant groups are particularly susceptible to invasion by defectors. Yet, redundancy can be found in groups formed by a wide range of organisms, including insects and microbes. Birch has recently argued that coercive behaviours might account for redundancy using insect colonies as a case (...) study. However, microbial examples suggest redundancy can evolve without coercive behaviours. This paper formulates an explanation for redundancy that does not require targeted punishment of defectors; instead, it proposes that redundancy might be due to ignorance. Specifically, it is suggested that redundancy evolves as a by-product of selection when group members have to opt whether to cooperate or not while being blind to the strategies of others. Accordingly, possessing information about the strategies of the group members might undermine rather than facilitate cooperation within groups. 1The Evolution of Redundancy 2Explaining Redundancy via Coercion 3Explaining Redundancy via Ignorance 3.1Cooperation behind the Darwinian veil of ignorance 3.2Modelling group tasks with a public goods game 3.3Group tasks under harsh environments 4Conclusion. (shrink)

The influential public health ethics framework proposed by Childress et al. includes five “justificatory conditions,” two of which are “necessity” and “least infringement.” While the framework points to important moral values, we argue it is redundant for it to list both necessity and least infringement because they are logically equivalent. However, it is ambiguous whether Childress et al. would endorse this view, or hold the two conditions distinct. This ambiguity has resulted in confusion in public health ethics discussions citing (...) the Childress et al. framework, as demonstrated by debate between Resnik and Wilson and Dawson. We analyse this debate to resolve these ambiguities. Finally, we argue that the necessity/least infringement principle of the Childress et al. framework applies only in cases in which only one intervention is to be implemented to achieve one specific goal. In other cases, it is not essential to require that only the least infringing intervention be implemented. (shrink)

How are we to grasp the genealogy of the “public intellectual”? When, how, and at whose hands did this term first come into use, framing an ideal of democratic responsibility for those who devote their work life to fostering knowledge and criticism—an image usually raised as a reproach to academic insularity though also sometimes assailed for encouraging an evasion of scholarly rigor? At first blush, the phrase seems redundant: the emergence of “intellectual”simpliciteris usually linked to a particular episode—the Dreyfusards’ (...) defense of the French republic—that already implied a commitment by writers, thinkers, and artists to political or civic action. From that time and place, the term traveled quickly across borders and before long to the United States, occasioning controversies from the start over who represented the “intellectual” as a social type and who did not, what activities or purposes best defined the role, and whether that role deserved respect, derision, or reinvention. To be sure, the social, cultural, and political world of “modern” societies has always featured individuals noted for scholarly, creative, speculative, or critical work that resonates with literate audiences attuned to key issues of the moment—whether such people were known as ministers,philosophes, journalists, poets, men or women of letters, Transcendentalists, or even, in some eighteenth-and nineteenth-century usages, natural philosophers or scientists. Nonetheless, the emergence of the noun “intellectual” from the early twentieth century, and its widening use since the 1920s, spawned a persistent and self-conscious discourse concerning the character, value or virtue of such figures. A skeptic might conclude that the addition of the modifier “public” has perpetuated old, tangled debates about intellectuals as such, without bringing with it much greater clarity. Words nonetheless are signs of historical troubles and social discontents. Excavating the usages of “public intellectual” over time can highlight some of the dilemmas that have confronted writers, critics, citizens, and political actors, past and present. (shrink)

Various due process provisions designed for use by civil servants in administrative decision-making may become redundant when automated decision-making is taken into use in public administration. Problems with mechanisms of good government, responsibility and liability for automated decisions and the rule of law require attention of the law-maker in adapting legal provisions to this new form of decision-making. Although the general data protection regulation of the European Union is important in acknowledging automated decision-making, most of the legal safeguards within (...) administrative due process have to be provided for by the national law-maker. It is suggested that all countries have a need to review their rules of administrative due process with a view to bringing them up to date regarding the requirements of automated decision-making. In whichever way the legislation is framed, the key issues are that persons who develop the algorithm and the code as well as persons who run or deal with the software within public authorities are aware of the preventive safeguards of legality in the context of automated decision-making, not only of the reactive safeguards constituted by the complaint procedures, and that legal mechanisms exist under which these persons can be held accountable and liable for decisions produced by automated decision-making. It is also argued that only rule-based systems of automatized decision-making are compatible with the rule of law and that there is a general interest in preventing a development into a rule of algorithm. (shrink)

Resumen: La imprecisión lingüística es una de las razones principales por las que es necesario interpretar las disposiciones legales, junto a la percepción de incongruencia entre su significado y la razón práctica que las explica o justifica. Son causas de imprecisión del lenguaje legislativo la vaguedad, la ambigüedad semántica, la ambigüedad pragmática y algunas otras, como la redundancia, la repetición, la infraespecificación, la inconsistencia y las anomalías. Todas ellas están presentes en el artículo 18 de la Ley 40/2015, de 1 (...) de octubre, de Régimen Jurídico del Sector Público. El trabajo analiza la imprecisión lingüística de las leyes con una clasificación de problemas sistemática y tomando este artículo como caso de estudio. Abstract: Linguistic imprecision is one of the main reasons why interpreting statutes is necessary, besides the perception of incongruence between their meaning and the practical reason that explains or justifies them. Causes or imprecision of statutory language are vagueness, semantic ambiguity, pragmatic ambiguity and some others, such as redundancy, repetition, infraspecification, inconsistence and anomalies. All of them are present in section 18 of the Spanish Law 40/2015, of 1 October, of Legal Regime of the Public Sector [Ley de Régimen Jurídico del Sector Público]. The paper analyses the linguistic imprecision of statutes with a systematic and comprehensive classification of problems, and taking that section 18 as a study case. (shrink)

Background Journal editors are responsible for what they publish and therefore have a duty to correct the record if published work is found to be unreliable. One method for such correction is retraction of an article. Anecdotal evidence suggested a lack of consistency in journal policies and practices regarding retraction. In order to develop guidelines, we reviewed retractions in Medline to discover how and why articles were retracted. Methods We retrieved all available Medline retractions from 2005 to 2008 and a (...) one-in-three random selection of those from 1988 to 2004. This yielded 312 retractions (from a total of 870). Details of the retraction including the reason for retraction were recorded by two investigators. Results Medline retractions have increased sharply since 1980 and currently represent 0.02% of included articles. Retractions were issued by authors (63%), editors (21%), journals (6%), publishers (2%) and institutions (1%). Reasons for retraction included honest error or non-replicable findings (40%), research misconduct (28%), redundant publication (17%) and unstated/unclear (5%). Some of the stated reasons might have been addressed by corrections. Conclusions Journals' retraction practices are not uniform. Some retractions fail to state the reason, and therefore fail to distinguish error from misconduct. We have used our findings to inform guidelines on retractions. (shrink)

There was a time in the history of philosophy that the phrase “public philosophy” would have been redundant. In this chapter, the authors survey the debate about the professionalization and institutionalization of philosophy between Scott Soames and Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle. They present an exploration of an example of how professional and non‐professional philosophers may benefit each other. The authors argue that nonprofessional philosophers (whom we might also call “outsider philosophers”) can offer new ways of looking at the (...) canon and broaden the subject matter of philosophy. They present a look forward to the future of interactions between professionalized and outsider philosophers. In an effort to make possible a future where such collaboration is normalized within the broader activity of philosophizing, the authors elucidate both the opportunities and challenges for collaboration. (shrink)

Andrew Steane reconfigures the public understanding of science, by drawing on a deep knowledge of physics and by bringing in mainstream philosophy of science. Science is a beautiful, multi-lingual network of ideas; it is not a ladder in which ideas at one level make those at another level redundant. In view of this, we can judge that the natural world is not so much a machine as a meeting-place. In particular, people can only be correctly understood by meeting with (...) them at the level of their entire personhood, in a reciprocal, respectful engagement as one person to another. Steane shows that Darwinian evolution does not overturn this but rather is the process whereby such truths came to be discovered and expressed in the world. From here the argument moves towards other aspects of human life. Our sense of value requires from us a response which is not altogether the same as following logical argument. This points us towards what religion in its good forms can express. A reply to a major argument of David Hume, and a related one of Richard Dawkins, is given. The book finishes with some brief chapters setting religion in the context of all human capacities, and showing, in fresh language, what theistic religious response is, or can be, in the modern world. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze the theory of legitimacy at the core of John Rawls’ political liberalism. Rawls argues that a political system is well grounded when it is stable. This notion of stability embodies both pragmatic and moral elements, each of which constitutes a key desideratum of Rawlsian liberal legitimacy. But those desiderata are in tension with each other. My main claim is that Rawls’ strategy to overcome that tension through his theory of public justification is ultimately unsuccessful, because (...) the account of consensus it envisages is unstably placed between the extremes of moralized redundancy and pragmatic free-for-all. In other words, what counts as consensus is either regulated too tightly, or not enough. -/- . (shrink)

Personhood is not a redundant category, but a social cluster kind. On this view, chimpanzees have their own kind of personhood profile. Seeing that chimpanzees have a personhood profile allows us to argue that chimpanzees like Tommy are individuals who deserve rights under the law. If chimpanzee personhood is a matter of public policy that needs to be decided by society, then learning more about the person profiles of chimpanzees will be essential in making this case. As the public (...) learns what scientists have come to see, and with public conversations about what counts as a person, our society can make another ethical transformation that will be recognized by the courts. But without the metaphysical personhood concept to rely on, we will have a difficult time showing that chimpanzees should count as persons under the law. (shrink)

Social transmission is at the core of cultural evolutionary theory. It occurs when a demonstrator uses mental representations to produce some public displays which in turn allow a learner to acquire similar mental representations. Although cultural evolutionists do not dispute this view of social transmission, they typically abstract away from the multistep nature of the process when they speak of cultural variants at large, thereby referring both to variation and evolutionary change in mental representations as well as in their corresponding (...) public displays. This conflation suggests that differentiating each step of the transmission process is redundant. In this paper, I examine different forms of interplay between the multistep nature of social transmission and the metric spaces used by cultural evolutionists to measure cultural variation and to model cultural change. I offer a conceptual analysis of what assumptions seem to be at work when cultural evolutionists conflate the complex causal sequence of social transmission as a single space of variation in which populations evolve. To this aim, I use the framework of variation spaces, a formal framework commonly used in evolutionary biology, and I develop two theoretical concepts, ‘technique’ and ‘technical space’, for addressing cases where the complexity of social transmission defies the handy assumption of a single variation space for cultural change. (shrink)

In his well?known paper from 1954, Herbert A. Simon sets out to demonstrate that it is possible, in principle, to make public predictions within the social sciences that will be confirmed by the events. However, Simon's proof by means of the Brouwer fixed?point theorem not only rests on an illegitimate use of continuous variables, it is also founded on the questionable assumption that facts ? even on the level of possibilities ? can be established by purely mathematical means. The ?proof? (...) also appears redundant since we already know from past experience that, for instance, the confirmation of a public election prediction is possible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 171-174 [Access article in PDF] Bioethics Inside the Beltway The Oversight of Human Gene Transfer Research LeRoy Walters Jesse Gelsinger's death last September in a gene transfer study being conducted at the University of Pennsylvania has helped to spark a national debate. In part, this debate parallels the broader discussion of how human subjects research should be reviewed and regulated in the (...) United States. However, human gene transfer research is one of a handful of biomedical technologies that seem to deserve special attention, at least in the early years of their development.The major participants in the national debate on human gene transfer include the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, members of Congress, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, disease-oriented advocacy groups, reporters, and academics. At the December 1999 meeting of the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC), the protocol that involved Jesse Gelsinger was a central focus of discussion, but other topics emerged as well. One ad hoc panel reviewed adverse events that had occurred in other research protocols using adenovirus vectors, while a second proposed changes in the general system for reporting adverse events to NIH and the RAC.During the first several months of the year 2000, the United States Congress also became involved in the human gene transfer debate. In February, Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) convened a hearing to which Jesse Gelsinger's father, representatives of NIH and FDA, and several other witnesses were invited. At approximately the same time, the House Commerce Committee and its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations initiated their own inquiries, asking the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services to review the oversight roles of NIH and FDA. In March and April, the House committee also wrote directly to the NIH Director, the FDA Commissioner, and the President of the University of Pennsylvania, requesting extensive documentation on gene transfer, in general, and the trial in which Jesse Gelsinger was involved, in particular. Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) have also raised questions and proposed solutions in multiple letters to the NIH Director and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. [End Page 171]The major general questions that have emerged from this discussion are the following:(1) What kinds of information about adverse events should be reported by researchers or sponsors during the course of human gene transfer trials?(2) To what group or groups should adverse-event information be reported? How often and in what ways should the information be analyzed?(3) Should the information about adverse events remain confidential, or should it be discussed publicly?(4) How can the disclosure and consent process in gene transfer trials be improved?(5) Which federal agency should have primary responsibility for overseeing human gene transfer research, and how can it best fulfill its oversight role?How these questions are answered will have immediate relevance to the field of human gene transfer research as it enters into its next phase. At the same time, the models that are created for this important cutting-edge field also may be useful in other complex or controversial arenas of biomedical research, for example, xenotransplantation or human embryonic stem-cell research. In addition, the lessons learned from this one important area of human subjects research may suggest ways to improve protections for all the volunteers who make clinical research--and medical progress--possible.In the remainder of this article, I will turn from reporting, in as objective a way as possible, on the status of the public policy debate about human gene transfer research to suggesting measures for improving the current oversight system for such research. My initial general recommendation is that we should not expect a single regulatory agency to be solely responsible for a field as large and dynamic as human gene transfer research. Rather, there should be some helpful redundancy or, to change the metaphor, checks and balances in the public oversight of this field. Thus, an... (shrink)

This scoping review maps research ethics and integrity challenges and best practices encountered by research actors in the DACH countries (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), including researchers, funders, publishers, research ethics committees, and policymakers, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic brought research and, in turn, research ethics and integrity, into public focus. This review identified challenges related to changing research environments, diversity in research, publication and dissemination trends, scientific literacy and trust in science, recruitment, research redundancy and study termination, (...) placebo and human challenge studies, data management, and informed consent. These challenges are linked to two crucial factors: first, actors in the DACH research ecosystem lacked a sound knowledge base to assess the risks and benefits of research during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, researchers in the DACH region faced pressure from policymakers, funders, and the public to generate relevant, timely, and consistent findings to mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, this review highlights best practices to mitigate the effects of future crises on research ethics and integrity, including enhanced cooperation among actors, continuous ethics assessments, and support for public scientific literacy. (shrink)

This paper is primarily about the personal and public responsibilities of ethics and of ethicists in speaking, writing and commenting publicly about issues of ethical, political and social significance. The paper argues that any such interventions are ‘willy-nilly’, actually or potentially, in the public domain in ways that make any self-conscious decision about intended publics or audiences problematic. In it is argued that a famous, and hitherto useful, distinction relating to the ethical limitations on freedom of speech which we owe (...) to John Stuart Mill may, because of the emergence of ‘the cloud’ have become redundant or inoperable. (shrink)

I have shown (to my satisfaction) that Leibniz's final attempt at a generalized syllogistico-propositional calculus in the Generales Inquisitiones was pretty successful. The calculus includes the truth-table semantics for the propositional calculus. It contains an unorthodox view of conjunction. It offers a plethora of very important logical principles. These deserve to be called a set of fundamentals of logical form. Aside from some imprecisions and redundancies the system is a good systematization of propositional logic, its semantics, and a correct account (...) of general syllogistics. For 1686 it was quite an accomplishment. It is a pity that Leibniz himself did not fully appreciate what he had achieved. It does seem to me that this was due in part, as the Kneales urge (Note 4), to his having kept the focus of his attention on traditional syllogistics. It is a great pity that he did not polish GI 195–200 for publication. The publication of GI 195, 198, and 200 would have most likely promoted further research. MAJR- Humanities, Social Sciences and Law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Conflicts—and Consensus—about Conflicts of Interest in MedicineMatthew K. Wynia and Bette–Jane Crigger*This fascinating collection of essays about individual experiences of conflict of interest leaves little doubt that physicians remain divided about the importance, impact and meaning of conflicts of interest in their work. These essays offer differing views about what conflicts of interest look and feel like “on the ground” and about whether specific conflicts of interest are bad, (...) just a fact of life, or maybe even good.Conflict, Conflict EverywhereThese essays situate conflict of interest in a variety of contexts: the treatment recommendations a physician makes for an individual patient; the relationship between teaching physician and medical student or practicing physician and health care organization; the interaction between academic researchers and industry collaborators or professional bodies and industry supporters. In this, the narratives taken together reflect the scope of concern about conflict of interest in medicine familiar in the literature. In his classic 1993 essay, Dennis Thompson noted that concerns about conflict of interest encompass issues of physician self–referral, risk sharing between physicians and health care institutions, gifts from industry, hospital purchasing practices, as well as sponsored research and research with patients (Thompson 1993). To that list have subsequently been added relationships with industry in medical education at all levels, physicians’ service as consultants to industry or members of industry speakers bureau, and development of clinical practice guidelines (Lo & Fields 2009).That almost none of these essays draw attention to some widely publicized situations of conflict of interest—for example, gifts to physicians or the provision of drug samples—should, we think, be seen more as an artifact of the authors’ varied individual experiences than as a failure by the authors to engage key concerns in the ongoing professional and public debate. It could also be that the authors, asked to submit personal stories, assumed that yet another essay about the ‘traditional’ issues in the conflicts of interest literature would be seen as redundant, routine or even boring. Or, there is the tantalizing possibility that the absence of some of the more familiar conflicts from these narratives is the early fruit of efforts to address these traditional issues through policies governing interactions between physicians and industry promulgated by academic medical centers and health systems, medical specialty societies, and industry.One significant area of concern that has emerged in recent years is conflict of interest in the development of clinical practice guidelines. E.g., Choudry et al. 2002; Sniderrman & Furberg 2009; Guyatt et al. 2010. Although none of the essays in this [End Page 101] collection address it head on, Perlmutter touches on several key issues. His depiction of how an FDA committee process limited the input he was able to provide as an expert, undermined his potential to contribute to the professional dialogue, and raised concerns about the objectivity of the drug approval process echoes concerns about objectivity, the role of expert opinion, and the presence on guideline development panels of individuals with financial interests in the recommendations to be developed that have been explored at some length in the literature, most recently by the Institute of Medicine in reports on evidentiary standards (Eden et al 2011) and principles for guideline development (Graham et al. 2011).Conflict of Interest or Dual Agency?Several essays set out physicians’ experience in navigating situations of diverging expectations. Bierut, for example, reflects on the disjunction between the goals and products of academic researchers and commercial sponsors. She saw herself advancing basic knowledge and was forced to grapple with the reality of sponsors’ goals to advance commercial ends as well. Nagldinne and Mikulec each recall struggles to reconcile their obligation to exercise professional judgment on behalf of patients with the demands of health care organizations focussed also on the bottom line. Cruz–Flores attests to the challenge of making recommendations for care when one is both a practicing clinician and a clinical investigator engaged in research that might offer benefit to a patient for whom there are limited options.Thompson defined conflicts of interest as “a set of conditions in which professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as a patient’s welfare or the validity of... (shrink)

The last person, or people, argument is often assumed to be a potent weapon against a purely instrumental attitude toward nature, for it is said to imply the permissible destruction of nature under certain circumstances. I distinguish between three types of instrumentalism—strong instrumentalism and two forms of weak instrumentalism:, which includes the psychological and aesthetic use ofnature, and, which focuses on the public service use of nature—and examine them in terms of two scenarios, the après moi, le déluge and the (...) “ultimate humanization of nature” scenarios. With regard to the first, I show that LPA is irrelevant to all the three versions of instrumentalism. With regard to the second scenario, I show that even though it is redundant insofar as is concerned and irrelevant insofar as is concerned, it is, surprisingly, effective against, despite the fact that as a form of weak instrumentalism it is not the target of LPA. In addition, I examine the implications of LPA for the three variants when it is applied to the preservation rather than the destruction of nature and conclude that LPA is effective against and, but not as effective against, which can recognize a permission, though not a duty, to save nature. (shrink)

This paper argues against the call to democratize artificial intelligence (AI). Several authors demand to reap purported benefits that rest in direct and broad participation: In the governance of AI, more people should be more involved in more decisions about AI—from development and design to deployment. This paper opposes this call. The paper presents five objections against broadening and deepening public participation in the governance of AI. The paper begins by reviewing the literature and carving out a set of claims (...) that are associated with the call to “democratize AI”. It then argues that such a democratization of AI (1) rests on weak grounds, because it does not answer to a demand of legitimization, (2) is redundant in that it overlaps with existing governance structures, (3) is resource intensive, which leads to injustices, (4) is morally myopic and thereby creates popular oversights and moral problems of its own, and finally, (5) is neither theoretically nor practically the right kind of response to the injustices that animate the call. The paper concludes by suggesting that AI should be democratized not by broadening and deepening participation but by increasing the democratic quality of the administrative and executive elements of collective decision making. In a slogan: The question is not so much whether AI should be democratized but how. (shrink)

Despite an increased recognition that plagiarism in published research can take many forms, current typologies of plagiarism are far from complete. One under-recognized variety of plagiarism—designated here as compression plagiarism—consists of the distillation of a lengthy scholarly text into a short one, followed by the publication of the short one under a new name with inadequate credit to the original author. In typical cases, compression plagiarism is invisible to unsuspecting readers and immune to anti-plagiarism software. The persistence of uncorrected (...) instances of plagiarism in all its forms—including compression plagiarism—in the body of published research literature has deleterious consequences for the reliability of scholarly communication. Not the least of these problems is that original authors are denied credit for their discoveries. When unsuspecting researchers read articles that are the products of plagiarism, they unwittingly engage the arguments of hidden original authors through the proxy of plagiarists. Furthermore, when these researchers later publish responses to the plagiarizing articles, not knowing they are engaging products of plagiarism, they create additional inefficiencies and redundancies in the body of published research. This article analyzes a suspected instance of compression plagiarism that appeared within the pages of this journal and considers the particular ways in which plagiarism of this variety weakens the quality of scholarly argumentation, with special attention paid to the field of philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 224-238 [Access article in PDF] Bookmarks A Hanging Judge Denis Dutton "CORNERING THE MARKET ON CHUTZPAH," blared the headline on one review, and in tone it wasn't alone. It's not often that a book by a public intellectual has received as much media attention—mostly vilification and scorn—as Richard A. Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Harvard University Press, $29.95). Three reasons for this (...) stand out. First, there's the sheer audacity of including a list of the top hundred public intellectuals, drawn from a larger list of 546 names. This invites endless dispute over how the list was generated, who is on it, who is left off, where each one stands, and why. Second, there is the fact that Posner has managed in the book to offend half of the public intellectuals you'd expect to be called on to review it—almost as though he made a list of potential reviewers and worked in a swipe at each. Finally, he has tapped into the deep antipathy humanist intellectuals have to seeing a beloved topic treated quantitatively, with statistics and applications of social and economic theory, replete with graphs and algebraic formulae. And after all, what topic is more beloved by the intellectuals than they themselves? That Posner would actually treat such important people as a demographic type, sorting them in terms of race, age, field, politics, sex—why, he even asks why so many are Jews. It's outrageous... and delicious.Definitions first. The idea of an intellectual, Posner says, should not be identified merely with having highbrow, cultivated tastes, being especially creative, or having high intelligence. All of these things are possible without being an intellectual, which Posner thinks ought to denote the application of the mind to "political matters in the broadest sense of that word, a sense that includes cultural matters when they are [End Page 224] viewed under the aspect of ideology, ethics, or politics (which may all be the same thing)." There is therefore a vague redundancy in the term "public intellectual," since the placing of ideas in a larger public context, acting as social critic, is what the intellectual most essentially does. In our age of vast communication media, it is also done con-spicuously in public, through op-eds, public radio interviews, and on TV clips with the regulation public-intellectual bookcase as a backdrop. This concern with larger moral issues means that for Posner paradigm individuals would therefore include the likes of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Edmund Wilson, Susan Sontag, and most powerfully in Posner's mind, George Orwell: people who write about literature, art, science, and so forth from a broadly political or ideological perspective. For example, when Allan Bloom writes about rock and roll, he is not doing so as a music critic but as a philosopher who sees it as a symptom and source of social degradation. That's echte public intellectual work (and rather bad work in this particular case, Posner believes). That it is done for a broader public is also a crux for Posner, who leaves omits John Rawls from his list, because as influential as Rawls is as a philosopher, he does not address a larger public in the way that Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum do.The decline referred to in Posner's title is a decline in the actual worth of public intellectuals' work, not in their media celebrity, which has grown roughly inversely to the value of what they do. This invidious situation has followed, in Posner's view, the proliferation of academics in the ranks of public intellectuals. From the nineteenth century, with such names as Thoreau, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and Tocqueville, to well into the twentieth, with the likes of Max Eastman, Edmund Wilson, H. G. Wells, and Dwight Macdonald, the great tradition of public intellectuals had its life outside of universities. Although there remain nonacademic public intellectuals today—Susan Sontag, Roger Kimball, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal—they are a severely diminished species. Universities, which have expanded... (shrink)

Ecology has had a lower profile in Biology & Philosophy than one might expect on the basis of the attention ecology is given in public discussions in relation to environmental issues. Our tentative explanation is that ecology appears theoretically redundant within biology and, consequently, philosophically challenging problemsrelated to biology are commonly supposed to be somewhere else, particularly in the molecular sphere. Richard Levins has recognized the genuine challenges posed by ecology for theoretical and philosophical thinking in biology. This essay (...) sets the stage for appreciating his work; it was preceded by four articles published in Biology & Philosophy 15(2),and is followed by a personal reminiscent. (shrink)

In this article, the authors study the problem of balance of trust and mistrust associated with the turbulence of modern society, redundancy, and heterogeneity of information and communication flows creating a contradictory picture of the world. Social networks are considered as one of the basic modern information resources creating previously unavailable opportunities for communication, interaction, information sharing, and commonality construction. Social networks users broadcast the experience of constructing communications in real daily life in the Internet community forming circles of ‘friends‘, (...) building a chain of weak social ties; but the problem of trusting ‘friends‘ remains not solved in global space. A survey of users of social networks, conducted as part of this study, demonstrates conflicting findings. The opinions of ‘friends‘ does not always have an impact on the degree of trusting events, information, groups, likes, and dislikes to other users. Users often trust strangers and less familiar people. The social networks demonstrates the demand for uniting ‘brige-building‘ trust. However, the trust remains extremely narrow throughout, leading to fragmentation and alienation of individuals from each other in an attempt to find their safe niche. Distrust of narrow and wide radius leads to far-reaching consequences and greater uncertainty in society, not creating the preconditions for openness and the vision of the future. (shrink)

In the UK, over 70% of AIDS, including new cases, is located in a few Districts in central London where the distribution of previously occurring and new cases is essentially confined to the original risk groups of homosexual/bisexual men, drug addicts of both sexes, and some of their sexual partners and consorts. But control policy is still based on the assumption that HIV has already spread from persons in these risk groups into the general population, and that it will spread (...) hereafter at an increased rate because of heterosexual transmission to cause a widespread epidemic of AIDS.The basis and implications of this policy were investigated in the South East region adjacent to London, Analysis of demographic and epidemiological data shows that, with one exception, there is very little extension of AIDS from affected Districts in London to the surrounding region or even to the suburban fringe. Where AIDS is prevalent, as in this exception, the distribution follows the same, original pattern which relates essentially to risks arising from life-styles. There is no significant association between the prevalence or spread of AIDS and conventional markers of deprivation, economic and social disadvantage.Allocations of personnel, services and expenditure, assessed from returns required under the AIDS Control Act of 1987 and official registration data, continue to follow the original policy assumptions. They are therefore unrelated to the numbers of existing and new cases, disproportionate and unrealistic. Claims that this widespread excess of effort is justified by the fact that AIDS has not spread to the general population are falsified by the continuation of cases almost exclusively in risk groups. There is nothing in the data required under the Act or in registrations in this main locus of AIDS in the UK to suggest any change in this or to justify continuation of current expenditure and redundant activities.There is no evidence in these data that ethnic variations in the resident populations of Districts are associated with variations in the prevalence of AIDS. However, the larger figures available in some of the national data do indicate a disproportionate increase in some minority ethnic groups. Further detail about risks factors in these groups are required and, meanwhile, effort and expenditure should be re-orientated toward treatment, contact tracing and other public health measures for more effective containment of the continuing spread of AIDS in all the high risk groups. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIlya Somin's Democracy and Political Ignorance represents a missed opportunity to fully examine the implications of public ignorance in modern democracies. Somin persuasively argues that existing levels of public ignorance undermine the main normative accounts of democratic legitimacy, and he demonstrates that neither cognitive shortcuts nor heuristics can provide a quick fix for democracy. However, Somin seeks to find a simple explanation for public ignorance in the conscious, rational choices of voters. He thus commits to the position that voters choose (...) to be ignorant and irrational—and to the simplistic implication that given the right incentives they would choose otherwise. This position is empirically problematic, methodologically flawed, and theoretically redundant. On the more plausible view that ignorance is the inadvertent result of social complexity, it is clear that simply focusing on incentives tells us little about what voters would or would not know under different institutional circumstances. (shrink)

A number of authors in recent liberal political theory have advanced an ‘argument from integrity’ in favour of legal accommodations. This holds that people are entitled to forms of legal accommodations every time they can plausibly claim that complying with a certain norm compromises their ability to act in accordance with some fundamental personal values. I advance two points against this argument. Valuing integrity unconditionally is implausible because a life devoid of integrity is one that does not prevent anyone from (...) developing crucial liberal virtues. If integrity is valued conditionally, on the other hand, its normative role becomes redundant. In fact, I argue, the key liberal values of fairness and toleration can give a more plausible guidance with regard to the problem of how to treat (and sometimes accommodate) moral commitments that are incompatible with public norms. I conclude that the notion of personal integrity is, by itself, unnecessary and possibly detrimental in a theory of justice. (shrink)

ExcerptIn 2021, in the pages of this journal, I contended that a coalition of interests in the United States had coalesced in opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump and duly taken power through the vehicle of Joe Biden.1 This coalition includes the Democratic Party, corporate elites, the media, academia, and—the subject of the present article—the national security (natsec) state. In that earlier piece, I focused on particular components of this coalition: legacy and social media. I went on in a (...) subsequent Telos piece to examine another of its elements: the academy.2 These fractions all appear, however, to be relatively minor players. While I argue that the legacy media have staged a counterrevolution to seize back control of the public sphere, this exhausts their parochial, pecuniary agenda; beyond this, they are simply part of a wider activist liberal cause. Contemporary liberal activism is in turn ideologically rooted in ideas propagated by sectors of the academy and hegemonic within it, but this has not, on my analysis, empowered the academy so much as the forces that make it increasingly redundant. (shrink)

This paper defends an in principle understanding of the authority of persons over themselves and, in consequence, argues for significant limits on morally permissible state authority. It also defends an account of the limits of permissible state action that distinguishes between the ability of persons to convey authority to common projects and what may be judged virtuous, good, safe, or proper to do. In terms of organ transplantation policy, it concludes that it is morally acceptable, and should be legally permissible, (...) for individuals to sell one of their kidneys while living, pocketing the cash to use as that person sees fit to advance their own understanding of their own best interests. Morally objectionable policy proposals, I argue, are not those that encourage individuals to sell a redundant kidney while living or families to sell the organs of a recently deceased loved one, but those that seek coercively to confiscate the organs of the recently deceased. Recognizing the authority of persons over themselves, and their ability to convey moral authority to common projects, including the sale of human organs for transplantation, would shed light on the medical marketplace and clarify public policy, while increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of procuring human organs for transplantation. (shrink)

In the last two decades, the World Wide Web has become the universal, and — for many users — main information source. Search engines can efficiently serve daily life information needs due to the enormous redundancy of relevant resources on the web. For educational — and even more so for scientific information needs, the web functions much less efficiently: Scientific publishing is built on a culture of unique reference publications, and moreover abounds with specialized structures, such as technical nomenclature, notational (...) conventions, references, tables, or graphs. Moreover, many of these structures are peculiar to specialized communities determined by nationality, research group membership, or adherence to a special school of thought. To keep the much-lamented “digital divide” from becoming a “cultural divide”, we have to make online material more accessible and adaptable to individual users. In this paper we attack this goal for the field of mathematics where knowledge is abstract, highly structured, and extraordinarily interlinked. Modern, content-based representation formats like OpenMath or content MathML allow us to capture, model, relate, and represent mathematical knowledge objects and thus make them context-aware and machine-adaptable to the respective user contexts. Building on previous work which can make mathematical notations adaptable we employ user modeling techniques to make them adaptive to relieve the reader of configuration tasks. We present a comprehensive framework for adaptive notation management and evaluate it on an implementation integrated in the e-learning platform panta rhei. (shrink)

In June 1995, a campaign by Greenpeace forced the multinational oil company Shell to cancel its planned disposal of a redundant oil installation in the Atlantic. The Brent Spar incident attracted massive publicity and was influential in changing government policy on marine disposal of waste. During and following their campaign, Greenpeace were criticised as emotive and irrational by Shell and academic scientists. This paper looks at the arguments used during the debate, using literature, interviews and questionnaires. We investigate the (...) use of key environmental words and phrases and ask what is meant by rationality in this context. We discuss some of the lessons that should be learnt from the incident by policy makers and scientists. (shrink)

Livestock production has been confronted with several epidemics over the last decades. The morality of common animal disease strategies—stamping out and vaccination—is being debated and provokes controversies among farmers, authorities and the broader public. Given the complexity and controversy of choosing an appropriate control strategy, this article explores the potential of nano-enabled diagnostics in future livestock production. At first glance, these applications offer promising opportunities for better animal disease surveillance. By significantly shortening the reaction time from diagnosis to appropriate control, (...) they could complement the current disease management strategies. Although nano-enabled diagnostics will not make livestock disease eradication strategies redundant or completely free of the culling of infected animals, these diagnostics could significantly reduce the number of culled animals and animal suffering. This article aims to demonstrate that the ethical assessment of advanced diagnostics can build on the experiences with decision making in biomedical ethics where nonmaleficence, beneficence, autonomy and justice serve as important benchmarks. Nano-enabled diagnostics may be an ethically sound solution if it can resolve the dilemma between stamping out and vaccination in favor of the latter and if it can balance the autonomy–paternalism dilemma between farmers and authorities. The technology should allow to be switched on and off by farmers, whilst simultaneously allowing for a weak paternalism on behalf of authorities in order to benefit the farmer and broader society and to protect them from harm. (shrink)

On January 18, 2011, President Obama signed Executive Order 13563, Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review, which instructs federal regulators to do the following: coordinate their agencies activities to simplify and harmonize rules that may be overlapping, inconsistent, or redundant; determine whether the present and future benefits of a proposed regulation justify its potential costs (including taking into account both quantitative and qualitative factors); increase participation of industry, experts, and the public (“stakeholders”) in the formal rule‐making process; encourage the use (...) of warnings, default rules, disclosure requirements, and provisions of information to the public as an alternative to traditional “command‐and‐control” rule‐making restricting consumer choice; and mandate a government‐wide review of all existing administrative rules to remove outdated regulations. Executive Order 13563 includes a qualitative “values” provision to be considered in the required cost–benefit analysis, which can potentially counteract the alleged regulatory reform rationale of President Obama. Furthermore, in Executive Order 13563, President Obama established a deadline of May 18, 2011, for all executive branch agencies to submit their plans to streamline their rulemaking operations and repeal those “overlapping, inconsistent, or redundant” rules. These two issues, along with complementary regulatory review proposals being discussed in the U.S. Congress, are evaluated in this essay. (shrink)

Using insights from two of the major proponents of the hermeneutical approach, Paul Ricoeur and Hannah Arendt—who both recognized the ethicopolitical importance of narrative and acknowledged some of the dangers associated with it—I will flesh out the worry that “narrativity” in political theory has been overly attentive to story telling and not heedful enough of story listening. More specifically, even if, as Ricoeur says, “narrative intelligence” is crucial for self-understanding, that does not mean, as he invites us to, that we (...) should always seek to develop a “narrative identity” or become, as he says, “the narrator of our own life story.” I offer that, perhaps inadvertently, such an injunction might turn out to be detrimental to the “art of listening.” This, however, must also be cultivated if we want to do justice to our narrative character and expect narrative to have the political role that both Ricoeur and Arendt envisaged. Thus, although there certainly is a “redemptive power” in narrative, when the latter is understood primarily as the act of narration or as the telling of stories, there is a danger to it as well. Such a danger, I think, intensifies at a time like ours, when, as some scholars have noted, “communicative abundance” or the “ceaseless production of redundancy” in traditional and social media has often led to the impoverishment of the public conversation. (shrink)

Until the late 19th century scientists almost always assumed that the world could be described as a rule-based and hence deterministic system or as a set of such systems. The assumption is maintained in many 20th century theories although it has also been doubted because of the breakthrough of statistical theories in thermodynamics (Boltzmann and Gibbs) and other fields, unsolved questions in quantum mechanics as well as several theories forwarded within the social sciences. Until recently it has furthermore been assumed (...) that a rule-based and deterministic system was also predictable if only the rules were known, but this assumption has now been undermined by modern chaos-theory describing rule-based and deterministic, but unpredictable systems, while catastrophe-theory delivers a set of types describing various kinds of instability and conditions for the stability of a given system. Hence the main trait in the theoretical development in the 20th-century science can be described as a basic modification and limitation of some of the fundamental and strong assumptions forwarded in the previous epochs of modern science. Ironically, the very same process has been a process in which the human capacity to intervene in nature has expanded dramatically and mainly with the help of the very same theories, and not least because they allow nature to be described and made manipulable on a lower level and a more fine-grained scale. While the overall theoretical consistency between the various theories has gone, the reach of human intervention in nature has increased based on quite new dimensions whether in the area of physics (e.g.: energy technologies, chemical technologies, nanotechnologies etc.) or biology (ge¬netic manipulation) or in the area of psychology, sociology and culture (artificial simulations of mental processes, new means of communication, implying changes in the social infrastructure and cultural behaviour etc.). While some of these changes and new conditions can be reflected from within the conceptual framework of rule-based systems, albeit more complex than formerly recognized, others seem to give rise to the question of whether there are »systems« and relations between different systems in the world which are not rule-based? For instance, it seems to be obvious that the notion of instability represents a major conceptual break with former theories of rule-based systems, as the stability of the latter is an axiomatically given property implied in the very notion of rule-based systems, while instability can only be the result of external influence which should be explained as the result of another rule-based sy¬stem. While there are no difficulties implied concerning the stability of rule-based systems, the notion of unstable states of a system raises the question of how there can be a system at all if there are no invariant stabilising principles? This is the first question which I will address. And I shall do so by taking two examples of such systems as my point of departure. The first example will be the computer and the second will be ordinary language. In both cases I will argue that the stability of these systems (which are both defined by the existence/presence of human intentions) are provided by the help of - differently organised - redundancy functions which both allow the maintenance of systems in unstable macro-states, suspension of previous rules, underdetermination and overdetermination and generation/emergence/creation of new rules more or less independent of previous rules by the help of optional recursions to the permanently accessible underlying levels as for instance the level of binary representation in computers. Since the notion of redundancy is both controversial as such and often avoided, the concept is discussed (as defined in Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of information and in the semiotic framework of J. J. Greimas) and leading to a more general definition in which the redundancy functions serve to overcome noisy conditions, but at the cost of rule-based stability, determination, and predictability. A second question will be how the notion of rule-generating systems relates to the notion of anticipatory systems and it will be argued that rule-generating systems share some features with an¬ticipatory systems and that the former from a certain viewpoint can be seen as a subclass of the latter, although anticipative features are not necessarily a part of the definition of rule-generating systems. On the other hand, it will be discussed whether anticipatory systems which are not rule-generating systems can exist and it will be argued that the capacity to anticipate is strongly limited if it is not part of a rule-generating system. Therefore, it is concluded that the most powerful anticipatory systems need to be rule-generating systems. (shrink)

In this article, I will draw on my own work and related publications to present some intuitions and hypotheses about the nature of the self and the mechanisms that lead to the development of consciousness or self awareness in human infants during the first 6 months of life. My main purpose is to show that the origins of a concept of self include the physical and the mental selves. I believe that it is essential when trying to understand what a (...) mental state is, that one identifies the social and physical aspects of the person to whom the mental state belongs. How can one identify a mental state or thought without making reference to a subject who experiences it (Hobson, 1990)? The other important feature of the self is that it is distinguished from other people and inanimate objects. ‘One's concept of self is a concept of a person; one's concept of persons cannot be a concept applicable only to a single individual (oneself), for the reason that in this case it would no longer constitute a concept'(Hobson, 1990, p. 165). I would like to argue that infants must be able to represent their physical and social selves in order to recognize that they are similar and different from other people, and to develop expectations and predictions about the behaviour of others (theory of mind). Unlike Strawson, I do not believe that the social and physical aspects of the self are, or become redundant to the nature of the self. I posit that the mature conscious self is a unique mythical and constantly changing entity, the formation of which is created not by the individual alone, but through continuous dialectical inquiry with other people. (shrink)