An experimental realization of quantum computers is composed of two or more calcium ions trapped in a magnetic quadripole. Information is transferred to and read from the ions by means of structured lasers that interact with the ions’ vibration pattern, causing changes of energy distribution in their electronic structure. Departing from an initial state when the ions are cooled, the use of lasers modifies the internal state of one ion that is entangled with the others, then changing the collective states. (...) In such quantum computers, some of the physically possible electronic states are avoided or not taken into consideration, to force the system to work as a binary device. In this essay, we discuss the dynamics that the ions could spontaneously display and its possible implications for the principles of computational logics. (shrink)

Patient safety is a central aspect of healthcare quality, focusing on preventable, iatrogenic harm. Harm, in this context, is typically assumed to mean physical injury to patients, often caused by technical error. However, some contributions to the patient safety literature have argued that disrespectful behavior towards patients can cause harm, even when it does not lead to physical injury. This paper investigates the nature of such dignitary harms and explores whether they should be included within the scope of patient safety (...) as a field of practice. We argue that dignitary harms in health care are—at least sometimes—preventable, iatrogenic harms. While we caution against including dignitary harms within the scope of patient safety just because they are relevantly similar to other iatrogenic harms, we suggest that thinking about dignitary harms can help to elucidate the value of patient safety, and to illuminate the evolving relationship between safety and quality. (shrink)

We review evidence that language is involved in the establishment and maintenance of adult categories of facial expressions of emotion. We argue that individual and group differences in facial expression interpretation are too great for a fully specified system of categories to be universal and hardwired. Variations in expression categorization, across individuals and groups, favor a model in which an initial “core” system recognizes only the grouping of positive versus negative emotional expressions. The subsequent development of a rich representational structure (...) may require the integration of a verbal categorization system with a perceptual processing system that is category-agnostic. Such a model may reconcile many strands of apparently conflicting behavioral, physiological, and neuroscience evidence concerning our understanding of facial expressions of emotion. (shrink)

The book offers a proposal on how to define truth in all its complexity, without reductionism, showing at the same time which questions a theory of truth has to answer and which questions, although related to truth, do not belong within the scope of such a theory. Just like any other theory, a theory of truth has its structure and limits. The semantic core of the position is that truth-ascriptions are pro-forms, i.e. natural language propositional variables. The book also offers (...) an explanation of the syntactic behaviour of truth-terms, and the pragmatic roles of truth-acts. The theory of truth we present is a technical proposal, relatively uncontaminated by radical philosophical discussion. It makes indeed philosophical points, but it is intended to be a conceptual analysis, as neutral as possible, of the aspects that may serve as a point of departure for more philosophically-laden destinations. Like the Fregean account of quantifiers, which is prior to and, to a large extent, independent of the metaphysical debate about existence and its forms, or the Kaplanian view on demonstratives, that is neutral regarding the debate about individuals and the possibilities we have to actually “reach” them in a referring act, we intend our proposal about truth to be a sophisticated and explicative setting that helps to situate other debates about truth accurately, far from the distorted and sometimes strongly ideological discussions that have turned the topic into a paradigm of philosophical impasse. (shrink)

People who have not experienced diseases and health conditions tend to judge them to be worse than they are reported to be by people who have experienced them. This phenomenon, known as the disability paradox, presents a challenge for health policy, and in particular, healthcare resource distribution. This divergence between patient and public preferences is most plausibly explained as a result of hedonic adaptation, a widespread phenomenon in which people tend to adapt fairly quickly to the state they are in, (...) good or bad, and adjust their baseline utility accordingly.If patient utilities can be shown to be inappropriate for use in public policy decision making, the disability paradox fades away. This paper offers a critique of one such attempt: the idea that adaptation leads to adaptive preferences. I argue that none of the main accounts of adaptive preferences in fact characterise adapted patient preferences as irrational. Adapted preferences should not, therefore, be treated as synonymous with adaptive preferences. I suggest that much patient adaptation should be understood as a form of the ubiquitous human ability to respond to environmental change. Consequently, we ought not to discount patient preferences. (shrink)

It is a commonly expressed sentiment that the science and philosophy of well-being would do well to learn from each other. Typically such calls identify mistakes and bad practices on both sides that would be remedied if scientists picked the right bit of philosophy and philosophers picked the right bit of science. We argue that the differences between philosophers and scientists thinking about well-being are more difficult to reconcile than such calls suggest, and that pluralism is central to this task. (...) Pluralism is a stance that explicitly drives towards accommodating and nurturing the richness and diversity of well-being, both as a concept and as an object of inquiry. We show that well-being science manifests a contingent pluralism at the level of methodology, whereas philosophy of well-being has largely rejected pluralism at the conceptual level. Recently, things have begun to change. Within philosophy, conceptual monism is under attack. But so is methodological pluralism within science. We welcome the first development, and bemoan the second. We argue that a joined-up philosophy and science of well-being should recognise the virtues of both conceptual and methodological pluralism. Philosophers should embrace the methodological justification of pluralism that can be found in the well-being sciences, and scientists should embrace the conceptual reasons to be pluralist that can be found in philosophical debate. (shrink)

This book provides a major new cross-disciplinary framework for thinking about poverty and human rights. Drawing on the fields of ethics, economics, and international law, Vizard demonstrates how the work of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has expanded and deepened human rights discourse across traditional disciplinary divides.

The concept of cooperative communities that enforce norm conformity through reward, as well as shaming, ridicule, and ostracism, has been central to anthropology since the work of Durkheim. Prevailing approaches from evolutionary theory explain the willingness to exert sanctions to enforce norms as self-interested behavior, while recent experimental studies suggest that altruistic rewarding and punishing—“strong reciprocity”—play an important role in promoting cooperation. This paper will use data from 308 conversations among the Ju/’hoansi (!Kung) Bushmen (a) to examine the dynamics of (...) norm enforcement, (b) to evaluate the costs of punishment in a forager society and understand how they are reduced, and (c) to determine whether hypotheses that center on individual self-interest provide sufficient explanations for bearing the costs of norm enforcement, or whether there is evidence for strong reciprocity. (shrink)

Categorical perception (CP) is said to occur when a continuum of equally spaced physical changes is perceived as unequally spaced as a function of category membership (Harnad, S. (Ed.) (1987). Psychophysical and cognitive aspects of categorical perception: A critical overview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A common suggestion is that CP for color arises because perception is qualitatively distorted when we learn to categorize a dimension. Contrary to this view, we here report that English speakers show no evidence of lowered discrimination (...) thresholds at the boundaries between blue and green categories even though CP is found at these boundaries in a supra-threshold task. Furthermore, there is no evidence of different discrimination thresholds between individuals from two language groups (English and Korean) who use different color terminology in the blue-green region and have different supra-threshold boundaries. Our participants' just noticeable difference (JND) thresholds suggest that they retain a smooth continuum of perceptual space that is not warped by stretching at category boundaries or by within-category compression. At least for the domain of color, categorical perception appears to be a categorical, but not a perceptual phenomenon. (shrink)

'Quality' is a widely invoked concept in healthcare, and 'quality improvement' is now a central part of healthcare service delivery. However, these concepts and their associated practices represent relatively uncharted territory for applied philosophy and bioethics. In this paper, we explore some of the conceptual complexity of quality in healthcare and argue that quality is best understood to be conceptually plural. Quality is widely agreed to be multidimensional and as such constitutively plural. However, we argue that quality is plural in (...) two further senses. First, quality is competitively plural : that is, different high-level conceptions of quality can be appropriately invoked in different contexts and serve... (shrink)

Neste trabalho apresentamos alguns resultados da pesquisa de doutorado desenvolvida junto à faculdade de Educação da Universidade de São Paulo entre 2002 e 2006, com o título: Ética do discurso e Ética Universal do Ser Humano: convergências entre Paulo Freire e Jurgen Habermas. Trata-se de uma breve descrição dos resultados obtidos, no intuito de aproximar o pensamento de dois autores complexos e de grande importância no pensamento filosófico mundial. Por um lado temos Paulo Freire e sua preocupação em relacionar educação (...) e crítica social libertadora. Por outro, o esforço gigantesco de Jürgen Habermas em produzir uma grande interpretação sobre o mundo, defendendo o projeto inicial da modernidade. Ambos se aproximam no final da década de 1990, chegando quase a um encontro pessoal, no âmbito da Teoria Crítica da Sociedade, quando seguidores de lado a lado identificam conceitos e intenções próximos, como a ideia do diálogo qualificado, de uma ética universalista possível, de uma emancipação humana no horizonte. (shrink)

The distinguished philosopher of language, Francois Recanati, has proposed a wide-ranging truth-conditional model of pragmatics. In this collection, various aspects of his theories are addressed by distinguished contributors, and are then commented on or answered by Recanati himself. This allows the reader to be drawn into the central debate within philosophy of language and cognitive science as to what kind of pragmatics system is needed.

The nature of emotion concepts and whether there are any that are universally “basic” remains controversial, as acknowledged in the article “Language and Emotion.” The suggestion that some emotions are embodied through a process of association between neural networks for bodily sensations (e.g., raised temperature) and neural circuitry dedicated to linguistic metaphor is interesting, but speculative. However, it is a hypothesis that risks relegating speakers of languages that lack sophisticated metaphors to a lower level on some scale of linguistic evolution.

Theories, Technologies, Instrumentalities of Color is the outcome of a workshop, held in Leuven, Belgium, in May 2000.

P. J. Rhodes: Preface Polly Low and Graham Oliver: Comparing Cultures of Commemoration in Ancient and Modern Societies Polly Low: The Monuments ot the War Dead in Classical Athens: Forms, Contexts, Meanings Alison Cooley: Commemorating the War Dead of the Roman World Angelos Chaniotis: The Ritualised Commemoration of War in the Hellenistic City: Memory, Identity, Emotion Avner Ben-Amos: Two Neo-Classical Monuments in Modern France: The Pantheon and Arc de Triomphe Graham Oliver: Naming the Dead, Writing the Individual: Classical Traditions and (...) Commemorative Practices in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Stefan Goebel: Cultural Memory and the Great War: Medievalism and Classicism in British and German War Memorials Lawrence A. Tritle: Monument to Defeat: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in American Culture and Society. (shrink)

Hype over novel quantum technologies has prompted discussion on the likely societal impacts of the sector. Calls to ensure the responsible development of quantum technologies are complicated by a lack of concrete case studies or real-world examples of irresponsible quantum. At this stage, responsible quantum faces a situation reminiscent of the Collingridge dilemma. In this dilemma, the moment in which discussion on societal risks and benefits can be most impactful is also the time when the least information is available. The (...) flipside of this challenge is an opportunity to build processes for examining the public good of quantum before the trajectory (and potential problems) of the sector become “locked in”. Recent work in this space has argued that quantum researchers and innovators must work with society to address uncertainties and concerns. By engaging quantum stakeholders and understanding their perspectives on responsibility, this paper seeks to support this proposition and enable further dialogue on responsible development and use of quantum technologies. (shrink)

This paper analyses the ethics of routine measurement for healthcare improvement. Routine measurement is an increasingly central part of healthcare system design and is taken to be necessary for successful healthcare improvement efforts. It is widely recognised that the effectiveness of routine measurement in bringing about improvement is limited—it often produces only modest effects or fails to generate anticipated improvements at all. We seek to show that these concerns do not exhaust the ethics of routine measurement. Even if routine measurement (...) does lead to healthcare improvements, it has associated ethical costs which are not necessarily justified by its benefits. We argue that the practice of routine measurement changes the function of the healthcare system, resulting in an unintended and ethically significant transformation of the sector. It is difficult to determine whether such changes are justified or offset by the benefits of routine measurement because there may be no shared understanding of what is ‘good’ in healthcare by which to compare the benefits of routine measurement with the goods that are precluded by it. We counsel that the practice of routine measurement should proceed with caution and should be recognised to be an ethically significant choice, rather than an inevitability. (shrink)

This ground-breaking book is designed to raise awareness of human rights implications in psychology, and provide knowledge and tools enabling psychologists to put a human rights perspective into practice. Psychologists have always been deeply engaged in alleviating the harmful consequences human rights violations have on individuals. However, despite the fundamental role that human rights play for professional psychology and psychologists, human rights education is underdeveloped in psychologists' academic and vocational training. This book, the first of its kind, looks to change (...) this, by: raising awareness among professional psychologists, university teachers and psychology students about their role as human rights promoters and protectors providing knowledge and tools enabling them to put a human rights perspective into practice providing texts and methods for teaching human rights. Featuring chapters from leading scholars in the field, spanning18 countries and six continents, the book identifies how psychologists can ensure they are practising in a responsible way, as well as contributing to wider society with a clear knowledge of human rights issues in relation to culture, gender, organisations and more. Including hands-on recommendations, case studies and discussion points, this is essential reading for professional psychologists as part of continuing professional development and those in training and taking psychology courses. (shrink)

In the twenty-first century, there has been a resurgence of ecologically conscious art among artists using new technologies. Like Eco-art, this recent movement, which might be called Eco-media, is interdisciplinary. Eco-media is heavily influenced by developments in environmental science, in particular developments in remote imaging and other kinds of remote Earth sensing (for example, the widespread use of satellite imaging and GPS) and developments in computer modelling (for example, detailed global models of climate that not only model the physics of (...) the Earth and solar system, but also explore the chemistry and biology of the Earth). This article will discuss developments in media art related to the computerized interpretation of complex data sets describing and modelling the natural world. It will explore work that has historically straddled artistic and scientific development, specifically Marey's work in the nineteenth century in photography and motion pictures and give examples of artists who are working in the area in-between art and science today. It will also discuss connections between this work and the historical Romantic sublime and the political dimension of this work as advocating for the preservation of the natural world, and give examples of some of the author's artworks in this area. (shrink)

Este trabalho tem como propósito contribuir para a desmistificação das atribuições pejorativas sugeridas por diferentes atores do campo não progressista, sustentadas em desinformação e falta de referenciais sólidos de análise, sobre o sentido emancipatório da obra de Paulo Freire e suas incidências sobre a educação em direitos humanos. Também tem o objetivo de analisar as sugestões teóricas de Freire como caminhos para a construção de mecanismos de consolidação de uma radicalidade democrática no seio da sociedade brasileira. Setores da sociedade sugerem (...) que Paulo Freire seria um autor de vertente marxista, postulador de doutrinas ortodoxas “esquerdistas” nos processos de educação formal, justificando propostas cujo teor têm como objetivo a contraposição a esta suposta doutrinação, como o projeto denominado “Escola sem partido”. Buscamos demonstrar que Paulo Freire tem como preocupação primeira o de caráter ontológico nos processos educativos, a formação humana, indicando meios educacionais para o aprimoramento da reflexão e da ação intimamente relacionadas, que levem ao aprimoramento do ser humano e que, no bojo desta preocupação, existe um objetivo maior, emancipatório, comportando todas as ordens deste aprimoramento: a promoção da justiça, o caráter laico e universal da escola pública, o direito à livre manifestação de ideias, o respeito às realidades culturais de cada estudante, a construção coletiva do conhecimento e a defesa dos direitos humanos. (shrink)

While not a coherent body of thought, the socialist ideology of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and its leader, Andreas Papandreou, diverges from the socialist principles of post-World War II social democratic parties of Western Europe. The latter spoke for the working class in advanced industrialized societies. These social democrats accepted the legitimacy of capitalism and, assuming continued economic growth, advocated reformist policies. Such programs were meant to strengthen the welfare state and bring about a more equitable distribution of income. (...) As social democracy began to falter, its Keynesian theoretical presuppositions became transparently inadequate. Social democracy's ideological moorings were adrift, while its policies became barely distinguishable from those of its conservative political opponents. (shrink)

"The Ironic Space" is a highly original study which explores how Kantian epistemology opens a critical window onto the inner form of nineteenth-century realist texts. By tracing the outlines of German idealism, the author describes a philosophical and literary paradigm, which reveals the many contours of irony in Stendhal's "Le Rouge et le noir," Goncharov's "A Common Story," and Meredith's "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel." The readings not only illuminate surprising aspects of the novels, but also demonstrate how their philosophical (...) grounding problematizes the reading process. (shrink)

Joseph Raz's defence of government is grounded in his ‘normal justification thesis’. This thesis justifies the exercise of state authority in just those cases where subjects are more likely to fulfill their duties by obeying the state than by carrying out their own deliberations. I argue that the assumptions underlying this argument are importantly similar to those made by the Enlightenment anarchist philosopher William Godwin. Raz's arguments can supplement Godwin's political theory, producing an argument which, though grounded in anarchist principles, (...) justifies a limited state authority. (shrink)

The cultural evolutionary approach to the dynamics of cumulative culture is insufficient for understanding how culture affects heritability estimates; it ignores the agency of individuals and internal complexity of social groups that drive cultural evolution. Both environmental and social selection need consideration. The WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) problem has never plagued anthropology: A wealth of ethnography is available for the problem at hand.

This article investigates the theoretical assumptions and implications of de Ste. Croix’s approach to interstate politics in The Origins of the Peloponnesian War. It suggests that two approaches can be identified in the work: one which sees a fundamental connection between political systems within a state and that state’s conduct of interstate politics, and another, closer to conventional ‘Realist’ theories, which sees a clear dividing line between domestic and interstate politics, and in which interstate relations need to be understood according (...) to a distinct analytical framework. Although this tension was probably not a particular concern to de Ste. Croix himself, it does have a bearing on ongoing debates in International Theory; the final part of the article briefly explores the possibility that the concept of ‘compulsion’, important to both Thucydides’ and de Ste. Croix’s understanding of the causes of the Peloponnesian War, might provide a way of reconciling these two approaches. (shrink)

These teaching materials explore the specific powers of governments to implement control measures in response to communicable disease, in two different contexts:The first context concerns global pandemic diseases. Relevant legal authority includes international law, World Health Organization governance and the International Health Regulations, and regulatory authority of nations.The second context is centered on U.S. law and concerns control measures for drug-resistant disease, using tuberculosis as an example. In both contexts, international and domestic, the point is to understand legal authority to (...) address public health emergencies. (shrink)

If language is crucial to the development of shared colour categories, how might cultural constraints influence the development of divergent category sets? We propose that communities arrive at different sets of categories because the tendency to group by perceptual similarity interacts with environmental factors (differential access to dying and printing technologies), to make different systems optimal for communication in different situations.

Our results on hippocampal long-term potentiation are considered in the context of Xia et al.'s hypothesis. Whereas the target article proposes presynaptic PKC involvement in adenylyl cyclase activation by phosphorylation of nenromodulin, we suggest an additional postsynaptic role involving RC3/nenrogranin. Finally, we examine the possibility that the adenylyl cyclase mutant mouse may display normal learning with a selective impairment of memory.

Two cross-modal experiments provide partial support for O'Regan & Noë's (O&N's) claim that sensorimotor contingencies mediate perception. Differences in locating a target sound accompanied by a spatially disparate neutral light correlate with whether the two stimuli were perceived as spatially unified. This correlation suggests that internal representations are necessary for conscious perception, which may also mediate sensorimotor contingencies.

Evaluation, as the expression of a writer’s attitudes, opinions and values, has become a key term in discourse studies in recent years and has proved to be a particularly fruitful way of analysing academic texts. But while studies have shown the importance of evaluation in research genres, its role in seemingly more promotional academic genres has been largely neglected. This article examines the journal description, a brief but ubiquitous feature of all journals, whether online or in print. Situated at the (...) academic—commercial interface, the JD provides information for prospective readers and authors while endorsing a particular view of the field and positioning the journal in the academic community. Drawing on a corpus of 200 JDs in four contrasting disciplines, we show how evaluation is a key feature of this genre, influencing both lexical choices and rhetorical structure. The analysis contributes both to our understanding of a neglected academic genre and the evaluative resources of language. (shrink)

This study investigates whether the host personality and the primary alterpersonality of a woman with multiple personality disorder are controlled by the left and right hemispheres, respectively. Results support the hypothesis. Behavioral and preference measures indicate that Pe is strongly right handed and Pa is left handed. Verbal and musical dichotic tests show significantly greater accuracy for stimuli presented to the left ear for Pa and to the right ear for Pe. It is concluded that shifts in hemisphericity involve redistribution (...) of attentional resources and callosal suppression. “Conditional handedness” is proposed as a handedness subtype, characterizing persons who alternate personalities and consistently display alternate hand preferences linked to specific personality characteristics. (shrink)