Social representations research is often undertaken by scholars who seek to ‘give voice’ to knowledge that are held by socially disenfranchised individuals and groups. However, this endeavour poses a number of problems in practice, not least because it assumes that the ‘voices’ voiced by individuals and/or groups in social research will be unambiguous and uniform, and unchanged by the research encounter. Despite the growth of attention to the critical potential of social representations theory, there remains a lack of scholarship on (...) the relationship between the theory's emphasis on the relational, or dialogical, nature of social life and the implications of this for critical research. In this article, I argue that the dialogical epistemology from which social representations research must depart incites reflection upon the design of empirical studies, which must equally attend to both ‘Ego’ and ‘Alter’, and the researcher-researched relationship, which may itself be best viewed as an Ego-Alter interaction. I make the case for adopting dialogical epistemology in critical social psychology, and argue that this is essential to undertaking ethical social research. I conclude by suggesting that claims to ‘giving voice’ have little place in critical social psychology in general, and social representations scholarship in particular. (shrink)

The term fuzzy logic is used in this paper to describe an imprecise logical system, FL, in which the truth-values are fuzzy subsets of the unit interval with linguistic labels such as true, false, not true, very true, quite true, not very true and not very false, etc. The truth-value set, , of FL is assumed to be generated by a context-free grammar, with a semantic rule providing a means of computing the meaning of each linguistic truth-value in as a (...) fuzzy subset of [0, 1].Since is not closed under the operations of negation, conjunction, disjunction and implication, the result of an operation on truth-values in requires, in general, a linguistic approximation by a truth-value in . As a consequence, the truth tables and the rules of inference in fuzzy logic are (i) inexact and (ii) dependent on the meaning associated with the primary truth-value true as well as the modifiers very, quite, more or less, etc. (shrink)

Medical practice is practiced morality, and clinical research belongs to normative ethics. The present book elucidates and advances this thesis by: 1. analyzing the structure of medical language, knowledge, and theories; 2. inquiring into the foundations of the clinical encounter; 3. introducing the logic and methodology of clinical decision-making, including artificial intelligence in medicine; 4. suggesting comprehensive theories of organism, life, and psyche; of health, illness, and disease; of etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, and therapy; and 5. investigating the moral and (...) metaphysical issues central to medical practice and research. Many systems of (classical, modal, non-classical, probability, and fuzzy) logic are introduced and applied. Fuzzy medical deontics, fuzzy medical ontology, fuzzy medical concept formation, fuzzy medical decision-making and biomedicine and many other techniques of fuzzification in medicine are introduced for the first time. -/- . (shrink)

In a previous paper the concept of disease was fuzzy-logically analyzed and a sketch was given of a prototype resemblance theory of disease (Sadegh-Zadeh (2000). J. Med. Philos., 25:605–38). This theory is outlined in the present paper. It demonstrates what it means to say that the concept of disease is a nonclassical one and, therefore, not amenable to traditional methods of inquiry. The theory undertakes a reconstruction of disease as a category that in contradistinction to traditional views is not (...) based on a set of common features of its members, that is individual diseases, but on a few best examples of the category, called its prototypes, and a similarity relationship such that a human condition is considered a disease if it resembles a prototype. It enables new approaches to resolving many of the stubborn problems associated with the concept of disease. (shrink)

The notions of health, illness, and disease are fuzzy-theoretically analyzed. They present themselves as non-Aristotelian concepts violating basic principles of classical logic. A recursive scheme for defining the controversial notion of disease is proposed that also supports a concept of fuzzy disease. A sketch is given of the prototype resemblance theory of disease.

At least as important as a particular item of medical knowledge itself is to know something about the relationships of that knowledge to the experiential world it is talking about. The reason is that the patients the physician is concerned with are parts of that experiential world. So, when using any knowledge in her practice, e.g., some knowledge on infectious diseases, a morally conscientious doctor will be interested in whether, and in what way, this knowledge relates to the ‘world out (...) there’. Does the medical knowledge she employs bear any relevance to the bodies and souls of her patients? Does it enable her to understand the patient’s suffering, illness experience, and illness narrative? Will it help her find useful diagnoses and treatments? Are there in fact any indicators of such qualities of medical knowledge? Why not use astrology, Ayurveda, or exorcism instead of the theory of infectious diseases? A prerequisite for dealing with such questions is the awareness of the relationships between medical knowledge and its referent, i.e., of the semantics of medical knowledge, on the one hand; and of the pragmatic factors beyond this semantics, which influence the role medical knowledge plays in health care, on the other, e.g., social and economic processes. In the present chapter, we shall look at these issues with an eye toward understanding why some particular information is allowed to enter the medical world as knowledge, whereas other information is considered unacceptable or quackery. Is there a clear line of demarcation between medical knowledge and self-deception? To begin with, we will discuss the issues of truth and justification because, as pointed out in Section 10.1 on page 402, knowledge is traditionally defined as justified true belief . These two defining features of knowledge, truth and justifiedness, are due to the classical conception of knowledge as the representation of some ‘reality’. This ancient, representational postulate brings with it that the predominant view on the semantics of medical knowledge is realism, i.e., the view that medical knowledge is concerned with and represents ‘the real world out there’. We shall therefore need to inquire into the philosophy and medical relevance of this doctrine before we proceed to alternative views. Our discussion thus divides into the following five parts: 12.1 Justified True Belief; 12.2 Realism; 12.3 Anti-Realism; 12.4 Beyond Realism and Anti-Realism in Medicine; 12.5 Social Epistemology. (shrink)

What follows is a brief comment on Ludwik Fleck's paper on the foundations of medical knowledge translated by Thaddeus J. Trenn in this issue. Since the original is much older than I am, I have some scruples in presenting the critical thoughts which occurred to me when I read it a few years ago. Despite the criticism, I am very sympathetic to most of what Fleck has told us in his tragically neglected work. Two facts make Fleck's tragedy even more (...) disturbing: (i) others have given rise to post-Fleck revolutions in epistemology by exploiting his ideas while omitting proper references to him, and (ii) sociology of science, precisely what Fleck wanted to promote, has emerged without his work being operative in any sense. In my commentary, I shall examine his concept of social conditioning of knowledge. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Representational transformation is a technique for deepening our understanding of mathematical concepts and facilitating the process of solving mathematical problems. This article suggests that representational transformation can contribute to thought processes in four ways. Firstly, representational transformation helps people employ a wider range of cognitive resources. When one representation of a concept or a problem is transformed into another representation, the sensory-motor resources that are involved in the processing of the base representation are employed to process the target representation. Secondly, (...) representational transformation helps in the process of organizing scattered information into suitable units. This gives structure to various parts of information and makes them much easier to handle. Thirdly, representational transformation helps in the process of suppressing irrelevant information and unnecessary elements of problems. This is a key step in organizing and structuring information. Fourthly, representational transformation helps in the process of discovering general rules and turning them into explicit knowledge. (shrink)

When humans are required to perform two or more tasks concurrently, their performance declines as the tasks get closer together in time. Here, we investigated the mechanisms of this cognitive performance decline using a dual-task paradigm in a simulated driving environment, and using drift-diffusion modeling, examined if the two tasks are processed in a serial or a parallel manner. Participants performed a lane change task, along with an image discrimination task. We systematically varied the time difference between the onset of (...) the two tasks and measured its effect on the amount of dual-task interference. Results showed that the reaction times of the two tasks in the dual-task condition were higher than those in the single-task condition. SOA influenced the RTs of both tasks when they were presented second and the RTs of the image discrimination task when it was presented first. Results of drift-diffusion modeling indicated that dual-task performance affects both the rate of evidence accumulation and the delays outside the evidence accumulation period. These results suggest that a hybrid model containing features of both parallel and serial processing best accounts for the results. Next, manipulating the predictability of the order of the two tasks, we showed that in unpredictable conditions, the order of the response to the two tasks changes, causing attenuation in the effect of SOA. Together, our findings suggest higher-level executive functions are involved in managing the resources and controlling the processing of the tasks during dual-task performance in naturalistic settings. (shrink)

On the basis of a ten-place comparative value relation, artificially reduced to a binary relation, some human value structures are studied and a concept of value kinematics is proposed. A miniature value logic is outlined, making it possible with precision to handle several explicated value notions and to analyze interrelations between them. Finally, the question is discussed whether health can be said to be an absolute and an intrinsic value.

Patrick Suppes'' set-theoretical approach to the analysis of theories, and Joseph D. Sneed''s metatheory are briefly outlined. The notions of observation, illusion and hallucination are reconstructed according to these approaches. It is argued that the terms perception and truth are theoretical with respect to observation but nontheoretical with respect to illusion and hallucination. Hallucination is construed as a special kind of illusion.

Practical Mysticism in Islam and Christianity offers a comparative study of the works of the Sufi-poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) and the practical teachings of the German Dominican, Meister Eckhart (c1260-1327/8). Rumi has remained an influential figure in Islamic mystical discourse since the thirteenth century, while also extending his impact to the Western spiritual arena. However, his ideas have frequently been interpreted within the framework of other mystical, philosophical, or religious systems. Through its novel approach, this book aims to reformulate (...) Rumi's practical mysticism by employing four methodological principles: a) mysticism is a coherent structure with mutual interconnection between its parts; b) the imposition of alien structures to interpret any particular mysticism damages its inward coherency; c) practical mysticism consists of two main parts, namely practices and stages; and d) the proper use of comparative methodology enables a deeper understanding of each juxtaposed system. Eckhart's speculative mysticism, which differs from and enjoys similarities with the love-based mysticism of Rumi, provides a "mirror" that highlights the special features of Rumi's practical mysticism. Such comparison also allows a deeper comprehension of Eckhart's practical thought. Offering a critical examination of practical mysticism, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Islamic studies, comparative mysticism, and the intellectual history of Islam. (shrink)

It has been argued that metaphor and emotion processing are tightly linked together. Here we explore whether neuroscientific evidence supports this claim.

ZusammenfassungWas ist praktisches Wissen?Die Diskussion über diese Frage hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten darauf konzentriert, das praktische Wissen als ein Wissen- wie aufzufassen. Im Folgenden wird eine weitere Differenzierung dieser Ansicht vorgenommen, indem durch eine Analyse der Syntax des klinischpraktischen Wissens dafür geworben wird, dieses Wissen als eine Kategorie von bedingten Geboten für das ärztliche Handeln in der klinischen Entscheidungsfindung zu betrachten. Syntaktisch gesehen, sind diese Gebote deontische Normen („conditional obligations“). Da sie durch die diagnostisch-therapeutische Forschung (= klinische Forschung) (...) aufgestellt und erforscht werden, muss die klinische Forschung als eine deontische Disziplin angesehen werden. Sie ist deshalb dem Bereich der normativen Ethik zuzuordnen. Im direkten Zusammenhang damit ist die klinische Praxis – als eine überzeitliche Institution, nicht als das Handeln von Einzelpersonen – als praktizierte Moral im Dienste der Menschen („Karitas“) einzustufen, weil sie aus dem Versuch besteht, jene Gebote umzusetzen. (shrink)

The rate of human health care-associated infections caused by Acinetobacter baumannii has increased significantly in recent years for its remarkable resistance to desiccation and most antibiotics. Phospholipases, capable of destroying a phospholipid substrate, are heterologous group of enzymes which are believed to be the bacterial virulence determinants. There is a need for in silico studies to identify potential vaccine candidates. A. baumannii phospholipase D role has been proved in increasing organism’s resistance to human serum, destruction of host epithelial cell and (...) pathogenesis in murine model. In this in silico study high potentials of A. baumannii PLD in elicitation of humoral and cellular immunities were elucidated. Thermal stability, long half-life, non-similarity to human and gut flora proteome and non-allergenicity were in a list of A. baumannii PLD positive properties. Potential epitopic sequences were also identified that could be used as peptide vaccines against A. baumannii and various other human bacterial pathogens. (shrink)

This study examined the performances of three groups of participants in interpreting metaphors in three different conditions: congruent gesture-prime conditions, opposite gesture-prime conditions, and no-prime conditions. In congruent gesture-prime conditions, each metaphor was preceded by the congruent gestural representation of metaphor schema. In opposite gesture-prime conditions, each metaphor was preceded by the opposite gestural representation of metaphor schema. The results showed that participants of congruent gesture-prime conditions had the best performance in interpreting metaphors, while participants of opposite gesture-prime conditions had (...) the worst performance. It is suggested that metaphor schema is an important part of metaphorical meaning of a metaphor. Therefore, when this part of meaning is activated by a gestural prime, metaphor comprehension is facilitated. Furthermore, when a schema is used to metaphorically describe a concept or an event, that schema and the neural network that represents it become one part of a larger interconnected neural network that represents the meaning of the metaphor. It could mean that the activation of one part of it could facilitate the activation of the whole of the network. Finally, it is emphasized that a gesture that depicts the schema of a metaphor is in fact the embodied realization of that metaphor. (shrink)

This study measured hand and head action strengths of eight typical emotional states using an authentic but implicit emotion elicitation task. Participants listened to and then retold five stories in which eight typical emotional states were experienced by the narrators. The number of hand and head gestures that occur naturally while experiencing an emotional state was used as an index to determine the hand and head action strength of that emotional state. Results showed a larger number of head gestures than (...) hand gestures, suggesting that head action strengths of the eight emotional states are stronger than their hand action strengths. These findings are consistent with the data extracted from Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (LSN), although the two sets of data were gathered in two completely different experimental conditions and in two different languages. Furthermore, our data showed a prototypical directionality effect for the typical emotional states, specifically, happiness, anger and pride were primarily accompanied by upward gestures but downward gestures for sadness and shame; surprise was primarily accompanied by forward gestures but backward gestures for fear and disgust. (shrink)

Western (deductive) logic originated in Greek antiquity. It found its first expression in those works of the great philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) which have come to be known as the Organon, i.e., ‘instrument’. Aristotle’s logic, also known as syllogistics, was unsystematically concerned with patterns of reasoning and argumentation. It remained in this rudimentary state relatively unchanged and unchallenged until the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time, logic underwent a period of unprecedented reform and modernization, due in large (...) part to the German mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848– 1925) It thus became more and more a mathematical endeavor of studying the structure and peculiarities of artificial, formal languages. In this new form, logic gave rise in the twentieth century to disciplines such as theoretical informatics and programming languages, and transformed our lives through computation, information processing, and the Internet. A formal language consists, in effect, of a particular alphabet and some precise rules of forming, and transforming, strings over this alphabet. There exist several types of formal languages analyzed in logic. Depending on their structure, they are called first-order languages, second-order languages, and so on. Today a logic is considered a theory of such a language and is, correspondingly, referred to as a first-order logic, a second-order logic, and so on. In this chapter, we shall outline a first-order logic as a paragon of deductive logic. Its full name is: “Classical, first-order predicate logic with identity”. What all these expressions mean exactly, will become clear below. The logic we shall study first is termed classical logic because the idea to create such an instrument, or ‘organon’, is rooted in Greek antiquity. Owing to its origin, it is based on three time-honored Aristotelian doctrines. For these and several other reasons that we shall discuss later in this chapter, it is also called a logic of the Aristotelian style, or an Aristotelian logic for short. (shrink)

Clinical practice is where the clinical encounter and decision-making occur. Thus, it constitutes the focus of medicine. Since the time of Hippocrates, it has been composed of five activities that have come to be known as anamnesis, i.e., history taking or clinical interview, diagnosis, prognosis, therapy, and prevention. These five activities are fundamental features of the healing relationship. The present chapter is devoted to the analysis and discussion of their logical, methodological, and philosophical problems. Usually, the patient expects the physician (...) to be an expert of her specialty devoid of a bad reputation. This constitutes what may be called a good doctor, i.e., one whose clinical decisions are right and good in most cases, at least in as many cases as another expert in the same area also achieves. In what follows, we shall analyze the characteristics and presuppositions of such right and good clinical decisions. To this end, we shall undertake a conceptual analysis of the clinical encounter and its outcomes, in order to develop a theory of clinical practice. Our analysis consists of the following five parts: 9.1 The Clinical Encounter; 9.2 Anamnesis and Diagnosis; 9.3 Prognosis; 9.4 Therapy; 9.5 Prevention. (shrink)

Medical knowledge as well as clinical practice are characterized by inescapable uncertainty. There are many reasons this is the case, but foremost among them is that almost everything in medicine is inevitably vague, be it something linguistic such as the term “illness”, or something extra-linguistic such as the condition referred to as illness. If we ask ourselves, then, what the term “illness” means exactly, on the one hand; and how we may precisely delimit the condition illness, on the other; we (...) shall realize that to answer these and similar questions requires specific methods that enable us to adequately cope with vagueness. As we shall see below, fuzzy logic provides us with just such methods. (shrink)

The concepts of categorical diagnosis and conjectural diagnosis are introduced. It is argued that in diagnostic reasoning conjectural diagnosis plays a more important role than categorical diagnosis. Attention is called to the inevitable vagueness of clinical language and to the suitability of epistemic logic and fuzzy logic for diagnostic reasoning.

The language of medicine is an extension of everyday language by adding technical terms such as "appendicitis", "angina pectoris", "blood pressure" and the like. It is therefore characterized by semantic chaos. Most of its terms are either not defined or ill-defined. The chaos would not deserve any attention, however, if it were not practically detrimental in research and practice. The best way to prevent the damage it causes is to learn in medicine something about methods of scientific concept formation. The (...) present chapter provides a concise and unrivalled introduction to such a methodology. We shall discuss the main methods of scientific concept formation known today, that is, all methods of definition and explication. Our discussion divides into the following four sections and is based on, and extends, the most valuable pioneering studies by Carl Gustav Hempel and, especially, Patrick Suppes (Hempel, 1952; Suppes, 1957, 151–173, 246–260): 6.1 What a Definition is; 6.2 What Role a Definition Plays; 6.3 Methods of Definition; 6.4 What an Explication is. (shrink)

Clinical judgment, also called clinical reasoning, clinical decision-making, and diagnostic-therapeutic decision-making, lies at the heart of clinical practice and thus medicine. In thepast, clinical judgment was considered the expert task of the physician. But the advent of computers in the 1940s and their use in medicine as of the late 1950s gradually changed this situation. In the 1960s, a new discipline emerged that has come to be termed medical computer science or medical informatics, including clinical informatics. Clinical informatics is concerned (...) with all aspects of the application of computing machinery in clinical research and practice. As one of its accomplishments in clinical practice, the physician’s capacity for clinical judgment is in the process of being turned over to computers. We are told that computers will be responsible for making diagnoses and treatment decisions in a not-too-distant future. This prospect, its historical, methodological and philosophical background, and its impact on health care will be discussed in the present Part VI which divides into these three chapters: 19 Medical Decision-Making 20 Clinical Decision Support Systems 21 Artificial Intelligence in Medicine? (shrink)