Drawing upon the works of I. A. Richards, Max Black, and Paul Ricoeur, Sallie McFague’s metaphorical theology aims to recover the central role of metaphor within biblical narrative-parables. This paper claims that metaphorical theology is not just a constructive approach to religious discourse but is linguistically unavoidable. The scope of this paper is an in-depth review of Sallie McFague’s metaphorical theology while demonstrating its valuable contribution to the growing conversation regarding the limits and possibilities of religious discourse. Through expositions on (...) narrative, parable, and metaphor, Sallie McFague challenges contemporary theology to move beyond self-imposed boundaries though the power of linguistic critique and embodied imagination. (shrink)

Although widespread throughout the biomedical sciences, the practice of honorary authorship—the listing of authors who fail to merit inclusion as authors by authorship criteria—has received relatively little sustained attention. Is there something wrong with honorary authorship, or is it only a problem when used in conjunction with other unethical authorship practices like ghostwriting? Numerous sets of authorship guidelines discourage the practice, but its ubiquity throughout biomedicine suggests that there is a need to say more about honorary authorship. Despite its general (...) acceptance among many scientists, honorary authorship is unethical. Even if burdensome, responsible researchers are obligated to forgo honorary authorship. (shrink)

Although popular, I argue that the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) account of authorship is flawed. It inadvertently allows for practices that it was designed to prevent. In addition, it creates a new category of authorless papers—orphan papers. The original World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) criterion is preferable.

The received view in philosophy of biology is that there is a well-understood, philosophically rigorous account of information—causal information. I argue that this view is mistaken. Causal information is fatally undermined by misinterpretations and conflations between distinct independent accounts of information. As a result, philosophical arguments based on causal information are deeply flawed. I end by briefly considering what a correct application of the relevant accounts of information would look like in the biological context.

It is unclear whether or not grant winning should count towards authorship credit in the sciences. In this paper, I argue that under certain circumstances grant winning can count for credit as an author on subsequent works. It is a mistake to think that grant winning is always irrelevant to the correct attribution of authorship.

Kaposy (2010) argues that contemporary neuroscience cannot provide rational reasons for abandoning folk psychological concepts like self, personhood, or free will because these concepts are necessa...

Much of the debate surrounding the concept of information in biology centers on the question of whether or not biological systems ‘really’ carry information. The criterion for determining if a system “really” carries information is whether or not there is a principled, theoretical account of information that captures the relevant biological usages. If biological systems do not carry information in this sense, information talk is termed merely heuristic and dismissed as philosophically uninteresting. To date, all three proposed theoretical accounts of (...) information—mathematical, causal and teleosemantic—fail to capture the meaning of biologists. Details of other biological practices that utilize informational concepts are often lost because the debate is too focused on one instance of information talk—genetic information and because biological representations are thought to need a certain kind of theoretical foundation. The problem with this methodology is that it takes the failure of philosophical accounts of information to capture current biological practices as conclusive evidence that informational representations in biology are incoherent. This approach is backwards. A better strategy is to get a clear understanding of biological practice and then to use it to shape our understanding of the philosophical significance of biological information. In this paper, I shift attention from abstract reasoning about information in the philosophical literature to concrete reasoning about informational models in biology. The current debate pays too little attention to the biologically prominent concept of signal. I develop a contextualized understanding of signaling models in biological practice. I argue that biologists use the concept of signal to model distinct functional roles in biological systems and not in any of the theoretical senses of information found in the current philosophical literature. For cell biologists, a signal causally indicates the state of a system at a given point and is used in the context of a style of functional explanation generally known as ‘causal role function,’ in which a mechanism or entity has a function if its behavior explains a contribution to a capacity of interest. I support this analysis with an example drawn from cell biology and reframe the debate over the significance of informational terms in biology. The focus on signal recasts the debate by highlighting examples of information talk which are central to active research programs in biology. The advantage of looking at these models is that their centrality to biological practice forces us to reconsider the adequacy of a methodology that dismisses biological models because we lack a particular kind of philosophical understanding of them. Standard philosophical accounts of information rely on assumptions appropriate for the needs of philosophers but are ill-suited for capturing biological practice. A contextualized understanding of the role of signal in biological practice allows us to work out from the details of practice to tackle broader philosophical issues. On this view, the significance of information talk in biology hinges more on our understanding of how biologists represent function than on our understanding of philosophical accounts of information. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 1, Page 3-4, January 2022.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 10, Page 26-27, October 2011.

Among the many contested boundaries in science studies is that between the cognitive and the social. Here, we are concerned to question this boundary from a perspective within the cognitive sciences based on the notion of distributed cognition. We first present two of many contemporary sources of the notion of distributed cognition, one from the study of artificial neural networks and one from cognitive anthropology. We then proceed to reinterpret two well-known essays by Bruno Latour, ‘Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with (...) Eyes and Hands’ and ‘Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest’. In both cases we find the cognitive and the social merged in a system of distributed cognition without any appeal to agonistic encounters. For us, results do not come to be regarded as veridical because they are widely accepted; they come to be widely accepted because, in the context of an appropriate distributed cognitive system, their apparent veracity can be made evident to anyone with the capacity to understand the workings of the system. (shrink)

Herbert Spencer was regarded by the Victorians as the foremost philosopher of the age, the prophet of evolution at a time when the idea had gripped the popular imagination. Until recently Spencer's posthumous reputation rested almost excusively on his social and political thought, which has itself frequently been subject to serious misrepresentation. But historians of ideas now recognise that an acquaintance with Spencer's thought is essential for the proper understanding of many aspects of Victorian intellectual life, and (...) the present selection is designed to answer this need. It provides a cross-section of Spencer's works from his more popular and approachable essays to a number of the volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy itself. (shrink)

ObjectivesTo describe reporting of informed consent in pragmatic trials, justifications for waivers of consent and reporting of alternative approaches to standard written consent. To identify factors associated with (1) not reporting and (2) not obtaining consent.MethodsSurvey of primary trial reports, published 2014–2019, identified using an electronic search filter for pragmatic trials implemented in MEDLINE, and registered in ClinicalTrials.gov.ResultsAmong 1988 trials, 132 (6.6%) did not include a statement about participant consent, 1691 (85.0%) reported consent had been obtained, 139 (7.0%) reported a (...) waiver and 26 (1.3%) reported consent for one aspect (eg, data collection) but a waiver for another (eg, intervention). Of the 165 trials reporting a waiver, 76 (46.1%) provided a justification. Few (53, 2.9%) explicitly reported use of alternative approaches to consent. In multivariable logistic regression analyses, lower journal impact factor (p=0.001) and cluster randomisation (p<0.0001) were significantly associated with not reporting on consent, while trial recency, cluster randomisation, higher-income country settings, health services research and explicit labelling as pragmatic were significantly associated with not obtaining consent (all p<0.0001).DiscussionNot obtaining consent seems to be increasing and is associated with the use of cluster randomisation and pragmatic aims, but neither cluster randomisation nor pragmatism are currently accepted justifications for waivers of consent. Rather than considering either standard written informed consent or waivers of consent, researchers and research ethics committees could consider alternative consent approaches that may facilitate the conduct of pragmatic trials while preserving patient autonomy and the public’s trust in research. (shrink)

In this paper we prove that from large cardinals it is consistent that there is a singular strong limit cardinal $\nu $ such that the singular cardinal hypothesis fails at $\nu $ and every collection of fewer than $\operatorname {\mathrm {cf}}(\nu )$ stationary subsets of $\nu ^{+}$ reflects simultaneously. For $\operatorname {\mathrm {cf}}(\nu )> \omega $, this situation was not previously known to be consistent. Using different methods, we reduce the upper bound on the consistency strength of this situation for (...) $\operatorname {\mathrm {cf}}(\nu ) = \omega $ to below a single partially supercompact cardinal. The previous upper bound of infinitely many supercompact cardinals was due to Sharon. (shrink)

Experimental data on social preferences present a number of features that need to be incorporated in econometric modelling. We explore a variety of econometric modelling approaches to the analysis of such data. The approaches under consideration are: the Random Utility approach ; the Random Behavioural approach ; and the Random Preference approach. These approaches are applied in various ways to an experiment on fairness conducted by Cappelen et al. :818–827, 2007). Various models that we estimate succeed in capturing the key (...) features of the dataset. Conclusions concerning fairness-related behaviour depend crucially on the choice of econometric model. (shrink)

Categorization and decision making are combined in a task with photorealistic faces. Two different types of face stimuli were assigned probabilistically into one of two fictitious groups; based on the category, faces were further probabilistically assigned to be hostile or friendly. In Part I, participants are asked to categorize a face into one of two categories, and to make a decision concerning interaction. A Markov model of categorization followed by decision making provides reasonable fits to Part I data. A Markov (...) model predicting decision making followed by categorization is rejected. In Part II, a no-parameter model predicts decisions using categorization and decision responses collected in separate trials, suggesting that Part 1 results are not an artifact of the presentation of categorization and decision questions within a single trial. Decisions concerning interaction appear to be based on information from the category decision, and not from the face stimuli alone. (shrink)

Motivated by the goal of constructing a model in which there are no κ-Aronszajn trees for any regular $k>\aleph_1$, we produce a model with many singular cardinals where both the singular cardinals hypothesis and weak square fail.

: A virtually unknown philosopher of the twentieth century, Spencer Heath was nevertheless well-known as a pioneer in the early development of commercial aviation. He retired from business in 1931 to devote the last thirty years of his life to his long-time interest in the philosophy of science and human social organization. He developed ….

Excerpt from Passages From the Philosophy of Herbert Spencer Perhaps to the average reader these lines from T be Foundations of Belief, by Arthur James Bal four, would seem to characterize the doctrine of Herbert Spencer. But the real student of his Philosophy Would resent the injustice of such an in terpretation. As though from a glance at a figure upon the border of an intricate piece Of tapestry, one could conceive the design and colour scheme of the (...) whole. Herbert Spencer could not avoid the conviction that there exists no rational foundation for the be lief in the continuance of conscious personality after death. He believed that the human intellect in its present state of development, could offer no solution to the great problem of identity. He neither af firmed nor denied but with unremitting labour and his life's devotion he produced a Philosophy which gave an inestimable impulse to modern thought if not to Science. In his Syntlzetic Pbilosopliy he revealed the mysterious unity of all existence he traced the progress of Evolution in life, mind, society and morality. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

The ethics of the Flexibility In duty hour Requirements for Surgical Trainees trial have been vehemently debated. Views on the ethics of the FIRST trial range from it being completely unethical to wholly unproblematic. The FIRST trial illustrates the complex ethical challenges posed by cluster randomised trials of policy interventions involving healthcare professionals. In what follows, we have three objectives. First, we critically review the FIRST trial controversy, finding that commentators have failed to sufficiently identify and address many of the (...) relevant ethical issues. The 2012 Ottawa Statement on the Ethical Design and Conduct of Cluster Randomized Trials provides researchers and research ethics committees with specific guidance for the ethical design and conduct of CRTs. Second, we aim to demonstrate how the Ottawa Statement provides much-needed clarity to the ethical issues in the FIRST trial, including: research participant identification; consent requirements; gatekeeper roles; benefit-harm analysis and identification of vulnerable participants. We nonetheless also find that the FIRST trial raises ethical issues not adequately addressed by the Ottawa Statement. Hence, third and finally, we raise important questions requiring further ethical analysis and guidance, including: Does clinical equipoise apply to policy interventions with little or no evidence-base? Do healthcare providers have an obligation to participate in research? Does the power-differential in certain healthcare settings render healthcare providers vulnerable to duress and coercion to participant in research? If so, what safeguards might be implemented to protect providers, while allowing important research to proceed? (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

The ideas upon which public education was founded in the last half of the nineteenth century were wrong. And despite their continued dominance in educational thinking for a century and a half, these ideas are no more right today. So argues one of the most original and highly regarded educational theorists of our time in 'Getting It Wrong from the Beginning'. Kieran Egan explains how we have come to take mistaken concepts about education for granted and why this dooms our (...) attempts at educational reform. (shrink)

The co-occurrence of stress-induced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obesity is common, particularly among military personnel but the link between these conditions is unclear. Individuals with comorbid PTSD and obesity manifest other physical and psychological problems, which significantly diminish their quality of life. Current understanding of the pathways connecting stress to PTSD and obesity is focused largely on behavioral mediators alone with little consideration of the biological regulatory mechanisms that underlie their co-occurrence. In this work, we leverage prior knowledge to (...) systematically highlight such bio-behavioral mechanisms and inform on the design of confirmatory pilot studies. We use natural language processing (NLP) to extract documented regulatory interactions involved in the metabolic response to stress and its impact on obesity and PTSD from over 8 million peer-reviewed papers. The resulting network describes the propagation of stress to PTSD and obesity through 34 metabolic mediators using 302 documented regulatory interactions supported by over 10,000 citations. Stress jointly affected both conditions through 21 distinct pathways involving only two intermediate metabolic mediators out of a total of 76 available paths through this network. Moreover, oxytocin (OXT), Neuropeptide-Y (NPY), and cortisol supported an almost direct propagation of stress to PTSD and obesity with different net effects. Although stress upregulated both NPY and cortisol, the downstream effects of both markers are reported to relieve PTSD severity but exacerbate obesity. The stress-mediated release of oxytocin, however, was found to concurrently downregulate the severity of both conditions. These findings highlight how a network-informed approach that leverages prior knowledge might be used effectively in identifying key mediators like OXT though experimental verification of signal transmission dynamics through each path will be needed to determine the actual likelihood and extent of each marker’s participation. (shrink)

We present an alternative proof that from large cardinals, we can force the tree property at $\kappa ^+$ and $\kappa ^{++}$ simultaneously for a singular strong limit cardinal $\kappa $. The advantage of our method is that the proof of the tree property at the double successor is simpler than in the existing literature. This new approach also works to establish the result for $\kappa =\aleph _{\omega ^2}$.

Introduction: Schools have become a primary setting for providing mental health care to youths in the U.S. School-based interventions have proliferated, but their effects on mental health and academic outcomes remain understudied. In this study we will implement and evaluate the effects of a flexible multidiagnostic treatment called Modular Approach to Therapy for Children with Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, or Conduct Problems on students' mental health and academic outcomes.Methods and Analysis: This is an assessor-blind randomized controlled effectiveness trial conducted across five (...) school districts. School clinicians are randomized to either MATCH or usual care treatment conditions. The target sample includes 168 youths referred for mental health services and presenting with elevated symptoms of anxiety, depression, trauma, and/or conduct problems. Clinicians randomly assigned to MATCH or UC treat the youths who are assigned to them through normal school referral procedures. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of MATCH compared to UC on youths' mental health and school related outcomes and assess whether changes in school outcomes are mediated by changes in youth mental health.Ethics and Dissemination: This study was approved by the Harvard University Institutional Review Board. We plan to publish the findings in peer-reviewed journals and present them at academic conferences.Clinical Trial Registration:ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02877875. Registered on August 24, 2016. (shrink)

In public goods experiments, stochastic choice, censoring and motivational heterogeneity give scope for disagreement over the extent of unselfishness, and whether it is reciprocal or altruistic. We show that these problems can be addressed econometrically, by estimating a finite mixture model to isolate types, incorporating double censoring and a tremble term. Most subjects act selfishly, but a substantial proportion are reciprocal with altruism playing only a marginal role. Isolating reciprocators enables a test of Sugden’s model of voluntary contributions. We estimate (...) that reciprocators display a self-serving bias relative to the model. (shrink)