De-domestication is the deliberate establishment of a population of domesticated animals or plants in the wild. In time, the population should be able to reproduce, becoming self-sustainable and incorporating ‘wild’ animals. Often de-domestication is part of a larger nature restoration scheme, aimed at creating landscapes anew, or re-creating former habitats. De-domestication is taken up in this paper because it both engages and raises questions about the major norms governing animals and nature. The debate here concerns whether animals undergoing de-domestication should (...) be looked upon as wild or non-wild and the effect this has on questions about how they should be treated. It also concerns the value of nature, and the kind and degree of nature management considered appropriate. The paper first describes actual de-domestication practices and considers the character of human duties to animals in process of de-domestication. Secondly, the paper explores the implications of de-domestication for nature management, focusing on notions of naturalness and wildness. Finally, because the current division of ethical topics, with its dependence upon whether animals and nature are domesticated, hampers rather than helps, a new perspective is offered on the issues raised by de-domestication. More ‘thinking outside the box’ with regard to animals and nature is recommended. (shrink)

Prediction‐based processes appear to play an important role in language. Few studies, however, have sought to test the relationship within individuals between prediction learning and natural language processing. This paper builds upon existing statistical learning work using a novel paradigm for studying the on‐line learning of predictive dependencies. Within this paradigm, a new “prediction task” is introduced that provides a sensitive index of individual differences for developing probabilistic sequential expectations. Across three interrelated experiments, the prediction task and results thereof are (...) used to bridge knowledge of the empirical relation between statistical learning and language within the context of nonadjacency processing. We first chart the trajectory for learning nonadjacencies, documenting individual differences in prediction learning. Subsequent simple recurrent network simulations then closely capture human performance patterns in the new paradigm. Finally, individual differences in prediction performances are shown to strongly correlate with participants’ sentence processing of complex, long‐distance dependencies in natural language. (shrink)

Disturbed identity is one of the defining characteristics of Borderline Personality Disorder manifested in a broad spectrum of dysfunctions related to the self, including disturbances in meaning-generating self-narratives. Autobiographical memories are memories of personal events that provide crucial building-blocks in our construction of a life-story, self-concept, and a meaning-generating narrative identity. The cultural life script represents culturally shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course within a given culture. It is used to (...) organize one’s autobiographical memories. Here, 17 BPD-patients, 14 OCD-patients, and 23 non-clinical controls generated three important autobiographical memories and their conceptions of the cultural life script. BPD-patients reported substantially more negative memories, fewer of their memories were of prototypical life script events, their memory narratives were less coherent and more disoriented, and the overall typicality of their life scripts was lower as compared with the other two groups. (shrink)

The book deals with the notion of Downward Causation from a wide array of perspectives, including physics, biology, psychology, social science, communication studies, text theory, and philosophy. The book includes proponents as well as opponents discussing the validity of the notion.

This paper tries to combine Peirce’s cosmology and metaphysics with current understanding in physics of the evolution of the universe, regarded as an ongoing semiotic process in a living cosmos. While the basic property of Life is viewed as an unexplainable Firstness inherent in the initial iconic state of the vacuous continuum we shall consider and exemplify two sign developing processes: (a) the transition from icon to index is considered as a symmetry breaking emergence of order actualising one among the (...) possibilities of the iconic vacuum; (b) the transition from index to symbol, regarded as a habit formation — an adaptation of the surroundings to the order that has emerged. While the iconic state is characterized by fractal self-similarity the transitions to index and symbol are modelled by the mean field theory of second order phase transitions. (shrink)

Ever since its inception, democracy has been subjected to the objection that ordinary citizens are not fit to rule. I discuss and criticize the most influential contemporary version of this argument, due to Jason Brennan, according to which democracy is illegitimate because voters are incompetent. I accept two core premises of Brennan’s argument – that legitimacy requires competence, and that voters are incompetent (in the sense of competence Brennan accepts) – but reject the conclusion that representative democracy is illegitimate. I (...) show that the argument can be interpreted as making two different claims: (1) That the democratic policymaking process as a whole is incompetent, and democratic policies therefore illegitimate; (2) that only democratic elections are incompetent, which either (a) makes democratic policies illegitimate or (b) makes elections themselves illegitimate. Each of these claims is false: (1) is false because voter incompetence does not taint the policymaking process sufficiently; (2a) is false because incompetent elections do not imply that policies made post-election are illegitimate; and (2b) is false because electoral decisions are not the kinds of things that can be illegitimate in the appropriate way. Finally, I address three potential criticisms of my defense of democracy: (i) that I set the bar for voters’ performance too low, (ii) that the representative democracy I defend is not really democratic, and (iii) that Brennan’s argument is an argument for replacing democracy with epistocracy, rather than for the illegitimacy of representative democracy. (shrink)

This article revisits the intellectual history of inequality in the thinking of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) and Dr Ram Manohar Lohia (1910–1967). Both were pivotal figures in the intellectual history of inequality in colonial and postcolonial India. Yet little work has been done to systematically juxtapose the two and their thinking on inequality. This article offers a first comparison, arguing that their ideas on inequality can be seen as the emergence of a unique, Indian version of what, in this (...) article, we term “organic intersectionality.” We build this argument on four claims. First, both were organic intellectuals whose thinking was molded in the marginalized groups from which they arose, but whose ideas developed in unique and organic ways. Second, both had a unique eye to the intersectional and holistic character of Indian inequality, cutting across caste, class, race, and gender. Third, their thinking grew from a deep engagement with religion, which they saw as both legitimizing and delegitimizing inequality. Fourth, both these figures exemplify postcolonial hybridity and thus stand in contrast both to a diffusionist approach whereby ideas are simply diffused from the West to the East, and to a nationalized, self-contained, or decolonial history of ideas. (shrink)

In the Proceedings that emerged from the Second International Workshop on the Assessment of Animal Welfare at Farm and Group Level, Sandoe, Christiansen, & Appleby challenged participants to ponder four fundamental questions:a. What is the baseline standard for morally acceptable animal welfare?b. What is a good animal life?c. What farming purposes are legitimate?d. What kinds of compromises are acceptable in a less-than-perfect world?Continued reflection on those questions warrants examination of the shape of our modern agricultural ethic. It also calls (...) for a reexamination of recent work by Nussbaum on extending the capabilities approach to animals and the interface of Nussbaum's work with Rollin's scholarship on telos . The resources of narrative ethics are summoned to navigate the above-mentioned questions and to explore how Nussbaum's approach and Rollin's notion of animals' natures relate to the main storyline associated with developments in agriculture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 4.1 (1997) 91-93 Concurrent Contents: Recent and Classic References at the Interface of Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology Articles Allen, J. F., J. Hallperin, and R. Friend. 1985. Removal and diversion tactics and the control of auditory hallucinations. Behavior Research and Therapy 23:601-605.Baker, H. D. 1995. Psychoanalysis and ideology: Bakhtin, Lacan, and Zizek. History of European Ideas 20:499-504.Bernet, R. 1994. Derrida-Husserl-Freud: The trace of transference. Southern (...) Journal of Philosophy 32 suppl.:141-158.Boden, M. A. 1996. Commentary on "Towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodes." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:135-136.Castelfranchi, C., and M. Miceli. 1996. Commentary on "Towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodes." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, no. 2:129-133.Fowes, B. J., and F. C. Richardson. 1996. Why is multiculturalism good? American Psychologist 51, no. 6:609-621.Frith, C. 1996. Commentary on "Free will in the light of neuropsychiatry." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:91-93.Forde, R. 1996. Inclusion of psychosocial conditions in clinical practice and the problem of medicalization. Theoretical Medicine 17, no. 2:151-161.Gaylin, W., and D. Doukas. 1995. The second-hand suicide threat. Hastings Center Report 25:20-22.Gillet, G. 1995. Consciousness, thought, and neurological integrity. Journal of Mind and Behavior 16, no. 3:215-233.Haskell, R. E. 1993. Realpolitik in the addictions field: Treatment-professional, popular-culture ideology, and scientific research. Journal of Mind and Behavior 14, no. 3:257-276.Kuys, T. 1995. The tally argument again. Methodological Science 28, nos. 2-3:43-55.Lear, J. 1995. The heterogeneity of the mental: Sebastian Gardner's irrationality and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 104:863-879.Libet, B. 1996. Commentary on "Free will in the light of neuropsychiatry." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 3:95-96.Lloyd, D. 1996. Commentary on "Toward a design-based analysis of emotional episodes." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:127-128.Pepper-Smith, R., W. R. C. Harvey, and M. Silberfeld. 1996. Competency and practical judgment. Theoretical Medicine 17, no. 2:135-150. [End Page 91]Spence, S. A. 1996a. Free will in the light of neuropsychiatry. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:75-90.------. 1996b. Response to the commentaries. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:99-100.Stein, D. J. 1996. The philosophy of psychopathy. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 39:569-580.Stephens, G. L. 1996. Commentary on "Free will in the light of neuropsychiatry." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:97-98.Varela, C. R. 1995. Ethnogenic theory and psychoanalysis: The unconscious as a social construction and a failed explanatory concept. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 25:4.Weisberger, A. M. 1995. The ethics of the broader usage of Prozac: Social choice or social bias? International Journal of Applied Philosophy 10, no. 1:69-74.Wright, I., A. Sloman, and L. Beaudoin. 1996a. Response to the commentaries. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:137.------. 1996b. Towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodes. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:101-126. Books American Psychiatric Association. Task Force on Consent to Voluntary Hospitalization. 1993. Consent to voluntary hospitalization. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.Christiansen, H. D. 1972. Ethics in counseling: Problem situations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Clark, P., and C. Wright, eds. 1988. Mind, psychoanalysis and science. New York: Blackwell.Comerchero, V., ed. 1970. Values in conflict: Christianity, marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.Epstein, R. S. 1994. Keeping boundaries: Maintaining safety and integrity in the psychotherapeutic process. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.Fairbairn, G. J. 1995. Contemplating suicide: The language and ethics of self harm. New York: Routledge.Grubb, A., ed. 1991. Decision-making and problems of incompetence. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Haas, L. J., and J. L. Malouf. 1995. Keeping up the good work: A practitioner's guide to mental health ethics. 2nd ed. Sarasota: Professional Resource Exchange.Hacking, I. 1995. Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. Princeton: Princeton University... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3.2 (1996) 139-142 Concurrent Contents: Recent and Classic References at the Interface of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology Articles Abramowitz, S., C. Abramowitz, C. Jackson et al. 1973. The politics of clinical judgment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 41: 385-391.Audi, R. N. 1972. Psychoanalytic explanation and the concept of rational action. The Monist 56: 444- 464.Barondess, J. A. 1979. Disease and illness--a crucial distinction. American (...) Journal of Medicine 66: 375-376.Barrett, R. J. 1988. Interpretations of schizophrenia. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 12: 357-388.Bechtel, W. 1993. The case for connectionism. Philosophical Studies 7: 119-154.Belzen, J. A. 1995. The impact of phenomenology on classical psychiatry: Rümke's position between Jaspers and Kraepelin. History of Psychiatry 6: 349-385.Benda, C. E. 1967. Neuroses of conscience. Journal of Existentialism 7: 425-442.Binns, P. 1995. Commentary on "Contentless consciousness." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2: 61-63.Blankenburg, W. 1980. Phenomenology and psychopathology. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 11: 50-78.Bloomfield, T. M. 1979. Psychoanalysis: A human science? Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 9: 271-287.Blumenfeld, D. 1972. Free action and unconscious motivation. The Monist 56: 426-443.Boudreaux, G. 1977. Freud on the nature of unconscious mental processes. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 7: 1-32.Bracken, P. J. 1995. Beyond liberation: Michael Foucault and the notion of a critical psychiatry. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 1-13.Brazier, M. 1995. Commentary on "Who should be committable?." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 49-50.Bursztajn, J., and A. Brodsky. 1995. Authenticity and autonomy in the managed-care era: Forensic psychiatric perspectives. Journal of Clinical Ethics 5, no. 3: 237-242.Byrnes, J. F. 1979. Suggestions on writing the history of psychological data. History and Theory 16: 297-305.Campbell, E. J., J. G. Scadding, and R. J. Roberts. 1979. The concept of disease. British Medical Journal 2: 757-762.Carveth, D. 1988. In reply to Eagle's reply on "The epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18: 377-378.Chadwick, R. F. 1995. Commentary on "Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 83-84.Christiansen, B. 1964. The scientific status of psychoanalytic clinical evidence (III). Inquiry 7: 47-79.Davis, M. 1987. Realistic utilitarianism and the social conditions of cognitive psychotherapy. Social Theory & Practice 13: 237-259.Dega, W., et al. 1978. Ethics and mental health: Discussion. Dialectics and Humanism 5: 219-235.Dingle, H. 1949. The logical status of psycho-analysis. Analysis 9: 63-66.Dupeau, J. 1977. Freud and degeneracy. Diogenes Spring: 43-64.Eagle, M. 1988. A reply to Carveth's "The epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18: 371-375.Elevitch, B. 1974-75. Reasons, motives and psychoanalysis. Philosophical Forum (Boston) 6: 143- 162.Elliot, P. 1995. Policies, identity, and social change: Contested grounds in psychoanalytic feminism. Hypatia 10: 41-55.Fabrega Jr, H. 1980. The position of psychiatric illness in biomedical theory: A cultural analysis. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 5: 145-168.Fisk, G. 1993. Accreditation of psychotherapists. British Journal of Hospital Medicine 50: 437-438.Flynn, B. G. 1985. Reading Habermas reading Freud. Human Studies 8: 57-76.Forrow, L., R. M. Arnold, and J. Frader. 1991. Teaching clinical ethics in the residency years--preparing competent professionals. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16: 93-112.Friedman, M. 1982. Philosophical anthropology and psychotherapy. Philosophical Context 12: 9-19.Galdston, I. 1969. The ontologic foundations of morality. Existential Psychiatry 7: 69-75.Gardner, S. 1995a. Commentary on "Irrationality and the dynamic unconscious." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 2: 175-176.Gardner, S. 1995b. Psychoanalysis, science, and commonsense. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 2: 93-113.Handelsman, M. M. et al. 1995. Does legally mandated consent to psychotherapy ensure ethical appropriateness? The Colorado experience. Ethics and Behavior 5, no. 2: 119-129.Hanlon, M. D. 1977. Commentary on Dunham's "Psychiatry, Sociology and Civil Liberties." Values and Ethics in Health Care 2: 275-278.Heaton, J. M. 1972. Insight in... (shrink)

This is a review and discussion of Ask Vest Christiansen’s book Gym Culture, Identity and Performance-Enhancing Drugs: Tracing a Typology of Steroid Use. As indicated by the title, the book...

In this review article, Christiansen provides a historical perspective on the two research traditions, implicit learning and statistical learning, thus nicely setting the scene for this special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science. In this “tale of two literatures”, he first traces the history of both literatures before sketching a framework that provides a basis for understanding implicit learning and statistical learning as a unified phenomenon.

In its ethics guidelines, the Association of Internet Researchers advocates a bottom-up, case-based approach to research ethics, one that emphasizes that ethical judgement must be based on a sensible examination of the unique object and circumstances of a study, its research questions, the data involved, and the expected analysis and reporting of results, along with the possible ethical dilemmas arising from the case. This article clarifies and illustrates the mind-set and process of such a bottom-up approach to internet research ethics. (...) Two ethics concepts to think with, namely ‘the distance principle’, and the notion of ‘perceived privacy’, are introduced and applied in a concrete empirical internet study, in which web archives based on personal communications on social media formed the main body of data. The empirical case example serves to highlight the unique challenges of internet research ethics, in light of the blurring boundaries between text and person, and between private and public on the internet, with profound implications and challenges for the definition of human subjects, privacy, and so on. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change (...) are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics. (shrink)

Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must “eagerly” recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build (...) a multilevel linguistic representation; and (3) the language system must deploy all available information predictively to ensure that local linguistic ambiguities are dealt with “Right-First-Time”; once the original input is lost, there is no way for the language system to recover. This is “Chunk-and-Pass” processing. Similarly, language learning must also occur in the here and now, which implies that language acquisition is learning to process, rather than inducing, a grammar. Moreover, this perspective provides a cognitive foundation for grammaticalization and other aspects of language change. Chunk-and-Pass processing also helps explain a variety of core properties of language, including its multilevel representational structure and duality of patterning. This approach promises to create a direct relationship between psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. More generally, we outline a framework within which to integrate often disconnected inquiries into language processing, language acquisition, and language change and evolution. (shrink)

The paper develops a new holistic theory of the word by integrating semiotic, linguistic, and psychological perspectives and introduces the Cogitative-Sensory Word Model, the CogSens Model, that unites the human mind and body. Saussure’s two-sided sign is replaced by a Peirce-inspired three-sided conception in which the expression unit mediates two content units, namely, an idea content connected to the human mind and an image content linked to the human body. It is argued that it is the word that makes human (...) language a unique tool of communication. Moreover, it is demonstrated how words interact with grammar to create an utterance. Finally, it is suggested that speech perception, i.e., fission of idea and image content, is the mirror image of speech production, i.e., fusion of idea and image content. (shrink)

The article provides an instructive in-depth analysis of communicative practices in the personal blog. Its aim is to document the discursive dynamics and interactional ethics of blogging, with a specific focus on negotiations of the blogging self in-between public and private. Based on key findings from an empirical case study of personal blogs, the article addresses the negotiation of the blogging self from three interdependent perspectives: the network structures, patterns of interaction, and thematic orientations of the blog. Instead of approaching (...) the online self as the individual blogger’s self-presentation to an often unknown and unfamiliar audience, I analyse and discuss the ‘blogging self’ as a relational and collaborative accomplishment, as something that is constantly subject to negotiation between author and readers, and is framed by the blog as a communicative genre. The theoretical foundation for this relational approach to the self is inspired by the work of sociologist Georg Simmel on how individuals attune to their networks of affiliation in a process of socialisation (Simmel 1955). The article contributes to the discussion of ethical behaviour and privacy protection in social media by highlighting the role of phatic communication in the blog. Specifically, I demonstrate how participants in the blog network negotiate and maintain an ethos of privacy protection in and through practices associated with the phatic. They do this by adhering to a ‘principle of sociability’, allowing them to experience their communication as personal but not private. (shrink)

Naturally occurring speech contains only a limited amount of complex recursive structure, and this is reflected in the empirically documented difficulties that people experience when processing such structures. We present a connectionist model of human performance in processing recursive language structures. The model is trained on simple artificial languages. We find that the qualitative performance profile of the model matches human behavior, both on the relative difficulty of center‐embedding and cross‐dependency, and between the processing of these complex recursive structures and (...) right‐branching recursive constructions. We analyze how these differences in performance are reflected in the internal representations of the model by performing discriminant analyses on these representations both before and after training. Furthermore, we show how a network trained to process recursive structures can also generate such structures in a probabilistic fashion. This work suggests a novel explanation of people's limited recursive performance, without assuming the existence of a mentally represented competence grammar allowing unbounded recursion. (shrink)

We present here the hypothesis that the unique microenvironmental pH landscape of acid‐base transporting epithelia is an important factor in development of epithelial cancers, by rendering the epithelial and stromal cells pre‐adapted to the heterogeneous extracellular pH (pHe) in the tumor microenvironment. Cells residing in organs with net acid‐base transporting epithelia such as the pancreatic ductal and gastric epithelia are exposed to very different, temporally highly variable pHe values apically and basolaterally. This translates into spatially and temporally non‐uniform intracellular pH (...) (pHi) patterns. Disturbed pHe‐ and pHi‐homeostasis contributes to essentially all hallmarks of cancer. Our hypothesis, that the physiological pHe microenvironment in acid‐base secreting epithelia shapes cancers arising in these tissues, can be tested using novel imaging tools. The acidic tumor pHe in turn might be exploited therapeutically. Pancreatic cancers are used as our prime example, but we propose that this concept is also relevant for other cancers of acid‐base transporting epithelia. (shrink)

As is well known among readers of Tradition and Discovery, William H. Poteat was a central influence in bringing Michael Polanyi to the attention of American scholars and, particularly, to the interest of scholarship in religion and theology. Poteat’s own work was heavily impacted by Polanyi. In turn, Polanyi’s affiliationwith Poteat at Duke and elsewhere clearly impressed and edified Polanyi and led to Polanyi’s request for Poteat’s collaboration with him on Meaning and to the prospect of Polanyi’s coming to Duke (...) for six weeks to facilitate this. Unfortunately, that promising time was not realized. This present essay represents an effortto discern a direction in which such a collaboration might have deeply and felicitously influenced Polanyi’s interpretation and celebration of his own poignant, yet quite restless, religious sensibilities. (shrink)

Autistic individuals without intellectual disabilities are sometimes not diagnosed until adolescence/adulthood. Due to increased risk of co-occurring mental health problems, these individuals may initially be referred to general, mental health services and not always be identified as autistic; some may be misdiagnosed with personality disorder prior to identification of autism. To explore possible mechanisms in misdiagnosis of autism, we report on the case of a young man with severe, non-suicidal self-injury and attention deficit disorder who had been diagnosed with and (...) treated for borderline PD prior to being diagnosed with autism. Following reassessment by mental health clinicians with experience of working with autistic individuals, the patient was diagnosed with autism, ADD, and depression—but not PD. Experiences from this case suggest that presence of co-occurring NSSI, depression, and ADD, as well as lack of comprehensive assessment and lack of autism knowledge in general mental health services, may contribute to risk that autism is misdiagnosed as PD. These findings highlight the need for autism expertise in general mental health services to facilitate appropriate diagnosis for autistic individuals who encounter these services, as well as the importance of undertaking comprehensive assessments. (shrink)

The gamer’s dilemma :31–36, 2009) asks whether any ethical features distinguish virtual pedophilia, which is generally considered impermissible, from virtual murder, which is generally considered permissible. If not, this equivalence seems to force one of two conclusions: either both virtual pedophilia and virtual murder are permissible, or both virtual pedophilia and virtual murder are impermissible. In this article, I attempt, first, to explain the psychological basis of the dilemma. I argue that the two different action types picked out by “virtual (...) pedophilia” and “virtual murder” set very different expectations for their token instantiations that systematically bias judgments of permissibility. In particular, the proscription of virtual pedophilia rests on intuitions about immoral desire, sexual violations, and a schematization of a powerful adult offending against an innocent child. I go on to argue that these differences between virtual pedophilia and virtual murder may be ethically relevant. Precisely because virtual pedophilia is normally aversive in a way that virtual murder is not, we plausibly expect virtual pedophilia to invite abnormal and immorally desirous forms of engagement. (shrink)

How do students learn about racism in the absence of ‘race’ as an explanatory concept for current social divisions? This article traces conceptual and affective negotiations of ‘race’ and racism in a Norwegian middle school classroom. Conceptual confusion about ‘race’, racism and lines of inclusion and exclusion in the nation is rife in this educational setting, where the curricular focus is on questions of immigration and integration. Treating ‘race’ as a ‘chameleon-like’ concept that adapts to the cultural context and political (...) situation, the analysis highlights the emotional investments and injuries that discussing race brings forward in the situation through a Kleinian psychoanalytic lens. Working through the affective as well as the conceptual aspects of the classroom’s struggles with ‘race’ and racism, the article argues that racism is enacted in the classroom partly as an effect of the denial of ‘race’ as a current effect of racism. Furthermore, it suggests that the denial of ‘race’ as an explanatory concept veils racial binaries that are enacted through Norwegian ethnonationalism, and facilitates enactment of racist dynamics in education that is intended to prevent racism. (shrink)

In Denmark and Sweden sperm donation is the most debated and contested of the reproductive technologies that are currently in use. Although the two countries are neighbouring welfare states with public healthcare in common, policies and practices of sperm banking and sperm donation differ strongly. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how the sperm used for donor insemination is narrated, chosen, produced and consumed at sperm banks in Denmark and Sweden.The analysis illustrates that marginalization and stigmatization of infertile men, (...) donors, single women, lesbians and donor children not only takes place in the media and during debates in the Danish and Swedish parliaments where the technology has historically been contested, but also at the sperm banks and fertility clinics. This article therefore calls for more inclusive stories on sperm donation to be narrated. (shrink)

In April 1931, the American Dental Association’s Seal of Acceptance was introduced. The seal is still in use today and has been widely praised in dental literature as a symbol of safety, efficacy and credibility within dental therapeutics and an icon of professionalism for the American Dental Association. The celebratory rhetoric perpetuates a problematic narrative of a unified profession. I argue that it is necessary to go beyond the standard narrative. The complex history of the introduction of the acceptance programme (...) in 1930 and 1931 revolves around personal zeal and struggles for authority between different fractions within the American Dental Association seeking to balance professional ideals with economic necessities. I show how authority and professional identity was claimed, redistributed and communicated within a professional organisation, and demonstrate how the seal was invoked to influence marketing strategies of dental manufacturers, reverse the relationship between manufacturers and the profession of dentistry, to brand dentistry in a wider, public context, and how it became an economic thorn in the side of the Board of Trustees of the American Dental Association. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 329-355.

Mata and von Helversen's integrative review of adult age differences in search performance makes a good case that cognitive control may impact certain aspects of self-regulation of search. However, information foraging as a framework also offers an avenue to consider how adults of different ages adapt to age-related changes in cognition, such as in cognitive control.

A central theme to be found in Dewey’s writings is his criticism of theories of knowledge proposed throughout the history of Western philosophy. None of the once familiar “isms,” whether it be a variant of empiricism, rationalism, or idealism, escaped Dewey’s scrutiny. And each in its turn proved to be unacceptable to Dewey, because it was found that each rested upon what Dewey referred to as “the philosophical fallacy,” namely “the conversion of eventual functions into antecedent existence,” or the fallacy (...) of selective emphasis. Basically, this fallacy amounted for Dewey to the emphasis of one aspect of scientific inquiry to the exclusion of the rest, and taking the features characteristic of that aspect as paradigmatic for the purpose of accounting for knowledge. Thus, for example, advocates of what Dewey called sensationalism, for whom knowledge was to be explicated in terms of an immediate acquaintance with a perceptual given, emphasized an aspect of scientific inquiry, viz., that inquiry is engaged in only when some given situation is problematic, without regard to the fact that even those features of a problematic situation, which are taken to be given and stable features for purposes of resolving the problem, are so taken only provisionally, depending upon whether the ensuing inquiry is successful in resolving the problem at hand. (shrink)