ABSTRACTOscar Larsson’s essay condemns discursive institutionalism for the “sin” of subjectivism. In reality, however, discursive institutionalism emphasizes the intersubjective nature of ideas through its theorization of agents’ “background ideational abilities” and “foreground discursive abilities.” It also avoids relativism by means of Wittgenstein’s distinction between experiences of everyday life and pictures of the world. Contrary to Larsson, what truly separates post-structuralism from discursive institutionalism is the respective approaches’ theorization of the relationship of power to ideas, with discursive institutionalists mainly focused on (...) persuasive power through ideas, while post-structuralists focus on the structural power in ideas or on coercive power over ideas. (shrink)

Psychology distinguishes between a bodily and a narrative self. Within neuroscience, models of the bodily self are based on exteroceptive sensorimotor processes or on the integration of interoceptive sensations. Recent research has revealed interactions between interoceptive and exteroceptive processing of self-related information, for example that mirror self-observation can improve interoceptive awareness. Using heartbeat perception, we measured the effect on interoceptive awareness of two experimental manipulations, designed to heighten attention to bodily and narrative aspects of the self. Participants gazed at a (...) photograph of their own face or at self-relevant words. In both experimental conditions interoceptive awareness was significantly increased, compared to baseline. Results show that attention to narrative aspects of self, previously regarded as relying on higher-order processes, has an effect similar to self-face stimuli in improving interoceptive awareness. Our findings extend the previously observed interaction between the bodily self and interoception to more abstract amodal representations of the self. (shrink)

This paper presents a computational model of the way humans inductively identify and aggregate concepts from the low-level stimuli they are exposed to. Based on the idea that humans tend to select the simplest structures, it implements a dynamic hierarchical chunking mechanism in which the decision whether to create a new chunk is based on an information-theoretic criterion, the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. We present theoretical justifications for this approach together with results of an experiment in which participants, exposed (...) to meaningless symbols, have been implicitly encouraged to create high-level concepts by grouping them. Results show that the designed model, called hereafter MDLChunker, makes precise quantitative predictions both on the kind of chunks created by the participants and also on the moment at which these creations occur. They suggest that the simplicity principle used to design MDLChunker is particularly efficient to model chunking mechanisms. The main interest of this model over existing ones is that it does not require any adjustable parameter. (shrink)

Law must evolve to play its part in addressing the anthropogenic threats of climate change and biodiversity loss. Lawyers have a key role to play in assisting that evolution, and the ethics that govern lawyers’ work will play a large part in determining its success. This article explains how four core approaches to legal ethics support lawyers in their work to address climate change and to facilitate more sustainable ways of living.

This article approaches the topics of invention and innovation by way of cultural theory. Building on the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and John Austin, the article offers definitions of invention and innovation in semiotic and performative terms. It conceptualizes invention as a process of resignification, and frames innovation as a felicitous performative. Structuralist theory appears to foreclose the potential for these two terms to exist in the empirical world. This article explores these barriers but also locates conceptual spaces for (...) invention and innovation, and identifies these phenomena as they occur in contemporary empirical sites. (shrink)

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

This paper describes the process by which female typists became participants of sorts while transcribing audiotaped interviews. The primary data included sensitive and sexual subject matter about women's Pap smear (PS) experiences. Besides overcoming minor technical difficulties, die major discovery was that the typists had a tendency to interpolate and even normalize the data. A feminist post‐structuralist perspective was extended to examine these interpolations as secondary data. This revealed that the typists were becoming unexpected participants as commentators, validators, analysts and (...) normalizers of the data. From the subjective positions of both medical typists and recipients of PS, the typists provided data validation that included contradictions and transgressions from the cancer screening scheme propaganda. Furthermore, both typists were exposed to other women's PS stories and experienced vicarious consciousness raising. For one typist this included embodiment of other women's distress, raising questions about the occupational hazards associated with transcribing distressing data. Thus the social and relational aspects of those involved in the transcription process proved influential to both the data (and analysis), and to the practical aspects of data management. I argue that details of such influences need to be submitted for scrutiny as additional aspects of rigour. (shrink)

This paper focuses on some of the ethical issues which may arise when conducting research in the context of homelessness. These issues are considered from the viewpoints of researchers, research coordinators and interviewers, drawing from their extensive real world experience. In addition to negotiating the complex context of homelessness, community-based homelessness researchers need to address a number of ethical issues in research conception, design, implementation and dissemination. Although these issues are commonly considered in community-engaged research, research with people who are (...) homeless may raise exceptional challenges. Such challenges include determining the nature of informed consent; protecting research participants and researchers, and determining appropriate compensation for participation. Understanding the context of homelessness to conduct ethical research will require sharing information and joint decision-making, processes that must include members of communities within which the research participants live. Furthermore, researchers should be sensitive to the changing context of homelessness, and vigilant for new ethical challenges. (shrink)

Illness and hospitalization are sources of vulnerability; they arguably endow nurses and midwives with the moral obligation to develop caring relationships with patients. Fairness and the equal treatment of patients are central to moral practice; current government publications are giving this political emphasis. This article argues that patient partiality is one factor that may result in insidiously unequal caregiving. Data generated during a qualitative study into professional caring suggest that patient partiality is an accepted part of everyday practice. Factors such (...) as the patient’s personality, nurse-patient familiarity and the perceived level of patients’ understanding and interest in their illness emerged as possible sources of partiality and influence on practitioners’ interactions with patients. The article argues that patient partiality can be managed morally if practitioners develop self-awareness and constantly reflect on the moral integrity of everyday practice. Throughout the article, unless it is stated that specific reference is being made to either nurses or midwives, reference to a nurse or practitioner denotes both. It is also emphasized that no implication is intended that any study participants provided unequal care. Rather, data are utilized solely to generate focused discussion around the concept of patient partiality. (shrink)

This study investigates moments in which one participant in an interaction embodies that he is “doing thinking,” a display that is commonly referred to as “thinking face. ” From an interactional perspective, it is assumed that embodied displays of “doing thinking” are a recurring social practice and serve interactive functions. While previous studies have examined thinking faces primarily in word searches and storytelling, the present study focuses on argumentative activities, in which children engage in processes of joint decision-making. The paper (...) has two interrelated aims. The first aim is to describe how multiple modalities—beyond the face—are temporally coordinated to create multimodal gestalts of “doing thinking.” It is shown that thinking displays not only involve dynamic imaginative gaze but also stylized bodily postures. The second aim is to generate knowledge about the functions of thinking displays in children's argumentative activities. The analysis describes how both speakers and recipients use thinking displays in different turn positions and align them with verbal talk or silence. The data for this study comprise video recordings of decision-making processes in groups of older children. Drawing on a multimodal approach to situated interaction, it will be proposed that embodied displays of “doing thinking” provide a resource to shape participation frameworks, mark epistemic stances and create epistemic ecologies for collaborative reasoning. By investigating thinking displays in a particular conversational activity, the study sheds light on the diversity and context-sensitive functionality of thinking displays. It also contributes to recent research on children's collaborative reasoning as an embodied discursive practice. (shrink)

Significant criticisms have been raised regarding the ethical and psychological basis of living wills. Various solutions to address these criticisms have been advanced, such as the use of surrogate decision makers alone or data science‐driven algorithms. These proposals share a fundamental weakness: they focus on resolving the problems of living wills, and, in the process, lose sight of the underlying ethical principle of advance care planning, autonomy. By suggesting that the same sweeping solutions, without opportunities for choice, be applied to (...) all, individual patients are treated as population‐level groups—as a theoretical patient who represents a population, not the specific patient crafting his or her individualized future care plans. Instead, advance care planning can be improved through a multimodal approach that both mitigates cognitive biases and allows for customization of the decision‐making process by allowing for the incorporation of a variety of methods of advance care planning. (shrink)

This authoritative and wide-ranging book, first published in 2003, examines the history of western linguistics over a 2000-year timespan, from its origins in ancient Greece up to the crucial moment of change in the Renaissance that laid the foundations of modern linguistics. Some of today's burning questions about language date back a long way: in 1400 BC Plato was asking how words relate to reality. Other questions go back just a few generations, such as our interest in the mechanisms of (...) language change, or in the social factors that shape the way we speak. Vivien Law explores how ideas about language over the centuries have changed to reflect changing modes of thinking. A survey chapter brings the coverage of the book up to the present day. Classified bibliographies and chapters on research resources and the qualities the historian of linguistics needs to develop, provide the reader with the tools to go further. (shrink)

The authors of this essay reflect on the experience of co-teaching a course on the history of genetics and race. The collaboration has pushed them both—a historian of science and a biologist—to consider how to make space for moral and scientific judgment in a history classroom. Drawing on examples from the course, they argue that it is possible to encourage social action and thoughtful critiques of past and current science without succumbing to a whiggish narrative of progress.

Many suggest that professionalism as traditionally understood is all but dead in today's legal marketplace. Some scholars believe that 'professional' orientations based on managerialism and influenced by profitability have seen the demise of the lawyer's traditional professional identity. This paper argues otherwise. A pilot qualitative study of new Australian lawyers indicates that professional ideals can still flourish. Participants both understood the traditional ideals and sought to incorporate them in their own developing sense of professionalism. This paper reviews the experiences of (...) 11 early-career Australian lawyers in their first year of practice. Preliminary results suggest that certain experiences are crucial to developing and retaining a broad sense of professionalism: finding a balance between autonomous/independent work and close mentoring and supervision; realizing that legal practice is not merely a rational and rule-based activity, but one that involves ongoing uncertainty, including the uncertainly of dealing with 'real' people displaying 'real' emotions; and reaching a comfortable 'value convergence' between one's own values and those modelled by colleagues. (shrink)

This study looks into the factors that foster the use of contingent employment in the Philippines, and its consequences. It also explores the relationship between corporate social performance and the nature of contingent employment. Results indicate an inverse relationship between levels of social performance and utilization of contingent employment. There is a direct relationship between the size and intensity of utilization of temporary employees and the combined effects of unionization and total employment size. Publicly listed companies exhibit higher utilization of (...) temporary employees. However, factors that foster the use of project employees need tobe explored further. Benefits are influenced by the intensity of utilization of contingent employees. Formalization of the use of contingent employees tends to blur the difference between casual and regular employees. The use of subcontracting positively influences the number of benefits provided and diminishes the differential benefits between regular and project employees. Unionization, however, tends to increase the differential benefits between regular employees and project employees. (shrink)

Maria Rentetzi. Trafficking Materials and Gendered Research Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna.

One of the common and commonsensical ways to distinguish cinema from every other art and semiotic system, and to define the property of its uniqueness, is to claim that cinema is the only art/”language” that links images. This “linking” can imply three different yet complementary operations. First, cinema links individual still photographs into an apparently continuous sequence of movement by pushing the individual frames or photographs through a camera or projector at sixteen or twenty-four or however many frames per second. (...) Second, cinema links images by editing , by splicing together individual shots, which are continuous chains of linked frames. Finally, cinema links images with sounds, synchronously or otherwise. The only problem with such an apparently unrestrictive and unprescriptive definition of cinema and the “cinematic” is that it obscures an essentially cinematic operation that precedes the linking of cinema images: the image must first be framed before it can be linked with another.But is framing unique to cinema? Don’t paintings have frames? Aren’t photographs frames? Isn’t the theater’s proscenium arch a frame? A consequence of such perfectly sensible questions is a consistent undervaluing of the cinema frame as an essentially and uniquely cinematic tool, unlike that of any other art, producing serious errors in the writing of film theory and serious misunderstandings of the processes of film history. The goal of this article is to diagnose some of these errors so they might someday be cured. Gerald Mast is professor of English and general in the humanities at the University of Chicago. Among his many books are A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, Film/Cinema/Movie, The Movies in Our Midst, and Howard Hawks, Storyteller. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “What Isn’t Cinema?” and “Kracauer’s Two Tendencies and the Early History of Film Narrative”. (shrink)

Background: Moral distress has been described as a major problem for the nursing profession, and in recent years, a considerable amount of research has been undertaken to examine its causes and effects. However, few research projects have been performed that examined the moral distress of an entire nation’s nurses, as this particular study does. Aim/objective: The purpose of this study was to determine the frequency and intensity of moral distress experienced by registered nurses in New Zealand. Research design: The research (...) involved the use of a mainly quantitative approach supported by a slightly modified version of a survey based on the Moral Distress Scale–Revised. Participants and research context: In total, 1500 questionnaires were sent out at random to nurses working in general areas around New Zealand and 412 were returned, giving an adequate response rate of 27%. Ethical considerations: The project was evaluated and judged to be low risk and recorded as such on 22 February 2011 via the auspices of the Massey University Human Ethics Committee. Findings: Results indicate that the most frequent situations to cause nursing distress were (a) having to provide less than optimal care due to management decisions, (b) seeing patient care suffer due to lack of provider continuity and (c) working with others who are less than competent. The most distressing experiences resulted from (a) working with others who are unsafe or incompetent, (b) witnessing diminished care due to poor communication and (c) watching patients suffer due to a lack of provider continuity. Of the respondents, 48% reported having considered leaving their position due to the moral distress. Conclusion: The results imply that moral distress in nursing remains a highly significant and pertinent issue that requires greater consideration by health service managers, policymakers and nurse educators. (shrink)

When Andre Bazin's most important essays on film were collected together in a single volume and titled What is Cinema? they raised a question that Bazin did not answer. Nor did he intend to. Nor has it been answered by any of the other theorists who have written what now seem to be the major works on film theory and who now seem the most influential spokesmen for the art. Rudolf Arnheim, Andre Bazin, Stanley Cavell, S. M. Einstein, Siegfried Kracauer, (...) Christian Metz, Hugo Munsterberg, Erwin Panofsky, and Gene Youngblood have failed to define what cinema essentially is.1 Unlike Ionesco's comically methodical Logician, they have been less than careful about posing the problem correctly. As a result they have been less than successful and less than precise with a deceptively difficult and complicated issue. They have defined some kinds of cinema, they have defined some of the qualities unique to those kinds of cinema, they have defined the characteristics and devices they find most valuable in some of those kinds of cinema, they simply have not defined cinema. · 1. Relevant sections of all these theorists can be found in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings . Gerald Mast, associate professor of humanities at Richmond College of the City University of New York, has written A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, Filmguide to the Rules of the Game, and Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings . This article is part of a forthcoming book, What Isn't Cinema? He has also contributed "Kracauer's Two Tendencies and the Early History of Film Narrative" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLegal ethics pedagogy does not often attend to the gap between principles and effective action. A pedagogy that does attend to this gap is ‘Giving Voice to Values’. Developed by a US business academic, Mary Gentile, GVV focuses not on the normative questions of 'what is the right thing to do?' but on the behavioural question 'how do we get the right thing done?' GVV has much to offer efforts to foster ethical behaviour in lawyers. In this article, I situate (...) GVV within the behavioural ethics literature, which examines how and why people make the decisions they do in the ethical realm. I then turn to a discussion of the GVV curriculum and a case study of its application in legal education. I report preliminary results from research into the effectiveness of the GVV approach in postgraduate practical legal training. Finally, I encourage legal ethics teachers to experiment with GVV as a way of helping students develop skills for dealing constructively with ethical challenges in legal practice. (shrink)

With the development of wireless technology, two basic wireless network models that are commonly used, known as infrastructure and wireless ad hoc networks, have been developed. In the literature, it has been observed that channel contention is one of the main reasons for packet drop in WANETs. To handle this problem, this paper presents a routing protocol named CCBR. CCBR tries to determine a least contended path between the endpoints to increase packet delivery ratio and to reduce packet delay and (...) normalized routing overhead. Moreover, throughout the active data section, each intermediate node computes its channel contention value. If an intermediate node detects an increase in channel contention, it notifies the source node. Then the source node determines another least contended route for transmission. The advantages of CCBR are verified in our NS2-based performance study, and the results show that CCBR outperforms ad hoc on-demand distance vector in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and routing overhead by 4% to 9%. (shrink)

If narrating—the feeling of stories, fictional or otherwise—is an inherent possibility of motion pictures , then Kracauer's distinction between the realist and formative tendencies must be questioned and, in effect, the two must be synthesized. Wasn't the practical problem for the earliest films how to construct a formative sequence of events within an absolutely real-looking visual context? Wasn't the paradox of film narrative the combination of an obviously unreal sequence of events with an obviously real visual and social setting? And (...) isn't that paradox the most intriguing and complex problem of narrative film today, when the visual and social setting have become increasingly real-seeming? And doesn't this paradox have something to do with the fact that narrative film today seems richer and more important than it did a decade ago, at a time when various admirers of both cinéma vérité and cinéma pur had announced the death of fictional filmed narrative? Kracauer's realist aesthetic, concentrating exclusively on the photographic surfaces of things in the material world , overlooks this paradox altogether. It overlooks the fact—extremely relevant to the cinema—that the term "realist" means one thing in its common application to a painting or photograph and quite another thing in its equally common application to a novel or play. A realistic visual image is one that is said to "look like," "resemble," "reproduce," "iconically represent" the surfaces of the visual world. We see—or think we see—in a painting what we see—or think we see—in the real world.1 But a realistic story is one that is said to chronicle "credibly," "probably," and "believably" the way we think people feel, think, or act, the way things happen, and the reasons they happen, all of which are consistent with the reader-audience-society's beliefs about psychology, motivation, and probability. The standard of one sense of realism is primarily visual while the standard of the other is primarily psychological. One might see the early films groping, then, toward a synthesis of the visual realism of late-nineteenth-century painting/photography with the psychological realism of late-nineteenth-century novel/drama. · 1. This equivocation deliberately avoids the question of whether there is anything actually real about what one sees in a painting or photograph. The fact is that a very large number of viewers operate in this assumption because they think there is something real about what they see, despite the theoretical imprecision of their holding such a belief. Gerald Mast is the author of, among other works, A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, and Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "What Isn't Cinema?," appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)