2. Daugman, J. G. Brain metaphor and brain theory 3. Mundale, J. Neuroanatomical Foundations of Cognition: Connecting the Neuronal Level with the Study of Higher Brain Areas.

An impressive body of recent literature posits that traditional notions of civil disobedience prevent us from properly considering potentially legitimate types of ‘uncivil’ political lawbreaking. When might uncivil (covert, legally evasive, morally offensive and potentially violent) lawbreaking prove normatively acceptable? If justifiable, what conditions should its practitioners be reasonably expected to meet? Despite some important insights, defenders of uncivil disobedience rely on a narrow and sometimes misleading view of civil disobedience, as previously practiced and theorized. Notwithstanding legitimate skepticism about Rawlsian (...) notions of civil disobedience, they reproduce its troublesome binary or ‘all-or-nothing’ view of political lawbreaking. Uncivil disobedience’s proponents tend to group a vast array of distinctive types of lawbreaking under one amorphous categorical rubric, impeding the suitably complex, nuanced analysis we need. A superior approach would pay careful attention to uncivil disobedience’s ambivalent historical record, a record suggesting that UD is more likely to reproduce authoritarian populism’s disturbing political logic than counteract it. (shrink)

This book analyzes the support that should be given to minority views, reconsidering classic debates in Science and Technology Studies and examining numerous case studies.

Taking reduction in the traditional deductive sense, the programmatic claim that most of genetics can be reduced by molecular genetics is defended as feasible and significant. Arguments by Ruse and Hull that either the relationship is replacement or at best a weaker form of reduction are shown to rest on a mixture of historical and logical confusions about the nature of the theories involved.

Assume [Formula: see text]. Let [Formula: see text] be a [Formula: see text] equivalence relation coded in [Formula: see text]. [Formula: see text] has an ordinal definable equivalence class without any ordinal definable elements if and only if [Formula: see text] is unpinned. [Formula: see text] proves [Formula: see text]-class section uniformization when [Formula: see text] is a [Formula: see text] equivalence relation on [Formula: see text] which is pinned in every transitive model of [Formula: see text] containing the real (...) which codes [Formula: see text]: Suppose [Formula: see text] is a relation on [Formula: see text] such that each section [Formula: see text] is an [Formula: see text]-class, then there is a function [Formula: see text] such that for all [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text]. [Formula: see text] proves that [Formula: see text] is Jónsson whenever [Formula: see text] is an ordinal: For every function [Formula: see text], there is an [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text] in bijection with [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

As a clinical geneticist I have been amazed at the speed of discovery over the past 20 years. The specific genetic causes of thousands of rare genetic conditions have been defined due to improvements in genomic sequencing, computing power and international collaborations to phenotype individuals with similar clinical features. This knowledge has resulted in an increased ability to make accurate molecular diagnoses which informs optimal treatment and clinical care, can remove the need for unnecessary investigations and informs reproductive decision-making. However (...) for any given individual, this genetic testing can often take weeks or months before the initial genetic diagnosis is made within a family. Occasionally genetic information is required more quickly to define a clinical action. For years point of care testing (POCT) has been a mainstay of clinical care, for example, in confirming pregnancy or monitoring blood glucose. I had been keen to explore scenarios where a genetic POCT could be employed in clinical practice. To me, an obvious example appeared to be neonatal testing to avoid gentamicin-induced hearing loss. Here was a situation where we had known about the genetic …. (shrink)

This article updates the author’s 1982 argument that lutetium and lawrencium, rather than lanthanum and actinium, should be assigned to the d-block as the heavier analogs of scandium and yttrium, whereas lanthanum and actinium should be considered as the first members of the f-block with irregular configurations. This update is embedded within a detailed analysis of Lavelle’s abortive 2008 attempt to discredit this suggestion.

The simple systems methodology is a powerful reductionistic research strategy. It has problems as implemented in developmental genetics because the organisms studied are few and unrepresentative. Stronger inferences require independent arguments that key traits are widely distributed phylogenetically. Evolutionary and developmental mechanisms of generative entrenchment and self-organization provide possible support, and are also necessary components of a developmental systems approach.

For much of 2021, allocating the scarce supply of Covid‐19 vaccines was the world's most pressing bioethical challenge, and similar challenges may recur for novel therapies and future vaccines. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) identified three fundamental ethical principles to guide the process: maximize benefits, promote justice, and mitigate health inequities. We argue that critical components of the recommended protocol were internally inconsistent with these principles. Specifically, the ACIP (...) violated its principles by recommending overly broad health care worker priority in phase 1a, using being at least seventy‐five years of age as the only criterion to identify individuals at high risk of death from Covid‐19 during phase 1b, failing to recommend place‐based vaccine distribution, and implicitly endorsing first‐come, first‐served allocation. More rigorous empirical work and the development of a complete ethical framework that recognizes trade‐offs between principles may have prevented these mistakes and saved lives. (shrink)

Discusses the problems that surround the developing science of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This title introduces and clarifies the basic concepts for understanding these problems and also discusses opposing views and possible solutions. It describes the kinds of research that seem to improve our understanding of the mechanisms of intelligence.

Early in his career Richard Rorty became well known for advocating what became known as eliminative materialism. This position depended on the radical idea that the main elements of commonsense psychology, including ordinary sensations, do not really exist. This chapter argues that on a closer reading of Rorty's relevant articles, it is clear that Rorty was not an eliminative materialist in any normal sense, but rather a more conventional materialist who made some misguided claims about what mind–brain identity involves.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dramatic Frame and Philosophic Idea in PlatoWilliam A. JohnsonIn a minority of plato's dialogues the central philosophic discourse is presented indirectly, refracted through the lens of a dramatic frame of more or less complexity.1 Scholars typically divorce the question of the dramatic frame from the philosophy of the dialogues: the frame is often simply set to one side by analytic philosophers, and tends to be considered in terms of (...) characterization, narrative technique, intratextual associations and the like by students of the "literary Plato."2 I here consider the four dialogues that mark Plato's most ambitious experiments in construction of a complex narrative frame: Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, and Theaetetus. By focusing on the effect that the indirect narration has on the reader, I construct a view of these narrative experiments that puts them together with the philosophic program of the dialogues. Baldly stated: I argue that the elaborate indirectness of the dramatic frame means to reflect, and to make vivid for the reader, not only the remove between written representation and the doing of philosophy, but also the remove between perceptible and Ideal world as suggested in Plato's vision of the Ideas.PhaedoAt the beginning of Plato's Phaedo, Echecrates asks Phaedo to tell him about the last hours of Socrates' life. He points out, "None of the people in Phlius go to Athens much these days, and it is a long time since we had any visitor from there who could give us any definite information, except that he was executed by drinking hemlock" (57a–b).3 The reader thereby comes to realize: (1) the conversation is situated in Phlius, a somewhat remote town on the Peloponnesus far from Athens (and far from anyone who might be able to correct or verify Phaedo's account); (2) since "no Phliasian goes to Athens much these days" and "it is a long time since we had any visitor from Athens who could give us any definite information," Phaedo's arrival in Phlius comes at a significant temporal distance from Socrates' death; (3) on the same grounds, the reader is led to wonder how long a time might have lapsed between this conversation and its report to Plato back in Athens (if indeed this is based on a report, on which see below); (4) on the other hand, Phaedo, as an intimate of Socrates, is presumed to be able to provide "definite information" (σαφές τι). Echecrates goes on to ask Phaedo to "be kind enough to give us a really detailed account" (σαφέστατα, 58d2) of Socrates' last day. When Phaedo says that he is willing, Echecrates urges again: "Now try to describe every detail as carefully as you can" (, 58d8). The bulk of Phaedo will be this account, told by Phaedo to Echecrates. The desire for accurate detail is emphasized. But Echecrates' insistence on accuracy sits uneasily with the spatial and temporal remove introduced at the beginning. How accurate, really, is Phaedo's account?The answer to this question—is the account accurate?—is, however, not at issue here. What is more interesting, or at least what interests me, is the fact that the dramatic frame seems designed to bring such questions into play. Bald historical questions (Did Socrates really say that? How does Plato know? Is Phaedo's memory accurate?) may seem unsophisticated, but they are natural questions for the reader to pose—as generations of readers and commentators attest. The questions are natural only in the sense that the text is constructed so as to prompt [End Page 578] them. Questions of historicity arise almost inevitably from the tension in the dramatic frame between, on the one hand, the repeated emphasis on the desire for accuracy, and, on the other hand, the strained relationship—elaborately indirect and distant both spatially and temporally—between the words of the text and the words of Socrates.A further, telling detail appears directly before Phaedo's narrative begins. In response to a question by Echecrates, Phaedo lists the friends of Socrates who were present. In the course of this list, Phaedo famously remarks, "I believe that Plato was ill" or perhaps better (Jowett) "but Plato, if I am not mistaken, was... (shrink)

In this paper, I highlight the importance of models and social structure to Kuhn’s conception of science, and then use these elements to sketch a Kuhnian classification of scientific controversies. I show that several important sorts of non-revolutionary scientific disagreements were both identified and analyzed in Structure. Ultimately, I contend that Kuhn’s conception of science supports an approach to scientific controversies that has the potential to both reveal the importantly different sources of scientific disagreements and to provide useful resources for (...) understanding their endurance and eventual termination. Several brief examples are used to suggest the power of a Kuhnian analysis and this analysis is contrasted with several more contemporary alternatives. (shrink)

This chapter examines the ways in which French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers conceptual resources for an enactive account of language, in particular his extensive consideration of language in The Logic of Sense. Specifically, Deleuze’s distinction between the nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau creations and that of Antonin Artaud’s “transla- tion” of Carroll’s Jabberwocky highlights the need for an enactive, rather than merely embodied, approach to sense-making, particularly with regard to the general category of what Jakobson and Halle (1956) call “sound (...) symbolism”. (shrink)

This essay explores the ways in which a broadly pluralist outlook can help illuminate longstanding issues of constitutional theory and practice. It begins with a common-sense understanding of pluralism as the diversity of observed practices within a general category (section 2). It turns out that many assumptions Americans and others often make about constitutional essentials are valid only locally but not generically. The essay then turns to pluralism in a more technical and philosophical sense—specifically, the account of value pluralism adumbrated (...) by Isaiah Berlin and developed by his followers. Section 3 sketches this version of pluralism, and section 4 brings it to bear on a range of familiar constitutional issues. In the process, a distinction emerges between, on the one hand, areas of variation among constitutions and, on the other, some general truths about political life that define core constitutional functions. The essay concludes (section 5) with some brief reflections on the normative thrust of pluralist constitutional theory—in particular, a presumption in favor of the maximum accommodation of individual and group differences consistent with the maintenance of constitutional unity and civic order. (shrink)