Clinical mental health researchers may understandably struggle with how to incorporate biological assessments in clinical research. The options are numerous and are described in a vast and complex body of literature. Here we provide guidelines to assist mental health researchers seeking to include biological measures in their studies. Apart from a focus on behavioral outcomes as measured via interviews or questionnaires, we advocate for a focus on biological pathways in clinical trials and epidemiological studies that may help clarify pathophysiology and (...) mechanisms of action, delineate biological subgroups of participants, mediate treatment effects, and inform personalized treatment strategies. With this paper we aim to bridge the gap between clinical and biological mental health research by (1) discussing the clinical relevance, measurement reliability, and feasibility of relevant peripheral biomarkers; (2) addressing five types of biological tissues, namely blood, saliva, urine, stool and hair; and (3) providing information on how to control sources of measurement variability. (shrink)

We consider the strongest forms of enumeration reducibility, those that occur between 1- and npm-reducibility inclusive. By defining two new reducibilities which are counterparts to 1- and i-reducibility, respectively, in the same way that nm- and npm-reducibility are counterparts to m- and pm-reducibility, respectively, we bring out the structure of the strong reducibilities. By further restricting n1- and nm-reducibility we are able to define infinite families of reducibilities which isomorphically embed the r. e. Turing degrees. Thus the many well-known results (...) in the theory of the r. e. Turing degrees have counterparts in the theory of strong reducibilities. We are also able to positively answer the question of whether there exist distinct reducibilities ≤y and ≤a between ≤e and ≤m such that there exists a non-trivial ≤y-contiguous ≤z degree. (shrink)

The care of elderly people with dementia poses ethical problems in several respects. This paper considers the problems in relation to treatment, withdrawal of treatment (including nutrition and hydration) in terminal care, and consent to involvement in research. It is ultimately the responsibility of the physician to take the decision about whether or not to proceed with treatment, according to the best interests of the patient, but nurses, families and significant others can be involved in making the decision. When withdrawal (...) of treatment or withdrawal of nutrition and hydration in the terminal stages of dementia are being considered it is necessary to take into account the nature of the treatment, whether or not it is extraordinary, and the goals of continued nutrition. In some circumstances it may be possible for them to be withdrawn. Only research which is aimed at evaluating treatment for dementia may involve subjects who are suffering from dementia. Soigner des personnes âgés souffrant de la démence pose plusieurs problèmes éthiques. Cet article considère les problèmes concernant le traitement, cessation de traitement (y inclus nutrition et hydration) dans la phase terminale, et consentement de participation dans les recherches. C'est ultimement la décision du docteur si oui ou non de continuer avec le traitement selon les meilleurs intérêts du malade, mais les infirmiers/ères, les familles et les personnes importantes autour du malade peuvent jouer un rôle dans les décisions. Si la cessation de traitement ou cessation de nutrition et hydration dans la phase terminale de démence est envisagée il est nécessaire de tenir compte de la nature du traitement, s'il est 'extraordinaire' ou non, et le but de nutrition si on continuait. Dans quelques circonstances il est possible de les discontinuer. Seuls les recherches qui ont pour but d'évaluer les traitements pour la démence peuvent utiliser des personnes souffrant de démence. Die Pflege von älteren Personen mit Demenz stellt einige ethische Probleme. Dieser Artikel betrachtet die Probleme in Beziehung auf die Pflege, Zurückziehung von Pflege (auch von Nahrung und Getrank) der Sterbenden und der Entscheidung, in der Forschung beteiligt zu sein. Der Arzt hat die schlussendliche Verantwortung über die Entscheidung ob mit der Pflege weitergefahren werden soll oder nicht nach dem besten Interesse der Patienten. Aber das Krankenpflegepersonal, die Familie und bedeutende Andere können auch an dieser Entscheidung teilnehmen. Wenn es sich um Zurückziehung der Pflege, oder Zurückziehung von Nahrung oder Getrank in der Sterbepflege von Personen mit Demenz handelt, is es nötig, das Wesen der Pflege und die Ziele einer fortfahrenden Nahrung zu kennen. In gewissen Fällen ist es möglich, diese zurück zu ziehen. Es sollen nur Patienten mit Demenz an Forschungen teilnehmen die über die Pflege der Demenz einschätzt. (shrink)

“I myself was forced to call myself a molecular biologist because when inquiring clergymen asked me what I did, I got tired of explaining that I was a mixture of crystallographer, biophysicist, biochemist, and geneticist.” Thus explained Francis Crick, who with James Watson discovered in 1953 the double helical structure of DNA, the genetic material..

This article opens with general and historical remarks on philosophy of science's problems with the concept of discovery. Then, drawing upon simple examples of Watson's and Crick's non-philosophical usage, I characterize phrases of the type "x discovers y" semantically. It will subsequently be shown how widespread philosophical discussion on discovery violates the semantic constraints of phrases of the type "x discovers y." Then I provide a philosophical reconstruction of "x discovers y" that is in keeping with the "folk" notion (...) of discovery. The philosophical ingredients of this approach are taken from a certain aspect of action theory and from epistemological reliabilism. The approach draws upon the concept of superior action and connects this concept to progressive research. In contrast to normal actions, superior actions are primarily explained by competencies. This perspective includes reminders of what some nineteenth-century philosopher-scientists had advocated as a competence-oriented view on scientific research. Finally, this approach is applied to the case of Watson's and Crick's discovery. (shrink)

El examen de los actores, instituciones y materiales implicados en el Proyecto Genoma Humano (PGH) remite inmediatamente al contexto de los macroproyectos científicos que suelen caracterizarse con el expresivo rótulo de «Big Science». Como es bien sabido, la afortunada expresión fue acuñada por el sociólogo de la ciencia Derek de Solla Price en 1936 quien elaboró su concepción considerando, principalmente, a la física de su época. Sin embargo, las ciencias biológicas tardaron varios decenios más en adquirir las dimensiones de la (...) Big Science. En el caso del PGH se presenta un panorama muy distinto al contexto en el que surgió la estructura de la doble hélice. El investigador aislado no tiene cabida en este contexto, y los grandes científicos son ahora directores de proyectos y el caso de James Watson es de nuevo paradigmático. (shrink)

We explore the implications of a hierarchical structure, consisting of (a) the higher order dimensions of nonspecific Positive Activation and Negative Activation and (b) multiple specific negative affects (e.g., fear, sadness, and anger) and positive affects (e.g., joviality, self-assurance, and attentiveness) at the lower level. Emotional blends of the same valence (e.g., simultaneously experiencing both fear and sadness) are an essential part of this structure and form the basis of the higher order Negative and Positive Activation dimensions. Mixed cross-valence emotions (...) (e.g., feeling both nervous and alert) are not central to this hierarchical scheme but are compatible with it. We examine the frequency of pure emotional states, same-valence emotional blends, and cross-valence mixed emotions in a large momentary mood sample. (shrink)

Necessity and sufficiency are the building blocks of all successful explanations. Yet despite their importance, these notions have been conceptually underdeveloped and inconsistently applied in explainable artificial intelligence, a fast-growing research area that is so far lacking in firm theoretical foundations. In this article, an expanded version of a paper originally presented at the 37th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, we attempt to fill this gap. Building on work in logic, probability, and causality, we establish the central role of (...) necessity and sufficiency in XAI, unifying seemingly disparate methods in a single formal framework. We propose a novel formulation of these concepts, and demonstrate its advantages over leading alternatives. We present a sound and complete algorithm for computing explanatory factors with respect to a given context and set of agentive preferences, allowing users to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for desired outcomes at minimal cost. Experiments on real and simulated data confirm our method’s competitive performance against state of the art XAI tools on a diverse array of tasks. (shrink)

The Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) literature tends to focus on bias as a problem that requires ex post solutions (e.g. fairness metrics), rather than addressing the underlying social and technical conditions that (re)produce it. In this article, we propose a complementary strategy that uses genealogy as a constructive, epistemic critique to explain algorithmic bias in terms of the conditions that enable it. We focus on XAI feature attributions (Shapley values) and counterfactual approaches as potential tools to gauge these conditions (...) and offer two main contributions. One is constructive: we develop a theoretical framework to classify these approaches according to their relevance for bias as evidence of social disparities. We draw on Pearl’s ladder of causation (Causality: models, reasoning, and inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, Causality, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511803161) to order these XAI approaches concerning their ability to answer fairness-relevant questions and identify fairness-relevant solutions. The other contribution is critical: we evaluate these approaches in terms of their assumptions about the role of protected characteristics in discriminatory outcomes. We achieve this by building on Kohler-Hausmann’s (Northwest Univ Law Rev 113(5):1163–1227, 2019) constructivist theory of discrimination. We derive three recommendations for XAI practitioners to develop and AI policymakers to regulate tools that address algorithmic bias in its conditions and hence mitigate its future occurrence. (shrink)

Reflecting Alan Robinson's fundamental contribution to computational logic, this book brings together seminal papers in inference, equality theories, and logic programming. It is an exceptional collection that ranges from surveys of major areas to new results in more specialized topics. Alan Robinson is currently the University Professor at Syracuse University. Jean-Louis Lassez is a Research Scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Gordon Plotkin is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Contents: Inference. Subsumption, A (...) Sometimes Undervalued Procedure, Larry Wos, Ross Overbeek, and Ewing Lusk. The Markgraf Karl Refutation Procedure, Hans Jurgen Ohlbach and Jorg H. Siekmann. Modal Logic Should Say More than it Does, Melvin Fitting. Interactive Proof Presentation, W. W. Bledsoe. Intelligent Backtracking Revisited, Maurice Bruynooghe. A Science of Reasoning, Alan Bundy. Inductive Inference of Theories from Facts, Ehud Y. Shapiro. Equality. Solving Equations in Abstract Algebras: A Rule-based Survey of Unification, Jean-Pierre Jouannaud and Claude Kirchner. Disunification: A Survey, Hubert Comon. A Case Study of the Completion Procedure: Proving Ring Commutativity Problems, Deepak Kapur and Hantao Zhang. Computations in Regular Rewriting Systems I and II, Girard Huet and JeanJacques Levy. Unification and ML Type Reconstruction, Paris Kanellakis, Harry Mairson, and John Mitchell. Automatic Dimensional Analysis, Mitchell Wand. Logic Programming. Logic Programming Schemes and Their Implementations, Keith Clark. A Near-Horn Prolog for Compilation, Donald Loveland and David Reed. Unfold/Fold Transformations of Logic Programs, P. A. Gardner and J. C. Shepherdson. An Algebraic Representation of Logic Program Computations, Andrea Corradini and Ugo Montanari. Theory of Disjunctive Logic Programs, Jack Minker, Arcot Rajasekar, and Jorge Lobo. Bottom-Up Evaluation of Logic Programs, Jeffrey Naughton and Raghu Ramakrishnan. Absys, the First Logic Programming Language: A View of the Inevitability of Logic Programming, E. W. Elcock. (shrink)

Resumen: ¿Qué es la identidad de la persona? El pensamiento de Harry Frankfurt y sus enmiendas, al hilo de objeciones de Velleman, Penelhum, Watson y Korsgaard, resulta instructivo porque manifiesta los alcances y las limitaciones de una radicalización paulatina de la determinación puramente individual de la propia identidad volitiva. En este trabajo se expone esa trayectoria intelectual, que va desde los actos más controlables hasta los menos sujetos al control voluntario inmediato, pero también autoimpuestos. Al final, Frankfurt admite cierto (...) amor innato.: What is personal identity? Frankfurt’s thought and the modifications it undergoes following objections by Velleman, Penelhum, Watson and Korsgaard are instructive because they highlight the scope and limitations of a gradual radicalization of a strictly individual self-constitution of one’s own volitional identity. This article traces that intellectual trajectory, which goes from those acts most amenable to immediate voluntary control to those that are least amenable to it, but nonetheless self-imposed. In the end, Frankfurt admits there is a certain innate love. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the role of curiosity as a key motivating factor in successful collaboration for interdisciplinary research. I argue that curiosity is an important, perhaps essential component of successful collaboration for interdisciplinary teams. I begin by defining curiosity and highlighting the significance of the characteristic motivation of the virtue for successful collaboration. I argue that curiosity initiates, maintains, and coordinates successful collaborative interdisciplinary research. Moreover, if curiosity is a foundational intellectual virtue, then it is not only (...) important but essential for successful collaboration. I then draw attention to a specific type of curiosity, namely inquisitiveness, and argue that the defining feature of inquisitiveness – good questioning – renders it a particularly valuable form of curiosity for collaborative projects, including (although not limited to) interdisciplinary research. I conclude by deriving some practical recommendations for successful collaboration in interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

Many have attempted to respond to arguments for the incompatibility of freedom with divine foreknowledge by claiming that God’s beliefs about the future are explained by what the world is like at that future time. We argue that this response adequately advances the discussion only if the theist is able to articulate a model of foreknowledge that is both clearly possible and compatible with freedom. We investigate various models the theist might articulate and argue that all of these models fail.

One of the major challenges facing agricultural and food systems today is the loss of agrobiodiversity. Considering the current impasse of preventing the worldwide loss of crop diversity, this paper highlights the possibility for a radical reorientation of current legal seed frameworks that could provide more space for alternative seed systems to evolve which centre on norms that support on-farm agrobiodiversity. Understanding the underlying norms that shape seed commons are important, since norms both delimit and contribute to what ultimately will (...) constitute the seeds and who will ultimately have access to the seeds and thus to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported. This paper applies a commoning approach to explore the underpinning norms of a Swedish seed commons initiative and discusses the potential for furthering agrobiodiversity in the context of wider legal and authoritative discourses on seed enclosure. The paper shows how the seed commoning system is shaped and protected by a particular set of farming norms, which allows for sharing seeds among those who adhere to the norms but excludes those who will not. The paper further illustrates how farmers have been able to navigate fragile legal and economic pathways to collectively organize around landrace seeds, which function as an epistemic farming community, that maintain landraces from the past and shape new landraces for the present, adapted to diverse agro-ecological environments for low-input agriculture. The paper reveals how the ascribed norms to the seed commons in combination with the current seed laws set a certain limit to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported and discusses why prescriptions of “getting institutions right” for seed governance are difficult at best, when considering the shifting socio-nature of seeds. To further increase agrobiodiversity, the paper suggests future seed laws are redirected to the sustenance of a proliferation of protected seed commoning systems that can supply locally adapted plant material for diverse groups of farmers and farming systems. (shrink)

Twenty papers from a conference in Villanova, Pennsylvania discuss the politics, psychoanalysis and feminist theory, aesthetics, and ethics of phenomenology and existentialism in North America, from its beginnings in the 1940s to its ...

The article concerns a mediaeval Indian debate over whether, and if so how, we can know that a self exists, understood here as a subject of cognition that outlives individual cognitions, being their common substrate. A passage that has not yet been translated from Sanskrit into a European language, from Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s Nyāyamañjarī, ‘Blossoms of Reasoning’, is examined. This rich passage reveals something not yet noted in secondary literature, namely that Mīmāṃsakas advanced four different models of what happens when the (...) self perceives itself. The article clarifies the differences between the four, and the historical and logical relationships between them. It also hypothesizes pressures that constituted the need for the creation of the newer views, i.e. perceived problems with the earlier views, which the proponents of the newer views saw themselves as overcoming. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

There are a class of moral virtues that have an intimate relationship with agential evaluation, following Gary Watson we can call these ‘second-order virtues,’ e.g., modesty, blind charity, being judgmental, etc. Julia Driver has argued that these virtues are distinguished by being virtues which require ignorance. Richard Y. Chappell and Helen Yetter-Chappell have argued that these virtues are distinguished by being virtues of salience. Aside from the disagreement about the distinguishing features of these virtues, there is an intrinsic interest (...) in the second-order virtues and vices. For these virtues and vices play an integral role in moral education and character formation. This paper seeks to deepen that discussion by examining a second-order vice, namely, the vice of being judgmental. I argue that being judgmental requires a salience structure which exhibits undue attention to the negative features of others (pace Jessie Munton). Modeling being judgmental as a vice of attention helps to unify the various characteristics of judgmental persons, namely, a tendency to excessive standing, excessive epitomization, and relational qualification. As an upshot, we receive another reason to adopt an attention model of the second-order virtues and vices. (shrink)

Desde que 1975 fue declarado por las Naciones Unidas Año Internacional de las Mujeres, han sido numerosas las medidas legales y políticas para asegurar la participación de las mujeres en todos los ámbitos de acción de la sociedad. Sin embargo, los logros no se sitúan solamente en un incremento cuantitativo de mujeres en sectores como el laboral o los procesos de toma de decisiones. La integración de la igualdad de género en la estructuración de la sociedad abre interrogantes sobre la (...) nueva lectura del poder, de la ciudadanía y de las relaciones personales. Y al mismo tiempo, cuestiona si las medidas de apoyo a la participación de las mujeres están teniendo o no un efecto positivo en favor de la igualdad. (shrink)