This article offers a critical contribution to the debate on a problematic ‘type’ of injecting drug use referred to as needle fixation. At the heart of this debate, is a questioning of the existence, prevalence and usefulness of the needle fixation concept for academics and drug treatment practitioners working with injecting drug users. The aim of this article is to extend and develop this discussion by examining the historical conditions of the needle fixation discourse. (...) Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, it uses primary and secondary sources from the 19th century to the present to trace the historical trajectory of the problematic relationship between the injecting drug user, the syringe and truth. By reconceptualizing needle fixation as a technology of government, this article will argue that needle fixation can be seen to be incompatible with contemporary rationalities found in treatment policy and practice, suggesting that we have moved beyond needle fixation as a way of governing injecting drug use and into the domain of risk management. Beyond revealing this tension, the article highlights new lines that are currently being drawn between the injecting drug user, the syringe and truth from the field of neuroscience and the risk-management potential of psychopharmacology. (shrink)

A wide array of syntactic phenomena can be categorized as being either direction-sensitive (e.g. coordination) or direction-insensitive (quantification and medial extraction). In the realm of categorial grammar, many frameworks are engineered to handle one class of phenomena at the expense of the other. In particular, Lambek-inspired frameworks handle direction-sensitivity elegantly but struggle with cases of direction-insensitivity, whereas in linear grammars, the situation is just the opposite. One reasonably successful attempt to unify the insights of both types of grammar and allow (...) for the analysis of direction-sensitive as well as direction-insensitive phenomena is hybrid type-logical categorial grammar (HTLCG), which augments the set of syntactic categories of an ordinary linear grammar with the directional slashes of a Lambek grammar. In this paper, the complementary nature of Lambek and linear grammars, with respect to direction-sensitive and direction-insensitive phenomena, is expounded on, as is the nature of how HTLCG attempts to reconcile the two systems. The paper further discusses an alternative to HTLCG—a linear grammar which adds Lambek-like capabilities by augmenting the string-combining (phenogrammatic) mechanism instead of the definition of syntactic categories (the tectogrammar). In particular, LCGϕ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\hbox {LCG}_\phi $$\end{document} (linear categorial grammar with phenominators) adds a form of subtyping based on phenominators—a class of linear functions which specify various modes of (phenogrammatic) combination. Most importantly, an algorithm is provided for embedding HTLCG into LCGϕ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\hbox {LCG}_\phi $$\end{document}, thereby demonstrating that LCGϕ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\hbox {LCG}_\phi $$\end{document} can handle direction-(in)sensitivity at least as well as HTLCG. (shrink)

Advance care planning (ACP) is a process that seeks to elicit patients’ goals, values, and preferences for future medical care. While most commonly employed in adult patients, pediatric ACP is becoming a standard of practice for adolescent and young adult patients with potentially life-limiting illnesses. The majority of research has focused on patients and their families; little attention has been paid to the perspectives of healthcare providers (HCPs) regarding their perspectives on the process and its potential benefits and limitations. Focus (...) groups were conducted with 15 physicians as part of a larger study of adolescent and young adult ACP in hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) patients. This study identified two categories important to the utility of ACP in pediatric HSCT patients; (1) the temporal context of ACP and decision making and (2) the limitations of pediatric ACP, with subcategories identified as (a) embodied and witnessed knowing, (b) the impact of clinical cascades—when the treatment of one organ system creates complications in another system that needs to be treated—and a creation of a “new normal” following complications of illness and its treatment in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), (c) the balancing of adolescents’ autonomy with their capacity to make informed medical decisions, and (d) the epistemological frames that differ between HCP and patients and their families. These findings support ACP in adolescent and young adult HSCT patients, with a number of implications for practice as this process becomes more common. (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over (...) other methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

This text deals with a problem concerning processes of the productive power of knowledge. We draw on so called poststructural theories challenging the classical image of thought – as hinged upon a representational logic identifying entities in a rigid sense – when formulating a problem concerning the gap between knowledge and the object of knowledge. More specifically we are looking at this problem in the contexts of sustainable development and childhood using illustrating examples in order to test the validity of (...) these theoretical accounts. The examples we use range from internationally agreed documents claiming universality concerning environmental protection and childhood to national curricula for the pre-school to a Swedish governmentally produced and distributed TV-series called Needle and Stick save the world, addressing the issue of sustainable development. In short, we wish to problematise the rigid positions of the child and the human being in relation to nature. (shrink)

ai Diminished gaze fixation is one of the core features of autism and has been proposed to be associated with abnormalities in the neural circuitry of affect. We tested this hypothesis in two separate studies using eye tracking while measuring functional brain activity during facial discrimination tasks in individuals with autism and in typically developing individuals. Activation in the fusiform gyrus and amygdala was strongly and positively correlated with the time spent fixating the eyes in the autistic group in (...) both studies, suggesting that diminished gaze fixation may account for the fusiform hypoactivation to faces commonly reported in autism. In addition, variation in eye fixation within autistic individuals was strongly and positively associated with amygdala activation across both studies, suggesting a heightened emotional response associated with gaze fixation in autism. (shrink)

Background: The broad autism phenotype includes subclinical autistic characteristics found to have a higher prevalence in unaffected family members of individuals with autism. These characteristics primarily affect the social aspects of language, communication, and human interaction. The current research focuses on possible neurobehavioral characteristics associated with the broad autism phenotype. Methods: We used a face-processing task associated with atypical patterns of gaze fixation and brain function in autism while collecting brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eye tracking in (...) unaffected siblings of individuals with autism. Results: We found robust differences in gaze fixation and brain function in response to images of human faces in unaffected siblings compared with typically developing control individuals. The siblings’ gaze fixations and brain activation patterns during the face processing task were similar to that of the autism group and showed decreased gaze fixation along with diminished fusiform activation compared with the control group. Furthermore, amygdala volume in the siblings was similar to the autism group and was significantly reduced compared with the control group. Conclusions: Together, these findings provide compelling evidence for differences in social/emotional processing and underlying neural circuitry in siblings of individuals with autism, supporting the notion of unique endophenotypes associated with the broad autism phenotype. (shrink)

Isaac Levi's new book is concerned with how one can justify changing one's beliefs. The discussion is deeply informed by the belief-doubt model advocated by C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, of which the book provides a substantial analysis. Professor Levi then addresses the conceptual framework of potential changes available to an inquirer. A structural approach to propositional attitudes is proposed, which rejects the conventional view that a propositional attitude involves a relation between an agent and either a linguistic entity (...) or some other intentional object such as a proposition or set of possible worlds. The last two chapters offer an account of change in states of full belief understood as changes in commitments rather than changes in performance; one chapter deals with adding new information to a belief state, the other with giving up information. The book builds upon topics discussed in some of Levi's earlier work. It will be of particular interest to discussion theorists, epistemologists, philosophers of science, computer scientists, and cognitive psychologists. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the complex interaction between attention, fixation, and one species of change blindness. The two main interpretations of the target phenomenon are the ‘blindness’ interpretation and the ‘inaccessibility’ interpretation. These correspond to the sparse view (Dennett 1991; Tye, 2007) and the rich view (Dretske 2007; Block, 2007a, 2007b) of visual consciousness respectively. Here I focus on the debate between Fred Dretske and Michael Tye. Section 1 describes the target phenomenon and the dialectics it entails. (...) Section 2 explains how attention and fixation weigh in these debates, and argues that Dretske’s hyper-rich view fails precisely because he overlooks certain effects of attention and fixation. Section 3 explains why Tye’s view is also unsatisfying, mainly because he misconceives the degree of access. Section 4 then puts forward the positive model covariance, which has it that the degree of cognitive access tracks the degree of phenomenology, and contrasts it with Block’s view on the Sperling iconic memory paradigm. The paper ends with a discussion of levels of seeing, which involve crowding, indexing, and other visual phenomena. Change ‘blindness’ is a set of phenomena that was discovered about two decades ago, yet an entirely satisfying understanding is still lacking. To move forward, a more detailed understanding of attention and fixation is called for. (shrink)

Anton, thirty-two,his profile indicates that he lives with his parents.He's Orthodox, though he never went to church,has a university degree, studied English.He worked as a tattoo artist and had his own style,if you can say that of a tattoo artist.Many locals felthis skillful hands and sharp needle.When it all began, he talked a lotabout politics and history, started attending the demonstrations,picked quarrels with his friends.Friends felt insulted, clients started disappearing.They were afraid, didn't understand, left the city.You feel a person (...) best when you touch him with a needle.A needle stings, a needle sutures. Under its warmmetal you sense the complaisant canvas of women'sskin and the light rigid tarpaulinof men's skin. You penetrate someone'smembrane, you let velvetdrops of blood out of the body, you pierce and pierce and pierceangels’ wings onto the obedient surface of the world.You, tattoo artist, pierce and pierce tattoos, for we are calledto fill this world with sense, fill itwith colors. You, tattoo artist, you pierce thiscover onto our souls and diseases—what we live for and what we die for.Someone told me he was shot at a roadblock,in the morning, he was armed, it happened very quickly—no one really knows what happened.He's buried in a mass grave—they're all buried this way.His personal belongings were returned to his parents.No one has even made any changes to his profile.The time will come when some assholewill write heroic poems about this.The time will come when some assholewill say it's impossible to write about it at all. (shrink)

A growing number of philosophers are bringing interventionism into the field of supervenient causation. Many argue that interventionist supervenient causation is exempted from the fixability condition. However, this approach looks ad hoc, inconsistent with the general interventionist requirement on fixation. Moreover, it leads to false judgments about the causal efficacy of supervenient/subvenient properties. This article aims to develop a novel interventionist account of supervenient causation that respects the fixability requirement. The treatment of intervention and fixation that I propose (...) can accommodate some theoretical constraints on causation and deliver correct causal verdicts in classic examples. It is also worth noting that this interventionist account offers a promising defense of mental causation without postulating mental-physical overdetermination. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to present some important insights of C. Hookway's pragmatist analysis of knowledge viewed less in the standard way, as justified true belief, than as a dynamic natural and normative question-answer process of inquiry, a reliable and successful agent-based enterprise, consisting in virtuous dispositions explaining how we can be held responsible for our beliefs and investigations. Despite the merits of such an approach, the paper shows that it may be inefficient in accounting for some challenges (...) posed by scepticism or by the nature of epistemic normativity. In which case it might be premature to propose it as a new conception of knowledge against the standard one and worth considering a different, though still pragmatist, strategy, in which inquiry would aim at the fixation of knowledge, still viewed as justified true beliefs, i.e critical commonsensical, warrantedly assertible, intellectual and sentimental dispositions for which the epistemic agent, viewed less as an individual person than as a scientific community of inquirers, should be taken as a knowing and reliable agent, both answerable and responsible for her assertions. (shrink)

Where research was once strictly confined to one laboratory or office, investigators now widely share and compare their plans, analyses, and results. With the advent of genomic knowledge, researchers are seeking to understand the genetics and genomics of complex human disease. They are combining their efforts into international consortia in order to take on problems that face individuals around the world, such as cancer and malaria — problems that are too large to solve by one country alone. These consortia bring (...) together diverse research groups from different parts of the world to focus on a common goal. Their projects may all focus on one disease or condition, but examine it from different perspectives and share the newly gained information with each other and the wider scientific community. (shrink)

How should we understand the surveillance state post Snowden? This paper is concerned with the relationship between increased surveillance capacity and state power. The paper begins by analysing two metaphors used in public post Snowden discourse to describe state surveillance practices: the haystack and the panopticon. It argues that these metaphors share a flawed common entailment regarding surveillance, knowledge and power which cannot accurately capture important aspects of state anxiety generated by mass surveillance in an age of big data. The (...) paper shows that the nature of big data itself complicates the power attributed to mass surveillance states by these metaphors and those who use them. Relying heavily on Ezrahi’s distinction between information and knowledge, the paper situates this argument concerning the state and anxiety borne of information overload in the context of literature that concerns the state and information management. Drawing primarily on James Scott’s work on legibility, it argues that the big data born of mass surveillance problematises the concept of information as empowering the state. Instead, understanding mass surveillance in an age of big data requires understanding the relationship between the surveillance state and information in terms of anxiety as well as power. (shrink)

Prior to having its authenticity and transparency examined the openness of human existence may be said to need preservation as is, regardless of its receptivity and responsiveness to the truth of Being. Paradoxically, in self-sacrifice the fulfilment of Dasein’s ownmost potentiality-for-being is dependent upon a most radical disowning of itself. This investigation approaches self-sacrifice on the basis of its analogy with the creation of the work of art – as the peculiar fixation of the existing, already disclosed world of (...) everydayness within Dasein’s final absence. Finally, the suggestion is made that the incommensurable greatness of the heroic self-sacrifice needs to be itself preserved from the degradation brought about by massive and compulsive reproduction. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 8, Edition 1 May 2008. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the phenomenology of desire and fixation.

United States public health experts have long expressed concern about the prevalence of the human immunodeficiency virus among injection drug users. The United States has the largest reported IDU population in the world: 1.1 to 1.5 million. Recent estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that 50 percent of incident HIV infections occur among IDUs, with additional infections occurring among their sex partners and offspring. More than 33 percent of new AIDS cases occur in IDUs, their sexual (...) partners, and their children. Almost one half of all women diagnosed with AIDS in the United States are IDUS. Many of the remaining infected women were infected as a result of sex with a male IDU.While public health agencies, legislators, community leaders, and religious groups have engaged in vigorous debate over the merits of needle exchange programs as an intervention to reduce HIV transmission, the programs, some legal and some illegal, have been implemented in fifty-five cities across the country. (shrink)

Motor imagery-based brain-computer interfaces have been studied without controlling subjects’ gaze fixation position previously. The effect of gaze fixation and covert attention on the behavioral performance of BCI is still unknown. This study designed a gaze fixation controlled experiment. Subjects were required to conduct a secondary task of gaze fixation when performing the primary task of motor imagination. Subjects’ performance was analyzed according to the relationship between motor imagery target and the gaze fixation position, resulting (...) in three BCI control conditions, i.e., congruent, incongruent, and center cross trials. A group of fourteen subjects was recruited. The average group performances of three different conditions did not show statistically significant differences in terms of BCI control accuracy, feedback duration, and trajectory length. Further analysis of gaze shift response time revealed a significantly shorter response time for congruent trials compared to incongruent trials. Meanwhile, the parietal occipital cortex also showed active neural activities for congruent and incongruent trials, and this was revealed by a contrast analysis of R-square values and lateralization index. However, the lateralization index computed from the parietal and occipital areas was not correlated with the BCI behavioral performance. Subjects’ BCI behavioral performance was not affected by the position of gaze fixation and covert attention. This indicated that motor imagery-based BCI could be used freely in robotic arm control without sacrificing performance. (shrink)

This paper argues that two of my critics (Cowie and Wilson) have become fixated on Fodor’s notion of modularity, both to their own detriment and to the detriment of their understanding of Carruthers, 2006. The paper then focuses on the supposed inadequacies of the latter’s explanations of both content flexibility and human uniqueness, alleged by Machery and Cowie respectively.

Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good—especially the first essay, “The Idea of Perfection”—is often associated with a critique of a certain picture of agency and its proper place in ethical thought. There is implicit in this critique, however, an alternative, much richer one. I propose a reading of Murdochian agency in terms of the continuous activity of cultivating and refining a distinctive practical standpoint, and I apply this reading to her account of moral progress. For Murdoch moral progress depends on (...) transcending egoism and achieving clear perception of a normatively-saturated reality, but it would be a mistake to think of egoism in terms of selfishness, or clarity in terms of altruism. Rather, I argue, Murdochian moral progress requires overcoming socially-conditioned and often ideological forms of alienation, and making the social conditions that inform our practical standpoints self-conscious. (shrink)

Background: Post-mortem needle biopsies have been used in resource-poor settings to determine cause of death and there is interest in using them in Bangladesh. However, we did not know how families and communities would perceive this procedure or how they would decide whether or not to consent to a post-mortem needle biopsy. The goal of this study was to better understand family and community concerns and decision-making about post-mortem needle biopsies in this low-income, predominantly Muslim country in (...) order to design an informed consent process. Methods: We conducted 16 group discussions with family members of persons who died during an outbreak of Nipah virus illness during 2004-2008 and 11 key informant interviews with their community and religious leaders. Qualitative researchers first described the post-mortem needle biopsy procedure and asked participants whether they would have agreed to this procedure during the outbreak. Researchers probed participants about the circumstances under which the procedure would be acceptable, if any, their concerns about the procedure, and how they would decide whether or not to consent to the procedure. Results: Overall, most participants agreed that post-mortem needle biopsies would be acceptable in some situations, particularly if they benefitted society. This procedure was deemed more acceptable than full autopsy because it would not require major delays in burial or remove organs, and did not require cutting or stitching of the body. It could be performed before the ritual bathing of the body in either the community or hospital setting. However, before consent would be granted for such a procedure, the research team must gain the trust of the family and community which could be difficult. Although consent may only be provided by the guardians of the body, decisions about consent for the procedure would involve extended family and community and religious leaders. Conclusions: The possible acceptability of this procedure during outbreaks represents an important opportunity to better characterize cause of death in Bangladesh which could lead to improved public health interventions to prevent these deaths. Obstacles for research teams will include engaging all major stakeholders in decision-making and quickly building a trusting relationship with the family and community, which will be difficult given the short window of time prior to the ritual bathing of the body. (shrink)