Psychiatric language and concepts, and the norms they embed, have come to influence more and more areas of our daily lives. This has recently been described as a feature of the ‘psychiatrization of society.’ This paper looks at one aspect of psychiatrization that is still little studied in the literature: the psychiatrization of our emotional lives. The paper develops an extended account of emotion pathologizing as a form of affective injustice that is related to psychiatrization and that specifically harms psychopathologized (...) people, i.e., people who are socially perceived to be mentally ill. After introducing an initial account of emotion pathologizing as articulated in Pismenny et al. (2024), we extend the account by demonstrating how processes and practices of emotion pathologizing are informed by (1) the dominant biomedical approach to psychiatry and (2) sanism, a system of discrimination and oppression that disadvantages people who have received a psychiatric diagnosis, or are perceived as in need of psychiatric treatment. We then argue that emotion pathologizing can manifest as an affect-related hermeneutical injustice that disadvantages psychopathologized individuals by unfairly constraining how they make sense of and understand their own emotional experiences. (shrink)

Public opinion in recent years has soured on multiculturalism, due in large part to fears of radical Islam. In Multiculturalism without Culture, Anne Phillips contends that critics misrepresent culture as the explanation of everything individuals from minority and non-Western groups do. She puts forward a defense of multiculturalism that dispenses with notions of culture, instead placing individuals themselves at its core. Multiculturalism has been blamed for encouraging the oppression of women--forced marriages, female genital cutting, school girls wearing the hijab. (...) Many critics opportunistically deploy gender equality to justify the retreat from multiculturalism, hijacking the equality agenda to perpetuate cultural stereotypes. Phillips informs her argument with the feminist insistence on recognizing women as agents, and defends her position using an unusually broad range of literature, including political theory, philosophy, feminist theory, law, and anthropology. She argues that critics and proponents alike exaggerate the unity, distinctness, and intractability of cultures, thereby encouraging a perception of men and women as dupes constrained by cultural dictates. Opponents of multiculturalism may think the argument against accommodating cultural difference is over and won, but they are wrong. Phillips believes multiculturalism still has an important role to play in achieving greater social equality. In this book, she offers a new way of addressing dilemmas of justice and equality in multiethnic, multicultural societies, intervening at this critical moment when so many Western countries are poised to abandon multiculturalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOrganization and management researchers praise the value of care in the workplace. However, they overlook the conflict between caring for work and for coworkers, which resonates with the dilemma of care allocation highlighted by ethicists of care. Through an in-depth qualitative study of two organizations, we examine how this dilemma is confronted in everyday organizational life. We draw on the concept of boundary work to explain how employees negotiate the boundary of their caring responsibilities in ways that grants or denies (...) care to coworkers. We argue that the possibility of an ethics of care for coworkers requires boundary work that suspends the separation of personal and professional selves and constitutes the worker as a whole person. We contribute to research on care in organizations by showing how care for coworkers may be enabled or undermined by maintaining or suppressing the care allocation dilemma. (shrink)

Background: The professional values presented in ethical guidelines of the Norwegian Nurses Organisation and International Council of Nurses describe nurses’ professional ethics and the obligations that pertain to good nursing practice. The foundation of all nursing shall be respect for life and the inherent dignity of the individual. Research proposes that nurses lack insight in ethical competence and that ethical issues are rarely discussed on the wards. Furthermore, research has for some time confirmed that nurses experience moral distress in their (...) daily work and that this has become a major problem for the nursing profession. Objectives: The purpose of this article is to obtain a deeper understanding of the ethical challenges that nurses face in daily practice. The chosen research questions are “What ethical challenges do nurses experience in their daily practice?” Research design: We conducted a qualitative interview study using a hermeneutical approach to analyzing data describing nurses’ experiences. Ethical considerations: The Norwegian Social Science Data services approved the study. Furthermore, the head of the hospital gave permission to conduct the investigation. The requirement of anonymity and proper data storage in accordance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki was met. Method and results: The context for the study comprised three different clinical wards at a university hospital in Norway. Nine qualified nurses were interviewed. The results were obtained through a systematic development beginning with the discovery of busyness as a painful phenomenon that can lead to conflicts in terms of ethical values. Furthermore, the consequences compromising professional principles in nursing care emerged and ended in moral blindness and emotional immunization of the healthcare providers. Emotional immunization occurred as a new dimension involving moral blindness and immunity in relation to being emotionally touched. (shrink)

Background: The professional values presented in ethical guidelines of the Norwegian Nurses Organisation and International Council of Nurses describe nurses’ professional ethics and the obligations that pertain to good nursing practice. The foundation of all nursing shall be respect for life and the inherent dignity of the individual. Research proposes that nurses lack insight in ethical competence and that ethical issues are rarely discussed on the wards. Furthermore, research has for some time confirmed that nurses experience moral distress in their (...) daily work and that this has become a major problem for the nursing profession. Objectives: The purpose of this article is to obtain a deeper understanding of the ethical challenges that nurses face in daily practice. The chosen research questions are “What ethical challenges do nurses experience in their daily practice?” Research design: We conducted a qualitative interview study using a hermeneutical approach to analyzing data describing nurses’ experiences. Ethical considerations: The Norwegian Social Science Data services approved the study. Furthermore, the head of the hospital gave permission to conduct the investigation. The requirement of anonymity and proper data storage in accordance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki was met. Method and results: The context for the study comprised three different clinical wards at a university hospital in Norway. Nine qualified nurses were interviewed. The results were obtained through a systematic development beginning with the discovery of busyness as a painful phenomenon that can lead to conflicts in terms of ethical values. Furthermore, the consequences compromising professional principles in nursing care emerged and ended in moral blindness and emotional immunization of the healthcare providers. Emotional immunization occurred as a new dimension involving moral blindness and immunity in relation to being emotionally touched. (shrink)

This paper defends the following principle: For any visually perceptible set of objects and any visual phenomenal character, there could be a veridical perception of exactly those objects with that character. This principle is rejected by almost all contemporary theories of perception, yet rarely addressed directly. Many have taken the apparent inconceivability of a certain sort of “shape inversion” — as compared to the more plausible, frequently discussed “color inversion” — as evidence that the spatial characters of our perceptions are (...) uniquely suited to and/or revelatory of the structure of their objects, such that alleged perceptions of those objects that differed radically in spatial character could not be veridical. I argue that these conclusions are unjustified: I claim that the difficulty involved in constructing coherent “shape inversion” scenarios is attributable to the complex relations among visual and tactile shape experiences, as opposed to relations between shape experiences and worldly shape properties. (shrink)

As concerns about the negative health effects of unhealthy eating, overweight and obesity have increased, so too have policy efforts to promote healthy eating. Federal, state, and local governments have proposed and implemented a variety of healthy eating policies. Many of these policies are controversial, facing objections that range from the practical (e.g., the policy won’t succeed at improving people’s diets) to the ethical (e.g., the policy is paternalistic or inequitable). Especially controversial have been policies limiting the options offered in (...) the marketplace, limiting access to certain options, or providing disincentives for the purchase of certain options. Examples of such policies include proposed .. (shrink)

In an effort to clear away confusions regarding the role of cultural analysis in historical explanation, this paper proposes a new approach to the issue of cultural autonomy. The premise is that there are two forms of cultural autonomy, analytic and concrete. Analytic autonomy posits the independent structure of culture-its elements, processes, and reproduction. It is achieved through the theoretical and artificial separation of culture from other social structures, conditions, and action. Concrete autonomy establishes the interconnection of culture with the (...) rest of social life, and is achieved by fleshing out the historically specific formulation of particular cultural structures. In addition to theoretically specifying the two forms of cultural autonomy, I demonstrate analytic and concrete autonomy in practice by examining two works that incorporate culture into the analysis of the same historical event. The rewards of recognizing both analytic and concrete cultural autonomy are twofold. First, cultural reductionism can be countered by establishing that culture is structural. Second and more important, once the independent nature of a cultural form is established, its causal contribution to concrete historical situations can be assessed accurately and integrated into historical explanation. (shrink)

This article criticizes recent suggestions that the current ELSI research field should accommodate a new direction towards a ‘post-ELSI’ agenda. Post-ELSI research seeks to avoid the modernist division of responsibility for technical and social issues said to characterize ELSI research. Collaboration and integration are consequently the key terms of post-ELSI strategies that are to distinguish it from ELSI strategies. We argue that this call for a new direction relies on an inadequate generalized analysis of ELSI research as modern that will (...) affect the construal of post-ELSI strategies. We are concerned that the call for post-ELSI shift will exclude imaginative proposals and intellectual freedom by narrowing down the scope and methodologies of ELSI and thereby missing opportunities to play a critical and constructive normative role. Instead of framing current trends in ELSI research as a radical and progressive shift from ELSI to post-ELSI, we suggest an alternative story of expansion and diversification described in terms of a drift from ELSA 1 to ELSA 2, pertaining to acronyms in use in Europe. ELSI research has never been modern. It has been experimenting from the very start on ways to mesh the works of humanist, social and natural scientist in order to bridge and build alignments of emerging scientific and societal goals and matters of concern. The development from ELSA 1 to ELSA 2 expands in our account the range of intellectual and methodological capacities of analysis and engagement of complex and dynamic science-society relationships. We present three areas of ELSA expertise to illustrate that the expertise within the field builds on scholarly achievements within the humanities, social sciences as well as the natural sciences. The plurality of disciplinary background of ELSA researchers represents a valuable diversity that enables mutual criticism and formulations of complementary approaches that together constitute a viable ELSA field. (shrink)

This special issue arises from the observation that an exploration of the role of non-evidential considerations in epistemology through a broader lens is missing from the current landscape of philosophical research. The present collection of contributions fills this research gap by bringing together three central and much-discussed epistemological topics for which non-evidential considerations become relevant.

The views on plagiarism of 574 students at four Australian universities operating in Singapore were investigated through a survey and interviews. Analysis of students’ responses to different plagiarism scenarios revealed misconceptions and uncertainties about many aspects of plagiarism. Self-plagiarism and reuse of a friend’s work were acceptable to more than one quarter of the students, and nearly half considered collusion to be a legitimate form of collaboration. One quarter of the students also indicated that they would knowingly plagiarize. This should (...) serve as a wake-up call regarding plagiarism in transnational higher education. Seven measures are recommended to curb plagiarism and foster academic integrity. (shrink)

Because of the transfer of responsibility from hospitals to community-based settings, providers in home-based care have more responsibilities and a wider range of tasks and responsibilities than before, often with limited resources. The increased responsibilities and the complexity of tasks and patient groups may lead to several ethical challenges. A systematic search in the databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, and SveMed+ was carried out in February 2019 and August 2020. The research question was translated into a modified PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, and (...) Outcome) worksheet. A total of 40 articles were included. The review is conducted according to the Vancouver Protocol. The main findings from the systematic literature review show that ethical challenges experienced by healthcare and social care providers in home-based care are related to autonomy and balancing ethical principles, decisions regarding intensity of care, challenges related to priority settings, truth-telling, and balancing the professional role. Findings regarding ethical challenges within home-based care are in line with findings from institutional healthcare and social care settings. However, some significant differences from the institutional context are also highlighted. (shrink)

As for Avicenna the human soul is a complete substance which does not inhere in the body nor is imprinted in it, asserting its survival after the death of the body seems easy. Yet, he needs the body to explain its individuation. The paper analyzes Avicenna's arguments in the De anima sections, V, 3 & 4, of the Shifā ' in order to explore the exact causal relation there is between the human soul and its body and confronts these arguments (...) with relevant passages in the Metaphysics. It argues that the causal relation between body and soul remains obscure and that, though Avicenna claims that there is a personal immortality and that the disembodied soul remains individuated, he does not provide a satisfactory ontological account for it. (shrink)

Here is the question: what constitutes a good explanation of phenomena?

The American Medical Association's Code of Ethics prohibits physicians from giving substances they believe are placebos to their patients unless the patient is informed of and agrees to use of the substance. Various questions surround the AMA policy, however. One of these has to do with what should be disclosed. The AMA holds that any treatment that the physician believes is a placebo should be identified as such to the patient. But consider a more restrictive policy that requires physicians to (...) defer to the medical community's consensus view about which treatments have a specific effect on the condition being treated. In light of the ethical goals that the AMA identifies—namely, concerns about patient trust, autonomy, and benefit—there are potential advantages to the more restrictive policy. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 55-74, February 2022. Many find that the objectionable nature of paternalism has something to do with belief. However, since it is commonly held that beliefs are directly governed by epistemic as opposed to moral norms, how could it be objectionable to hold paternalistic beliefs about others if they are supported by the evidence? Drawing on central elements of relational egalitarianism, this paper attempts to bridge this gap. In a first step, it (...) argues that holding paternalistic beliefs about others implies a failure to regard them as equals in terms of their moral agency. In a second step, it shows that the fact that we should regard others as equals in this sense raises the threshold for sufficiency of evidence for paternalistic beliefs to be epistemically justified. That is, moral reasons of relational equality encroach on the epistemic. However, these reasons are not decisive. In cases where others are about to jeopardize critical goods such as their lives, mobility or future autonomy, relational equality sometimes calls for paternalistic action and, by extension, the formation of beliefs that render such action rational. The upshot is that in order to meet demands of relational equality we have a pro tanto reason to not hold paternalistic beliefs about others. (shrink)

Representations of the active brain have served to establish a particular domain of competence for brain mappers and to distinguish brain mapping’s particular contributions to mind/brain research. At the heart of the claims about the emerging contributions of functional brain mapping is a paradox: functional imagers seem to reject representations while also using them at multiple points in their work. This article therefore considers a love-hate relationship between scientists and their object: the case of the iconoclastic imager. This paradoxical stance (...) is the result of the formation of an interdisciplinary approach that brings together a number of scientific traditions and their particular standards of what constitutes scientific evidence. By examining the various ways in which images are deployed and rejected, the origins of these conflicting tendencies can be traced to the technological, methodological, and institutional elements in the work of functional imagers. This approach provides insight into the current demarcation of imaging and reflects on features of visual knowledge. (shrink)

Background: Research suggests that nurses generally do not participate in ethical decision-making in accordance with ethical guidelines for nurses. In addition to completing their training, nurses need to reflect on and use ethically grounded arguments and defined ethical values such as patient’s dignity in their clinical work. Objectives: The purpose of this article is to gain a deeper understanding of how nurses deal with ethical decision-making in daily practice. The chosen research question is “How do nurses participate in ethical decision-making (...) for the patient?” Design and method: We use Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as well as Kvale and Brinkmann’s three levels of understanding in interpreting the data material. Nine registered nurses were interviewed. Ethical considerations: The Ombudsman of Norwegian Social Science Data and the head of the hospital approved the investigation. The participants received both oral and written information about the study and they gave their consent. We informed the participants that the participation was voluntary and that they were free to withdraw at any point in the course of the study. The requirement of anonymity and proper data storage was in accordance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (1964). The participants were assured that privacy, and confidentiality would be duly protected. Results: Four key themes emerged: (1) confusion in relation to professional and operational expectations of role, (2) ideal somnolence, (3) inadequate argumentation skills, and (4) compound pressure. Conclusion: Ethical ideals appear to be latent in the mindset of the participants; however, the main finding of this investigation is that nurses need to activate the ideals and apply them into practice. Furthermore, management needs to initiate professional reasoning and interdisciplinary discussions leading to common goals for patients. (shrink)

This paper addresses the significance of the general class of diffeomorphisms in the theory of general relativity as opposed to the Poincaré group in a special relativistic theory. Using Anderson's concept of an absolute object for a theory, with suitable revisions, it is shown that the general group of local diffeomorphisms is associated with the theory of general relativity as its local dynamical symmetry group, while the Poincaré group is associated with a special relativistic theory as both its global dynamical (...) symmetry group and its geometrical symmetry group. It is argued that the two groups are of equal significance as symmetry groups of their associated theories. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate how life in Norwegian nursing homes may affect experiences of dignity among persons with dementia. The study had a qualitative design and used a phenomenological and hermeneutic approach. Participant observation in two nursing home units was combined with qualitative interviews with five residents living in these units. The study took place between March and December 2010. The residents feel that their freedom is restricted, and they describe feelings of homesickness. They also experience (...) that they are not being seen and heard as individual autonomous persons. This lack of freedom, experiences of homesickness and feelings of not being confirmed and respected as individual autonomous persons may be a threat to their personal dignity. In order to protect and enforce the dignity of persons with dementia living in nursing home, we should confirm them as whole and as individual persons, and we should try to make the nursing homes less institutional and more home like. (shrink)

I distinguish between the classical Gricean approach to conversational implicatures , which I call the action-theoretic approach, and the approach to CIs taken in contemporary cognitive science. Once we free ourselves from the AT account, and see implicating as a form of what I call “conversational tailoring”, we can more easily see the many different ways that CIs arise in conversation. I will show that they arise not only on the basis of a speaker’s utterance of complete sentences but also (...) on the basis of sub-sentential clauses—cases of so-called embedded implicatures—as well as from discourse segments containing several sentences—cases that Geurts calls ‘multiplicatures’. I will argue that they arise also from contents that are themselves implicit, such as presupposed contents or other implicatures. All but the first sort of case are difficult for the traditional Gricean AT account to handle, whereas they fall naturally out of an account that sees conversational participants as engaged in conversational tailoring—i.e., as engaged in a process of shaping informational and discourse structural properties of utterances in their successive conversational turns, and hence shaping their interlocutors’ cognitive environments. (shrink)

Dehaene (in Reading in the Brain) reviews and finds support for the phonological deficit hypothesis of developmental dyslexia, which proposes that dyslexics have a basic deficit in processing the constituents of spoken words. This hypothesis can be seen as reflecting three associated claims: a) there is only one basic kind of dyslexia; b) all (or most) dyslexic children have phonological impairments, and c) these phonological impairments cause their dyslexia. We consider each of these claims, and the evidence presented by Dehaene, (...) and conclude that questions remain about all three. Phonological deficits alone seem unlikely to be able to account for the complexity and heterogeneity of developmental dyslexia. (shrink)

The American Medical Association prohibits physicians from giving placebos to their patients unless the patients are informed of and agree to the use of placebos.1 This prohibition, and the ethics of placebo treatment more generally, have been discussed in numerous recent papers (Finniss, Kaptchuk, Miller, et al. 2010; Shaw 2009; Foddy 2009; Miller and Colloca 2009; Kolber 2007; Blease 2010). Though some bioethicists support the AMA prohibition, others challenge it, arguing that using placebos without patients’ knowledge and consent—that is, using (...) placebos deceptively—can be ethical (Kolber 2007; Foddy 2009). This paper is about a specific ethical objection to use of placebos by physicians: deceptive .. (shrink)

In a recent article in this Journal, Shlomo Cohen and Haim Shapiro introduce the concept of “comparable placebo treatments” —placebo treatments with biological effects similar to the drugs they replace—and argue that doctors are not being deceptive when they prescribe or administer CPTs without revealing that they are placebos. We critique two of Cohen and Shapiro’s primary arguments. First, Cohen and Shapiro argue that offering undisclosed placebos is not lying to the patient, but rather is making a self-fulfilling prophecy—telling a (...) “lie” that, ideally, will become true. We argue that offering undisclosed placebos is not a “lie” but is a straightforward case of deceptively misleading the patient. Second, Cohen and Shapiro argue that offering undisclosed CPTs is not equivocation. We argue that it typically is equivocation or deception of another sort. If justifiable, undisclosed placebo use will have to be justified as a practice that is deceptive in most instances. (shrink)

In his extended essay "On Grace and Dignity," Friedrich Schiller sets out an important challenge to Kant when he argues that sensibility must play a constitutive role in the ethical life. This paper argues that there is much we can learn from Schiller's "corrective" to Kant's moral theory and Kant's reply to this critique, for what is at stake in their debate are rival conceptions of the proper state of moral health for us as finite rational beings and competing political (...) notions concerning the ideal form of self-governance that we ought to strive to attain. (shrink)

Bishop is a professor of nursing; Scudder is a professor of philosophy.

BIEN’s definitive statement of a Basic Income (BI) and the commentaries on its five characteristics are examined in turn, to identify potential clarifications, revisions and omissions. The following amendments are proposed as a basis for further discussion: to shift the position of ‘unconditionally’ in the definitive statement so that it refers to the cash payment rather than to its delivery; some clarifications to characteristics 3 ‘individual’ and 4 ‘universal’; to introduce ‘uniform’, without which BIs could be used to endorse flagrant (...) discrimination against, or even zero amounts for, less favoured groups; to restore the comprehensive nature of ‘unconditionality’ (which is now characteristic 6), by substituting ‘behavioural requirement’ in place of ‘work requirement’; to give the characteristic ‘without means test’ its own commentary (no. 7). The introduction of ‘uniform’ and ‘behavioural’ into the definitive statement should help to prevent BIEN’s definition from being regarded as male orientated. (shrink)

Increasingly, nurses conduct scientific inquiry into complex health‐care problems by collaborating on teams with researchers from other highly specialized fields. As cross‐disciplinary research proliferates and becomes institutionalized globally, researchers will increasingly encounter the need to integrate their particular research perspectives within inquiries without sacrificing the potential contributions of their discipline‐specific expertise. The work of the philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) offers the necessary philosophical grounding. Here, I defend a role for philosophy in cross‐disciplinary research and present selected ideas in Lonergan's work. (...) These include: (1) a dynamic, normative pattern that each inquirer operates uniquely also forms the common core, or unity, in knowing; (2) the possibility of cross‐disciplinary knowledge development is dependent on each researcher's consciousness of her or his attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibleness; and (3) shifts in researchers' viewpoints, or horizons, facilitate their collaborative inquiry and their grasp of the unity in knowing. The desire to know, shared by team members, drives their inquiry. Lonergan's stance is consistent with nursing values because it respects, but does not unconditionally privilege, any researcher or discipline. Arguments support a claim that Lonergan's perspective is well suited to guide nurse researchers participating on cross‐disciplinary health research teams. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with aspects of responsibility in Norwegian public health nursing. Public health nursing is an expansive profession with diffuse boundaries. The Norwegian public health nurse does not perform ‘hands on’ nursing, but focuses on the prevention of illness, injury, or disability, and the promotion of health. What is the essence of ethical responsibility in public health nursing? The aim of this article is to explore the phenomenon based on the ethics of responsibility as reflected upon by the (...) philosopher Emanuel Levinas (1906–1995). From an ethical point of view, responsibility is about our duty towards the Other, a duty we have not always chosen, are prepared for, or can fully explain; but it is nevertheless a demand we have to live with. Interviews with five experienced Norwegian nurses provide the empirical base for reflection and interpretation. The nurses share stories from their practice. In interpreting the nurses’ stories, the following themes emerge: personal responsibility; boundaries; temporality; worry, fear, and uncertainty; and a sense of satisfaction. As the themes are developed further, it becomes apparent that, despite their diversity, they are all interrelated aspects of ethical responsibility. Responsibility for the Other cannot be avoided, ignored, or transferred. The nurses’ responsibility is personal and infinite. Levinasian ethics can help nurses understand the importance of accepting that being a responsive carer can involve not only contentment in the predictable, but also the fear, worry, and uncertainty of the unpredictable. (shrink)

:I present arguments in favour of the view that the propositions expressed by utterances containing singularly referring terms have modes of presentation of the objects referred to by those terms as constituents. I rely on recent work by Sperber and Wilson, Recanati and other pragmatists, and claim that a Fregean account of singular reference is supported by this work. This is in opposition to Recanati himself, who in his book Direct Reference has argued for a view which is closer to (...) that of some neo‐Russellians. In particular, I argue contra Recanati for the truth‐conditional relevance of the modes of presentation associated with demonstratives and other referential terms. That is, 1 argue that these modes of presentation must be seen as part of the truth‐conditional content of utterance‐tokens containing such terms. (shrink)

This article discusses ‘Notes on Language Games’, written by Harold Garfinkel in 1960 and never before published, one of three distinct versions of his famous ‘Trust’ argument, i.e., that constitutive criteria define shared events, objects, and meanings. The argument stands in contrast to an approach to cultural anthropology that was becoming popular in 1960 called ‘ethnoscience’. In this previously unknown manuscript, Garfinkel proposes that cultural events and language events are the same, in that both are created through constitutive commitments to (...) interactional systems. The best-known version of the Trust argument (Garfinkel, 1963) emphasizes Schutz, while other versions build on Parsons (Garfinkel 2019). In this third version, the Trust conditions are elaborated in terms of Wittgenstein’s language games. Various strands of Garfinkel’s thinking about culture, language and interaction are interwoven. That Garfinkel was working with Parsons in 1960 to document a contractual basis for social events and their assembly practices in ‘systems of interaction’, a constitutive practice argument with roots in Durkheim’s work, is yet another strand. The article highlights how the Trust argument is the key to everything, not only ethnomethodology, but also Garfinkel’s attempt to develop a general sociology of culture, language and interaction. (shrink)

Qualitative research should strive for knowledge translation toward the goal of closing the gap between knowledge and practice. However, it is often a challenge in nursing to identify knowledge translation strategies able to illustrate the usefulness of qualitative results in any given context. This article defines storytelling and uses pragmatism to examine storytelling as a strategy to promote the knowledge translation of qualitative results. Pragmatism posits that usefulness is defined by the people affected by the problem and that usefulness is (...) promoted by modalities, like storytelling, that increase sensitivity to an experience. Indeed, stories have the power to give meaning to human behaviors and to trigger emotions, and in doing so bring many advantages. For example, by contextualizing research results and appealing to both the reason and the emotions of audiences, storytelling can help us grasp the usefulness of these research results. Various strategies exist to create stories that will produce an emotional experience capable of influencing readers’ or listeners’ actions. To illustrate the potential of storytelling as a knowledge translation strategy in health care, we will use our story of discovering this strategy during a qualitative study in a nursing home as an example. (shrink)

Shao Yung1 Shao Yung (-77) was an extraordinary thinker who lived during an extraordinary age. Among the great thinkers of the Northern Sung (960-), ...

This piece seeks to elucidate how and why Latin America is neither anecdotal nor peripheral to pandemic preoccupations—nor to larger health and disease narratives—past and present. First, it examines the world's proportionately most destructive pandemic as coterminous with the rise of imperialism. Next, it traces how the impetus for international health cooperation based on regional crises predated and informed efforts elsewhere. Finally, it explores two under-charted narratives: the creative harnessing of data produced under adversity, and alternative health solidarities that bypass (...) reigning hierarchies of “humanitarian” aid. Together, these glimpses underscore a fundamental need for incorporating histories of and from Latin America to overcome the “history-telling injustice” created by the centuries-long Western dismissal of knowledge, practices, experiences, and existential meaning generated in the Global South. In short, these accounts provide a more complex and possibility-filled restructuring of dominant narratives around the diverse trajectories and consequences, as well as varieties of resistance, that shape understandings of pandemics. (shrink)

In the midst of the recent Ebola outbreak, scientific developments involving infection challenge experiments on nonhuman primates (NHPs) sparked hope that successful treatments and vaccines may soon become available. Yet these studies pose a stark ethical quandary. On the one hand, they represent an important step in developing novel therapies and vaccines for Ebola and the Marburg virus, with the potential to save thousands of human lives and to protect whole communities from devastation; on the other hand, they intentionally expose (...) sophisticated animals to severe suffering and a high risk of death. Other studies that infect NHPs with a lethal disease in order to test interventions that may prove beneficial for humans pose the same ethical difficulty. Some advocates have argued that all research on primates should be phased out, and ethicists have questioned whether a moral justification of primate research is possible. A 2010 European Union directive banned virtually all research on great apes, and 2013 guidelines from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), based upon recommendations in an influential 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, eliminated most biomedical research with chimpanzees in the United States. But studies involving other NHPs face no comparable restrictions.Should research on NHPs other than great apes be subject to tighter restrictions than it currently is? In this article, we explore this general question in the context of one particular type of biomedical research: infection challenge studies. We advocate a presumptive prohibition on infection challenge experiments in NHPs, but we also argue that exceptions to this prohibition are permissible, subject to strict substantive and procedural safeguards, when necessary to avert substantial loss of human life or severe morbidity for a substantial number of people. (shrink)

As concerns about the negative health effects of unhealthy eating and overweight/obesity increase, so too do efforts to combat obesity. Both the federal government, as well as state and local governments, have proposed and implemented a variety of healthy eating and obesity prevention policies. Many of these policies are controversial, facing objections that range from the practical to the ethical. In this paper, we consider one such policy — restrictions on food assistance programs that are meant to improve participants’ diet (...) — and one criticism of these policies, that they are inequitable. We take as our primary example the recent, unsuccessful effort by New York State to exclude sweetened beverages from the items eligible for purchase in New York City with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. (shrink)

The problem of how to access and deploy the explanatory power of culture in historical accounts has long remained vexing. A recent approach, combining and transcending the "culture as structure"/ "culture as practice" divide among social historians, puts explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in historical transformation. This article argues that meaning construction is at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of (...) historical explanation. Through an empirical analysis of political alliance during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882, I demonstrate that historians can uncover meaning construction by analyzing the symbolic structures and practices of narrative discourse. (shrink)

In this article, I compare the ways in which Baudrillard and Heidegger seek to bring attention to the importance of death for our personal existential situation which has now become repressed in conceptions of existence and society. Heidegger critiques public conceptions of death that serve to cover up its importance. Less well known is that, somewhat in parallel fashion, Baudrillard charts a ‘genealogy’ of the ‘extradition’ of the dead from the centre of the social and he claims that we live (...) currently in a death denying society. This reduces the meaning of our own impending deaths. However, unlike Heidegger, Baudrillard’s ‘genealogical’ critique of the exclusion of death in modern society is not a one-way dismissal because he proposes an alternative social role for death in the form of ‘primitive symbolic exchange’. (shrink)