Astrobiology aims to determine the distribution and diversity of life in the universe. But as the word “biosignature” suggests, what will be detected is not life itself, but an observation implicating living systems. Our limited access to other worlds suggests this observation is more likely to reflect out‐of‐equilibrium gasses than a writhing octopus. Yet, anything short of a writhing octopus will raise skepticism about what has been detected. Resolving that skepticism requires a theory to delineate processes due to life and (...) those due to abiotic mechanisms. This poses an existential question for life detection: How do astrobiologists plan to detect life on exoplanets via features shared between non‐living and living systems? We argue that you cannot without an underlying theory of life. We illustrate this by analyzing the hypothetical detection of an “Earth 2.0” exoplanet. Without a theory of life, we argue the community should focus on identifying unambiguous features of life via four areas: examining life on Earth, building life in the lab, probing the solar system, and searching for technosignatures. Ultimately, we ask, what exactly do astrobiologists hope to learn by searching for life? (shrink)

Although Tacitus began his writing career during the Principate at the end of the first century CE, the dominant approach to thinking about political life was still guided by Republicanism, a constellation of concepts from the mid-first century BCE Roman Republic. Republicanism held that there was only one type of monarchy and that it necessarily precluded libertas. Tacitus, who was living under different iterations of monopolistic power in the Principate, questions this tenet by examining various Germanic tribes. The Germania explores (...) different types of monarchical arrangements, showing that monarchy is not a one-size-fits-all form and that there are significant political differences among the Germanic monarchies, some of which preserve libertas. In this examination, he highlights the inapplicability of Republicanism to a system as dynamic as the Principate. (shrink)

Attention is drawn to a clear statement of the concept of an absolute zero of temperature by John Locke some time between 1698 and 1704. From the writings of Boyle and Newton it seems unlikely that either of them was responsible for providing their friend with this insight.

AimThe neurocognitive basis of Developmental Coordination Disorder remains an issue of continued debate. This combined systematic review and meta-analysis provides a synthesis of recent experimental studies on the motor control, cognitive, and neural underpinnings of DCD.MethodsThe review included all published work conducted since September 2016 and up to April 2021. One-hundred papers with a DCD-Control comparison were included, with 1,374 effect sizes entered into a multi-level meta-analysis.ResultsThe most profound deficits were shown in: voluntary gaze control during movement; cognitive-motor integration; practice-/context-dependent (...) motor learning; internal modeling; more variable movement kinematics/kinetics; larger safety margins when locomoting, and atypical neural structure and function across sensori-motor and prefrontal regions.InterpretationTaken together, these results on DCD suggest fundamental deficits in visual-motor mapping and cognitive-motor integration, and abnormal maturation of motor networks, but also areas of pragmatic compensation for motor control deficits. Implications for current theory, future research, and evidence-based practice are discussed.Systematic Review RegistrationPROSPERO, identifier: CRD42020185444. (shrink)

The French writer, philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the most original spiritual personalities of the 20th century. Now Coles presents a brilliant portrait of the beloved and controversial figure who was a spiritual influence on T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Adrienne Rich, and Albert Camus.

Background: Pre-licensure ethics nursing education does not adequately prepare and instill confidence in nurses to address ethical issues, and yet ethics education provides nurses with greater confidence to take moral action, which can mitigate the negative effects of moral distress. Objectives: To assess the feasibility and acceptability of a nursing ethics education program that included simulated case-based ethics competencies as a form of evaluation. The program aimed at building nurses’ ethical knowledge and confidence to respond to ethical challenges in practice. (...) Research design: A prospective, longitudinal, correlational, single-cohort feasibility study using an investigator-developed survey and intervention field data. Participants and research context: Registered nurses were recruited from an academic quaternary-care medical center and 9 small- to mid-sized regional hospitals within one health system in the Midwest United States. Ethical considerations: IRB approval was obtained. Participants could complete the educational program regardless of research process participation. Findings: Of 20 participants, 19 (95%) provided post-program surveys and 18 completed competencies. Median (IQR) scores with quartiles for scheduling, timing, and length of sessions were all 10.0 [9.0, 10.0], and participants perceived that the content was interesting, increased knowledge and confidence in ethics, increased skills in providing ethical care, and would recommend the program to colleagues. Of factors, an increase in ethics knowledge had the highest “always agree” (17, 89.5%) response. Most participants reported that ethics competencies were appropriate 9.0 [9.0, 10.0] and sufficiently challenging 10.0 [9.0, 10.0]. Discussion: The education program developed nurses’ ethics knowledge and confidence. The single-cohort feasibility design provided early-stage intervention outcomes; however, a larger randomized controlled trial would substantiate program value. Conclusion: This novel ethics education program was highly feasible and acceptable to hospital-based nurses who reported increased knowledge and confidence in providing ethical care. Simulated case-based ethics competencies were an appropriate evaluation method. (shrink)

This research assessed how the performance and team skills of three-person teams working with an Intelligent Team Tutoring System on a virtual military surveillance task were affected by feedback privacy, participant role, task experience, prior team experience, and teammate familiarity. Previous work in Intelligent Tutoring Systems has focused on outcomes for task skill training for individual learners. As research extends into intelligent tutoring for teams, both task skills and team skills are necessary for good team performance. This work includes a (...) brief review of previous research on ITTSs, feedback, teams, and teamwork, including the recounting of two categories of a framework of teamwork performance, Communication and Cognition, which are relevant to the present study. This research examines the effects of an intelligent agent, as well as features of the team, its members, and the task being undertaken, on team communication and team situation awareness. Thirty-seven teams of three participants, each at their own computer running a multiplayer surveillance simulation, were given just-in-time private or public performance feedback during four 5-min trials. In the fourth trial, two of the three participants switched roles. Feedback type, teamwork experience, and teammate familiarity had no statistically significant effect on communication or team situation awareness. However, higher levels of role experience and task experience showed significant and medium-sized effects on communication performance. Results, based on performance data and structured interview responses, also revealed areas of improvement in future feedback design and a potential benchmark for feedback frequency in an action-oriented serious game-based ITTS. Among the conclusions are six design objectives for future ITTSs, establishing a foundation for future research on designing effective ITTSs that train interpersonal skills to nascent teams. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Athenian Religion: A HistorySusan Guettel ColeRobert Parker. Athenian Religion: A History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xxix 1 370 pp. Cloth, $55.Parker begins by acknowledging Durkheim’s claim that “religion is something eminently social” (1), but he is not interested in demonstrating how ritual activity was embedded in Athenian social relationships or even how traditional rituals colored Athenian political life. His target is not Athenian society itself, and his project (...) is not an analysis of the ways and means by which ritual created or defined community. His real interest, in fact, is not religion at all, but rather the administration of public ritual.Parker admits that issues of topography and the organization of space are important for understanding Attic ritual, but his preference for Athenian literature and epigraphical sources inevitably shapes his view of a “web of religious life in Attica... spun by the spider at the centre” (25). The calendar of the Salaminians is more important to his argument as a source on institutions than it is as a source for administration of ritual at the edges of Attica. This preference for center over hinterland overcomes even the lack of sources. Solon’s calendar of festivals and that shadowy ghost, the Attic genos, assume more importance than the great sanctuaries at Eleusis and Brauron.Recognizing archaeological material when relevant, Parker is nevertheless skeptical about current work that claims a relationship between material culture and the expression of polis identity (citing in particular Snodgrass, De Polignac, and Morgan). For Parker the “polis” is an abstraction, and an abstraction, he claims, cannot have a history. He does comment on issues of identity and community organization, but these issues are important only in the context of the community’s regulation of ritual, where Parker prefers the written word, preferably inscribed, to the material artifact.The history of Athenian religion, as laid out here, is a history of collective decision making and collective ritual. Parker begins with mountain rituals of Zeus, chiefly because Mount Hymettos preserves our earliest Attic inscriptions, but his interests and chronological range are otherwise limited by the evidence for Attic public record keeping. His interests are also limited by a narrow definition of collective ritual, conditioned perhaps by modern notions of political autonomy and an exaggerated affection for the institutions of Athenian democracy. His targeted time period therefore begins rather conventionally with Solon’s calendar of “sacrifices from the kurbeis” (Lys. 30.17) and ends with the latest evidence for tribe and deme decrees, evidence that trails off in the middle [End Page 293] of the third century b.c. In between we have chapters arranged chronologically, on hereditary priesthoods and the Attic genos, the sixth century and the organization of festivals, democracy and empire, new gods in the fifth century, the trial of Socrates, and the ritual innovations of the fourth century. This looks like a conventional list of topics, but with Parker’s interest in public institutions this sequence is actually only a chronological framework for his real project, the administration of ritual. Seen in this context the Attic genos is not, as once argued, a relic of archaic aristocratic institutions or a privileged group within the phratry, but an administrative solution to an organizational problem. In Parker’s view, the genos provided priests for public cults. Expansion of political rights in the fifth century eventually required ritual by committee, and although, he argues, the genos, as an institution, did not go out of existence, the privileged families that controlled the traditional priesthoods had to yield to the boards of officials that now supervised some of the more important public rituals.Innovations, perhaps because they are more easily detectable in the kind of evidence Parker prefers, stand out more than tradition. Ritual innovations of the fifth century included rites modeled on those elsewhere in Greece (Artemis Agrotera, Pan, and Boreas, for example). Parker explains these innovations in political terms, describing their introduction as a reflection of Athenian pride in overcoming the Persian threat. Religious innovations of the second half of the fifth century (rituals associated with Adonis, Sabazius, and Cybele, for instance) are treated not as an incoming surge of foreign influence (as... (shrink)

A new approach examined two aspects of chess skill, long a popular topic in cognitive science. A powerful computer‐chess program calculated the number and magnitude of blunders made by the same 23 grandmasters in hundreds of serious games of slow (“classical”) chess, regular “rapid” chess, and rapid “blindfold” chess, in which opponents transmit moves without ever seeing the actual position. Rapid chess led to substantially more and larger blunders than classical chess. Perhaps more surprisingly, the frequency and magnitude of blunders (...) did not differ in rapid versus blindfold play, despite the additional memory and visualization load imposed by the latter. We discuss the involvement of various cognitive processes in human problem‐solving and expertise, especially with respect to chess. Prior opposing views about the basis of general chess skill have emphasized the dominance of either (a) swift pattern recognition or (b) analyzing ahead, but both seem important and the controversy appears currently unresolvable and perhaps fruitless. (shrink)

Many philosophers have suggested that metaethical scepticism is an inherently unstable position. Recently, Dworkin has offered an argument to this effect, claiming that (a) metaethical scepticism entails a set of first-order moral claims, and (b) this set of claims is internally inconsistent. The present essay shows why this argument fails. Along the way, it situates a plausible anti-realist semantics within the range of options for dealing with uncontroversially non-referring terms, like ‘unicorns’.

Jerry Fodor, LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited , New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, x+228, $37.95, ISBN 978-0-119-954877-4 Content Type Journal Article Pages 439-443 DOI 10.1007/s11023-009-9164-4 Authors David Cole, University of Minnesota-Duluth Department of Philosophy 369 A B Anderson Hall Duluth MN 55812 USA Journal Minds and Machines Online ISSN 1572-8641 Print ISSN 0924-6495 Journal Volume Volume 19 Journal Issue Volume 19, Number 3.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 633-637 [Access article in PDF] Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jas; Elsner, eds. Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xii + 379 pp. Cloth, $65. As he moves from monument to monument and polis to polis, Pausanias gives the impression that the sun is always shining and the weather fresh and sweet. Beyond the next (...) turn in the road, there might be a grove or spring and maybe a precinct of Demeter, a statue of Artemis, or a little temple of Aphrodite. If they were "worth seeing," we can rely on Pausanias to let us know. Delivering a mixed narrative that weaves together history, myth, and his own style of ekphrasis, his even-toned voiceover makes him a comfortable traveling companion. Or does it? We know that the oaks on Mt. Parnon make the forest dark (they are still there today), but for Pausanias, the land is called Skotitas, "Dark," not for the shadows of the oaks, but for Zeus Skotitas who had his sanctuary nearby. As Ada Cohen points out in her essay, Pausanias does not describe the landscape itself but only the places where it intersects with divinity. As the collaborators here make clear, similar principles of selection operate on other levels. Pausanias may enable us to visualize a lost world, but the view is sanitized. Writing at the peak of Roman wealth, power, and privilege, he gives us old Greece with hardly a trace of Rome. He presents cities without houses, landscapes without agriculture, sanctuaries without worshippers, and the past without the present. Like the cardboard and cellophane 3-D glasses worn by cinema audiences in the 1950s, his text brings into temporary and unstable focus a very specialized scene, but the view is that of a virtual museum, a theme park created for our viewing enjoyment.How did he do it and what are the consequences? I admit that when it comes to Pausanias, I am one of those "seekers after lost religions" whom Elsner classifies with archaeologists surveying the text of Pausanias for possible excavation sites. We will all be a little more careful after reading this book. Yet, where else [End Page 633] could we find the information Pausanias gives? Habicht rehabilitated Pausanias in the 1980s by demonstrating how well his text stands up when compared with the surviving external record. Pausanias did not have a spreadsheet to keep straight the sixty-nine altars at Olympia, but he must at least have taken notes.The arrangement of the articles presented here replicates a familiar academic setting. Structured like a weekend conference, the book divides into three sessions ("The Traveler and the Text," "Studies and Comparisons," and "Nachleben"), with four papers and two comments in each session. Very generally, the topics are: landscape as language (J. Elsner); mental baggage and method (E. Bowie); informants and information (C. P. Jones); pilgrimage and the inspiration of vision (I. Rutherford); selection and cultural choice (M. Torelli); memory and memorization (D. Konstan); identity, monumentality and the recall of mo(nu)ments sublime (J. Porter); representation of space and movement (A. Cohen); archaic text and image on the chest of Kypselos (A. M. Snodgrass); filling the empty map of Messenia (S. E. Alcock); Greek narratives in Roman images (B. Bergmann); other Spartas (P. Cartledge); shaping the genre of travel writing (S. B. Sutton); Leake's Pausanias and Greek topography (J. M. Wagstaff); rearranging Pausanias or Farnell on Greek ritual (J. Henderson); Harrison and Verrall present Pausanias for the hoipolloi (M. Beard); Sparta and the French Enlightenment (S. Bann); and remembering and reforming the past (J. Cherry).There isn't space enough here to do justice to every argument, but I will take a sentence to praise the editors for inspiring the synergy of so many specialties. Archaeologists talk about texts; literary scholars talk about places and objects; and art historians discuss the relation between the two. The section entitled Nachleben surveys the nineteenth-century efflorescence of Pausanias and from four very different vantage points evaluates his influence on... (shrink)

We show that for every enumeration degree $a there exists an e-degree c such that $a \leq c , and all degrees b, with $c \leq b , are properly Σ 0 2.

I reply to the excellent commentaries by Nancy Snow and Jennifer Cole Wright on my book, The Character Gap: How Good Are We? Topics discussed include the criteria of virtue, kinds of virtuous motives, vicious motivation and behavior, continence and incontinence, the possibility of widespread vice, and a recent meta-analysis of helping behavior.

Michael Tye, Consciousness Revisited: Materialism Without Phenomenal Concepts Content Type Journal Article Pages 103-106 DOI 10.1007/s11023-011-9225-3 Authors David Cole, Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota-Duluth, 369 A.B. Anderson Hall, Duluth, MN 55812, USA Journal Minds and Machines Online ISSN 1572-8641 Print ISSN 0924-6495 Journal Volume Volume 21 Journal Issue Volume 21, Number 1.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Tyrant’s Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient GreeceThomas ColeDeborah T. Steiner. The Tyrant’s Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. xiv + 279 pp. Cloth, price not stated.Literacy, as the author correctly points out in her introduction (5), tends to be seen nowadays as “a tool of cultural progress, of rational thought, of scientific analysis, a critical marker (...) that separates the developing from the developed world”; and so the spread of literacy in the Greek world of the Archaic and Classical periods is almost inevitably treated as an event that “heralds in a new rational, skeptical and objective approach,” leading to “advances... in logic, science and technology.” What follows this observation—by way of supplement or corrective to the communis opinio—is an attempt to show that for the Greeks themselves—insofar as their attitude can be documented down to the early fourth century B.C.—writing was something rather different: a multivalent and at times mysterious system of signifiers only partially differentiated from the nonalphabetic symbols and signs that preceded its introduction (chap. 1), a talismanic means of giving greater solemnity and efficacy to the contents of oaths, curses, prayers, and oracles (chap. 2), a frequent source of a “conservative and backward looking” vehicle (metaphor) for carrying on psychological and cosmological speculation (chap. 3), and a medium highly suspect as being the one preferred by tyrants, Greek or oriental, when communicating with their subjects or deputies (chap. 4) and by various types of subversives (conspiring oligarchs, religious fanatics, apolitical shunners of assembly and agora) when communicating among themselves (chap. 5).The attempt, though carried out with energy and imagination, strikes me as ultimately unsuccessful—inconclusive at best and at times dedicated to establishing theses which are refuted by the very evidence that has been assembled to support them. This is especially apparent in chapter 3, which suffers from a failure to allow for the existence of highly traditional modes of argumentation such as metaphor alongside the use of metaphorical vehicles in conjunction with highly “progressive” or revolutionary tenors. The habit of comparing perception, remembering, and forgetting to the inscribing, preservation, and erasure of texts on the wax tablets of the mind (100–5) is surely inseparable from the development both of an empiricist psychology and epistemology and of a materialistic view of the soul; and the atomist analogy between letters and the basic constituents of the cosmos (116–22) stands in equally close relationship to the concern of the scientist—be he ancient or modern—to draw distinctions between primary and secondary sensory qualities and to produce an accounting for the apparently qualitative differences between phenomena in ultimately quantitative terms.While not actually refuting the author’s theses, chapter 2 reveals the existence [End Page 145] of a fairly strong argumentum ex silentio against them. Its discussion is based almost entirely on inferences as to the attitudes whose existence might be posited to explain the frequency with which writing is used in certain contexts, and this frequency is, to my mind, more efficiently and plausibly accounted for as the result of nothing more mysterious than a general recognition of the superiority of written to verbal texts in situations where permanence, transportability, visibility, or reliability and authenticity are called for. We are still far from the skepticism, rationalism, and objectivity posited by the modern communis opinio, but much nearer to that than the obscurantism and authoritarianism of the alternative vision offered here. One would certainly not be surprised if, “as documents came to supplement and then to replace symbolic objects,” the former came to acquire some of the sacral character of the latter, and Steiner cites evidence (63 n. 8) to suggest that this actually occurred in medieval England. Parallels can also be cited from medieval Tibet, where monks sought to secure to themselves the spiritual benefits of Buddhist scriptures by wadding pages from the texts in question into small pellets and swallowing them; or even twentieth-century America, where college students seem to derive comparable reassurance from the photocopies of unread articles that line their bookshelves. But nothing in the evidence Steiner cites... (shrink)

Behrendt & Young's (B&Y's) novel “unifying model” of hallucinations, although comprehensive, fails to incorporate research into the possible role of 5-HT2A receptors in the mode of action of novel “atypical” antipsychotic drugs (which treat hallucinations effectively), and into the role of such receptors, which are located in thalamocortical circuits, in mediating drug-induced hallucinations.

I respond to a challenge by Dieterle (Philos Math 18:311–328, 2010) that requires mathematical social constructivists to complete two tasks: (i) counter the myth that socially constructed contents lack objectivity and (ii) provide a plausible social constructivist account of the objectivity of mathematical contents. I defend three theses: (a) the collective agreements responsible for there being socially constructed contents differ in ways that account for such contents possessing varying levels of objectivity, (b) to varying extents, the truth values of objective, (...) socially constructed contents are constrained to be what they are, and (c) typically, socially constructed mathematical contents are objective and possess truth values that are highly constrained by the intended applications of the mathematical facets of reality that they represent. (shrink)

Organizations are faced with the challenge of responding to increasing pressures to promote diversity in various ways. We draw attention to one possible proactive organizational response—the incorporation of diversity in organizational identity. This initial response necessarily evokes subsequent tasks of managing the changed identity. Therefore, this article also addresses the management of diversity identity within organizations, and relevant organizational outcomes. Our theoretical model is grounded in institutional theory, and we propose that the management of diversity identity can impact both perceptions (...) of legitimacy as well as diversity identity. Adequate, inadequate, and optimal management of diversity identity have differential effects on legitimacy and diversity identity. We contribute to the literature by a) unbundling initial and later firm responses to promoting diversity at the organizational level, and b) offering a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of managing diversity identity within organizations. (shrink)

In response to the need for a more diverse workforce, our medical school developed new policies and procedures that focus on the recruitment and selection of diverse students with a specific focus on those considered underrepresented in medicine. To understand what these students bring to the practice of medicine, researchers investigated their perception of their cultural assets and how they plan to use these assets as physicians. A cross-section of 23 ethnically, culturally, and geographically diverse medical students were interviewed and (...) data were analyzed through phenomenographical methods. The results indicate that students view themselves as having multiple assets that could be of significant value in their future practice of medicine, including: a) an interest in science and access to family members in medicine, b) personal and familial struggles with health, c) self and family as immigrants, and d) strong family and community orientations. Students perceived these as cultural assets because they could directly identify where these assets could be valuable in medicine but questioned how to maintain them throughout medical school. Now that our institution has identified these assets, next steps include administrators' investigation of ways to leverage them through curricular and educational programs. (shrink)

Offering a theory of imagination, and indirectly a defense of the humanities, this overly-rich and confusing work contains more literature than philosophy, and more philosophy than imagination. The author makes many suggestive comparisons: e.g., the literary equivalent of traditional positivism is the novels of Robbe-Grillet; the poetic equivalents of Peirce's firstness, secondness, and thirdness are the poems of Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, respectively. While Levi's division of the imagination into its teleological, dramatic, literary, and metaphysical (...) forms is well taken, he fails to heed Plato's warning to define the essence and not to be satisfied with a list of its kinds. The printing is careless.--A. B. (shrink)

Political opportunism of the far-right threatens the efficacy of public health policies and political stability in general. In this commentary, we outline some of the ways that the European far-right has misused public health concerns as propaganda tools. This is a significant threat to the goals of making health and science more inclusive, and we recommend some policies for mitigating the racist effect of the far-right. Notably, we recommend (a) transparency in health policies and robust implementation of the rule of (...) law, (b) the use of operative public values and human rights in health policy making, and (c) investment in decolonizing mindsets which may be corrosive of health policies. (shrink)

To provide some background for the commentaries by Nancy Snow and Jennifer Cole Wright, I summarize the main ideas from the three parts of my book, The Character Gap: How Good Are We?

This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of “Enlightenment rationalism.” The subjects of the volume—including, among others, Burke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, Gabriel Marcel, Russell Kirk, and Jane Jacobs—do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the presuppositions, (...) methods, and logic of the natural sciences. The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commentary on that thinker, but also to place that thinker in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a history. (shrink)