Leading scholars explore the relationship between deconstructive theory and process thought.

Medicine and the humanities have been exploring new ways to improve the quality of healthcare. One such collaboration is the practice of narrative medicine which uses literature to teach physicians to better meet their patients’ needs. Narrative medicine, however, draws primarily from Anglophone literature, yet post-war French literature, philosophy and criticism have much to add to the theoretical and practical underpinnings of narrative medicine. As well, such scholarship provokes a number of questions that expose certain weaknesses in narrative medicine as (...) it is practiced currently. As this paper demonstrates, drawing post-war French literature into narrative medicine opens new ways to think about life, narrative and the place of the patient in the modern healthcare system. (shrink)

The concept of mutual aid is central to the anarchist tradition, but also a source of controversy. This book’s intervention is to consider solidarity and mutual aid at the intersection of politics and biology, developing out of the work of Catherine Malabou.

Cet article souhaite montrer que les modèles spatiaux, physiques ou expérientiels, proposés généralement pour rendre compte du fonctionnement des particules verbales en anglais, posent de nombreux problèmes. En particulier, il s’avère impossible de réduire le signifié de UP (vs DOWN) à l’expression d’un « mouvement vertical vers le haut » et les valeurs non spatiales sont très nombreuses. L’alternative décrite ici, dans le cadre général de la Théorie de la Relation Interlocutive (Douay & Roulland 2014), consiste à rechercher dans le (...) fonctionnement même du système linguistique les causes et les motifs à la fois de la structuration spatiale et non spatiale. Cette recherche s’appuie sur une définition systémique du langage fondée sur l’auto-référence et l’auto-organisation, plutôt que sur des stimuli environnementaux qui seraient plus ou moins « évidents ». (shrink)

The persistence, and international expansion, of food banks as a non-governmental response to households experiencing food insecurity has been decried as an indicator of unacceptable levels of poverty in the countries in which they operate. In 1998, Poppendieck published a book, Sweet charity: emergency food and the end of entitlement, which has endured as an influential critique of food banks. Sweet charity‘s food bank critique is succinctly synthesized as encompassing seven deadly “ins” (1) inaccessibility, (2) inadequacy, (3) inappropriateness, (4) indignity, (...) (5) inefficiency, (6) insufficiency, and (7) instability. The purpose of this paper is to examine if and how the contemporary food bank critique differs from Sweet charity’s “ins” as a strategy for the formulation of synthesizing arguments for policy advocacy. We used critical interpretive synthesis methodology to identify relationships within and/or between existing critiques in the peer-reviewed literature as a means to create “‘synthetic constructs’ (new constructs generated through synthesis)” of circulating critiques. We analyzed 33 articles on food banks published since Sweet charity, with the “ins” as a starting point for coding. We found that the list of original “ins” related primarily to food bank operations has been consolidated over time. We found additional “ins” that extend the food bank critique beyond operations (ineffectiveness, inequality, institutionalization, invalidation of entitlements, invisibility). No synthetic construct emerged linking the critique of operational challenges facing food banks with one that suggests that food banks may be perpetuating inequity, posing a challenge for mutually supportive policy advocacy. (shrink)

Physical activity (PA) is important for managing the side effects and long-term outcomes of cancer treatment, yet many adolescents and young adults diagnosed with cancer (AYAs) are not meeting PA guidelines. Body image and social support are two factors that can influence PA behavior and require further attention in this population. The purpose of this study was to examine the associations between body image, social support, and PA among AYAs. An online cross-sectional survey administered through the Research Electronic Data Capture (...) platform was used to assess self-reported body image (body-related self-conscious emotions of appearance and fitness shame, guilt, authentic pride, and hubristic pride), social support (general and cancer-specific), and PA (mild, moderate-to-vigorous, and resistance exercise) in AYAs (N= 119;Mage= 34.5 ± 5.5 years). Based on findings from path analyses, body image and social support were directly associated with PA (R2= 0.09–0.33). Social support was also directly associated with body image. However, there were no indirect effects. These findings provide preliminary support for the influential role of appearance and fitness body-related emotions and cancer-specific social support on PA. The results have important implications for the development of targeted strategies aimed at improving body image (e.g., cognitive dissonance and compassion-focused interventions) and social support (e.g., facilitating the provision of cancer-specific support), with the overall goal of increasing AYAs’ PA. (shrink)

Do the nonverbal signals used to make social judgements differ depending on the type of judgement being made and what other nonverbal signals are visible? Experiment 1 investigated how nonverbal signals across three channels (face: angry/fearful, posture: expanded/contracted, lean: forward/backward), when viewed together, were used for judgements of emotion, threat, and status. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and explored how use of the body channels differed in making social judgements when the face channel was obscured. Both experiments found facial anger (...) linked to high anger, threat, and status ratings; facial fear was linked to low ratings. Expanded body posture increased threat and status judgements, while backward lean decreased anger and threat. With the face channel blocked (Experiment 2B), the influence of body posture increased across emotion, threat, and status judgements, while body lean was more consistent. Findings demonstrate that despite the face’s importance across types of social judgements, the body channels differentially contribute to judgements of emotion, threat and status. Further, they are differentially affected by the absence of facial information. How much face and body-related channels are used in social judgements is moderated by the type of judgement being made and the availability of other (particularly facial) channel information. (shrink)

We describe an approach to textual inference that improves alignments at both the typed dependency level and at a deeper semantic level. We present a machine learning approach to alignment scoring, a stochastic search procedure, and a new tool that finds deeper semantic alignments, allowing rapid development of semantic features over the aligned graphs. Further, we describe a complementary semantic component based on natural logic, which shows an added gain of 3.13% accuracy on the RTE3 test set.

The acoustic environments of small, central urban parks are often dominated by traffic sounds. Water sounds can be used to mitigate the negative impacts of unwanted sounds through masking. Studies comparing the effects of different water sounds are typically conducted using recordings in laboratory settings where ecological validity is limited. An urban redesign project in Montreal took the innovative approach of trying three sequential temporary designs of a new public square, each of which included a distinct water feature that produced (...) a lightly-audible mist. Here we report on a field experiment evaluating the effect of the water feature in each of the three designs. Respondents evaluated their experience with the three different designs using questionnaires including soundscape and restorativeness scales, and perceived loudness. The results indicate a significant interaction effect between the water feature and the design of the space, particularly on ratings of chaotic and loud. While two water feature designs had an overall “positive” effect on soundscape assessment, the third water feature design produced the opposite effect. These findings hold even after accounting for ambient temperature. This opportunity to test multiple water features in the same space revealed that water features do not automatically improve soundscape assessments. The visual design, function of the space and environmental conditions should be carefully considered and calls for more field studies. We discuss consequences and considerations for the use of water features in public spaces as well as the implications in terms of ecological validity of soundscape studies. (shrink)

Time-motion studies revolutionized the design and efficiency of repetitive work last century. Wouldtime-ideastudies revolutionize the rules of intellectual/creative work this century? Collaborating with seven professional dancers, we set out to discover if there were any significant temporal patterns to be found in a timeline coded to show when dancers come up with ideas and when they modify or reject them. On each of 3 days, the dancers were given a choreographic problem (or task) to help them generate a novel, high (...) quality contemporary dance phrase. They were videoed as they worked on this task for sessions of 15, 30, and 45 min. At the end of each 15 min interval during each session, we had them perform the phrase they were creating. They recorded and then coded the video of themselves dancing during these sessions by using a coding language we developed with them to identify when ideas are introduced, modified, and rejected. We found that most ideas are created early and that though these early ideas are aggressively pruned early on, many still make it into the final product. The two competing accounts of creativity in design research make predictions for the temporal structure of creativity. Our results support neither account, rather showing a more blended version of the two. The iterative design view, arguably the dominant view, is that good ideas are the product of generating many ideas, choosing one fairly early, committing to it, and iteratively improving it. The “fail fast fail often” view is that good ideas are the product of rapidly generating and discarding ideas and holding back from early commitment to any one in particular. The result of holding back commitment, typically, is not that an idea is taken up later and then incrementally improved at the last minute, as much as that later designs are not completely novel, instead incorporating the best parts of the entire sequence of ideas. In our study, we found no evidence that one account or the other was more predictive for the domain of contemporary dance. The behavior of the dancers that we studied revealed elements of both, calling into question how predictive these theories are. (shrink)

This paper presents our work on textual inference and situates it within the context of the larger goals of machine reading. The textual inference task is to determine if the meaning of one text can be inferred from the meaning of another and from background knowledge. Our system generates semantic graphs as a representation of the meaning of a text. This paper presents new results for aligning pairs of semantic graphs, and proposes the application of natural logic to derive inference (...) decisions from those aligned pairs. We consider this work as first steps toward a system able to demonstrate broad-coverage text understanding and learning abilities. (shrink)

Community Partnered Participatory Research is grounded in the ethical principle of respect for persons participating in the research enterprise. The critical importance of respect for person...

This study aimed to examine the number of latent classes of criminal social identity that exist among male recidivistic prisoners. Latent class analysis was used to identify homogeneous groups of criminal social identity. Multinomial logistic regression was used to interpret the nature of the latent classes, or groups, by estimating the associationsto number of police arrests, recidivism, and violent offending while controlling for current age. The best fitting latent class model was a five-class solution: ‘High criminal social identity’, ‘High Centrality, (...) Moderate Affect, Low Ties’, ‘Low Centrality, Moderate Affect, High Ties’,‘Low Cognitive, High Affect, Low Ties’, and ‘Low criminal social identity’. Each of the latent classes was predicted by differing external variables. Criminal social identity is best explained by five homogenous classes that display qualitative and quantitative differences. (shrink)

This study aims to reveal patterns of e-petition co-signing behavior that are indicative of the political mobilization of online “communities”. We discuss the case of We the People, a US national experiment in the use of social media technology to enable users to propose and solicit support for policy suggestions to the White House. We apply Baumgartner and Jones's work on agenda setting and punctuated equilibrium, which suggests that policy issues may lie dormant for periods of time until some event (...) triggers attention from the media, interest groups, and elected representatives. In the case study presented, we focus on 21 petitions initiated during the week after the Sandy Hook shooting in opposition to gun control or in support of policy proposals that are alternatives to gun control, which we view as mobilized efforts to maintain stability and equilibrium in a policy system threatening to change. Using market basket analysis and social network analysis we found a core group of petitions in the “support law-abiding gun owners” theme that were highly connected and four “communities” of e-petitioners mobilizing in opposition to change in gun control policies and in favor of alternative proposals. (shrink)

Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is (...) little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of ‘culture’ and to become organized around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation. (shrink)

Cash assistance programs have been piloted as Basic or Guaranteed Income across the United States. This research asks how programs are being designed and evaluated, with implications for how collective program impacts are understood. To answer this question, we assemble and review 105 programs based in the United States, covering over 40,000 beneficiaries. We compare eligibility criteria, funding sources, distribution amounts, program administration, pilot duration, and evaluation measures. We find that just over half of the programs use income-based qualifications and (...) most (84 %) have some form of place-based eligibility criteria defined by residence. The plurality of programs (28) are based in California (CA) and 16 operate at the county level. We also find that while the development of pilots often uses community development framing, funding and evaluation measures tend to be more aligned with either economic or public health intervention assessments. As multiple fields of study engage with poverty alleviation, our findings add nuance to the complex and continuously developing landscape of interventions and evaluations. (shrink)

The structure of the pre‐Christian book of Daniel as newly edited in Palestine in the first century B.C. is coherent, often symmetrical, and meaningful and was the version used by Jesus and the early Christians. Origen's and Jerome's reordering of the fourteen‐chapter book in conformity with the extant Hebrew, however, vitiated that structure. Susanna's account opened the pre‐Christian Palestinian version. That account inaugurates the themes of wisdom and judgment and provides the restoration of right order within the community in (...) exile, a restoration essential for what transpires thereafter. Her experience is the first of four holy ordeals placed symmetrically in the first half of the book and framing the book as a whole. Significantly, the two chapters of Daniel most quoted in the Gospels are the ones that open the two halves of the book: Susanna, and the first vision of Daniel. Those two chapters are linked thematically and by diction, including the pair of unique phrases ‘[one grown] ancient of evil days' and ‘Ancient of Days’. Susanna exemplifies the experiences of the saints – suffering and then vindicated – and also, for the writers of the synoptic Gospels – the experiences of Jesus in his passion. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Purpose Recent research has found unrealistic optimism among patient-subjects in early-phase oncology trials. Our aim was to investigate the cognitive and motivational factors that evoke this bias in this context. We expected perceptions of control to be a strong correlate of unrealistic optimism. Methods A study of patient-subjects enrolled in early-phase oncology trials was conducted at two sites in the USA. Respondents completed questionnaires designed to assess unrealistic optimism and several risk attribute variables that have been found to evoke the (...) bias in other contexts. Results One hundred and seventy-one patient-subjects agreed to be interviewed for our study. Significant levels of perceived controllability were found with respect to all nine research-related questions. Perceptions of control were found to predict unrealistic optimism. Two other risk attribute variables, awareness of indicators and mental image, were correlated with unrealistic optimism. However, in multivariate regression analysis, awareness and mental image dropped out of the model and perceived controllability was the only factor independently associated with unrealistic optimism. Conclusion Patient-subjects reported that they can, at least partially, control the benefits they receive from participating in an early-phase oncology trial. This sense of control may underlie unrealistic optimism about benefiting personally from trial participation. Effective interventions to counteract unrealistic optimism may need to address the psychological factors that give rise to distorted risk/benefit processing. (shrink)

Considered together, Butler and Whitehead draw from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. The contributors of this volume offer a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts.

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies often contain a puritanical conversion narrative, but Colonel Jack’s narrator is unique in his problematized relationship to Christian conversion. Alert to the negative implications of mercenary conversion, Defoe presents in Colonel Jack a hero who not only revels in his complex ploys to evade the law, but explicitly rejects conversion to Christianity at several points in the narrative. By reading Colonel Jack alongside narratives of European enslavement and incarceration, I suggest that in this text Defoe (...) deliberately reproduces the form of the popular Barbary captivity narrative. This subgenre of narrative portrays conversion as a force to be resisted, informs Jack’s reluctance to embrace Christianity, and ultimately suggests that living in a Christian nation may actually be a hindrance to conversion, making Catholic South America a milieu more conducive to the protagonist’s religious transformation than Protestant Virginia. (shrink)

Charles Peirce famously divided all signs into icons, indices and symbols. As recent decades have seen mainstream analytic philosophy of language broaden its traditional focus on symbols to recognise the "essential indexical", can the moral be extended to icons? Is there an “essential icon”? If so, what exactly would be "essential" about it? I argue that essential iconicity does exist, and a prime example is logical form, insofar as it cannot be discursively described, only 'shown'. Danielle Macbeth’s radical new “expressivist” (...) interpretation of Frege’s logic and Charles Peirce’s existential graphs are mobilized in support of this claim, which offers an original new direction to the foundations of logic. (shrink)

This substantial book is a highly original and thorough work of synthetic first philosophy. Although it has some recognizable roots in the Kantian/Sellarsian tradition of the Pittsburgh school, it adds a wealth of precise discussion of examples from science and mathematics, made possible by Macbeth's dual training in arts and sciences. It presents a developmental story of human reason bootstrapping itself towards greater power and clarity through the Western tradition (which is the sole purview of the discussion). This development is (...) divided into three distinct stages, which might be summarized very roughly as knowledge of: i) Objects, ii) Concepts applied to Objects and iii) Concepts alone. (shrink)

Would you want to be operated on by a surgeon trained at a medical school that did not evaluate its students? Would you want to fly in a plane designed by people convinced that the laws of physics are socially constructed? Would you want to be tried by a legal system indifferent to the distinction between fact and fiction? These questions may seem absurd, but there are theories being seriously advanced by radical multiculturalists that force us to ask such questions. (...) These scholars assert that such concepts as truth and merit are inextricably racist and sexist, that reason and objectivity are merely sophisticated masks for ideological bias, and that reality itself is nothing more than socially constructed mechanism for preserving the power of the ruling elite. In Beyond All Reason, liberal legal scholars Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry mount the first systematic critique of radical multiculturalism as a form of legal scholarship. Beginning with an incisive overview of the origins and basic tenets of radical multiculturalism, the authors critically examine the work of Derrick Bell, Catherine MacKinnon, Patricia Williams, and Richard Delgado, and explore the alarming implications of their theories. Farber and Sherry push these theories to their logical conclusions and show that radical multiculturalism is destructive of the very goals it wishes to affirm. If, for example, the concept of advancement based on merit is fraudulent, as the multiculturalists claim, the disproportionate success of Jews and Asians in our culture becomes difficult to explain without opening the door to age-old anti-Semitic and racist stereotypes. If historical and scientific truths are entirely relative social constructs, then Holocaust denial becomes merely a matter of perspective, and Creationism has as much "validity" as evolution. The authors go on to show that rather than promoting more dialogue, the radical multiculturalist preferences for legal storytelling and identity politics over reasoned argument produces an insular set of positions that resist open debate. Indeed, radical multiculturalists cannot critically examine each others' ideas without incurring vehement accusations of racism and sexism, much less engage in fruitful discussion with a mainstream that does not share their assumptions. Here again, Farber and Sherry show that the end result of such thinking is not freedom but a kind of totalitarianism where dissent cannot be tolerated and only the naked will to power remains to settle differences. Sharply written and brilliantly argued, this book is itself a model of the kind of clarity, civility, and dispassionate critical thinking which the authors seek to preserve from the attacks of the radical multiculturalists. With far-reaching implications for such issues as government control of hate speech and pornography, affirmative action, legal reform, and the fate of all minorities, Beyond All Reason is a provocative contribution to one of the most important controversies of our time. (shrink)

Commentant des extraits du journal tenu dès l’enfance par la lausannoise Angletine Charrière de Sévery, cette contribution éclaire l’écrit personnel féminin sous un autre angle que celui de l’« intime » : celui de l’apprentissage de l’être en société, fondamental en milieu nobiliaire au siècle des Lumières. Il se traduit par le report quotidien sur le papier des visites effectuées et reçues par sa famille, comptabilité à laquelle n’échappent pas même les jours auxquels il ne se passe rien. Après avoir (...) situé cette pratique scripturaire dans une tradition familiale féminine, la contribution en analyse l’évolution : de la simple description à la critique, en passant par l’appropriation des premiers instruments du jugement, Angletine prend de plus en plus de place dans son journal, jusqu’à ce que sa mère s’en efface. (shrink)

The model-theoretic argument known as Putnam´s paradox threatens our notion of truth with triviality: Almost any world can satisfy almost any theory. Formal argument and intuition are at odds. David Lewis devised a solution according to which the very stucture of the world fixes how it is to be divided into elite classes which determine the reference of any true theory. Three claims are defended: Firstly, Lewis´ proposal must be completed by an account of successful referential intentions. Secondly, contrary to (...) Catherine Elgin´s criticism of Lewis, natural properties corresponding to elite classes may play a role in sound scientific inquiry. Thirdly, despite Bas van Fraassen´s objection that the sceptic cannot consistently maintain doubts about reference, there is a promising sceptical strategy of exploiting Putnam´s results which is answered by Lewis´ account. (shrink)