This paper puts forward a general framework for thought about human information processing. It is intended to avoid some of the problems of pipeline or stage models of function. At the same time it avoids the snare of supposing a welter of indefinitely many separate processes. The approach is not particularly original, but rather represents the common elements or presuppositions in a number of modern theories. These presuppositions are not usually explicit, however, and making them so reduces the danger of (...) slipping back into earlier modes of thought.The key point is to distinguish between persisting representations and the processes that translate one representation into another. Various classes or groups of persisting representations can be distinguished by the experimental treatments that interfere with them. In particular, there now seem to be several kinds of short-term or temporary storage, different from each other as well as from longterm memory; the translating processes also have several different modes or kinds. A particularly important aspect of the current position is that a model of this general type no longer requires some external agent to direct and control long sequences of behaviour. (shrink)

We distinguish three aspects of medical diagnosis: generating new diagnostic hypotheses, selecting hypotheses for further pursuit, and evaluating their probability in light of the available evidence. Drawing on Peirce’s account of abduction, we argue that hypothesis generation is amenable to normative analysis: physicians need to make good decisions about when and how to generate new diagnostic hypothesis as well as when to stop. The intertwining relationship between the generation and selection of diagnostic hypotheses is illustrated through the analysis of a (...) detailed clinical case study. This interaction is not adequately captured by the existing probabilistic, decision-theoretic models of the threshold approach to clinical decision-making. Instead, we propose to conceptualize medical diagnosis in terms of strategic reasoning. (shrink)

Clinical diagnostic medicine is an experimental science based on observation, hypothesis making, and testing. It is an use dynamic process that involves observation and summary, diagnostic conjectures, testing, review, observation and summary, new or revised conjectures, i.e. it is an iterative process. It can then be said that diagnostic hypotheses are also ‘observation-laden’. My aim is to enlarge on the strategies of medical diagnosis as these are meshed in training and clinical experience—that is, to describe the patterns of reasoning used (...) by experienced clinicians under different diagnostic circumstances and how these patterns of inquiry allow further insight into the evaluation and treatment of patients. I do not aim to present a theory and illustrate it with examples; I wish rather am to let a realistic example, similar to actual clinical scenarios, direct the exposition. To this end, I introduce an account of medical diagnosis—briefly comparing and contrasting it to other accounts—in order to focus on discussing the process of diagnosis through a detailed clinical case. (shrink)

This essay presents a scenario of the origin of life that is based on analysis of biological architecture and mechanical design at the microstructural level. My thesis is that the same architectural and energetic constraints that shape cells today also guided the evolution of the first cells and that the molecular scaffolds that support solid-phase biochemistry in modern cells represent living microfossils of past life forms. This concept emerged from the discovery that cells mechanically stabilize themselves using tensegrity architecture and (...) that these same building rules guide hierarchical self-assembly at all size scales (Sci Amer 278:48–57;1998). When combined with other fundamental design principles (e.g., energy minimization, topological constraints, structural hierarchies, autocatalytic sets, solid-state biochemistry), tensegrity provides a physical basis to explain how atomic and molecular elements progressively self-assembled to create hierarchical structures with increasingly complex functions, including living cells that can self-reproduce. BioEssays 22:1160–1170, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This book, first published in 2006, examines the incentives at work in a wide range of institutions to see how and how well coordination is achieved by informing and motivating individual decision makers. The book examines the performance of agents hired to carry out specific tasks, from taxi drivers to CEOs. It investigates the performance of institutions, from voting schemes to kidney transplants, to see if they enhance general well being. The book examines a broad range of market transactions, from (...) auctions to labor markets, to the entire economy. The analysis is conducted using specific worked examples, lucid general theory, and illustrations drawn from news stories. Of the seventy different topics and sections, only twelve require a knowledge of calculus. The second edition offers new chapters on auctions, matching and assignment problems, and corporate governance. Boxed examples are used to highlight points of theory and are separated from the main text. (shrink)

Resource Allocation Mechanisms derives the general welfare properties of systems in which individuals are motivated by self-interest. Satisfactory outcomes will emerge only if individual incentives are harnessed by means of a communication and payoff process, or mechanism, involving every agent. Professor Campbell employs a formal and abstract model of a mechanism that brings into prominence the criteria by which the performance of an economy is to be judged. The mechanism approach is used to prove some fundamental theorems about the possibility (...) of designing an economic system satisfying the criteria. It also establishes a way of thinking about economic issues that is becoming increasingly useful in special branches of economics, such as industrial organization and public finance. This book can be viewed as two different texts: one constitutes an introduction to the theory of mechanism design and the other is a treatment of welfare economics with conventional emphasis on Pareto optimality as well as providing substantial material on incentives, uncertainty, and existence of equilibrium. (shrink)

What the Old Testament says about wealth and poverty cannot be taken as prescriptive for any modern society, but its emphasis on the fate of the powerless prompts us to ask how our society deals with those unable to protect themselves from the depredations of others.

This paper puts forward a general framework for thought about human information processing. It is intended to avoid some of the problems of pipeline or stage models of function. At the same time it avoids the snare of supposing a welter of indefinitely many separate processes. The approach is not particularly original, but rather represents the common elements or presuppositions in a number of modern theories. These presuppositions are not usually explicit, however, and making them so reduces the danger of (...) slipping back into earlier modes of thought.The key point is to distinguish between persisting representations and the processes that translate one representation into another. Various classes or groups of persisting representations can be distinguished by the experimental treatments that interfere with them. In particular, there now seem to be several kinds of short-term or temporary storage, different from each other as well as from longterm memory; the translating processes also have several different modes or kinds. A particularly important aspect of the current position is that a model of this general type no longer requires some external agent to direct and control long sequences of behaviour. (shrink)

William James, like his father before him, devoted much attention to religion. He defended the human desire to have faith in something, or some being, whose existence could not be empirically defended. Faith generated a feeling of ease and peacefulness, and therefore could be considered a moral good. In The Varieties of Religious Experience James argued that faith could be discovered and enacted in unconventional ways.Mr. Schulte has redefined James’s thesis to support Alcoholic Anonymous 3rd edition. He claims that James (...) provided the germinal idea of the AA program according to the program’s cofounders Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith. Schulte uses Varieties in an adulterate fashion: each of the 8.. (shrink)

Proposes the path for understanding human existence developed by M. Merleau-Ponty as a replacement for the paths historically employed by psychology. Descartes established the agenda for modernistic philosophy when he proposed that the task of philosophy is to provide a foundation on which assurances of certain truth can be built. Modernist philosophers diverged, following the paths of sensation and of reason . Postmodernists argue that Descartes's agenda was misguided and that there is no foundation for certain knowledge. They set upon (...) the path of language which led them to the dismissal of the human S. Merleau-Ponty explored the path of the lived body in which thought and extension are intertwined, and along which is located the human S in its temporality and embodiment. The path of embodiment is held to be a more fruitful path than the path of language. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Throughout the philosophical tradition there usually have been those philosophers who have either denied the existence of mental entities outright, or else have claimed that they were, in some sense, reducible to physical entities. And, on this score, the twentieth century has been no exception. In the last twenty or so years, the various denials of the existence of mental entities have taken three distinct forms. First, there is the sort of behaviorism advocated by Quine and Ryle. Second, there is (...) the materialism of J. J. C. Smart and D. M. Armstrong. And, third, there is the so-called Identity Theory as advocated by Donald Davidson, Thomas Nagel, and a host of others too numerous to mention. (shrink)

So Lentricchia has fulfilled one of his purposes in this essay. He has subverted the patriarchy from within: that is, he has subverted Bloom’s literary history as well as the essentialist feminism associated with it. But he has not fulfilled his affiliated purpose of establishing a dialogue between feminists and feminized males. The “feminization” of literary studies by patriarchal figures like Bloom does not account for the feminization of Stoddard, Gilder, Van Dyke, Woodberry, or Stedman. Their feminization, like that of (...) the Stevens who felt positively lady-like, was not the result of patriarchal oppression. And it will not disappear as the result of the subversion of the patriarchy by a feminized male. Mistaking the work of feminization with the work of the patriarch eradicates the feminine. By identifying the difference between a feminization produced by the patriarchy and a feminine cultural sphere, Lentricchia has made room for the different cultural conversation he wants to develop. But this conversation can take place only after the backdrop of an oppressive patriarch can drop away.This conversation might begin with an account of that cultural sphere in which women are the agency to which Lentricchia alludes. It might begin when we recall that the model for the culture’s “Emmeline Grangerfords” was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva. The social change Little Eva helped effect was the emancipation of both slaves and slaveholders. Donald E. Pease is professor of English and American literature at Dartmouth College. His articles on nineteenth-century authors and literature have appeared in a number of journals. He is the coeditor, with Walter Benn Michaels, of American Renaissance Reconsidered, and is the author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Contexts, which won the Mark H. Ingraham Prize in 1987. (shrink)