Summary Benjamin Moore (1867?1922), physiologist and biochemist, was an eminent member of the British scientific and medical community in the early twentieth century. As a founder and president of the State Medical Services Association (SMSA) from its establishment in 1912 until his untimely death in 1922, Moore was a prominent medical services activist and planner in a period of intense debate on health services reform. As a medical scientist, Moore was also a participant in the campaign by laboratory scientists to (...) obtain a larger role in clinical education, research, and medicine in this period. This article examines the medical services activism and ideas of Benjamin Moore. In particular, it seeks to demonstrate how his health services proposals and those he influenced, including SMSA and Labour Party plans, sought to advance the interests of laboratory scientists. (shrink)

Objectives: Bronchoalveolar lavage obtained at bronchoscopy is useful for research on pulmonary defence mechanisms. Bronchoscopy involves some discomfort and risk to subjects. We audited the process of consent, experienced adverse effects and reasons for participation among research bronchoscopy volunteers.Design: 100 consecutive volunteer research subjects attending for bronchoscopy, repeat bronchoscopy or routine recruitment clinic were interviewed. Information was gathered about volunteer motivation, perception of the consent process and adverse effects of bronchoscopy. Suggestions for improvement were requested. Responses were themed by a (...) second investigator prior to data analysis.Results: 81 bronchoscopy-experienced subjects and 19 new volunteers were interviewed. 19 subjects reported adverse symptoms during or after bronchoscopy, but no symptoms were of sufficient severity that they would not repeat the procedure. The frequency of symptoms was not related to gender, the quality of the lavage or the HIV status of the subject. 76 subjects reported that the information given pre-procedure was useful and adequate but 43 had further questions mostly relating to their own results. The reasons given for research participation were access to health assessment , access to treatment when ill , desire to participate in research and remuneration . 7 subjects complained that the remuneration was inadequate.Conclusions: The main incentive to participation in research bronchoscopy was access to healthcare. Informed consent and procedure technique were adequate but subjects would value more feedback about individual and project results. (shrink)

Gordon Finlayson's response to Peter Gordon’s Adorno and Existence.

This is the second volume of analytical commentary on Wittgenstein's masterpiece, the Philosophical Investigations. Like the first, it consists of philosophical essays and critical exegesis. The six essays deal comprehensively with various themes in Wittgenstein''s philosophy: the relationship between his mathematics and his philosophy of mind; his conception of grammar and rules of grammar; the relation between a rule and what accords with a rule; the characterization of rule-following as mastery of a technique manifest in practice; his notion of a (...) form of life, and of agreement in definitions and judgements; a comprehensive investigation into his account of logical and mathematical necessity and other topics. (shrink)

This is a much revised and extended new edition of _Part I_ of the first volume of the monumental four-volume _Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations_. Takes into account much new material that was unavailable when the first edition was written Following Baker’s death in 2002, P.M.S. Hacker has rewritten many essays completely _Part I: Essays_ now includes two completely new essays: 'Meaning and Use' and 'The Recantation of a Metaphysician'; the essays: ‘The Augustinian Conception of Language’, ‘The Language-Game Method’, (...) ‘Contextual Dicta and Contextual Principles’, ‘Philosophy’, ‘Surveyability and Surveyable Representations’, and ‘Truth and the General Propositional Form’ are redrafted and expanded, incorporating new source materials and new arguments, as well as taking into account debates of the last quarter of a century The accompanying _Part II: Exegesis §§1-184_ - has been thoroughly revised in the light of the electronic publication of Wittgenstein’s _Nachlass_, and includes many new interpretations of the remarks, a history of the composition of the _Philosophical Investigations_ and an overview of its structure. The revisions will ensure that this remains the definitive reference work on Wittgenstein’s masterpiece for the foreseeable future. (shrink)

Background: Genomic analysis may reveal both primary and secondary findings with direct relevance to the health of probands’ biological relatives. Researchers question their obligations to return findings not only to participants but also to family members. Given the social value of privacy protection, should researchers offer a proband’s results to family members, including after the proband’s death? Methods: Preferences were elicited using interviews and a survey. Respondents included probands from two pancreatic cancer research resources, plus biological and nonbiological family members. (...) Hypothetical scenarios based on actual research findings from the two cancer research resources were presented; participants were asked return of results preferences and justifications. Interview transcripts were coded and analyzed; survey data were analyzed descriptively. Results: Fifty-one individuals (17 probands, 21 biological relatives, 13 spouses/partners) were interviewed. Subsequently, a mailed survey was returned by 464 probands, 1,040 biological family members, and 399 spouses/partners. This analysis highlights the interviews, augmented by survey findings. Probands and family members attribute great predictive power and lifesaving potential to genomic information. A majority hold that a proband’s genomic results relevant to family members’ health ought to be offered. While informants endorse each individual’s choice whether to learn results, most express a strong moral responsibility to know and to share, particularly with the younger generation. Most have few concerns about sharing genetic information within the family; rather, their concerns focus on the health consequences of not sharing. Conclusions: Although additional studies in diverse populations are needed, policies governing return of genomic results should consider how families understand genomic data, how they value confidentiality within the family, and whether they endorse an ethics of sharing. A focus on respect for individual privacy—without attention to how the broad social and cultural context shapes preferences within families—cannot be the sole foundation of policy. (shrink)

There is a debate in Bayesian confirmation theory between subjective and non-subjective accounts of evidence. Colin Howson has provided a counterexample to our non-subjective account of evidence: the counterexample refers to a case in which there is strong evidence for a hypothesis, but the hypothesis is highly implausible. In this article, we contend that, by supposing that strong evidence for a hypothesis makes the hypothesis more believable, Howson conflates the distinction between confirmation and evidence. We demonstrate that Howson’s counterexample fails (...) for a different pair of hypotheses. (shrink)

In ‘Wittgenstein on Language and Rules’, Professor N. Malcolm took us to task for misinterpreting Wittgenstein's arguments on the relationship between the concept of following a rule and the concept of community agreement on what counts as following a given rule. Not that we denied that there are any grammatical connections between these concepts. On the contrary, we emphasized that a rule and an act in accord with it make contact in language. Moreover we argued that agreement in judgments and (...) in definitions is indeed necessary for a shared language. But we denied that the concept of a language is so tightly interwoven with the concept of a community of speakers as to preclude its applicabilty to someone whose use of signs is not shared by others. Malcolm holds that ‘This is an unwitting reduction of Wittgenstein's originality. That human agreement is necessary for “shared” language is not so striking a thought as that it is essential for language simpliciter .’ Though less striking, we believe that it has the merit of being a true thought. We shall once more try to show both that it is correct, and that it is a correct account of Wittgenstein's arguments. (shrink)

The Second Edition of _Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity_ now includes extensively revised and supplemented coverage of the Wittgenstein's complex and controversial remarks on following rules. Includes thoroughly rewritten essays and the addition of one new essay on communitarian and individualist conceptions of rule-following Includes a greatly expanded essay on Wittgenstein’s conception of logical, mathematical and metaphysical necessity Features updates to the textual exegesis as the result of taking advantage of the search engine for the Bergen edition of the _Nachlass_ (...) Reflects the results of scholarly debates on rule-following that have raged over the past 20 years. (shrink)

There are three distinct questions associated with Simpson’s paradox. Why or in what sense is Simpson’s paradox a paradox? What is the proper analysis of the paradox? How one should proceed when confronted with a typical case of the paradox? We propose a “formal” answer to the first two questions which, among other things, includes deductive proofs for important theorems regarding Simpson’s paradox. Our account contrasts sharply with Pearl’s causal account of the first two questions. We argue that the “how (...) to proceed question?” does not have a unique response, and that it depends on the context of the problem. We evaluate an objection to our account by comparing ours with Blyth’s account of the paradox. Our research on the paradox suggests that the “how to proceed question” needs to be divorced from what makes Simpson’s paradox “paradoxical.”. (shrink)

This is a collection of the key articles written by renowned Wittgenstein scholar, G.P. Baker, on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, published posthumously. Following Baker’s death in 2002, the volume has been edited by collaborator and partner, Katherine Morris. Contains articles previously only available in other languages, and one previously unpublished paper. Completely distinct from the widely-known work Baker did with P.M.S. Hacker in the Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations.

This paper describes the results of a field experiment involving 400 employees from ten financial institutions operating within the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone of the People's Republic of China. It was found that, when faced with an agency-based problem, employees indicated they would be less inclined to advise management of the existence of unethical work practices. Younger employees without supervisory experience displayed significant risk aversion. Traditional Chinese values associated with Confucian work dynamism, were shown to be poor predictors of moral (...) choice response. A parsimonious regression model was developed that provides evidence that the universal trait Masculinity/Femininity acted to offset the negative influence of the agency problem. On the other hand, an operative's level of education attainment exerted a negative influence on moral response scores. (shrink)

This investigation examined age-related differences in auditory-visual integration as reflected on perceptual judgments of temporally misaligned AV English sentences spoken by native English and native Spanish talkers. In the detection task, it was expected that slowed auditory temporal processing of older participants, relative to younger participants, would be manifest as a shift in the range over which participants would judge asynchronous stimuli as synchronous. The older participants were also expected to exhibit greater declines in speech recognition for asynchronous AV stimuli (...) than younger participants. Talker accent was hypothesized to influence listener performance, with older listeners exhibiting a greater narrowing of the AV simultaneity window and much poorer recognition of asynchronous AV foreign-accented speech compared to younger listeners. Participant groups included younger and older participants with normal hearing and older participants with hearing loss. Stimuli were video recordings of sentences produced by native English and native Spanish talkers. The video recordings were altered in 50 ms steps by delaying either the audio or video onset. Participants performed a detection task in which they judged whether the sentences were synchronous or asynchronous, and performed a recognition task for multiple synchronous and asynchronous conditions. Both the detection and recognition tasks were conducted at the individualized signal-to-noise ratio corresponding to approximately 70% correct speech recognition performance for synchronous AV sentences. Older listeners with and without hearing loss generally showed wider AV simultaneity windows than younger listeners, possibly reflecting slowed auditory temporal processing in auditory lead conditions and reduced sensitivity to asynchrony in auditory lag conditions. However, older and younger listeners were affected similarly by misalignment of auditory and visual signal onsets on the speech recognition task. This suggests that older listeners are negatively impacted by temporal misalignments for speech recognition, even when they do not notice that the stimuli are asynchronous. Overall, the findings show that when listener performance is equated for simultaneous AV speech signals, age effects are apparent in detection judgments but not in recognition of asynchronous speech. (shrink)

There are three questions associated with Simpson’s paradox (SP): (i) Why is SP paradoxical? (ii) What conditions generate SP? and (iii) How to proceed when confronted with SP? An adequate analysis of the paradox starts by distinguishing these three questions. Then, by developing a formal account of SP, and substantiating it with a counterexample to causal accounts, we argue that there are no causal factors at play in answering questions (i) and (ii). Causality enters only in connection with action.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 1, Page W1-W2, January 2012.

We introduce a distinction, unnoticed in the literature, between four varieties of objective Bayesianism. What we call ' strong objective Bayesianism' is characterized by two claims, that all scientific inference is 'logical' and that, given the same background information two agents will ascribe a unique probability to their priors. We think that neither of these claims can be sustained; in this sense, they are 'dogmatic'. The first fails to recognize that some scientific inference, in particular that concerning evidential relations, is (...) not (in the appropriate sense) logical, the second fails to provide a non-question-begging account of 'same background information'. We urge that a suitably objective Bayesian account of scientific inference does not require either of the claims. Finally, we argue that Bayesianism needs to be fine-grained in the same way that Bayesians fine-grain their beliefs. (shrink)

This is a new edition of the first volume of G.P.Baker and P.M.S. Hacker’s definitive reference work on Wittgenstein’s _Philosophical Investigations_. Takes into account much material that was unavailable when the first edition was written. Following Baker’s death in 2002, P.M.S. Hacker has thoroughly revised the first volume, rewriting many essays and sections of exegesis completely. Part One – the Essays – now includes two completely new essays: 'Meaning and Use' and 'The Recantation of a Metaphysician'. Part Two – Exegesis (...) §§1–184 – has been thoroughly revised in the light of the electronic publication of Wittgenstein’s _Nachlass_, and includes many new interpretations of the remarks, a history of the composition of the book, and an overview of its structure. The revisions will ensure that this remains the definitive reference work on Wittgenstein’s masterpiece for the foreseeable future. (shrink)

Theories of sentence production that involve a convergence of activation from conceptual‐semantic and syntactic‐sequential units inspired a connectionist model that was trained to produce simple sentences. The model used a learning algorithm that resulted in a sharing of responsibility (or “division of labor”) between syntactic and semantic inputs for lexical activation according to their predictive power. Semantically rich, or “heavy”, verbs in the model came to rely on semantic cues more than on syntactic cues, whereas semantically impoverished, or “light”, verbs (...) relied more on syntactic cues. When the syntactic and semantic inputs were lesioned, the model exhibited patterns of production characteristic of agrammatic and anomic aphasic patients, respectively. Anomic models tended to lose the ability to retrieve heavy verbs, whereas agrammatic models were more impaired in retrieving light verbs. These results obtained in both sentence production and single‐word naming simulations. Moreover, simulated agrammatic lexical retrieval was more impaired overall in sentences than in single‐word tasks, in agreement with the literature. The results provide a demonstration of the division‐of‐labor principle, as well as general support for the claim that connectionist learning principles can contribute to the understanding of non‐transparent neuropsychological dissociations. (shrink)