Data gathered by investigators are used to test the validity of a specific scientific hypothesis. When the hypothesis relates to the biology of a disease or its treatment, then data sets may contain specific and identifiable medical information. Since the information in a clinical data set was gathered to test a specific hypothesis and there is usually a sponsor interested in the outcome, the issue of who owns the data is a critical one. In my opinion, data from both publicly (...) and privately funded research should be made available, in a format that protects confidentiality and intellectual property rights, to interested and responsible parties within a reasonable period of time after publication. (shrink)

In this introduction to Part 1 of “Contextualism—the Next Generation: Symposium on the Future of a Methodology,” the editor of Common Knowledge, a “journal of left-wing Kuhnian opinion,” reports that the new symposium responds to contextualist criticism of the previous CK symposium, which was on xenophilia. The content of the earlier symposium met with objections, from contextualists, on the grounds of methodology, and the new symposium questions the methodology of contextualism for the limits that it places on content as well (...) as on normative aims and degree of focus. Tracing the origins of contextualism to Kuhn and his theory that paradigms of scientific knowledge are incommensurable, this essay then argues that Kuhnian method is formal, with scant concern for content, and that Kuhn’s work was vatic, more than philosophical or historical. Kuhn’s depiction of his sudden, blinding realization that Aristotelian physics is correct in its own context is assessed as an ironic application of biblical scenes of revelation to what is, essentially, a process of scrupulous, piecemeal scholarship. What Kuhn unknowingly wanted, the essay concludes, was a combination of contextualism and phenomenology, as a means of knowing what it was like to believe in Aristotelian, as opposed to modern, concepts of matter, quality, space, void, position, change, and motion. The essay then introduces the first contribution to the new symposium: a monograph retrieving geometrical and taxonomic—Euclidean and Theophrastan—idioms of discourse about fictional characters and inquiring into their changing affective content. (shrink)

This paper concerns what if any obligations a “society of equals” has to criminal offenders after legal punishment ends. In the United States, when people leave prisons, they are confronted with a wide range of federal, state, and local laws that burden their ability to secure welfare benefits, public housing, employment opportunities, and student loans. Since the 1980s, these legal consequences of criminal convictions have steadily increased in their number, severity, and scope. The central question I want to ask is (...) whether the infliction of these burdensome legal consequences for those who have already been punished by the state is consistent with the ideal of equality. I argue that these collateral legal consequences violate relational egalitarian principles of justice and are thus objectionable. I conclude by examining possible objections to my argument. (shrink)

This qualitative analysis examines the thinking of Thomas Merton and Jacques Ellul on the impact that they believe technology and the idea of progress has had on human freedom. The thesis is that for both Merton and Ellul, modern technology itself and an uncritical acceptance of the idea of technological progress potentially inhibits the contemplative life and serves to deprive humanity of the God-given gift of freedom. Examining Merton and Ellul through theological, sociological, and political lenses allows a point-by-point comparison (...) of a number of different ideas that directly relate to the impact that technology has had on the human condition. This comparison identifies commonalities of thought and traces some of the antecedents to their thought. Merton the Roman Catholic and Ellul the Protestant offer remarkably similar conclusions regarding the impact that technology has had on the human condition. As Christians, they provide a distinctly Christocentric view of freedom, and it is against this unique view that the impact of technology and the idea of progress is evaluated. Both men offer a "third way," which is an approach that allows one to transcend the grip that the technological society maintains over the individual. They are examples of men not only thinking about the impact that technology has had on human freedom as much as they are individuals firmly committed to living out the ideals that they spent their lives articulating. (shrink)

A juvenile. Not unique, but a rarity for a university press. The publisher characterizes Skammy (about Skamandrios) as: an exciting story of adventure and mighty deeds, Skammy...struggles with great questions of life, death, and immortality. It offers models of human thought, behavior, and morality ranging from heroism, courage, integrity, and endurance to cowardice and treachery.".

In this piece, the editor of Common Knowledge offers excerpts from his two-year correspondence with a reader in Hong Kong, who was drawn to arguments made in the journal about maintaining “quietism and resistance in the face of vile behavior.” In the summer and fall of 2019, during the insurrection in Hong Kong, his correspondent shifts rapidly from taking comfort in CK’s defense of quietism to a full embrace of “uncivil disobedience.” She implies that the solidarity the editor expresses with (...) Hong Kong is merely rhetorical, and he responds by writing this article and quoting in it the entire text of the 1984 Joint Declaration of the Chinese and British governments on the question of Hong Kong. The declaration’s guarantees of autonomy and civil rights appear in bold italics. The editor concludes by suggesting that it falls to the United Nations Security Council to enforce the terms of the treaty. (shrink)

A simple tool is provided to assist researchers in assessing contributions to a scientific publication, for ease in evaluating which contributors qualify for authorship, and in what order the authors should be listed. The tool identifies four phases of activity leading to a publication—Conception and Design, Data Acquisition, Analysis and Interpretation, and Manuscript Preparation. By comparing a project participant’s contribution in a given phase to several specified thresholds, a score of up to five points can be assigned; the contributor’s scores (...) in all four phases are summed to yield a total “contribution score”, which is compared to a threshold to determine which contributors merit authorship. This tool may be useful in a variety of contexts in which a systematic approach to authorial credit is desired. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the uses of history in science. It focuses in particular on Anglo-American genetics and on university textbooks—where the canon of a science is consolidated, as the heterogeneous approaches and controversies of its practice are rendered unified for its reproduction. Tracing the emergence and eventual standardization of geneticists’ use of a case-based method of teaching in the 1920s–1950s, this paper argues that geneticists created historical environments in their textbooks—spaces in which students developed an understanding of the (...) laws of genetics through simulations of their discovery and use. Witnessing the unfolding of Mendel’s and Morgan’s experiments and performing genetic crosses on paper, students learned not only the rules that were explicitly taught as such, but also the experientially-based, tacit skills needed to find and follow these rules. This didactic system taught them how to go on when confronting new situations, and in doing so, provided geneticists with an important disciplinary tool, freeing the first steps of their student’s enculturation from the physical infrastructure of the laboratory. (shrink)

This introduction to the third and final part of the Common Knowledge symposium “Unsocial Thought, Uncommon Lives” is reprinted here in a special issue of representative pieces from the journal’s first twenty-five years. The title is taken from an article by Isaiah Berlin in CK. Perl’s essay argues against the Aristotelian presumption that “man is a social animal” and explains that the CK symposium on unsocial thought was meant to substantiate that “societies do as a rule smother instinctive behaviors, but (...) in the process they also as a rule incarnate the least respectable instincts with greater force than individuals can do independently.... If even heroism and altruism, let alone standard social conduct, are oblique expressions of aggression, cruelty, and the will to power, then the obvious conclusion to reach is that human beings are not fit company for each other.... The standard means of veering off from this conclusion is to blame one’s own society, or aspects of contemporary society, and then to propose improvements. Historically, evidence suggests, efforts of this kind are opportunities for controversy and thus for exercise of the will to power. Social order is such that even the discussion of social order occasions conflict.” Perl goes on to argue that individualists and communitarians are “fundamentally in accord”: they are “teams” agreeing to the rules of a dubious conflict from which only “stylites, dendrites, and mendicants” have done what is required to exempt themselves. (shrink)

In order to understand ongoing activity, observers segment it into meaningful temporal parts. Segmentation can be based on bottom‐up processing of distinctive sensory characteristics, such as movement features. Segmentation may also be affected by top‐down effects of knowledge structures, including information about actors' intentions. Three experiments investigated the role of movement features and intentions in perceptual event segmentation, using simple animations. In all conditions, movement features significantly predicted where participants segmented. This relationship was stronger when participants identified larger units than (...) when they identified smaller units, and stronger when the animations were generated randomly than when they were generated by goal‐directed human activity. This pattern suggests that bottom‐up processing played an important role in segmentation of these stimuli, but that this was modulated by top‐down influence of knowledge structures. To describe accurately how observers perceive ongoing activity, one must account for the effects of distinctive sensory characteristics, the effects of knowledge structures, and their interactions. (shrink)

Après avoir fait le point sur les divers manuscrits du Digénis Acritas , connus à l'époque byzantine et sur leurs relations, l'auteur tente de discerner lesquels entrent dans la composition de la version escoriale.

In this piece, the editor of Common Knowledge introduces a long-term project titled “Antipolitics: Symposium in Memory of György Konrád.” Konrád, who died in 2019, was a founding member of the Common Knowledge editorial board, and the symposium is meant to find present-day applications for the arguments of his book Antipolitics, published in 1982 in Hungarian. Although written under Cold War conditions and to that extent dated, the book is directed against politics and politicians as such: “What Machiavelli's Prince is (...) to would-be rulers, Antipolitics should be for those resistant to being ruled — a treasury of axioms and apothegms,” which this editorial collects, updates, and analyzes. Given that democratic systems and constitutions are “open and subject to further development,” Konrád urges us to devise and run experiments in governance that apply “creative imagination” to problems that, in better times, we might leave to politicians to resolve. “The crisis for democracy today,” Perl argues, “is that bad government (as Konrád, Václav Havel, and Adam Michnik defined it in the 1980s) appears to be what various electorates crave and therefore choose.” Realizing that elections produce, as Aristotle said, oligarchy rather than democracy, we should rethink majority rule and experiment with sortition as a counterpolitical means of self-government. (shrink)

Compilation of articles originally published in Common knowledge.

Much of our behavior is guided by our understanding of events. We perceive events when we observe the world unfolding around us, participate in events when we act on the world, simulate events that we hear or read about, and use our knowledge of events to solve problems. In this book, Gabriel A. Radvansky and Jeffrey M. Zacks provide the first integrated framework for event cognition and attempt to synthesize the available psychological and neuroscience data surrounding it. This synthesis (...) leads to new proposals about several traditional areas in psychology and neuroscience including perception, attention, language understanding, memory, and problem solving.Radvansky and Zacks have written this book with a diverse readership in mind. It is intended for a range of researchers working within cognitive science including psychology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, and education. Readers curious about events more generally such as those working in literature, film theory, and history will also find it of interest. (shrink)

In this introduction to part 3 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” the journal's editor argues that, apart from sortition, the best guarantees of safety in a democracy are, first, to augment judicial oversight of all political processes and, second, to exclude politicians from the process of selecting judges. “There can never be too much judicial interference,” he writes, “in what politicians regard as their domain.” The author reached this conclusion during attempts by the newly elected Israeli government, in the (...) spring of 2023, to make itself absolute by eliminating checks on its conduct that the Supreme Court had been developing and applying since the 1950s. Traditional Jewry and Judaism being notoriously hypernomian, the resistance to legality on the part of the ruling coalition has conveyed an aura of antinomian heresy. The choice in Israel appears to be between antipolitics and antinomianism, rather than between Left and Right politically—and the antipolitical model in Israel of a superintendent judiciary and an autonomous attorney general is arguably superior to the American prototype, even from the perspective (“all men are created equal..., endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”) that we have come to regard as quintessentially American. (shrink)

water paradox has long served as an argument against the Principle of Indifference. A solution to the paradox is proposed, with a view toward resolving general difficulties in applying the principle.

People with disabilities suffer from pervasive inequalities in employment, education, transportation, housing, and health care compared to those who are not disabled. Moreover, people with disabilities are often subject to unjustified stigma and pity. In this paper, I will explain why these disadvantages violate relational egalitarian principles of justice. As I will show, my argument can account for both kinds of inequality that disabled people face.

This paper concerns the question of what makes disability discrimination morally objectionable. When I refer to disability discrimination, I am focusing solely on a failure or denial of reasonable accommodations to a disabled person. I argue a failure to provide reasonable accommodations is wrong when and because it violates principles of relational equality. To do so, I examine four accounts of wrongful discrimination found in the literature and apply these theories to disability discrimination. I argue that all of these accounts (...) leave us wanting because they have implausible implications or other limitations. I then defend my relational egalitarian theory of wrongful disability discrimination. I argue why principles of relational equality can explain the wrongness of failing to accommodate a disabled person. I will then illustrate how my account can identify plausible instances of disability discrimination while avoiding implausible implications. Finally, I discuss some further complications with my account while highlighting its benefits. Importantly, my argument can capture the distinctive wrongness of disability law and policy’s reasonable accommodation mandates. (shrink)

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, responds to a piece by Dionigi Albera that, in turn, responds to Jeffrey Perl’s introduction, published in May 2017, to CK’s multipart symposium on xenophilia. Albera argues that the ambivalence that Perl observes in many instances of xenophilia needs genealogical explanation, and Albera turns for this purpose to analysis of the relationship between Aphrodite and Ares in Greco-Roman mythology. In the present piece, Perl extends that exploration in analysis of a series (...) of images in which the gods of love and war, along with their illegimate children Eros and Phobos, are given comical and often vulgar treatment by artists ranging from Botticelli and Mantegna, in the fifteenth century; to Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, in the sixteenth; to Rubens, Jan Bruegel the Elder, and Poussin, in the seventeenth; to Lagrenée, in the eighteenth; to David and Guillemot, in the nineteenth; to Jeff Koons in our own day. Perl and Albera agree with these artists that the antithetical pair, Aphrodite and Ares, have a fully logical, if furtive relationship in mythology, iconography, and psychology. The idealization to which the comic images respond—that when warriors make love, there is no warfare—is laughed, again and again, out of court. But Perl’s concern, unlike Albera’s, is that this cynicism on the part of artists and advanced intellectuals means that, despite their ostensible preference for peace over conflict, they will always find cause to undermine every effort to make way for peace. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Background Incentives and guidance from the criminal law Other regulatory incentives and guidance Civil incentives Conclusion.

This essay introduces the second of three installments of an “elegiac symposium” in Common Knowledge on figures and concepts devalued in what Thomas Kuhn refers to as “paradigm shifts.” The essay suggests that Kuhn’s idea is provincial, in three specified senses, and then goes on to show how differently Japanese culture regards and manages major change. The author of this introduction, who is also the journal’s editor, begins by evaluating a triptych of 1895 by Toshikata as a response to the (...) seemingly revolutionary changes brought by the Meiji Restoration a generation before. He then goes on to discuss, as exemplary of Japanese attitudes toward change, the Shinto ritual during which the sacred shrines of Ise Jingū are torn down and rebuilt every twenty years. The essay concludes by explaining how the impetus for this ritual is also involved in less-exalted aspects of Japanese culture; for example, in the peculiarities of the market for ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Overall, this essay shows that Japanese ways of regarding concepts such as “old” and “new,” “continuity” and “change,” differ so radically from those presupposed in the West that the latter should be regarded as provincial rather than as universally valid. (shrink)

A wide-ranging history of the intellectual developments that produced the modern idea of the algorithm. Bringing together the histories of mathematics, computer science, and linguistic thought, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reveals how recent developments in artificial intelligence are reopening an issue that troubled mathematicians long before the computer age. How do you draw the line between computational rules and the complexities of making systems comprehensible to people? Here Jeffrey M. Binder offers a compelling tour of four (...) visions of universal computation that addressed this issue in very different ways: G. W. Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator; a universal algebra scheme Nicolas de Condorcet designed during the French Revolution; George Boole's nineteenth-century logic system; and the early programming language ALGOL, whose name is short for algorithmic language. These episodes show that symbolic computation has repeatedly become entangled in debates about the nature of communication. To what extent can meaning be controlled by individuals, like the values of a and b in algebra, and to what extent is meaning inevitably social? By attending to this long-neglected question, we come to see that the modern idea of the algorithm is implicated in a long history of attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day. Machine learning, in its increasing dependence on words, now places this boundary in jeopardy, making its stakes all the more urgent to understand. The idea of the algorithm is a levee holding back the social complexity of language, and it is about to break. This book is about the flood that inspired its construction. (shrink)

This essay is the journal editor's introduction to part 3 of an ongoing symposium on quietism. With reference to writings of James Joyce, Francis Picabia, J. M. Coetzee, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elaine Pagels, and Karen King—and with extended reference to Jonathan Lear's study of “cultural devastation,” Radical Hope—Jeffrey Perl explores the possibility that the fear of anomie (“anomiphobia”) is misplaced. He argues that, in comparison with the violence and narrowness of any given social order, anomie may well be (...) preferable, and, in any case, may be no more than another name for quietism. (shrink)

In his introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, the journal's editor tours the reader through two private apartments and through two public art collections in an effort to establish that aesthetically coherent mixtures of apparently immiscible objects from widely divergent cultures are possible and also morally glamorous. Xenophobia at its least reprehensible, he argues, is a fear of ecumenism and its consequences, as well as a fear of one's own conversion — of “turning Turk.” Xenophilia (...) at its most admirable is a pursuit of coherent mixtures where others cannot imagine their possibility. Bits lifted from reputedly pure and organic wholes may be transformed by means of overlap and mediated juxtaposition into a novel milieu that has a wholeness, authenticity, and charisma of its own. Such coherence depends on minds that are capable of loving what does not satisfy their narcissism and that can sense in the products of their own culture elements or signs of enervation, anomie, lack, derangement, waywardness, rigidity, preciousness, or warping. The author concludes that xenophilia neither signals nor facilitates the adulteration that xenophobes so fear. (shrink)

In this introduction to the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, the editor explains the rationale of the new project, citing increases in aggressive xenophobia internationally. He comments on the intergroup-relations theorist Todd Pittinsky's argument that, since tolerance is not logically the antithesis of negative feelings toward out-groups, even long-established traditions of toleration are inadequate to prevent intergroup aggression. Pittinsky proposes that tolerance be replaced, as a principle of peacekeeping, by the encouragement of positive feelings toward out-groups, (...) and the author of this essay responds by showing how the Freudian theory of ambivalence and the history of literature on which Freud drew in constructing it support Pittinsky's viewpoint. Enemies regularly fall in love, above all in Shakespearean drama, which Freud explains by arguing that all human relations are love-hate relations. Thus, this essay suggests, it takes as much psychic energy to repress the love in what appear to be relationships of hatred as to repress the hatred in what appear to be relationships of love. There is a metaphysical component as well to this argument: the xenophobe and xenophile equally presuppose that the identity principle is applicable to society as well as to mathematics; both assume that each discrete social group is self-identical and differs from all other groups more or less radically. The main difference between –phile and –phobe is the latter's relative incapacity to live with ambivalence. Given these arguments, one must expect to find negative as well as positive motives in the etiology and conduct of xenophilia—and the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium is said to focus on cases of xenophilia in which varieties of enmity accompany that singular and underrated variety of love. (shrink)

As part of a larger study eliciting Canadian producer and non-producer views about animal welfare, open-ended, semi-structured interviews were used to explore opinions about animal welfare of 20 Canadian pig producers, most of whom were involved in confinement-based systems. With the exception of the one organic producer, who emphasized the importance of a “natural” life, participants attached overriding importance to biological health and functioning. They saw their efforts as providing pigs with dry, thermally regulated, indoor environments where animals received abundant (...) feed, careful monitoring and where prospective disease outbreaks could be minimized and controlled. Emphasis was also placed on low-stress handling and agreeable working conditions which were believed to promote good animal care. The fact that pigs tend to respond to such conditions with steady growth reinforced the belief that good welfare was provided. Participants supported the use of sow gestation stalls, but with some reservations, and expressed concern about welfare problems that could occur if sows were grouped. Invasive procedures (castration, tail-docking, teeth clipping) were recognized as painful but were accepted because they were seen as: (1) necessary for sales or management; (2) satisfactory trade-offs to prevent worse welfare problems such as injury or infection; or (3) sufficiently short-term to be relatively unimportant. Participants were adamantly opposed to animal neglect and some welcomed actions of animal protectionists that expose poor care. Producers also welcomed natural-science-based approaches to improving animal welfare. The findings contribute to a broader effort to identify overlapping values among different stakeholder groups as a basis for formulating mutually agreeable, farm animal care and handling polices. (shrink)

Discussions of withdrawal of life support often revolve around a patient’s perceived level of suffering or lack of experience. Personhood, however, is often linked to personal agency. In the present study, 279 laypeople estimated the amount of agency and experience in hypothetical patients differing in degree of consciousness. Participants also indicated whether they would choose to maintain or terminate life support. Patients were more likely to terminate life support for a patient in a persistent vegetative state, followed by one with (...) amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and in a minimally conscious state. The decision to maintain life support was reliably predicted by perceptions of a patient’s agency but life support decisions were not significantly predicted by ratings of experience. In sum, decisions regarding maintaining life support are more influenced by perceptions of a patient’s ability to plan and act than by perceptions of a patient’s ability to feel or experience. (shrink)

This essay introduces a Common Knowledge symposium on the relationship between texts (for instance, musical scores or dramatic scripts) and performance in the arts by drawing out its implications for the interpretation of publicly consequential texts (such as constitutions, legal statutes, and canon law). Arguing that judges and clerics could learn much from studying the work of Philip Gossett and other practitioners of textual criticism in the arts, the essay suggests that a wider array of choices exists for legal interpretation (...) than the usual alternative between originalism or literalism, on the one hand, and intuitionism, on the other hand. Contributions to the symposium (titled “Between Text and Performance”) emphasize what Roger Moseley calls “improvisatory fluency in historical idioms,” and this introduction recommends that jurists develop for the law the kind of “ear” that musicians must have when a score invites or demands improvisation. (shrink)