As part of a book symposium on Erwin Dekker's Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) and the Rise of Economic Expertise (2021), Jon Murphy reflects on Tinbergen's and Keynes's differing views on the role of experts underlying the Tinbergen-Keynes debate.

A premise of this paper that despite an emphasis on professional distance the occurrence of self-disclosure is inevitable in the practice of youth work, yet there is little in-depth discussion in the literature, which recognises or reflects this. We utilise literature from counselling and psychotherapy which highlights the pervasive and unavoidable nature of self-disclosure within therapeutic relationships. In doing so we argue that not only is self-disclosure inevitable in youth work, but that decisions about whether or not particular disclosures are (...) right or wrong are difficult, arguing that they need to be reflected upon and explored in their particular context. We suggest some boundaries for self-disclosure, as well as offer a model within which to begin to distinguish aspects of self-disclosure. This it is hoped will help maintain both effective and professional relationships with young people, but maintain that this still requires the professional judgement of youth workers. In so doing self-disclosure is recognised as not only inevitable but as a useful aid to youth work practice. (shrink)

As part of a book symposium on his Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) and the Rise of Economic Expertise (2021), Erwin Dekker responds to commentaries by Mariana Mortágua and Francisco Louçã, Thomas Kayzel, Jon Murphy, Michele Alacevich, Mauro Boianovsky, and William Peden.

This book brings together several directions of work in model theory between the late 1950s and early 1980s.

The present volume collects some of Barwise's papers written since then, those directly concerned with relations among logic, situation theory, and situation semantics. Several papers appear here for the first time.

In honor of William Wainwright, this article takes up his interest in interreligious dialogue. It pursues two goals simultaneously: One is to provide a better model for understanding philosophy of religion. Terrence Tilley claims that there is the standard model which is mistaken in that it takes arguing for religious beliefs to be equivalent to justifying commitment to a religion. He promotes a practical model, which has its ancestry in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal. This model (...) begins with the lived practices of religion and justifies its intellectual content as explanation for the rightness of this way of life. Wainwright’s work fits into the practical model, but Tilley provides a description and a stronger basis for it. The second goal is to provide much more adequate epistemological resources than those used by the standard model, with contributions from Catholic modernist theologian George Tyrrell, recent philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who became interested in evaluating traditions, in science, in moral reasoning, and finally what he came to call large-scale traditions. The problem he needed to overcome is the fact that such traditions carry their own, often different, concepts of reasoning. The possibility of fruitful rational conversation between religions is illustrated here by an account of dialogue between Christianity and Shi’ia Islam, as exemplified in David Burrell’s ability to use conversation with Islamic thought to clarify for Christians their own doctrines of the Trinity, the mediation of Christ, and original sin. (shrink)

In many ways, we live in propitious times for gay and lesbian people. In 1996, the Supreme Court struck down Colorado law prohibiting any kind of protected status based on sexual orientation. In 2003, the Supreme Court held that states may not criminalize sexual conduct between consenting adults of the same sex in private, so long as no money changes hands. In 2010, the Congress repealed the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy that excluded openly gay men and lesbians from military (...) service. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down key elements of the Defense of Marriage Act that prohibited any federal recognition of same‐sex marriage. Most states do not allow same‐sex marriage, but more and more states are joining the fold. Likewise, most U.S. states do not forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation, but the number that does is increasing. Arguably, no other social minority has made as much legal progress in so short a time. Despite these advances, the story of gay and lesbian people and the law is not yet finished, and the meaning of homosexuality for bioethics is still being written too. Concerns about gay and lesbian people remain important to bioethics in key domains, especially in seeing to the conferral of optimal health care benefits and in sorting through the priorities and social effects of research. Progress in these domains still involves lifting certain burdens of medical and social misjudgments about same‐sex attraction. (shrink)

Does God's existence make a difference to how we explain morality? Mark C. Murphy critiques the two dominant theistic accounts of morality--natural law theory and divine command theory--and presents a novel third view. He argues that we can value natural facts about humans and their good, while keeping God at the centre of our moral explanations.

This paper is a critical analysis of the concept of mental disorder recently advanced by Jerome Wakefield. Wakefield suggests that mental disorders are most aptly conceived as "harmful dysfunctions" involving two distinct and separable components: the failure of the mechanism in the person to perform a natural function for which the mechanism was designed by natural selection, and a value judgment that the dysfunction is undesirable.

The EBM+ programme is an attempt to improve the way in which present-day evidence-based medicine (EBM) assesses causal claims: according to EBM+, mechanistic studies should be scrutinised alongside association studies. This paper addresses two worries about EBM+: (i) that it is not feasible in practice, and (ii) that it is too malleable, i.e., its results depend on subjective choices that need to be made in order to implement the procedure. Several responses to these two worries are considered and evaluated. The (...) paper also discusses the question of whether we should have confidence in medical interventions, in the light of Stegenga's arguments for medical nihilism. (shrink)

Social identity is a factor that is associated with well-being and community participation. Some studies have shown that ethnic identity goes along with empowerment, and that interaction between the two leads to greater indices of well-being and community participation. However, other works suggest a contextual circumstance (i.e., perceiving one’s own group as a minority and/or being discriminated) may condition the nature of these relations. By means of a cross-sectional study, we analyzed the relations of social identification (or identity fusion) and (...) collective psychological empowerment with personal well-being, social well-being and community participation in a sample of Basques. A total of 748 Basques participated (63.1% women; ageM= 39.28;SD= 12.13). Individuals who were highly identified or fused with Basque speakers and who were highly empowered showed higher indices of well-being (both personal and social) and of community participation than non-fused individuals with low empowerment. The results also suggest that social identification (or identity fusion) offsets the negative effects of perceiving the group as a linguistic minority. Collective psychological empowerment proved to be an especially relevant factor that needs to continue to be explored. (shrink)

Different patterns of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome diversity have been cited as evidence of long-term patrilocality in human populations. However, what patterns are expected depends on the nature of the sampling scheme. Samples from a local region reveal only the recent demographic history of that region, whereas sampling over larger geographic scales accesses older demographic processes. A historical change in migration becomes evident first at local geographic scales, and alters global patterns of genetic diversity only after sufficient time has passed. Analysis (...) of forager populations in the ethnographic record suggests that patrilocality may not have predominated among pre-agricultural humans. The higher female migration rate inferred by some genetic studies may reflect a shift to patrilocality in association with the emergence of agriculture. A recent global survey does not show the expected effects of higher female migration, possibly because the sampling scheme used for this study is accessing pre-agricultural human migration patterns. In this paper, we show how the demographic shift associated with agriculture might affect genetic diversity over different spatial scales. We also consider the prospects for studying sex-biased migration using the X-linked and autosomal markers. These multi-locus comparisons have the potential of providing more robust estimates of sex differences than Y-linked and mitochondrial data, but only if a very large number of loci are included in the analysis. BioEssays 28: 290–300, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Metabolism is a set of chemical reactions, used by living organisms to process chemical compounds in order to take energy and eliminate toxic compounds, for example. Its processes are referred as metabolic pathways. Understanding metabolism is imperative to biology, toxicology and medicine, but the number and complexity of metabolic pathways makes this a difficult task. In our paper, we investigate the use of causal Bayesian networks to model the pathways of yeast saccharomyces cerevisiae metabolism: such a network can be used (...) to draw predictions about the levels of metabolites and enzymes in a particular specimen. We propose a two-stage methodology for causal networks, as follows. First construct a causal network from the network of metabolic pathways. The viability of this causal network depends on the validity of the causal Markov condition. If this condition fails, however, the principle of the common cause motivates the addition of a new causal arrow or a new `hidden' common cause to the network (stage 2 of the model formation process). Algorithms for adding arrows or hidden nodes have been developed separately in a number of papers, and in this paper we combine them, showing how the resulting procedure can be applied to the metabolic pathway problem. Our general approach was tested on neural cell morphology data and demonstrated noticeable improvements in both prediction and network accuracy. (shrink)

Wide ranging and up to date, this is the single most comprehensive treatment of the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls. An unprecedented survey that reflects the surge of Rawls scholarship since his death, and the lively debates that have emerged from his work Features an outstanding list of contributors, including senior as well as “next generation” Rawls scholars Provides careful, textually informed exegesis and well-developed critical commentary across all areas of his work, including non-Rawlsian perspectives (...) Includes discussion of new material, covering Rawls’s work from the newly published undergraduate thesis to the final writings on public reason and the law of peoples Covers Rawls’s moral and political philosophy, his distinctive methodological commitments, and his relationships to the history of moral and political philosophy and to jurisprudence and the social sciences Includes discussion of his monumental 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, which is often credited as having revitalized political philosophy. (shrink)

I distinguish three evolutionary explanations of mental illness: first, breakdowns in evolved computational systems; second, evolved systems performing their evolutionary function in a novel environment; third, evolved personality structures. I concentrate on the second and third explanations, as these are distinctive of an evolutionary psychopathology, with progressively less credulity in the light of the empirical evidence. General morals are drawn for evolutionary psychiatry.

Until approximately twenty years ago, advances in the study of human genetics had little influence on the practice of medicine. In the 1980s, this changed dramatically with the mapping of the altered genes that cause cystic fibrosis and Huntington disease. In just a few years, these discoveries led to DNA-based tests that enabled clinicians to determine whether prospective parents were carriers of CF or whether an individual carried the Huntington gene and, as a result, would almost certainly develop the disease.Observers (...) interested in the social and economic implications of genetic technology realized that such genetic tests could be used by insurance companies to predict which insurance applicants were likely to become ill or even die from these diseases. (shrink)

Conceivability is an important source of our beliefs about what is possible; inconceivability is an important source of our beliefs about what is impossible. What are the connections between the reliability of these sources? If one is reliable, does it follow that the other is also reliable? The central contention of this paper is that suitably qualified the reliability of inconceivability implies the reliability of conceivability, but the reliability of conceivability fails to imply the reliability of inconceivability.

This paper examines moral misconduct and recidivism at the corporate level. We analyze the factors that facilitate moral transgressions and why some companies appear to be serial offenders. We propose that negative learning is a core process that encourages repeat misconduct. We offer a framework of negative learning, grounded in a case example. The framework also suggests circumstances that reverse the vicious selfreinforcing cycle of negative learning, so companies learn to adopt a more ethical stance when faced with moral choices.

This paper is an investigation into the logic of information flow. The basic perspective is that logic flows in virtue of constraints and that constraints classify channels connecting particulars In this paper we explore some logics intended to model reasoning in the case of idealized information flow, that is, where the constraints involved are exceptionless. We look at this as a step toward the far more challenging task of understanding the logic of imperfect information flow, that is where the constraints (...) admit of exceptional connections. This paper continues and amplifies work presented by the same authors in [10]. (shrink)

Traditional measurement of multisensory facilitation in tasks such as speeded motor reaction tasks (MRT) consistently show age-related improvement during early childhood. However, the extent to which motor function increases with age and hence contribute to multisensory motor reaction times in young children has seldom been examined. Thus, we aimed to investigate the contribution of motor development to measures of multisensory (auditory, visual, and audiovisual) and visuomotor processing tasks in three young school age groups of children (n = 69) aged (5−6, (...) n = 21; 7−8, n = 25.; 9−10 n = 18 years). We also aimed to determine whether age-related sensory threshold times for purely visual inspection time (IT) tasks improved significantly with age. Bayesian results showed decisive evidence for age-group differences in multisensory MRT and visuo-motor processing tasks, though the evidence showed that threshold time for visual identification IT performance was only slower in the youngest age group children (5−6) compared to older groups. Bayesian correlations between performance on the multisensory MRT and visuo-motor processing tasks indicated moderate to decisive evidence in favor of the alternative hypothesis (BF10 = 4.71 to 91.346), though not with the threshold IT (BF10 < 1.35). This suggests that visual sensory system development in children older than 6 years makes a less significant contribution to the measure of multisensory facilitation, compared to motor development. In addition to this main finding, multisensory facilitation of MRT within race-model predictions was only found in the oldest group of children (9−10), supporting previous suggestions that multisensory integration is likely to continue into late childhood/early adolescence at least. (shrink)