One of the surprises from genome sequencing projects is the apparently small number of predicted genes in different eukaryotic cells, particularly human. One possible reason for this ‘shortage’ of genes is multiple distribution of proteins; a single protein is targeted to more than one subcellular compartment and consequently participates in different biochemical pathways and might have completely different functions. Indeed, in recent years, there have been reports on proteins that were found to be localized in cellular compartments other than those (...) initially attributed to them. Furthermore, the phenomenon of highly uneven isoprotein distribution was recently observed and termed ‘eclipsed distribution’. In these cases, the amount of one of the isoproteins, in one of the locations, is significantly minute and its detection by standard biochemical and visualization methods is masked by the presence of the dominant isoprotein. In fact, the minute amounts of eclipsed proteins can be essential. Since detecting eclipsed distribution is difficult, we assume that this phenomenon is probably more common than currently recorded. Hence, developing methods for localization and functional detection of eclipsed proteins is a challenge in cell biology research. Finally, eclipsed distribution may lead to cellular pathologies as has been suggested to occur in human disorders such as Prion diseases and Alzheimer. This review provides a short description of the eclipsed distribution phenomenon followed by an overview of protein distribution mechanisms, examples of eclipsed distribution and experimental approaches for revealing these elusive proteins. BioEssays 29:772–782, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.. (shrink)

Contextualist solutions to skeptical puzzles have recently been subjected to various criticisms. In this paper, I will defend contextualism against an objection prominently pressed by Stanley 2000. According to Stanley, contextualism in epistemology advances an empirically implausible hypothesis about the semantics of knowledge ascriptions in natural language. It is empirically implausible because it attributes to knowledge ascriptions a kind of semantic context-sensitivity that is wholly unlike any well- established type of semantic context-sensitivity in natural language.

This quoted passage makes a negative claim – a claim about what we are not doing when we characterize an episode or state as that of knowing – and it also makes a positive claim – a claim about what we are doing when we characterize an episode or state as that of knowing. Although McDowell has not endorsed the negative claim, he has repeatedly and explicitly endorsed the positive claim, i.e., that “in characterizing an episode or a state as (...) that of knowing… we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.” This is what I will henceforth call “the positive Sellarsian claim”. (shrink)

In his recent Knowledge and its Limits, Timothy Williamson argues that no non-trivial mental state is such that being in that state suffices for one to be in a position to know that one is in it. In short, there are no “luminous” mental states. His argument depends on a “safety” requirement on knowledge, that one’s confident belief could not easily have been wrong if it is to count as knowledge. We argue that the safety requirement is ambiguous; on one (...) interpretation it is obviously true but useless to his argument, and on the other interpretation it is false. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept a “privileged access” thesis concerning our own present mental states and mental events. According to these philosophers, if I am in mental state (or undergoing mental event) M, then – at least in many cases – I have privileged access to the fact that I am in (or undergoing) M. For instance, if I now believe that my cat is sitting on my lap, then (in normal circumstances) I have privileged access to the fact that I now (...) believe that my cat is sitting on my lap. Similarly, if I now imagine a parade coming down Main Street, then (again, in normal circumstances) I have privileged access to the fact that I am now imagining a parade coming down Main Street. And again, if it now visually appears to me as if there is a cloud in the sky, then (again, in normal circumstances) I have privileged access to the fact that it now visually appears to me as if there is a cloud in the sky. In each of these aforementioned cases, if circumstances are normal, then, these philosophers say, I have a distinctive kind of privileged epistemic access to facts about my own mental states or events. Of course, I don’t have privileged epistemic access to all facts about my own mental states or events. For instance, I don’t have privileged epistemic access to facts about which unconscious mental states or events I have. But I do have privileged epistemic access to many facts about my own mental states or events, and in particular to the various facts listed above. (shrink)

Aesthetic cosmopolitanism is conceptualized here as a cultural condition in which late modern ethno-national cultural uniqueness is associated with contemporary cultural forms like film and pop-rock music, and as such it is produced from within the national framework. The social production of aesthetic cosmopolitanism is analyzed through elaborations on Bourdieu's field theory, as an outcome of the intersection of and interplay between global fields of art and fields of national culture. A sociological explanation for the emergence of aesthetic cosmopolitanism is (...) proposed. It focuses on claims by social sectors within national contexts for status and recognition of their own contemporary cultural uniqueness. (shrink)

Current cultural cosmopolitanism is portrayed in this paper as residing in the bodies of individuals around the world in the form of nondeclarative personal culture, stored as types of internalized embodied knowledge acquired through engagements with globally circulating products, artefacts, devices and gadgets. These types of knowledge exist as mental schemata, motor skills, sensory knowledge and informative data, and are habitually and routinely enacted in everyday life practices. The first two sections of the paper outline a perspective on cultural cosmopolitanism (...) and the notion of nondeclarative personal culture. The second part of the paper looks at cosmopolitan habits, focusing on three essential everyday life practices – musicking, eating, getting dressed – and discussing them as cases exemplifying current cultural cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Márcia Elena Botelho Soares é psicóloga, graduada pela Universidade Federal do Pará, mestra em psicologia clínica e social e doutora em psicologia pela mesma instituição. Também possui especialização em saúde pública pela Universidade do Estado do Pará. Foi professora da Universidade da Amazônia e atualmente é professora titular da Faculdade de Psicologia da Universidade Federal do Pará. Contribuiu na formação de psicólogos humanistas em Belém do Pará e estuda sobre as convergências entre a Abordagem Centrada na Pessoa e a Fenomenologia, (...) tema que permanece atual na práxis e na formação dos psicólogos dessa perspectiva. (shrink)

International ethics scholars have argued that because postmodern, poststructural, and critical theorists view ethics as contextual, these approaches have little to offer to the consideration of ethics and international affairs.

The article investigates the problem of the truth as the purpose of the criminal procedure, the problem of its cognition. Individuals carrying out criminal procedure activities (including the court) are servants of the procedural form and, at the same time, its hostages, therefore they are unable to approach the objective, absolute truth and should be content with the formal (legal) truth. This position falls under criticism. Attempts to artificial segmentation of the truth to its separate categories or forms are nothing, (...) but justification of the procedural erosion of a certain form. The article offers the opinion that the classical criminal procedure shall establish absolute, not formal (legal) truth. The truth is not only an aspiration of the criminal procedure, but, at the same time, a derivative, regulatory principle, the idea that works only in classical criminal procedure. This principle does not work in quasi-processes, i. e. in those criminal procedure forms that are organically separated from the classical procedure form. (shrink)

This article discusses the legal concept of excessive use of force by analyzing a particular incident that took place in Israel in the summer of 1997: eighty families, faced with dire housing needs, squatted in vacant apartments in an immigrant absorption center in the town of Mevasseret Zion near Jerusalem. After a period of failed attempts to persuade the families to leave the apartments peacefully, the police moved to evacuate the families, and did so by use of massive force. In (...) the article I describe the violent measures used by the State, and analyze the media portrayal of the squatting and the evacuation. I argue that both these forceful measures and the media portrayal of the squatting and evacuation cumulatively took part in constructing the squatters as criminal deviants rather than political protesters. I claim further that we should understand the concept of use of force not only as a means to achieve certain ends by the state, but also as a mechanism through which the state constructs a social problem and presents it in a manner beneficial to its own interests. Excessive use of force, in this sense, is not just a disproportionate response to a real or perceived threat posed by an individual or group, but a means by which the state fosters a belief that the individual or group present some danger, which must be tackled through the use of a certain level of force. By drawing a line between the legitimate and illegitimate use of force, the state affirms its monopoly on violence, which ultimately can be used to suppress political resistance. (shrink)

What you believe is typically responsive to what you perceive, what you recall, what inferences you’ve made and various other factors. Let’s use the term ‘input.

Rieber 1998 proposes an account of "S knows that p" that generates a contextualist solution to Closure. In this paper, I’ll argue that Rieber’s account of "S knows that p" is subject to fatal objections, but we can modify it to achieve an adequate account of "S knows that p" that generates a unified contextualist solution to all four puzzles. This is a feat that should matter to those philosophers who have proposed contextualist solutions to Closure: all of them have (...) motivated their contextualism by appeal to the fact that they can explain the plausibility of each of the statements in Closure taken individually, and they can do this without having to deny that each of those statements is true, at least in the context in which it is plausible. But notice that this consideration would equally well motivate a contextualist approach to the other puzzles. Nonetheless, no contextualist has yet suggested how a contextualist solution to the other puzzles might go. (shrink)

(NEG) is widely accepted both by internalist and by externalists. In fact, there have been very few opponents of (NEG). Timothy Williamson (e.g., 2000) rejects (NEG), for reasons that have by now received a great deal of scrutiny.2 John McDowell also rejects (NEG), but his reasons have not received the scrutiny they deserve. This is in large part because those reasons have not been well understood. We believe that McDowell’s challenge to (NEG) is important, worthy of fair assessment, and maybe (...) even correct. In this paper, we explain McDowell’s challenge to (NEG), and also explain how McDowell can address a seemingly fatal objection to his view. (shrink)

Sometimes, there are reasons for which we believe, intend, resent, decide, and so on: these reasons are the “bases” of the latter, and the explanatory relation between these bases and the latter is what I will call “the basing relation.” What kind of explanatory relation is this? Dispositionalists claim that the basing relation consists in the agent’s manifesting a disposition to respond to those bases by having the belief, intention, resentment, and so on, in question. Representationalists claim that the basing (...) relation consists in the agent’s representing the bases as justifying the belief, intention, resentment, and so on, in question. This article shows that an adequate account of the basing relation requires a particular refinement and combination of these two views. On the hybrid account defended here, the basing relation involves a disposition exercise that is individuated by the agent’s object-involving de se representation of that very exercise as justifying. (shrink)

A skeptic claims that I do not have knowledge of the external world. It has been thought that the skeptic reaches this conclusion because she employs unusually stringent standards for knowledge. But the skeptic does not employ unusually high standards for knowledge. Rather, she employs unusually restrictive standards of evidence. Thus, her claim that we lack knowledge of the external world is supported by considerations that would equally support the claim that we lack evidence for our beliefs about the external (...) world. These considerations do not threaten the truth of our ordinary attributions of evidence, however, for such attributions are context-sensitive in their semantics. It is argued that this solution to the problem of the external world enjoys all of the benefits, and suffers none of the problems, of other solutions to the problem of the external world. (shrink)

Rationality, whatever exactly it demands of us, promotes success, whatever exactly that is. Some philosophers interpret that slogan as something that can provide them with a way of reductively explaining the demands of rationality by appeal to some independently intelligible notion of success: being rational, they might say, is just having whatever property it is that promotes success. Other philosophers may interpret the same slogan as something that can provide them with a way of reductively explaining the notion of success (...) by appeal to some independently intelligible notion of the demands of rationality: having success, they might say, is just having whatever property it is that is promoted by being rational. In this paper, I argue that neither of these reductive efforts can succeed. I then argue that understanding the way in which rationality promotes success requires us to understand why the promotion relation between rationality and success can be severed by some kinds of luck, but not by others. To explain the kind of luck that can sever promotion, we should conceive of both rationality and success as distinct but related facets of something more fundamental than either of them. (shrink)

Goldman’s epistemology has been influential in two ways. First, it has influenced some philosophers to think that, contrary to erstwhile orthodoxy, relations of evidential support, or confirmation, are not discoverable a priori. Second, it has offered some philosophers a powerful argument in favor of methodological reliance on intuitions about thought experiments in doing philosophy. This paper argues that these two legacies of Goldman’s epistemology conflict with each other.

In Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, Ned Dobos highlights several negative consequences the preparation for war has for individuals and states. But he misses what I consider perhaps the most significant consequence of military mobilization for states, especially democracies: how war and the preparation for it affect deliberative politics. While many argue that all states, including democracies, require strong militaries—and there is some evidence that long wars can build democracies and states—I focus on the other effects of militarization and war (...) on democratic states. War and militarism are antipodal to democracy and undermine it. Their normative bases are conflicting—democracy takes force off the table, whereas force is legitimate in war. Thus, while militarism and militarization can sometimes yield liberalization and the expansion of civil rights, they are arguably more likely to undermine democratic norms and practices. (shrink)

For those working in Epistemology dizzying questions such as the following arise: - When are beliefs rational, or justified? - How should we update our beliefs in the light of new evidence? - Is it possible to gain knowledge, or justification? - How do we know what we know, and why do we care about whether--and what--others know? - How can the exploration of pre-Socratic philosophical questions about knowledge assist with the design of twenty-first-century computer interfaces? Addressing the need for (...) an authoritative and comprehensive reference work to enable users to answer these and other questions, and to make sense of--and to navigate around--an ever more complex corpus of scholarly literature, Epistemology is a new title in Routledge's acclaimed Critical Concepts in Philosophy series. Edited by Ram Neta, it is a four-volume collection which brings together foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship in a unique one-stop 'mini library'. Supplemented with a full index, and including an introduction to each volume, newly written by the editor, which places the assembled materials in their historical and intellectual context, Epistemology is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource. (shrink)

There is some consensus that for S to know that p, it cannot be merely a matter of luck that S’s belief that p is true. This consideration has led Duncan Pritchard and others to propose a safety condition on knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the safety condition is not a proper formulation of the intuition that knowledge excludes luck. We suggest an alternative proposal in the same spirit as safety, and find it lacking as well.

A sophisticated and intellectually powerful analysis of culpability and moral responsibility in war, This book focuses on the causes of many episodes of foreseeable collateral damage. Trenchant, original, and ranging across security studies, international law, ethics, and international relations, Accountability for Killing will reshape our understanding of the ethics of contemporary war.

Why do women sellers in product markets receive lower prices than men sellers when selling the same identical products? This Article investigates the effects of cultural beliefs about competence, desert and trust on market interactions with women and men sellers. We use an experimental approach to show that the prices people are willing to pay for the exact same product are affected by cultural beliefs about gender; when a woman sells a gift card, she is likely to receive five percent (...) less for it, compared to when a man does. Our analysis further suggests that it is beliefs about women’s relative competence and moral entitlement that drive the gender price gap in product markets. When the participants in the experiment were presented with information that suggested that the woman seller was a competent or entitled seller, no gender price differences were found between such women sellers and their equally qualified male counterparts. Nonetheless, information about the trustworthiness of sellers did not decrease the gap between women and men sellers. This suggests that price gaps between women and men in product markets are not generated by beliefs about the trustworthiness of women and men. (shrink)

Historically, prominent proponents of the guidance deontological conception of epistemic justification have thought that the guidance deontological conception entails access internalism. Alvin Goldman has argued that this is not so, and that there is no good argument from the guidance deontological conception of justification to access internalism. This paper refutes Goldman's argument. If the guidance deontological conception of epistemic justification is correct, then so is access internalism.