BackgroundBayesian estimation with informative priors permits updating previous findings with new data, thus generating cumulative knowledge. To reduce subjectivity in the process, the present study emphasizes how to systematically weigh and specify informative priors and highlights the use of different aggregation methods using an empirical example that examined whether observed mother-adolescent positive and negative interaction behavior mediate the associations between maternal and adolescent internalizing symptoms across early to mid-adolescence in a 3-year longitudinal multi-method design.MethodsThe sample consisted of 102 mother-adolescent dyads. (...) Mothers and adolescents reported on their internalizing symptoms and their interaction behaviors were observed during a conflict task. We systematically searched for previous studies and used an expert-informed weighting system to account for their relevance. Subsequently, we aggregated the priors using three methods: linear pooling, logarithmic pooling, and fitting a normal distribution to the linear pool by means of maximum likelihood estimation. We compared the impact of the three differently specified informative priors and default priors on the prior predictive distribution, shrinkage, and the posterior estimates.ResultsThe prior predictive distributions for the three informative priors were quite similar and centered around the observed data mean. The shrinkage results showed that the logarithmic pooled priors were least affected by the data. Most posterior estimates were similar across the different priors. Some previous studies contained extremely specific information, resulting in bimodal posterior distributions for the analyses with linear pooled prior distributions. The posteriors following the fitted normal priors and default priors were very similar. Overall, we found that maternal, but not adolescent, internalizing symptoms predicted subsequent mother-adolescent interaction behavior, whereas negative interaction behavior seemed to predict subsequent internalizing symptoms. Evidence regarding mediation effects remained limited.ConclusionA systematic search for previous information and an expert-built weighting system contribute to a clear specification of power priors. How information from multiple previous studies should be included in the prior depends on theoretical considerations, and may also be affected by pragmatic considerations regarding the impact of the previous results at hand. (shrink)

The original data reported by Benjamin Libet and colleagues are reinterpreted, taking into account the facilitation which is experimentally demonstrated in the first of their series of articles. It is shown that the original data equally well or better support a quite different set of conclusions from those drawn by Libet. The new conclusions are that it takes only 80 ms for stimuli to come to consciousness and that “subjective back-referral of sensations in time” to the time of the stimulus (...) does not occur. (shrink)

This book is an original discussion of key problems in moral theory. The author argues that the work of recent feminist theorists in this area, particularly that of Carol Gilligan, marks a radically new departure in moral thinking. Gilligan claims that there is not only one true, moral voice, but two: one masculine, one feminine. Moral values and concerns associated with a feminine outlook are relational rather than autonomous; they depend upon interaction with others. In a far-reaching examination and critique (...) of Gilligan's theory, Hekman seeks to deconstruct the major traditions of moral theory which have been dominant since the Enlightenment. She challenges the centrepiece of that tradition: the disembodied, autonomous subject of modernist philosophy. Gilligan's approach transforms moral theory from the study of abstract universal principles to the analysis of moral claims situated in the interactions of people in definite social contexts. Hekman argues that Gilligan's approach entails a multiplicity of moral voices, not just one or even two. This book addresses moral problems in a challenging way and will find a wide readership among philosopher's, feminist thinkers and psychologists. (shrink)

This article reflects on the work of feminist bioethicists over the past ten years, reviewing how effective feminists have been in using relational theory to reorient bioethics and where we hope it will go from here. Feminist bioethicists have made significant achievements using relational theory to shape the notion of autonomy, bringing to light the relevance of patients' social circumstances and where they are situated within systems of privilege and oppression. But there is much work to be done to reorient (...) bioethics so that it is capable of addressing some current public health challenges. We argue that relational theory holds promise for beginning this work. (shrink)

Organizations are increasingly embedded with consultants and other non-employees who have the opportunity to engage in wrongdoing. However, research exploring the reporting intentions of employees regarding the discovery of wrongdoing by consultants is scant. It is important to examine reporting intentions in this setting given the enhanced presence of consultants in organizations and the fact that wrongdoing by consultants changes a key characteristic of the wrongdoing. Using an experimental approach, the current paper reports the results of a study examining employees' (...) reporting intentions subsequent to their discovery of wrongdoing by a consultant. The results of the study indicate that perceptions about the seriousness of a wrongdoing, personal costs and personal responsibility related to reporting a wrongdoing, and moral-equity judgments are significantly associated with reporting intentions for a normal reporting channel. Only perceptions of seriousness and personal costs are significantly associated for an anonymous reporting channel. Lastly, while personal costs for the anonymous reporting channel were lower than the normal reporting channel, reporting intentions were similar across the two channels. (shrink)

The phenomenon of multiple personality--Like the "split-Brain" phenomenon--Involves a disintegration of the normally unified self to the point where one must question whether there is one, Or more than one, Person associated with the body even at a single moment in time. Besides the traditional problem of determining identity over time, There is now a new problem of personal identity--Determining identity at a single moment in time. We need the conceptual apparatus to talk about this new problem and a test, (...) Like the one I propose, For determining the number of persons associated with a body at a single moment in time. (shrink)

Pioneering work in interdisciplinary animal studies, much of it under the rubric of ecofeminism, dates back to the 1970s. Yet animal studies remained an idiosyncratic backwater until its twenty-first-century reinvention as a high-profile area of humanities research. This essay ties the soaring cachet of the new animal studies to a revamped origin story—one beginning in 2002 and claiming Derrida as founding father. In readings of Derrida and leading animal studies theorist Cary Wolfe, I examine the gender politics of animal studies (...) today, especially that affiliated with Wolfe’s formulation of posthumanism. In addition to slighting important ecofeminist precedents, this approach to animal studies is remarkably anxious to distance itself both from emotional attachments to animals and from scholars working on gender, sexuality, and race. I attribute this anxiety in part to the gendered opposition, longstanding in academia, between scholarship frankly motivated by feeling and scholarship whose prestige depends on claims to “masculine” objectivity and theoretical rigor. To counter this logic, I turn to animal studies foremothers Carol Adams and Donna Haraway; despite disagreements on several key issues, Adams and Haraway share a readiness to own their debt to feminist thinking and to see their theoretical work as inseparable from emotional and political commitments to animals. (shrink)

ArgumentThe new English term “empathy” was translated from the GermanEinfühlungin the first decade of the twentieth century by the psychologists James Ward at the University of Cambridge and Edward B. Titchener at Cornell. At Titchener's American laboratory, “empathy” was not a matter of understanding other minds, but rather a projection of imagined bodily movements and accompanying feelings into an object, a meaning that drew from its rich nineteenth-century aesthetic heritage. This rendering of “empathy” borrowed kinaesthetic meanings from German sources, but (...) extended beyond a contemplation of the beautiful to include a variety of experimental stimuli and everyday objects in the laboratory. According to Titchener's structural psychology, all higher thought could be reduced to more elemental aspects of mind, and experimental introspection showed empathy to be constituted of kinaesthetic images. The existence of kinaesthetic images, Titchener argued, formed an incisive critique of the view that thought could take place without images, held by one of Titchener's major psychological rivals, the school of thought-psychologists in Würzburg, Germany. The new term “empathy” in early American academic psychology therefore delineated a kinaesthetic imaginative projection that took place on the basis of ontological difference between minds and things. (shrink)

Popper welcomes Tarski's theory of truth as a vindication of the ‘objective or absolute or correspondence theory of truth’: -/- Tarski's greatest achievement, and the real significance of his theory for the philosophy of the empirical sciences, is that he rehabilitated the correspondence theory of absolute or objective truth … He vindicated the free use of the intuitive idea of truth as correspondence to the facts ….

In philosophy one runs the risk of two kinds of criticism: that the answer one gives to a question is false or otherwise inadequate; or, perhaps worse, that the question one is trying to answer is itself misconceived. Carnap has directed a criticism of the second kind against traditional ontological disputes; the supposed issue between nominalists and realists is, according to him, devoid of cognitive content. This view is, of course, of a piece with Carnap’s general antipathy to metaphysical questions: (...) nevertheless, Carnap employs some specific arguments against ontological questions in particular, and does not rely on standard verificationist arguments against metaphysics in general. My object in this paper will be mainly to get clear the issues raised by Carnap in ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’,’ in the hope that this will clear the way for a positive account of the status of ontological issues. In the final section I shall offer some- inevitably sketchy - suggestions towards such an account. (shrink)

Diagnosable individuals, caregivers, and clinicians typically embrace a biological conception of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), finding that medical treatment is beneficial. Scientists study ADHD phenomenology, interventions to ease symptoms, and underlying mechanisms, often with an aim of helping diagnosed people. Yet current understanding of ADHD, jointly influenced by science and society, has an unintended downside. Scientific and social influences have embedded negative values in the ADHD concept, and have simultaneously dichotomized ADHD diagnosable from non-diagnosable individuals. In social settings insistent on certain (...) types of success, the negative values associated with the diagnostic category are attributed to people in the dichotomized "ADHD" group. Devaluation, institutional restrictions on "success" definitions and endpoints, and limited options for achieving success jointly constitute institutionalized intolerance of ADHD. (shrink)

The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way is an expose of certain theoretical problems in cognitive science, and in particular, problems that concern the Classical Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). The problems that Fodor worries plague CTM divide into two kinds, and both purport to show that the success of cognitive science will likely be limited to the modules. The first sort of problem concerns what Fodor has called “global properties”; features that a mental sentence has which depend on how the (...) sentence interacts with a larger plan (i.e., set of sentences), rather than the type identity of the sentence alone. The second problem concerns what many have called, “The Relevance Problem”: the problem of whether and how humans determine what is relevant in a computational manner. However, I argue that the problem that Fodor believes global properties pose for CTM is a non-problem, and that further, while the relevance problem is a serious research issue, it does not justify the grim view that cognitive science, and CTM in particular, will likely fail to explain cognition. (shrink)

Life saving or life sustaining treatment may not be instigated in the clinical setting when such treatment is deemed to be futile and therefore not in the patient’s best interests. The concept of futility, however, is related to many assumptions about quality and quantity of life, and may be relied upon in a manner that is ethically unjustifiable. It is argued that the concept of futility will remain of limited practical use in making decisions based on the best interests principle (...) because it places such high demands on the individual responsible for decision making. This article provides a critical analysis of futility (in the context of the best interests decision-making principle), and proposes an ethically defensible notion of futility. (shrink)

This paper looks at a range of metaphors used within HIV/AIDS discussions and research in support of the claim that bioethicists should pay serious attention to metaphors. Metaphors shape the ways we think about problems and the types of solutions we investigate. HIV/AIDS is an especially rich field for the investigation of metaphor, since the struggles for dominance among different metaphorical options has been very evident. In the field of medical resarch as well as in the area of public policy, (...) different metaphors support different strategies and, therefore, the choice of metaphor has ethical significance. I argue that feminists should engage in these debates since they have an interest in the metaphors selected. They can also learn to be more self-conscious in choosing politically liberating metaphors in other bioethics contexts. (shrink)

Today I want to talk about an element in the milieu in which Ludwig Wittgenstein conceived the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that has not been recognized to date: the generalization of the methodology of experimental scale models that occurred just about the time he was writing it. I find it very helpful to keep in mind how this kind of model portrays when reading the Tractatus — in particular, when reading the statements about pictures and models, such as:That a picture is a (...) fact ,That a picture is a model of reality ,That the “pictorial relationship” that makes a picture a picture is part of that picture , andThat a picture must have its pictorial form in common with reality in order to able to depict it. (shrink)

This paper argues that Gadamer's hermeneutics offers a methodological perspective for social and political theory that overcomes the impasse created by the dichotomy between the positivist and humanist approaches to social action. Both the positivists’attempt to replace the actors’subjective concepts with the objective concepts of the social scientist and the humanists’attempt to describe meaningful action strictly in the social actors’terms have been called into question in contemporary discussions. Gadamer's approach, which is based on the hermeneutical method of textual interpretation, offers (...) an alternative to both the positivist and humanist perspectives. Gadamer argues that understanding a text involves the fusing of the conceptual schemes of author and interpreter. Relying on Ricoeur's analysis of the parallels between actions and texts, it is argued that this understanding of the process of textual interpretation can be profitably applied to the analysis of social action. This application, furthermore, provides a means of analyzing social action that transcends the dichotomy between the positivist and humanist approaches. Gadamer's approach legitimizes the imposition of the observer's conceptual scheme without denying the constitutive role of the social actors’concepts. (shrink)

Confessional modes of self-representation have become crucial in feminist epistemologies that broaden and contextualize the location and production of knowledge. In some versions of confessional feminism, the insertion of “I” is reflective, the product of an uncomplicated notion of experience that shuttles into academic discourse apersonal truth. In contrast to reflective intrusions of the first person, reflexive confessing is primarily a questioning mode that imposes self-vigilance on the process of self positioning.

Catharine MacKinnon's investigation of the role of sexuality in the subordination of women is a logical culmination of radical feminist thought. If this is correct, the position of her work relative to radical feminism is analogous to the place Parmenides's work occupied in ancient Greek philosophy. Critics of MacKinnon's work have missed their target completely and must engage her work in a different way if feminist theory is to progress past its current stalemated malaise.

The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under which things are felt as beautiful, but it has been unable to give any explanation of the nature and origin of beauty Psychoanalysis, unfortunately, has scarcely anything to say about beauty either.1 Freud.

This paper explores definitions of death from the perspectives of several world and indigenous religions, with practical application for health care providers in relation to end of life decisions and organ and tissue donation after death. It provides background material on several traditions and explains how different religions derive their conclusions for end of life decisions from the ethical guidelines they proffer.

Infants can anticipate the future location of a moving object and execute a predictive reach to intercept the object. When a moving object is temporarily hidden by darkness or occlusion, 6‐month‐old infants’ reaching is perturbed, but performance on darkness trials is significantly better than occlusion trials. How does this reaching behavior change over development? Experiment 1 tested predictive reaching of 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants. While there was an increase in the overall number of reaches with increasing age, there were significantly (...) fewer predictive reaches during the occlusion compared to visible trials and no age‐related changes in this pattern. The decrease in performance found in Experiment 1 is likely to apply not only to the object representations formed by infants but also those formed by adults. In Experiment 2 we tested adults with a similar reaching task. Like infants, the adults were most accurate when the target was continuously visible and performance in darkness trials was significantly better than occlusion trials, providing evidence that there is something specific about occlusion that makes it more difficult than merely lack of visibility. Together, these findings suggest that infants’ and adults’ capacities to represent objects have similar signatures throughout development. (shrink)

We argue that a turn toward virtue ethics as a way of understanding medical professionalism represents both a valuable corrective and a missed opportunity. We look at three ways in which a closer appeal to virtue ethics could help address current problems or issues in professionalism education—first, balancing professionalism training with demands for professional virtues as a prerequisite; second, preventing demands for the demonstrable achievement of competencies from working against ideal professionalism education as lifelong learning; and third, avoiding temptations to (...) dismiss moral distress as a mere “hidden curriculum” problem. As a further demonstration of how best to approach a lifelong practice of medical virtue, we will examine altruism as a mean between the extremes of self-sacrifice and selfishness. (shrink)

Evidence is summarised for and against the hypothesis that potentiation or facilitation of neural responses during a train of threshold-level stimuli occurred in the experiments reported by Libet et al. . It is concluded that such potentiation probably did occur. Since the main arguments for the existence of subjective backwards referral take it as given that such potentiation did not occur, it is further concluded that the main arguments for the existence of subjective backwards referral fail.

Most modern moral theories are impartialist in character. They perceive the demands of morality as standing in opposition to partial concerns and acting as constraints upon them. In this paper I argue that our partial concerns in general, and our love and concern for others in particular, are not ultimately at odds with the demands of morality, impartially understood, but are the necessary preconditions of our being motivated by impartial morality. If we are to care about morality, we must first (...) care about people and things other than morality. If we are to be educated morally, we must first be educated in the emotions. (shrink)