BackgroundFinancial compensation of research participants has been standard practice for centuries, however, there is an ongoing debate among researchers and ethicists regarding the ethical nature of this practice. While these debates develop ethical arguments and theories, they fail to incorporate input from those most affected by financial compensation: potential research participants.MethodsTo identify attitudes surrounding clinical research, participants of a long-standing cohort completed a one-time interview. Open-ended questions stimulated a participant-driven discussion surrounding medical research. Following a grounded theory methodology, 58 semistructured (...) interview transcripts were coded, focusing on attitudes surrounding financial compensation of research participants.ResultsOf the interviews coded, the majority of participants identified as Black/African American and were women. Five major themes emerged. In support of financial compensation, participants felt that study participants should be compensated for time, effort and risk. However, participants were concerned that compensation may differentially impact low-income populations and entice them to hide potentially harmful side effects. Participants also mentioned that financial compensation may invalidate study results if participants knowingly provide false information to subvert inclusion/exclusion criteria.ConclusionThe emergence of both positive and negative themes reiterates the complicated issue of providing financial compensation for study participation. While compensation as a motivator for research participation raises ethical concerns, participants discussed weighing the benefits with the risks in order to make an informed decision. To avoid paternalistic behaviours, research staff must allow potential research participants to review the available information and make the decision that best reflects their wishes. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: To Do No Harm: DES and the Dilemmas of Modern Medicine. By Roberta J. Apfel and Susan M. Fisher.

Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), but grammatical objects revealed the opposite pattern of results (thus showing an unintentionality bias). In Experiment 2, participants made an intentionality judgment about one of the two actors in a partially (...) symmetric sentence (e.g., “John exchanged products with Susan”). The results revealed a tendency to treat the grammatical subject as acting more intentionally than the grammatical object. In Experiment 3 participants were encouraged to think about the events that such sentences typically refer to, and the tendency was significantly reduced. These results suggest a privileged relationship between language and central theory-of-mind concepts. More specifically, there may be two ways of determining intentionality judgments: (1) an automatic verbal bias to treat grammatical subjects (but not objects) as intentional (2) a deeper, more careful consideration of the events typically described by a sentence. (shrink)

: An open-ended questionnaire elicited concepts of virtue and duty, and ethical language and priorities from commercial fishers and residents of ports in the Republic of Ireland. Respondents came from viable and stressed fisheries and from nontraditional and traditional natural resources communities (including one in Gaeltacht). In reporting the characteristics of a "good" fisher, viable fisheries emphasized virtues such as work ethic, respect for the crew, and respect for the sea. The responses from stressed fisheries materialized virtue, and decreased (...) emphasis on interpersonal relationships while increasing emphasis on owning a large vessel, investing, and being greedy. Most noble actions primarily concerned rescues and sharing equipment and time in difficult circumstances. Worst actions concerned physical damage to gear, persons, or to the marine environment. Respondents personified the sea, and used similar vocabulary to express care for people and for marine organisms. Although respondents from all communities thought over-fishing and illegal fishing were threats to the fishery, respondents from viable fisheries were more likely to believe they could take personal conservation action to protect the fishery, while those from stressed fisheries despaired of personal protective action and believed that nothing could be done, or that excluding the foreign fleets was necessary for Irish fisheries to recover. European Community policies often conflict with the norms of traditional, artisanal fishers. (shrink)

Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially. Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core (...) cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of childrens cognitive development. Carey shows how developmental cognitive science resolves aspects of long-standing philosophical debates about the existence, nature, content, and format of innate knowledge. She also shows that understanding the processes of conceptual development in children illuminates the historical process by which concepts are constructed, and transforms the way we think about philosophical problems about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought. (shrink)

The construct of wellbeing has been criticised as a neoliberal construction of western individualism that ignores wider systemic issues such as inequality and anthropogenic climate change. Accordingly, there have been increasing calls for a broader conceptualisation of wellbeing. Here we impose an interpretative framework on previously published literature and theory, and present a theoretical framework that brings into focus the multifaceted determinants of wellbeing and their interactions across multiple domains and levels of scale. We define wellbeing as positive psychological experience, (...) promoted by connections to self, community and environment, supported by healthy vagal function, all of which are impacted by socio-contextual factors that lie beyond the control of the individual. By emphasising the factors within and beyond the control of the individual and highlighting how vagal function both affects and are impacted by key domains, the biopsychosocial underpinnings of wellbeing are explicitly linked to a broader context that is consistent with, yet complementary to, multi-levelled ecological systems theory. Reflecting on the reciprocal relationships between multiple domains, levels of scale and related social contextual factors known to impact on wellbeing, our GENIAL framework may provide a foundation for a transdisciplinary science of wellbeing that has the potential to promote the wellbeing of individuals while also playing a key role in tackling major societal challenges. (shrink)

Susan Hekman believes we are witnessing an intellectual sea change. The main features of this change are found in dichotomies between language and reality, discourse and materiality. Hekman proposes that it is possible to find a more intimate connection between these pairs, one that does not privilege one over the other. By grounding her work in feminist thought and employing analytic philosophy, scientific theory, and linguistic theory, Hekman shows how language and reality can be understood as an indissoluble unit. (...) In this broadly synthetic work, she offers a new interpretation of questions of science, modernism, postmodernism, and feminism so as to build knowledge of reality and extend how we deal with nature and our increasingly diverse experiences of it. (shrink)

The later Wittgenstein is notoriously hard to understand. His novel philosophical approach is the key to understanding his perplexing work. This volume assembles leading Wittgenstein scholars to come to grips with its least well understood aspect: the unfamiliar aims and method that shape Wittgenstein's approach. Wittgenstein at Work investigates Wittgenstein's aims, rationale and method in two steps. The first seven chapters analyse how he proceeds in core parts of the Philosophical Investigations: the discussion of the Augustinian picture of language, ostensive (...) definition, philosophical method, understanding, rule-following, and private language. The final five chapters examine his most striking methodological remarks: his repudiation of theory and non-trivial theses, and some core notions of his methodology: his notions of clarification, synoptic representation, nonsense, and philosophical pictures. The volume considerably advances discussion of the therapeutic aspects of his approach that are currently a focus of debate. This volume is an indispensable methodological companion to the Philosophical Investigations, useful to both specialists and students alike. Fischer, Erich Ammereller, Severin Schroder, Anthony Kenny, Oswald Hanfling, Cora Diamond, Hans-Johann Glock, Stuart Shanker. (shrink)

This is a book about the aesthetics of wonder, about wonder as it figures in our relation to the visual world and to rare or new experiences.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a global threat to physical and mental health worldwide. Research has highlighted adverse impacts of COVID-19 on wellbeing but has yet to offer insights as to how wellbeing may be protected. Inspired by developments in wellbeing science and guided by our own theoretical framework, we examined the role of various potentially protective factors in a sample of 138 participants from the United Kingdom. Protective factors included physical activity, tragic optimism, gratitude, social support, and nature connectedness. (...) Initial analysis involved the application of one-sample t-tests, which confirmed that wellbeing in the current sample was significantly lower compared to previous samples. Protective factors were observed to account for up to 50% of variance in wellbeing in a hierarchical linear regression that controlled for a range of sociostructural factors including age, gender, and subjective social status, which impact on wellbeing but lie beyond individual control. Gratitude and tragic optimism emerged as significant contributors to the model. Our results identify key psychological attributes that may be harnessed through various positive psychology strategies to mitigate the adverse impacts of hardship and suffering, consistent with an existential positive psychology of suffering. (shrink)

The Physician Payments Sunshine Act requires health care product manufacturers to report to the federal government payments more than $10 to physicians. Bringing unprecedented transparency to medicine, PPSA holds great potential for enabling medical stakeholders to manage conflicts of interest and build patient trust—crucial responsibilities of medical professionalism. The authors conducted six focus groups with 42 physicians in Chicago, IL, San Francisco, CA, and Washington, DC, to explore attitudes and experiences around PPSA. Participants valued the concept of transparency but were (...) wary of the law's design and consequences. They downplayed PPSA's potential and felt it undermined public trust. Showing broad unawareness of COI, they dismissed the notion of industry influence and welcomed company “perks.” Misapprehensions may leave physicians unprepared to advance the opportunities PPSA holds for professionalism. The authors offer recommendations for government and medicine to improve physicians' and other stakeholders' understandings and use of the data. (shrink)

Does expertise within a domain of knowledge predict accurate self-assessment of the ability to explain topics in that domain? We find that expertise increases confidence in the ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena. However, this confidence is unwarranted; after actually offering full explanations, people are surprised by the limitations in their understanding. For passive expertise, miscalibration is moderated by education; those with more education are accurate in their self-assessments. But when those with more education consider topics related to (...) their area of concentrated study, they also display an illusion of understanding. This “curse of expertise” is explained by a failure to recognize the amount of detailed information that had been forgotten. While expertise can sometimes lead to accurate self-knowledge, it can also create illusions of competence. (shrink)

Lingering skepticism about climate change might be due in part to the way climate projections are perceived by members of the public. Variability between scientists’ estimates might give the impression that scientists disagree about the fact of climate change rather than about details concerning the extent or timing. Providing uncertainty estimates might clarify that the variability is due in part to quantifiable uncertainty inherent in the prediction process, thereby increasing people's trust in climate projections. This hypothesis was tested in two (...) experiments. Results suggest that including uncertainty estimates along with climate projections leads to an increase in participants’ trust in the information. Analyses explored the roles of time, place, demographic differences, and initial belief in climate change. Implications are discussed in terms of the potential benefit of adding uncertainty estimates to public climate projections. (shrink)

Why Theories of Concepts Should Not Ignore the Problem of Acquisition.

Current advances in connectivity, sensor technology, computing power and the development of complex algorithms for processing health-related data are paving the way for the delivery of innovative long-term health care services in the future. Such technological developments will, in particular, assist the elderly and infirm to live independently, at home, for much longer periods. The home is, in fact, becoming a locus for health care innovation that may in the future compete with the hospital. However, along with these advances come (...) valid privacy and security questions arising from the fact that the data collected and transmitted through these technologies could also allow for individual monitoring as well as unauthorized access to critical diagnostic and other health data. (shrink)

Donald C. Williams was a key figure in the development of analytic philosophy. This book will be the definitive source for his highly original work, which did much to bring metaphysics back into fashion. It presents six classic papers and six previously unpublished, revealing his full philosophical vision for the first time.

For ages, medicine has had poor access to the fetus inside the mother's womb. But in relatively recent years, the human body has become transparent. The latest breakthroughs of technology have made it possible, from the very beginning of pregnancy, to consider the fetus as an individual who can be examined and sampled. His or her physician may now establish a diagnosis and prognosis and prescribe a treatment in the same way as in traditional medicine.

The term conceptual simulation refers to a type of everyday reasoning strategy commonly called “what if” reasoning. It has been suggested in a number of contexts that this type of reasoning plays an important role in scientific discovery; however, little direct evidence exists to support this claim. This article proposes that conceptual simulation is likely to be used in situations of informational uncertainty, and may be used to help scientists resolve that uncertainty. We conducted two studies to investigate the relationship (...) between conceptual simulation and informational uncertainty. Study 1 was an in vivo study of expert scientists; the results suggest that scientists do use conceptual simulation in situations of informational uncertainty, and that they use conceptual simulation to make inferences from their data using the analogical reasoning process of alignment by similarity detection. Study 2 experimentally manipulated experts' level of uncertainty and provides further support for the hypothesis that conceptual simulation is more likely to be used in situations of informational uncertainty. Finally, we discuss the relationship between conceptual simulation and other types of reasoning using qualitative mental models. (shrink)

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, specifically, how (...) we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 8, Page 27-29, August 2011.

Can the Hippocratic and Judeo-Christian traditions be synthesized with contemporary thought about practical reason, virtue and community to provide real-life answers to the dilemmas of healthcare today? Bishop Anthony Fisher discusses conscience, relationships and law in relation to the modern-day controversies surrounding stem cell research, abortion, transplants, artificial feeding and euthanasia, using case studies to offer insight and illumination. What emerges is a reason-based bioethics for the twenty-first century; a bioethics that treats faith and reason with equal seriousness, that (...) shows the relevance of ancient wisdom to the complexities of modern healthcare scenarios and that offers new suggestions for social policy and regulation. Philosophical argument is complemented by Catholic theology and analysis of social and biomedical trends, to make this an auspicious example of a new generation of Catholic bioethical writing which has relevance for people of all faiths and none. (shrink)

Susan Haack; IX*—Theories of Knowledge: An Analytic Framework, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 83, Issue 1, 1 June 1983, Pages 143–158, https://.

In this article, we will consider how the regulation of populations is not just a feature of prisons, but of all institutions and organisations that control members though hierarchies, divisions and norms. While nurses and other allied health professionals are considered to be predominantly self‐regulatory, practice is guided by a code of conduct and codes of ethics that act as rules that serve to uphold the safety of the patient, whether they are a sick person in a hospital bed or (...) an inmate in a prison. The codes of conduct espouse a number of rules that to a certain extent govern the behaviour of individual and groups of practitioners through reciprocal rewards and punishments. Supervision is one method of monitoring the effectiveness of the codes of conduct and ethics while regulating both the minimum standard of individual practice and of training organisations. It is posited that one of the possible effects of clinical supervision is to make the person effectively self‐regulatory as, an autonomous practitioner. We take the view that professional autonomy is a highly problematic concept requiring closer examination. (shrink)

The 20-item happiness scale proposed by the Eysenck Personality Profiler was completed by 1,148 Anglican clergymen and 523 Anglican clergywomen during their first year in ordained ministry. The data demonstrated that clergymen were neither more nor less happy than men in the general population, and that clergywomen were happier than women in the general population. These findings are discussed in the context of work-related satisfaction and overall well-being.

Research on the origins of human social smiling is presented as a case study of how a species-specific, species-typical behavior may emerge from thousands of momentary events in which a continuously changing biological organism acts to make, respond to, and learn from its experience.

Research on language processing has shown that the disruption of conceptual integration gives rise to specific patterns of event-related brain potentials —N400 and P600 effects. Here, we report similar ERP effects when adults performed cross-domain conceptual integration of analogous semantic and mathematical relations. In a problem-solving task, when participants generated labeled answers to semantically aligned and misaligned arithmetic problems, the second object label in misaligned problems yielded an N400 effect for addition problems. In a verification task, when participants judged arithmetically (...) correct but semantically misaligned problem sentences to be “unacceptable,” the second object label in misaligned sentences elicited a P600 effect. Thus, depending on task constraints, misaligned problems can show either of two ERP signatures of conceptual disruption. These results show that well-educated adults can integrate mathematical and semantic relations on the rapid timescale of within-domain ERP effects by a process akin to analogical mapping. (shrink)

According to some philosophers, a sentence's semantics can fail to constitute a complete propositional content, imposing mere constraints on such a content. Recently, Daniel Harris has begun developing a formal constraint semantics. He claims that the semantic values of sentences constrain what speakers can literally say with them—and what hearers can know about what was said. However, that claim is undermined by his conception of semantics as the study of a psychological module. I argue instead that semantic constraints should be (...) understood as properties of public languages. (shrink)

Armstrong's combinatorialism, in his own words, is the following project: "My central metaphysical hypothesis is that all there is is the world of space and time. It is this world which is to supply the actual elements for the totality of combinations. So what is proposed is a Naturalistic form of a combinatorial theory."2 Armstrong calls his central hypothesis "Naturalism." He intends his well−known theory of universals to satisfy this thesis. He now attempts to give a naturalistic theory of modality.