Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.

Circumscribed delusional beliefs can follow brain injury. We suggest that these involve anomalous perceptual experiences created by a deficit to the person's perceptual system, and misinterpretation of these experiences due to biased reasoning. We use the Capgras delusion (the claim that one or more of one's close relatives has been replaced by an exact replica or impostor) to illustrate this argument. Our account maintains that people voicing this delusion suffer an impairment that leads to faces being perceived as drained of (...) their normal affective significance, and an additional reasoning bias that leads them to put greater weight on forming beliefs that are observationally adequate rather than beliefs that are a conservative extension of their existing stock. We show how this position can integrate issues involved in the philosophy and psychology of belief, and examine the scope for mutually beneficial interaction. (shrink)

We provide a taxonomy of the two most important debates in the philosophy of the cognitive and neural sciences. The first debate is over methodological individualism: is the object of the cognitive and neural sciences the brain, the whole animal, or the animal--environment system? The second is over explanatory style: should explanation in cognitive and neural science be reductionist-mechanistic, inter-level mechanistic, or dynamical? After setting out the debates, we discuss the ways in which they are interconnected. Finally, we make some (...) recommendations that we hope will help philosophers interested in the cognitive and neural sciences to avoid dead ends. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Representation -- The Transition -- The Sign-Systems of 1908 -- Rhetorical Concerns -- Interpretation, Worldviews and the Object.

Some sensory modalities, such as sight, touch and audition, are arguably spatial, and one way to understand these spatial senses is to investigate spatial representations in them. Here I focus on a specific element in this area— the interplay between perspectival variation and spatial constancy—and discuss recent interdisciplinary works on this topic. With these relevant experimental works, we will see clearly how traditional controversies in philosophy, for example, whether we perceive perspectival shapes as well as objective shapes, and whether any (...) sensory field should be postulated in senses other than vision, can benefit from considerations in empirical sciences. (shrink)

It feels like there’s two of you inside—like there’s another half of you, which is my anorexia, and then there’s the real K [own name], the real me, the logic part of me, and it’s a constant battle between the two. The anorexia almost does become part of you, and so in order to get it out of you I think you do have to kind of hurt you in the process. I think it’s almost inevitable. We came to the (...) concept of authenticity belatedly, one might say. We had been talking to people who had a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa about their experiences of living with their condition, and though we had not raised issues of authenticity or identity ourselves, they often did. They struggled with questions of .. (shrink)

This study draws on semistructured interviews with 19 white, rural, straight-identified men who have sex with men to understand how they perceive their gender and sexuality. It is among the first to use straight men’s own narratives, and helps address the underrepresentation of rural masculinities research. Through complex interpretive processes, participants reworked non-normative sexual practices—those usually antithetical to rural masculinities—to construct normative masculinity. Most chose other masculine, white, and straight or secretly bisexual men as partners for secretive sex without romantic (...) involvement. By choosing these partners and having this type of sex, the participants normalized and authenticated their sexual encounters as straight and normatively masculine. The participants engaged in bud-sex, a specific type of male–male sex that reinforced their rural masculinity and heterosexuality. The married men framed sex with men as less threatening to marriage than extramarital sex with women, helping to preserve a part of their lives that they described as central to their straightness. The results highlight the flexibility of heterosexuality; the centrality of heterosexuality to normative rural masculinity; how similar sexual practices carry different meanings across contexts and populations; and the social construction of masculinities and sexualities by age, race, gender, time period, and place. (shrink)

Signs and things -- How Shall a Sign be Called? -- Peirce -- Modes of Representation -- Medium Matters -- The Mute Poem -- Rhetoric of the image.

Financial derivatives have been singled out as the major villain in the latest crisis, particularly through speculative trading by banks. Yet little attention has been paid to the fundamental rôle that derivatives play in modern capitalism. Even less has there been a focus on how the boom in derivatives-trading was prompted by the crisis of profitability and capital-accumulation. This article shows that while derivatives were one means by which speculation took off, the momentum behind this was driven by low profitability. (...) That was why banks turned their mortgage-loans into derivative-driven securities, why pension-funds placed bets on commodity-futures and why countries such as Greece used derivatives to hide the real state of their finances. Derivatives helped determine the form and magnitude of the crisis, but were not its underlying cause. Proposed reforms of the derivatives-market ignore the fundamental determinants of the financial crisis, assuming it to be a failure of regulation. (shrink)

The concept of need is often proposed as providing an additional or alternative criterion to cost-effectiveness in making allocation decisions in health care. If it is to be of practical value it must be sufficiently precisely characterized to be useful to decision makers. This will require both an account of how degree of need for an intervention is to be determined and a prioritization rule that clarifies how degree of need and the cost of the intervention interact in determining the (...) relative priority of the intervention. Three common features of health care interventions must be accommodated in a comprehensive theory of need: the probabilistic nature of prognosis (with and without the intervention); the time course of effects; and the fact that the most effective treatments often combine more than one intervention. These common features are problematic for the concept of need. We outline various approaches to prioritization on the basis of need and argue that some approaches are more promising than others. (shrink)

This paper develops the situational model of primate beliefs from the Prior-Lurz line of thought. There is a strong skepticism concerning primate beliefs in the analytic tradition which holds that beliefs have to be propositional and non-human animals do not have them. The response offered in this paper is twofold. First, two arguments against the propositional model as applied to other animals are put forward: an a priori argument from referential opacity and an empirical argument from varieties of working memory. (...) Second, the Prior-Lurz situational model based on state of affairs as opposed to propositions is introduced and defended with two significant modifications. With this model of primate beliefs we can make progress in understanding how other primates can have certain mindreading capacity. (shrink)

Street art is an art form that entails creating public works incorporating the street physically and in their meaning. That physical property is employed as an artistic resource in street art raises two questions. Are street artworks necessarily illegal? Does being illegal change the nature of production and aesthetic appreciation? First, I argue street artworks must be in the street. On my view, both the physical and sociocultural senses of the street can be constitutive of meaning. Second, I argue that (...) illegality is a prototypical and paradigmatic feature of street art. While illegality alone does not make works better than sanctioned street art, it affects the production process and changes what is available to appreciate. (shrink)

The paper presents an interpretation of Aristotle's views on natural justice in the Nicomachean Ethics. It focuses, in particular, on Aristotle's understanding of the relationship which exists between natural justice and political justice, or between natural law and positive law. It is suggested that Aristotle's views on this subject are often misunderstood. It is also suggested that, contrary to what some commentators might think, Aristotle's comments on natural justice are actually central for our understanding of his political thought as a (...) whole. It is argued that Aristotle is, therefore, definitely a natural law theorist of some description. However, Aristotle's natural law theory is unconventional in certain respects. In particular, Aristotle does not consider natural law to be a critical standard by means of which positive law might be evaluated. This places Aristotle outside the mainstream of natural law theory as it has been traditionally understood. Aristotle is not, in this sense at least, the forerunner of the Stoic natural law tradition and of the individualistic, liberal natural law theory of the modern era. He is, rather, the founding father of what might best be described as the conservative natural law tradition, the most well known adherents of which in modern times are Montesquieu, Burke and Hegel. (shrink)

This book brings together perspectives on predictive processing and expected experience. It features contributions from an interdisciplinary group of authors specializing in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Predictive processing, or predictive coding, is the theory that the brain constantly minimizes the error of its predictions based on the sensory input it receives from the world. This process of prediction error minimization has numerous implications for different forms of conscious and perceptual experience. The chapters in this volume explore these implications (...) and various phenomenon related to them. The contributors tackle issues related to precision estimation, sensory prediction, probabilistic perception, and attention, as well as the role predictive processing plays in emotion, action, psychotic experience, anosognosia, and gut complex. Expected Experiences will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science working on issues related to predictive processing and coding. (shrink)

"Trust" and Professional Power: Towards a Social Theory of Self This paper sets out to delve into the relationship trust and professional authority in the context of health care. Understood in its micro-political terms and conceived as impacting on individualorganisational levels and the socio-political; this relationship stands at the interface of competingpressures working to produce the increasing complexity of social life. “Trust” is inextricably linked withuncertainty and complexity while professional authority rests on the specialist knowledge claimed bythe range of experts (...) and technologists that inhabit the spaces through which social life is governed andcomplexity managed. (shrink)

This article investigates the place that habit occupies in different ‘architectures of the person’, focusing particularly on constructions of the relations between habit and other components of personhood that are marked by time. Three such positions are examined: first, the relations between thought, will, memory, habit and instinct proposed by post-Darwinian accounts of ‘organic memory’; second, Henri Bergson’s account of the relations between habit, memory and becoming; and, third, the temporal aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus understood as a (...) set of hereditable dispositions. These different ‘architectures of the person’ are considered with regard to the role they accord habit in trans-generational mechanisms of inheritance; the historicised forms of embodied personhood that they propose; and the manner in which they account for the emergence of a capacity for freedom that can (partially) offset the weight of the inherited past. It is argued that the imputation of such a capacity to some forms of personhood, but not others, is both shaped by and provides the conditions for the operation of liberal forms of government. The manner in which the conduct of those who exhibit such a capacity for freedom is brought under the direction of varied ‘authorities of freedom’ is given particular consideration. (shrink)

The non-identity problem arises when an intervention or behavior changes the identity of those affected. Delaying pregnancy is an example of such a behavior. The problem is whether and in what ways such changes in identity affect moral considerations. While a great deal has been written about the non-identity problem, relatively little has been written about the implications for physicians and how they should understand their duties. We argue that the non-identity problem can make a crucial moral difference in some (...) circumstances, and that it has some interesting implications for when it is or is not right for a physician to refuse to accede to a patient's request. If a physician is asked to provide an intervention (identity preserving) that makes a person worse off, then such harm provides a good reason for the physician to refuse to provide the intervention. However, in cases where different (identity-altering) interventions result in different people having a better or worse life, physicians should normally respect patient choice. (shrink)

Chapman and colleagues make a compelling case for reforming the Common Rule to better protect group interests in genomics and data-centric research (Chapman et al. 2025). Drawing on insights from p...

Recently, there is a renewed debate concerning the role of perspective in vision. Morales et al. (2020) present evidence that, in the case of viewing a rotated coin, the visual system is sensitive to what has often been called “perspectival shapes.” It has generated vigorous discussions, including an online symposium by Morales and Cohen, an exchange between Linton (2021) and Morales et al. (2021), and most recently, a fierce critique by Burge and Burge (2022), in which they launch various conceptual (...) and empirical objections. Although Morales and Firestone (2022) have responded to them recently, and we are in agreement with Morales and Firestone in general, there are further problems in Burge and Burge (2022) that are worth highlighting. The main point of this comment is that what the Burge–Burge team call “viewpoint-dependent relational properties” are simply instances of what the Morales–Firestone team call “perspectival shapes”; the confusion arises from Burge and Burge’s misconstrual of Morales et al.’s claims. This shows that conceptually, the two teams are in large agreement, as Morales and Firestone (2022) also point out, and the focus should be put on the empirical disagreements, which has been covered by Morales and Firestone (2022). Relatedly, we argue that Burge and Burge (2022) misinterpret Morales et al. (2020) as supporting a new entity in perception science, and that this misinterpretation is a primary source of their apparent disagreement. This is worth pointing out because such misunderstanding generates many unnecessary quarrels that hinder progress. (shrink)

A major and timely re-examination of key areas in the social and political thought of Hegel and Marx. The editors' extensive introduction surveys the development of the connection from the Young Hegelians through the main Marxist thinkers to contemporary debates. Leading scholars including Terrell Carver, Chris Arthur, and Gary Browning debate themes such as: the nature of the connection itself scientific method political economy the Hegelian basis to Marxs' "Doctoral Dissertation" human needs history and international relations.

In this letter we focus on the cognitive science of consciousness. The general message is that, while this interdisciplinary area has made much progress in recent years, there is a tendency of downplaying conceptual issues, and therefore underestimating the difficulties of various problems. We briefly focus on a few prominent examples only, due to the space limit, but the general message should be clear: this recent tendency can be problematic for the progress of the consciousness branch of cognitive sciences.

Ethics, communication skills, and the law ('practice skills') are important in all aspects of modern health care. Doctors and nurses must be sensitive to the ethical aspects of their work and understand the legal framework within which clinical decisions are made. Well developed skills of communication, with patients, their relatives and other members of the clinical team, are a key feature of good clinical practice Until recently, the important of practice skills has been relatively neglected in health care education. This (...) situation is changing. The UK General Medical Council, for example, has recently identified three aspects as part of the core of the medical course, and the move to degree courses in nursing has led to an increasing focus of practice skills in nurse education. The Oxford Practice Skills Project (OPSP) team have developed a course, within the University of Oxford Clinical School, which covers the teaching of practice skills in an integrated manner. This course is widely recognized as one of the most systematic developments of education in these areas. This manual describes the OPSP course in detail and provides teaching materials. Although developed initially for medical students, it should be helpful to all those involved in teaching ethics, communication skills, and law in health care. Each Seminar is described in detail Tutors' guides are provided Student handouts are included Contains guidelines for introducing 'practice skills' into a busy clinical curriculum Includes over forty case histories for teaching and examination Gives details of many useful sources and resources Details a variety of teaching methods together with their advantages and disadvantages Provides an ethics teaching toolkit for clinical teachers new to this area Readers are welcome to photocopy any part of this manual for their own teaching. (shrink)

In 1925, David Katz published an influential monograph on touch, Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, which was translated into English in 1989. Although it is called “the world of touch,” it also discusses the thermal and the nociceptive senses, albeit briefly. In this chapter, we will follow this approach, but we will speak about “somatosensory senses” in general in order to remind ourselves that perceptions of temperatures and pains should also be considered together in this context.

The name remains: Jewish questioner -- London and language: English writer -- Familial socialism: political Marxist -- King's and kibbutzim: Cambridge Zionist -- Paris, California: French intellectual -- Generation of understanding: East European liberal -- Unities and fragments: European historian -- Age of responsibility: American moralist -- The banality of good: social democrat.

This paper is about compositionality, belief reports, and related issues. I begin by introducing Putnam’s proposal for understanding compositionality, namely that the sense of a sentence is a function of the sense of its parts and of its logical structure (section 1). Both Church and Sellars think that Putnam’s move is superfluous or unnecessary since there is no relevant puzzle to begin with (section 2). I will urge that Putnam is right in thinking that there is indeed a puzzle with (...) a discussion of translation and belief individuation (section 3). Later Salmon (2001/ 2007) reinforces Church’s position, but I will argue that it is still possible to make my case by clarifying the nature of my proposal, i.e., understanding explanations of action from the third-person point of view (section 4). Now, Fine (2007) agrees with Putnam that there is indeed a puzzle to be solved, but he argues that Putnam’s solution of it is problematic, and that his own semantic relationism is a better view. In response to this, I will recast the notion of compositionality based on a certain conception of belief individuation, namely that the semantic content of a sentence is a function of the semantic contents of its parts and of the structure of intensional discourses (sections 3 and 5). Finally the paper will end with a reconsideration of the recalcitrant Kripke’s puzzle about belief (1979/1988), since it might seem to put some pressure on my account. It turns out that my understanding of this puzzle is again different from Fine’s perspective (section 6). (shrink)

In this talk, we defend extended cognition against several criticisms. We argue that extended cognition does not derive from armchair theorizing and that it neither ignores the results of the neural sciences, nor minimizes the importance of the brain in the production of intelligent behavior. We also argue that explanatory success in the cognitive sciences does not depend on localist or reductionist methodologies; part of our argument for this is a defense of what might be called ‘holistic science’.

This article focuses on the role of past standards stories and how they are deployed strategically in ways that shape the process of standards creation. It draws upon an ethnographic study over multiple years of standards meetings, discussions, and online activity. Building on existing work that examines how standards are shaped by stories, this study follows the development of Augmented Reality Markup Language and maps how the story of Hypertext Markup Language became the key story that actors utilized and debated (...) to push for participation, agreement, and material development of the standard. The authors present several different ways the recurring HTML story was effective at various points in the process as a diagnostic tool, promissory future, empirical evidence, and confidence building measure. Understanding these strategic deployments serves as an empirical example of how recurring stories of the past can shape standards development. These mappings illustrate how standards can be built on past standards sociologically as well as technologically and also broadens our theoretical tools for understanding the importance of stories in the sociology of standards. (shrink)

This article explores and critically evaluates the potential contribution to discourse studies of topic modelling, a group of machine learning methods which have been used with the aim of automatically discovering thematic information in large collections of texts. We critically evaluate the utility of the thematic grouping of texts into ‘topics’ emerging from a large collection of online patient comments about the National Health Service in England. We take two approaches to this, one inspired by methods adopted in existing topic (...) modelling research and the other using more established methods of discourse analysis. In the study, we compare the insights produced by each approach and consider the extent to which the automatically generated topics might be of use to discourse analysts attempting to organise and study sizeable datasets. We found that the topic modelling approach was able to group texts into ‘topics’ that were truly thematically coherent with a mixed degree of success, while the more traditional approach to discourse analysis consistently provided a more nuanced perspective on the data which was ultimately closer to the ‘reality’ of the texts it contains. This study thus highlights issues concerning the use of topic modelling and offers recommendations and caveats to researchers employing such approaches to studying discourse in the future. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the debate on the role of financial derivatives for capitalism. It responds to Bryan and Rafferty’s defence of their analysis and their critique of my own. The paper argues that their analysis confuses what a financial derivative does, and mixes together different kinds of derivative – and non-derivative – that play very different roles. After detailing these points, the paper discusses the relationship between gold, money and derivatives, rejecting their notion that derivatives are some kind of (...) new ‘commodity money’. An important theme absent from Bryan and Rafferty’s analysis is the relationship of financial trading and derivatives markets to parasitism in the imperialist world economy. To illustrate this, the paper notes advantages enjoyed by the major financial powers – the US and the UK – that are the main centres for the origination of derivatives and for derivatives trading. (shrink)

The impacts of early fishing on aquatic ecosystems were minimal, as primitive technologies were used to harvest fish primarily for food. As fishing technology grew more sophisticated and human populations dispersed and expanded, local economies transitioned from subsistence to barter and trade. Expanded trade networks and mercantilization led to surplus catches becoming tradable commodities. Today, global export fish commodities, including fresh, frozen, cured, and canned fish, are valued at over US$ 100 billion, but commoditization loses the ecological imperative, with overfishing (...) the result. To sustain global fisheries, human and ecosystem relationships with living fish need to be valued, as fish landed for both food and profit. Toward this end, we propose two decommoditization strategies: (a) valuing cultural property, the intergenerational relationships of people to places, in environmental policy and (b) instituting social subsidies that reward or enable local communities to cooperate in sustaining aquatic living resources, such as with marine protected areas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dialogic and the Aesthetic:Some Reflections on Theatre as a Learning MediumAnthony Jackson (bio)A Doll's House will be as flat as ditchwater when A Midsummer Night's Dream will still be as fresh as paint; but it will have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which is always intensely utilitarian.— George Bernard Shaw, "The Problem Play"1People have tried for centuries to use (...) drama to change people's lives, to influence, to comment, to express themselves. It doesn't work. It might be nice if it worked, but it doesn't. The only thing dramatic form is good for is telling a story.—David Mamet, A Whore's Profession2These two assertions, some 100 years apart, were of course meant to be contentious—but they do point to one of the recurring questions about the role that theatrical art plays in modern Western culture and nicely encapsulate the contrasting claims made by practitioners and critics alike for the "work in the world" that drama can do. On the one hand, it is argued that what is conventionally thought of as great dramatic art—while it may be imaginatively rich, aesthetically compelling, and "timeless" in its appeal—will not achieve the social impact that plays such as A Doll's House have done. Such plays have a different function. They can be directly useful to us in the "real world" beyond the theatre walls, perhaps capable of influencing that world or at least influencing the way we think about and operate in the world—but they may not, consequently, have much shelf life. A Doll's House, of course, obstinately refuses to leave both shelf and stage but in this respect may be an exception that proves the rule; the vast majority of "interventionist" dramas rarely outlive their historical moment. (A play such as Spirochete, a [End Page 104] living newspaper written in 1938 in Chicago with the aim of heightening public awareness of the widespread—but barely discussed—problem of syphilis and of the cures available, undoubtedly did much effective work in the world but remains of and for its time.3 )On the other hand, playwright David Mamet casts buckets of cold water over the whole notion of "useful" dramatic art. Let us not delude ourselves, he argues, into thinking drama is good for anything else than telling a story—the value of good dramatic storytelling is important enough as it is. It serves the art form—and possibly those we wish to influence—badly if we insist on trying to change the world using drama as our lever. A genuine work of art, it is often said, cannot be didactic or "instrumental." The novel, play, or poem that sets out to convey information or to preach a message risks surrendering those very qualities we usually value in art—complexity, multilayered meanings, richness of imagination. Jonathan Levy, in his A Theatre of the Imagination, argues that "the impulse to create theatre for children is the impulse to give a gift, without strings. It is this impulse... we should... call upon when we find ourselves in the theatre tempted to teach."4 Further, "when art is used to teach, either the teaching or the art must suffer."5 The implication is clearly that teaching and dramatic art make awkward bedfellows. It has to be one or the other, not both. The late, much missed, Lowell Swortzell took a not dissimilar line in his provocative essay on theatre-in-education, "Trying to like TIE,"6 and many practitioners of children's and young people's theatre have likewise resisted having their work categorized as educational or in any way curriculum driven. The work must have its own justification, as art, as storytelling, offering young people an experience that may complement but that is fundamentally different from anything else they get in school. Even Augusto Boal has at times appeared to reinforce the dichotomy. Arguing for a theatre that can serve the immediate needs of the marginalized, the oppressed, and the disadvantaged, he has negotiated a challenging and productive path through the artistic and socially responsive implications of... (shrink)

Knowledge was a major issue in science and philosophy in the twentieth century. Its first irruption was in the heated controversy concerning the foundations of mathematics. To justify his rejection of the use of the actual infinite in mathematical reasoning, Brouwer has made the construction of mathematical objects dependent on the knowing subject. This approach was rejected by the mainstream of analytical philosophers who feared a fall into pyschologism. Several years later, the question of the progress of scientific knowledge was (...) put forward in the thirties by the post-positivist philosophers to fill the vacuum in the philosophy of science following the demise of the logical positivism programme. The answers given to these questions have deepened the already existing gap between philosophy and the history and practice of science. While the positivists argued for a spontaneous, steady and continuous growth of scientific knowledge the post-positivists make a strong case for a fundamental discontinuity in the development of science which can only be explained by extrascientific factors. The political, social and cultural environment, the argument goes on, determine both the questions and the terms in which they should be answered. Accordingly, the sociological and historical interpretation involves in fact two kinds of discontinuity which are closely related: the discontinuity of science as such and the discontinuity of the more inclusive political and social context of its development. More precisely it explains the discontinuity of the former by the discontinuity of the latter subordinating in effect the history of science to the wider political and social history. The underlying idea is that each historical and social context generates scientific and philosophical questions of its own. From this point of view the question surrounding the nature of knowledge and its development are entirely new topics typical of the twentieth century social context reflecting both the level and the scale of the development of science. To the surprise of modern historians of science and philosophy, the same kind of questions, which would allegedly be new topics specific to the twentieth century concerning the nature of knowledge and its progress, were already raised more than eleven centuries earlier in the context of the Arabic tradition which, as we discuss further on, developed a trans-cultural and trans-national concept of the unity of science (see the contributions of Deborah Black and Jon McGinnis which tackle the issue of the nature of knowledge). The neglect of the Arabic tradition in philosophy of science is a major a gap not only in the development of science but a fundamental flaw in the writing of its history and philosophy caused by the total reduction of epistemology to political and social history of science. How has this period of the history of science and philosophy come to be ignored? In what circumstances were the questions akin to the nature of knowledge raised in the first place? What is the relation between on the one hand the questions of knowledge and its growth and on the other hand the unity of science in the Arabic tradition? The answers to some of these questions are the aim of the present volume, the first of the series Logic, Epistemology and the Unity of Science to be devoted to a so-called non-western tradition. Let us first highlight in a kind of overview some landmarks concerning the timing of the emergence of the Arabic tradition and its significance for the history of science. (shrink)

Purpose: Studies of reactive and proactive modes of inhibitory control tend to show age-related declines and are accompanied by abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex. We explored which mode of inhibitory control would be more amenable to change and accrue greater benefits following engagement in a 4-week theater acting intervention in older adults. These gains were evaluated by performance on the AX-CPT task. We hypothesized that an increase in proactive control would relate to an increase in AY errors and a decrease (...) in BX errors. In contrast, an increase in reactive control would be associated with a decrease in AY errors, no change in AY reaction time, and an increase in BX response time. Further, we posited that an increase in behavioral proactive control would accompany greater cue versus probe activity for previously identified regions in the prefrontal cortex. In contrast, an increase in behavioral reactive control would be accompanied by greater probe activation in these identified brain areas.Materials and Methods: The participants were 179 community-dwelling adults aged 60–89 years who were on average, college-educated. Participants were pseudo-randomly assigned to either an active-experiencing acting intervention condition or the active control condition ; participant assignment was subject to time of enrollment. Participants in both groups were trained by theater-actor researchers with expertise in acting interventions. In contrast to the active control participants who attended a course on theater acting, the acting-intervention group was required to consistently deploy proactive and reactive control mechanisms. Both groups met two times/week for 75-min for 4 weeks. Participant brain-behavioral performance on the AX-CPT task was evaluated prior to and after this four-week period.Results: No intervention effects were found in favor of proactive control. Behavioral evidence in favor of reactive control was weak. Brain-related benefits to reactive control was illustrated by greater probe-activation in Brodmann areas 6 and 8, relative to controls and pre-intervention.Conclusion: We found some evidence for improvements in reactive control via brain measures, attributed to engagement in the acting intervention. (shrink)

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Ethnomethodological studies of work attempt to examine ordinary activities for the ways in which they exhibit observably and accountably competent work practice as viewed by practitioners. Because it is the analyst's task to describe activities as viewed by practitioners,qua practitioners, two methodical problems must be solved. The first problem is how the analyst can know and describe the members' point of view. Because members display their point of view to each other, the problem can be formulated as the question of (...) how the analyst can identify members' displays. This is theproblem of observability. The second problem is how the analyst can make a distinction between activities done by practitioners, qua practitioners, and other activities. How can the analyst for instance, distinguish talkas work from talkat work? This is theproblem of specificity. This paper's aim is to critically examine the ways in which ethnomethodology manages these two problems. First, the concept of the occasioned corpus of setting features is discussed. Next, two examples of ethnomethodological studies of institutional work are examined. It is argued that these studies fail to provide an adequate description of the specificity of the work studied because both disregard practitioners' orientation to the requirements of institutional accounting and reporting. Finally, it is discussed how practitioners' orientations to institutional criteria can be made observable in the analysis. (shrink)

Summary What are the connections between Ian Hunter's specific criticisms of cultural studies and his more general criticisms of those strands of the humanities that take issue with instrumental reasoning? How are these connections informed by his assessments of the limitations, and the consequences, of the ?moment of theory?? What are the implications of his critique of anti-instrumental defences of the humanities for contemporary debates concerning the future trajectories of cultural studies? In exploring these questions I consider the continuities between (...) Hunter's initial criticisms of cultural studies and the broader contours of his subsequent engagements with contemporary diagnoses of the fading critical vocation of the humanities. While endorsing the general tenor of Hunter's remarks on these questions, I conclude by arguing the need for genealogies of cultural studies and of the humanities that cast their nets more widely than Hunter's primary focus on textual disciplines. (shrink)

Freeman Dyson has questioned whether any conceivable experiment in the real universe can detect a single graviton. If not, is it meaningful to talk about gravitons as physical entities? We attempt to answer Dyson’s question and find it is possible concoct an idealized thought experiment capable of detecting one graviton; however, when anything remotely resembling realistic physics is taken into account, detection becomes impossible, indicating that Dyson’s conjecture is very likely true. We also point out several mistakes in the literature (...) dealing with graviton detection and production. (shrink)