Let (L; f) be a finite simple Ockham algebra and let (X;g) be its dual space. We first prove that every connected component of X is either a singleton or a generalised crown (i.e. an ordered set that is connected, has length 1, and all vertices of which have the same degree). The representation of a generalised crown by a square (0,1)-matrix in which all line sums are equal is used throughout, and a complete description of X, including the number (...) of connected components and the degree of the vertices, is given. We then examine the converse problem of when a generalised crown can be made into a connected component of (X; g). We also determine the number of non-isomorphic finite simple Ockham algebras that belong properly to a given subvariety P 2n,0. Finally, we show that the number of fixed points of (L; f) is 0,1, or 2 according to the nature of X. (shrink)

Literature on racism, anti‐racism, whiteness, nursing education and nurse educators was reviewed and analysed for the development of race consciousness and application of anti‐racist pedagogy. The literature describes an oppressive educational climate for non‐white identifying people, a curriculum that does not attend to the social construction of difference, and a nursing culture that is not consciously situated in a broader sociopolitical context. A particular focus on studies of nurse educators demonstrates a stark need for personal and professional development towards effectively (...) delivering anti‐racist pedagogy and a deconstruction of white normativity and dominance amongst white faculty. The protection and reproduction of white privilege is identified through the scholarship itself through a lack of racial analysis, an externalization of the root of oppression and non‐specific study measures and outcomes. The persistence and pervasiveness of white dominance in nursing and the lack of anti‐racist competence in white educators, particularly, merits a shift in anti‐racist efforts away from short‐term skill acquisition initiatives towards the deconstruction of socialized white supremacy and enactments of white privilege in nurse educators themselves. (shrink)

This essay is a short response to comments made by Cannon, Meeks, and Yu to my articles “Beyond Subjectivism,” published in this special edition of Tradition and Discovery (34:1), and “Connected andSeparate Knowing: A Marriage of Two Minds,” published in Knowledge, Difference, and Power, edited by Nancy Goldberger, et al., focusing on convergences between my work and the ideas of Michael Polanyi.

Healthcare environments continue to prove discriminatory and marginalizing towards patients and healthcare workers themselves, which contributes to inequitable health outcomes across lines of socially constructed difference. This content and discourse analysis of nursing identity scholarship asks whether there is a connection between nursing identity and oppressive behaviour by examining the construction of nursing identity and the foundational discourses, sometimes in absentia, that support such a construction. Bourdieu's concepts of social fields and Audre Lorde's concept of the master's house are applied (...) as a framework towards understanding the constructs of power and status in healthcare. The analysis identifies a gap in nursing identity literature where social constructs of difference are not considered. In the reviewed literature, nursing identity has been co‐opted by the professionalization project in effort to stabilize a conceptualization of nursing's contribution to healthcare towards gaining professional and societal status. This leads to a monolithic, apolitical representation of nursing identity that erases difference, denies historical influence, universalizes nursing work and further marginalizes marginalized identities. The oppressive and hegemonic nature of a universal nursing identity may contribute to a lack of disciplinary reflexivity about the ongoing influences of foundational discursive constructs of gender, epistemology, power and professional status. (shrink)

In the present essay, I explore some ways in which Polanyi’s concepts can be applied to enrich our understanding of epistemological development and the educational practices that seem to facilitate orsuppress it. Among the concepts discussed are Polanyi’s notion of uncertainty, combined with confidence as driving intellectual activity; the role of conviviality in the collaborative construction of knowledge,· the act of discovery as beginning with a problem that obsesses the thinker and proceeding through the integration of (often tacit) fragments into (...) a coherent whole; the notion of personal knowledge and commitment as transcending the disjunction between subjective and objective; apprenticeship as a personal relationship between a learner and a more sophisticated master, and most important, the assertion that beliefis prior to doubt. Thus, in terms ofthe concepts my colleagues and I have developed, “connected knowing” (a personal approach) is not simply equal to “separate knowing” (a detached, impersonal mode) as a procedure for arriving at knowledge, but is prior to it, “making meaning” being a necessary prerequisite to testing the validity ofa position. Drawing on interview data and memoirs of academic experiences, I argue that because these priorities are often reversed in educational practice, students learn to delete their personal responses from their essays in order to meet what they perceive as the utterly objective standards of the academy. When educators “endorse” uncertainty, students are encouraged to engage in the collaborative making of meaning and the pursuit of problems of personal importance. (shrink)

Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government (...) spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us. (shrink)

In this essay on epistemological development in college students, I argue that “subjectivism” (a.k.a. “multiplism;” often identified in female undergraduates) should be understood and treated not as amanifestation of a primitive, irrational notion of knowing that must be exterminated and replaced by the more impersonal, detached, objective procedures embodied in scientific method and critical thinking. Rather, it should be regarded as a point of departure for moving into more reflective modes of thought when approached via, and encouraged into, the more (...) personal, empathic procedure made known in Women’s Ways of Knowing as “connected knowing.” Along the way, I develop further the difference between “connected knowing” and “separate knowing” (the latter being the dominant academic paradigm of knowing), bringing out how connected knowing is an important and at times indispensable complement to separate knowing in achieving an objectivity integrated with subjectivity. (shrink)

In this commentary we concur with Frost's view of the centrality of universal principles in models of word identification. However, we argue that other processes in sentence comprehension also fundamentally constrain the nature of written word identification. Furthermore, these processes appear to be universal. We, therefore, argue that universality in word identification should not be considered in isolation, but instead in the context of other linguistic processes that occur during normal reading.

The concept of professionalism is embedded into all aspects of nursing education and practice yet is rarely critically interrogated in nursing scholarship. This paper describes how professionalism in nursing is based on whiteness. When actualized, this oppressive construct homogenizes individuals' identities to assist nurses in building and wielding power against each other and against patients, and results in dehumanization and disconnection. Foregrounding an ethic of authenticity as a practice of resistance against white professionalism offers an alternative possibility for how nursing (...) could be taught, practiced and theorized. As such a practice must begin with oneself, the authors outline a reflexive process from which to begin this work. (shrink)

This article discusses when it is ethically acceptable to withdraw consent for the storage and use of embryos and gametes. Currently, the law in the UK states that consent to use of a gamete or embryo can be withdrawn up to the point of the embryo's transfer to the recipient's uterus or when the gamete is used in providing treatment services; that is, the ‘point of no return’. In this article, we will consider other points of no return and argue (...) that having a single point of no return, a one size fits all form of consent can, in some cases, lead to restrictions on individuals’ autonomy and cause particular types of harm. Therefore, having different points of no return that fit different circumstances could extend autonomy and allow people to enter into agreements that are tailored more to their own particular needs and circumstances. (shrink)

In _Aristotle’s Ever-turning World in _Physics _8_ Blyth analyses the reasoning in Aristotle’s explanation of cosmic movement, with detailed evaluation of ancient and modern commentary on this central text in the history of ancient and medieval philosophy and science.

Market metaphors have come to dominate discourse on medical practice. In this essay, we revisit Peter Berger and colleagues’ analysis of modernization in their book The Homeless Mind and place that analysis in conversation with Max Weber’s 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation” to argue that the rise of market metaphors betokens the carry-over to medical practice of various features from the institutions of technological production and bureaucratic administration. We refer to this carry-over as the product presumption. The product presumption (...) foregrounds accidental features of medicine while hiding its essential features. It thereby confounds the public understanding of medicine and impedes the professional achievement of the excellences most central to medical practice. In demonstrating this pattern, we focus on a recent article, “Physicians, Not Conscripts—Conscientious Objection in Health Care,” in which Ronit Stahl and Ezekiel Emanuel decry conscientious refusals by medical practitioners. We demonstrate that Stahl and Emanuel’s argument depends on the product presumption, ignoring and undermining central features of good medicine. We conclude by encouraging conscientious resistance to the product presumption and the language it engenders. (shrink)

This article argues for the importance of studying life after mental illness. A significant proportion of people who experience mental illness recover, but the experience continues to affect their lives. Historical examination of the birth of mental after-care through the Mental After-Care Association (MACA) highlights the challenges faced by those who were discharged recovered from English and Welsh lunatic asylums between 1879 and 1928. This research demonstrates the relationship between ideas regarding psychiatric recovery and citizenship. Throughout the period, certification of (...) insanity for institutional treatment stripped patients of the status and rights of citizenship. Discharge on account of recovery restored a patient's legal access to citizenship, yet suspicions about their right and ability to particate in society lingered. The MACA designed after-care to facilitate restoration to full citizenship. The MACA was a product of the active citizenship movement, according to which, one's right to identify as a citizen depended on the performance of certain duties to the community. These duties varied according to socio-economic position and sex, meaning that each individual was prescribed a gendered personal citizenship role. MACA personnel saw their endeavours as part of their own citizenship roles, and designed their treatments accordingly. The MACA used a patient's assumption of a citizenship role to indicate recovery, and believed that supporting the performance of that role had mentally healing effects for patients who had been discharged recovered. MACA workers thus imbued the psychiatric innovation of after-care with the liberal political and social values of active citizenship. (shrink)

Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross‐linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim that, beyond this general tendency, communicative needs play an important role in shaping colexification patterns. We approach this question by means of a series of human experiments, using an artificial language communication game paradigm. Our results across four experiments match the previous cross‐linguistic findings: all other (...) things being equal, speakers do prefer to colexify similar concepts. However, we also find evidence supporting the communicative need hypothesis: when faced with a frequent need to distinguish similar pairs of meanings, speakadjust their colexification preferences to maintain communicative efficiency and avoid colexifying those similar meanings which need to be distinguished in communication. This research provides further evidence to support the argument that languages are shaped by the needs and preferences of their speakers. (shrink)

In their target article, Millum and Bromwich situate their article against a backdrop of well-documented empirical research demonstrating that many participants have variable and often poor...

An algebra A is said to be congruence coherent if every subalgebra of A that contains a class of some congruence on A is a union of -classes. This property has been investigated in several varieties of lattice-based algebras. These include, for example, de Morgan algebras, p-algebras, double p-algebras, and double MS-algebras. Here we determine precisely when the property holds in the class of symmetric extended de Morgan algebras.

A pO -algebra $${(L; f, \, ^{\star})}$$ is an algebra in which ( L ; f ) is an Ockham algebra, $${(L; \, ^{\star})}$$ is a p -algebra, and the unary operations f and $${^{\star}}$$ commute. Here we consider the endomorphism monoid of such an algebra. If $${(L; f, \, ^{\star})}$$ is a subdirectly irreducible pK 1,1 - algebra then every endomorphism $${\vartheta}$$ is a monomorphism or $${\vartheta^3 = \vartheta}$$ . When L is finite the endomorphism monoid of L is (...) regular, and we determine precisely when it is a Clifford monoid. (shrink)

In some Platonic dialogues Socrates apparently shares significant characteristics with contemporary sophists, especially a technique of antithetical argumentation. Since sophists anticipated later Academic philosophers in arguing antithetically and a resultant form of, then, with Socrates’ repeated claims to ignorance, Plato’s depiction of him arguing antithetically suggests later Academics could plausibly appeal to Plato for evidence that Socrates and he were, as it seems they actually did.

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

ABSTRACT This article explores the history of the bedwetting alarm, invented in 1938 by two psychologists to cure enuresis, or bedwetting, using the principles of classical conditioning. Infused with the optimism of behaviorism, the bedwetting alarm unexpectedly proved difficult to implement in practice, bearing a multitude of unanticipated complications that hindered its widespread acceptance. Introduced as a medical and psychological technology, in practice the alarm was also a child‐rearing device, encouraging the kind of behavioristic attitudes that had prompted its initial (...) development, while simultaneously promoting the child‐centered approach that would become dominant in the early 1950s. The life story of the bedwetting alarm muddies the traditional account of how child‐rearing theories progressed in tidy succession, suggesting both that behavioristic approaches did not die out in the 1930s and that elements of permissive child‐rearing were being considered earlier than we traditionally assume. (shrink)

The paper describes the conceptual models used to understand the processes determining plant growth rates in response to environmental changes. A series of experiments and growth models were used at three organizational levels: the specific plant organs, the whole plant and the plant canopy. The energy conversion efficiency and the total plant carbon balance were first examined. The carbon partitioning amongst the plant parts was then studied. The energy conversion efficiency is generally understood. In modelling carbon partitioning it was first (...) necessary to establish the carbon demand for each plant organ. The carbon partitioned amongst plant organs was then calculated in two ways. The first one based on empirical data consisted in defining which organ received the carbon prior to other organs. The second one was based on the relationship between the carbon mass of specific organs and their trophic activity. This hypothesis allowed the optimization of the carbon partitioning in order to maximize the whole plant growth rate. The opportunities to use these theoretical approaches in plant growth modelling are discussed. (shrink)

This text is based on an image that, in some ways, can be understood only in terms of sound. In the lonely darkness of a movie theatre, the audience spends ninety minutes gazing at a single image: that of a rubber dinghy drifting aimlessly on a vast expanse of water.This is the rare challenge posed by German filmmaker Philip Scheffner with his documentary Havarie: viewers are asked to focus on a single image while listening to a variety of sounds – (...) especially the voices of many nameless individuals discussing their own drifting journeys.A few years ago, Scheffner happened “totally by accident” to come across a cellphone video on YouTube lasting three minutes and thirty-six seconds; it was titled simply “refugees”... (shrink)

(1977). Integrated study and educational research: Some observations on the British scene. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 109-123.