I examine the degree of specialization in various sub-fields of philosophy, drawing on data from the PhilPapers Survey. The following three sub-fields are highly specialized: Ancient philosophy, seventeenth/eighteenth century philosophy, and philosophy of physics. The following sub-fields have a low level of specialization: metaphilosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of probability, philosophy of the social sciences, decision theory, and philosophy of race and gender. Highly specialized sub-fields tend to require extensive knowledge in some area beyond the typical training of a philosopher, (...) and outside of philosophy proper. In addition, there is a correlation between sub-field size and degree of specialization. Larger sub-fields tend to be more specialized. (shrink)

The ectoplasmic specialization (ES) is a testis‐specific, actin‐based hybrid anchoring and tight junction. It is confined to the interface between Sertoli cells at the blood–testis barrier, known as the basal ES, as well as between Sertoli cells and developing spermatids designated the apical ES. The ES shares features of adherens junctions, tight junctions and focal contacts. By adopting the best features of each junction type, this hybrid nature of ES facilitates the extensive junction‐restructuring events in the seminiferous epithelium during spermatogenesis. (...) For instance, the α6β1‐integrin–laminin 333 complex, which is usually limited to the cell–matrix interface in other epithelia to facilitate cell movement, is a putative apical ES constituent. Furthermore, JAM‐C and CAR, two tight junction integral membrane proteins, are also components of apical ES involving in spermatid orientation. We discuss herein the mechanisms that maintain the cross‐talk between ES and blood–testis barrier to facilitate cell movement and orientation in the seminiferous epithelium. BioEssays 29: 36–48, 2007. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Expert chess players, specialized in different openings, recalled positions and solved problems within and outside their area of specialization. While their general expertise was at a similar level, players performed better with stimuli from their area of specialization. The effect of specialization on both recall and problem solving was strong enough to override general expertise—players remembering positions and solving problems from their area of specialization performed at around the level of players 1 standard deviation (SD) above them in general skill. (...) Their problem‐solving strategy also changed depending on whether the problem was within their area of specialization. When it was, they searched more in depth and less in breadth; with problems outside their area of specialization, the reverse. The knowledge that comes from familiarity with a problem area is more important than general purpose strategies in determining how an expert will tackle it. These results demonstrate the link in experts between problem solving and memory of specific experiences and indicate that the search for context‐independent general purpose problem‐solving strategies to teach to future experts is unlikely to be successful. (shrink)

This article has two objectives: the first, to analyze the professionalization process of assisted reproduction (AR) in order to see how AR is consolidating into an independent field within medicine, and the second, to see how AR arrived and was assimilated into Mexican culture. As opposed to other projects that have traced back the story of a particular specialty to see how it emerged as such, this article looks at an ongoing process: specialization in action. By analyzing the data collected (...) through three years of multisited ethnography using tools offered by the sociology of professions and the history of medical specialization, I identify specific moments in which AR is gaining cognitive, normative, and evaluative consolidation, structure, and independence. This leads me to suggest that AR might separate from gynecology and become an independent specialty within medicine. I offer examples to support this argument and show how AR has developed into a biomedical service, a professional biomedical field, and a biomedical business. (shrink)

Lindquist et al. have assumed that functional specialization requires a one-to-one mapping between brain regions and discrete emotions. This assumption is in tension with the fact that regions can have multiple functions in the context of different, possibly distributed, networks. Once we open the door to other forms of functional specialization, neuroimaging data no longer favor constructionist models over natural kind models.

This article locates Lonergan’s call for a new political economy within a larger project, the “education of liberty,” one aim of which is to have large numbers of producers and consumers voluntarily and intelligently adapting their economic decisions to the rhythms of the economy. Part I of the article describes several basic obstacles to such adaptations, including a type of economic realism that assumes “rational agency” in the marketplace is equivalent to the pursuit of perceived self-interest. How are any of (...) these obstacles to be overcome? The promise of functional specialization is to take what is best in the past and to apply it in future efforts to improve the human condition. Thus, Part II of the article summarizes this author’s understanding of the eight functional specialties, and Part III singles out an underdeveloped understanding of rational agency as the focus of an experiment in applying the functional specialties to one obstacle to the education of liberty. The experiment is no more than an invitation to others who may wish to exploit the promise of functional specialization. Leading questions under the eight headings identify parts of possible collaborative projects. [The second article by the same author in this issue of the journal provides an exercise in the fourth specialty of dialectic in response to this invitation.]. (shrink)

We review evidence for multifaceted functional specialization of somatosensory information processing, both within and outside classical somatosensory cortex. We argue that the nature of such specialization has not yet been clarified adequately to regard the proposed action/perception dichotomy as being established. However, we believe this is a good working hypothesis that can motivate further work.

Committee decision making is examined in this study focusing on the role assigned to the committee members. In particular, we are concerned about the comparison between committee performance under specialization and non-specialization of the decision makers. Specialization (in the context of project or public policy selection) means that the decision of each committee member is based on a narrow area, which typically results in the acquirement and use of relatively high expertise in that area. When the committee members’ expertise is (...) already determined, specialization only means that the decision of each committee member is based solely on his/her relatively high expertise area. This form of specialization is potentially inferior relative to non-specialization under which the decision of each committee member is based on different areas, not just his/her relatively high expertise area. Given that the expertise of the committee members is already determined but unknown, our analysis focuses on non-specializing individuals whose decision is based on a decision rule that does not require information on the decision-making skills. Under these realistic assumptions, non-specialization is shown to be preferable over specialization, depending on the aggregation rule applied by the committee. The significance of our approach is not limited to the specific results that we obtain. Rather, it should be viewed as a first step toward a deeper examination of the role of individual decision makers in enhancing the performance of collective decision making. (shrink)

Human Specialization in Design and Technology explores emerging trends in learning and training-standardization, customization, personalization-with a unique focus on human needs and conditions. Analyzing evidence from current academic research as well as the popular press, this concise volume defines and examines the trajectory of instructional design and technologies toward more human-centered and specialized products, services, processes, environments, and systems. Examples from education, healthcare, business, and other sectors offer real-world demonstrations for scholars and graduate students of educational technology, instructional design, ICT, (...) and business development. (shrink)

Specialization appears to be a more efficient way to achieve shared ends: you specialize in one task and I in another and we combine our efforts. Specialization in literature would seem to call for a divide between literary critics, who interpret and evaluate fictions, and fiction writers themselves. But such a divide is a disadvantage for assessing some claims made within literary criticism, notably that a certain style goes with a certain content.

AimsSport specialization is an actual trend in youth athletes, but it can increase injury risk. The aim was to determine the eventual correlation between sports specialization and injury risk in various sports, using a biopsychosocial approach.Methods169 sport-specialized athletes completed [; overall,, ] a self-reported questionnaire regarding sociodemographic, physical-attitudinal, injuries and psychological-attitudinal To analyze data univariate and correlate analyses were used.ResultsOf 169 athletes enrolled, 53% were single-sport specialized. In team sports a high risk of having to remain at rest for up (...) to 1 month because of overuse was observed. Males who suffered direct trauma in the team group were more exposed to that type of injury, and also the type of specialization figured significantly. In addition, interoceptive awareness correlates with injury. This study shows that, even though young athletes seem to be at a high risk of becoming injured, early team sport specialization and a high performance level cannot be considered to be the only risk factors. (shrink)

Specialization is an agent of separation, both between competing specialists and between technology and society. Specialization is not an agent of integration. In the problem conception phase of the engineering design process, the emphasis must be on formulating and developing the questions that will frame the ultimate design solution. Using specialists in this phase often leads to biased questions based on the specialists’ areas of expertise. Rather, what is needed is a suspension of commitment to particular solutions and to ask (...) questions without preconceived biases. This study takes a critical look at engineering education as now practiced versus the practice of 40 years ago and concludes with a recommendation for more broadly educating future engineers. (shrink)

We raise the new possibility that people diagnosed with developmental dyslexia (DD) are specialized in explorative cognitive search, and rather than having a neurocognitive disorder, play an essential role in human adaptation. Most DD research has studied educational difficulties, with theories framing differences in neurocognitive processes as deficits. However, people with DD are also often proposed to have certain strengths – particularly in realms like discovery, invention, and creativity – that deficit-centered theories cannot explain. We investigate whether these strengths reflect (...) an underlying explorative specialization. We re-examine experimental studies in psychology and neuroscience using the framework ofcognitive search, whereby many psychological processes involve a trade-off between exploration and exploitation. We report evidence of an explorative bias in DD-associated cognitive strategies. High DD prevalence and an attendant explorative bias across multiple areas of cognition suggest the existence of explorative specialization. An evolutionary perspective explains the combination of findings and challenges the view that individuals with DD have a disorder. In cooperating groups, individual specialization is favored when features that confer fitness benefits are functionally incompatible. Evidence for search specialization suggests that, as with some other social organisms, humans mediate the exploration–exploitation trade-off by specializing in complementary strategies. The existence of a system of collective cognitive search that emerges through collaboration would help to explain our species’ exceptional adaptiveness. It also aligns with evidence for substantial variability during our evolutionary history and the notion that humans are adapted not to a particular habitat but to variability itself. Specialization creates interdependence and necessitates balancing complementary strategies. Reframing DD therefore underscores the urgency of changing certain cultural practices to ensure we do not inhibit adaptation. Key improvements would remove cultural barriers to exploration and nurture explorative learning in education, academia, and the workplace, as well as emphasize collaboration over competition. Specialization in complementary search abilities represents a meta-adaptation; through collaboration, this likely enables human groups (as a species and as cultural systems) to successfully adapt. Cultural change to support this system of collaborative search may therefore be essential in confronting the challenges humanity now faces. (shrink)

I offer a simple method for further investigating the Interactive Specialization framework, and some data that may or may not be compatible with the approach, depending on the precise meaning of Findings from my lab indicate that, while networks of brain areas cooperate in specialized ways to support cognitive functions, individual brain areas participate in many such networks, in different cognitive domains.

My aim in this paper is to re-examine specialization in science. I argue that we need to acknowledge the role that conceptual changes can play in the creation of new specialties. Whereas earlier sociological accounts focus on social and instrumental changes as the cause of the creation of new specialties, I argue that conceptual changes play an important role in the creation of some scientific specialties. Specifically, I argue that conceptual developments played an important role in the creation of both (...) endocrinology and virology. (shrink)

This paper proposes a solution to a puzzle regarding when people switch from one skilled area of specialization to another, in which they have had little training. Certain analogies between the previous area and the area switched to enable this. I use Susan Carey as an example.

The traditional verbal/nonverbal dichotomy is inadequate for completely describing cerebral lateralization. Musical functions are not necessarily mediated by the right hemisphere; evidence for a specialist left-hemisphere mechanism dedicated to the encoded speech signal is weakening, and the right hemisphere possesses considerable comprehensional powers. Right-hemisphere processing is often said to be characterized by holistic or gestalt apprehension, and face recognition may be mediated by this hemisphere partly because of these powers, partly because of the right hemisphere's involvement in emotional affect, and (...) possibly through the hypothesized existence of a specialist face processor or processors in the right. The latter hypothesis may, however, suffer the same fate as the one relating to a specialist encodedness processor for speech in the left. Verbal processing is largely the province of the left because of this hemisphere's possession of sequential, analytic, time-dependent mechanisms. Other distinctions are special cases of an analytic/holistic dichotomy. More fundamentally, however, the left hemisphere is characterized by its mediation of discriminations involving duration, temporal order, sequencing, and rhythm, at thesensory level, and especially at themotorlevel. Spatial aspects characterize the right, the mapping of exteroceptive body space, and the positions of fingers, limbs, and perhaps articulators, with respect to actual and target positions. Thus there is a continuum of function between the hemispheres, rather than a rigid dichotomy, the differences being quantitative rather than qualitative, of degree rather than of kind. (shrink)

This paper attempts to bring new insights to a long-standing historical debate over medical specialization by analyzing the formation of medical mycology, a somewhat marginal biomedical discipline that emerged in the mid-twentieth century around studies of fungal disease in humans. The study of fungi predates that of bacteria and viruses, but from the 1880s it became eclipsed by bacteriology. However, in the postwar period, there were moves to establish medical mycology as an independent speciality. I trace the processes that led (...) to the launch of professional societies in the United States, Britain and Japan, three major players in medical mycology, and more broadly in biomedicine. The analysis of the three different national contexts illustrates how geographical, medico-technological, epidemiological, political and social conditions gave the specialty a distinctive character in each country; this was further complicated by the different and changing medical fields in which fungal diseases were studied and treated. The three case studies show medical specialization as a process that is not simply cumulative but responds to specific historical events and developments. (shrink)

The methodological underpinnings of studies into early specialization have recently been critiqued. Previous researchers have commented on the variety of, and over-simplified, methods used to capture early specialization. This exploratory study, therefore, suggests a new direction for how early specialization can be conceptualised and measured. We aim to create an index approach whereby early specialization is measured as a continuous variable, in line with commonly used definitions. The continuous variable for degrees of early specialization is calculated from a questionnaire which (...) captures the four key components of early specialization; 1) intensity, 2) year-round training, 3) single sport, and 4) commencing age 12 or younger. The proposed index approach is illustrated in a sample of 290 Swedish aesthetic performers aged 12-20 years (M = 15.88), whose descriptive statistics are used to discuss the suitability and usability of the measure. The proposed index approach functions as a guideline to future researchers. We hope that introducing a new index approach we will encourage further discussion around the measurement of early specialization. Additionally, we hope to pave the way for future research to explore more complex research questions. (shrink)

The core question behind this Frontiers research topic is whether explaining linguistic phenomena requires appeal to properties of human cognition that are specialized to language. We argue here that investigating this issue requires taking linguistic research results seriously, and evaluating these for domain-specificity. We present a particular empirical phenomenon, bound variable interpretations of pronouns dependent on a quantifier phrase, and argue for a particular theory of this empirical domain that is couched at a level of theoretical depth which allows its (...) principles to be evaluated for domain-specialization. We argue that the relevant principles are specialized when they apply in the domain of language, even if analogs of them are plausibly at work elsewhere in cognition or the natural world more generally. So certain principles may be specialized to language, though not, ultimately, unique to it. Such specialization is underpinned by ultimately biological factors, hence part of UG. (shrink)

From delegation to specialization: nurses and clinical trial co‐ordinationThis paper considers an area of clinical research that has been delegated by physician‐researchers to nurses and others in the United States, that of clinical trials co‐ordination. It uses interviews with nurse trial co‐ordinators to explore the occupational processes by which the boundaries of work enactment and the definition of work have been established by nurses and others. It then discusses the occupational processes that have been established to formalize a role for (...) nurses in clinical research. It raises the question of (and offers speculation on) whether specialization alone will distinguish nursing from other occupational groups engaged in clinical research work. (shrink)

This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequality between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning process driving cultural evolution increases individuals’ economic gains. The key assumptions are that human populations are structured into groups and that cultural learning is more likely to occur within than between groups. Then, if groups are sufficiently isolated and there are potential gains from specialization and exchange, stable stratification can sometimes result. This model predicts (...) that stratification is favored, ceteris paribus, by (1) greater surplus production, (2) more equitable divisions of the surplus among specialists, (3) greater cultural isolation among subpopulations within a society, and (4) more weight given to economic success by cultural learners. (shrink)

Mathematics is becoming increasingly specialized, divided into a vast and growing number of subfields. While this division of cognitive labor has important benefits, it also has a significant drawb...

This article challenges the long-standing belief that Plato is an early proponent of the division of labor on account of the political proposals advanced in the Republic. In contrast, I contend that the Republic offers a radical critique—rather than any endorsement—of job specialization and its accompanying psychological orientation toward acquisitiveness. The article begins with a methodological section that attempts to explain the origin of the common misreading of Plato's works and forwards an interpretive framework for situating arguments raised in the (...) Platonic dialogues in their dramatic and dialogic contexts. Having established these hermeneutic principles, the article proceeds to analyze the shifting significance of job specialization within the imaginary cities that are considered in the Republic and concludes that the dialogue ultimately critiques job specialization insofar as it prevents individuals from harmonizing their souls and hinders their ability to philosophize. (shrink)

In the past few years, two new DNA topoisomerases have been discovered in bacteria, bringing the total number of DNA topoisomerases in E. coli to four. Two classes of topoisomerases, type 1 and type 2, are distinguishable by their amino acid homology and their apparent reaction mechanism. Of the four E. coli topoisomerases, there are two type 1 and two type 2 enzymes. In eukaryotes, the existence of multiple type 1 and type 2 enzymes has also become apparent. The existence (...) of these multiple enzymes provokes a question whose answer has both evolutionary and physiological implications: are these topoisomerases functionally redundant, or have they acquired sufficient specialization that they now perform unique biological reactions? In bacteria, there is evidence for both specialization and redundancy in the functions of topoisomerases. (shrink)