Les décisions politiques sur les risques environnementaux complexes font fréquemment intervenir des éléments scientifiques contestés. Il n’y a généralement pas de « faits » qui conduisent à une politique correcte unique. Les éléments de preuve qui sont intégrés dans les avis scientifiques destinés à une décision politique nécessitent une évaluation de leur qualité. En 2003, l’Agence néerlandaise d’évaluation environnementale a adopté une méthode standardisée, désignée sous le nom de « guide », dans le cadre de laquelle les principaux aspects de (...) la production et de l’utilisation des connaissances sont présentés grâce à une liste de contrôle visant à l’évaluation et à la communication des incertitudes. Dans cet article, nous présentons des résultats de l’application de ce guide à la controverse sur les risques des particules en suspension. La délibération active sur l’incertitude dans un contexte d’expertise entraîne un processus d’apprentissage commun entre les experts et les décideurs politiques, ce qui conduit à une meilleure prise de conscience du phénomène d’incertitude et de ses implications politiques.Policy decisions on complex environmental risks often involve disputed science. Typically, there are no “ facts” to support a single unequivocally correct policy. The evidence provided in scientific studies for policy-making decisions requires high-quality assessment. In 2003, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency adopted a standardized method, referred to as “guidelines”, whereby key quality aspects of knowledge production and use are presented in the form of a checklist for uncertainty assessments and communication. In this article, we present the outcomes of applying the guidelines in controversies on the risks of ambient particulate matter. In the policy–advisory context, active deliberation on uncertainty produces a common learning process for advisors and policy makers, which leads to a deeper understanding and increased awareness of the phenomenon of uncertainty and its policy implications. (shrink)

We apply an online optimization process based on machine learning to the production of Bose-Einstein condensates. BEC is typically created with an exponential evaporation ramp that is optimal for ergodic dynamics with two-body s-wave interactions and no other loss rates, but likely sub-optimal for real experiments. Through repeated machine-controlled scientific experimentation and observations our ’learner’ discovers an optimal evaporation ramp for BEC production. In contrast to previous work, our learner uses a Gaussian process to develop a statistical model of the (...) relationship between the parameters it controls and the quality of the BEC produced. We demonstrate that the Gaussian process machine learner is able to discover a ramp that produces high quality BECs in 10 times fewer iterations than a previously used online optimization technique. Furthermore, we show the internal model developed can be used to determine which parameters are essential in BEC creation and which are unimportant, providing insight into the optimization process of the system. (shrink)

On the text and translation of the De mysteriis -- Iamblichus the man -- The De mysteriis : a defence of theurgy, and an answer to Porphyry's letter to Anebo -- Iamblichus's knowledge of Egyptian religion and mythology -- The nature and contents of De mysteriis -- Iamblichus, De mysteriis : text and translation.

The power of the application of bioinformatics across multiple publicly available transcriptomic data sets was explored. Using 19 human and mouse circadian transcriptomic data sets, we found that NR1D1 and NR1D2 which encode heme‐responsive nuclear receptors are the most rhythmic transcripts across sleep conditions and tissues suggesting that they are at the core of circadian rhythm generation. Analyzes of human transcriptomic data show that a core set of transcripts related to processes including immune function, glucocorticoid signalling, and lipid metabolism is (...) rhythmically expressed independently of the sleep‐wake cycle. We also identify key transcripts associated with transcription and translation that are disrupted by sleep manipulations, and through network analysis identify putative mechanisms underlying the adverse health outcomes associated with sleep disruption, such as diabetes and cancer. Comparative bioinformatics applied to existing and future data sets will be a powerful tool for the identification of core circadian‐ and sleep‐dependent molecules. (shrink)

About a decade ago, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency unwittingly embarked on a transition from a technocratic model of science advising to the paradigm of ‘‘post-normal science’’. In response to a scandal around uncertainty management in 1999, a Guidance for ‘‘Uncertainty Assessment and Communication’’ was developed with advice from the initiators of the PNS concept and was introduced in 2003. This was followed in 2007 by a ‘‘Stakeholder Participation’’ Guidance. In this article, the authors provide a combined insider/outsider perspective on (...) the transition process. The authors assess the extent to which the PNS paradigm has delivered new approaches in the agency’s practice and analyze two projects—on long-term options for Dutch sustainable development policy and for urban development policy—the latter in somewhat more detail. The authors identify several paradoxes PBL encounters when putting the PNS concept into practice. It is concluded that an openness to other styles of work than the technocratic model has become visible, but that the introduction of the PNS paradigm is still in its early stage. (shrink)

What do we mean by theory in the arts, and what role does it play in that sense? Theory appears as an active, transformative, fluid, and communicative element of art practices, and research in the arts in particular. Theory is the fluid that perfuses and connects the territory of fine art and design, as well as other art forms such as music, architecture, writing, moving images, dance, and theatre. At the heart of this publication is the new field of research (...) in theory and the way the ArtEZ Theory in the Arts research group investigates its possibilities and extends its boundaries. Editor Peter Sonderen currently chairs the professorship Theory in the Arts at ArtEZ University of the Arts. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that the understanding one has of a proposition or a propositional content of a representational vehicle is a species of what contemporary epistemologists characterise as objectual understanding. Second, we demonstrate that even though this type of understanding differs from linguistic understanding, in many instances of successful communication, these two types of understanding jointly contribute to understanding a communicated thought.

Semantic theories that violate semantic innocence, that is require reference shifts when terms are embedded in ‘that’ clauses and the like, are often challenged by producing sentences where an anaphoric expression, while not itself embedded in a context in which reference shifts, is anaphoric on an antecedent expression that is embedded in such a context. This, in conjunction with a widely accepted principle concerning unproblematic anaphora (the ‘Principle of Anaphoric Reference’), is used to show that such reference shifting has absurd (...) consequences. We show that it is the widely accepted principle concerning anaphora that is to be blamed for these consequences and not the supposed sin of reference shifting. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to describe the experiences of undergoing a presymptomatic genetic test for the hereditary and fatal Huntington’s disease, using a case study approach. The study was based on 18 interviews with a young woman and her husband from the decision to undergo the test, to receiving the results and trying to adapt to them, which were analysed using a life history approach. The findings show that the process of undergoing a presymptomatic test involves several closely (...) connected ethical and medical questions, such as the reason for the test, the consequences of the test results and how health-care services can be developed to support people in this situation. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a teleological account of epistemic reasons. In recent years, the main challenge for any such account has been to explicate a sense in which epistemic reasons depend on the value of epistemic properties. I argue that while epistemic reasons do not directly depend on the value of epistemic properties, they depend on a different class of reasons which are value based in a direct sense, namely reasons to form beliefs about certain propositions or subject matters. (...) In short, S has an epistemic reason to believe that p if and only if S is such that if S has reason to form a belief about p, then S ought to believe that p. I then propose a teleological explanation of this relationship. It is also shown how the proposal can avoid various subsidiary objections commonly thought to riddle the teleological account. (shrink)

Discovering the underlying mathematical expressions describing a dataset is a core challenge for artificial intelligence. This is the problem of symbolic regression. Despite recent advances in training neural networks to solve complex tasks, deep learning approaches to symbolic regression are underexplored. We propose a framework that leverages deep learning for symbolic regression via a simple idea: use a large model to search the space of small models. Specifically, we use a recurrent neural network to emit a distribution over tractable mathematical (...) expressions and employ a novel risk-seeking policy gradient to train the network to generate better-fitting expressions. Our algorithm outperforms several baseline methods (including Eureqa, the gold standard for symbolic regression) in its ability to exactly recover symbolic expressions on a series of benchmark problems, both with and without added noise. More broadly, our contributions include a framework that can be applied to optimize hierarchical, variable-length objects under a blackbox performance metric, with the ability to incorporate constraints in situ, and a risk-seeking policy gradient formulation that optimizes for best-case performance instead of expected performance. (shrink)

Book Information Ethics and Sex. By Igor Primoratz. Routledge. London/New York. 1999. Pp. xi + 205. Paperback, 14.99.

This book offers a multidisciplinary collection of historiographical case studies which in various ways explore the question of the modes of interrelation between 'change' and 'continuity' in historical narratives in Western cultural history."--Introduction, p. [1].

Genomic research results and incidental findings with health implications for a research participant are of potential interest not only to the participant, but also to the participant's family. Yet investigators lack guidance on return of results to relatives, including after the participant's death. In this paper, a national working group offers consensus analysis and recommendations, including an ethical framework to guide investigators in managing this challenging issue, before and after the participant's death.

Returning genomic research results to family members raises complex questions. Genomic research on life-limiting conditions such as cancer, and research involving storage and reanalysis of data and specimens long into the future, makes these questions pressing. This author group, funded by an NIH grant, published consensus recommendations presenting a framework. This follow-up paper offers concrete guidance and tools for implementation. The group collected and analyzed relevant documents and guidance, including tools from the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium. The authors then (...) negotiated a consensus toolkit of processes and documents. That toolkit offers sample consent and notification documents plus decision flow-charts to address return of results to family of living and deceased participants, in adult and pediatric research. Core concerns are eliciting participant preferences on sharing results with family and on choice of a representative to make decisions about sharing after participant death. (shrink)

PURPOSE: To evaluate the effects of social support on comprehension and recall of consent form information in a study of Parkinson disease patients and their caregivers.DESIGN and METHODS: Comparison of comprehension and recall outcomes among participants who read and signed the consent form accompanied by a family member/friend versus those of participants who read and signed the consent form unaccompanied. Comprehension and recall of consent form information were measured at one week and one month respectively, using Part A of the (...) Quality of Informed Consent Questionnaire .RESULTS: The mean age of the sample of 143 participants was 71 years . Analysis of covariance was used to compare QuIC scores between the intervention group and control group . In the 1-week model, no statistically significant intervention effect was found . However, the intervention status by patient status interaction was statistically significant . In the 1-month model, no statistically significant intervention effect was found . Again, however, the intervention status by patient status interaction was statistically significant . At both time periods, intervention group patients scored higher on the QuIC than did intervention group caregivers, and control group patients scored lower on the QuIC than did control group caregivers.IMPLICATIONS: Social support played a significant role in enhancing comprehension and recall of consent form information among patients. (shrink)

Does transparency in doxastic deliberation entail a constitutive norm of correctness governing belief, as Shah and Velleman argue? No, because this presupposes an implausibly strong relation between normative judgements and motivation from such judgements, ignores our interest in truth, and cannot explain why we pay different attention to how much justification we have for our beliefs in different contexts. An alternative account of transparency is available: transparency can be explained by the aim one necessarily adopts in deliberating about whether to (...) believe that p. To show this, I reconsider the role of the concept of belief in doxastic deliberation, and I defuse 'the teleologian's dilemma'. (shrink)

The theory of belief, according to which believing that p essentially involves having as an aim or purpose to believe that p truly, has recently been criticised on the grounds that the putative aim of belief does not interact with the wider aims of believers in the ways we should expect of genuine aims. I argue that this objection to the aim theory fails. When we consider a wider range of deliberative contexts concerning beliefs, it becomes obvious that the aim (...) of belief can interact with and be weighed against the wider aims of agents in the ways required for it to be a genuine aim. (shrink)

Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss argue that any truth norm for belief, linking the correctness of believing p with the truth of p, is bound to be uninformative, since applying the norm to determine the correctness of a belief as to whether p, would itself require forming such a belief. I argue that this conflates the condition under which the norm deems beliefs correct, with the psychological state an agent must be in to apply the norm. I also show that (...) since the truth norm conflicts with other possible norms that clearly are informative, the truth norm must itself be informative. (shrink)

BackgroundJunior medical doctors have a key role in discussions and decisions about treatment and end-of-life care for people with dementia in hospital. Little is known about junior doctors’ decision-making processes when treating people with dementia who have advance care directives, or the factors that influence their decisions. To describe among junior doctors in relation to two hypothetical vignettes involving patients with dementia: their legal compliance and decision-making process related to treatment decisions; the factors influencing their clinical decision-making; and the factors (...) associated with accurate responses to one hypothetical vignette. MethodA cross-sectional survey of junior doctors, including trainees, interns, registrars and residents, on clinical rotation in five public hospitals located in one Australian state. The anonymous, investigator-developed survey was conducted between August 2018 and June 2019. Two hypothetical vignettes describing patients with dementia presenting to hospital with an ACD and either: bacterial pneumonia; or suspected stroke were presented in the survey. Participants were asked to indicate whether they would commence treatment, given the ACD instructions described in each vignette.ResultsOverall, 116 junior doctors responded. In Vignette 1, 58% of respondents selected the legally compliant option. Participants who chose the legally compliant option perceived ‘following patient wishes’ and ‘legal requirements to follow ACDs’ as equally important reasons for complying with the ACD. The most common reason for not selecting the legally compliant option in Vignette 1 was the ‘ACD is relevant in my decision-making process, but other factors are more relevant’. In Vignette 2, 72% of respondents indicated they would commence treatment and 18% selected they would not commence treatment.. Similar reasons influenced participant decision-making in Vignette 2, a less legally certain scenario.ConclusionsThere are critical gaps in junior doctors’ compliance with the law as it relates to the implementation of ACDs. Despite there being differences in relation to the legal answer and its certainty, clinical and ethical factors guided decision-making over and above the law in both vignettes. More education and training to guide junior doctors’ clinical decision-making and ensure compliance with the law is required. (shrink)

Objective: Ethical guidelines are designed to ensure benefits, protection and respect of participants in clinical research. Clinical trials must now be registered on open-access databases and provide details on ethical considerations. This systematic survey aimed to determine the extent to which recently registered clinical trials report the use of standard of care and post-trial obligations in trial registries, and whether trial characteristics vary according to setting. Methods: We selected global randomized trials registered on http://www.clinicaltrials.gov and http://www.controlled-trials.com. We searched for intervention (...) trials of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis from 9 October 2004, the date of the most recent version of the Helsinki Declaration, to 10 April 2007. Results: We collected data from 312 trials. Fifty-eight percent (58%, 95% CI = 53 to 64) of trial protocols report informed consent. Fifty-eight percent (58%, 95% CI = 53 to 64) of trials report active controls. Almost no trials (1%, 95% CI = 0.5 to 3) mention post-trial provisions. Most trials measure surrogate outcomes. Twenty percent (20%, 95% CI = 16 to 25) of trials measure patient-important outcomes, such as death; and the odds that these outcomes are in a low income country are five times greater than for a developed country (odds ratio (OR) 5.03, 95% CI = 2.70 to 9.35, p = < 0.001). Pharmaceutical companies are involved in 28% (CI = 23 to 33) of trials and measure surrogate outcomes more often than nonpharmaceutical companies (OR 2.45, 95% CI = 1.18 to 5.09, p = 0.31). Conclusion: We found a large discrepancy in the quality of reporting and approaches used in trials in developing settings compared to wealthier settings. (shrink)

It is often held that a correct semantic theory should assign a semantic content, p, to a given sentence, s, just in case a speaker who utters s says that p – thus ‘what is said’ is taken to be a semantically significant notion. This paper explores what exactly such a claim amounts to and offers five versions of the relationship between a semantic theory and judgements of what is said. The first three of these versions embody the central claim (...) of semantic significance; however, I argue that none of these versions are feasible. Thus, contrary to the initial proposal, I claim that ‘what is said’ is not a semantically significant notion. Assignments of semantic content do not turn on evaluations of what a speaker uttering a sentence says. (shrink)

There is a sense in which it is trivial to say that one accepts intention- (or convention-) based semantics.[2] For if what is meant by this claim is simply that there is an important respect in which words and sentences have meaning (either at all or the particular meanings that they have in any given natural language) due to the fact that they are used, in the way they are, by intentional agents (i.e. speakers), then it seems no one should (...) disagree. For imagine a possible world where there are physical things which share the shape and form of words of English or Japanese, or the acoustic properties of sentences of Finnish or Arapaho, yet where there are no intentional agents (or where any remaining intentional agents don’t use language). In such a world, it seems clear that these physical objects, which are only superficially language-like, will lack all meaning. Furthermore, it seems that questions of particular meaning are also settled by the conventions of intentional language users: it’s nothing more than convention which makes the concatenation of letters ‘a’^‘p’^‘p’^‘l’^‘e’ mean apple, rather than banana, in English.[3] So, understood as the minimal claim that intentional agents, who have a practice of using certain physical objects (written words, sounds, hand gestures, etc) to communicate certain thoughts, are a prerequisite for linguistic meaning, the idea that semantics is based on both intention and convention seems indisputable. I will label a theory which recognises this preconditional role for speaker intentions an A-style intention-based semantics and we will explore one such account in §1. (shrink)

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 234. H/b £?.??, $?.??, P/b £?.??, $?.??. If asked for an example of a rigid designator it is likely that one would suggest a name, like ‘Aristotle’ or ‘Tony Blair’, or a demonstrative, like ‘that book’ said whilst pointing at a certain text. Intuitively, what these expressions have in common is the central role they accord to perception of an object: you can see the book you want to talk about, there are (...) people around in our community who have bumped into Tony, and, although no one alive today perceived Aristotle directly, it seems plausible to claim that our ability to use the name now relies on the fact that someone, sometime, did perceive him directly. However, as anyone at all familiar with rigid designation knows, not all such expressions follow this model. Kripke himself stressed that certain definite descriptions have a constant extension across all possible worlds (for example, ‘the smallest prime number’, ‘the actual prime minister of Great Britain now’) and thus meet the criterion for being rigid designators; while Kaplan emphasized the role of a descriptive rule in determining the referent for a token utterance of an indexical, like ‘I’ or ‘tomorrow’. (shrink)

We conceptualise a framework that incorporates psychological and non-psychological factors influencing pro-environmental behaviour. We conducted qualitative investigations in five sectors in South Africa, where individuals and groups are dealing with significant environmental issues, including climate change, biodiversity loss and land-use change. We found three fundamental elements necessary for behavioural change to be realised: awareness (A) is defined as an understanding that society and earth systems are connected; motivation (M) involves the personal and operational drivers that encourage an individual or organisation (...) to respond to new levels of awareness; and pathways (P) recognise the practical solutions and opportunities that facilitate actual change. AMP was built up from thirty-eight variables that cut across between three and five of the case studies, which were further grouped into fourteen categories. The inter-connectedness of AMP suggests that for pro-environmental behaviour to occur, attention cannot be focused on satisfying one of the elements in isolation. This is the first attempt to integrate theory from social psychology, sociology, organisational theory and management in a conceptual framework for pro-environmental behaviour. The AMP framework is useful for supporting practitioners or change-agents designing environmental sustainability initiatives. (shrink)

The article examines the role of narrative discourse in religious education and communication as represented in Kirsten M. Andersen’s Kantian approach. In Hegel’s Lutheran perspective figurative thinking is deconstructed in forms of interpretive narrative, the topos of the speculative Good Friday. On this account the words of Jesus should be understood as an unprecedented revolutionary parrhesia. Hegel’s pervasive awareness of the linguistic mediation, translation and appropriation anticipates the role of language and communication in hermeneutics and deconstruction. The proposed alternative to (...) the Kantian account is inspired by Paul Ricoeur, Günter Bader, Niklas Luhmann, Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou. (shrink)

According to the widely endorsed Knowledge Account of Assertion, the epistemic requirements on assertion are captured by the Knowledge Norm of Assertion, which requires speakers only to assert what they know. This paper proposes that in addition to the Knowledge Norm there is also an Epistemic Propositional Certainty Norm of Assertion, which enjoins speakers only to assert p if they believe that p on the basis of evidence which makes p an epistemic propositional certainty. The paper explains how this propositional (...) certainty norm accounts for a range of data related to the practice of assertion and defends the norm against general objections to certainty norms of assertion put forward by Duncan Pritchard, John Turri, and Timothy Williamson, by drawing on linguistic theories about epistemic modals and gradable predicate semantics. Together these considerations show that the prospects of a certainty account of assertion are much more promising than is usually assumed. (shrink)