Coming Out: Considering the Closet of Illness

This essay explores key concerns surrounding coming out as a person with illness and addresses important professional and social considerations for those who are closeted in various kinds of illness. Using central tenets of Queer Theory and Disability and Cultural Studies as a theoretical base, I examine the politics of coming out in the specific context of my lived experience during the 2002 NEH Summer Institute, Medicine, Literature, and Culture While such an environment might foster unusual candor about personal illness experience, I discovered that the choice to come out as a person with chronic, non-infectious disease (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) was nevertheless complicated in interesting ways.     

Indeterminiertheit,Iterabilität und Intentionalität

In his recent paper Indeterminacy, empiricism, and the first person John R. Searle tries to refute Willard V. O. Quine's famous indeterminacy of translation thesis by arguing that this thesis is in fact areductio ad absurdum of Quine's own linguistic behaviorism. Searle accuses Quine of being (irrationally) antimentalistic and suggests that the absurdity of Quine's thesis might be avoided if a full-fledged intentionality were tolerated in the debate on meaning. — This anti-Quinean approach in some respects reminds of the improbable debate between Searle and Jacques Derrida ten years ago, when Derrida had split and deferred intentionality by showing that the essential iterability of signs inevitably infects every intentional act with an unremovable non-presence.In this paper it is argued that Searle's attacks on Quine and Derrida have both failed — and that there are structural similarities between these two failures which reveal some interesting parallels between Quine's and Derrida's philosophy.     

Medical Intellectuals: Resisting Medical Orientalism

In this paper, we propose analogies between medical discourse and Edward Said's Orientalism. Medical discourse, like Orientalism, tends to favor institutional interests and can be similarly dehumanizing in its reductionism, textual representations, and construction of its subjects. To resist Orientalism, Said recommends that critics—intellectuals—adopt the perspective of exile. We apply Said's paradigm of intellectual-as-exile to better understand the work of key physician-authors who cross personal and professional boundaries, who engage with patients in mutually therapeutic relationships, and who take on the public responsibility of representation and advocacy. We call these physician-authors medical intellectuals and encourage others to follow in their path.     

Language in action

A number of general points behind the story of this paper may be worth setting out separately, now that we have come to the end.There is perhaps one obvious omission to be addressed right away. Although the word information has occurred throughout this paper, it must have struck the reader that we have had nothing to say on what information is. In this respect, our theories may be like those in physics: which do not explain what energy is (a notion which seems quite similar to information in several ways), but only give some basic laws about its behaviour and transmission.     

Between Science and Nature: Interpreting Lactation Failure in Elizabeth von Arnim's The Pastor's Wife

Interpreting a scene of lactation failure allows us to represent breast-feeding as a contested social practice. This essay reads a novelistic scene of lactation failure in the context of the decline of breast-feeding in the twentieth century. The protagonist's ignorance of the female experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation is an effect of her objectification within the opposition between science and nature. Unnatural as a woman because she is a natural individual, the pastor's wife exemplifies the dilemmas of breast-feeding as a biosocial practice of maternity in a technological society which features the breakdown of traditional female networks in which knowledge about maternity and breast-feeding are circulated.     

Emeralds are no chameleons — Why “Grue” is not projectible for induction

The model function for induction of Goodmans's composite predicate Grue was examined by analysis. Two subpredicates were found, each containing two further predicates which are mutually exclusive (green and blue, observed before and after t). The rules for the inductive processing of composite predicates were studied with the more familiar predicate blellow (blue and yellow) for violets and primroses. The following rules for induction were violated by processing grue: From two subpredicates only one (blue after t) appears in the conclusion. As a statement about a future and unobserved condition this subpredicate, however, is not projectible for induction whereas the only suitable predicate (green before t) does not show up in the conclusion. In a disjunction a v b where a is true and b false the disjunction is true. When, however, the only true component is dropped, what remains is necessarily false. An analogous mistake may be observed in the processing of grue, where the only true component (green) was dropped in the conclusion. — As a potent criterion for correct inductions a check of the necessity of the conclusions is recommended.The author is indebted to Prof. Curt Christian for valuable suggestions.     

Where “Sex” Is Born(e): Intersexed Births and the Social Urgency of Heterosexuality

Our beloved genders of the present moment are neither universal nor trans-historical presences in the world. The specific gender order which we employ today is the legacy of a particular cultural and political history, and there is still a great deal at stake in preserving it. As a graduate student I stumbled upon the topic of intersexuality a few years ago and found myself enthralled with its implications. Continuing to present itself inspite of all our scientific knowledge about the supposed immutability of female and male, intersexuality disrupts the gender order. The response to this disruption has been swift and terrible: from the intersexed infants who enter our world everyday are carved (literally and figuratively) supposedly normal boys and girls (mostly girls). The following exposition represents a pre-fieldwork (theoretical) stage in my current research and attempts to demonstrate that medical authorities manage intersex cases as they do in order to stabilize the always precarious institution of heterosexuality.     

Clinical interpretation: The hermeneutics of medicine

I argue that clinical medicine can best be understood not as a purified science but as a hermeneutical enterprise: that is, as involved with the interpretation of texts. The literary critic reading a novel, the judge asked to apply a law, must arrive at a coherent reading of their respective texts. Similarly, the physician interprets the text of the ill person: clinical signs and symptoms are read to ferret out their meaning, the underlying disease. However, I suggest that the hermeneutics of medicine is rendered uniquely complex by its wide variety of textual forms. I discuss four in turn: the experiential text of illness as lived out by the patient; the narrative text constituted during history-taking; the physical text of the patient's body as objectively examined; the instrumental text constructed by diagnostic technologies. I further suggest that certain flaws in modern medicine arise from its refusal of a hermeneutic self-understanding. In seeking to escape all interpretive subjectivity, medicine has threatened to expunge its primary subject — the living, experiencing patient.     

Prinzipielle Problemstellungen der Forschungspolitik

Research consists of choosing a problem, proposing and testing problem solutions, and presenting the results. In its central moment — conjectures and testing — science must be autonomous in order to be successful. Securing this autonomy by organizational means is one of the tasks of research policy. Research needs to justify itself only when the researcher makes a claim to the resources of others. To discuss problems of justification of governmental support, it is imperative to distinguish between basic and applied research. In basic research the problem choice is guided only by considerations of scientific interest, while in applied research the problems emanate from extra-scientific concerns since applied research is by definition a means for tackling concrete practical problems. Deciding on external criteria (e.g. deciding whether to support more energy research or more cancer research) is a genuine political problem rather than a problem of research policy. Thus applied research can be justified by referring to the benefit the expected results will yield, but basic research requires a completely different justification. One such justification is the argument that applied research requires a certain overhead in basic research. Securing an adequate balance between funding basic and applied research within the problem area concerned is another task of research policy. (E.g. in the area of cancer whether to support more molecular biology research or more clinical research.) When the overhead argument is not applicable, there still remain several possible justifications for basic research. These are examined in the paper. When setting priorities for basic research within a certain discipline, one apparently must turn to the scientific community itself. It may well be that the researches, who constitute the only expertise available for this task, have to rely on tacit knowledge. If so, this remains afaute de mieux procedure since articulated criteria would be preferable to intuitive procedures. The purpose of methodological reflection on research policy making is to supply intellectual instruments for making the discussion about substantive problems more rational. The substantive problems can be tackled only through the close cooperation of research policy makers and researchers. Thus methodology should not limit the degrees of freedom of either but increase them.     

Some basic problems in the development of the human sciences in China today

Paper read on November 3, 1988 before the Philosophical Society of Fribourg (Switzerland) — In China we use social sciences to refer to all disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. The expression is juxtaposed to natural sciences. Since I do not discuss such subjects as economics, education, journalism, and other practical fields, I prefer to use here the term human sciences.     

Depression and Anxiety in Persons with Parkinson's Disease With and Without “On–Off” Phenomena

On–off phenomena in Parkinson's disease (PD) are unpredictable motor fluctuations associated with long-term levodopa use. Mood fluctuations have been found to coincide with the motor fluctuations in that depression and anxiety increase while the person with PD is in the off state. What has been relatively unexplored is whether those persons with PD who have on–off phenomena differ psychologically in fundamental ways from those who do not have on–off phenomena. In the present study, depression and anxiety symptoms were assessed in 36 persons with PD (n = 14 with on–off phenomena, n = 22 without on–off phenomena). All those with on–off phenomena were assessed in their on state. Those persons with PD with on–off phenomena had significantly higher levels of anxiety than those without on–off phenomena. However, both groups, regardless of on–off status, were mildly depressed. Neurobiological interpretations of the results implicate the locus coeruleus in the pathogenesis of both on–off phenomena and anxiety, whereas psychological interpretations of the results involve the issues of learned helplessness and control over health symptoms in PD.     

Six-year-old children's understanding of sentences adjoined with time adverbs

The adjoining of clauses with temporal links is the basis for many sentences that convey sequence of events. The present study attempts to delineate 6-year-old children's (N=30) understanding of the meaning sequences imparted by sentences adjoined with after, before, and until. Their performance of the meaning sequence for each of 24 carefully constructed sentences is compared to an adult model. Analysis of the results (using a Wilcoxon Matched Pairs Signed Rank Test) indicated that: (1)Ss understood sentences adjoined with after according to an adult model more frequently than before adjoined sentences (P<0.01); (b) Until adjoined sentences with a negative marker in the main clause were understood according to an adult model more often than until adjoined sentences with no such negative element, but the difference was not significant at a=0.01; (3)Ss understood before adjoined sentences according to an adult model more often than until adjoined sentences, but the difference was not significant at a=0.01. In general, the results indicated that 6-year-olds have not yet completed development of an adult grammar with respect to adjoining clauses with temporal links, after, before, and until.     

Free construction of time from events

Conclusions and conjectures Some may be of the opinion that one event can begin before another only by virtue of the existence of some event (a witness) which wholly precedes the other and does not wholly precede the one (and similarly for ends before and does not abut). Those would prefer ₀ to as a model for observers' apprehensions of events. Since G is a functor from to ₀, the current construction (restricted to ₀) remains applicable.This work supports a claim that the psychologically fundamental temporal relationships are wholly precedes, begins before, ends before and abuts. But only in a very weak sense. Any other set of relationships which is interdefinable with this one, using only quantifier-free formulas in the definitions, could be used to define a category which is indistinguishable from (because the same functions preserve and reflect the new relationships). This work equally supports the claim that those relationships are the psychologically fundamental ones, or the claim that it is just wholly precedes which is fundamental, and that we perceive begins before just by virtue of witnesses. But it refutes the claim that only wholly precedes is fundamental, and that we understand begins before only because we understand time as a linear ordering.     

Natural Piety

William Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is a meditation on the possibilities and limitations of consciousness vis-à-vis the natural world. The child's glow of delighted fascination grays into adult worries, venalities, and fear of death. But the lingering embers of our childhood bond with nature can still guide and sustain us.     

The endorsement of irrational beliefs in a general clinical population

Burgess' Attitude and Belief Scale, a measure of Ellis' irrational beliefs, was administered to a large sample of outpatients. All 13 subscales demonstrate very adequate internal consistency. A factor analysis yielded one factor accounting for 83% of the variance, which was labeled irrationality. Clients endorsed focused items more than overgeneralized items, self-referential items more than non-self-referential items, and preferential items more than irrational items. Clients also received higher scores on the irrational process of demandingness than they did on the irrational process of awfulizing, self-worth and low frustration tolerance. The results were consistent with new formulations in Rational-Emotive theory. Suggestions were made for the construction of measures of irrational beliefs.