Recipes for Theory Making

This is a paper about philosophical inquiry and cooking. In it, I suggest that thinking about cooking can illuminate our understanding of other forms of inquiry. Specifically, I think it provides us with one way to circumvent the dilemma of absolutism and relativism. The paper is divided into two sections. In the first, I sketch the background against which my project is situated. In the second, I develop an account of cooking as inquiry, by exploring five aspects of recipe creation and use.     

Pursuing Medicina [Medicine]: Latina Physicians and Parental Messages on Gendered Career Choices

Sex Roles - Prior research underscores that college-educated Latinas are hyper-segregated into highly feminized occupations and that Latino parents socialize their daughters to seek out these...     

Healing Without Waging War: Beyond Military Metaphors in Medicine and HIV Cure Research

Military metaphors are pervasive in biomedicine, including HIV research. Rooted in the mind set that regards pathogens as enemies to be defeated, terms such as “shock and kill” have become widely accepted idioms within HIV cure research. Such language and symbolism must be critically examined as they may be especially problematic when used to express scientific ideas within emerging health-related fields. In this article, philosophical analysis and an interdisciplinary literature review utilizing key texts from sociology, anthropology, history, and Chinese and African studies were conducted to investigate the current proliferation of military metaphors. We found the use of these metaphors to be ironic, unfortunate, and unnecessary. To overcome military metaphors we propose to (1) give them less aggressive meanings, and/or (2) replace them with more peaceful metaphors. Building on previous authors' work, we argue for the increased use of “journey” (and related) metaphors as meaningful, cross-culturally appropriate alternatives to military metaphors.     

Striving for God's Attention: Gendered Spaces and Piety

This article looks at the inadequacy of space available to women in the two most holy sites for all Muslims: Masjid al‐Haram in Makkah and Masjid an‐Nabawi in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. I argue that religious discourse, shaped by geopolitical factors, has framed piety for women primarily in terms of modesty, such that a woman is often considered a good Muslim if she is visible only within her female community but invisible to the larger society. Furthermore, I argue that the allocation of meager space affects not only the perception of women's religious standing in society, but also women's own perception about their moral selves. The article claims that by being relegated to small sections within religious spaces, women's collective worship is evident neither to the community at large nor can it be fully experienced by individual women, thus placing obstacles in women's path to seek to closeness to God.     

Metaphors for retirement: Unshackled from schedules

This study uses metaphor analysis to examine the meanings of retirement for a group of 35 retired Canadian executives and managers. Our analysis identified eight metaphors relating to the meanings of retirement. The findings provide us with a range of insights into the experience of retirement, from loss of purpose and identity to liberation from the constraints of work to retirement being constructed as a new beginning or renaissance. Based on the accounts given by each manager, metaphors were collated and compared across retirees to reveal four distinct configurations that conceptualize retirement as exploring new horizons, searching for meaning, contributing on your own terms and putting your feet up. We discuss the implications of these metaphor configurations for understanding the consumer and producer-oriented meanings of retirement and challenge dominant career constructions of retirement as disengagement and decline. Our findings reveal that retirement appears to be better understood by incorporating future-focused and agentic forms that contribute to different types of identity work in retirement.     

Editorial: Animal Metaphors

Social dominance theory (SDT) suggests that prejudice legitimizes and maintains the existing social hierarchy. Consistent with an SDT explanation, it was predicted that (a) perceptions of threat to the existing social hierarchy and (b) social dominance orientation (SDO) would be related to stronger beliefs in stereotypes and "legitimizing myths." In addition, this analysis tests SDT's predicted interaction between perceptions of threat and SDO. It was predicted that for high SDO individuals the relation between perceptions of intergroup threat and the endorsement of legitimizing myths would be stronger than for low SDO individuals. These predictions were examined using a national probability General Social Survey archival data set. The results were consistent with our predictions and suggest that social dominance theory compliments and augments other threat theories of prejudice.     

The Prospect of Genome-guided Preventive Medicine: A Need and Opportunity for Genetic Counselors

One of the major anticipated benefits of genomic medicine is the area of preventive medicine. Commercially available genomic profiling is now able to generate risk information for a number of common conditions several of which have recognized preventive guidelines. Similarly, family history assessment affords powerful health risk prediction based on the shared genetic, physical and lifestyle environments within families. Thus, with the ability to help predict disease risk and enable preemptive health plans, genome-guided preventive medicine has the potential to improve population health on an individualized level. To realize this potential, steps to broaden access to accurate genomic health information must be considered. With expertise in genetic science, risk assessment and communication, and a patient-centered practice approach, genetic counselors are poised to play a critical role in facilitating the incorporation of genomic health risks into the burgeoning field of genome-guided preventive medicine.     

Metaphors for the Mobile Internet

This paper examines a set of metaphors for describing, understanding and characterising the Mobile Internet. The metaphors are a result of extensive user studies in the US, Hong Kong and Europe in the late 2006 and early 2007. In these studies, we explored the user experience related to the Mobile Internet through in-depth contextual interviews with over 40 users, including a group in the US, which was deprived of their standard Internet PC access for several days. Our analysis of the collected data resulted in six metaphors that can be used as powerful creative tools in designing Mobile Internet applications.     

Changing Metaphors of the Self: Implications for Counseling

This article reviews some of the more prevalent metaphors used to describe the nature and character of the self. These metaphors include the unified and integrated selves as well as the postmodern perspectives of multiple selves. The authors contend that counselors have theories about the self whether implicit or explicit, and that these theories directly influence their practice. They further contend that it is beneficial for counselors and other helping professionals to take the time to clarify their beliefs and assumptions about the self and that metaphors are useful conceptual tools. Various ethical questions associated with different metaphors of the self are posed.     

Alternative Recipes for Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Five World Regions

In most cross-national research on Life Satisfaction (LS) an implicit assumption appears to be that the correlates of LS are the same the world over; ‘one size fits all’. Using data from the World Values Survey (1999–2014), we question this assumption by assessing the effects of differing personal values/life priorities on LS in five world regions: the West, Latin America, the Asian-Confucian region, ex-Communist Eastern Europe, and the Communist countries of China and Vietnam. We indicate that differing values - traditional family values, friendship and leisure values, materialistic values, political values, prosocial and environmental values, and religious values – are endorsed to varying degrees in different parts of the world, and vary in whether they have positive or negative effects on LS. Personal values provide the basis for alternative ‘recipes’ affecting LS. By ‘recipes’ we mean linked set of values, attitudes, behavioural choices and domain satisfactions that have a positive or negative effect on LS. We estimate structural equation models which indicate that differing values-based recipes help to account for large, unexpected differences between mean levels of LS in the five world regions, compared with the levels ‘predicted’ by GDP per capita. In particular, the high priority given to traditional family and religious recipes in Latin America helps to account for unexpectedly high LS in that region. Deficits in prosocial attitudes and behaviours partly account for low LS in ex-Communist Eastern Europe.

     

Metaphors and models of doctor-patient relationships: Their implications for autonomy

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

Gendered Reason: Sex Metaphor and Conceptions of Reason

Reason has regularly been portrayed and understood in terms of images and metaphors that involve the exclusion or denigration of some element—body, passion, nature, instinct—that is cast as “feminine.” Drawing upon philosophical insight into metaphor, I examine the impact of this gendering of reason. I argue that our conceptions of mind, reason, unreason, female, and male have been distorted. The politics of “rational” discourse has been set up in ways that still subtly but powerfully inhibit the voice and agency of women.     

Women and Weight: Gendered Messages on Magazine Covers

In this content analysis, the covers of 21popular women's and men's magazines were examined forgendered messages related to bodily appearance. Magazinecovers were divided according to gender of readers and each cover was reviewed using a checklistdesigned to analyze visual images and text as well asthe placement of each on the covers. Analyses showedthat 78% of the covers of the women's magazinescontained a message regarding bodily appearance, whereasnone of the covers of the men's magazines did so.Twenty-five percent of the women's magazine coverscontained conflicting messages regarding weightloss and dietary habits.In addition, the positioning ofweight-related messages on the covers often implied thatlosing weight may lead to a better life. Men's magazinesfocus on providing entertainment and expanding knowledge, hobbies, and activities; women'smagazines continue to focus on improving one's life bychanging one's appearance.     

Pain and its Metaphors: A Dialogical Approach

Most health professionals are unaware of the extent to which aspects of language, such as metaphor, influence their practice. Sensitivity to metaphor can deepen our understanding of healthcare and, arguably, improve its quality. This is because metaphors, and the linguisticality of which they are a part, shape medical practice in important ways. Examples are the metaphors used in pain management. By exploring the dialogical tension between such metaphors, we can better understand the ways in which they influence medical practice.     

Cancer Metaphors: Taiwan and the United States

The Cancer Metaphors Test, a measure of the imagery of cancer, was administered to a sample of 138 Taiwanese college students and 167 United States college students, equated on age and gender, and presumed not to be different on academic achievement and socioeconomic level. A factor analysis of the Taiwanese protocols replicated the factor structure previously found on the CMT for United States respondents. Significant differences were obtained on two of the four CMT factors, with Taiwanese students scoring higher on both Terminal Pessimism and Future Optimism. Such differences are discussed in terms of differential coping strategies.     

The Personality of Vegetables: Botanical Metaphors for Human Characteristics

ABSTRACT A dictionary search indicated that fruit and vegetable metaphors for human characteristics were relatively infrequent When used, they were more likely to describe physical than personality attributes, often with euphemistic overtones, and fruit metaphors reflected more favorable characteristics than did vegetable metaphors These findings were confirmed in a semantic analysis of fruit, vegetable, and animal terms