Female puberty rites: reconsideration and speculation

By using the odd-numbered Murdock-White SCCS societies, Brown's three hypotheses on female puberty rites were tested. Only matrilocal/ambilocal residence was significantly associated with female puberty rites. But after an adjustment for data quality control, even this relationship became insignificant. Female physiology as symbolized by menstruation is suggested as a better predictor for female puberty rites.     

A biochemical analysis of people with chronic fatigue who have Irlen Syndrome: speculation concerning immune system dysfunction.

This study investigated the biological basis of visual processing disabilities in adults with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The study involved 61 adults with symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome who were screened for visual processing problems (Irlen Syndrome) and divided into two groups according to the severity of symptoms of Irlen Syndrome. Significant variations were identified in blood lipids and urine amino and organic acids of the two groups, which may be indicative of activation of the immune system due to some infective agent. It was suggested that metabolic profiling may help the development of more valid diagnostic categories and allow more investigation of immune system dysfunction as a possible causal factor in a range of learning and behaviour disorders.     

Interrupting speculation: The thinking of Heidegger and Greek tragedy

Despite his extended readings of parts of the Antigone of Sophocles, Heidegger nowhere explicitly sets about giving us a theory of tragedy or a detailed analysis of the essence of tragedy. The following paper seeks to piece together Heidegger's understanding of tragedy and tragic experience by looking to themes in his thinking – particularly his analyses of early Greek thinking – and connecting them both to his scattered references to tragedy and actual examples from Greek tragedy. What we find is that, for Heidegger, tragedy is an interruption of speculation, a refusal to philosophize, a way of showing how things are that resonates with the goal of Heidegger's own thinking.     

试论现代道教戒律建设的基本构想

道教戒律,是道教教制建设的重要内容,是加强道门自身建设和提升信仰境界的有效手段.     

Origins of knowledge.

Experiments with young infants provide evidence for early-developing capacities to represent physical objects and to reason about object motion. Early physical reasoning accords with 2 constraints at the center of mature physical conceptions: continuity and solidity. It fails to accord with 2 constraints that may be peripheral to mature conceptions: gravity and inertia. These experiments suggest that cognition develops concurrently with perception and action and that development leads to the enrichment of conceptions around an unchanging core. The experiments challenge claims that cognition develops on a foundation of perceptual or motor experience, that initial conceptions are inappropriate to the world, and that initial conceptions are abandoned or radically changed with the growth of knowledge.     

A theory of implicit and explicit knowledge

The implicit-explicit distinction is applied to knowledge representations. Knowledge is taken to be an attitude towards a proposition which is true. The proposition itself predicates a property to some entity. A number of ways in which knowledge can be implicit or explicit emerge. If a higher aspect is known explicitly then each lower one must also be known explicitly. This partial hierarchy reduces the number of ways in which knowledge can be explicit. In the most important type of implicit knowledge, representations merely reflect the property of objects or events without predicating them of any particular entity. The clearest cases of explicit knowledge of a fact are representations of one's own attitude of knowing that fact. These distinctions are discussed in their relationship to similar distinctions such as procedural-declarative, conscious-unconscious, verbalizable-nonverbalizable, direct-indirect tests, and automatic-voluntary control. This is followed by an outline of how these distinctions can be used to integrate and relate the often divergent uses of the implicit-explicit distinction in different research areas. We illustrate this for visual perception, memory, cognitive development, and artificial grammar learning.     

A metaphysics for practical knowledge

Is Anscombean practical knowledge independent of what the agent actually does on an occasion? Failure to understand Anscombe’s answer to this question is a major obstacle to appreciating the subtlety and plausibility of her view. I argue that Anscombe’s answer is negative, and turns on the nature of mistakes in performance, and reveals a distinctive implicit metaphysics of mind and knowledge, structured by related capacities and exercises of capacities. If my interpretation is correct, then practical knowledge shares features with knowledge-how and knowledge-that, but deserves its own epistemic category.     

A defense of middle knowledge

Conclusion Adams has not demonstrated that conditionals of freedom are necessarily false, just as I have not demonstrated that they are possibly true. According to Adams, we have good reason to think that they are not possibly true because we do not know what it is for them to be true. This is basically the claim that we cannot explain conditionals of freedom without reference to what would happen in certain situations. I argued that similar considerations apply to propositions about future free choices. We cannot explain propositions about future free choices without reference to what will happen. Neither conditionals of freedom nor propositions about future free choices are true in virtue of corresponding to actual states of affairs or any states of affairs that are necessitated by certain other states of affairs. In both instances we must appeal to states of affairs that are not determined to be actual by either the present states of affairs or the antecedent of the counterfactual. I do not consider this difficulty with propositions about future free choices to be a sufficient reason to reject the possibility of them being true. They are true because they correspond to what will happen. But then I also do not believe that Adams' reasons are sufficient to reject the possibility of true conditionals of freedom. They are true because they correspond with what would happen in certain counterfactual situations. Hence it is no more difficult to understand what it is for conditionals of freedom to be true than it is to understand what it is for propositions about future free choices to be true. I conclude that, contrary to Adams, it is possible for God to have middle knowledge.     

Forbidden knowledge. A case study with commentaries exploring ethical issues and genetic research

This case is part of a series of case studies used as an exercise within a program on research ethics education. The case involves research on genetic birth defects in a culturally distinct, closed religious community in which elders speak for the community. The case raises ethical issues of informed consent in such a setting; of collaboration with the community; of conflicts between the researchers' responsibilities to the community as a whole and to individual subjects; of the impact of the researcher's findings on the practices and values of the community and issues regarding how the researchers share findings with subjects and how the findings are stored.