The case of Debbie revisited: A literary perspective

The publication in theJournal of the American Medical Association of a narrative entitled “It's Over, Debbie,” in which a gynecology resident apparently performs euthanasia, has stirred considerable debate characterized by varying interpretations not only of the ethical issues involved but of the meaning of the text itself. Formal analysis reveals the narrative to be strikingly literary in its ambiguity, its foregrounding of its own textuality, and its dominant structure of repetition and reversal. The analysis points to features that account for some of the varying interpretations in the debate, and it calls into question the relation of the text to whatever events it may represent and to how the resident may have perceived these events.     

The vanishing argument from queerness1

The ‘argument from queerness’, made famous by J. L. Mackie, remains one of the most influential arguments in metaethics. However, many philosophers focus on just one or two of its strands, while others assume a particular but by no means universal reading of it. This essay attempts to disentangle and evaluate all strands of the argument. Surprisingly, when this is done, not much is left as a distinct argument from queerness. Much of the argument collapses into other types of argument, and what is left, though intuitively appealing, is not viable as philosophical argument.     

The equalitarian dogma revisited

Henry Garrett (1961), a president of the American Psychological Association, claimed that “the equalitarian dogma,” the belief that Blacks and Whites are genetically equal in cognitive ability, was the “scientific hoax of the century.” Since then, the dogma has become more ingrained, despite increased contrary evidence. The dogma has been perpetuated by intimidation as well as by pious thinking. Its long endurance is a scandal of great proportion and illuminates how science works, and sometimes does not. I discuss (a) current international data on race differences; (b) their genetic and evolutionary origins; (c) political fallout from my presentations; (d) corruption of scholarship that has occurred, illustrated partly by the example of Cyril Burt; and (e) what should be done to improve matters.     

The ontomystical argument revisited

I argue that Alexander Pruss’s ontomystical arguments should not be endorsed without further argumentative support of their premises. My specific targets are his claims that (i) Śamkara’s principle is true and (ii) the high mystics had phenomenal experiences of radical dependence and as of a maximally great being. Against (i), I urge a host of counterexamples. The only ways I can see for Pruss to respond to these counterexamples end up falsifying (ii). The key problem which leads to this conclusion is that Pruss needs a criterion for distinguishing phenomenal experiences from non-phenomenal experiences according to which the experiences of the high mystics were phenomenal experiences while the experiences of those persons I discuss in my counterexamples to Śamkara’s principle are not. There appears to be no such criterion. I suggest that the future of the ontomystical arguments lies in developing them as inductive rather than deductive arguments.     

The narcissism-overclaiming link revisited

The present research investigated how different dimensions of narcissism (i.e., assertive, antagonistic, and vulnerable) and content-specific forms of assertive narcissism (i.e., intellectual ability, physical attractiveness, social dominance) are related to overclaiming bias (i.e., the tendency to illegitimately claim knowledge). In the data from a large-scale online study (N = 1,658), the associations between overclaiming bias and any kind of narcissism were smaller than in many previous studies. Furthermore, assertive narcissism was more positively related to overclaiming bias than antagonistic and vulnerable narcissism were. Intellectual-ability-specific and social-dominance-specific assertive narcissism were more positively related to overclaiming bias than physical-attractiveness-specific assertive narcissism was. Finally, multiple regression analyses suggested that the narcissism-overclaiming link is most robust for social-dominance-specific assertive narcissism.     

The Peierls-Nabarro model revisited

We re-examine two important issues within the Peierls-Nabarro model, which are critical in obtaining accurate values for the Peierls stress. The first is related to the sampling scheme (double versus single counting) of the misfit energy across the glide plane and the second is the effect of atomic relaxation on the Peierls stress. We argue that the double-counting scheme is physically more appropriate. An analytical formula is derived for the Peierls stress of dislocations in alternating lattices. The atomic relaxation is shown to play an important role on the Peierls stress for narrow dislocations.     

The measurement problem revisited

Synthese - It has been realized that the measurement problem of quantum mechanics is essentially the determinate-experience problem, and in order to solve the problem, the physical state...     

The cutaneous rabbit revisited

In the cutaneous rabbit effect (CRE), a tactile event (so-called attractee tap) is mislocalized toward an adjacent attractor tap. The effect depends on the time interval between the taps. The authors delivered sequences of taps to the forearm and asked participants to report the location of one of the taps. The authors replicated the original CRE findings and observed a smaller but significant mislocalization when the attractor tap preceded the attractee tap. These results are consistent with the CRE arising from spatiotemporal interactions between the sensory codes for each individual tap. In subsequent experiments, the authors showed that the CRE was not affected by either gaze direction or concurrent auditory temporal information. The authors propose a model that explains the CRE by the spatiotemporal dynamics of an early, unimodal, sensory map.