The scapegoat — or the one that got away

The scapegoat is the focus of projections. It may be an individual or a group, an obvious misfit or a concealed one, a temporary phenomenon or a permanent lifestyle (adopted willingly or unwillingly). The scapegoat makes it possible for man to live at peace with God, himself or his society by acting as symbolic recipient of qualities which man is unwilling to recognise in himself. The scapegoater by his treatment tries to reduce the scapegoat into something not human; for this reason a scapegoat which shows only small divergences from the norm evokes particular hostility. The individual scapegoat in a small group may accept his role fairly happily, but group scapegoats find few compensations. A variety of defence mechanisms will be adopted in these circumstances, but generally mature adjustment is impossible. The scientific and artistic achievements of scapegoats in the past have helped to liberalise society and extend the range of our compassion. So perhaps a society without scapegoats would lose its capacity for moral growth.     

A multivariate projection‐type analogue of the Wilcoxon — Mann — Whitney test

The problem of comparing two independent groups based on mulitivariate data is considered. Many such methods have been proposed, but it is difficult to gain a perspective on the extent to which the groups differ. The basic strategy here is to determine a robust measure of location for each group, project the data onto the line connecting these measures of location, and then compare the groups based on the ordering of the projected points. In the univariate case the method uses the same measure of effect size employed by the Wilcoxon — Mann — Whitney test. Under general conditions, the projected points are dependent, causing difficulties when testing hypotheses. Two methods are found to be effective when trying to avoid Type I error probabilities above the nominal level. The relative merits of the two methods are discussed. The projected data provide not only a useful (numerical) measure of effect size, but also a graphical indication of the extent to which groups differ.     

To Be or Not: A Brief History of the Health Humanities Consortium

The Health Humanities Consortium (HHC) was established in 2015 to “promote health humanities scholarship, education, and practice through transdisciplinary methods and theories that focus on the intersection of the arts and humanities, health, illness, and healthcare.” As the founding co-chairs of the HHC, we provide a history of the founding of this organization in this article, describing the journey of its creation, the choices and challenges it faced as a new organization, and our hopes for a rich future.

     

What Malapropisms Mean: A Reply To Donald Davidson

In this paper, I argue against Davidson's (1986) view that our ability to understand malapropisms forces us to re-think the standard construal of literal word meaning as conventional meaning. Specially, I contend that the standard construal is not only intuitive but also well-motivated, for appeal to conventional meaning is necessary to understand why speakers utter the particular words they do. I also contend that, contra Davidson, we can preserve the intuitive distinction between what a speaker means and what his words mean, even while retaining the standard construal of literal word meaning as conventional.