Property rights, genes, and common good

This paper applies aspects of Hugo Grotius's theologically informed theory of property to contemporary issues concerning access to the human DNA sequence and patenting practices. It argues that Christians who contribute to public debate in these areas might beneficially employ some of the concepts with which he worked--notably "common right," the "right of necessity," and "use right." In the seventeenth century, wars were fought over trading rights and access to the sea. In the twenty-first century, information and intellectual property are the issues of the day. Grotius's writings serve to correct the overemphasis in modern liberalism on individual rights, and have practical application to the debate concerning the reduction of the human genome to the status of private property.     

The distinction between positive and negative reinforcement: use with care

It is customary in behavior analysis to distinguish between positive and negative reinforcement in terms of whether the reinforcing event involves onset or offset of a stimulus. In a previous article (Baron & Galizio, 2005), we concluded that a distinction of these terms is not only ambiguous but has little if any functional significance. Here, we respond to commentaries by a group of distinguished behavior analysts about the issues we raised. Although several of the commentators argued for preservation of the distinction, we remain unconvinced that its benefits outweigh its weaknesses. Because this distinction is so deeply embedded in the language of behavior analysis, we hardly expect that it will be abandoned. However, we hope that the terms positive and negative reinforcement will be used with circumspection and with full knowledge of the confusion they can engender.     

Turning configural processing upside down: part and whole body postures

Like faces, body postures are susceptible to an inversion effect in untrained viewers. The inversion effect may be indicative of configural processing, but what kind of configural processing is used for the recognition of body postures must be specified. The information available in the body stimulus was manipulated. The presence and magnitude of inversion effects were compared for body parts, scrambled bodies, and body halves relative to whole bodies and to corresponding conditions for faces and houses. Results suggest that configural body posture recognition relies on the structural hierarchy of body parts, not the parts themselves or a complete template match. Configural recognition of body postures based on information about the structural hierarchy of parts defines an important point on the configural processing continuum, between recognition based on first-order spatial relations and recognition based on holistic undifferentiated template matching.     

The generalized optic acceleration cancellation theory of catching

The generalized optic acceleration cancellation (GOAC) theory of catching proposes that the path of a fielder running to catch a ball is determined by the attempt to satisfy 2 independent constraints. The 1st is to keep the angle of elevation of gaze to the ball increasing at a decreasing rate. The 2nd is to control the rate of horizontal rotation necessary to maintain fixation on the ball. Depending on the lateral velocity of the ball relative to the fielder, this rate may be zero or constant at a negative or positive value. The authors show that a simulated fielder implementing the GOAC strategy follows a path indistinguishable from that of real fielders running to catch balls thrown on the same trajectories.     

A behavioral intervention for teaching tackling skills to high school football athletes

We evaluated an intervention that combined task analysis and differential reinforcement for teaching tackling skills to 2 high school football athletes. As a result of intervention, both players tackled more proficiently in practice drills and maintained proficient tackling during games.     

Kant's Criticisms of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

According to recent commentators like Paul Guyer, Kant agrees with Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1) that physico-theology can never provide knowledge of God and (2) that the concept of God, nevertheless, provides a useful heuristic principle for scientific enquiry. This paper argues that Kant, far from agreeing with Hume, criticizes Hume's Dialogues for failing to prove that physico-theology can never yield knowledge of God and that Kant correctly views Hume's Dialogues as a threat to, rather than an anticipation of, his own view that the concept of God provides a useful heuristic principle for science. The paper concludes that Kant's critique of physico-theology reflects Kant's deep dissatisfaction with Hume's manner of argumentation and suggests that Kant's attempt to provide a more successful critique of physico-theology merits continued philosophical attention.     

FDG-PET Analysis and Findings in Amnesia Resulting From Hypoxia

The assumptions underlying neuroimaging, and problems in its analysis and interpretation, are commonly underestimated in neuropsychology. The ways in which fluoro-deoxy-glucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) data can be analysed are discussed. PET findings from four patients who had suffered severe amnesia, following episodes of acute hypoxia, are presented. These patients had shown evidence of medial temporal (hippocampal and parahippocampal) atrophy on MRI brain scans. The PET data were analysed in several different ways. The converging findings were that the patients showed bilateral thalamic hypometabolism, and there was also evidence of retrosplenial hypometabolism bilaterally. Cognitively, these patients performed most like other patients with medial temporal lesions, but the results indicate that structural lesions can have distal metabolic effects on structures elsewhere. These findings are interpreted in the light of neuroanatomical observations concerning parallel projections between medial temporal lobe structures and the thalamus, some of which pass via the retrosplenium.     

Situating Coordination and Cooperation Between Ecological and Social Psychology

The major thrust of this analysis is to demonstrate the value of making ecological psychology more social while recognizing that for this to occur, social psychology must become more ecological in the sense that its key concepts must be treated in an embodied manner. I elaborate these propositions by focusing on establishing differences between coordination and cooperation. I then explore a range of relationships between them from a social psychological perspective. To accomplish this integration, which uses the commitment to reciprocity as a joint organizing principle, I use three complementary models—dynamical systems, effectivities-affordances, and a role-rule model of social commitment. Key aspects of the analysis involve (1) elaborating the meaning of Turvey's (1990) Turvey, M. T. 1990. Coordination. American Psychologist, 45: 938–954. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] proper-relations view of coordination and (2) demonstrating the particular relevance of roles and trust as unifying concepts. From this perspective, coordinations occur between roles, rather than individuals, at the level of team play. Team play, in turn, is shown to depend on trust. And trust, in turn, is related to perceptions of dependability, thereby illustrating a critical intersection of ecological and social psychology.     

How to endure presentism

Presentism and endurantism are natural bedfellows: arguments have been mounted from endurantism to presentism and vice versa. I generalise an argument against the compatibility between presentism and endurantism offered recently by Tallant (forthcoming. “Presentism, Persistence and Trans-temporal Dependence.” Philosophical Studies). I then show how to reformulate endurantism so that it is compatible with presentism. I demonstrate that this reformulated version of endurantism can do the same work with respect to the problem of temporary intrinsics as can standard definitions.