Towards authentic conversations. Authenticity in the patient-professional relationship

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the significance of the existential notion of authenticity for medical ethics. This is done by analyzing authenticity and examining its implications for the patient-professional relationship and for ethical decision-making in medical situations. It is argued that while authenticity implies important demand for individual responsibility, which has therapeutic significance, it perpetuates ideas which are antithetical both to authentic interaction between patients and professionals and to fruitful deliberation of moral dilemmas. In order to counteract these consequences, an alternative idea of authenticity is introduced. According to this idea, authenticity is not regarded primarily as individual sovereignty, but as an ability to participate in a dialogue in which the subjectivity of both partners is respected. Such practice, based on mutual trust and responsibility, would enhance common decision-making and overcome the alienation between patients and professionals.     

Sensorimotor synchronization: Motor responses to pseudoregular auditory patterns

Musically trained and untrained subjects (N=30) were asked to synchronize their finger tapping with stimuli in auditory patterns. Each pattern comprised six successive tonal stimuli of the same duration, the first of which was accented by a different frequency. The duration of interstimulus onset intervals (ISIs) gradually increased or decreased in constant steps toward the end of the patterns. Four values of such steps were used in different trials: 20, 30, 45, and 60 msec. Various time-control mechanisms are hypothesized as being simultaneously responsible for subjects’ incorrect reproduction of the internal temporal ratios of the stimulus patterns. The mechanism of assimilation (of a central tendency) led subjects to enforce a regular (isochronous) structure on the patterns. The influence of other time-control mechanisms (distinction, subjective expression of an accent, sequential transfer) was expressed mainly in differences between intertap onset intervals (ITIs) and the corresponding ISIs at the beginning of the patterns. The duration of the first two ITIs was in the majority of the trials in an inverse ratio to the ratio of the respective ISIs. The distortions resulting from the timing mechanisms concerned were more pronounced in the performance of nonmusicians than in that of musicians.     

Birkhoff-like sheaf representation for varieties of lattice expansions

Given a variety we study the existence of a class such that S1 every A can be represented as a global subdirect product with factors in and S2 every non-trivial A is globally indecomposable. We show that the following varieties (and its subvarieties) have a class satisfying properties S1 and S2: p-algebras, distributive double p-algebras of a finite range, semisimple varieties of lattice expansions such that the simple members form a universal class (bounded distributive lattices, De Morgan algebras, etc) and arithmetical varieties in which the finitely subdirectly irreducible algebras form a universal class (f-rings, vector groups, Wajsberg algebras, discriminator varieties, Heyting algebras, etc). As an application we obtain results analogous to that of Nachbin saying that if every chain of prime filters of a bounded distributive lattice has at most length 1, then the lattice is Boolean.We wish to thank Lic. Alfredo Guerin and Dr. Daniel Penazzi for helping us with linguistics aspects. We are indebted to the referee for several helpful suggestions. We also wish to thank Professor Mick Adams for providing us with several reprints and useful e-mail information on the subject.Suported by CONICOR and SECyT (UNC).     

Detachment and defeasibility in deontic logic

The purpose of the paper is to present a logical framework that allow to formalize a kind of prima facie duties, defeasible conditional duties, indefeasible conditional duties and actual (indefeasible) duties, as well as to show their logical interconnections.     

Sentence processing: Evidence against the serial,independent stage assumption

The assumption that the processing stages involved in sentence comprehension are serially and independently executed was tested in two separate experiments using two new sentence types. One experiment was a sentence-picture verification task, the other was not. In Experiment I, subjects viewed sentences such as It's false that the dots are red and indicated, by pressing the appropriate response key, which of two colors would make the sentence true. In Experiment II, subjects verified sentences such as It isn't true that the dots aren't red against pictures of colored dots. On the strength of Sternberg's additive factor method, present findings challenge the validity of the serial, independent stage assumption, and results are alternatively discussed in terms of a capacity sharing model.This research was supported by PHS research grant MH 23401 to Sam Glucksberg, principal investigator.     

Forest lights: Notes on the conceptualization of the unconscious

Using the metaphor of lights appearing unexplained in the night, the author argues for a conceptualization of the unconscious based on a posture of trust and acceptance rather than one of fear and explanation.His last book,Idea and Experience, dealt with Husserl's project of phenomenology inIdeas I. He has recently completed another book,The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature.