Thingly hermeneutics/Technoconstructions

Within the Euro-American community of philosophers relating hermeneutics to science there is a considerable disagreement about where hermeneutics may be located. The older traditions hold that hermeneutics apply to and are limited to the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of science. But newer approaches claim that hermeneutics applies to the very praxis of science and to the constitution of scientific objects. This paper sides with the latter perspective and argues that a tendency to retain vestigial positivist interpretations of science keeps the older tradition from seeing hermeneutics as deeply embedded in science praxis. After arguing this point historically, I turn to a hermeneutic recuperation of science, first by drawing from the hermeneutic approach of Joseph Rouse, and then by the hermeneutic constructionism of Bruno Latour. I finally turn to what I term technoconstruction in science, particularly in imaging processes, to show concrete cases of the hermeneutic preparation of scientific objects. I conclude that contemporary science has exceeded its earlier modernist framework and now operates in a constructionist-hermeneutic framework.     

The Patient Self-Determination Act and Advance Directives: Snapshots of Activities in a Tertiary Health Care Center

This study describes the results of a retrospective review of patients' charts who had an advanced directive (AD) and who were hospitalized in a tertiary, acute care teaching hospital. The purpose of the review was to understand from clinical, sociological, ethical and legal perspectives the nature and utility of ADs. Findings and implications of the review are discussed in terms of: patient demographics; diagnoses; quality of ADs; influence of ADs on clinical decisions; and legal aspects of ADs.     

Children‘s ability to remember an occurrence of a repeated event

The authors summarise the findings of four recent experiments whichexamined childrens capacity to remember a particular occurrence of arecurring event. Issues discussed include the timing of the interview, thetype of errors, the questioning techniques, the age of the child, theconsistency of the childs account, and the impact of an interveninginterview. Implications for professionals who conduct investigatory orevidentiary interviews with child witnesses are discussed and suggestionsfor future research are also offered.     

Process characteristics of worry and obsessive intrusive thoughts

One hundred and twenty-five university students were administered a battery of self-report measures to assess worry disposition and content, frequency of obsessive intrusive thoughts, and 10 conceptually derived appraisal dimensions of worry and obsessional intrusions. Process ratings indicated that the worrisome thoughts were considered more disturbing than the ego-dystonic intrusive thoughts. Worry was also distinguished by a focus on the possible consequences of negative events, whereas concern about the personal meaning of the thought was a unique process dimension for obsessive intrusive thoughts. Both content and process variables are important in differentiating worry and obsessive-like intrusive thoughts in a nonclinical population.     

The generation effect and the modeling of associations in memory

The search of associative memory (SAM) model of Gillund and Shiffrin (1984) was applied to data of two experiments that examined the generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). Subjects studied a list of related word pairs, in which they either read both words in the pair or generated the righthand response term using the left-hand stimulus term plus the response word fragment as generation cues. Experiment 1 manipulated encoding condition within subjects and used an incidental learning procedure. Experiment 2 manipulated encoding condition between subjects and used an intentional learning procedure. Memory was tested with recognition, cued recall, and free recall. A higher order association model gave a better and more parsimonious fit to the results than did an item-level association model. The relationship between various versions of SAM and current accounts of the generation effect are discussed, particularly the two-factor theory of Hirshman and Bjork (1988).     

Exposure-based models of human parsing: Evidence for the use of coarse-grained (nonlexical) statistical records

Several current models of human parsing maintain that initial structural decisions are influenced (or tuned) by the listener's or reader's prior contact with language. The precise workings of these models depend upon the grain, or level of detail, at which previous exposures to language are analyzed and used to influence parsing decisions. Some models are premised upon the use of fine-grained records (such as lexical cooccurrence statistics). Others use coarser measures. The present paper considers the viability of models based exclusively on the use of fine-grained lexical records. The results of several studies are reviewed and the evidence suggests that, if they are to account for the data, experience-based parsers must draw upon records or representations that capture statistical regularities beyond the lexical level. This poses problems for several parsing models in the literature.Aspects of this work were supported by ESRC grant No. R0023 4062 to Don Mitchell, by a Spanish Government grant DGICVT No. PB-92-0656-C04-02 to Fernando Cuetos, and by the Belgian National Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, of which Marc Brysbaert is a Research Associate. We are grateful to Chuck Clifton, Barbara Hemforth, Martin Pickering, Matt Traxler, and an anonymous reviewer-all of whom made helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.     

Sacrificing one to save many

Attempts to solve the Trolley Problem by means of a single principle have proved unpersuasive. Nor can the intuition about Transplant be adequately grounded in the hypothetical dissent of rational contractors. It is explained by the initial liability principle, that loss should lie where it falls unless there is sufficient reason to shift it. If we did not think we should accept misfortune in such cases and thought that minimising loss of life was sufficient reason to shift the loss we should not be according others the minimum respect and treatment we feel is their due. The intuition about Trolley is explained by the affinity of that case to the pure case where the choice is between saving many and saving fewer, where minimising misfortune is the only credible option. But these considerations are not yet enough to accommodate the cases that lie between the extremes of Trolley and Transplant. We can handle the intermediate cases by attempting to assimilate them to one or other paradigm and to one another with a sensitivity to morally relevant and irrelevant differences that seeks initially to be faithful to the values reflected by our moral intuitions. Those intuitive judgements are unlikely to survive such an examination wholly unmodified.     

MATERNITY LEAVE AND WOMEN'S MENTAL HEALTH

The Wisconsin Maternity Leave and Health Study addresses an important policy issue, parental leave, by investigating the work status, maternity leave, and mental health of 570 women. In the longitudinal design, the women, all of whom were living with a husband or partner, were interviewed during the fifth month of pregnancy, 1 month postpartum, and 4 months postpartum. At 4 months postpartum, full-time workers, part-time workers, and homemakers did not differ in depression or anger, but full-time workers showed elevated anxiety compared with the other two groups. In multiple regression analyses, length of leave interacted significantly with marital concerns when predicting depression; women who took a short leave (6 weeks or less) and were high on marital concerns had the highest depression scores. Short maternity leave can be conceptualized as a risk factor that, when combined with other risk factors such as marital concerns, places women at greater risk for depression.