The turn to the local: the possibility of returning health care to the community

It is not too early to suggest that the attempts to place medical cae in private hands (through group insurance arrangements) has not fulfilled its promise--or better, the promises that were made for it. Yet history has not been kind to plans to make government the single payer, and the laudable progress in medical technology has placed high-technology medical care beyond the reach of most private budgets. In this paper I suggest that the major problem of the U.S. health care system as presently conceived is a failure of legitimacy, and I put forward a proposal that purports to solve that problem. The proposal is to localize health care, on the model of a public school system, on the argument that such localization will answer most of the questions of legitimacy at the core of the private insurance imbroglio, provide a brake for medical costs, while preserving our ability to take advantage of the most advanced medical interventions. I present some initial arguments for the proposal, but await its proof in the dialogue emerging as the present insurance system collapses.     

The Logic of Pragmatic Truth

The mathematical concept of pragmatic truth, first introduced in Mikenberg, da Costa and Chuaqui (1986), has received in the last few years several applications in logic and the philosophy of science. In this paper, we study the logic of pragmatic truth, and show that there are important connections between this logic, modal logic and, in particular, Jaskowski's discussive logic. In order to do so, two systems are put forward so that the notions of pragmatic validity and pragmatic truth can be accommodated. One of the main results of this paper is that the logic of pragmatic truth is paraconsistent. The philosophical import of this result, which justifies the application of pragmatic truth to inconsistent settings, is also discussed.     

Rorschach responses in healthy, community dwelling older adults

Five predicted relationships between age and intellectual level and 16 Rorschach variables were examined through a cross-sectional analysis of 47 healthy, community-dwelling elderly men and women. Subjects were compared by age and intellectual level using gender, level of medication, and scores on the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) and the Geriatric Social Readjustment Questionnaire (GSRQ) as covariates. Screening tests for psychiatric and physical illness, recent life events, and hearing and vision loss were administered. In contrast to prior research suggesting changes in Rorschach scores with differences in age and intellectual level, only one significant difference was found for these variables. The data suggest that age and intellectual level may contribute less to Rorschach responses than was previously thought.     

Think before you speak: pauses, memory search, and trace redintegration processes in verbal memory span

Immediate memory span and speed of memory search were assessed for words and nonwords of short and long spoken duration. Memory span was substantially greater for words than for nonwords and for short than for long items, though speed of memory search was unaffected by either length or lexicality. An analysis of the temporal pattern of responses in the memory span task indicated that inter-item pauses were longer between nonwords than words but that these pause durations were unaffected by item length. A model of verbal short-term memory span is described in which trace selection from a short-term store and the redintegration (restoration) of degraded phonological traces both occur in the pauses between saying successive items. Both trace selection and trace redintegration appear to play important roles in accounting for individual differences in memory span.     

Assessment of pointer dog behavior

Studies of behavioral traits of the “Arkansas Line of nervous pointer dogs” are well documented (Murphreeet al., 1969). Demonstrations of drug effects on these traits, as measured on the standardized behavior test and expressed as “Morbidity Score,” have been disappointing, despite other evidence of effectiveness of drug treatments such as modification of operant performance (Murphreeet al. 1974c). A simple reproducible test with high interrater reliability is presented here. Subjects were nine nervous dogs that received placebo, pimozide, and chlordiazepoxide in a double-blind crossover design. Both drugs significantly attenuated “human avoidance,” a nervous trait. Placebo had no effect. The chlordiazepoxide effect was maximal on the first day of administration, returning to baseline three to four days after the last dose. The pimozide maximal effect was on day 4, with return to baseline six to nine days after the last dose. In addition to the aberrant behavior of the nervous pointer, hyperresponsiveness to dopaminergic stimulation and increased levels of L-DOPA in the cisternal spinal fluid were observed.     

Repressive coping and verbal-autonomic response dissociation: the influence of social context.

This study examined whether verbal-autonomic response dissociation in repressive copers is potentiated by conditions that enhance social evaluative concerns. Women classified as repressive, low-anxious, or high-anxious gave a self-disclosing speech in either a private condition (a single researcher observed) or a public condition (3 researchers ostensibly observed). Repressors exhibited heart rate elevations that were greater in magnitude than their self-reports of negative affect, but only in the public condition. High-anxious Ss in both conditions showed an opposite pattern of verbal-autonomic dissociation in which self-reported negative affect exceeded cardiac response. Low-anxious Ss in both conditions showed little responsivity in either channel. Results are interpreted within a self-regulatory framework in which differences in self-concept in the domain of emotionality predispose repressive and high-anxious individuals to engage in contrasting, emotion-focused coping styles.     

A model theoretic approach to ‘natural’ reasoning

A general framework is proposed for accommodating the recent results of studies into ‘natural’ decision making. A crucial element of this framework is the notion of a ‘partial structure’, recently introduced into the semantic approach to scientific theories. It is through the introduction of this element that connections can be made with certain problems regarding inconsistency and rationality in general.