Three Naive Questions: Addressed to the Modern Educational Optimism

This paper aims to question anew the popular and supposedly self-evident affirmation of education, in its modern incarnation as in its historical notion. The “naive” questions suggest that we have recently taken for granted that education ought to be for the masses, that it ought to be upbringing, and that it is better than ignorance. Drawing on the tradition that calls such an understanding of education into question, the author shows that the hidden costs of disregarding such reflection end up, camouflaged and smuggled, taxing the current debates regarding generally accepted education strategies. The characteristic feeling of the currently accepted model of education being in chronic crisis is less a testament to an absence of alternative approaches than to a lack of thorough self-reflection.     

The Kindness of Psychopaths

Psychopathy attracts considerable interdisciplinary interest. The idea of a group of people with abnormal morality and interpersonal relations raises important philosophical, legal and clinical issues. However, before engaging these issues, we ought to examine whether this category is scientifically grounded. We frame the issue in terms of the question whether ‘psychopathy’ designates a natural kind according to the cluster approaches. We argue that currently there is no sufficient evidence for an affirmative answer to this question. Furthermore, we examine three ways of dealing with the category of psychopathy. We could eliminate the category, revise it, or subscribe to a more encompassing account of kinds, which could capture psychopathy as it is currently conceptualised. We argue that while a revision of the category of psychopathy is to be expected with empirical and theoretical advancements, we also emphasise its role in clinical and forensic research, which makes it an important pragmatic kind.     

An exploration of attitudes toward the use of patient incentives to support diabetes self-management

Objective: To improve our understanding of the potential of incentives to enhance diabetes self-management (type 1 and type 2) and to integrate incentives into a conceptual model of diabetes self-management over time.

Design: A qualitative analysis of in-depth individual interviews with 12 patients and 9 providers.

Main outcome measures: Influence of time on patients’ needs for diabetes self-management technologies and on the use of incentives to drive behavioural changes.

Results: Ten of the 12 participants with diabetes (83%) were interested in using financial incentives to improve their diabetes self-management. We found that incentives can play two key roles in diabetes self-management: guide the learning phase during the creation of habits; and serve as an acknowledgement of efforts made in the stable phase, when providers typically only focus on the patients’ failures at self-management.

Conclusion: Patients seem receptive to the idea of financial incentives, which have the potential to support diabetes self-management through either small monetary amounts or tangible rewards. Incentives hold promise for supporting behaviour changes, especially in early stages of diabetes, but they require careful planning to avoid the undesired consequence of decreased intrinsic motivation.     

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The function debate: between “cheap tricks” and evolutionary neutrality

We examine the use of the notion of natural selection in the philosophical debate on functions in biology. This debate has been largely shaped by the way in which different accounts assess various selective pressures in justifying claims about biological functions. Cummins (Functions: new essays in the philosophy of psychology and biology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 157–172, 2002), one of the main proponents of the causal role account of biological functions, argues that a correctly understood neo-Darwinian notion of natural selection has nothing to do with functional talk in biology. In this paper, we counter Cummins’ account by showing that progress in the molecular approaches to evolutionary biology—specifically scientific data available in neo-functionalization research—offers valuable support to the etiological selectionist approach to functions in biological and biologically-related sciences. Finally, we use the presented data to build our own account of biological functions, which tries to avoid the wrong turns taken by both major strands in the biological function debate, namely causal role and etiological accounts. According to our account, the function of a certain gene or a protein in the biological system that contains it is a particular causal activity, or a group of causal activities whose manifestation is in a specific way determined by corresponding mechanisms of genetic expression. Also, we argue that in many important cases this particular expression of genetic activity was positively selected at a certain point in evolutionary history. Since we take selection as an important but not the only factor that grounds biological functions, we are committed to a weak etiological account.     

Principles of Information Processing and Natural Learning in Biological Systems

Journal for General Philosophy of Science - The key assumption behind evolutionary epistemology is that animals are active learners or ‘knowers’. In the present study, I updated the...     

An analog-to-digital converter for on-line use in response dynamics research

A general-purpose translator was designed for an analysis of the dynamic properties of the intracranially reinforced (ICR) barpressing response. It is used principally as an animal training device.