Three ways to change your mind: an epistemic framework for cognitive interventions

Belief change is an important element of much CBT, yet very little consideration has been given to the theories of knowledge, the epistemology, which underlie this process. This article argues that understanding the epistemic basis of the techniques therapists use can help guide their choice of interventions. The empirical evidence for cognitive restructuring is considered, the importance of distancing and decentring noted, and three epistemic styles are identified: the rational-empiricist, pragmatist and 'constructivist' approaches. Different schools of CBT emphasise one or more of these. The article describes how these epistemes can be used to make decisions about which cognitive interventions to use, particularly when clients may be sceptical about reality testing because of entrenched beliefs or real-life adversity.

Where's My Consciousness-Ometer? How to Test for the Presence and Complexity of Consciousness

Tools and tests for measuring the presence and complexity of consciousness are becoming available, but there is no established theoretical approach for what these tools are measuring. This article examines several categories of tests for making reasonable inferences about the presence and complexity of consciousness (defined as the capacity for phenomenal/subjective experience) and also suggests ways in which different theories of consciousness may be empirically distinguished. We label the various ways to measure consciousness the measurable correlates of consciousness (MCC) and include three subcategories in our taxonomy: (a) neural correlates of consciousness, (b) behavioral correlates of consciousness, and (c) creative correlates of consciousness. Finally, we reflect on how broader philosophical views about the nature of consciousness, such as materialism and panpsychism, may also be informed by the scientific process.

Conceptualizations of Knowledge in Structuring Approaches to Moral Development: A Process-Relational Approach

Like other aspects of child development, views of the nature and development of morality depend on philosophical assumptions or worldviews presupposed by researchers. We analyze assumptions regarding knowledge linked to two contrasting worldviews: Cartesian-split-mechanistic and process-relational. We examine the implications of these worldviews for approaches to moral development, including relations between morality and social outcomes, and the concepts of information, meaning, interaction and computation. It is crucial to understand how researchers view these interrelated concepts in order to understand approaches to moral development. Within the Cartesian-split-mechanistic worldview, knowledge is viewed as representation and meaning is mechanistic and fixed. Both nativism and empiricism are based in this worldview, differing in whether the source of representations is assumed to be primarily internal or external. Morality is assumed to pre-exist, either in the genome or the culture. We discuss problems with these conceptions and endorse the process-relational paradigm, according to which knowledge is constructed through interaction, and morality begins in activity as a process of coordinating perspectives, rather than the application of fixed rules. The contrast is between beginning with the mind or beginning with social activity in explaining the mind.

The Future of Computational Linguistics: On Beyond Alchemy

Over the decades, fashions in Computational Linguistics have changed again and again, with major shifts in motivations, methods and applications. When digital computers first appeared, linguistic analysis adopted the new methods of information theory, which accorded well with the ideas that dominated psychology and philosophy. Then came formal language theory and the idea of AI as applied logic, in sync with the development of cognitive science. That was followed by a revival of 1950s-style empiricism-AI as applied statistics-which in turn was followed by the age of deep nets. There are signs that the climate is changing again, and we offer some thoughts about paths forward, especially for younger researchers who will soon be the leaders.

Franz Joseph Gall on the "deaf and dumb" and the complexities of mind

Franz Joseph Gall used a broad variety of phenomena in support of his organology. Well known are his observations on anatomical features of the brain, species-specific behavioral patterns, the observation that some individuals may excel in one faculty while being mediocre in others, changes in the organs with development and aging, and how the organs associated with the faculties might be affected by diseases and acute brain lesions. We here present a widely overlooked source: his observations on individuals then classified as "deaf and dumb." We discuss how these observations were presented by Gall in support of his organology and in his disputes with empiricists and sensationalists about the nature of mind.

Reading versus Seeing? Winckelmann's Excerpting Practice and the Genealogy of Art History

From his arrival in Italy in 1755, Winckelmann's work is infused throughout by a fundamental antinomy: reading versus seeing. This antinomy possesses for him a decidedly epistemological significance: it allows him to present himself as the father of a discipline deserving of its name, i.e., the history of art. In Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), he claims to break with a long tradition of art discourse which had been primarily supported by ancient texts, basing his book instead on the direct observation of the artworks. The aim of this paper is to critically examine this antinomy. How does seeing relate to reading in his working method? What relationship does art history, in the empirical dimension Winckelmann wanted to give it, have to book knowledge? Winckelmann's excerpts collection provides valuable answers to these questions. Following an old scholarly tradition, Winckelmann used to write down passages of his readings, constituting a vast handwritten library of excerpts which never left him. The result of this intense excerpting practice consists in some 7,500 pages, which allow to better define the share of empirical observation and book-based knowledge in his approach to ancient art.

Pseudoscience in medicine: cautionary recommendations

INTRODUCTION

Certain real life applications of scientific and social science ideas that knowingly reject accumulated empirical biomedical evidence have been termed 'pseudoscience,' or empirical rejectionism. An uncritical acceptance of empiricism, or even of evidence-based medicine, however, can also be problematic.

OBJECTIVES

With reference to a specific type of medical denialism associated with moral failure, justified by dissident AIDS and anti-vaccine scientific publications, this paper seeks to make the argument that this type of denialism meets certain longstanding definitions for classification as pseudoscience.

METHODS

This paper uses a conceptual framework to make certain arguments and to juxtapose arguments for evidence-based approaches to medicine against literature that highlights certain limitations of an unquestioning approach to empiricism.

RESULTS

Discussions of certain real life examples are used to derive the important insight that, under certain conditions, moral failure can result in the violation both Type I and Type II scientific error types, with catastrophic consequences.

CONCLUSION

It is argued that the validity of all theory should not be assumed before sufficient empirical evidence has accumulated to support its validity across contexts. However, caution is required, to avoid the consequences of an unquestioning approach to empiricism.

Is Empiricism Innate? Preference for Nurture Over Nature in People's Beliefs About the Origins of Human Knowledge

The origins of human knowledge are an enduring puzzle: what parts of what we know require learning, and what depends on intrinsic structure? Although the nature-nurture debate has been a central question for millennia and has inspired much contemporary research in psychology and neuroscience, it remains unknown whether people share intuitive, prescientific theories about the answer. Here we report that people (N = 1,188) explain fundamental perceptual and cognitive abilities by appeal to learning and instruction, rather than genes or innateness, even for abilities documented in the first days of life. U.S. adults, adults from a culture with a belief in reincarnation, children, and professional scientists-including psychologists and neuroscientists, all believed these basic abilities emerge significantly later than they actually do, and ascribed them to nurture over nature. These findings implicate a widespread intuitive empiricist theory about the human mind, present from early in life.

Rationalism, Empiricism, and Evidence-Based Medicine: A Call for a New Galenic Synthesis

Thirty years after the rise of the evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement, formal training in philosophy remains poorly represented among medical students and their educators. In this paper, I argue that EBM’s reception in this context has resulted in a privileging of empiricism over rationalism in clinical reasoning with unintended consequences for medical practice. After a limited review of the history of medical epistemology, I argue that a solution to this problem can be found in the method of the 2nd-century Roman physician Galen, who brought empiricism and rationalism together in a synthesis anticipating the scientific method. Next, I review several of the problems that have been identified as resulting from a staunch commitment to empiricism in medical practice. Finally, I conclude that greater epistemological awareness in the medical community would precipitate a Galenic shift toward a more epistemically balanced, scientific approach to clinical research.

The bottom of the universe: Flat earth science in the Age of Encounter

This essay challenges the dominance of the spherical earth model in fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Western European thought. It examines parallel strains of Latin and vernacular writing that cast doubt on the existence of the southern hemisphere. Three factors shaped the alternate accounts of the earth as a plane and disk put forward by these sources: (1) the unsettling effects of maritime expansion on scientific thought; (2) the revival of interest in early Christian criticism of the spherical earth; and (3) a rigid empirical stance toward entities too large to observe in their entirety, including the earth. Criticism of the spherical earth model faded in the decades after Magellan's crew returned from circuiting the earth in 1522.

The Invisibility of Disability: Using Dance to Shake from Bioethics the Idea of 'Broken Bodies'

Complex social and ethical problems are often most effectively solved by engaging them at the messy and uncomfortable intersections of disciplines and practices, a notion that grounds the InVisible Difference project, which seeks to extend thinking and alter practice around the making, status, ownership, and value of work by contemporary dance choreographers by examining choreographic work through the lenses of law, bioethics, dance scholarship, and the practice of dance by differently-abled dancers. This article offers a critical thesis on how bioethics has come to occupy a marginal and marginalizing role in questions about the differently-abled body. In doing so, it has rendered the disabled community largely invisible to and in bioethics. It then defends the claim that bioethics - as a social undertaking pursued collaboratively by individuals from different disciplines - must take much better notice of the body and the embodied individual if it is to better achieve its ends, which include constructing a moral and just society. Finally, this article considers how the arts, and specifically dance (and here dance by differently-abled dancers), provides us with rich evidence about the body and our ability to respond positively to normally 'othered' bodies. It concludes that greater attention to empirical evidence like that being generated in InVisible Difference will help to expand the reach and significance of bioethics, and thereby its relevance to (and consciousness of) important questions about the status of bodies and bodily differences, which must be considered as central to its ambitions.

Magical Empiricism and 'Exposed Being' in Medicine and Traditional Healing

Southern African traditional healers often generalize too broadly from discrete ('accidental') instances of success, partly to recruit a clientele, while biomedicine frequently reasons incorrectly from the general to the specific. Both logics are based on empirical observations, but are inversions of each other; these I characterize as 'magical empiricism.' 'Magic' functions as a metapragmatic discourse to recruit a clientele from a skeptical public that doubts the efficacy of any therapeutic interventions, and it acts in parallel with other practical (and efficacious) healing acts. I introduce the concept of 'exposed beings' to describe locally specific constructions of the person as patient and healer. This helps to explain the existence and enduring appeal of many different medical practices and beliefs in South Africa, but I suggest that 'medical parallelism' rather than 'pluralism' might be more accurate.

[Investigation of Empiricism. On Ernst Mach's Conception of the Thought Experiment]

Investigation of Empiricism. On Ernst Mach's Conception of the Thought Experiment. The paper argues that Ernst Mach's conception of the thought experiment from 1897/1905 holds a singular position in the lively discussions and repeated theorizations that have continued up to the present in relation to this procedure. Mach derives the thought experiment from scientific practice, and does not oppose it to the physical experiment, but, on the contrary, endows it with a robust relation to the facts. For Mach, the thought experiment is a reliable means of determining empiricism, and at the same time a real, because open and unbiased, experimenting. To shed light on this approach, the paper carries out a close reading of the relevant texts in Mach's body of writings (in their different stages of revision) and proceeds in three steps: first, Mach's processual understanding of science will be presented, which also characterizes his research and publication practice (I. 'Aperçu' and 'Sketch'. Science as Process and Projection); then in a second step the physiological and biological justification and valorization of memory and association will be examined with which Mach limits the relevance of categories such as consciousness and will (II. The Biology of Consciousness. Or The Polyp Colony); against this background, thirdly, the specific empiricism can be revealed that Mach inscribes into the thought experiment by on the one hand founding it in the memory and association, and on the other by tracing it back to geometry, which he deploys as an experimenting oriented to experience (III. Thinking and Experience. The Thought Experiment).

The interplay of deductive and inductive reasoning in psychoanalytic theorizing

Deductive and inductive reasoning both played an essential part in Freud's construction of psychoanalysis. In this paper, the author explores the happy marriage of empiricism and rationalism in Freud's use of deductive reasoning in the construction of psychoanalytic theory. To do this, the author considers three major amendments Freud made to his theory: (i) infant and childhood sexuality, (ii) the structural theory, and (iii) the theory of signal anxiety. Ultimately, the author argues for, and presents Freud as a proponent of, the epistemological position that he calls critical realism.

Herpes PCR testing and empiric acyclovir use beyond the neonatal period

BACKGROUND

Diagnostic strategies based on empirical testing and treatment to identify herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection in neonates may not be appropriate for older children in whom the most common presentation of severe infection is encephalitis, a rare and clinically recognizable condition.

METHODS

Use of acyclovir in infants and children in 6 common non-HSV infection-related diagnosis-related groups was characterized between 1999 and 2012 at 15 US pediatric hospitals by using the Pediatric Health Information System database. Characteristics of non-neonatal patients at 1 institution tested for HSV encephalitis over a 6.5-year period were then analyzed to identify factors associated with potentially unnecessary testing and treatment.

RESULTS

Acyclovir use increased from 7.6% to 15.6% (P < .001) from 1999 to 2012. Much of this increase came in infants 30 to 60 days of age (82.7% increase, P < .001) and in patients with milder disease severity (44.8% increase, P < .001). Length of stay was increased by 2 days for children treated with acyclovir (P < .001). At our institution, 1394 HSV cerebrospinal fluid polymerase chain reactions were performed in children >30 days old, with only 3 positive results (0.22%). Comparison of the 3 subjects with positive testing and 55 with negative testing revealed that all cases, but only 4% (95% confidence interval 1.2%-14.0%) of noncases had clinical characteristics typical of HSV encephalitis.

CONCLUSIONS

Strategies for diagnosis and empirical treatment of suspected HSV encephalitis beyond the neonatal period have trended toward the approach common for neonates without evidence of an increase in disease incidence. This may result in increased medical costs and risk to patients.

Data fabrication and falsification and empiricist philosophy of science

Scientists have rules pertaining to data fabrication and falsification that are enforced with significant punishments, such as loss of funding, termination of employment, or imprisonment. These rules pertain to data that describe observable and unobservable entities. In this commentary I argue that scientists would not adopt rules that impose harsh penalties on researchers for data fabrication or falsification unless they believed that an aim of scientific research is to develop true theories and hypotheses about entities that exist, including unobservable ones. This argument presents a challenge for constructive empiricists, such as van Fraassen. Constructive empiricists need to be able to explain why rules pertaining to data fabrication and falsification do not threaten their philosophy of science.

The excitations and suppressions of the times: locating the emotions in the liver in modern Chinese medicine

This paper explores how doctors of Chinese medicine have borrowed from a long history of scholarship on the problem of "constraint" to develop treatments for modern emotion-related disorders, such as depression. I argue that this combining of medical practices was made possible by a complex sequence of events. First, doctors in the 1920 and 1930s were engaged in a critical reexamination of the entire corpus of Chinese medical knowledge. Spurred by the encounter with European imperialism, the sudden rise of Japan as a new power in East Asia, and the political struggles to establish a Chinese nation state, these scholars were among the first to speculate on the possible relationship between Chinese medicine and Western medicine. Second, in the 1950 and 1960s, doctors like other intellectuals were focused on national reunification and institution building. They rejected some of the experimental claims of their predecessors to focus on identifying the key characteristics of Chinese medicine, such as the methodology of "pattern recognition and treatment determination bianzheng lunzhi." The flexibility of the new bianzheng lunzhi paradigm allowed doctors to quietly adopt innovations from their early twentieth century counterparts that they ostensibly rejected, ultimately paving the way for contemporary treatments of depression.

Divining and knowing: Karl Sudhoff's historical method

This article investigates the historical method of Karl Sudhoff (1853- 1938), Germany's first professor of medical history. It argues that in order to understand his ideas more fully, we need to step outside the historiography of medical history and assess his methodology in relation to the norms and ideals of German academic history writing in general. The article demonstrates that the philology-based "critical method" of Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) was central to Sudhoff's methodological thinking. It investigates the underlying philosophical and epistemological assumptions of Ranke's method, which tend to be less appreciated than his overt empiricism and explores how Sudhoff applied these to the new professionalizing subdiscipline of the history of medicine. The article argues that Sudhoff's concerns with the methodology of history, which involved a particular conception of the relationship between the human sciences and the medical sciences, offers compelling addresses to our times.