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Walasek L, Brown GDA. Incomparability and Incommensurability in Choice: No Common Currency of Value? Perspect Psychol Sci 2023:17456916231192828. [PMID: 37642131 DOI: 10.1177/17456916231192828] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 08/31/2023]
Abstract
Models of decision-making typically assume the existence of some common currency of value, such as utility, happiness, or inclusive fitness. This common currency is taken to allow comparison of options and to underpin everyday choice. Here we suggest instead that there is no universal value scale, that incommensurable values pervade everyday choice, and hence that most existing models of decision-making in both economics and psychology are fundamentally limited. We propose that choice objects can be compared only with reference to specific but nonuniversal "covering values." These covering values may reflect decision-makers' goals, motivations, or current states. A complete model of choice must accommodate the range of possible covering values. We show that abandoning the common-currency assumption in models of judgment and decision-making necessitates rank-based and "simple heuristics" models that contrast radically with conventional utility-based approaches. We note that if there is no universal value scale, then Arrow's impossibility theorem places severe bounds on the rationality of individual decision-making and hence that there is a deep link between the incommensurability of value, inconsistencies in human decision-making, and rank-based coding of value. More generally, incommensurability raises the question of whether it will ever be possible to develop single-quantity-maximizing models of decision-making.
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Foucher JR, Jeanjean LC, de Billy CC, Pfuhlmann B, Clauss JME, Obrecht A, Mainberger O, Vernet R, Arcay H, Schorr B, Weibel S, Walther S, van Harten PN, Waddington JL, Cuesta MJ, Peralta V, Dupin L, Sambataro F, Morrens M, Kubera KM, Pieters LE, Stegmayer K, Strik W, Wolf RC, Jabs BE, Ams M, Garcia C, Hanke M, Elowe J, Bartsch A, Berna F, Hirjak D. The polysemous concepts of psychomotricity and catatonia: A European multi-consensus perspective. Eur Neuropsychopharmacol 2022; 56:60-73. [PMID: 34942409 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroneuro.2021.11.008] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/15/2021] [Revised: 11/10/2021] [Accepted: 11/15/2021] [Indexed: 12/30/2022]
Abstract
Current classification systems use the terms "catatonia" and "psychomotor phenomena" as mere a-theoretical descriptors, forgetting about their theoretical embedment. This was the source of misunderstandings among clinicians and researchers of the European collaboration on movement and sensorimotor/psychomotor functioning in schizophrenia and other psychoses or ECSP. Here, we review the different perspectives, their historical roots and highlight discrepancies. In 1844, Wilhelm Griesinger coined the term "psychic-motor" to name the physiological process accounting for volition. While deriving from this idea, the term "psychomotor" actually refers to systems that receive miscellaneous intrapsychic inputs, convert them into coherent behavioral outputs send to the motor systems. More recently, the sensorimotor approach has drawn on neuroscience to redefine the motor signs and symptoms observed in psychoses. In 1874, Karl Kahlbaum conceived catatonia as a brain disease emphasizing its somatic - particularly motor - features. In conceptualizing dementia praecox Emil Kraepelin rephrased catatonic phenomena in purely mental terms, putting aside motor signs which could not be explained in this way. Conversely, the Wernicke-Kleist-Leonhard school pursued Kahlbaum's neuropsychiatric approach and described many new psychomotor signs, e.g. parakinesias, Gegenhalten. They distinguished 8 psychomotor phenotypes of which only 7 are catatonias. These barely overlap with consensus classifications, raising the risk of misunderstanding. Although coming from different traditions, the authors agreed that their differences could be a source of mutual enrichment, but that an important effort of conceptual clarification remained to be made. This narrative review is a first step in this direction.
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Kitanaka J. In the Mind of Dementia: Neurobiological Empathy, Incommensurability, and the Dementia Tojisha Movement in Japan. Med Anthropol Q 2021; 34:119-135. [PMID: 32311787 DOI: 10.1111/maq.12544] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/04/2018] [Revised: 08/08/2019] [Accepted: 08/12/2019] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
Abstract
Living in the world's leading superaging society, Japanese are confronted with a tsunami of dementia that has generated fear of becoming mentally incommensurable to oneself and to others. Based on three years of fieldwork in various clinical settings, including a memory clinic in Tokyo, I show how people with dementia (dementia tojishas) and doctors have employed three approaches to overcoming incommensurability: psychotherapeutic, neurobiological, and ecological. With a primary focus on the neurobiological, I show how tojishas and doctors try to cultivate what I call "neurobiological empathy," asking people to imagine not just how to be together with those with dementia but also what it is to be (in the mind of someone) with dementia. Investigating both the effects and limits of the neurobiologization of dementia, I ask how the dementia tojisha movement can work toward diminishing the preexisting fear about dementia and supplementing incommensurability with understanding and empathy.
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Affiliation(s)
- Junko Kitanaka
- Department of Human Sciences, Faculty of Letters, Keio University
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Abstract
The purpose of this article is to offer a critical analysis of different uses of the Kuhnian concept of paradigm to study psychoanalysis by showing how this notion may be used to establish a more profitable dialogue between different theoretical systems of psychoanalysis. In order to do so, we will examine how various authors, psychoanalysts and philosophers use this tool to understand psychoanalysis and its history. It will be argued that the understanding of theoretical systems of psychoanalysis as paradigms emphasises both their similarities (in the comprehension of a Freudian common ground) and their incommensurabilities. Additionally, it will be shown that the theories are not subject to communication, but rather the phenomena that such theories enable us to understand; they are, therefore, redescribed in each one of the systems allowing them to develop.
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Affiliation(s)
- Leopoldo Fulgencio
- Department of Psychology of Learning, Development and Personality, Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
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Vinokur AI, Hilleke KP, Fredrickson DC. Principles of weakly ordered domains in intermetallics: the cooperative effects of atomic packing and electronics in Fe 2Al 5. Acta Crystallogr A Found Adv 2019; 75:297-306. [PMID: 30821262 PMCID: PMC6396395 DOI: 10.1107/s2053273318017461] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/07/2018] [Accepted: 12/10/2018] [Indexed: 11/10/2022] Open
Abstract
Many complex intermetallic structures feature a curious juxtaposition of domains with strict 3D periodicity and regions of much weaker order or incommensurability. This article explores the basic principles leading to such arrangements through an investigation of the weakly ordered channels of Fe2Al5. It starts by experimentally confirming the earlier crystallographic model of the high-temperature form, in which nearly continuous columns of electron density corresponding to disordered Al atoms emerge. Then electronic structure calculations on ordered models are used to determine the factors leading to the formation of these columns. These calculations reveal electronic pseudogaps near 16 electrons/Fe atom, an electron concentration close to the Al-rich side of the phase's homogeneity range. Through a reversed approximation Molecular Orbital (raMO) analysis, these pseudogaps are correlated with the filling of 18-electron configurations on the Fe atoms with the support of isolobal σ Fe-Fe bonds. The resulting preference for 16 electrons/Fe requires a fractional number of Al atoms in the Fe2Al5 unit cell. Density functional theory-chemical pressure (DFT-CP) analysis is then applied to investigate how this nonstoichiometry is accommodated. The CP schemes reveal strong quadrupolar distributions on the Al atoms of the channels, suggestive of soft atomic motions along the undulating electron density observed in the Fourier map that allow the Al positions to shift easily in response to compositional changes. Such a combination of preferred electron counts tied to stoichiometry and continuous paths of CP quadrupoles could provide predictive indicators for the emergence of channels of disordered or incommensurately spaced atoms in intermetallic structures.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anastasiya I. Vinokur
- Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1101 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706, USA
| | - Katerina P. Hilleke
- Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1101 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706, USA
| | - Daniel C. Fredrickson
- Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1101 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706, USA
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Jiao S. Harm reduction: Philosophical drivers of conceptual tensions and ways forward. Nurs Inq 2019; 26:e12286. [PMID: 30773745 DOI: 10.1111/nin.12286] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/27/2018] [Revised: 01/12/2019] [Accepted: 01/18/2019] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Abstract
Of the various debates surrounding harm reduction, a conceptual tension that perhaps has the most relevance for the provision of services is that of harm reduction as a technical solution versus a contextualized social practice. The aim of this paper was to examine this conceptual tension. First, the two perspectives will be presented through the use of examples. Second, philosophical drivers that serve to underpin and justify each perspective will be explicated at the level of the knowledge that we privilege; the ideologies that we subscribe to; and the interests that we stand to serve. In this paper, I argue that the existing tension between technical and social approaches to harm reduction is embedded within discord pertaining to ways of knowing, paradigms of inquiry, prevailing ideologies, and notions of harm and risk. Building on these sources of tension, I suggest a means of philosophical reconciliation between the two approaches and ways forward, namely through acknowledging multiple sources of knowledge, through embracing paradigmatic incommensurability, through considering alternative conceptions of people who use drugs as political subjects, through involving service providers and end-users in shared decision-making, and lastly through reaffirming people who use drugs as the intended beneficiaries of services.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sunny Jiao
- School of Nursing, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
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Abstract
This article addresses the prioritization questions that arise when people attempt to institutionalize reasonable ethical principles and create guidelines for microlevel decisions. I propose that this instantiates an incommensurability problem, and suggest two different kinds of practical solutions for dealing with this issue.
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Cooper A. Placing plants on paper: Lists, herbaria, and tables as experiments with territorial inventory at the mid-seventeenth-century Gotha court. Hist Sci 2018; 56:257-277. [PMID: 29909654 DOI: 10.1177/0073275318776515] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/08/2023]
Abstract
Over the past several decades, historians of science have come increasingly to focus on the role of so-called "paper technologies," reorganizing and transforming information through the use of paper and pen, in the emergence of modern science. Taking as a case study an effort by administrators in the seventeenth-century German princely state of Saxe-Gotha to enlist foresters and herb-women to catalog the medicinal plants of the territory, this article analyzes the varied forms of paperwork produced in the process, including an extremely unusual table, and argues that the table represented an effort to produce a synoptic visualization, akin to but not identical to a map, of the location of the territory's herbs. While this table may not have ultimately succeeded as a viable paper technology, due to problems of incommensurability, it demonstrates the role of administrative practices and state actors in experimenting with information about the natural world during the early modern period.
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Affiliation(s)
- Alix Cooper
- History Department, Stony Brook University, USA
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Fredrickson RT, Fredrickson DC. Communication between cation environments in aluminosilicate frameworks: incommensurately modulated crystal structure of an e-plagioclase. Acta Crystallogr B Struct Sci Cryst Eng Mater 2016; 72:787-801. [PMID: 27698321 DOI: 10.1107/s2052520616010350] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/28/2016] [Accepted: 06/26/2016] [Indexed: 06/06/2023]
Abstract
Despite being one of the most common minerals in the earth's crust the crystal structure of intermediate e-plagioclase remains only partially understood, due in a large part to its complex diffraction patterns including satellite reflections. In this article we present a detailed analysis of the structure of e-plagioclase (An44) using single-crystal X-ray diffraction measured at ambient and low temperature (T = 100 K), in which the full modulated structure is successfully refined. As in earlier studies, the diffraction pattern exhibits strong main a-reflections and weak e-satellite reflections. The average structure could be solved in terms of an albite-like basic cell with the triclinic centrosymmetric and non-centrosymmetric space groups P \bar 1 and P1 (treated in its C \bar 1 and C1 setting, respectively, to follow conventions in the literature), while the incommensurately modulated structure was modeled in (3 + 1)D superspace, employing both the centro- and non-centrosymmetric superspace groups X \bar 1(αβγ)0 and X1(αβγ)0, where X refers to a special (3 + 1)D lattice centering with centering vectors (0 0 ½ ½), (½ ½ 0 ½), and (½ ½ ½ 0). Individual positional and occupational modulations for Ca/Na were refined with deeper insights being revealed in the non-centrosymmetric structure model. Through the structural details emerging from this model, the origin of the modulation can be traced to the communication between Ca/Na site positions through their bridging aluminosilicate (Si/Al)O4 tetrahedra.
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Affiliation(s)
- Rie T Fredrickson
- Department of Geoscience, University of Wisconsin, 1215 W Dayton Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA
| | - Daniel C Fredrickson
- Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin, 1101 University Ave, Madison, WI 53706, USA
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Ivanković V, Savić L. Integrative Bioethics: A Conceptually Inconsistent Project. Bioethics 2016; 30:325-335. [PMID: 26644388 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12235] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/05/2023]
Abstract
This article provides a critical evaluation of the central components of Integrative Bioethics, a project aiming at a bioethical framework reconceptualization. Its proponents claim that this new system of thought has developed a better bioethical methodology than mainstream Western bioethics, a claim that we criticize here. We deal especially with the buzz words of Integrative Bioethics - pluriperspectivism, integrativity, orientational knowledge, as well as with its underlying theory of moral truth. The first part of the paper looks at what the claims of a superior methodology consist in. The second reveals pluriperspectivism and integrativity to be underdeveloped, hazy terms, but which seem to be underpinned by two theses - the incommensurability and the inclusiveness theses. These theses we critically scrutinize. We then consider strategies the project's proponents might apply to curb these theses in order to acquire minimal consistency for their framework. This part of the article also deals with the conception of moral truth that drives the theory, a position equally burdened with inconsistencies. In the last part of the article, we observe the concept of orientational knowledge, and develop two interpretations of its possible meaning. We claim that, following the first interpretation, Integrative Bioethics is completely descriptive, in which case it is informative and important, but hardly bioethics; if it is normative, following the second interpretation, it is bioethics as we already know it, but merely clad in rhetorical embellishments. We conclude that there is nothing new about this project, and that its inconsistencies are reason enough for its abandonment.
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Olsson L, Jerneck A, Thoren H, Persson J, O’Byrne D. Why resilience is unappealing to social science: Theoretical and empirical investigations of the scientific use of resilience. Sci Adv 2015; 1:e1400217. [PMID: 26601176 PMCID: PMC4640643 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1400217] [Citation(s) in RCA: 61] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/15/2014] [Accepted: 04/12/2015] [Indexed: 05/22/2023]
Abstract
Resilience is often promoted as a boundary concept to integrate the social and natural dimensions of sustainability. However, it is a troubled dialogue from which social scientists may feel detached. To explain this, we first scrutinize the meanings, attributes, and uses of resilience in ecology and elsewhere to construct a typology of definitions. Second, we analyze core concepts and principles in resilience theory that cause disciplinary tensions between the social and natural sciences (system ontology, system boundary, equilibria and thresholds, feedback mechanisms, self-organization, and function). Third, we provide empirical evidence of the asymmetry in the use of resilience theory in ecology and environmental sciences compared to five relevant social science disciplines. Fourth, we contrast the unification ambition in resilience theory with methodological pluralism. Throughout, we develop the argument that incommensurability and unification constrain the interdisciplinary dialogue, whereas pluralism drawing on core social scientific concepts would better facilitate integrated sustainability research.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lennart Olsson
- Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), 22100 Lund, Sweden
- Corresponding author. E-mail:
| | - Anne Jerneck
- Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), 22100 Lund, Sweden
| | - Henrik Thoren
- Department of Philosophy, Lund University, 22100 Lund, Sweden
| | | | - David O’Byrne
- Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), 22100 Lund, Sweden
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Moura GGM, Kalikoski DC, Diegues ACS. A resource management scenario for traditional and scientific management of pink shrimp (Farfantepenaeus paulensis) in the Patos Lagoon estuary (RS), Brazil. J Ethnobiol Ethnomed 2013; 9:6. [PMID: 23311826 PMCID: PMC3599677 DOI: 10.1186/1746-4269-9-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/27/2012] [Accepted: 01/09/2013] [Indexed: 06/01/2023]
Abstract
BACKGROUND This article aims to discuss the incorporation of traditional time in the construction of a management scenario for pink shrimp in the Patos Lagoon estuary (RS), Brazil. To meet this objective, two procedures have been adopted; one at a conceptual level and another at a methodological level. At the conceptual level, the concept of traditional time as a form of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) was adopted. METHOD At the methodological level, we conduct a wide literature review of the scientific knowledge (SK) that guides recommendations for pink shrimp management by restricting the fishing season in the Patos Lagoon estuary; in addition, we review the ethno-scientific literature which describes traditional calendars as a management base for artisanal fishers in the Patos Lagoon estuary. RESULTS Results demonstrate that TEK and SK describe similar estuarine biological processes, but are incommensurable at a resource management level. On the other hand, the construction of a "management scenario" for pink shrimp is possible through the development of "criteria for hierarchies of validity" which arise from a productive dialog between SK and TEK. CONCLUSIONS The commensurable and the incommensurable levels reveal different basis of time-space perceptions between traditional ecological knowledge and scientific knowledge. Despite incommensurability at the management level, it is possible to establish guidelines for the construction of "management scenarios" and to support a co-management process.
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Affiliation(s)
- Gustavo Goulart Moreira Moura
- Environmental Sciences at University of São Paulo (PROCAM/USP), Fishing Research Group lidership (GPP) of the Núcleo de Pesquisa e Apoio a Populações de Áreas Úmidas do Brasil (NUPAUB-USP). Rua do Anfiteatro, nº 181, Colméias - Favo 6, Cidade Universitária - CEP, 05508-060, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
| | - Daniela Coswig Kalikoski
- Natural Resources Management at University of Manitoba and Former Professor in Universidade Federal do Rio Grande (FURG), Rio Grande, Brazil
| | - Antonio Carlos Sant’Ana Diegues
- Environmental Sciences at University of São Paulo (PROCAM-USP) and scientific coordinator of the Núcleo de Pesquisa e Apoio a Populações de Áreas Úmidas do Brasil (NUPAUB-USP), Sao Paulo, Brazil
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