Category Error Research Articles

Application of a Simulation Model to Estimate Treatment Error and Clinical Risk Derived from Point-of-Care International Normalized Ratio Device Analytic Performance.

In 2016, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed to enhance performance expectations for point-of-care testing (POCT) international normalized ratio (INR) devices relative to International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 17593:2007. The objective of the study was to estimate the frequency of warfarin dosing errors associated with a central laboratory INR method, a POCT INR method, and the proposed FDA performance goals. A data set of INR results (n = 51912) from adult patients with INR ≤4 was used to assess the influence of adding assay imprecision and bias on warfarin dose decisions. The frequency of error in warfarin dose and size of error (≥1 or ≥2 dose categories) was compared using published assay specifications for the Instrumentation Laboratory ACL TOP® and the Roche Diagnostics CoaguChek® XS relative to the proposed FDA guidelines. The frequency of warfarin dose misclassification was largely influenced by bias and was not sensitive to assay imprecision. The central laboratory and POCT INR methods met the FDA performance specifications, had equal rates of ≥2 warfarin dose category error, and had statistically different rates of ≥1 warfarin dose category error in large samples (n >250). Simulation models are useful tools for evaluating POCT INR assay performance criteria required to achieve the proposed FDA guidelines. This simulation depicted how the Roche Diagnostics CoaguChek XS instrument meets the guideline.

It's All Their Fault

It's All Their Fault Peter Heinegg The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. By Stephen Greenblatt, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2017. 419 pp. $27.95. A vivid, learned‐but‐lively survey of what may have been the Christian world's worst category error—confusing the etiological myths of Genesis 2.4b‐3.24 for a sequence of actual events—and its fateful repercussions. As in The Swerve (2011), Greenblatt seizes on a grand cross‐cultural meme (original sin, as found in Augustine's sublimely pessimistic writings—more or less the polar opposite of the liberating Epicurean materialism found in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura) and rings the changes on its antecedents, its components, and its prodigious career. Actually, it would have helped if Greenblatt had started out by telling readers that an etiological myth doesn't aim to provide a scientific or factual or logical explanation of some important phenomenon, but instead meditates imaginatively on it. Thus, the author of the Yahwist creation story talks about “the man” and “the woman,” generic beings, not individual persons, no Mr. Adam or Ms. Eve. That unknown writer must have known that, left to themselves, a single pair of humans could never have gotten to a third generation without launching a deadly cycle of incest. But he (pace Harold Bloom) had other things in mind, perhaps most crucially the mystery of self‐consciousness, which elevates us to a godlike state, capable of moral judgment, but reveals the truth about death, and thus makes us literally mortals. This dark picture, as opposed to the Priestly creation myth (Gen. 1‐2.4a), with its bold gender equality and its happy ending on the Sabbath, where humans expressly imitate their Creator, does not, however, constitute a Pauline‐Augustinian “Fall” into permanent alienation from God, with a catastrophic burden of guilt. Greenblatt knows how this genre works, of course; and near the end of the book he talks about “just‐so stories,” but he might have done it sooner. Greenblatt begins by tracing the Bible to its presumed source: the crucible of the Babylonian exile. Crushed by military defeat and facing deracination and assimilation by a powerful, seductive enemy culture, the Jews (once they were set free by Cyrus in 538 BCE) had to forge a cohesive identity. They did so by “changing the story” through “the dream of the master text” that would bring together all the vital strands of tradition, to serve “as an alternative to the ruined Temple, a substitute for what had been lost.” The Bible was meant as a “counter‐narrative” to the Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis story, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. In those ancient Mesopotamian documents the Flood is caused not by Yahweh's furious indignation at human depravity, but by the gods’ disgust with the horde of raucous earthlings. Genesis borrowed many items from its pagan predecessors, like the figure of Utnapishtim (=Noah; but the Noachian covenant, with its noble theme of a new birth for humanity, introduces us to a friendly God who makes reliable treaties with his creatures). Greenblatt is distressed by the whole notion of cosmic punishment for sin, which would be picked up and vastly expanded by the Christine doctrine of the Fall and Redemption. That was a spectacular misreading of Genesis 3; it eventually gave birth to all sorts of literary and artistic splendor, but at the cost of imposing on believers a harrowing, demon‐ridden, life‐denying (see Nietzsche's Anti‐Christ) narrative, whose final refutation at the hands of Darwin Greenblatt chronicles and celebrates. The Jews, according to Greenblatt, rejected some of the positive features of Gilgamesh, for example, the intense, loving brotherhood of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and especially the joyous humanizing of Enkidu through the ministrations of the hierodule Shamhat. By contrast, when Adam and Eve are initiated into the fullness of human self‐awareness, the result is “disaster.” On other hand, Greenblatt seems to slight the overwhelming bitterness with which both Enkidu and Gilagmesh lament the coming of death. The Yahwist myth of Adam and Eve proved to be irresistibly fascinating and gave rise to a host of different interpretations. One of the more curious responses came...

Potential Underestimation of Sleep Apnea Severity by At-Home Kits: Rescoring In-Laboratory Polysomnography Without Sleep Staging.

Home sleep apnea testing (HSAT) is increasingly available for diagnosing obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). One key limitation of most HSAT involves the lack of sleep staging, such that the respiratory event index is calculated using the total recording time (TRT) rather than total sleep time (TST). We performed a retrospective analysis of n = 838 diagnostic polysomnography (PSG) nights from our center; n = 444 with OSA (4% rule, apneahypopnea index (AHI) ≥ 5), and n = 394 with AHI < 5. We recalculated the AHI using time in bed (TIB) instead of TST, to assess the predicted underestimation risk of OSA severity. Of all the patients with OSA, 26.4% would be reclassified as having less severe or no OSA after recalculating the AHI using TIB rather than TST. Of the n = 275 with mild OSA, 18.5% would be reclassified as not having OSA. The risk of underestimation was higher in those with moderate or severe OSA. Of the n = 119 moderate OSA cases, 40.3% would be reclassified as mild, and of the n = 50 severe OSA cases, 36.0% would be reclassified as moderate. Age strongly correlated with the degree of underestimation of the AHI, because age was significantly correlated with time awake during PSG. The risk of sleep apnea underestimation is predicted to be substantial in a tertiary sleep center population. Phenotyping errors included risk of falsely negative results (from mild to normal), as well as category errors: moderate or severe moving to mild or moderate severity, respectively. Clinicians should recognize this underestimation limitation, which directly affects diagnostic phenotyping and thus therapeutic decisions. A commentary on this article appears in this issue on page 531.

Partners of Humans: A Realistic Assessment of the Role of Robots in the Foreseeable Future

As robots are generally thought to perform human-like tasks, they depend on the successes of information technology in the area of artificial intelligence to succeed in such pursuits. But robots, through their anthropomorphic character and their weighty presence in science fiction, attract the attention of the press and the media in a way that, at times, blurs the distinction between the actual state of the art and exaggerated claims. This makes it hard to assess the true functional positioning of robots, how this is likely to move forward and whether the outcome of progress could be detrimental to human society. The aim of this paper is to review the actual level of competence that is being achieved in robotics research laboratories and a plausible impact that this is likely to have on human control over life and jobs. The key thesis here is that cognition in machines and even an artificial form of consciousness lead to operations in a set of tasks (the ‘algorithmic’ category) which is different from that available to truly cognitive and conscious human beings (the ‘life-need’ category): that is, in the paper it is argued that a major category error (Ryle in The concept of mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1949) looms in predictions of serious threats to humanity. As far as a threat to jobs goes, it is argued that early attention to education and re-skilling of humans in the workplace can lead to an effective symbiosis between people and robots.

The worldly space: the digital university in network time

This article considers the effect of information technology upon teaching, learning and research in the ‘digital university’. In less than a generation the university has become a business like any other. It does so in the determining context of neoliberal globalisation and the computer revolution. The university develops through what we may now see as a disastrous ‘category error’. The article argues that humans are analogue creatures who have constructed analogue worlds that they recognise in large measure, in nature. Digital logic is nowhere recognised in nature, and is ultimately alien to us. The university is the key institution for enabling us to understand who and what we are, yet it is being undermined through the suffusion of the market logic and the digital technologies that drive it from a past we look to less, to a present we dwell in more, and a future we are less able to shape.

Filling Collective Duty Gaps

A collective duty gap arises when a group has caused harm that requires remedying but no (or not enough) member(s) did harm that can justify the imposition of individual remedial duties. Examples range from airplane crashes to climate change. How might collective duty gaps be filled? This paper starts by examining two promising proposals for filling them. Both proposals are found inadequate. Thus, while gap-filling duties can be defended against objections from unfairness and demandingness, we need a substantive justification for their existence. I argue that substantive justification can be found in the normative force of commitments individuals make to others with regard to ends. Along the way, I argue that gap-filling duties must be conceptualized differently in group agents, as compared to non-agent groups: in the former, gap-filling duties can be understood as duties to “take up the slack”; in the latter, this would be a category error.

Form Without Matter: Empedocles and Aristotle on Color Perception by Mark Eli Kalderon

Reviewed by: Form Without Matter: Empedocles and Aristotle on Color Perception by Mark Eli Kalderon Gregory Salmieri Mark Eli Kalderon. Form Without Matter: Empedocles and Aristotle on Color Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 216. Cloth, $75.00. Kalderon describes his book as "an essay in the philosophy of perception written in the medium of historiography" (vii). It is an example of what has sometimes been called 'philosophical scholarship' or 'philosophical exegesis'—that is, scholarship on a historical thinker that is intended to bring to light a view of enduring philosophical significance and to commend it to the attention of contemporary philosophers working on the relevant issues. This is an especially challenging genre, and I do not think that Kalderon navigates it successfully, but he has nonetheless produced a book of great value to students of Aristotle's theory of perception—especially students who are also interested in contemporary work on perception. Philosophers of perception who do not have a strong antecedent interest in Aristotle will find material of value as well, but this material may not be prevalent or prominent enough in the book to sustain their interest. The first two chapters develop the puzzle of how to reconcile the idea that the objects of vision are at a distance from the perceiver with the idea that perception involves contact between the sense organ and its object. Kalderon attributes this puzzle to Empedocles, who he thinks attempted to reconcile the two ideas by identifying color as an effluence that proceeds from the distant object into the eye. Having been "ingested" thusly by the perceiver, the distant object's color can be present in awareness. Plato attempted a somewhat different reconciliation, and a host of philosophers attempted to resolve the puzzle by denying (in one way or another) that perception is an awareness of distant objects. (Kalderon mentions Parmenides, Melissus, Democritus, and Protagoras as ancient thinkers who took this tack, and he names Berkeley as a modern exponent; I take it that the entire representationalist tradition falls within this camp as well.) The remaining seven chapters describe how Aristotle resolves the puzzle by denying that perception involves literal contact between organ and object, but respecting the facts that make the metaphors of contact and ingestion apt. Kalderon's Aristotle rejects as a category error the view that color can travel or touch things, but he holds that "in seeing, we take in the scene before us by assimilating the chromatic form of the particulars arrayed in the scene, by our experience being constitutively shaped by their color" (191). Thus, in perception, the external world is present to the mind in a way that would be impossible if perception were a mere effect of external objects. The presence is due to a physical process in which the distant object affects a medium and sense organs made of that medium, without literally traveling through them into the perceiver. This theory, which is most fully stated in the book's final chapter, is developed gradually through a series of discussions of knotty passages (mostly) from De Anima 2 and De Sensu. Kalderon's interpretations of these texts are plausible, and his commentary is often insightful—particularly as regards why positions that strike modern readers as absurd would have seemed compelling to Aristotle, and how (sometimes non-obvious) variants of these positions might be defensible in a contemporary context. I found the discussion of the view that "the chromatic hues result from the proportion or ratio of light and dark" (110) especially helpful in this respect. [End Page 343] Concise discussions of prominent competing interpretations make the book a good point of entry to the secondary literature on the relevant Aristotelian chapters. However, these discussions are often too brief to enable the reader to assess Kalderon's interpretation. More importantly, little is said about the significance of each of his interpretive claims to the book's argument. This does not diminish the book's value as a commentary on specific passages, but it makes it hard to read as an "essay in the philosophy of perception." It is difficult to tell digressions from essential content, and readers who are unconvinced of Kalderon...

Pitch Error Coding the Sight Read, Practice, and Performance of an Elite Oboist

This paper presents a developing Pitch Error Coding Protocol for assessing the accuracy of a musician’s performance. The protocol organized performance errors into any of three main categories, each based on an established cognitive theory of music memory and processing: (1) the Serial Distance Hypothesis (SDH); (2) the Implication Realization (I-R) model; and (3) the mental organizing principle of the Schema Theory (SCH). An elite oboist formed the basis of a detailed case study where his sight reading, practice, and performance of a challenging excerpt of music were examined. These data were used to: 1) investigate the protocol; 2) ask whether any protocol components could explain errors better than others; 3) and show where improvements after practice occurred. The results revealed that the SDH accounted for the majority of pitch errors, these originated in a three-note proximity of the target and some SDH errors overlapped with the I-R category errors. Although final counts for SDH and I-R are similar, SDH uniquely identified errors more frequently than the I-R. Future research and development of the protocol might look at combinations of pieces and performer to determine whether SDH may be a dominant source of error.

Mind/body “hard problem” is not a category error

Reber’s Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) has much to recommend it. However, while the CBC effectively renders null any ontological gap between mind and body, it leaves two important remaining gaps unaddressed: the epistemologic and the causal gap. Brakel’s (2013) Diachronic Conjunctive Token Physicalism (DiCoToP) is briefly introduced as a beginning remedy for the epistemologic, but unfortunately not the causal, gap. Thus the “hard problem” remains both hard and problematic.

Caterpillars, consciousness and the origins of mind

A novel framework for the origins of consciousness and mind, the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), is presented. The model is based on a simple, perhaps radical axiom: subjectivity is an inherent feature of particular kinds of organic form. Experiential states, including those denoted as and consciousness, are present in the most primitive species. The model has several conceptual and empirical virtues, among them: (a) it (re)solves the problem of how minds are created by brains ─ also known as the Hard Problem (Chalmers 1995) ─ by showing that the apparent difficulty results from a category error; (b) it redirects the search for the origins of mind from complex neural structures to foundational biomechanical ones; and (c) it reformulates the long-term research focus from looking for miracle moments where a brain is suddenly capable of making a mind to discovering how complex and sophisticated cognitive, emotional and behavioral functions evolve from more primitive ones.

Late modern wars and category errors

Late modern wars and category errors

The Italian Constitutional Court’s Judgment 238 of 2014 Is Not AnotherKadiCase

This article provides a critical view of Judgment No. 238 of 2014 handed down by the Italian Constitutional Court. By and large the comments presented below pertain to the single issue of the relationship between different legal orders — between the legal orders of two states, or between the legal order of one state and the legal order of international law. The following comments are based on a postulate that law is pluralist in its structure. Law is about officially enforced normativity between human beings. As there are multiple sources of law and multiple enforcers, there are also multiple legal systems. These legal systems may choose to yield to each other, they may seek to coordinate between themselves, but they may also conflict and collide. As a matter of principle, a legal order can proclaim the primacy of another legal order in respect of its own norms, including within the proclaiming legal order itself. However, a legal order cannot proclaim the primacy of its own norms within another legal order. This is why Judgment No. 238 represents what this author terms a ‘category error’ when the ruling seeks to determine the content of international law through a methodology that leans heavily upon the primacy of the Constitution of Italy.

Rapid identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing of positive blood cultures using MALDI-TOF MS and a modification of the standardised disc diffusion test: a pilot study

AimsIn an era when clinical microbiology laboratories are under increasing financial pressure, there is a need for inexpensive, yet effective, rapid microbiology tests. The aim of this study was to...

Rethinking the Romance Genre: Global Intimacies in Contemporary Literary and Visual Culture by Emily Davis

Emily Davis. Rethinking the Romance Genre: Global Intimacies in Contemporary Literary and Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. 236. US$95. With a few notable exceptions such as Laura Chrisman's Rereading the Imperial Romance, the romance genre has received little sustained analysis from transnational or postcolonial perspectives. Even existing works such as Chrisman's are narrow in geographic scope and tend to focus on Victorian romance fiction. Emily Davis' Rethinking the Romance Genre represents an important step in studies of the genre, and the book is in particular a timely and significant resource for the study of contemporary romance from a postcolonial feminist perspective. Davis follows a tradition of scholarship on the romance that explores the genre's political complexities. Taking an even more positive stance than early scholarship in the field such as Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance, Davis argues that global romances provide crucial lessons for a transnational feminist politics ... in an era of flexible capitalism (2). While acknowledging, as have previous scholars, that popular literature is often politically compromised, Davis nevertheless insists that popular genres can be harnessed to radical politics. While she may be overstating the case somewhat--it is not exactly clear how the romances under her investigation provide crucial lessons for transnational feminism, for example--the book nevertheless successfully challenges the widespread views among scholars and pundits that romance is incompatible with politics or politically conservative. In the first part of her book, Davis examines utopian texts that use romance narratives to imagine national and transnational alliances. Specifically, this section studies South African, interracial, anti-apartheid romances of the 1980s and finds that they deploy problematic discourses of masculinist nationalism. Davis also examines texts that revise the colonial romance tradition (a love story between a Western white woman and a colonial male subject [22]) to overcome the limitations of the nationalist romance and envision the possibilities of transnational alliances, particularly between women from the North and South. The second part of Davis' book focuses on gothic texts that challenge the romance tradition. Davis argues that the romance is one of the favored forms of colonialist rhetoric and that anti-colonialist texts therefore use the gothic, romance's dark twin, in an effort to romance as an instrument of oppression passed on by colonialism to a contemporary neocolonial world system dominated by economic globalization (102). This portion of the text demonstrates impressive geographic and textual range and studies novels and plays set in the Caribbean, the Philippines, and India as well as contemporary film and television. The main problem with Davis' otherwise solid and important book is its tendency toward category errors. This occurs in her history of the romance genre early in the book and in her choice of romances for analysis later in the book. While the former may be more justifiable than the latter, both expose the underlying problem. In her brief history of the romance tradition in the introduction of her book, Davis traces the genre from Greek sources to medieval courtly narrative poems in twelfth-century France to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels. At this point in history, she suggests, the romance bifurcates into utopian stories (of romantic love in a feminized domestic sphere and masculinized adventures of nationalist heroes) and dystopian gothic stories representing associated with the social and economic changes of early modernity (6). Contemporary gothic romances, she argues, reflect fears about globalization--that is, enduring anxieties about modernity. …

COMPOSITION, RESEARCH AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE: A RESPONSE TO JOHN CROFT

AbstractJohn Croft's ‘Composition is Not Research’ (TEMPO Vol. 69, No. 272 (2015), pp. 6–11) argues that, ‘the very idea that musical composition is a form of research is a category error’ (p. 6). My response argues that Croft's analysis is borne of a widespread, misguided and essentialist attempt to reduce all research to the paradigm of scientific method, and that he accepts this paradigm uncritically. Whilst asserting that ‘composition is research’ does not entail a category mistake (as the whole point about research is that it is not delimited in any way), assuming that all research must be reducible to the scientific paradigm of method does entail the requisite reification to constitute such a mistake. The imposition of this reductionist paradigm has a distorting impact on the Humanities more generally and, whilst these distortions are particularly acute with musical composition, that is no reason to single it out for persecution. I argue that where the tenets of scientific method are adopted outside of science, this constitutes, more often than not, superficial pseudo-science (or scientism), whereby the tenets of scientific method are fetishized and applied divorced from the complete scientific method and scientific objectives. I conclude that the Humanities would do better to develop its own paradigms – paradigms that are better suited and intrinsic to its respective disciplines.

Democratic policing, community policing and the fallacy of conflation in international police development missions

In international police development missions it has become common practice to regard ‘community policing’ as a synonym for ‘democratic policing’. It is argued here that democratic policing is the parent concept and that community policing is simply one among a range of possible manifestations of some, but by no means all, of the democratic policing ideals (in so far as they can be identified). To conflate the two, or even to recognise the difference yet accord equal status, is a category error. The result yields two corrosive products: incomplete application of democratic policing in every case, and cultural inappropriateness in some.

Text as Sliding Signifier

In the 1980s Ricoeur conceptualized metaphoricity and narrativity as twin ends of a discursive field governed by the productive imagination. A decade earlier Ricoeur was working at a significantly different proposition. He wanted to establish a parallel, in fact a strong homology, between metaphor and text. In both cases Ricoeur articulated a complex criteriology to establish the parallelism between the terms. Should we regard the earlier parallel as a first and less precise version of the later? a distinct thesis? a reconcilable claim? a category error? Was the rejection and return an evolution, a clarification, or simply a different topic? The thesis of this close reading of Ricoeur’s middle period writings on metaphor is that the shift of analogical relations is actually a migration from the first to the second homology, and that the second homology is the correct one.

‘IP’ Moral Rights Breaches are Deception Offences, Not Property Offences: Correcting a Category Error

In March of 2014 Nature Publishing Group, responsible for the publication of journals such as Nature and Scientific American, was subject to criticism for its requirement that contributing authors waive their moral rights (a component of their copyright) in relation to their published articles. Some of the rights included under the umbrella term ‘moral rights’ are the right to have any copies of one’s work reproduced accurately and without alteration; the right to the accurate attribution of one’s work under one’s own name; and the right not to have the work of others falsely attributed to oneself. The Nature Publishing case, from the criticism it sparked to the group’s own response, highlights a category error that occurs when moral rights are conceived of as property rights. Rather, moral rights are natural, non-proprietary rights. In correcting this category error it becomes evident that moral rights offences are not property offences, such as theft, but fraud offences—like plagiarism and forgery. Subsequently, whereas property rights, by definition, are able to be transferred or waived, it can be shown that no justification can be made for treating moral rights as transferrable or able to be waived.

Assessing the Relationship between Semantic Processing and Thought Disorder Symptoms in Schizophrenia.

Aberrant semantic processing has been linked to the etiology of formal thought disorder (TD) symptoms in schizophrenia. In this cross-sectional study, two prominent theories, overactivation and disorganized structure of semantic memory (SM), were examined in relation to TD symptoms using the continuum approach across two established semantic tasks (direct/indirect semantic priming and categorical fluency). The aim was to examine the validity of the two TD theories in relation to TD symptoms in schizophrenia. Greater direct and indirect priming, fluency productivity and category errors were expected if the data supported the overactivation theory. Reduced fluency productivity and increased category errors would be characteristic of disorganized storage. Fifty-seven schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder patients and 48 controls completed a clinical assessment and the semantic tasks. There was significantly reduced direct priming in patients compared to controls (p<.05), while indirect priming was not significantly different; there was no association between TD and degree of priming. Patients produced more category-inappropriate words (p<.005) than controls, which was related to increasing severity of circumstantiality. The pattern of results was more indicative of a disorganized SM storage problem in this sample. This phenomenon may underlie some TD symptoms in general schizophrenia. The findings strengthen the relationship between SM deficits and TD symptoms, though this appears to differ between individual symptoms. The authors discuss the value of the continuum approach in addressing research questions in TD etiology. Given low levels of TD in this study, replication of these findings in a sample with greater TD is desirable.

Género y conductas de riesgo para la salud: una aproximación desde un punto de vista interconductual

The multidisciplinary approach of gender has been stalled by a lack of precision and conceptual clarity, including category errors as they are known from a rylean perspective, taking concepts that belongs to a given scope (i.e. psychology) trying to extrapolate them to analyze a phenomena that belongs to another area of knowledge (i.e. sociology). We argue in favor of clarity defining the different facets of the study of gender. An interbehavioral approach emphasizes individual adjustment to the conventions of gender, suggesting that the analysis of the interaction between gender and risk-taking behaviors related to health should involve identifying specific situational elements and relationships: macrocontingencies (i.e. conventions, values, beliefs) and microcontingencies (i.e. specific situation, people, dispositional factors). We conclude that the implementation of the analysis proposed here will facilitate the detection of risk-taking behaviors and the development of effective strategies for their prevention.