Central Puzzles Research Articles

Hits and Myths: The Essence, the Puzzles and the Missile Crisis

Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis is recognized more for its general decision-making models than for its historical analysis. The second (1999) edition, co-authored with Philip Zelikow, adopts the same basic models and answers the same three ‘central puzzles’ of the missile crisis: (1) why did the USSR deploy nuclear missiles to Cuba; (2) why did the United States blockade Cuba; and (3) why did the USSR withdraw its missiles? This review article questions the answers Allison and Zelikow provide to each of these questions. In particular, I discuss the importance of the partially secret Khrushchev–Kennedy agreement as a factor in ending the crisis and present new evidence suggesting that Turkey may not, as usually assumed, have been opposed at the time of the crisis to decommissioning its US Jupiter missiles. I also suggest some additional missile crisis questions beyond the three ‘central puzzles’.

Feedforward Origins of Response Variability Underlying Contrast Invariant Orientation Tuning in Cat Visual Cortex

Contrast invariant orientation tuning in simple cells of the visual cortex depends critically on contrast dependent trial-to-trial variability in their membrane potential responses. This observation raises the question of whether this variability originates from within the cortical circuit or the feedforward inputs from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). To distinguish between these two sources of variability, we first measured membrane potential responses while inactivating the surrounding cortex, and found that response variability was nearly unaffected. We then studied variability in the LGN, including contrast dependence, and the trial-to-trial correlation in responses between nearby neurons. Variability decreased significantly with contrast, whereas correlation changed little. When these experimentally measured parameters of variability were applied to a feedforward model of simple cells that included realistic mechanisms of synaptic integration, contrast-dependent, orientation independent variability emerged in the membrane potential responses. Analogous mechanisms might contribute to the stimulus dependence and propagation of variability throughout the neocortex.

Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (review)

Reviewed by: Tacit and Explicit Knowledge Wiebe E. Bijker (bio) Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. By Harry Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. xiv+186. $32.50. This book serves as yet another argument why a scholarly journal in the history of technology should indeed be titled “technology and culture.” According to Harry Collins, most, if not all, machines work only because humans make up for the social failures of these machines. Technologies only work when they are part of culture. Take the pocket calculator. Have calculators “learned arithmetic” when being designed and built? Have humans delegated their arithmetic knowledge to calculators? The sum “7, divided by 11, multiplied by 11” will in most cases give an answer with a long decimal tail, while anyone with the smallest knowledge of arithmetic knows the answer to be 7. We can use calculators, Collins argues, because we humans have tacit knowledge of the strong type, “collective tacit knowledge” that compensates for the calculator’s lack of cultural knowledge about how to use arithmetic in human interactions. Collins distinguishes three types of tacit knowledge, where until now we had only one: weak, or relational, tacit knowledge is tacit without any fundamental philosophical reason. It may be tacit because of secrecy or because of not making the effort to fully explicate what one knows. Think of an old warehouse man who knows exactly where to find the parts on the shelves; he may not be able to actually list everything, but when shown an example or given a proper description, he’ll find his way through the racks to the proper location. A computer, when properly programmed, would be able to do the same, though possibly in a different manner. With enough effort, any piece of relational tacit knowledge can be made explicit. Medium, or somatic, tacit knowledge is tacit because it is tied to the human body. Here the famous example is the one Michael Polanyi used in his early introduction of tacit knowledge. When we ride our bicycles, we do not self-consciously use any models of physics to calculate balance. Rather, [End Page 809] practice and training somehow establish the capability to balance on a riding bicycle into our neural and muscular systems in ways that we cannot make explicit. We cannot tell anyone how we do it, and hence we call this knowledge tacit. In principle, however, all that goes into the balancing could be explained in terms of physics and mechanics (and indeed has), and thus might be built into a sophisticated robot. This somatic tacit knowledge is embedded into our human body, but is not principally inexplicable. Strong, or collective, tacit knowledge is the irreducible heartland of the concept. Here it is about knowledge being social. The example can be bicycle riding again, but now not as balancing on an empty field but as moving about in traffic. This, for example, involves knowing how to make eye contact with car drivers on a busy junction, knowing which traffic signs to obey and which to ignore, predicting the behavior of cars, pedestrians, and other cyclists, and knowing how that would be different in different cities. This kind of knowledge we can only learn by participating in a social world, interacting with other people. This is the kind of knowledge that we do not know how to make fully explicit and build into machines. Where somatic tacit knowledge is embodied in the human physique, collective tacit knowledge is embodied in society. This is an exceptionally well-written book, and if it wasn’t worth reading for its arguments it would be so for its lucid and engaging style. It contains gems such as a list of different forms of communication characterized by how types of knowledge are transferred, and an analysis of “cannot”: Collins shows eight ways in which something cannot be done, and then links this to knowledge transfer. Collins fundamentally redefines one of the central puzzles in the philosophy and sociology of knowledge by turning the classic problem of tacit knowledge on its head. Tacit knowledge is what enables us to move around in the world; it is our regular mode of knowing, teaching, and learning. What...

The Road to Somewhere: Why Health Reform Happened

Why did comprehensive health care reform pass in 2010? Why did it take the form it did—a form that, while undeniably ambitious, was also more limited than many advocates wanted, than health policy precedents set abroad, and than the scale of the problems it tackled? And why was this legislation, despite its limits, the subject of such vigorous and sometimes vicious attacks? These are the questions I tackle in this essay, drawing not just on recent scholarship on American politics but also on the somewhat-improbable experience that I had as an active participant in this fierce and polarized debate. My conclusions have implications not only for how political scientists should understand what happened in 2009–10, but also for how they should understand American politics. In particular, the central puzzles raised by the health reform debate suggest why students of American politics should give public policy—what government does to shape people's lives—a more central place within their investigations. Political scientists often characterize politics as a game among undifferentiated competitors, played out largely through campaigns and elections, with policy treated mostly as an afterthought—at best, as a means of testing theories of electoral influence and legislative politics. The health care debate makes transparent the weaknesses of this approach. On a range of key matters at the core of the discipline—the role and influence of interest groups; the nature of partisan policy competition; the sources of elite polarization; the relationship between voters, activists, and elected officials; and more—the substance of public policy makes a big difference. Focusing on what government actually does has normative benefits, serving as a useful corrective to the tendency of political science to veer into discussions of matters deemed trivial by most of the world outside the academy. But more important, it has majoranalyticalpayoffs—and not merely for our understanding of the great health care debate of 2009–10.

Slicing the cuprate Fermi surface to reveal underlying order

A complete theoretical picture of high-Tc superconductivity in the cuprates is still lacking despite more than two decades of research. One of the central puzzles in these materials is related to the nature of the low-lying electronic excitations that seems to differ radically between the underdoped and overdoped regimes that define the edges of the superconducting dome. While there is little doubt that overdoped cuprates are bad metals with a large Fermi surface, the nature of low-lying excitations in underdoped cuprates is a matter of intensive debate. The recent discovery of quantum oscillations (QO) in the electrical resistance of the low-disorder ortho-II YBa2Cu3O6.5[1] under a magnetic field strong enough to suppress superconductivity has opened up a new direction of research in the high Tc area and re-inserted the concept of a Fermi liquid (FL) into the underdoped region, where it was long thought that fermionic coherence is completely lost. The issue of QO has been the subject of intensive debates in the literature over the last three years (see Refs. [1–5, 7–10], to name a few). The debates will surely intensify because of new quantum oscillation experiments that show more periods than before, allowing the detection of multiple oscillation frequencies, and a new interpretation of this data presented in an article in Physical Review B by Suchitra E. Sebastian and her international team of colleagues from Cambridge and Oxford universities in the UK, Los Alamos Laboratory in the US, the University of British Columbia and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, both in Canada, and Max-Planck-Institut fur Feskorperforschung in Stuttgart, Germany [11]. According to the standard Lifshitz-Kosevich theory [12], quantum oscillations in a FL originate from Landau quantization of closed orbits in a magnetic field. A period F of QO is related to an extreme cross section of the Fermi surface (FS) by F=nΦ0, where n is the carrier density enclosed by the FS, and Φ0 is the magnetic flux quantum. QO measurements in the overdoped Tl2Ba2CuO6+δ[6] revealed a large hole FS, consistent with photoemission [13] and with the Luttinger count for free electrons. In sharp contrast, Fermi surfaces extracted from QO measurements in underdoped YBCO are small pockets, which collectively account for only few percent of the area of the Brillouin zone (BZ). Such small pockets imply that the FS undergoes a substantial reconstruction between overdoped and underdoped regimes. FS reconstruction and small pockets are expected when the system develops a density-wave order in either spin or charge channel (spin-density wave (SDW) [14] or d-density wave (DDW) [7], respectively). In both cases, however, the reconstructed FS contains both electron and hole pockets, at least when the order parameter is not too large. The measurements of QO revealed multiple oscillation frequencies, several of them as satellites of the major peak at F∼ 530 T[3, 5]. This peak was originally identified [5] as coming from an electron pocket on the basis of required consistency with the observed negative sign of the Hall coefficient, and satellites were attributed to bilayer splitting and warping of an electron FS. Sebastian et al. have offered another interpretation of the QO data [11]. They argue that the major peak corresponds to the hole pocket located near (π/2,π/2) (the α pocket in their notations), while the two satellites at 460 T and 602 T correspond to electron γ pockets near (0,π) and symmetry-related points (see Fig.1). They further associate the high-frequency oscillation at 1650 T, which they identified earlier [3], with another, larger hole β pocket, and argue that their (α,β,γ) pocket structure is quantitatively consistent with the FS for an incommensurate SDW state. The agreement with the data becomes even better once one includes the ortho-II potential due to oxygen ordering [8].

The coevolution of cooperation and dispersal in social groups and its implications for the emergence of multicellularity.

BackgroundRecent work on the complexity of life highlights the roles played by evolutionary forces at different levels of individuality. One of the central puzzles in explaining transitions in individuality for entities ranging from complex cells, to multicellular organisms and societies, is how different autonomous units relinquish control over their functions to others in the group. In addition to the necessity of reducing conflict over effecting specialized tasks, differentiating groups must control the exploitation of the commons, or else be out-competed by more fit groups.ResultsWe propose that two forms of conflict – access to resources within groups and representation in germ line – may be resolved in tandem through individual and group-level selective effects. Specifically, we employ an optimization model to show the conditions under which different within-group social behaviors (cooperators producing a public good or cheaters exploiting the public good) may be selected to disperse, thereby not affecting the commons and functioning as germ line. We find that partial or complete dispersal specialization of cheaters is a general outcome. The propensity for cheaters to disperse is highest with intermediate benefit:cost ratios of cooperative acts and with high relatedness. An examination of a range of real biological systems tends to support our theory, although additional study is required to provide robust tests.ConclusionWe suggest that trait linkage between dispersal and cheating should be operative regardless of whether groups ever achieve higher levels of individuality, because individual selection will always tend to increase exploitation, and stronger group structure will tend to increase overall cooperation through kin selected benefits. Cheater specialization as dispersers offers simultaneous solutions to the evolution of cooperation in social groups and the origin of specialization of germ and soma in multicellular organisms.

Your Money and Your Brain

This trade book on neuroeconomics presents the latest findings from neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics. It seeks to explain one of the central puzzles in financial behavior: why individual and professional investors alike so persistently fail to learn from their own mistakes. 'Your Money and Your Brain' combines the findings of neuroimaging labs around the world with empirical studies in behavioral finance and case studies of actual decisions by both retail and professional investors. The book is organized around the theme of the emotions aroused by financial decision-making - among them, greed, confidence, surprise, regret and happiness. Each chapter concludes with practical recommendations on how individuals and investment firms can improve their financial decision-making.

Abdicating and Limiting Parliament's Sovereignty — Reply to Goldsworthy

Jeffery Goldsworthy’s thoughtful review article is just the sort of response that one hopes for in writing a monograph. Inevitably, authors focus on certain puzzles which are of greatest interest to them. In spending so many evenings and weekends worrying about the detail of these puzzles, one’s greatest hope is not only that other readers will find those efforts helpful and worthwhile, but that they will be motivated to join issue. And this is exactly what Jeffrey Goldsworthy has done in his review article.Goldsworthy’s writing covers a wide range of comparative constitutional law and theory. He has already presented carefully thought out views on many central constitutional and theoretical puzzles. It is not surprising, therefore, that he does not agree with me in many regards. However, it is gratifying that he has taken the time to engage so thoroughly with the arguments presented in The Constitution of Independence.The purpose of this Reply is to isolate points of agreement and disagreement in aid of future research and writing in the area of comparative constitutional law and theory. As both Goldsworthy and I acknowledge, a certain amount of complexity, even confusion, is inevitable in this area. I have tried to keep this Reply relatively brief in order not to add to that complexity, and in the hope of avoiding confusion. The point of this sort of mise au point is to assist readers in knowing where to direct their own contemplations of these topics.The balance of this Reply will deal first with central points of debate or disagreement, and later with points of agreement.

Tyrannus Rex vs. Leviathan

Hobbes famously deflates the status of the tyrant, saying that tyranny is no more than monarchy misliked. This formula does not capture the complexities of his treatment of tyranny, however, and markedly fails to explain Hobbes's own employment of the vocabulary of tyranny. Hobbes's criticism and use of the concept of tyranny are examined, and solutions to central puzzles are offered.

Private Law and Private Narratives

Responsibility and Fault collects Tony Honore's recent essays about the familiar form of responsibility that he calls 'outcome responsibility', the kind of re sponsibility that is invoked when an agent is held responsible for some outcome to which he or she has contributed. Outcome responsibility is a familiar and pervasive feature of human life-persons think of themselves, and of each other, in terms of the impact that they have in the world. It is difficult to imagine what human life would be like without it. Our conception of interpersonal interaction is shaped by it, as is our autobiographical conception of ourselves as persons. I apologize to you if I jostle you in the corridor, because the dropping of your pile of papers is the result of my doing. In the quiet of my study, I take credit for solving this week's crossword puzzle, or feel foolish for having yet again spilled coffee into my keyboard. As Honore puts it, 'This responsibility is an essential constituent of our character and identity, without which we would lack both achievements and failures' (at 76). This type of responsibility is the inevitable concomitant of the fact that when humans act, they make their way in the world, changing it in countless ways. Once Honore has drawn our attention to it, the idea of outcome responsibility is familiar, and everywhere. The book's main focus is on the way in which this familiar idea animates the law, particularly the law of torts.' One of the central puzzles of tort theory can be posed as a question about outcome responsibility, and the particular ways in which people can be related to consequences. There are two aspects to this question. The first of these centres around a knot of interpretive questions, about what counts as a consequence in the legally relevant sense, and about how those consequences matter. Honore has done groundbreaking work on this first question, both on his own and together with H.L.A. Hart. Causation and the

Creating and enforcing norms, with special reference to sanctions

Two central puzzles about social norms are how they are enforced and how they are created or modified. The sanctions for the violation of a norm can be categorized as automatic, guilt, shame, informational, bilateral costly, and multilateral costly. The choice of sanction is related to problems in creating and modifying norms. We use our analysis of the creation, modification, and enforcement of norms to analyze the scope of feasible government action either to promote desirable norms or to repress undesirable ones. We conclude that the difficulty of predicting the effect of such action limits its feasible scope.

Chemokine receptors as HIV-1 coreceptors: roles in viral entry, tropism, and disease.

In addition to CD4, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) requires a coreceptor for entry into target cells. The chemokine receptors CXCR4 and CCR5, members of the G protein-coupled receptor superfamily, have been identified as the principal coreceptors for T cell line-tropic and macrophage-tropic HIV-1 isolates, respectively. The updated coreceptor repertoire includes numerous members, mostly chemokine receptors and related orphans. These discoveries provide a new framework for understanding critical features of the basic biology of HIV-1, including the selective tropism of individual viral variants for different CD4+ target cells and the membrane fusion mechanism governing virus entry. The coreceptors also provide molecular perspectives on central puzzles of HIV-1 disease, including the selective transmission of macrophage-tropic variants, the appearance of T cell line-tropic variants in many infected persons during progression to AIDS, and differing susceptibilities of individuals to infection and disease progression. Genetic findings have yielded major insights into the in vivo roles of individual coreceptors and their ligands; of particular importance is the discovery of an inactivating mutation in the CCR5 gene which, in homozygous form, confers strong resistance to HIV-1 infection. Beyond providing new perspectives on fundamental aspects of HIV-1 transmission and pathogenesis, the coreceptors suggest new avenues for developing novel therapeutic and preventative strategies to combat the AIDS epidemic.

Biodiversity at the edge: a test of the importance of spatial "mass effects" in the Rothamsted Park Grass experiments.

The coexistence of many plant species competing for a few resources is one of the central puzzles of community ecology. One explanation is that different species may be competitively superior in different microhabitats. Many species could then coexist within each piece of a mosaic landscape by what has been termed "mass effects," because subpopulations in areas with negative growth rates would be supplemented by propagules from areas with reproductive surpluses. If mass effects are important, plant species diversity should increase near habitat boundaries, especially where habitat differences are moderate. In the first experimental test of this prediction, plants were censused on 54 transects within the long-established Rothamsted Park Grass plots. Very few showed significant declines in species richness with distance from subplot boundaries. Nonetheless, the regression coefficients were negative much more often than expected by chance, suggesting that weak mass effects operated. The effect was strongest where neighboring subplots differed greatly, with no evidence of the predicted decline where differences were extreme. Detailed analyses of transects with apparent mass effects revealed few species that behaved as predicted. This study serves both to provide evidence of the existence of mass effects and to question their importance in the maintenance of local plant diversity in this system.

An Agenda for Political Psychology: Alexander George as Architect, Engineer and Community-Builder

The scholarship of Alexander L. George identifies central puzzles in political psychology and international relations. This essay reviews his pioneering work on personality and foreign policy behavior, cognition and foreign policy behavior, decision making, the importance of substantive theory in the explanation of foreign policy behavior, process theory and the explanation of decision making, and policy-relevant theory that bridges the gap between the academic and policy communities. In his scholarship, George defined an enduring blueprint for the study of the psychology of international relations and simultaneously built bridges across disciplines. George is architect, engineer, and communitybuilder in political psychology. A collection of essays generally coheres around a single theme. But in a volume honoring the contribution of Alexander L. George to political psychology, this kind of concentration is impossible. In his long and productive career, he has identified central problems, raised important new questions, and stimulated research in almost every corner of the field. The six contributors to this volume honor Alexander George by tracing the linkages between one of the many questions he has raised and the research each is now doing. Through their essays, we can trace the intellectual development and research program of one of the fathers of political psychology. At the same time, the essays also map many important strands in contemporary political psychology. That they do so is testimony to the enduring legacy of the work of Alexander George, who has been at once an architect, an engineer, and a community-builder in the field.

Dynamics and Transubstantiation in Leibniz's Systema Theologicum

Dynamics and Transubstantiation in Leibniz's SystemaTheologicum DANIEL C. FOUKE 1. INTRODUCTION FROMTHE X66OSto the end of his life, two of Leibniz's primary concerns were to reunify the churches and to provide a defense of the rationality of Christian theism. Both projects require, among other things, some account of the "mysteries " of the faith. The "mysteries" are doctrines, like those of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and transubstantiation, which are revealed and must be believed, but which yet remain beyond the power of reason to either demonstrate or comprehend., The epistemic status of these mysteries is therefore highly problematic : how can one believe in a proposition which cannot be understood, and if such belief were possible, then how could it be defended against charges of irrationality? Leibniz approaches this problem by interpreting the mysteries as pr/mafac/e impossibilities. The job of the theologian and apologist is then to demonstrate, through metaphysical analysis, that these mysteries are genuine logical possibilities which transcend the natural order, but which may be realized at least through the power of God. In this way, it is possible to understand and believe the claims of the Church, even though faith still has its role, because reason is helpless to demonstrate that such mysteries actually occur." Among the mysteries of the faith which Leibniz discusses, there is none to which he devoted more labor than the Eucharist. Leibniz's lifelong project of ' See Denzinger, "SystematicIndex of Dogmaticand Moral Matters," Ib, in The Sourcesof CatholkDograa, trans. RoyDeferrari (St.Louisand London: B. Herder, 1957). 9For an interesting and thorough discussionof the epistemologicalstatus of the Christian mysteries,and howLeibnizconfrontsthisproblemwitha theory oflanguage,seeMarceloDascal, "Reasonand the Mysteriesof Faith: Leibnizon the Meaningof ReligiousDiscourse,"in Le//m~" Language,S/gasand Thought(Amsterdamand Philadelphia:John Benjamins,1987). [45] 46 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:1 JANUARY 1994 reunifying the churches forced him to give some discussion of this bone of contention among Christians.s It has been shown elsewhere that the early attempts to demonstrate the possibility of transubstantiation (which were part of Leibniz's effort to reunify the churches) exercised a significant influence on the development of Leibniz's mature metaphysics.4 While Leibniz continued to work for reunification of the churches during his middle period,5 there are important changes in both his explanation of transubstantiation and the role of this explanation in his metaphysical development. In his early period Leibniz concentrated on the Eucharist as one of the central puzzles to be solved in a first step toward reunification of the churches and a defense of Christian rationality. He experimented with a variety of metaphysical systems which would allow him to account intelligibly for substantial change in the Host, and was finally led to place primary emphasis on minds as the only genuine sources of substantiality. This was a significant step towards the metaphysics of the mid-168os and the 169os. Leibniz again turns to a discussion of transubstantiation in the Systerna Theologicurn and the correspondence with Pellison 6 and Bossuet, the Bishop of sAfter Boineburg's death, Leibniz reveals his view that transubstantiation is of central metaphysical importance in a letter to DukeJohann Friedrich into whose service Leibniz had entered. In this letter of 1679 Leibniz proposes the revival of a project he had earlier pursued for Boineburg, a work to be entitled Dmon.arat/onesCaato/kat. This work was to be written in three parts, the first giving demonstrations of the existence of God and the soul, the second giving proofs of the possibilities of the mysteries, and the third dealing with the relations between the Church and the state. It was to be accompanied by a preface which would include a new logic dealing with Utheart of weighing probabilities and discovering to which of two sides the balance tips," and was also to indude a treatment of metaphysics clarifying the notions of'God, the soul, person, and the nature of substance and accidents." In particular the metaphysical discussion would aim to reestablish and intelligibly explain "the substantial forms that the Cartesians claim to have destroyed as inexplicable chimeras, to the prejudice of our religion, whose mysteries would be only impossibilities if the nature of bodies consists...

Minority Rights, Jewish Political Traditions, and Zionism

One of the central puzzles of Israeli politics is the general strength of democratic institutions, given the fact that relatively few of the immigrants to Palestine or to Israel over the last century came from countries with a viable democratic tradition. A second puzzle is that one of the weaker aspects of these democratic institutions is respect for minority rights, though it is precisely as a minority group that Jewish historical experience is most extensive. A number of influences have clearly contributed to this outcome. The general currents of Western liberalism, the role of the British model, and populist aspects of East European socialist ideologies all pushed the Zionist movement and Israeli governance a democratic direction. On the other hand, Zionism, like contemporary nationalisms to which it was both an imitation and a reaction, focused on the rights of those who shared a Jewish identity rather than their relations with those who did not. As Jews knew all too well from their own experience with modern nationalism, the place of minorities a state based on the principle of nationality was highly problematic. Furthermore, Zionism functioned a Middle Eastern context where ethnoreligious particularism the delineation of all rights and privileges according to group identity was the rule even before the advent of modern nationalism. And finally, Zionism and Israel both have had to contend with an ethnic group considered to represent a basic threat to the security or survival of the Jewish community. While these influences may be important, one cannot overlook the impact of political traditions developed during centuries of Jewish communal life. Attitudes toward democratic procedures and non-Jewish rights were inevitably shaped by the way that Jews had customarily organized their political life; as Shlomo Avineri argues, in the Jewish kehilla [community] lie the origins of Israeli democracy as well as some of the lack of elegance which ac-

Why Does Miles Die? A Study of Britten's The Turn of the Screw

Journal Article Why Does Miles Die? A Study of Britten's The Turn of the Screw Get access CLIFFORD HINDLEY CLIFFORD HINDLEY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Musical Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1990, Pages 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/74.1.1 Published: 01 January 1990