Explanation Of Action Research Articles

Touchy matter: the delicate balance between Morgan’s canon and open-minded description of advanced cognitive skills in the animal

Fayet, Hansen and Biro (1) provide two observations of Atlantic puffins, Fratercula arctica, performing self-directed actions while holding a stick in their beaks. The authors interpret this as evidence of tool use as they suggest that the stick was manipulated towards the birds’ plumage with the specific goal of scratching. While these are interesting observations, the authors do not address a simple and likely explanation of the self-directed actions that does not constitute tool use; that the observations occurred by chance. As such, their conclusions about tool use and cognition in seabirds are premature.

The functions of parenthetical structures in the context of communicative registers of the language (in the novel Aviator by E. G. Vodolazkin)

The article provides an analysis of parenthetical structures in the novel Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin in light of its genre peculiarities and in the context of communicative registers of the language. In the diary entries of Innokentiy Platonov (the main character of the novel), the parenthetical structures appear instrumental for a variety of communicative tasks, for example, they mark important details of the past and recapture memories of the events making the reader a witness; they also help to provide explanations of situations and actions and express the reaction to what is happening or taking place. The additional speech plan of parenthetical structures easily correlates with: 1) informative register (the author of the diary shares his knowledge with the readers); 2) reproductive register (the events are described as occurring or taking place in front of the author and the readers); 3) reactive register (the author of the diary expresses his reaction to the events of the past and present). The article describes the major groups of parenthetical structures in terms of their meaning, singled out within each communicative register, and provides data on the number of items selected by means of the continuous sampling method. It is established that the most frequent parenthetical structures in the novel are those operating in the context of the informative register, predominantly with the meaning of incidental, clarifying or particularizing information, and also those performing a reasoning function.

On the Clandestine Moral Order Embodied in Psychoanalytic Explanations of Actions

In many contemporary societies, multitudes have used and are still using psychoanalysis to account for their actions to one another, by attributing to them repressed motives as their causes. The significance of this wide metaclinical use of psychoanalysis remains deeply misunderstood, as searchers predominantly treat psychoanalysis as a pure theory (despite the fact that it transformed social interactions), or as an asocial procedure, achieved by individuals escaping the moral requirements of society. To correct our vision of psychoanalysis, I rely on Michael Polanyi’s analysis of moral inversion and Charles W. Mills’ sketch of a psychoanalytic vocabulary of motives. An analysis of Freud’s theory of repression benefitting from those complementary insights shows that it allows contemporaries to assert backhandedly and indirectly their commitment to the cardinal values of an emerging individualist society.

Culture and Individual Action: Rebuilding the Broken Dialog Between Anthropology and Psychology

The separation of psychology and anthropology was considered “as one of the most stunting developments in the history of the human sciences” (Bruner 1996). Meta-analysis of theoretical perspectives proves the insufficiency of action explanation in both fields. We think it is a good incentive to start rebuilding the broken dialog between the disciplines by examining the ways in which contemporary psychological anthropology and cultural psychology inform and challenge one another (Mattingly, Lutkehaus, & Throop, Ethos, 36(1), 1–28, 2008). The cultural models school of contemporary psychological anthropology defines culture as the collection of cultural schemes (D’Andrade 1995; Shore 1996; Strauss and Quinn 1997). This definition minimized the distance between culture and action, as it moved culture into the human mind. Meanwhile, this school faced the gap between cognition and action – the well-known issues of “directive force” of these models (to influence individual’s actions cognitive schemas need to be associated with affect at the level of the individual (Westen 2001). Here we argue that semiotic cultural psychological insights on how affective processes are semiotically organized can usefully complement contemporary psychological anthropology and thus enable to account for the fundamental role of affects in influencing individual action by culture.

Inhibition of lipolysis: A novel explanation for the hypothermic actions of acetaminophen in non-febrile rodents

Acetaminophen is both widely used to treat children with fever and is also responsible for thousands being hospitalised annually. Historically the antipyretic actions of acetaminophen were attributed to the inhibition of cyclooxygenase (COX-1/2) enzymes and more recently a novel COX-1 variant (COX-3) located in the brain. However, the evidence for acetaminophen-mediated COX inhibition remains contentious. This study assesses the impact of acetaminophen and other putative COX-3 inhibitors on the release of fatty acids during lipolysis as an alternative mechanism by which antipyretics can reduce body temperature during fever. 3T3-L1 adipocytes, primary brown adipocytes and isolated mitochondria were exposed to COX-3 inhibitors and lipolysis and mitochondrial electron transport chain function assessed. Acetaminophen, aminopyrine and antipyrine at 1–10 mM caused a significant decrease (up to 70%; P < 0.01, from control) in lipolysis within 1, 3 and 24 h without affecting cell viability. The inhibition was observed regardless of where along its signalling pathway lipolysis was stimulated. All three compounds were found to significantly attenuate mitochondrial function by up to 30% for complex I and 40% for complex II (P < 0.01, from control). These novel observations combined with the known limited inhibition of the COX enzymes by acetaminophen suggest both the antipyretic and hypothermia induced by acetaminophen and related compounds could be attributed to the direct inhibition of lipolysis and mitochondrial function, rather than cyclooxygenase inhibition centrally. Further these observations could provide new drug targets for reducing fever with the added bonus of fewer individuals being hospitalized by accidental acetaminophen overdose.

The Problem of Luck and the Contradictory Nature of Moral Responsibility in the Libertarian Accounts of Free Will

This paper aims to reveal the structural problem of libertarian accounts of free will. It is divided into three parts. In the first part, I formulate the main principles of libertarian accounts from the perspective of their values. I argue that there are two main understandings of autonomy that motivate libertarian project: causal-autonomy and substance-autonomy. Causal-autonomy refers to independency from the factors that are beyond the control of the agent. Substance-autonomy concerns the existence of the substance of self, which is self-sufficient and exercises control over a person’s behavior. I show that different strands of metaphysical libertarianism could be understood within the context of this distinction. Agent-causal theories emphasize the value of substance-autonomy as a necessary condition for causal-autonomy. Event-causal libertarianism considers causal-autonomy to be sufficient for genuine freedom of will. In the second part, I discuss different formulations of the problem of luck. I show the respective advantages of compatibilist position in the context of the problem of luck and sketch the main strategies of libertarian responses to this problem. Four versions of the problem of luck are discussed: rollback argument, promise argument, the problem of contrastive explanation of action and Hume’s statement of the problem of luck. In the third part, I develop Hume’s criticism of libertarianism making this criticism independent from Hume’s denial of the possibility of causal indeterminism. I argue that causal account of action both in event-causal theories and in agent-causal theories leads to contradictory intuitions about agent’s responsibility in indeterministic universe. My argument purports to show that attributions of moral responsibility for indetermined actions are not grounded because person is intuitively both responsible and not responsible for these actions.

Empathy for a reason? From understanding agency to phenomenal insight

The relationship between empathy, understood here as a cognitive act of imaginative transposition, and reasons, has been discussed extensively by Stueber (Rediscovering empathy: folk-psychology, agency, and the human sciences, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006; South J Philos 49(11):156–180, 2011; Emot Rev 4(1):55–63, 2012; in: Maibom (ed) The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy, Routledge, New York, pp 137–147, 2017). Stueber situates his account of empathy as the reenactment of another person’s perspective within a framework of folk psychology as guided by a principle of rational agency. We argue that this view, which we call agential empathy, is not satisfying for two main reasons that we will examine consecutively. First, agential empathy cannot satisfactorily account for the case of emotional actions, which requires to take into account the phenomenal dimension of the mental states they stem from. We argue that Stueber overlooks this aspect, which is not reducible to understanding the reasons behind an agent’s behavior. We introduce the notions of experiential empathy and phenomenal insight to account for the imagined representation of the subjectively felt dimension of the target’s experience. Second, in virtue of his restrictive view of empathy, Stueber partly misconstrues this process: action explanation is not all there is to say about empathy. We argue that we have to go beyond the scope of agential empathy to do justice to the epistemic richness of empathy. Experiential empathy can in principle be available independently from reasons explanations: the main epistemic achievement of empathy can be indeed a matter of phenomenal insight only.

Episodic memory in nonhuman animals?

Experimental psychologist Jonathan Crystal and evolutionary psychologist Thomas Suddendorf debate with nonhuman animals experience human-like episodic memory.

Current state of nonengrafting donor leukocyte infusion (focus on microtransplantation for acute myeloid leukemia).

Microtransplantation (or micro-stem cell transplantation, MST) is one permutation of alloreactive immunotherapy increasingly studied in clinical trials. It is most commonly applied to patients with myeloid malignancies who are not suitable candidates for allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation. This review highlights the past 2 years of work on stem/progenitor cell products in the field of nonengrafting donor leukocyte infusion (NE-DLI), with a focus on applications of MST in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Assessing the utility of MST is hampered by lack of randomized controlled trials and by variability in donor selection algorithms, treatment timing, and unknown factors. The inherent complexity of the bidirectional alloreactive reactions, implicating many cell types, makes it challenging to move beyond correlative, population-level biology toward mechanistic explanations for MST's actions in any given patient-donor pair. Yet there are indicators that by stimulating a recipient-vs.-tumor effect, MST might substantially improve complete remission rates in AML and that it might find a role in postremission therapy. The mechanistic underpinnings of MST are gradually being disentangled and its clinical development remains in early stages.

Factors Determining the Provision of Psychosocial Services for Oncological Patients and Their Loved Ones in Lithuania

It is acknowledged by various organizations, experts, and researchers around the world that meeting psychological and social needs is an important factor in cancer treatment. However, there is a shortage of psychosocial care supply for cancer patients and their family members in Lithuania. The aim of this study is to discern the causes of this insufficient supply. In order to find out the possible causes, Jon Elster’s action explanation framework was used. According to the framework, it is possible to deduce these factors: institutional constraints, economical (resources and labor supply) constraints, social preferences, and political preferences. Qualitative research (expert interviews) and secondary data analysis research methods were employed to gather the required data. A data analysis shows that the there are no institutional constraints for the provision of psychosocial care. However, there is a lack of public resources dedicated for the provision of psychosocial care. As a consequence, the main providers of psychosocial care for cancer patients and their family members are NGOs, which heavily depend on volunteer labor force. There is a contradiction in the point of view toward the professionalization of psychosocial care provision. It is the natural position of medical professionals that the provision of psychosocial care should be in the hands of professionals. On the other side, NGOs disagree with such a perspective. The need for psychosocial care is verbalized by experts and professionals; however, the general public prefers medical treatment. Thus, it is understandable why the public resources allocated to the provision of psychosocial care are so scarce. It is also evident that the political parties are not interested in psychosocial care, as it was shown by our analysis of their political programs.

WHERE NEUROSCIENCE GETS THINGS WRONG (AND RIGHT)

ABSTRACTAlex Rosenberg's book How History Gets Things Wrong holds that our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long evolutionary pedigree and a genetic basis, but this vehicle involves a defective theory of human nature because it involves a defective theory of the brain as shown by neuroscience. Reviewing his arguments, I argue that our attachment (if any) to history as a vehicle of understanding is not an inherited characteristic as evolutionary theory, if relevant, would require, but is developed culturally. I also argue that an evolutionary basis for a cognitive capacity does not undermine its reliability as a vehicle of knowledge or understanding. Moreover, evolutionary theory and neuroscience are separable theories, and neuroscience is misused and misunderstood by Rosenberg.Rosenberg holds that neuroscience provides a better theory of mind than does the “theory of mind” used by historians (as he understands them), where the latter is assumed by him to involve explaining by reference to beliefs and desires. However, Rosenberg illegitimately adopts what philosophers of mind call “theory‐theory” to characterize historians' assumptions and does not recognize that neuroscience need not be conceived as a rival theory of explanation of action. He wrongly supposes that historical narratives are essentially explanations of individual action. A better use of neuroscience is to learn that “imagining the past” and “imagining the future” use the same brain processes, and just as imagining the future has no causal chain linking the relevant brain states directly to reality, so we have no reason to think that “imagining the past” does. Getting our imaginings correct requires sound historiographical expertise.

Wandering a Metro: Actor-Network Theory Research and Rapid Rail Infrastructure Communication

Wandering a Metro: Actor-Network Theory Research and Rapid Rail Infrastructure Communication

Can Normic Laws Save Hempel’s Model of Historical Explanation? a Critique of Schurz’ Approach

Abstract I critically discuss Gerhard Schurz’ improved version of Hempel’s covering law model as the model appropriate for human action explanation in the historical sciences. Schurz takes so-called “normic laws” as the best means to save Hempel’s covering law model from the objection that there are no strict laws in historiography. I criticize Schurz approach in two respects: 1) Schurz falsely takes Dray’s account of historical explanations to be a normic law account. 2) Human action explanation in terms of goals and means-ends-beliefs are not based on normic laws at all, for the explanandum (the action) in an explanation follows from the volitional and doxastic premises (the explanans) alone. To show this, I argue that there is a conceptual connection between volition and action, rooted in our actual usage of volitional concepts. Ultimately, a difference in principle between the methods of explanation in science and historiography has to be acknowledged.

ECCO Essential Requirements for Quality Cancer Care: Primary care.

ECCO Essential Requirements for Quality Cancer Care (ERQCC) are checklists and explanations of organisation and actions that are necessary to give high-quality care to cancer patients. They are written by European experts representing all disciplines involved in cancer care. This paper concerns the integration of primary care into care for all cancers in Europe. Primary care integration.

How perceived security risk affects intention to use smart home devices: A reasoned action explanation

Smart home devices form a significant part of the consumer IoT market yet they have potential security risks. Little is known about how security risk perceptions influence householders’ decisions to adopt smart home devices. In order to examine how perceptions of security risks influence intentions to use smart home devices, we test a new model of how perceived security risk affects intention to use smart devices. This model draws on the reasoned action approach from social psychology and proposes that security risk perceptions have an indirect effect on smart home adoption decisions by influencing cognitions that have a more immediate, effect on adoption intentions. The results demonstrated that perceived security risk does have an effect on intentions to use smart home devices and both attitude to use of smart home devices and perceived control over secure use of these devices play a role in this effect, confirming the value of modelling perceived risks as determinants of more direct cognitive antecedents of consumer intentions. We also investigated the role of age and education in smart home adoption decisions and found that older and more highly educated people are more likely to take their own assessments of security risk into account when they make decisions about adoption of smart home devices. Given the role of perceived security risk in influencing consumers’ intentions to use smart home devices, enabling, influencing, and guiding consumers to develop the knowledge and skills they need for secure use of smart home devices is of particular importance. The findings of this study suggest several paths of action for information security professionals to achieve this.

Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience

A radical embodied cognitive neuroscience (RECN) based on ecological psychology requires the understanding of the brain, its structure, and its functions to be compatible with the main tenets of the Gibsonian theory. In this paper, we propose neural reuse as a promising candidate to achieve such understanding. We base our proposal on two fundamental ideas. In section two, we review what we take to be the two central requirements for a RECN based on ecological psychology: compatibility with the explanation of perception and action at the ecological scale and the rejection of computation as a paradigm for the explanation of the activity of the brain. In section three, we show how neural reuse meets the two requirements and, furthermore, we evaluate its theoretical parallelism with ecological psychology. Finally, after developing these ideas, in the conclusion we put forward further aspects and research possibilities that follow from the coalition of neural reuse and ecological psychology for a Gibsonian neuroscience.

Social movement theory and the Italian radical community archives: A question of valence?

The theory and practice of the radical community, and a capacity for self-organisation, demonstrates the ability to control the symbols and language of society, to define new conventions of meaning, and to offer alternative reasons and explanations for action. However, the predominant sociological account of Italian social movements of the 1960s and 1970s censures potentially relevant discursive practices of the radical community. This is evidenced by the lack of diversity amongst the epistemic sources of Anglo American Social Movement Theory (SMT). The assumptions in play in disciplinary thought disqualify the practice and theory of radical social movements as a credible mode of analysis of the social and political condition. Ultimately, this discounts the radical subject as knowledge producer. By reflecting on my personal experience of conducting doctoral research at three key community archives in Italy I contemplate an alternative approach, which considers the valence of these radical communities as essentially epistemological and not simply ‘political’, or social.

J. J. Gibson’s most radical idea: The development of a new law-based psychology

J. J. Gibson spent most of his career developing his own theory of perception. The culmination of his work was the ecological approach to visual perception, but during more than three decades he had challenged many of the central concepts of psychology and his own convictions regarding the foundations of perception. In this article I argue that the driving force of the development of ecological psychology was Gibson’s most radical idea: that psychology needs a law-based explanatory strategy at its own scale to be successful. According to Gibson, instead of pursuing explanations based on the patching up of simple stimulus-response events with the postulation of more or less lawful sub-personal mechanisms, psychology needs its own laws at a proper scale to provide legitimate explanations for perception and action.

Teleology and mentalizing in the explanation of action

In empirically informed research on action explanation, philosophers and developmental psychologists have recently proposed a teleological account of the way in which we make sense of people’s intentional behavior. It holds that we typically don’t explain an agent’s action by appealing to her mental states but by referring to the objective, publically accessible facts of the world that count in favor of performing the action so as to achieve a certain goal. Advocates of the teleological account claim that this strategy is our main way of understanding people’s actions. I argue that common motivations mentioned to support the teleological account are insufficient to sustain its generalization from children to adults. Moreover, social psychological studies, combined with theoretical considerations, suggest that we do not explain actions mainly by invoking publically accessible, reason-giving facts alone but by ascribing mental states to the agent.

Emotion as power: capital and strategy in the field of politics

ABSTRACT Recent work across the social sciences have converged on the issue of emotion. In the vanguard of these advances has been the sociology of emotions, broadly defined, which, in various guises – structural, cultural, critical, social psychological, positivist and so on – has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the emotional dimensions of social life, and its centrality to the explanation and understanding of social action. In this paper, and building on previous work, I wish to make a contribution to an increasingly important interdisciplinary sub-field – the political sociology of emotion – and to reconsider and explain the increasingly important role of emotional practice, understood as the strategic deployment of emotional capital, in contemporary party politics.