Familiar Kind Research Articles

Keeping an AI on the mental health of vulnerable populations: reflections on the potential for participatory injustice

AbstractConsidering the overall shortage of therapists to meet the psychological needs of vulnerable populations, AI-based technologies are often seen as a possible remedy. Particularly smartphone apps or chatbots are increasingly used to offer mental health support, mostly through cognitive behavioral therapy. The assumption underlying the deployment of these systems is their ability to make mental health support accessible to generally underserved populations. Hence, this seems to be aligned with the fundamental biomedical principle of justice understood in its distributive meaning. However, considerations of the principle of justice in its epistemic significance are still in their infancy in the debates revolving around the ethical issues connected to the use of mental health chatbots. This paper aims to fill this research gap, focusing on a less familiar kind of harm that these systems can cause, namely the harm to users in their capacities as knowing subjects. More specifically, we frame our discussion in terms of one form of epistemic injustice that such practices are especially prone to bring about, i.e., participatory injustice. To make our theoretical analysis more graspable and to show its urgency, we discuss the case of a mental health Chatbot, Karim, deployed to deliver mental health support to Syrian refugees. This case substantiates our theoretical considerations and the epistemo-ethical concerns arising from the use of mental health applications among vulnerable populations. Finally, we argue that conceptualizing epistemic participation as a capability within the framework of Capability Sensitive Design can be a first step toward ameliorating the participatory injustice discussed in this paper.

Defusing a Paradox to a Hypodox

One way of resolving a paradox is to defuse it to a hypodox. This way is relatively unknown though. The goal of this paper is to explain this way with varied examples. The hypodoxes are themselves a broad class: both the Truth-teller and the 21st birthday of someone born on 29th February can be construed as hypodoxes. The most familiar kind of relation between paradoxes and hypodoxes is exemplified by the relation between the Liar and the Truth-teller. This article concerns a second kind where a paradox is defused to a hypodox by restricting or rejecting some granted principles. The Liar paradox has this second kind of relation to a Liar hypodox, which will be introduced. In some cases, defusing a paradox to a hypodox is only a partial resolution, as the hypodox itself may then need resolving. Even so, such a partial resolution decomposes a complex problem into more easily understood problems. Moreover, I compare the result of defusing a paradox to a hypodox with the results of resolving paradoxes in other ways. I give four examples. The first is mainly pedagogic, concerning a birthday. The second is a lightweight legal case, presenting a parking voucher paradox. The third is a formal system in which a Liar and Liar-like sentences are hypodoxical. The fourth is a philosophical critique of ways of solving Bertrand’s chord paradox.

Interconnected Takagi-Sugeno system and fractional SIRS malware propagation model for stabilization of Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper is devoted to investigate the dynamical behaviors of malware attack on a familiar kind of complex heterogeneous networks, namely Wireless Sensor Network, and discuss an effective immunization treatment based on fractional interconnected Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy systems. Our approach is based on the mathematical modeling to establish a controlled fractional network-based SIRS malware propagation model that better describes the attacking behavior of malicious objects on Wireless Sensor Network. After that, we point out some qualitative properties of the proposed network-based SIRS malware propagation model such as the existence of positively invariant set, backward bifurcation and asymptotic behavior. Especially, in order to study the model's stability, we evaluate an epidemiological threshold value R0, namely basic reproductive ratio, which ensures the existence of at least one endemic equilibrium P⁎ and the local asymptotic stability of malware-free equilibrium P0. As a consequence of theoretical result, the malware-free equilibrium P0 is unstable when R0>1 and hence, the rest of this paper is to address a stabilization problem for the proposed controlled network-based model and establish some sufficient conditions related to linear matrix inequalities and positive definite matrices. Finally, we illustrate the obtained theoretical results by a computational example.

Design of PI3K-mTOR Dual Inhibitors for Ovarian Cancer: Are We on the Right Track?

Ovarian cancer is one of the most familiar kinds of gynecological cancer seen in women. Though it is not as familiar as breast cancer, the survival rate for ovarian cancer is very low when compared with breast cancer. Even after being one among the familiar types, to date, there are no proper treatments available for ovarian cancer. All the treatments that are present currently show a high rate of recurrence after the treatment. Therefore, treating this silent killer from the roots is the need of the hour. PI3K/AKT/m- TOR pathway is one of the pathways that get altered during ovarian cancer. Studies are already going on for the inhibition of PI3K and mTOR separately. Efforts have been made to inhibit either PI3K or mTOR separately earlier. However, due to its side effects and resistance to the treatments available, current studies are based on the inhibition of PI3K and mTOR together. Inhibition of PI3K and mTOR simultaneously reduces the chances of negative feedback, thus decreasing the toxicity. This review contains the evolution of PI3K and mTOR drugs that are approved by the FDA and are in the trials for different cancer types, including Ovarian cancer. In this article, how a molecular targeted therapy can be made successful and free from toxicity for treating ovarian cancer is discussed. Therefore, this review paves the way for finding an effective scaffold rather than the clinical part. The scaffold thus selected can be further modified and synthesized in the future as dual PI3K/mTOR inhibitors specifically for OC.

Are Natural Kind Terms Ambiguous?

Recent experimental studies have claimed to find evidence for the view that natural kind terms such as "water" are ambiguous: that they have two extensions, one determined by superficial properties, the other by underlying essence. In an online experiment, we presented to 600 participants scenarios describing discoveries of novel samples that differ in deep structure from samples of a familiar kind but are superficially identical, such as a water-like substance that is not composed of H2 O. We used three different types of question sets to probe whether the participants considered the sample as a member of the kind or not. Our results did not confirm the predictions of the ambiguity view. They were, rather, consistent with views that take underlying essences to be the sole criterion for membership in a natural kind.

History as a Cautionary Tale

History as a Cautionary Tale

Metz’s Heterochthonous Relational Moral Theory and Business Ethics

AbstractOne of the practical ethical areas that Thaddeus Metz applied his Relational Moral Theory (RMT) to is business ethics. In this important area of applied ethics, Metz examines the question of how business owners, and related agents ought to deal with others, especially workers and consumers. He argues that the relational account of obligations recommends a stakeholder model of business and provides a plausible alternative (if not better to) familiar kinds of utilitarianism and Kantianism. In this article, I discuss and engage with this claim by raising a number of issues for RMT. For although I believe that Metz’s moral account could, in general and under certain description, be positioned as a viable competitor to utilitarianism and Kantianism, it is not clear that in certain theoretical aspects of the stakeholder account of business, it fares better than, for example, utilitarianism. Furthermore, I argue, on the one hand, that RMT should be understood as a heterochthonous account of African ethics and, on the other hand, that an autochthonous account of African ethics captures better or comes closer to the moral sensibilities of indigenous Africans. An autochthonous account of African ethics has a different take on the issue of the stakeholder model of business and does conceptualize the business relationship in terms of needs and welfare whereby a “distant” individual may be owed more duties than a “local” individual.

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

How to Cure a Horse, or, the Experience of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Experience

How to Cure a Horse, or, the Experience of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Experience

Combinatorial proofs and refinements of three partition theorems of Andrews

In his recent work Andrews revisited two-color partitions with certain restrictions on the differences between consecutive parts, and he established three theorems linking these two-color partitions with more familiar kinds of partitions. In this note we provide bijective proofs as well as refinements of those three theorems of Andrews. Our refinements take into account the numbers of parts in each of the two colors.

Two kinds of selection marking

AbstractWhy does an argument clause contain a meaningless complementizer in languages such as English and German, but not in Mandarin; and why does an adverbial clause occur with a meaningless correlative adverb in the matrix clause in Mandarin, but not in languages such as English and German? Extending the c-selection from one type of sisterhood to another type of sisterhood, this paper recognizes the modification relation as a kind of selection relation, in addition to the familiar kind of argument-taking selection relation. This research argues that dependency marking is seen in different types of sister relations. It shows how Mandarin uses modification markers systematically, but does not use argument markers, also systematically. The paper explains the existence of modification markers in various constructions in Mandarin and in various languages. It lets us gain a better understanding of language variations.

Along the Wayside, Spring 2022

Hawthorne is well and alive, as witnessed by various conference presentations. Among these are:Hawthorne opens The Marble Faun (1860) with “a familiar kind of Preface.” His preface is familiar for two reasons: first, the practice was by then conventional, and second, it is addressed to “that friend of friends, that unseen brother of the soul, whose apprehensive sympathy has so often encouraged me to be egotistical in my Prefaces.” His only concern is that in the interval since his last publication, “that all-sympathizing critic” might have died or lost interest. My paper will chart Hawthorne’s transition from the obscurest man to a living lion of American letters. By the end of his career, as Richard Brodhead has demonstrated, Hawthorne had become one of his very own literary inheritors. But there is a great deal of continuity between the anonymous teller of stories and the acclaimed historical romancer. “The Battle-Omen,” a tale he published anonymously in the Salem Gazette in 1830, will be examined as a case in point. Hawthorne’s omission of the tale from his three short-story collections may be explained by the liberal use he made of it in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne’s novel ends with Dimmesdale’s Election Day sermon, which will steer my analysis back to “The Custom-House,” where the author famously remarks that Salem “ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else.” Of course, to apply an additional turn of the screw to Dickinson’s poetic homage to her fellow reclusive New Englander, one need not live in Salem to be haunted.Hawthorne’s novels model a form of gothic sympathy, for they suggest that we bond most authentically through the tacit acknowledgment of our shared repressions. With a specific focus on The Scarlet Letter, this paper will argue that gothic sympathy invites us to eschew the pressures of individual and collective ego maintenance and instead embrace our affinity with abjection, a gesture that is simultaneously horrifying and alluring, for although it forces us to confront the threat of self-dissolution, it also offers the potential for jouissance, for a liberating reacquaintance with versions of ourselves and intimate associations that we once thought were foreclosed.In 1857, after his term as Consul in Liverpool expired, Nathaniel Hawthorne, family in tow, began a tour of France and Italy that would ultimately form the basis of his final novel, The Marble Faun (1860). Armed with the popular travel books of the era, a Murray’s travel guide and Hillard’s Six Months in Italy, Hawthorne undertook the viewing of a dizzying array of artist’s studios, galleries, and museums during his first few months in Italy. His reactions to the art he viewed, preserved in his Italian Notebooks, vary from contemplative to confused and even flippant at times. He was wholly overwhelmed by the volume of art preserved in Rome, which he deemed to be unnecessarily generous considering its quality, and very critical of the state in which it was kept. His responses to the art that he did deem valuable were mixed—he at times attempted to respond to it in a short prose passage, and at times he simply declined to comment due to lack of inspiration or mood. This conference paper surveys Hawthorne’s emotive responses to art within the context of contemporary art criticism. It argues that Hawthorne’s emotional connections with art varies over the course of his career, culminating in The Marble Faun, a novel built on the complications of sympathetic signification through art.

Epistemic injustice and data science technologies

Technologies that deploy data science methods are liable to result in epistemic harms involving the diminution of individuals with respect to their standing as knowers or their credibility as sources of testimony. Not all harms of this kind are unjust but when they are we ought to try to prevent or correct them. Epistemically unjust harms will typically intersect with other more familiar and well-studied kinds of harm that result from the design, development, and use of data science technologies. However, we argue that epistemic injustices can be distinguished conceptually from more familiar kinds of harm. We argue that epistemic harms are morally relevant even in cases where those who suffer them are unharmed in other ways. Via a series of examples from the criminal justice system, workplace hierarchies, and educational contexts we explain the kinds of epistemic injustice that can result from common uses of data science technologies.

MODES OF CONVERGENCE TO THE TRUTH: STEPS TOWARD A BETTER EPISTEMOLOGY OF INDUCTION

AbstractEvaluative studies of inductive inferences have been pursued extensively with mathematical rigor in many disciplines, such as statistics, econometrics, computer science, and formal epistemology. Attempts have been made in those disciplines to justify many different kinds of inductive inferences, to varying extents. But somehow those disciplines have said almost nothing to justify a most familiar kind of induction, an example of which is this: “We’ve seen this many ravens and they all are black, so all ravens are black.” This is enumerative induction in its full strength. For it does not settle with a weaker conclusion (such as “the ravens observed in the future will all be black”); nor does it proceed with any additional premise (such as the statistical IID assumption). The goal of this paper is to take some initial steps toward a justification for the full version of enumerative induction, against counterinduction, and against the skeptical policy. The idea is to explore various epistemic ideals, mathematically defined as different modes of convergence to the truth, and look for one that is weak enough to be achievable and strong enough to justify a norm that governs both the long run and the short run. So the proposal is learning-theoretic in essence, but a Bayesian version is developed as well.

Brain Storm Optimization with Long Short Term Memory Enabled Phishing Webpage Classification for Cybersecurity

Phishing is a familiar kind of cyberattack in the present digital world. Phishing detection with maximum performance accuracy and minimum computational complexity is continuously a topic of much interest. A novel technology was established for improving the phishing detection rate and decreasing computational constraints recently. But, one solution has inadequate for addressing every problem due to attackers from cyberspace. Thus, the initial objective of this work is for analysing the performance of different deep learning (DL) techniques from detection phishing activity. This study introduces a novel Brain Storm Optimization with Long Short Term Memory Enabled Phishing Webpage Classification (BSOLSTM-PWC) for Cybersecurity. The proposed BSOLSTM-PWC technique enables to accomplish cybersecurity by the identification and classification of phishing webpages. To accomplish this, the BSOLSTM-PWC technique initially employs data pre-processing technique to transform the data into actual format. Besides, the BSOLSTM-PWC technique employs LSTM classifier for the identification and categorization of phishing webpages. Moreover, the BSO algorithm is utilized to appropriately adjust the hyperparameters involved in the LSTM model. For reporting the improved outcomes of the BSOLSTM-PWC method, a wide-ranging simulation analysis is made using benchmark dataset. The experimental outcomes reported the enhanced outcomes of the BSOLSTM-PWC method on existing methods.

Does anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony imply interest relativism about knowledge attributions?

Anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony is the thesis that testimonial knowledge is not reducible to knowledge of some other familiar kind, such as inductive knowledge. Interest relativism about knowledge attributions is the thesis that the standards for knowledge attributions are relative to practical contexts. This paper argues that anti-reductionism implies interest relativism. The notion of “implies” here is a fairly strong one: anti-reductionism, together with plausible assumptions, entails interest relativism. A second thesis of the paper is that anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony creates significant pressure toward attributor contextualism (a version of interest relativism). Even if anti-reductionism does not strictly entail attributor contextualism, the most powerful motivations for anti-reductionism also motivate attributor contextualism over alternative positions.

Acquaintance, knowledge, and value

Taking perceptual experience to consist in a relation of acquaintance with the sensible qualities, I argue that the state of being acquainted with a sensible quality is intrinsically a form of knowledge, and not merely a means to more familiar kinds of knowledge, such as propositional or dispositional knowledge. We should accept the epistemic claim for its explanatory power and theoretical usefulness. That acquaintance is knowledge best explains the intuitive epistemic appeal of ‘Edenic’ counterfactuals involving unmediated perceptual contact with reality (cf. Chalmers, in: Gendler, Hawthorne (eds) Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press, 2006). It explains the elusiveness of knowledge gained through new acquaintances. It coheres with the knowledge-like functional role of acquaintance in the special context of evaluative beliefs and evaluative reasoning, where the objects of acquaintance serve as evidence and inferential basis. And, finally, taking acquaintance to be knowledge is theoretically fruitful: it helps vindicate claims about the relationship between knowledge and concern for others we already find intuitive or outright accept. After developing a novel case for the epistemic claim, I respond to two familiar objections against it: namely, (1) that there are no pre-propositional, pre-conceptual cases of perceptual experience that remain epistemically relevant (Sellars in Empiricism and the philosophy of mind, Routledge, 1968, McDowell, in: Lindgard (ed) John McDowell: Experience, norm, and nature, Blackwell, 2008); and (2) that the category of knowledge appears gerrymandered once we add ‘object’ knowledge to the epistemological mix (Farkas, in: Knowles, Raleigh (eds), Acquaintance: new essays, Oxford University Press, 2019).

Everywhere Chimerical

I advance an approach to thinking about moral obligation and how it moves us that runs counter to mainstream thought in ethics. Many assume, with Kant, that bona fide moral obligation must involve some truly unconditional, categorical, or inescapable constraint. Following in Hume’s footsteps, I advocate for viewing our paradigmatic obligations as instead deriving from rules of important social practices, followed out of a felt sense of reverence or regard. I do not offer a complete defense of this more Humean approach here; instead, I respond to a familiar kind of objection. Some allege that seeing our obligations this way can lead to a troubling kind of conflict between an agent’s motive to fulfill her obligations and the very values that, for her, make a given practice and its rules worthy of her devotion. In such circumstances, the objector alleges, any motive to fulfill her obligations will amount to little more than an agent’s “worshiping” of the rules. I disarm this charge of “rule-worship” as it has been levied against the Humean approach, though not by denying that this sort of motivational conflict can arise. Instead, I argue that once the source and nature of conflict are better understood, its possibility is no threat. Indeed, far from a strike against it, the way that the Humean approach to obligation helps us to make good sense of this kind of conflict is ethically attractive, and thus a selling point.

Triptolide is a Promising Therapeutic Approach in Treating Thyroid Cancer Based on in silico and in vitro Experiment.

IntroductionThyroid cancer is a familiar kind of cancer. Natural products are promising therapeutic approaches in treating thyroid cancer. Triptolide is a diterpenoid epoxide extracted from Tripterygium wilfordii. The mechanism of triptolide in the treatment of thyroid cancer has not been investigated clearly.MethodsWe evaluated triptolide targets and thyroid cancer targets with related databases. The protein–protein interaction (PPI) networks of the triptolide targets and thyroid cancer targets were constructed with Cytoscape software. Gene ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analyses of the core PPI network were obtained. Molecular docking analysis was used to evaluated the binding of triptolide with core targets. Furthermore, apoptosis assays, real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and Western blotting were used to evaluate the anticancer functions of triptolide.ResultsTriptolide had 34 targets, and thyroid cancer had 210 targets. The core PPI network of merged PPI networks had 164 nodes and 4513 edges. GO and KEGG enrichment analyses showed that triptolide were related to the cell cycle, apoptosis, and inflammatory signaling pathways. Molecular docking analysis showed that triptolide directly reacted with four core targets: cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 1A (CDKN1A), c-JUN, RELA, and tumor protein p53 (TP53). CB-Dock analysis indicated that triptolide could stably bind to core targets. Triptolide inhibited the growth but induced apoptosis of thyroid cancer cells. Triptolide increased the mRNA expression of CDKN1A and TP53 but reduced the mRNA expression of c-JUN and RELA, as shown by RT-PCR. Triptolide increased the protein levels of CDKN1A and phospho-p53 but reduced those of phospho-c-JUN and phospho-NF-κB p65, as shown by Western blotting.DiscussionWe considered that triptolide could treat thyroid cancer by inhibiting cell proliferation, inducing apoptosis and inhibiting inflammatory pathways such as the NF-κB and MAPK signaling pathways. CDKN1A, c-JUN, RELA, and TP53 were involved in the antithyroid cancer mechanism of triptolide.

Twelve-month-olds disambiguate new words using mutual-exclusivity inferences

Representing objects in terms of their kinds enables inferences based on the long-term knowledge made available through kind concepts. For example, children readily use lexical knowledge linked to familiar kind concepts to disambiguate new words (e.g., “find the toma”): they exclude members of familiar kinds falling under familiar kind labels (e.g., a ball) as potential referents and link new labels to available unfamiliar objects (e.g., a funnel), a phenomenon dubbed as ‘mutual exclusivity’. Younger infants' failure in mutual exclusivity tasks has been commonly interpreted as a limitation of early word-learning or inferential abilities. Here, we investigated an alternative explanation, according to which infants do not spontaneously represent familiar objects under kind concepts, hence lacking access to the information necessary for rejecting them as referents of novel labels. Building on findings about conceptual development and communication, we hypothesized that nonverbal communication could prompt infants to set up kind-based representations which, in turn, would promote mutual exclusivity inferences. This hypothesis was tested in a looking-while-listening task involving novel word disambiguation. Twelve-month-olds saw pairs of objects, one familiar and one unfamiliar, and heard familiar kind labels or novel words. Across two experiments providing a cross-lab replication in two different languages, infants successfully disambiguated novel words when the familiar object had been pointed at before labeling, but not when it had been highlighted in a non-communicative manner (Experiment 1) or not highlighted at all (Experiment 2). Nonverbal communication induced infants to recruit kind-based representations of familiar objects that they failed to recruit in its absence and that, once activated, supported mutual-exclusivity inferences. Developmental changes in children's appreciation of communicative contexts may modulate the expression of early inferential and word learning competences.