Implicit Reliance Research Articles

The Garrison and the Jamaican State: A Model for Co-optation

The informal system that is present in communities called garrisons in Jamaica often operate outside of the law. Under the leadership of dons, who were initially appointed to carry out the dictates of politicians, the operations of the garrison accounts for approximately 40% of Jamaica’s homicide and is perceived as a socially disorganized space. Research done on these communities suggests that dismantling these communities will ameliorate the high incidence of crime. The main question of this study is, are these communities socially disorganized spaces? The major argument is, the ineptitude of the Jamaican state has resulted in the institution of various mechanisms by non-state actors within these communities to address their justice concerns, and there is an implicit reliance on their services by the Jamaican state. The problem of crime in Jamaica is complex and requires a multi-dimensional approach to addressing the issue. In this paper, I use a Foucauldian lens to highlight the utility of this instituted informal system and suggest that any strategies geared towards addressing crime and violence that occur in these communities should explore coalescing these informal structures into Jamaica’s formal framework.

Strong Scientific Meritocratism: Standpoint Epistemology as a Middle Ground in the Debate over Personal Merit in Science

Abstract Dorian Abbot and twenty-eight coauthors from many quarters of science have recently published a spirited defense of a perceived ‘liberal’ scientific meritocratism—roughly the view that rivalrous or excludable goods in the sphere of scientific work should be distributed entirely based on potential recipients’ merits in that sphere. They propose to understand merit in terms of ‘achievements,’ not least in the form of individual academic track records. A closer examination of their argument reveals their implicit reliance on several incompatible conceptions of merit. Moreover, they conspicuously ignore the typical collective nature of academic achievements in modern science. In this paper, I argue that a different version of scientific meritocratism, based on the central theses of standpoint epistemology, represents an attractive compromise between Abbot et al. and anti-meritocratic theories informed by the sociology of science. Ultimately, however, the credentials of this ‘strong scientific meritocratism’ rest on empirical hypotheses which remain underexamined.

Cripping the pain scale: literary and biomedical narratives of pain assessment

This article analyses the literary representation of pain scales and assessment in two chronic pain narratives: ‘The Pain Scale’, a lyric essay by Eula Biss, and essays from Sonya Huber’s...

A survey on BIM information management: the approach of producers and consumers of model information in Brazil

BIM Information Management, namely how information is introduced in and consumed from building information models, have an impact on the efficacy and efficiency of BIM workflows. Implicit reliance on all the information contained in a model may result in non-value-adding work from model authors. The recommended alternative is creation and use of information according to the Project BIM Execution Plan specifications. Regardless the adopted approach, model asseveration is demanded from authors (i.e., the verification that all required information is reliable and is available on a released model). International standards, such as ISO 19650, require clear and rigorous specification of information need, but anecdotal evidence indicates that the current practices in local markets are far from those recommended by these standards. An extensive online survey was conducted to assess current practices of professionals from the Brazilian market. Results showed that about half of the respondents adopt document-based (MEA/MET) recommended practices when dealing with model information, while the other half kept a behaviour more akin to the older CAD workflows. The implicit reliance (without checking MEA/MET documents) on model information varies according to professional role, being lower for design professionals and coordinators and higher for construction managers. As standards evolve and introduce new concepts for deeper and more granular information management, such as the Level of Information Need, it is necessary that professionals adapt their practices for increased efficiency on their BIM workflows.

The experience of informal caregivers in providing patient care in hospitals in low- and middle-income countries: A qualitative meta-synthesis.

ObjectiveIn low- and middle-income countries, informal caregivers frequently stay in hospitals and perform patient care tasks typically performed by nurses in other contexts. This article reviews qualitative research on these informal caregivers, to gain insight and understanding of their experiences.MethodsWe undertook a qualitative meta-synthesis. Relevant literature was identified through searches of electronic databases in 2021. Thematic analysis was conducted to facilitate the identification of conceptual relationships to formulate synthesised findings.ResultsTwenty-four studies met the inclusion criteria – 13 from Sub-Saharan Africa, five from Bangladesh, two from India, two from Iran, one from Brazil and one from Peru. Three themes were generated from the meta-synthesis: (1) The unwelcome but tolerated guest, (2) Enduring personal sacrifice and (3) Fulfilling familial obligations. These themes emphasised the significant burden associated with the hospital caregiving experience and highlighted the implicit reliance on informal caregivers in low- and middle-income countries.ConclusionsInformal caregivers perform an essential caregiving role, yet occupy a peripheral and voluntary space in hospitals. There is a clear need to support informal caregivers so that they can safely perform their tasks.

‘We have a lot of (un)learning to do’: whiteness and decolonial prefiguration in a food movement organization

ABSTRACT Despite the disproportionate food injustice experienced by Indigenous Peoples, Black people and people of color, food movements have been dominated by white settlers who have had limited success in addressing this injustice. Settler colonialism is increasingly recognized as a root cause of food insecurity for Indigenous Peoples on Turtle Island; it is also a key contributor to food insecurity experienced by Black people and people of color. The racialized exploitation of land and labor central to both settler colonialism and racial capitalism continue to form the backbone of the Canadian food system today, elucidating the important role food movements hold in the struggle for decolonization and racial justice. In this paper we present a case study of the (im)possibilities of white/settlers working towards Indigenous Food Sovereignty and food justice. By analyzing protests linked to Food Secure Canada’s 2018 Assembly, we find that an implicit reliance on representation may have limited the organization’s capacity for change. We propose that unsettling (un)learning, organizational transformation, and participation in broader anticolonial/anticapitalist struggle – what we are calling decolonial prefiguration – offers a more constructive path to decolonized futures that support food sovereignty and justice for all.

Young children’s agency with digital technologies

AbstractThis paper examines the evidence of children's agency in research about infants, toddlers and technologies. It finds that an implicit reliance on technological determinism as a theoretical perspective for positioning technologies relative to young children's development tends to shape research in terms of understanding the impact of technologies on young children. Drawing on critical constructivism as a philosophical stance on technologies, this paper argues that children's agency with technologies may be further investigated in terms of practice architectures to better understand the social mediation of infant and toddler interactions and engagements with technologies.

Does Judith Butler subvert gender binarism? Let’s talk about sex(ual dipoles)

It seems that there are compelling arguments why gender is not an ontological category. Although the deconstruction of the ontological accommodation of the subject (and of our world) has opened up new possibilities of understanding the subject and its structures, some pitfalls can be detected in the relevant literature. In particular, the theory that rejects essentialist understandings of the subject implicitly retains vestiges of the ontology that it rejects. A case in point is the anti-essentialist view on gender in its implicit reliance on the gender binarism that it meant to discard. In the present article, I critically engage with Judith Butler’s position on gender identity and with her aim of subverting gender binarism. Butler has based her position on grounds of gender as a non-ontological category. My main argument is that her effort to subvert gender binarism in and through the example of homosexuality is not as fruitful as the relevant literature has assumed (consider, for instance, that Butlers’ work has been highly influential in feminist and queer theory, cultural studies and other fields). Gender binarism subversion in and through the example of homosexuality is problematic because homosexuality adheres to the body binarism, thus to its “raw” corporeality, as much as heterosexuality does: in both heterosexuality and homosexuality, the sex of the body still determines one’s sexual orientation and her/his choice of partner(s). Thus, contra assertions to the opposite, I argue that homosexuality remains trapped in the “metaphysics of gender substance.” I conclude this article by discussing why bisexuality escapes the body binary and thus gender binarism.

An Extra-Mathematical Program Explanation of Color Experience

ABSTRACT In the debate over whether mathematical facts, properties, or entities explain physical events (in what philosophers call ‘extra-mathematical’ explanations), Aidan Lyon’s (2012) affirmative answer stands out for its employment of the program explanation (PE) methodology of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit (1990). Juha Saatsi (2012; 2016) objects, however, that Lyon’s examples from the indispensabilist literature are (i) unsuitable for PE, (ii) nominalizable into non-mathematical terms, and (iii) mysterious about the explanatory relation alleged to obtain between the PEs’ mathematical explanantia and physical explananda. In this paper, I propose a counterexample to Saatsi’s objections. My counterexample is Frank Jackson’s (1998a) program explanation for color experience, which I argue needs recasting as an extra-mathematical PE due to its implicit reliance on reflectance, a property that suffers conceptual regress unless redefined with Fourier harmonics. Pace Saatsi, I argue that this recast example is an authoritative PE, non-nominalizable, and minimally esoteric. Important for the indispensability debate at large, moreover, is that my counterexample reifies Fourier harmonics without the Enhanced Indispensability Argument (an argument to which Lyon applies PE as a premise). Indispensabilists have long overlooked the conditionalization of a limited mathematical realism on property realism, and my counterexample to Saatsi exploits this conditionalization.

Developing Psychologically Compelling Understanding of the Involvement of Humans in Research

Research conducted on humans has a long history of ethical protections, with the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 triggering stronger protection across most jurisdictions. While there have been many reorientations and corrections in the emphasis of codes protecting human research participants, all have implicitly assumed a conception of human decision-making and the person that are psychologically not feasible. In this paper, we examine two problematic assumptions dominant in many research ethics guidelines: (1) implicit reliance on a model of classical rationality in conceptualizing the process whereby individuals make a decision of whether to give consent to participate in a study and (2) the assumption of autonomous subjects in the bioethical principle of autonomy and in operationalizing informed consent processes. For both of these problems, we outline theoretical psychological work that provides more compelling accounts of (1) human decision-making and rationality as bounded and ecological and (2) of personhood and agency as relational and emergent. We conclude by considering approaches to bioethics that are compatible with such conceptions of personhood and therefore provide a more satisfactory framework for a relational ethics.

The road to the Sustainable Development Goals: building global alliances and norms

ABSTRACTSeveral insider accounts of the formation of the Sustainable Development Goals suggest that the process (the procedures used and the emergent organizational and governance system features) was as important as the resulting goal-set. The paper looks at both aspects, and relationships between them: the rising influence of Southern nations (seen in the roles played by Colombia, Brazil, some African countries and the G77); the partial transcendence of traditional inter-bloc negotiation, including through adoption of elements of deliberative decision-making; the major involvement of civil society and business organizations, thanks especially to the IT revolution; the adoption of a goals-targets-indicators frame that has flexibility at national level and implicit reliance on intensive further civil society activism and monitoring. The paper considers these features and the implied prospects for the SDGs in relation to various perspectives on global governance, with special reference to norm-setting: Ruggie’s concepts of ‘global public domain’ and ‘polycentric global governance’, Risse and Sikkink’s ‘norms cascade’, Murphy’s posited required elements for progressive global innovation, and Raskin’s model of transition through responses to crises. It concludes with questions for further work, including regarding the possibly problematic absence of an explicit inspirational value-core.

Bringing medication prescribing out of the dark: Time for full disclosure

Health information technology (IT) has come a long way in providing patients and healthcare professionals ready access to critical health information.1–3 But 1 piece of the puzzle too often remains a mystery—the reason a medication is being prescribed. Today, the vast majority of prescriptions are written and transmitted electronically,4 yet rarely do the recipients of this information know why the drug has been prescribed.1–3 Perhaps most importantly, the reason often remains a mystery to patients and their caregivers. For far too long, the mystery of prescribing was considered part of secundum artem—the art of medical practice. As recently chronicled by key advocates of indications-based prescribing, the centuries-long practice of prescribing in Latin was intended to protect patients from knowledge that their physicians believed was beyond their grasp and could jeopardize their response to treatment.2 According to an 1833 editorial, “the only state in which the mind can rest… during severe illness, is that of implicit reliance in the skill of the physician, and an entire acquiescence in the course adopted, without the slightest question or argument.”5 Physicians believed that very few patients had the mental fortitude to calmly reason about their condition and associated treatment during the course of a serious illness.

Intent and Liability in Employment Discrimination

The Silicon Valley Ellen Pao trial brought to the forefront once again the changing nature of discrimination in the workplace with its focus on a culture of bias and the prevalence of unconscious discriminatory behavior. This case is only the most recent high-profile example. There is an emerging consensus among scholars that the concept of “intent” in disparate treatment employment discrimination should be broadened to encapsulate more flexible notions including implicit bias, negligent discrimination, and structural discrimination. These scholars argue convincingly that psychological research demonstrates that implicit bias and reliance on ingrained stereotypes is, to some extent, natural to human decision-making processes. As a result, bias in the workplace operates at both an overt, knowing level but also beneath the surface and, at times, without the conscious knowledge of the decision-makers themselves.However, despite extensive discussion of implicit bias in the legal literature, few, if any, scholars have considered alterations to liability and compensation schemes as a result of the broader meanings of intent. This article proposes looking to criminal law as a practical and theoretical model for an amendment to Title VII that would include gradations of intent with concomitant gradations in liability. The Model Penal Code presents an orderly and well-thought-out approach to intent, or mens rea, and the gradations of intent that support a finding of guilt. In addition, theory and policy supporting criminal law’s linkage of intent and liability are remarkably analogous to Title VII’s goal of elimination of discrimination. As a result, this article contends that a careful and measured consideration of criminal law’s approach to liability is instructive.Drawing on the extensive literature on flexible intent and criminal law theories of retributivism and consequentialism, this article proposes a statutory expansion of the definition of disparate treatment discrimination under Title VII with an adjustment in the liability regime based on the level of employer intent. We contend that a clear link between intent level and damages constitutes an attractive balancing of employer and employee needs that should spur this crucial statutory change. A statutory amendment to Title VII that both broadens the meaning of “intent” for disparate treatment claims but also limits liability based on the level of intent offers a compromise position that expands the application of discrimination law to meet changing workplace norms and a theoretically and emotionally satisfying means of accomplishing that change.

The Trojan Horse of the Paris Climate Agreement: How Multi-Level, Non-Hierarchical Governance Poses a Threat to Constitutional Government

There is little novelty to be found in the Paris Climate Agreement. Nevertheless, it may have serious implications for climate policy-making. It establishes an international framework for decentralized climate policy-making by states, which should aim to achieve an ambitious collective objective of limiting global average temperature increase to well below to well below 2 °C or even 1.5 °C. The agreement does not set any mechanism, methodology or criteria, however, for assigning individual mitigation obligations to party states. It does not impose any significant substantive obligations on the parties, and, from a legal, as opposed to political or moral, viewpoint, it seems to be virtually non-binding. This gap is destined to become the Paris Agreement’s Trojan horse, because, under the guise of direct democracy in a system of multi-level, non-hierarchical governance, it grants not only credibility but also de facto authority to climate activists, thus posing a threat to constitutional government and representative democracy. The agreement demands that nation states explicitly acknowledge that their efforts are inadequate, while setting them up for failure, thereby changing the political environment in which climate policy is made. The ambition-obligation disparity creates a large arena for climate activism at international and national levels, effectuating a transfer of power, or at least of influence, that is inconsistent with the fundamental principles of constitutional government. If the collective efforts appear to fall short of achieving the Paris Agreement’s objectives, the judiciary is likely to be dragged into climate policy-making. Climate action groups or executive governments supporting ambitious action will charge the body politic with impotence, declare “government failure,” and seek the help of the courts to get governments to “do the right thing.” To support their claims, they can invoke the admissions and objectives set out in the Paris Agreement. Thus, in demanding that the signatories acknowledge explicitly that their efforts are inadequate, the Paris Agreement paves the way for the new international climate governance. Its implicit reliance on political activism by the climate movement and the related non-hierarchical governance by the courts constitute a threat to constitutional government, the rule of law, and representative democracy. It risks an unconstitutional usurpation of power by activist groups and unelected and unaccountable judges that could undermine legislative power and the role of positive law in deciding legal disputes. This risk of subversion is not well understood by politicians and governments. Nations should protect themselves against these threats. After all, signing away control over climate policy to unaccountable and unelected actors is not in the public interest. Nor is it, under even the most optimistic of circumstances, a viable path to rational, effective and sustainable climate policies. Indeed, the future of representative democracy may be at stake. Climate policy-making should not be left to the UNFCC secretariat, the climate movement and the judiciary. Now is the time for national legislatures to assert and defend their prerogatives.

Editorial preface for the special issue “Advances in security, privacy and trust technologies”

With the fast development of Internet technologies, the information and communication systems are continuously facing new security, trust and privacy challenges. Indeed, the potentially invasive nature of the information has implications on privacy of the users and their online activity such as transactions. Likewise, the implicit reliance on technology to make decisions on one’s behalf makes essential to study new mechanisms for expressing and reasoning about trust. This special issue brings together research articles covering diverse aspects of security, privacy and trust in computer and networked-based information systems, including privacy concerns, tools to help secure information, methods for development and assessment of trustworthy systems, analysis of vulnerabilities and attacks, trends and new developments, secure operating systems and applications, security issues in wireless networks and pervasive systems, design and test strategies for secure and survivable systems, and cryptology, among others. The papers of the special issue are selected based on strict review results, where papers went through three rounds of review and revision. As a result, nine papers were selected and are arranged in the special issue as follows. Xiong et al. in the first paper ‘‘The finite volume element method for a parameter identification problem’’ use finite volume element method to solve a parameter identification problem of parabolic equations with over-specified data. The authors provide the numerical scheme of the unknown function and control parameters and obtain the error estimates of approximate solution. The proposed method is experimentally evaluated and compared with the exact solution to confirm the good accuracy of the presented scheme. The second paper by Chen et al. ‘‘An Opinion Mining Framework For Cantonese Reviews’’, analyze opinion mining for Cantonese language. The authors motivate the need to construct a particular lexical database for Cantonese and explore some Cantonese special written-tradition rules and incorporate them into the feature-based opinion summarization system framework. The experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the traditional Mandarin sentiment analysis method using ICTCLAS. In the third paper ‘‘A Secure Remote Data Integrity Checking Cloud Storage System from Threshold Encryption’’, Yao et al. study the confidentiality and integrity issues in cloud storage system. The authors address the privacy issue of decentralized cloud storage system using threshold cryptography. The threshold encryption scheme is therefore integrated with a secure decentralized erasure code to form a secure cloud storage system. Zhang et al. in the fourth paper ‘‘How to build a faster private information retrieval protocol’’, propose a secure multi-bit homomorphic encryption scheme based on Learning With Errors over Rings (RLWE) assumption. The authors use canonical embedding to transform ring & Fatos Xhafa fatos@cs.upc.edu

Weird Investigations and Nativist Semiotics in H. P. Lovecraft and Dashiell Hammett

This article argues that Dashiell Hammett’s least-known novel, The Dain Curse , which is often read as a metacritique of the detective form, actually operates as a hard-boiled critique of the competing pulp weird tale, most associated with H. P. Lovecraft. Hammett’s novel exposes the weird tale’s inherent nativism and its implicit reliance on notions of the criminally degenerate body popularized by Cesare Lombroso. The Dain Curse dismantles the positivism of Lombrosian criminology, weird fiction, and—by extension—the classical ratiocinative detective tradition, and their attendant eugenic epistemology.

Endogenous Money and the Natural Rate of Interest: The Reemergence of Liquidity Preference and Animal Spirits in the Post-Keynesian Theory of Capital Markets

Since the beginning of the fall of monetarism in the mid-1980s, mainstream macroeconomics has incorporated many of the principles of post-Keynesian endogenous money theory. This paper argues that the most important critical component of post-Keynesian monetary theory today is its rejection of the “natural rate of interest.” By examining the hidden assumptions of the loanable funds doctrine as it was modified in light of the idea of a natural rate of interest — specifically, its implicit reliance on an “efficient markets hypothesis” view of capital markets — this paper seeks to show that the mainstream view of capital markets is completely at odds with the world of fundamental uncertainty addressed by post-Keynesian economists, a world in which Keynesian liquidity preference and animal spirits rule the roost. This perspective also allows us to shed new light on the debate that has sprung up around the work of Hyman Minsky, calling into question to what extent he rejected the loanable funds view of financial markets. When Minsky’s theories are examined against the backdrop of the natural rate of interest version of the loanable funds theory, it quickly becomes clear that Minsky does not fall into the loanable funds camp.

Economic Sociology as Disequilibrium Economics: A Contribution to the Critique of the New Economic Sociology

This paper analyses the problem of the asocial view of the market at the theoretical core of contemporary economic sociology. Despite much emphasis on the apparent interpenetration of society and the economy, contemporary economic sociology is rooted in an analytical distinction between the two spheres. The implicit reliance on the neoclassical economic conception of the market helps to explain why the ‘new economic sociology’ often collapses into disequilibrium economics, where disequilibrium becomes the central but unstated prediction of a good deal of the work in the paradigm. Using a sample of contributions from the field, I demonstrate that a strong tendency running through much of the new economic sociology tends to understand society as a fundamentally distortionary force. To resolve this problem, I argue that an independent field of economic sociology necessitates a distinction between social relationships and social relations.

Sustaining Nothing: Untranslatable Material in Beckett's Worstward Ho

Sustaining Nothing: Untranslatable Material in Beckett's <i>Worstward Ho</i>

What Should Not Be Contracted Out: A Consequentialist Perspective

In what fields, if at all, is contracting out of government functions normatively impermissible? The theoretical framework proposed in this article focuses on this question from the perspective of two normative values: personal rights, and democratic decision-making and accountability. This analysis, conducted within a consequentialist framework, stresses the implications of the explicit and implicit reliance of normative arguments on assumptions concerning privatization outcomes. Special attention is given to the normative implications of three types of variations in the contours of contracting out that affect the severity of the principal-agent problem: differences in public-private incentive alignment; the degree of product observability; and differences in private firms’ market share in product provision. This theoretical framework is then applied to two central case studies: the contracting out of core incarceration and military functions. While the normative assessment of contracting out of incarceration finds little reason to prohibit this practice in some developed nations, an inherent democratic accountability deficit constitutes a grave concern with respect to the contracting out of core military operations in combat zones.