Normative Thinking Research Articles

Personalized vaccinology: A review

At the current time, the field of vaccinology remains empirical in many respects. Vaccine development, vaccine immunogenicity, and vaccine efficacy have, for the most part, historically been driven by an empiric “isolate-inactivate-inject” paradigm. In turn, a population-level public health paradigm of “the same dose for everyone for every disease” model has been the normative thinking in regard to prevention of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases. In addition, up until recently, no vaccines had been designed specifically to overcome the immunosenescence of aging, consistent with a post-WWII mentality of developing vaccines and vaccine programs for children. It is now recognized that the current lack of knowledge concerning how immune responses to vaccines are generated is a critical barrier to understanding poor vaccine responses in the elderly and in immunoimmaturity, discovery of new correlates of vaccine immunogenicity (vaccine response biomarkers), and a directed approach to new vaccine development.The new fields of vaccinomics and adversomics provide models that permit global profiling of the innate, humoral, and cellular immune responses integrated at a systems biology level. This has advanced the science beyond that of reductionist scientific approaches by revealing novel interactions between and within the immune system and other biological systems (beyond transcriptional level), which are critical to developing “downstream” adaptive humoral and cellular responses to infectious pathogens and vaccines. Others have applied systems level approaches to the study of antibody responses (a.k.a. “systems serology”), [1] high-dimensional cell subset immunophenotyping through CyTOF, [2,3] and vaccine induced metabolic changes [4]. In turn, this knowledge is being utilized to better understand the following: identifying who is at risk for which infections; the level of risk that exists regarding poor immunogenicity and/or serious adverse events; and the type or dose of vaccine needed to fully protect an individual. In toto, such approaches allow for a personalized approach to the practice of vaccinology, analogous to the substantial inroads that individualized medicine is playing in other fields of human health and medicine. Herein we briefly review the field of vaccinomics, adversomics, and personalized vaccinology.

Radical Pedagogies: Re-imagining Architecture’s Disciplinary Protocols

Radical Pedagogies explores a series of pedagogical experiments that played a crucial role in shaping architectural discourse and practice in the second half of the 20th Century. As a challenge to normative thinking, they questioned, redefined, and reshaped the post-war field of architecture. They are radical in the literal meaning stemming from the Latin radix (root), as they question the basis of architecture. These new modes of teaching shook foundations and disturbed assumptions, rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. They operated as small endeavours, sometimes on the fringes of institutions, but had long-lasting impact. Much of architectural teaching today still rests on the paradigms they introduced.

The ‘T-Shaped Buyer’: A transactional perspective on supply chain relationships

This paper challenges the normative view of interdependent buyer-seller relationships and provides a more holistic perspective of the contextual reality that shapes buyer behaviour. By proposing an innovative qualitative methodology, which focusses on boundary-spanning, pre-sales interactions, the research penetrates complex and commercially sensitive buyer-seller relationships. The longitudinal research design uses web-based diaries and follow-up interviews to explore conditions of power based interdependence between buyers and sellers. The ensuing data is mapped using qualitative content analysis and the results are aggregated graphically for assessment. Using this approach the study develops a nuanced view of the dominant patterns of buyer behaviour, and challenges the opinion that a search for competitive advantage will strengthen cooperative relationships in conditions of power based interdependence. The paper introduces the metaphor of the 'T-Shaped Buyer' to explain the empirical findings and, while acknowledging the contextual limits of the study, suggests that this metaphor may cause both academics and practitioners to reflect on normative thinking.

“Utopian in the Right Sense”: The Responsibility to Protect and the Logical Necessity of Reform

In this article I argue that the claims made about the efficacy of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) echo the pejorative conceptions of “utopianism” as advanced by E. H. Carr and Ken Booth in two ways: through the determination of RtoP supporters to claim “progress” in spite of countervailing empirical evidence; and through the exaggerated importance that supporters ascribe to institutionalization, which mistakenly conflates state support with a change in state behavior and interests. I argue that RtoP's impact on the behavior of states has been and will continue to be limited. Moreover, while RtoP has garnered widespread support among states, this is due to it having been rendered largely impotent through a process of norm cooptation. While both Carr and Booth criticized a particularformof utopianism, they both also defended the articulation of normative prescriptions that arenot immediatelyfeasible. To this end, I conclude by suggesting a potential reform of the existing international legal order that meets Carr's preference for normative thinking that is “utopian in the right sense.”

Chekhov's Three Sisters: A Proto-Poststructuralist Experiment

Chekhov's Three SistersA Proto-Poststructuralist Experiment Sarah Wyman (bio) In Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters (1900), the domestic scene may appear estranged, both static and understated, but it becomes increasingly familiar the longer one looks. Characters, like well-tuned instruments, echo, harmonize, and clash as they seek meaning in each other's words and gestures. In an impressionistic polyphony of voices, one hears soundings of desire, outrage, and self-revelation above a basso continuo of longing, loss, and regret.1 Borrowing terms from painting and music, critics have called this play both impressionistic and symphonic, descriptors that point to how Chekhov's writing works in a new way or changes the structures of dramatic storytelling. Indeed, more than realism or formalism, Chekhov's mosaic approach, an experiment in representation, ushers in stylistic techniques that enable the technical innovation of artists to follow and project well beyond his own moment. Considered radical in its day for its true-to-life effects, Chekhovian drama continues to engage contemporary theatre publics due to the freshness of its approach to writing the human condition and to staging the problem of representation itself. Raymond Williams indicates that with Chekhov one witnesses "a writer of genius beginning to create a new dramatic form, but in ways so original and so tentative that it is in constant danger of breaking down."2 Like a painting whose array of brushstrokes merge into meaning when beheld from a distance, Chekhov creates a play whose intricate system of verbal and visual signifiers requires a particular perspective. The work captures ordinary life as it is lived, the ostensibly real, in a manner revolutionary for its time. As a theatrical work, Three Sisters marks a new kind of verisimilitude that is, paradoxically, realistic in its [End Page 183] estrangement.3 Chekhov's four major plays remain relevant to discussions of new works for theatre because they self-reflexively engage hermeneutical questions of meaning-making even as they conjure convincing illusions of the real. Furthermore, their dialectical approach to complex questions sets similarity and difference against each other in ways that destabilize easy, normative thinking. Chekhov's plays testify to art's relevance as an arbiter of culture, as demonstrated by their astonishing popularity and many contemporary adaptations.4 As visual/verbal/aural performance, Three Sisters engages an array of touchstones that will come to describe the trope of early-twentieth-century modernism. Although various scholars have noted Chekhov's attention to formal structures and his convincing characterization, they have not recognized the way the playwright's approach to rhetorical choices prefigures poststructuralist concerns. I will examine Chekhov's self-reflexive attention to aspects of dramatic writing, to human being, and to discursive effects as perceived by those who people his plays. He plays with dialectics of real and virtual time as he foregrounds and defamiliarizes the dramatic genre and affective experience. Both thematically and structurally, Chekhov's new writing, metadiscursively concerned with its own meaning-making, goes beyond the cohesive systems described by formalism and structuralism to approach questions now considered the purview of poststructuralism and even postmodernism. Chekhov's approach to playwriting epitomizes Fredric Jameson's celebrated notion of multiple narratives of modernism that have dominated critical theory from the mid-nineteenth century until today. The critic identifies modernism itself as a representation, a signifier whose referent is so multivalent as to be nearly untenable. For Jameson, modernism escapes representation, and only situations of modernity, those that Chekhov captures eloquently onstage, can be narrated. Chekhov's work weaves many of the strands Jameson includes in his definition of modernity as trope: the fetish of the new; a self-reflexive reification of language such that it operates beyond its communicative function; a dissociation from the present (due to an emphasis on past and future); a celebration of chance; a critique of progress and causality; the (illusory) autonomy of the aesthetic system, still lodged firmly in culture; the self grasped as a construction knowable only through inadequate representations; and the emergence of formal abstraction.5 Through its participation in this conceptual aesthetic arena, one whose grip on critical theory remains strong today, Chekhov's new writing ensures its cultural foothold as...

Moral Education in Late Modernity

This article argues that there should be a stronger emphasis on morality, involving a clear articulation of a normative point of view, in education as well as in child raising, with a continuity from early childhood to higher age levels, such that the asymmetry of roles (child – adult) gradually gives way to genuine reciprocity and a shared sense of responsibility. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s work, we explore the historical conditions of moral education. Solid modernity was an age of authorities, sometimes changing into authoritarian education and politics. This prompted a reaction in the form of liquid modernity, followed by anxiety and indecision among parents and teachers now that the old certainties informing normative thinking and practice were gone. Today, wee again witness a reaction and a change in cultural trends: a rebirth of solidity that carries a potential for a new normativity, a potential we consider betrayed in the current wave of claims of productivity, competitiveness and self‐sufficiency in neoliberalism, notions we regard as difficult to unify with moral education, if not in outright conflict with its deeper aspiration. Accordingly, authority in school these days is a matter of obtaining discipline and achievement, not promoting values or serious engagement with moral issues. This calls for a new discussion about education as well as an extended framework of morality. We urge that such a framework question the anthropocentric premises on which Bauman’s understanding of the discontents of late modernity is premised, highlighting the crises and pathologies involving human society at the expense of those affecting nonhumans.

Hybrid Speech Acts: A Theory of Normative Thought and Language That ‘Has It Both Ways’

In this essay, I propose a novel hybrid metanormative theory. According to this theory, speakers making normative claims express both cognitive and motivational attitudes in virtue of the constitutive norms of the particular speech acts they perform. This view has four principal virtues: (1) it is consistent with traditional semantic theories, (2) it supports a form of motivational judgment internalism that does justice to externalist intuitions, (3) it illuminates the connection between normative language and normative thought, and (4) it explains how speakers can express different conative states when speaking in different normative domains. In the first section, I discuss the theories of Stephen Finlay and David Copp. I show that they each come very close to having it both ways but ultimately fail. Understanding the shortcomings of these views is instrumental to a clear presentation of my own Hybrid Speech Act theory in section two. In the final section, I demonstrate how my view achieves its four advantages.

Barriers to seeking care for accidental bowel leakage: a qualitative study.

Fewer than 50% of women with urinary incontinence (UI) and 30% of women with accidental bowel leakage (ABL) seek care. We sought to describe barriers to care seeking for ABL to inform development of an instrument to measure these barriers. We recruited women with ABL with varied prior care-seeking experiences to participate in focus groups and cognitive interviews so we could understand factors that may have prevented or delayed care seeking. Focus groups continued until thematic saturation was reached using conventional content analysis. Final themes were established and characterized by comparing within and across the focus groups and with previously described UI and ABL care-seeking barriers. Cognitive interviews were confirmatory. Thirty-nine women (aged 46-85) participated in six focus groups and ten cognitive interviews; 89% were white, 8% African American, and 3% Latina. We identified 12 barriers to seeking care for ABL: (1) Lack of knowledge about the condition; (2) Lack of knowledge about treatment; (3) Fear of testing/treatment; (4) Normative thinking; (5) Avoidance/denial; (6) Life impact; (7) Embarrassment/shame; (8) Self-blame; (9) Stigma; (10) Isolation; (11) Provider barriers; (12) Access limitations. These 12 barriers encompassed three overarching themes: the internalized self in relation to ABL; perceptions about ABL and its treatments; and interaction with the healthcare system. ABL care-seeking barriers are similar to those described for UI, with the notable addition of lack of knowledge that ABL is a medical condition experienced by others. Interventions to promote access to effective treatments for ABL should include information about prevalence and treatability.

Special Considerations and Reporting among Crime Victims in Lagos: A Qualitative Study

It is commonly assumed that victims’ reporting decision making is contingent upon some special normative and contextual considerations. This study examines the effects of these special considerations on crime reporting practices among victims in Lagos, Nigeria, using the qualitative method. The findings indicate that some special considerations anchored on cultural indices of stigmatization, stereotypes, taboos, tenderness of age, and gender are critical to victims’ decision-making choices for reporting in the study area. Consequently, it is suggested that government should use public enlightenment to make rational than normative thoughts steer reporting among victims for public safety in Lagos, Nigeria.

Marginal Latinidad: Afro-Latinas and US film

Afro-Latina/os, those that I argue here have a “marginal Latinidad,” are rarely included in what is imagined as the Latino/Hispanic population within the United States, as their mediated racialization can be difficult to read and sometimes intentionally ambiguous. Using actors Rosario Dawson, Zoe Saldana, and Gina Torres as case studies, this article asks: how are audiences reading these Afro-Latina actors’ race/ethnicity and what are the discourses informing these readings? Based on critical, textual, and reception analyses, I assert that Dawson, Saldana, and Torres’s ethnoracialization reflects their embodiment of “marginal Latinidad,” which is constructed in juxtaposition to normative Latino representation, influenced by the presence of blackness, rooted in narrative location and context, and, at times, signals ideological challenges to normative racial thinking in the United States.

Expressivism and realist explanations

It is often claimed that there is an explanatory divide between an expressivist account of normative discourse and a realist conception of normativity: more precisely, that expressivism and realism offer conflicting explanations of (1) the metaphysical structure of the normative realm, (2) the connection between normative judgment and motivation, (3) our normative beliefs and any convergence thereof, or (4) the content of normative thoughts and claims. In this paper I argue that there need be no such explanatory conflict. Given a minimalist approach to the relevant metaphysical and semantic notions, expressivism is compatible with any explanation that would be acceptable as a general criterion for realism.

Reflections on the Refusal to Acknowledge Private Governments

In this chapter I will argue that the state-centred view of governance that excludes, or at least obscures, private governments and continues to dom- inate our thinking has been, and continues to be, a particularly tenacious paradigm. For all its staying power, however, and indeed because of it, it is a paradigm that needs to be eclipsed. This is so not simply because this state-centred view of the world is preventing us from developing an understanding of the world that captures what has been taking place, but because it is limiting normative thinking. It is restricting our ability to comprehend and respond to the divisions that are being created in the world by limiting our awareness of the sources of these divisions and the options and opportunities available to challenge and, hopefully, reverse them.

Reproducing knowledge in construction expertise: a reflexive theory, critical approach

An auto-ethnography and then analyses of narratives and ethnographies of other construction professionals are used to argue that reproduction of knowledge and expertise development is constrained by both normative professional thinking and a discourse of economic constraint generated by a highly competitive marketplace with a focus on time, cost, and quality trade-offs. The analysis of construction professionals’ narratives suggests that expertise development in construction is essentially an incremental process built on scenarios and influenced mostly by context and people, discourses of practices, legalities and professional expectations. Sometimes that incrementalism is distorted through radical innovation, but that is rare. Construction expertise in these stories is reproduced from base level learning and grows through practice. Practitioners, it is argued, accumulate knowledge and expertise, but the practice that emanates remains bounded within prevailing discourse which itself changes incrementally.

A CASE FOR SOME NORMATIVE CONTENT IN SOUTH AFRICAN TRUST LAW

The nature and content of the fiduciary duty in South African trust law is discussed and the principles and theory of fiduciary law are set against the value system underpinning such law. The aspect of trust and the role of power within the fiduciary relationship, with particular reference to the duty of care as inherent ingredient of the fiduciary function, are investigated. While the fiduciary duty cannot be separated from the duties of a trustee, it is submitted that it is made up of more than a duty of care, and also includes aspects such as impartiality, independence, accountability, loyalty and good faith. The legislated duties of the company director, namely care, diligence and skill, are compared with the contents of the fiduciary duties of trustees, with reference to traditional viewpoints in other jurisdictions, such as the profit and conflict rule, the duty of loyalty and the law of equity. Against this background the question is posed whether the fiduciary duty of the trustee in South Africa is an expression of positive law only, or whether some normative content has actually infiltrated the application thereof. It is submitted that, as matters of a fiduciary nature are closely interwoven with moral and social aspects, the application of positive law when dealing with the fiduciary duty of trustees has indeed been influenced by some normative thinking.

Comparing the Law and Governance of Assisted Dying in Four European Nations

This article provides a comparative law and governance insight to assisted dying in England, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands, bringing together empirical studies of regulation and normative thinking about the role of the state. It follows the ‘new governance’ scholarly effort to challenge the conventional wisdom that regulation, especially in regard to controversial and sensitive public policy issues, must be determined by top-down, command and control rules. The question here is a straightforward, but fundamental one: to what extent do, and should, private actors contribute to the creation, application and enforcement of the law on assisted dying? Critical attention is paid to the differences that exist in the aforementioned nations and how they matter from a broader governance and policy-oriented perspective.

Oakeshott on Practice, Normative Thought and Political Philosophy

This paper examines Michael Oakeshott's ideas on the relation between political philosophy and normative thought. To this end, some of the most controversial concepts of his thought are considered in the context of the philosophical debates that developed after the success of analytic philosophy and, in particular, of Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic. First, the paper argues that, in contrast to analytic and ordinary language thinkers, Oakeshott defends the legitimacy and the rationality of normative thinking. To this end, the importance of the Oakeshottian concepts of tradition and moral practice is stressed, and the controversial notion of ‘pursuit of intimations’ is considered. Through a discussion of Oakeshott's unpublished notes, the relevance of Aristotle for the development of his thought is also highlighted. Second, the paper contends that Oakeshott sees political philosophy as a critical activity aiming at universal concepts. At the same time, the paper stresses the Oakeshottian distinction between political philosophy and normative thought. With this discussion as a background, the paper finally discusses some of the controversies provoked by Oakeshott's position.

Being Realistic and Demanding the Impossible

Characterising realism by contrasting it with moralism leaves open several questions to do with realism’s practical import. If political judgment is not to be derived — exclusively or at all — from pre-political moral commitments, what scope is there for genuinely normative political thinking? And even if there is some scope for political normativity, does realism’s reliance on interpretations of political practices condemn it to some form of status quo bias? In this paper I address those questions. My main aim is to assuage some worries about realism’s alleged conservative tendencies. I argue that there is an important sense in which realists can support radical and even unachievable political change — one can be realistic and demand the impossible, as the soixante- huitard slogan goes. To see how that may be the case one needs to characterise realism by contrasting it with both non-ideal theory and utopianism. In a nutshell, realism differs from non- ideal theory because it need not be concerned with feasibility constraints, and it differs from utopianism because it eschews detailed blueprints of the perfect polity.

Does the Origin of Normativity Stem from the Internalization of Dominance Hierarchies?

Many natural scientists explain the evolutionary origin of morality by documenting altruistic behaviour in our nearest nonhuman relatives. Christine Korsgaard has criticized such attempts on the premise that they do not put enough effort in explaining the capacity to be motivated by normative thoughts. She speculates that normative motivation may have originated with the internalization of the dominance instincts. In this article I will challenge the dominance hierarchy hypothesis by arguing that a proper investigation into how and when dominance inhibits behaviour does not seem to reveal a minimal normative dimension.

Reasoning about benefits, costs, and risks of chemical substances: mapping different levels of sophistication

The ability to evaluate options and make informed decisions about problems in relevant contexts is a core competency in science education that requires the use of both domain-general and discipline-specific knowledge and reasoning strategies. In this study we investigated the implicit assumptions and modes of reasoning applied by individuals with different levels of training in chemistry when engaged in a task that demanded the evaluation of the benefits, costs, and risks (BCR) of using different chemical substances. We were interested in identifying and characterizing different levels of sophistication in the use of chemistry concepts and ideas in BCR reasoning. Our qualitative study elicited reasoning patterns that ranged from intuitive to mixed to normative, with students mostly in mid-undergraduate years demonstrating reasoning that was a mixture of intuitive and chemical ways of thinking. Intuitive reasoning was governed primarily by affective impressions about the substances under evaluation. Consideration of compositional, structural, and energetic features of substances was observed with increased training in chemistry, with a tendency to mix particle-level explanations with intuitive assumptions. Normative thinking shifted toward proactive use of appropriate disciplinary knowledge, recognition of a need for more data about bulk properties particularly on large scales, and consideration of pros, cons, and trade-offs. Implications are discussed for ways to improve the undergraduate chemistry curriculum so that students gain proficiency in making productive judgments and informed decisions.

The Perils of Covenant Theology

Abstract This essay takes the work of Eugene Borowitz, specifically his articulation of covenant theology, to display several serious problems in Jewish normative thinking. It focuses on three broad issues: (1) the unjustified and unjustifiable leap in Borowitz's argument for the centrality of covenant to Jewish experience, (2) the ease with which one might rescript his argument as a manifesto for Jewish assimilation to America, and (3) the inability of Borowitz's covenant theology to be as supportive of the individual as he claims it to be. In its conclusion, this essay shows how a minor strand of Borowitz's thought might serve as the beginning to a solution of these problems.