Wrong Turn Research Articles

Meanings and Understandings in the History of Ideas

Abstract This paper presents a framework of four types of meaning and understanding in the history of political thought and intellectual history. Previous frameworks have overlooked a whole type of meaning – the type often prioritised by political theorists and philosophers. I call this “extended meaning.” Correcting a wrong turn in philosophy of language in the 1950s, I show how extended meaning has robust intellectual foundations, and I illustrate its value for textual interpreters. Even historians often need extended meaning, for example to help resolve ambiguous passages. So, the main types of meaning are not alternatives: scholars interested in one kind of meaning still need others. This paper thus celebrates both diversity and unity.

Gross Negligence Manslaughter Revisited: Time for a Change of Direction?

This article postulates that the House of Lords took a wrong turn in Adomako, missing the opportunity to revise the Caldwell/Lawrence guidance on recklessness, to produce a more appropriate determinant of criminal liability for inadvertent conduct causing death. It will be advocated that gross negligence manslaughter is replaced with reckless manslaughter utilising an objective capacity–based test. A proposal that encompasses both acts and omissions will be advanced which is theoretically underpinned by a hybrid theory of culpability. It will be contended that this hybrid theory best represents current approaches to criminally reckless conduct in practice and produces a morally apposite method of ascertaining criminal responsibility where the risk of death was not foreseen.

Copyright at the Museum: Using the Publication Doctrine to Free Art and History

This Article is the first to use the copyright publication doctrine to clarify whether art, photographs, films, and historical documents that fill our museums and libraries are in the public domain. Knowing whether a photo, painting, film, or original letter was published is critically important to anyone who wants to use it today. Before 1989, publishing a work with no copyright notice dedicated the work to the public domain. Unpublished works without a notice are likely protected by copyright, and their unauthorized use can result in severe federal penalties. Unfortunately, the meaning of “publication” in copyright law is notoriously ambiguous. The federal statutory definition suggests that works “made available” to the public are published, while leading treatises generally assume that works given to public museums and libraries are unpublished. Confronted with this uncertainty, risk averse institutions too often assume that archived works are protected by copyright. Misunderstanding the law can keep cultural treasures locked in dark archives, vaults and basements, preventing their use as a foundation for new expression and distorting our sense of history.This Article critically examines mistaken assumptions about copyright publication. It finds that neither the statutory definition nor leading treatises adequately identify when a work is published. A better standard for determining when a work is published and in the public domain is needed to free works from being locked up by copyright uncertainty. The best solution would clarify the boundaries of a stable public domain. In a recent decision, the Supreme Court took a wrong turn in dismissing the importance of the public domain. Knowing what content may be freely used is critical to preserving First Amendment values and freeing cultural treasures from copyright’s bondage. The copyright ambiguity of archived works should be resolved in a way that honors the expressive and historical value of the public domain. After considering several alternatives, this Article shows how precedential patterns point to the best solution to the publication ambiguity. Drawing on empirical analysis of federal cases interpreting copyright publication, I identify the variables that are most important in determining whether archived works are published. The suggested solution focuses on copyright owner intent and the availability of authorized copies. Other factors described as significant in leading treatises — such as the type of work or archive — actually mask these two fundamental inquiries. The proposed standard provides a much needed solution to clarify which pieces of our cultural heritage are in the public domain and freely available as raw materials for educational sharing, expressive work, historical research, and public discourse.

From Westminster to Makola; the Wrong Turn We Took.

From Westminster to Makola; the Wrong Turn We Took.

Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination by Sebastian LeCourt

Reviewed by: Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination by Sebastian LeCourt Michael Ledger-Lomas (bio) Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination. by Sebastian LeCourt; pp. 229. Oxford UP, 2018. $77.00 cloth. The central insight of Sebastian LeCourt's excellent monograph is that "secularity is a discourse about religion, not its lack" (1). He follows other Victorianists in moving away from the empirical question of whether religion waxed or waned in Britain to investigate instead how Victorians defined it and thus demarcated it from other areas of life (28). Undergirding his book is also a quiet but insistent politics: he follows his theoretical lodestars Charles Taylor, Tal Asad, and Saba Mahmood in emphasizing the shortcomings of secularism, or the version of it bequeathed to the present by Western history. These theorists argue that only when religion is defined narrowly as the beliefs that individuals choose for themselves is it plausible to insist that it can or should be refused entry to the public sphere. If Western secularity perhaps took a wrong turn as early as John Locke (14), then the Victorian period looks like the cul-de-sac for its "Protestant conceptions of sincerity and interiority" (3). LeCourt, though, argues that Victorian intellectuals always harboured doubts about this disembodied Protestant secularism. The "liberal writers" (2) he discusses—Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Andrew Lang—are drawn to meatier accounts of religion as a tie that binds, one that shapes individuals, nations, and races and that is inherited rather than chosen. LeCourt cycles through various labels for their rebellion against impoverished visions of religion and thus secularity: "aesthetic secularism" or "pluralistic secularism" (3) but more commonly "many-sidedness" (17), an insistence that a liberal aesthetic should confront and incorporate particularist world views. If many-sidedness had a German Romantic provenance, then its cultivation led disenchanted liberals to anthropology, which allowed them to imagine what mental worlds bounded by ethnicity might be like: to be chosen by your religion, rather than to choose it. In deft overviews of Victorian anthropology in his introduction and in his first chapter—on Friedrich Max Müller, the living link between German philology and anthropology—LeCourt recognizes that it was a fragmented discipline without a secure institutional home, whose methodological assumptions oscillated sharply over time. Although racialist approaches were sometimes in vogue, the rise of evolutionary thinking revived an enlightened stadialism which envisaged all peoples as passing up the same ladder of mental development. But all of these approaches posed a challenge to the autonomous Protestant subject who is the conventional hero of secularization narratives, because even theorists who believed in a unitary human nature maintained that people and their religions were deeply determined by their cultures. [End Page 293] Thanks to scholars such as George Stocking, Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, Colin Kidd, and Timothy Larsen, the religious preoccupations of Victorian anthropology and its prolonged flirtation with racism are familiar enough. LeCourt breaks new ground in documenting how anthropology's understanding of religion as an ethnic identity marked Victorian aesthetics. The second chapter argues that Matthew Arnold valued culture for its ability to blend strident particularisms. LeCourt's Arnold views culture neither as a substitute for religion nor as a homogenous whole. Instead, religion (and religions) poses tests for culture's assimilative power, with "Hebraism" particularly fascinating him as a faith that challenged but ultimately enriched the many-sided knower. Yet although LeCourt's Arnold is drawn to racial understandings of religion, he was undecided on whether aesthetics sits above or within racial determinism. Did culture reconcile Hellenism and Hebraism, for instance, or should it not just be identified with Hellenism (96)? The third chapter presents George Eliot as still more subtle and undecided in her stance on that question. Although she rebels against the canting certainties of evangelical Christianity, the ruthless solipsism of German higher criticism and philosophy do not make for a desirable alternative because it leaves the Scriptures and religion as no more than the projection of the individual's wants. Eliot finds a worthier foil to the secular in Daniel Deronda's Judaism. Deronda does not choose it through laborious ratiocination; rather...

In Favor of the Classical Quine on Ontology

AbstractI make a Quinean case that Quine’s ontological relativity marked a wrong turn in his philosophy, that his fundamental commitments point toward the classical view of ontology that was worked out in most detail in hisWord and Object(1960). This removes the impetus toward (a version of) structuralism in his later philosophy.

The Majestic Equality of Disenfranchisement: Assessing the Right to Freedom from Discrimination in the Light of the Ngaronoa Litigation

The right to freedom from discrimination in New Zealand is underpinned by equality, one of the most influential, yet amorphous principles in political theory. This paper argues that the failure of New Zealand courts to unpack the normative backing of the anti-discrimination guarantee leaves discrimination law normatively impoverished, enabling arbitrary and inconsistent reasoning. The decisions of the High Court in Taylor v Attorney- General and the Court of Appeal in Ngaronoa v Attorney-General thus reflect a wrong turn in New Zealand discrimination law, taken in the case of Ministry of Health v Atkinson. Because discrimination law necessitates moral judgment, this paper argues that the courts have been wrong to treat discrimination law as a largely amoral enterprise. Seen in this context, it should be unsurprising that the decisions of Taylor v Attorney-General and Ngaronoa v Attorney-General appear to mask moral judgments behind a facade of empiricism and common sense, and reveal differing conceptions of the principle of equality.

Landscapes Mythicized:

The lay of a people is often tethered to the lay of the land that they live in or leave behind; for the land holds all the associations of ancestry, heritage, and environment that constitute what Emile Durkheim would call “the collective conscious.” Landscapes may assume near mythical dimensions in forming and framing the creative impulse of writers who draw their images and symbols, themes and motifs, and aspirations and apprehensions from their terrestrial roots and routes. In the present paper, I seek to reread a few poems of the famous Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali with a view to highlighting his poetics of place that remains true to the kindred points of haven (America, the adopted land) and home (Kashmir, the homeland). Attempts will be made to shed light on the re-creative dynamics of his poetry that helps him to mythicize these two landscapes with the aid of “memory” and “imagination.” My objective here is to foreground the process through which the poet’s re-creation of place combines with the reader’s focus on spatiality to situate Ali’s poems such as “Postcard from Kashmir,” “Snowmen,” “A Wrong Turn,” “Snow on the Desert,” “Farewell,” etc. In the poem, “Postcard from Kashmir” for example, the speaker holds the postcard that represents to him the land of his birth – “Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,/ my home a neat four by six inches.” The persistent pains of “exile” lead him to proximate the half-inch Himalayas to this “home,” because he realizes “This is home. And this the closest I’ll ever be to home.” Similarly, in the poem “Snow on the Desert,” the poet brings to bear all his imaginative elasticity to re-create the Papago’s way of living in the Sonoran desert in the South Western part of the United States. His poetic narrative brings to the surface the native history of the Papagos people whose long lost lives are imaginatively re-created by a diasporic poet, keenly aware of the ancient glory of his own homeland as contrasted with its recent abjection.

On human and non-human people: an interview with Jane Rawson

Australian fiction writer Jane Rawson writes about strange but familiar worlds. Her books and stories are relentlessly inventive, disruptive but tender and funny, and thoroughly thought-provoking. Her debut novel, A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (Transit Lounge, 2013), was shortlisted in the science fiction category for the 2013 Aurealis Awards and won the Small Press Network’s ‘Most Underrated Book Award’. This was followed by two books in 2015, a novella, Formaldehyde (2015, winner of the Seizure Viva la Novella competition), and the nonfiction work The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change (Transit Lounge, co-written with James Whitmore). Her novel From the Wreck, the main topic of this interview, was published by Transit Lounge (Melbourne) in 2017 and by Picador (UK) in 2019. It won the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Barbara Jeffries Award, the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. This interview took place before a live audience at Imprints Booksellers in Hindley Street, Adelaide, in 2018, and was updated via email exchange between the interviewer and Jane Rawson.

Observation of Continuous Contraction and a Metastable Misfolded State during the Collapse and Folding of a Small Protein

To obtain proper insight into how structure develops during a protein folding reaction, it is necessary to understand the nature and mechanism of the polypeptide chain collapse reaction, which marks the initiation of folding. Here, the time-resolved fluorescence resonance energy transfer technique, in which the decay of the fluorescence light intensity with time is used to determine the time evolution of the distribution of intra-molecular distances, has been utilized to study the folding of the small protein, monellin. It is seen that when folding begins, about one-third of the protein molecules collapse into a molten globule state (IMG), from which they relax by continuous further contraction to transit to the native state. The larger fraction gets trapped into a metastable misfolded state. Exit from this metastable state occurs via collapse to the lower free energy IMG state. This exit is slow, on a time scale of seconds, because of activation energy barriers. The trapped misfolded molecules as well as the IMG molecules contract continuously and slowly as structure develops. A phenomenological model of Markovian evolution of the polymer chain undergoing folding, incorporating these features, has been developed, which fits well the experimentally observed time evolution of distance distributions. The observation that the “wrong turn” to the misfolded state has not been eliminated by evolution belies the common belief that the folding of functional protein sequences is very different from that of a random heteropolymer, and the former have been selected by evolution to fold quickly.

The Osland ‘Wrong Turn’ and the Problems that Fictions Produce

While much academic attention has been devoted to whether the doctrine of extended joint criminal enterprise (‘EJCE’) can be justified, the basic joint criminal enterprise doctrine (‘JCE’) has escaped much scrutiny. The extraordinary recent case of IL v The Queen (2017) 262 CLR 268, however, has demonstrated that JCE is more problematic than was thought. It is argued here that the difficulties exposed in IL arose because of a ‘wrong turn’ in Osland v The Queen (1998) 197 CLR 316. The High Court’s insistence in that case that all JCE participants are principals in the first degree might have been convenient, but it was also fictitious and unprincipled – as Sir John Smith argued at the time. For as long as the law proceeds as though JCE participants have struck blows that they have not in fact struck, and fails to acknowledge that they are accessories, the Australian common law of complicity will be dishonest, obscure and unnecessarily complex.

Moving the Coal-Posts: Ottawa’s Wrong Turn on Carbon Pricing for Electricity Generation

New federal government carbon pricing regulations for electricity generators will reduce the average carbon cost for coal plants, while decreasing incentives for cleaner wind, solar and hydro projects, says a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. As phase two of the carbon-pricing “backstop”, originally enacted in 2018 under the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, the federal government has proposed an emissions benchmark for electricity generators that will vary by the type of fuel used. In “Moving the Coal-Posts: Ottawa’s Wrong Turn on Carbon Pricing for Electricity Generation,” author Grant Bishop examines Ottawa’s proposed plan and finds that a fuel-specific approach creates an unlevel playing field between different sources of electricity. The federal government’s fuel-specific method contrasts with Alberta’s current Carbon Competitiveness Incentive Regulation, which uses a uniform benchmark for all fuels used to generated electricity. The report finds that relative to a uniform standard for output-based allocations, Ottawa’s fuel-specific benchmark risks distorting the order in which plants are dispatched (i.e. turned on and off as demand requires) – potentially pushing high-emission coal plants ahead of lower-emission natural gas plants. In addition, unlike Alberta’s approach, Ottawa’s system does not allocate credits to zero-emission electricity producers such as hydro, wind and solar, and will diminish incentive for new investment in renewable generation. “Ottawa’s approach undercuts the concept of a single economy-wide carbon price and the economic rationale behind carbon pricing,” says Bishop. “While the federal government is likely concerned to avoid spikes in power prices in those provinces where power generation currently relies on coal, Ottawa risks distorting provincial power markets and investment incentives by differentiating carbon costs for producers of the same product.”

Ice Thieves

Abstract Navigating humor’s potentials for violence and for creative and critical connections with oceanic catastrophes, from extinctions to sea-level rise, this essay argues that humor is a diverse and perhaps important dimension of contemporary cultural production about the changing oceans. Jane Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists uses humor to emphasize fictional people’s challenging and idiosyncratic daily struggles to survive in a future marked by sea-level rise and other climate-related processes. The novel’s absurd tragicomic tensions situate climate change as violence that is, at some level, unrepresentable. Its humor stresses not only the immense difficulties faced by characters who navigate in this future but also the deep socioeconomic inequality with which such difficulties are bound up, opening the narrative toward efforts to achieve climate justice.

You or Me? Personality Traits Predict Sacrificial Decisions in an Accident Situation.

Emergency situations during car driving sometimes force the driver to make a sudden decision. Predicting these decisions will have important applications in updating risk analyses in insurance applications, but also can give insights for drafting autonomous vehicle guidelines. Studying such behavior in experimental settings, however, is limited by ethical issues as it would endanger peoples' lives. Here, we employed the potential of virtual reality (VR) to investigate decision-making in an extreme situation in which participants would have to sacrifice others in order to save themselves. In a VR driving simulation, participants first trained to complete a difficult course with multiple crossroads in which the wrong turn would lead the car to fall down a cliff. In the testing phase, obstacles suddenly appeared on the "safe" turn of a crossroad: for the control group, obstacles consisted of trees, whereas for the experimental group, they were pedestrians. In both groups, drivers had to decide between falling down the cliff or colliding with the obstacles. Results showed that differences in personality traits were able to predict this decision: in the experimental group, drivers who collided with the pedestrians had significantly higher psychopathy and impulsivity traits, whereas impulsivity alone was to some degree predictive in the control group. Other factors like heart rate differences, gender, video game expertise, and driving experience were not predictive of the emergency decision in either group. Our results show that self-interest related personality traits affect decision-making when choosing between preservation of self or others in extreme situations and showcase the potential of virtual reality in studying and modeling human decision-making.

Vertical versus horizontal: What is really at issue in the exclusion problem?

I outline two ways of reading what is at issue in the exclusion problem faced by non-reductive physicalism, the “vertical” versus “horizontal”, and argue that the vertical reading is to be preferred to the horizontal. I discuss the implications: that those who have pursued solutions to the horizontal reading of the problem have taken a wrong turn.

Odpowiedzialność karna za przestępne współdziałanie w prawie angielskim po wyroku R v. Jogee; Ruddock v. The Queen

The combined decisions of the UK Supreme Court and Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in R v. Jogee; Ruddock v. The Queen caused upheaval in the English law on criminal complicity. The Supreme Court/Privy Council decided that the law on criminal complicity „took a wrong turn” 33 years ago in the Privy Council ruling in Chan Wing-Siu which concerned a controversial doctrine of parasitic joint enterprise liability. According to the said doctrine, if A and B set out to commit a crime X (e.g. robbery) and B foresees that A might commit crime Y (e.g. murder) in the course of committing crime X, B will be liable for crime Y, even if he does not intend that crime Y be committed. The mere fact of foresight on B’s part is enough for him to be criminally liable. Decision in Jogee; Ruddock is of seminal importance as it overturned the doctrine of parasitic joint enterprise liability. It is doubtful, however, to what extent the Supreme Court has resolved the problems that have bedeviled this area of law. This article presents in outline the English law on criminal complicity and attempts to assess the changes that were introduced in Jogee; Ruddock. A number of issues still call for further refinement and resolution. It appears, however, that the emphasis the Supreme Court put on intention as a required standard of fault, draws, at least superficially, the continental (Polish and German) and English criminal law closer together in terms of mens rea requirements for secondary liability.

Alcohol Induced Fatty Liver: A Tragic Inception of Wrong Turn

Alcohol Induced Fatty Liver: A Tragic Inception of Wrong Turn

Dodgy fossils: international legislation and the meaning of 'cultural property'

In our small world of palaeontology, it has ended friendships and ruined careers. Important fossils are lost to science, or are in limbo. In the wider world, people get shot or imprisoned. Through it, fortunes are made by rich people in the West, while peasant farmers in the South lose the fortunes they never had. 'It' is UNESCO 1970: The Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. This paper looks back at the ancestry of UNESCO 1970, to suggest that its ethically inspired progenitors probably would not have wanted it to turn out the way it did. The wrong turn seems to have been in the ambiguity (perhaps intentional, certainly not articulated) of the meaning of 'cultural property' in the 1970 Convention. Merryman (1986) reviewed 'cultural property'; he explained that it has two almostopposite meanings, whose complex bases, in semantics, nationalism and money, are explored in this paper. I ruminate on how differently the word 'culture' might be understood in the minds of legislators (and politicians) in the Signatory Countries to the 1970 Convention, and speculate about how their interpretations might, from one point of view, be inadvertently ('culturally', 'lost in translation') mistaken and how, from another point of view, they might coincide neatly with national interests. Maybe UNESCO 1970 itself did turn out the way its authors intended. The purpose of the Convention's Articles was to police international trade in national and personal property, arguably in support of the principles of capitalism, as variously applied in the signatory counties - and now, nearly 50 years on, globally. Finally, I question whether fossils should be in the Convention at all; I ask: except possibly for fossil hominins, whose 'cultural' property are they?

Familiarity Factors of Street Features in Pedestrian Wayfindings

From an origin point to a destination point, good wayfinding process requires familiar recognition on the street environment. However, the unclear reasons of identifying street features to determine a route to the destination influences a pedestrian to select the wrong turn, walk in longer distance, and lost his direction. This paper aims to identify the factors that influence pedestrian familiarity, familiar or unfamiliar, in people wayfinding. Two hundred questionnaires were collected in Teluk Intan, Perak, Malaysia. Quotations from 30 interviews were used to triangulate the findings. Factor analysis available in IBM SPSS version 21 was used in exploring the familiarity factors for wayfinding. The finding suggests three factors influenced pedestrian to familiar with the street environment, which the factors are characteristic, attraction, and interest of street features. While, the duplication design of street features, error in defining the position of street features and form similarity of street features influence pedestrian to become unfamiliar with the street environment. This paper implies that the physical form of street features gives impact to pedestrian familiarity. Consideration of the three factors that influence pedestrian to familiar with the environment can improve how pedestrian experience in street network especially wayfinding.

Another wrong turn? The rule in Hastings-Bass in Guernsey

Another wrong turn? The rule in Hastings-Bass in Guernsey