bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Lutherans and the Suffering of Christ
Authors: Heal Bridget
Published: September 2017

Chapter 5 focuses on one particular type of Lutheran devotional image: the crucifix. It examines transformations in Lutheran Passion piety from the early Reformation to the era of Paul Gerhardt (1607–76), using this to illustrate the increasing significance accorded to images. Luther himself had condemned the excesses of late-medieval Passion piety, with its emphasis on compassion for Christ and the Virgin Mary, on physical pain and on tears. From the later sixteenth century onwards, however, Lutheran sermons, devotional literature, prayers and poetry described Christ’s suffering in increasingly graphic terms. Alongside this, late-medieval images of the Passion were restored and new images were produced. Drawing on case studies from the Erzgebirge, a prosperous mining region in southern Saxony, and Upper Lusatia, the chapter investigates the ways in which images of the Passion were used in Lutheran communities during the seventeenth century.
The Visual Culture of a Lutheran Court
Authors: Heal Bridget
Published: September 2017

Chapter 7 turns from the devotional to the magnificent image, exploring the role of religious art at the Dresden court of the Saxon elector. The chapter focuses on the second half of the seventeenth century, on the period of religious and political stability that followed the Peace of Westphalia (1648). It investigates Dresden’s cultural connections to Italy. By the seventeenth century Lutheran texts provided a theologically grounded aesthetic that acknowledged the spiritual value of beautiful images. During this age of princely collecting—of the Kunstkammer—piety and politics merged. The castle chapel in Dresden provides a wonderful example, examined in detail in this chapter: here a rich visual and liturgical culture served not only to promote proper Lutheran piety but also to demonstrate the magnificence of the prince, in this case Elector Johann Georg II (r. 1656–80).
Protestant Aesthetics beyond the Court
Authors: Heal Bridget
Published: September 2017

While princely residential cities such as Dresden provided key focal points for the Empire’s spiritual and cultural life during the later seventeenth century, Chapter 8 shows that the appeal of the Lutheran baroque extended well beyond courtly circles. Not only princes and nobles but also prosperous burghers commissioned magnificent churches and religious images, as the examples investigated here demonstrate. The chapter uses case studies from two Saxon territories, the Erzgebirge and Upper Lusatia, to suggest that wherever finances permitted churches were rebuilt or redecorated in the new style, employing visual magnificence in the service of Lutheran piety. There were some splendid monuments in Brandenburg as well, for example Andreas Schlüter’s pulpit for Berlin’s Marienkirche (1703). There, however, Lutheran culture was also shaped by the presence of Calvinists and Pietists.
Conclusion
Authors: Heal Bridget
Published: September 2017

The conclusion highlights the extent to which the research presented in this book changes our understanding of Lutheran confessional culture. It reiterates the book’s main structure and themes: Luther’s own understanding of images and the legacy that his writings and the images commissioned for them left to his successors; the era of uncertainty following his death; the renewal and transformation of piety in the seventeenth century; the age of the baroque. It once again emphasizes the importance of the Empire’s territorial divisions in shaping Lutheran culture, and it considers whether there was a distinctly Lutheran iconography or aesthetic. Finally, it draws attention to the variety of historical actors who helped shape Lutheran visual culture, from eminent theologians to ordinary parish pastors, and from princes and nobles to townsfolk.
Introduction and Overview
Authors: Empson Laura
Published: September 2017

Professional organizations—such as accounting, consulting, and law firms, investment banks, hospitals, and universities—embody some of the most complex and challenging interpersonal and leadership issues that organizations present. Leaders of professional organizations must contend with ambiguous authority structures, complex interpersonal relations, and idiosyncratic professional colleagues: in other words, with the power, the politics, and the prima donnas. This chapter introduces the core themes of the book. It identifies the book’s intended audience, the kinds of practitioners and academics it will appeal to and why. It provides data on the scale and significance of the professional services sector and defines in detail what is meant by the concepts ‘professional organization’ and ‘professional services firm’. It outlines the empirical foundations, which include formal research interviews with more than 500 professionals in sixteen countries, and concludes by presenting a detailed overview of all the chapters in the book.
Leadership Dynamics
Authors: Empson Laura
Published: September 2017

This chapter explains in detail how leadership actually happens in a professional organization. The concept of plural leadership emphasizes that leadership is something that happens between people and is therefore co-constructed through interaction. This chapter develops a model of plural leadership dynamics, which emphasizes how leadership is fluid and unstable, changing and adapting as the relations between professionals change and adapt. Leadership dynamics in this context encompasses three microdynamics: ‘legitimizing’, ‘negotiating’, and ‘manoeuvring’. In other words, the model demonstrates how leadership in professional organizations is the result of a complex and highly nuanced set of interactions among peers, rather than a simpler, more transactional exchange between leaders and followers. In professional organizations, leadership represents an unstable equilibrium—it changes and adapts as relations between professionals change and adapt. The leaders who misjudge the subtleties of these interactions will quickly discover that nobody has to ‘follow’ them.
Leadership and Ambiguity
Authors: Empson Laura
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines in detail the leadership dynamics of the plural leadership group: who they are, who has the power to decide who they are, how they work together under normal circumstances, and how their dynamics change in response to a crisis. The conventional view is that organizational crises demand a clear and decisive response from ‘strong’ leaders. Yet this approach is hard to reconcile with the extensive autonomy and contingent authority which determines the distinctive power dynamics of professional organizations. The chapter examines a global law firm’s partner restructuring programme during the global financial crisis and asks: how, when authority is ambiguous, are leaders able to respond effectively in a crisis? The answer is that, under the cloak of ambiguity, leaders may be able to exercise considerable informal power by mobilizing and exploiting the organization’s hidden hierarchy. In the process, they move from an intuitive to a more deliberate form of mutual adjustment. This chapter explains exactly how it is done.
Happiness Contested
Authors: Innes Joanna
Published: September 2017

Innes suggests that in the eighteenth century ‘happiness’ was a widely current term which could denote an individual ‘feeling’, a social experience, a spiritual state, or a political imperative. From the century’s end, changes in thought and politics put pressure on these meanings. The claim that good government promoted the happiness of the people became a flashpoint when both radical reformers and loyalists tried to give ‘happiness’ practical substance during years of hardship. Malthus argued that the happiness realistically available was limited, and that to suggest otherwise encouraged anti-social behaviour—a view that resonated widely. While some dissident ‘Romantic’ Tories continued to argue thereafter that government should deliver happiness as popularly conceived, mainstream politicians, theologians, and political economists developed doubts. By contrast radicals (including Bentham and his circle) argued that the failure to deliver happiness demonstrated the need for radical political change
The Sufferings of John Lilburne
Authors: Braddick Michael J.
Published: September 2017

Braddick explores how John Lilburne used Christian tropes of suffering and martyrdom to dramatize imperilled civic liberties rather than the true religion. His sufferings grew out of his religious commitments, but his public appeal was to all Englishmen, many of whose religious beliefs he would have found objectionable: what he had in common with them was his legal inheritance, not a shared religious identity. This line of argument was more comprehensible to later generations than the more inspired spiritual radicalism of many of his contemporaries, and his example continued to appeal to eighteenth-century audiences. To the Romantics, however, his perspective seemed cramped and limited: Carlyle thought that he lacked the transcendent vision of the true hero. While Lilburne had helped to secularize the tropes of martyrdom, its appeal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries depended on their being reinvested with transcendent political ideals rather than the defence of particular rights.
The ‘Highest Roade to Happiness’
Authors: Knights Mark
Published: September 2017

Knights explores the writings of the later seventeenth-century merchant James Boevey, which digested his own experiences, apparently for the benefit of himself, his family circle and friends, though possibly with an eye to publication. In thirty manuscript volumes, Boevey set out an ‘Active Philosophy’, developed in the light of his manifold difficulties—extended litigation, imprisonment, associated commercial losses, brushes with death and a far from easy family life. He saw happiness as an art, and as something to be achieved. In that context suffering was something from which lessons could be learned, but he did not employ an orthodox Christian framework for this view: he does not seem to have been a Weberian merchant motivated by protestant ethics but instead endorsed a more speculative set of beliefs which nevertheless helped to advance mercantile values.
‘The Wretch of To-day, may be happy To-morrow’
Authors: Lloyd Sarah
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores what we can know about the conceptualization and representation of by poorer Britons. It draws on ‘pauper letters’ to parish authorities, written tactically, and on autobiographies and letters composed by the relatively poor, noting echoes of the characterization of happiness by elite social commentators. It draws attention to a growing interest (linked to the development of the concept of nostalgia) in the emotional charge that could be derived from reflection on emotional experience as people contrasted past happiness with present misery, or vice versa. While reading such accounts may lead us to think that we are penetrating the interior lives of marginal people in the past, Lloyd suggests that our response is probably coloured by the fact that we are heirs to these ways of conceptualizing and representing experience. We need to work harder to glean insight from earlier ways of representing happiness and suffering.
ASEAN, Anti-Politics, and Human Rights
Authors: Gerard Kelly
Published: September 2017

Through the lens of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), this chapter considers the political impacts of ASEAN’s recent reform. Prevailing explanations of why and how ASEAN has come to govern human rights frame this as a process of normative change. This chapter departs from these accounts by examining the structural context in which political processes have been reformed, considering how human rights governance has been rescaled and restructured, the drivers of this process, and whose interests these reforms advance. The chapter highlights the AICHR’s depoliticizing impacts at the level of the polity and at the level of politics, where ASEAN’s elites have been empowered as opposed to rights advocates. The chapter argues that the AICHR gives the appearance of expanding rights protections, while enabling elites to manage conflicts over human rights abuses according to their preferences.
The Meta-Governance of Austerity, Localism, and Practicesof Depoliticization
Authors: Griggs Steven , Howarth David , Mackillop Eleanor
Published: September 2017

This chapter contributes to ‘second-generation’ accounts of depoliticization through the critical assessment of the meta-governance of English local authorities under conditions of austerity. It draws on the grammar of post-structuralism to examine the case of a county council and how in the context of the 2010 public spending cuts, its corporate centre sought, but ultimately failed, to implement a system of ‘integrated commissioning’. The chapter focuses on the discursive and rhetorical strategies to de-contest this project of organizational change, foregrounding how the rhetoric of austerity was deployed to depoliticize proposals for change. Such strategies of depoliticization, as counter-attempts to decouple austerity from integrated commissioning demonstrates, are always open to contestation, such that the complex interactions of politicization and depoliticization strategies cannot be divorced from accounts of local agency and the politics of hegemony. This chapter thus concludes against hasty characterizations of the depoliticizing practices of neo-liberal meta-governance.
Towards a Political Economy of Depoliticization Strategies
Authors: Berry Craig , Lavery Scott
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that the literature on depoliticization tends to overlook the structural context within which depoliticization processes take place and, in particular, the way in which depoliticization strategies are embedded within distinctively capitalist forms of social organization. Too often, analysis focuses on categorizing different ‘types’ of depoliticization processes or outcomes, while neglecting to examine how depoliticization strategies are used as a discursive tool for embedding or shoring up dominant models of economic growth. The chapter seeks to resituate depoliticization in the political economy framework developed originally by Peter Burnham, while acknowledging that Burnham’s reductionist approach to institutions has paradoxically encouraged subsequent scholars to largely ignore structural context in characterizing instances of depoliticization. The chapter offers a preliminary application of an alternative political economy approach by examining macroeconomic policymaking in the post-crisis period in the United Kingdom, focusing on the Help to Buy scheme and the Office for Budget Responsibility.
Embracing the Mixed Nature of Politics
Authors: Stoker Gerry
Published: September 2017

Judging what is and what should be are everyday human activities, and, by understanding how they are done, analysts can explore the issue central to this chapter: that citizens are losing sight of the positive functions of politics and becoming too focused on its unavoidable and undesirable traits. Two aspects of political culture are making it more challenging for citizens to embrace the mixed nature of politics. First, too much fast thinking—intuitively driven cognition processes—is framing the political exchanges between citizens and political elites by citizens leading the former to focus too much on the negative features of politics. Second, a weakened system of moral accounting means that citizens do not have the satisfaction of seeing a moral balancing of the books that might in turn reconcile them to the yin and yang of politics.
The Battle Over the Lisbon Treaty’s Two Control Regimes
Authors: Brandsma Gijs Jan , Blom-Hansen Jens
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyses the transitional period between the pre- and post-Lisbon periods. It starts by investigating the design of the Lisbon Treaty’s two control regimes, the delegated acts regime and the implementing acts regime. This takes us back to the years just after the turn of the millennium and the negotiations on the failed Constitutional Treaty when the two delegation regimes were first introduced. Once in place, the treaty provisions were not directly operational. The delegated acts regime was to be followed up by an inter-institutional agreement on its practical application, and the implementing acts regime required a new horizontal framework regulation on comitology procedures to become operational. These two issues represented the first institutional battles in the post-Lisbon period. This chapter investigates how the Council, the Parliament, and the Commission each manoeuvred to secure as efficient a position in the control regimes as possible.
Institutional Preferences on the Post-Lisbon Control Regimes
Authors: Brandsma Gijs Jan , Blom-Hansen Jens
Published: September 2017

This chapter conducts an alternative investigation of our core theoretical argument that the EU institutions act as control-maximizers when designing or installing control structures. The case-based analysis in Chapter 5 and the large-N statistical analysis in this chapter have different merits. The case-based analysis allows us to include context and details and gives the reader an understanding of the substance. It also makes it possible to examine the actors’ strategies, that is, to show how they pursue their preferences. However, since the analysis is based on a limited number of non-randomly selected cases, the generalizability of the findings is questionable. In this chapter we analyse a large number of delegation situations in the post-Lisbon period with the aim of uncovering systematic preference patterns.
Explaining Choices of Delegation and Control Regimes
Authors: Brandsma Gijs Jan , Blom-Hansen Jens
Published: September 2017

This chapter turns from preferences on delegation regimes to decisions and examines how differing preferences are turned into decisions. It focuses on two factors in addition to preferences. First, legislation in the EU is decided under different procedures which provide the actors with different powers to act on their preferences. Second, legislation comes with transaction costs. Controlling delegated powers takes time and requires staff with technical insight. These costs are bearable to the member states in the Council of Ministers because they can rely on their national ministerial systems to exercise control. However, for the European Parliament, exercising control in practice is demanding. The Parliament is therefore likely to choose its battles with more care than the Council. The aim of this chapter is to understand the overall post-Lisbon pattern of delegation and control structures resulting from the numerous negotiations in daily legislative practice.
Mechanisms and Causation
Authors: Glennan Stuart
Published: September 2017

This chapter motivates a theory of causation according to which causal claims are existential claims about mechanisms. The chapter begins with a review of the variety of causal claims, emphasizing the differences between singular and general claims, and between claims about causal production and claims about causal relevance. I then argue for singularism—the view that the truth-makers of general causal claims are facts about collections of singular and intrinsic causal relations, and specifically facts about the existence of particular mechanisms. Applying this account, I explore possible truth conditions for causal generalizations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between mechanistic and manipulability approaches to causation. I argue that Woodward’s manipulability account provides valuable insights into the meaning of causal claims and the methods we use to assess them, but that the underlying truth-makers for the counterfactuals in that account are in fact mechanisms.
Production and Relevance
Authors: Glennan Stuart
Published: September 2017

This chapter offers an account of mechanistic production, which is contrasted with Salmon and Dowe’s theory of physical production. It provides a new analysis of the nature of events, and an account of how those events can form productive causal chains. This account identifies three distinct kinds of production: constitutive, precipitating, and chained. The chapter shows how the New Mechanist account addresses a number of standard problems for theories of causation, and for mechanistic theories in particular. These include how mechanistic production could be grounded in fundamental physics, how productive theories can explain causation by omission, prevention, and disconnection, how to explain causal relevance without appeal to counterfactuals, and how to understand the relation between production and constitution in inter-level causal claims. The chapter concludes by discussing how the New Mechanist approach to causation and constitution leads to a sensible account of the nature and limits of reduction and emergence.
Explanation
Authors: Glennan Stuart
Published: September 2017

This concluding chapter offers an abstract account of explanation as such, arguing that explanations involve the construction of models that always show what the targets of explanation depend upon (dependence), and sometimes show how multiple targets depend upon similar things (unification). It then suggests, in light of this account, how Salmon’s three conceptions of scientific explanation are not alternative conceptions, but are in fact complementary aspects of successful explanation. Explanations of natural phenomena are then divided into three kinds—bare causal, mechanistic, and non-causal. Bare causal explanations show what depends upon what, while mechanistic explanations show how those dependencies arise. Non-causal explanations in various forms show non-causal dependencies, which arise from features of the space in which mechanisms act.
Postscript
Authors: Glennan Stuart
Published: September 2017

As I have worked on this book, I have often been struck by the audacity of its title. The phrase “the New Mechanical Philosophy” was not my own, but still, to appropriate the venerable tradition of mechanical philosophy, to call it new, and to add a definite article to boot—maybe that’s just too much. Nonetheless I have stuck with the title, and the project, because I think it reflects both the continuity with the history of science and its philosophy, and a sea change in philosophical thinking in the new century. Mechanical philosophy is as old as Democritus; it was a central theme in the scientific revolution; it has helped drive research and debates on the nature of life and the nature of mind. But the New Mechanical Philosophy is new in large part because it tracks changes in the way science is done. Over recent decades, the sciences have developed increasing, if still rudimentary, capacities to analyze complex and heterogeneous systems—cells, brains, ecosystems, economies, and so on. Whereas in earlier epochs many of the greatest scientific achievements have been to understand the basic building blocks—the laws of electricity and magnetism or the structure of the hydrogen atom—scientists are now able to greater and greater extents understand how these things are put together to make the universe we know. Mechanical philosophy is always about understanding how things are put together, so it is a philosophy for this time....
Global climate change increases the need for genetic management
Authors: Frankham Richard , Ballou Jonathan D. , Ralls Katherine , Eldridge Mark D. B. , Dudash Michele R. , Fenster Charles B. , Lacy Robert C. , Sunnucks Paul
Published: September 2017

Adverse genetic impacts on fragmented populations are expected to accelerate under global climate change. Many populations and species may not be able to adapt in situ, or move unassisted to suitable habitat. Management may reduce these threats by augmenting genetic diversity to improve the ability to adapt evolutionarily, by translocation, including that outside the species’ historical range (assisted colonization) and by ameliorating non-genetic threats. Global climate change amplifies the need for genetic management of fragmented populations.
Take home messages
Authors: Frankham Richard , Ballou Jonathan D. , Ralls Katherine , Eldridge Mark D. B. , Dudash Michele R. , Fenster Charles B. , Lacy Robert C. , Sunnucks Paul
Published: September 2017

We recommend augmentation of gene flow for isolated population fragments that are suffering inbreeding and low genetic diversity, provided that proposed population crosses have low risks of outbreeding depression, and the predicted benefits justify the financial costs.
Introduction
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides an overview and contextualization of the study. Following a discussion of the importance of consumer durables as markers of affluence (at the level of the household and of society in general), the chronology of the mass-market consumer durables revolution is sketched out. The next section explores the problems involved in creating mass markets in inter-war Britain, owing to both income constraints and notions of respectability which placed limits on conspicuous consumption, while associating consumer credit with recklessness and living beyond one’s means. There follows a discussion of how creating mass markets involved coordinating value chains—the sequence of steps from design and manufacture to retail that collectively determine the good’s format, price, and distribution channels. Finally, the structure of the book is set out and there is a brief discussion of how the study goes about reconstructing the story of the inter-war consumer durables revolution.
Furniture
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: September 2017

New furniture was the first consumer durable to be successfully diffused to a mass (middle- and working-class) market in Britain. This chapter charts how a small number of furniture retailers pioneered many of the techniques used to create British mass markets for consumer durables. The key innovator was Benjamin Drage, who devised a successful formula to sell suites of new furniture, and the consumer credit used to purchase them, to ‘Mr Everyman’, using a revolutionary national advertising campaign. Drage’s spectacular early success is shown to have inspired emulation and adaption not just by furniture retailers, but by suppliers of other consumer durables. This chapter shows how furniture retailers managed to convince millions of working-and lower-middle-class families that buying their furniture new and furnishing out of income was not only practicable but constituted the cornerstone of modern aspirational lifestyles.
A Home of One’s Own
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: September 2017

Prior to 1914 owner-occupation was unusual, with even many landlords renting the houses they themselves lived in. The inter-war years, and particularly the 1930s, witnessed the start of a trend towards Britain becoming a nation of owner-occupiers and of a popular perception that ownership was socially superior to renting. The 1930s owner-occupation boom has traditionally been portrayed as a process from which the working class were largely excluded. However, working-class families (particularly recently married couples) played a substantial role in this boom. This transition was the product of falling building costs, mortgage liberalization, and an intensive marketing campaign by the two key components of the private house-building value chain: the house-building firms that determined the character, design, and location of the final product, and the building societies that provided the all-important mortgage finance.
British Radio Marketing, Distribution, and Retailing
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: September 2017

This chapter concludes discussion of the inter-war radio market by examining the specific strategies used by independent radio manufacturers to develop distinctive brands and thus avoid falling under the control of larger radio companies. These include innovative marketing, product differentiation through innovations in design, and strong, cooperative links with the retail trade. It also examines two alternative channels of supply for radio reception that did not require purchasing a receiver—relay services (which provided radio services from central stations by wire relays) and set rentals. Both offered the potential to extend the market to families that struggled to afford the cost of a radio set and—in the case of wire relays—to families without mains electricity. However, the expansion of these services—especially wire relays—was constrained by the determined opposition of the mainstream radio trade.
Failure to Accelerate
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: September 2017

From an international perspective, the inter-war car industry was a British success story. Britain ranked only second to the United States as the world’s leading producer of, and market for, automobiles, owing to a relatively strong domestic market by European standards. However, while consumers’ expenditure was high, it was not deep—car ownership per capita in 1938 being around a third of US levels. This chapter examines why the British automobile sector failed to take off into mass market diffusion. A number of important factors are highlighted, including lower British wages relative to the United States; punitive vehicle and petrol taxation; and the high unit production costs incurred in serving a market too small to justify Fordist mass production. However, a more fundamental reason was the low priority given to car ownership in a relatively small, densely populated, and highly urbanized island nation with well-developed public transport networks.
Introduction
Authors: Gelman Andrew , Nolan Deborah
Published: September 2017

This introduction to Teaching Statistics describes how an instructor might use this book, the general philosophy behind incorporating demonstrations, examples, and projects into a course, and what makes a good example. This chapter also provides a list of the most popular activities and a table that maps statistical concepts to activities that can be found throughout the book.
Statistical graphics
Authors: Gelman Andrew , Nolan Deborah
Published: September 2017

A statistical graph can offer an alternative compelling approach to teaching statistical thinking, but making good statistical graphs is hard to do. Each step in the process (e.g., change in scale, transform a variable, select colors, add a reference marker) engages students in better understanding data and models. However, this creative process is not easily encapsulated in a textbook. Since it is relatively easy to make a basic plot with statistical software, we can engage students in activities around making statistical graphs. This chapter provides guiding principles and lecture topics for teaching data visualization. The chapter contains exercises to deconstruct and reconstruct a plot, create a plot to reveal an important feature of the data, and turn a table of numbers into a plot.
Multiple regression and nonlinear models
Authors: Gelman Andrew , Nolan Deborah
Published: September 2017

This chapter covers multiple regression and links statistical inference to general topics such as lurking variables that arose earlier. Many examples can be used to illustrate multiple regression, but we have found it useful to come to class prepared with a specific example, with computer output (since our students learn to run the regressions on the computer). We have found it is a good strategy to simply use a regression analysis from some published source (e.g., a social science journal) and go through the model and its interpretation with the class, asking students how the regression results would have to differ in order for the study’s conclusions to change. The chapter includes examples that revisit the simple linear model of height and income, involve the class in models of exam scores, and fit a nonlinear model (for more advanced classes) for golf putting.
Structuring an introductory statistics course
Authors: Gelman Andrew , Nolan Deborah
Published: September 2017

The demonstrations and examples in this book are presented as separate modules so that the reader can easily use any subset of them. This chapter illustrates how we integrate our demonstrations and other teaching material into a non-calculus- based semester-long introductory course. We provide lesson plans that include an outline of the course material and student activities for each of 26 lecture periods of 75 minutes each. We make no claims for the optimality of this syllabus; rather, we include it to show how class-participation activities can be inserted into a standard course. In addition, we sketch an alternative list of activities for each week of a 15-week semester.
Decision theory and Bayesian statistics
Authors: Gelman Andrew , Nolan Deborah
Published: September 2017

This chapter outlines some of our more effective demonstrations for teaching decision theory and Bayesian statistics. Our contribution here is in the tricks used to involve students; the ideas behind most of the demonstrations are well known. The activities serve several purposes, including focusing student attention on difficult conceptual issues that are hard to learn in a lecture or by solving homework problems (e.g., the principle of expected gain and determining the value of a life); alerting students to their cognitive illusions (e.g., the incoherent utilities for money and uncalibrated subjective probability intervals); bringing personal issues into the class (e.g., different areas of knowledge in the subjective probability intervals and personal decision problems); dramatizing counterintuitive results which a student might not realize as counterintuitive; and demonstrating the multiple levels of uncertainty in a Bayesian analysis, as well as the coverage property of posterior intervals.
Problems and projects in probability
Authors: Gelman Andrew , Nolan Deborah
Published: September 2017

When probability is taught as a separate unit, not as part of a statistics course, then it makes sense to include exercises and examples that are motivated from mathematics rather than from applications. This chapter illustrates one way to promote active student involvement in a more advanced class. The material is designed to accommodate various mathematical backgrounds and to challenge all students. There are essentially three basic aspects to our mathematical probability courses: we teach in an interactive seminar style; we give students many challenging problems; and we require students to work on longer projects where they derive complicated results step by step. This chapter provides examples of many different kinds of problems, such as challenging questions on Buffon’s needle and noodle, a structured project on arcsine laws, an unstructured project on random permutations, and reading research paper in probability.
Statistical thinking in a data science course
Authors: Gelman Andrew , Nolan Deborah
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, we describe the philosophy, goals, syllabus, and activities for a course that we have developed in data science course. In this course we integrate topics from computing, statistics, and working with data. This integrated approach addresses many core aspects in statistics training, including statistical thinking, the role of context in addressing a statistical problem, statistical communication through code, and the balance between programming and mathematical approaches to problems. When designing this course, we asked ourselves what our students ought to be able to do computationally. While we do provide a list of technical material, we also considered the broader goals of the course. Examples include plotting on Google Earth and developing a spam filter for unwanted email.
The Symmetry Objection
Authors: Streumer Bart
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that non-cognitivists need to explain how their view is compatible with the claim that when two people make conflicting normative judgements, at most one of these judgements is correct. It considers three quasi-realist explanations of how non-cognitivism is compatible with this claim. It argues that to defend these explanations non-cognitivists must take their quasi-realism so far that the book’s arguments against realism also apply to non-cognitivism. The chapter also argues that non-cognitivists cannot explain how their view is compatible with this claim by endorsing a hybrid view or by appealing to a version of the reduction argument. The failure of these explanations constitutes the symmetry objection to non-cognitivism. The chapter ends by comparing non-cognitivism to the error theory.
The Error Theory
Authors: Streumer Bart
Published: September 2017

This chapter asks to which judgements the error theory applies, what the error theory entails, and whether what the error theory entails can be true. It argues that the error theory does not apply to judgements about standards, but does apply to instrumental normative judgements and judgements about reasons for belief. It then compares the error theory that this book defends to the moral error theories that have been defended by J.L. Mackie, Richard Joyce, and Jonas Olson. The chapter argues that Mackie, Joyce, and Olson underestimate the generality of their own arguments. It ends by arguing that the error theory entails that all normative judgements are false, and that it can be true that all normative judgements are false.
Reason to Believe the Error Theory
Authors: Streumer Bart
Published: September 2017

This chapter gives three arguments for the claim that there can be a reason for a person to perform an action only if this person can perform this action: the argument from crazy reasons, the argument from tables and chairs, and the argument from deliberation. It considers and rejects several potential counterexamples to this claim. It then argues that if these arguments show that there can be a reason for a person to perform an action only if this person can perform this action, similar arguments show that there can be a reason for a person to have a belief only if this person can have this belief. The chapter concludes that since we cannot believe the error theory, there is no reason for us to believe this theory.
Objections, Rejection, Revision
Authors: Streumer Bart
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers six objections to the error theory. It argues if we cannot believe the error theory, these objections fail. It then asks whether opponents of the error theory can resist the book’s arguments by rejecting the claims that played a central role in these arguments. It argues that our inability to believe the error theory may make this seem legitimate, but that it is actually illegitimate. The chapter also considers and rejects several challenges to the role that these claims play in the book’s arguments. It ends by arguing that if we cannot believe the error theory, non-cognitivism, reductive realism, and fictionalism cannot be defended as revisionary alternatives to the error theory.
Effects, Parallels, Progress
Authors: Streumer Bart
Published: September 2017

This chapter first describes the effects of coming close to believing the error theory. It then sketches how certain other philosophical views can also be defended by arguing that we cannot believe these views: scepticism about moral responsibility, eliminativism about propositional attitudes, scepticism about truth, and dialetheism. The chapter also explains how philosophers should modify their methodology if there can be true philosophical theories that we cannot believe. It concludes that we should not reject a philosophical theory because it is literally hard to believe: to make progress in philosophy, we should make a sharp distinction between a theory’s truth and our ability to believe it.
Incidental findings: Current ethical debates and future challenges in advanced neuroimaging
Authors: Gibson Lorna M. , Sudlow Cathie L.M. , Wardlaw Joanna M.
Published: September 2017

The urgency to pragmatically address the challenges of managing incidental findings on neuroimaging is driven by the recent development of very large, population-based imaging studies, and ever-increasing use of imaging within research, clinical, and commercial sectors. Incidental findings are complex and variable. Their clinical significance ranges from benign to life-threatening; detection may be influenced by imaging, reader, and participant characteristics; and feedback may generate follow-up and anxiety. Appropriate management of incidental findings is therefore challenging, but essential in order to minimize negative impacts on participants, health services, individual research studies, and public trust in the wider community. This chapter summarizes current knowledge of the scale of the problem of incidental findings, factors influencing detection, potential impact, and public expectations. It highlights areas where robust, empirical data are needed to inform the design of feasible management policies and improve informed consent processes for the future.
What do new neuroscience discoveries in children mean for their open future?
Authors: Lew Cheryl D.
Published: September 2017

Over the last decade, the number of neuroimaging and other neuroscience studies on the developing brain from fetal life through adolescence has increased exponentially. Children are viewed as particularly vulnerable members of our society and observations of significant neural structural changes associated with behavioral anomalies raise numerous ethical concerns around personal identity, free will, and the possibility of an open future. This chapter provides a review of recent research in the pediatric neuroscience literature, common pediatric decision-making, and social justice models, and discusses the implications of this research for the future of pediatric ethics thinking and policy. New research presents challenges to professional and pediatric bioethicist views of the moral future of children in pediatric healthcare and opportunities to examine anew notions of how to consider the developing moral agency of children.
At the crossroads of civic engagement and evidence-based medicine: Lessons learned from the chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency experience
Authors: Benjaminy Shelly , Traboulsee Anthony
Published: September 2017

The field of neuroethics aims to align neurotechnologies with societal values. To achieve this goal, the field must be responsive to the priorities of diverse publics. Researchers have developed many initiatives aimed at fostering reciprocal and inclusive dialogue between neuroscientists and publics that bring the voices of end-users to the forefront of innovation in the brain sciences. This chapter explores the opportunities and challenges of community engagement in the neurosciences. It draws on the contentious case study of the chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) research trajectory that generated both hope and skepticism, galvanized substantial international attention, and was heavily criticized for privileging scientific inquiry driven more by public pressure than by evidence. It concludes with lessons learned from the cautionary CCSVI tale, and discusses opportunities for reciprocal and impactful engagement that the field of neuroethics may foster as novel neurotechnologies are developed.
Brain death and the definition of death
Authors: Bernat James L.
Published: September 2017

The idea that a person is dead when brain functions have ceased irreversibly is one of the oldest and most enduring debates in neuroethics. This chapter traces the history of brain death by explaining the technological, medical, and societal factors stimulating its origin and acceptance; discusses its medical, legal, religious, and social recognition; highlights a few of its controversies; examines a recent commission report; and discusses two highly publicized cases that have reignited debates. Next, it provides the conceptual basis for brain death by analyzing the definition and criterion of death and offers an analytic framework for a biophilosophical account of death that justifies the practice of brain death, pinpoints the areas of contention, and compares competing concepts of death. It concludes with thoughts about brain death as a contemporary neuroethical issue, and predicts the future landscape of the debate over brain death and the definition of death.
Environmental neuroethics: Setting the foundations
Authors: Cabrera Laura Y.
Published: September 2017

The ways in which humans relate to their environments have been studied from different perspectives, including ethics, sociology, behavioral sciences, and genetics. This chapter discusses an emerging approach within neuroethics—environmental neuroethics—that focuses on ethical and social implications of environmental influences on brain health and mental health. It begins with an overview of different disciplinary approaches to examine the relationship between the environment and human health and follows with a discussion of environmental effects on brain and mental health. It then argues for the importance of generating normative discussion about related issues, particularly because these matters are of global concern with linked social justice implications. This section also lays the foundations for the first generation of environmental neuroethics. The chapter concludes with key questions and challenges ahead for environmental neuroethics.
First Nations and environmental neuroethics: Perspectives on brain health from a world of change
Authors: Tesluk Jordan , Illes Judy , Matthews Ralph
Published: September 2017

Amid changing environmental conditions and persisting health deficits, First Nations people in Canada face mounting risks to their neurological and mental health. While the influence of environmental change on the human brain poses concerns to all members of society, the ethical implications of such impacts are different for indigenous peoples who have close relationships with the environment. First Nations make extensive use of Western systems of medicine and environmental sciences. However, persistent gaps between traditional systems of knowledge and Western science contribute to the marginalization of First Nations under current healthcare and environmental management systems, and create challenges for researchers who seek to work with and support First Nations people. This chapter addresses the role that neuroethics can play in bringing indigenous knowledge and Western institutions of science together in protecting the health of the brain.
Security threat versus aggregated truths: Ethical issues in the use of neuroscience and neurotechnology for national security
Authors: Moreno Jonathan D. , Tennison Michael N. , Giordano James
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores uses of brain science for purposes of national security intelligence and defense, discusses the neuroethical issues that these approaches foster, and posits ways that such ethical concerns can be addressed. The chapter begins with a historical overview of military attempts to employ the tools and techniques of brain and cognitive science, and illustrates ethical problems generated by these attempts. It then focuses on the ways that ethical systems and approaches might be utilized or limited in neuroscience and neurotechnology for military and security operations. With recognition of the global trends and the power dynamics that such scientific capacity can yield, the chapter emphasizes the importance of neuroethical preparedness and provides a novel paradigm for neuroethical risk assessment and mitigation. The authors of this chapter offer their insights through their perspectives as American scholars engaged not only in American issues, but as scholars engaged through collaboration and cooperation on the global stage.