scholarly journals Identifying the Explanatory Domain of the Looping Effect: Congruent and Incongruent Feedback Mechanisms of Interactive Kinds

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuomas Vesterinen
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Ian Hacking ◽  
Feedback Mechanisms ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Diagnostic Labels ◽  
Realist Interpretation ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
Interactive Kinds

Abstract Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mechanisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders.

Shared genetic architecture across psychiatric disorders

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Andrew D. Grotzinger
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
Genetic Correlations ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Symptom Level ◽  
Genetic Level ◽  
Genetic Signal ◽  
Family Based ◽  
Shared Genetic

Abstract Psychiatric disorders overlap substantially at the genetic level, with family-based methods long pointing toward transdiagnostic risk pathways. Psychiatric genomics has progressed rapidly in the last decade, shedding light on the biological makeup of cross-disorder risk at multiple levels of analysis. Over a hundred genetic variants have been identified that affect multiple disorders, with many more to be uncovered as sample sizes continue to grow. Cross-disorder mechanistic studies build on these findings to cluster transdiagnostic variants into meaningful categories, including in what tissues or when in development these variants are expressed. At the upper-most level, methods have been developed to estimate the overall shared genetic signal across pairs of traits (i.e. single-nucleotide polymorphism-based genetic correlations) and subsequently model these relationships to identify overarching, genomic risk factors. These factors can subsequently be associated with external traits (e.g. functional imaging phenotypes) to begin to understand the makeup of these transdiagnostic risk factors. As psychiatric genomic efforts continue to expand, we can begin to gain even greater insight by including more fine-grained phenotypes (i.e. symptom-level data) and explicitly considering the environment. The culmination of these efforts will help to inform bottom-up revisions of our current nosology.

scholarly journals Editorial: Life Phenomenology--Movement, Affect and Language

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Stephen Smith ◽  
Tone Saevi ◽  
Rebecca Lloyd ◽  
Scott Churchill
Keyword(s):  
Daily Living ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Linguistic Awareness ◽  
International Human ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
The Many

The “life phenomenology” theme of the 35th International Human Science Research Conference challenged participants to consider pressing questions of life and of living with others of our own and other-than-human kinds. The theme was addressed by keynote speakers Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Ralph Acampora and David Abram who invoked a motile, affective and linguistic awareness of how we might dwell actively and ethically amongst human communities and with the many life forms we encounter in the wider, wilder world we have in common. Conference participants were provoked to consider the following questions: “How might phenomenology have us recognize a primacy of movement and bring us in touch with the motions and gestures of the multiple lifeworlds of daily living? What worlds from ecology to technology privilege certain animations? What are the affects and effects of an enhanced phenomenological sensitivity? What senses, feelings, emotions and moods of self-affirmation and responsiveness to others sustain us in our daily lives? And to what extent might the descriptive, invocative, provocative language of phenomenology infuse the human sciences and engender a language for speaking directly of life?”

Seeing the Facts and Saying What You Like: Retroactive Redescription and Indeterminacy in the Past

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Gustafsson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Ian Hacking ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Conduct ◽  
General Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
Journal History

AbstractIn chapter 17 of his book, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Ian Hacking makes the disquieting claim that “perhaps we should best think of past human actions as being to a certain extent indeterminate.”<xref ref-type="fn" rid="FN1">1</xref> Against what may appear like the self-evident conception of the past as fixed and unalterable, Hacking suggests that when it comes to human conduct and experience, there are reasons to adopt a more flexible view. This suggestion has caused lively debate, in the journal History of the Human Sciences and elsewhere.<xref ref-type="fn" rid="FN2">2</xref> Central to this debate is the question of what it means to use a recently invented vocabulary to redescribe past human affairs. In particular, it is asked: How do the linguistic, cultural and social differences between past and present matter to the possibility of such a redescription’s being true? We who do research in the humanities and social sciences often make retroactive redescriptions of precisely this sort. Hence, the debate is clearly of some general importance for how to conceive the goals and methods of our inquiries. My overall aim in this paper is to clarify what we may learn from the clash between Hacking and his critics.

scholarly journals The Ontology of Interactive Kinds

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rico Hauswald
Keyword(s):  
Causal Property ◽  
Realist Interpretation ◽  
Interactive Kinds ◽  
Special Case ◽  
Do So

AbstractThis paper defends the notions of an interactive kind and a looping effect as features of social and human scientific classifications and aims to give a realist interpretation of them. I argue that interactive kinds can best be modeled as a special case of changing causal property cluster kinds. In order to do so, I develop a typology of looping effects according to the sort of entities that are affected, the main types of which are individual-looping, category-looping, and kind-looping. Based on this distinction, I identify interactive kinds as those causal property cluster kinds that are subjected to kind-looping.

scholarly journals What’s my age again? Age categories as interactive kinds

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hane Htut Maung
Keyword(s):  
Young Adulthood ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Philosophical Problem ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Older Adulthood ◽  
Causal Processes ◽  
Inductive Inferences ◽  
Homeostatic Property Cluster ◽  
Interactive Kinds

AbstractThis paper addresses a philosophical problem concerning the ontological status of age classification. For various purposes, people are commonly classified into categories such as “young adulthood”, “middle adulthood”, and “older adulthood”, which are defined chronologically. These age categories prima facie seem to qualify as natural kinds under a homeostatic property cluster account of natural kindhood, insofar as they capture certain biological, psychological, and social properties of people that tend to cluster together due to causal processes. However, this is challenged by the observation that age categories are historically unstable. The properties that age categories are supposed to capture are affected by healthcare and cultural developments, such that people are staying biologically, psychologically, and socially young for longer. Furthermore, the act of classifying people into age categories can bring about changes in their behaviors, which in turn alter the biological, psychological, and social properties that the categories are supposed to capture. Accordingly, I propose that age categories are best understood as interactive kinds that are influenced in dynamic ways by looping effects. I consider some implications of these looping effects for our classificatory practices concerning age, including how different disciplines may need to review the ways they define and use age categories in their inductive inferences.

Ways to Be Understood: The Ontological Turn and Interpretive Social Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 565-585
Author(s):  
Akos Sivado
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Setting ◽  
Ian Hacking ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Alternative Version ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
Ontological Turn

The ontological turn in anthropological methodology, at least in its conceptualization-oriented formulation, aims to turn away from the concepts and objects found within one’s own social setting in order to turn to indigenous conceptualization processes and take a look at “the things (and persons) themselves.” This article aims to unpack what such constant reconceptualization amounts to, arguing that when modified to meet certain objections, the ontological turn could provide important ingredients for an alternative version of interpretive social science—one that wishes to understand social phenomena as human kinds in the vein of Ian Hacking, Sally Haslanger and Ron Mallon.

"It's About Us": Religious Studies as Human Science

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 355-373
Author(s):  
Lieve Orye
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Folk Psychology ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
Ex Nihilo

AbstractThis article argues that, in order to understand religious studies's debate over reductionism, one should take the social-historical context of the debate and the fteld's subject matter into account. Martin Kusch's work on folk psychology and Ian Hacking's work on 'human kinds' provide an example of how this can take place. The article argues that the study of religion is part of the human sciences and that this area differs from the natural sciences precisely insomuch as the former's subject matter involves a learning reflexive human being. However, large parts of the study of religion exemplify a co-called 'inferior' science-or, as some would say, theology-insomuch as these areas have developed a myopia by looking through distorting Christian glasses. This form of the field seems based on 'knowledge ex nihilo', a shortcoming for a human science because it lacks any conscious reflection on its, and its subject matter's, involvement in society.

scholarly journals Three-dimensional convolutional autoencoder extracts features of structural brain images with a “diagnostic label-free” approach: Application to schizophrenia datasets

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroyuki Yamaguchi ◽  
Yuki Hashimoto ◽  
Genichi Sugihara ◽  
Jun Miyata ◽  
Toshiya Murai ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Clinical Information ◽  
Label Free ◽  
Brain Images ◽  
Diagnostic Labels ◽  
Convolutional Autoencoder ◽  
Mri Scans ◽  
Magnetic Resonance Imaging Mri

ABSTRACTThere has been increasing interest in performing psychiatric brain imaging studies using deep learning. However, most studies in this field disregard three-dimensional (3D) spatial information and targeted disease discrimination, without considering the genetic and clinical heterogeneity of psychiatric disorders. The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of a 3D convolutional autoencoder (CAE) for extracting features related to psychiatric disorders without diagnostic labels. The network was trained using a Kyoto University dataset including 82 patients with schizophrenia (SZ) and 90 healthy subjects (HS), and was evaluated using Center for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) datasets including 71 SZ patients and 71 HS. The proposed 3D-CAEs were successfully reconstructed into high-resolution 3D structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans with sufficiently low errors. In addition, the features extracted using 3D-CAE retained the relevant clinical information. We explored the appropriate hyper parameter range of 3D-CAE, and it was suggested that a model with eight convolution layers might be relevant to extract features for predicting the dose of medication and symptom severity in schizophrenia.

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