scholarly journals What Exactly (If Anything) is Wrong with Paternalism Towards Children?

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 348-367
Author(s):  
Johannes Drerup
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Normative Issues ◽  
Specific Limitation ◽  
Methodological Difficulties

Theoretical and practical issues concerning the justification of paternalism towards children are widely debated in a variety of philosophical contexts. The major focus of these debates either lies on questions concerning the general legitimacy of paternalism towards children or on justifications of paternalism in concrete situations involving children (e.g. in applied ethics). Despite the widespread consensus that the legitimacy of educational paternalism in important respects hinges on its principled, temporal and domain-specific limitation (e.g., via a soft-paternalist strategy), surprisingly little has been said about conditions and criteria that determine what exactly (if anything) is morally wrong with paternalism towards children. This contribution aims to further the understanding of these normative issues by providing a critical analysis of the theoretical and methodological difficulties involved in developing context-invariant criteria for the identification of specific wrong-making features of paternalist rationales and paternalistically justified practices in cases involving children. I am going to show that the moral status of pro- and anti-paternalist reasons is much more context-sensitive than usually assumed by proponents of standard generalist justificatory strategies. In conclusion my argument is that a moral particularist and casuistic framework may offer an adequate theoretical alternative to make sense of the context-dependent wrongs (and rights) of educational paternalism.

A diachronic frequency account of the allomorphy of some grammatical markers

2010 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
THOMAS BERG
Keyword(s):  
Life Expectancy ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Relative Ease ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
New Variant ◽  
Specific Frequency ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
Frequency Threshold ◽  
Morphological System

Allomorphy is a reaction of the morphological system to problems that the unrestrained application of inflectional and other rules creates at the phonological level. These problems are dealt with in some cases but left unattended in others. A diachronic analysis of English reveals that phonemically conditioned allomorphy originates from gradual sound change, with the old and the new variant forming a morphophonological paradigm. The historical stability as well as the synchronic motivation of allomorphy are claimed to be frequency-based. The higher the frequency, the longer the life expectancy. Synchronically, there is a (language- and domain-specific) frequency threshold above which morphophonological variation occurs and below which it fails to occur. The underlying logic of the model is that frequency encourages lexicalization at all linguistic levels. The relative ease with which high-frequency items are accessed enhances the tolerance towards formal variation, hence the emergence of natural phonological rules. As the application of these rules is context-dependent, allomorphy arises as a context-sensitive process. Repair strategies are also argued to be under the sway of frequency. Epenthesis is found in highly frequent structures while coalescence is reserved for less frequent ones. Frequency also determines the scope and the optionality of morphophonological rules. Phonemically governed allomorphy is shown to be a member of the larger family of variationist phenomena which are bound together by their sensitivity to frequency.

scholarly journals David DeGrazia on Animal Rights: A Critical Analysis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Pełka
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Animal Minds ◽  
Famous People ◽  
Social Philosopher ◽  
Equal Consideration

The article aims to critically discuss the theory of animal rights developed by American social philosopher David DeGrazia. It consists of two parts. The first one describes the main elements of DeGrazia’s approach, namely his views on animal minds, the principle of equal consideration, the idea of unequal moral status, the concept of border persons, and practical remarks concerning improving the treatment of animals by humans. The second part presents remarks about the points where DeGrazia’s proposals should be supplemented and corrected so as to make them more convincing and widely accepted. The conclusion of the essay is the proposal of a cultural revolution for the benefit of animals, which should be initiated by famous people, like actresses, actors, sportswomen and sportsmen, because of their influential position in contemporary societies.

scholarly journals BioALBERT: A Simple and Effective Pre-trained Language Model for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Usman Naseem ◽  
Matloob Khushi ◽  
Vinay Reddy ◽  
Sakthivel Rajendran ◽  
Imran Razzak ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Language Model ◽  
Named Entity Recognition ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Entity Recognition ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Named Entity ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Biomedical Named Entity Recognition

Abstract Background: In recent years, with the growing amount of biomedical documents, coupled with advancement in natural language processing algorithms, the research on biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER) has increased exponentially. However, BioNER research is challenging as NER in the biomedical domain are: (i) often restricted due to limited amount of training data, (ii) an entity can refer to multiple types and concepts depending on its context and, (iii) heavy reliance on acronyms that are sub-domain specific. Existing BioNER approaches often neglect these issues and directly adopt the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models trained in general corpora which often yields unsatisfactory results. Results: We propose biomedical ALBERT (A Lite Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for Biomedical Text Mining) - bioALBERT - an effective domain-specific pre-trained language model trained on huge biomedical corpus designed to capture biomedical context-dependent NER. We adopted self-supervised loss function used in ALBERT that targets on modelling inter-sentence coherence to better learn context-dependent representations and incorporated parameter reduction strategies to minimise memory usage and enhance the training time in BioNER. In our experiments, BioALBERT outperformed comparative SOTA BioNER models on eight biomedical NER benchmark datasets with four different entity types. The performance is increased for; (i) disease type corpora by 7.47% (NCBI-disease) and 10.63% (BC5CDR-disease); (ii) drug-chem type corpora by 4.61% (BC5CDR-Chem) and 3.89 (BC4CHEMD); (iii) gene-protein type corpora by 12.25% (BC2GM) and 6.42% (JNLPBA); and (iv) Species type corpora by 6.19% (LINNAEUS) and 23.71% (Species-800) is observed which leads to a state-of-the-art results. Conclusions: The performance of proposed model on four different biomedical entity types shows that our model is robust and generalizable in recognizing biomedical entities in text. We trained four different variants of BioALBERT models which are available for the research community to be used in future research.

Shared Book Reading and Bilingual Decoding in Latinx Immigrant Homes

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-208
Author(s):  
Amanda K. Kibler ◽  
Judy Paulick ◽  
Natalia Palacios ◽  
Tatiana Hill
Keyword(s):  
Family Literacy ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Shared Reading ◽  
Book Reading ◽  
Shared Book Reading ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Family Literacy Practices ◽  
Older Siblings

Through in-home ethnographic observations of three multilingual immigrant families’ shared book reading, we identified recurring literacy practices in the home in which mothers, older siblings, and younger children participated during the reading. We found that families engaged in context-sensitive and cooperative shared reading practices, wherein decoding tended to be the focus. This practice—which we call transcultural decoding—involved multidirectional language socialization practices and occurred across languages, and older family members contributed both expertise and restrictive conceptions of reading. This work suggests the importance of (a) acknowledging the major focus on decoding during shared reading in families, and reconceptualizing that work as complex and nuanced, particularly across languages and cultures, and (b) considering siblings as cultural and linguistic mediators in family literacy practices.

The Politics of Communication between Planning Officers and Politicians: The Exercise of Power through Discourse

10.1068/a3287 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Tait ◽  
Heather Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
Planning Practice ◽  
Communication Work ◽  
Normative Issues ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Methodological Difficulties

The relationship between local government officers and elected members is central to the decisionmaking processes associated with planning, as with many other areas of public policymaking. Legal responsibilities and issues of accountability and legitimacy lie at the heart of the relationship between officers and members, with interaction mediated and constituted through ritualised communicative encounters such as committee meetings and associated reports, and less formally through ad hoc contacts. Given the importance of this relationship it is striking that there has been relatively little research into the influences on officers and members within everyday planning practice. In this paper we will explore the extent to which a consideration of the language used in planning practice can inform our understanding of the relationship between planners and politicians. Thinking within the planning field about the role of language as a mechanism for reflecting and constituting power has been dominated by the work of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault. However, despite the increasing attention focused on the importance of language and communication, work within the planning community has tended to concentrate on normative issues of how planning ought to operate in society rather than situating these theories within the ‘real’ world of practice. The objectives behind the case study research evaluated in this paper are therefore twofold. First, to explore the role of language and discourse in reflecting and constituting relations of power in a planning authority on the south coast of England and, second, to explore the value of Foucault's and Habermas's ideas as tools of research in planning. On the basis of this study we conclude that there are some important theoretical and methodological difficulties in connecting the ideas of Habermas and Foucault to the world of everyday planning practice.

Intercultural Differences in the Bioethical Assessment of Abortion: Preliminary Results and a Proposal for Further Research

1994 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 1375-1381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pantaleon Fassbender
Keyword(s):  
Frequency Analysis ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
European Origin ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
Moral Question ◽  
Configural Frequency Analysis ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Ethical Decisionmaking

Descriptor terms related to 37 articles dealing with the moral question of abortion and taken from a printed database specializing in Catholic applied ethics were scanned for clusters with respect to the Anglo-American or European origin of the articles. To identify types within the data Configural Frequency Analysis was used. Application indicated a dominant interest in the process of ethical decisionmaking in Anglo-American Catholic bioethics. The assumption that European Catholic bioethicists discuss the morality of abortion primarily in terms of an anthropological debate focused on the moral status of prenatal life could not be validated statistically.

scholarly journals Easy as pie. How not to treat statistics

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 208-212
Author(s):  
A.N. Krichevets
Keyword(s):  
Data Processing ◽  
Statistical Methods ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Probabilistic Nature ◽  
Statistical Results ◽  
Methodological Difficulties

The article discusses the methodological difficulties associated with the spread of statistical methods of data processing in psychological works. In particular, there is a simplification of the understanding of statistics by researchers, which increasingly leads to the adoption of the hypothesis of the presence of the effect, in a situation where it is not. There is a brief review of publications and examples where this issue is the subject of critical analysis. Presented a research which showed that in the repetition of experiments published in reputable journals, the significance accepted in the scientific community was observed only in 39% of the works — this effect was called the “publication shift”. The article discusses ways to solve this problem, in particular, meta-analysis, through which it is possible to confirm the results of a series of experiments relating to one problem — subject to the availability of information about the design and openness of raw data. An understanding of the probabilistic nature of statistical results must be mandatory for the evaluation of studies

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