Homeopathy, Western medicine and the discourse of evidence: Negotiating legitimacy in a public online forum

This article reports on the analysis of an online forum on the UK’s National Health Service website where participants debated the provision of homeopathy as publicly funded medical treatment. Using membership categorisation analysis, the article looks at how members negotiated a category distinction between homeopathy and ‘orthodox Western medicine’, focusing on the discursive resources that the participants drew on to position each other and the website itself in moral terms. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the institutionalisation of complementary and alternative medicine by demonstrating the strong polarisation of views that are present in the public domain, and the ways that public institutions become held accountable to ideologies of evidence and choice. In this way, the study adds to our growing knowledge about public engagement in pluralistic healthcare systems, showing further the limitations of the ‘rational choice’ assumptions that underlie pluralism.

Skill, Drill, and Intelligent Performance: Ryle and Intellectualism

In this paper, we aim to show that a study of Gilbert Ryle’s work has much to contribute to the current debate between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism with respect to skill and know-how. According to Ryle, knowing how and skill are distinctive from and do not reduce to knowing that. What is often overlooked is that for Ryle this point is connected to the idea that the distinction between skill and mere habit is a category distinction, or a distinction in form. Criticizing the reading of Ryle presented by Jason Stanley, we argue that once the formal nature of Ryle’s investigation is recognized it becomes clear that his dispositional account is not an instance of reductionist behaviorism, and that his regress argument has a broader target than Stanley appears to recognize.

The Effects of Categorization on Perceptual Judgment are Robust across Different Assessment Tasks

Learned visual categorical perception (CP) effects were assessed using three different measures (similarity rating, same-different judgment, and an XAB task) and two sets of stimuli differing in discriminability and varying on one category-relevant and one category-irrelevant dimension. Participant scores were converted to a common scale to allow assessment method to serve as an independent variable. Two different analyses using the Bayes Factor approach produced patterns of results consistent with learned CP effects: compared to a control group, participants trained on the category distinction could better discriminate between-category pairs of stimuli and were more sensitive to the category-relevant dimension. In addition, performance was better in general for the more highly discriminable stimuli, but stimulus discriminability did not influence the pattern of observed CP effects. Furthermore, these results were consistent regardless of how performance was assessed. This suggests that, for these methods at least, learned CP effects are robust across substantially different performance measures. Four different kinds of learned CP effects are reported in the literature singly or in combination: greater sensitivity between categories, reduced sensitivity within categories, increased sensitivity to category-relevant dimensions, and decreased sensitivity to category-irrelevant dimensions. The results of the current study suggest that the cause of these different patterns of CP effects is not due to either stimulus discriminability or assessment task. Other possible causes of the differences in reported CP findings are discussed.

Inorganic -e and double n in the Caligula Brut: implications for case marking

This article investigates variant forms of the demonstrative ‘that’ and the adjective in the Caligula Manuscript of Laȝamon's Brut and concludes that they to a large extent maintain the traditional category distinction between the accusative and the dative by the use of the suffixes -ne and -Vn (where V stands for any vowel) respectively. There are, however, factors that potentially compromise the status of these terminations as case markers: phonetic reduction (which has often been invoked), capricious addition or deletion of final e, occasional doubling or simplification of nasals, and simply unexpected choices of forms in the paradigm. These seem to be consistent with the sort of mistakes that scribes might occasionally make when faced with an original that has a different orthographical and morphological system from their own, and they are not as disruptive of the case-marking system as at first sight they might appear. For one thing, they occur rather rarely and are generally outnumbered by historically expected forms; for another, the resultant unexpected case forms, usually with the stem vowel preferred by the historical forms in the case of the demonstrative, are predominantly accompanied by a historically motivated case form of their head noun. The status of accusative -ne and dative -Vn, in fact, appears to be stable enough to lead to the development of a system or subsystem of indicating case regardless of gender considerations in their respective case contexts. These suffixes can therefore be treated validly as independent case markers, although in concrete cases the possibility always exists that there is an optional final e, an unhistorical double or single n, or an unexpected choice of inflectional forms.