'Politics as a science' ...

'The science of politics is the oldest of the social sciences but still perhaps the most dependent: it derives much of its methodology from statistics (the science of the state turned into the science of numerical data), from economics and from sociology and it steals much of its substance from anthropology, from history and from law. Yet there is little doubt about the core of the subject: it focuses on the ways in which decisions are taken by men acting within territorially or functionally defined networks and constellations of organizations. And the hallmark of the discipline is 'its systematic analysis', whether couched in verbal and literary terms or in the formalized language of statistics or of mathematical logic.' Preface vii

Hayward R. Alker, Karl W. Deutsch, Antoine H. Stoetzel (eds.), Mathematical Approaches to Politics, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1973, pp. 475.

Sets in Hodges' model

INDIVIDUAL
  |

     INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

'The emotions that we want to infer are the seven basic emotion categories. Concretely this set is E = {Anger,  Contempt, Disgust, Fear, Happy, Sadness, Surprise}.' p.111.*	Sets - Venn diagrams Physical obs = { Temperature, Pulse, Respiration, Blood Pressure, Gait ... }
Social = { Friends, Family, Work colleagues, Neighbours ... }	Politics { [Freedom], - Elections, Law, Policy, Government, MPs, Ministers, PM-President ... }

David Sanchez-Mendoza, David Masip, Xavier Baro, and Agata Lapedriza. Emotion Detection Using Hybrid Structural and Appearance Descriptors. In. MDAI 2013: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence - Volume 8234 November 2013. Pages 105–116 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41550-0_10

*I am unable to double-check this reference and hope it is correct(?).

See also:

UNIVERSAL EMOTIONS: Paul Ekman Group

Venn : diagram

Your story about the use of the Resilient Health Systems evidence collection

Championing evidence-based humanitarian action

Evidence Aid aims to save lives and livelihoods in disasters by providing decision-makers with the best available evidence and by championing its use.

On Wednesday, 22 November 2023 at 10:12:26 GMT, Claire Allen, UK <callen AT evidenceaid.org> wrote:

Kind request - Do you have 5-10 minutes to complete our survey about the Resilient Health Systems evidence collection

https://evidenceaid.org/evidence/resilient-health-systems
Your insights and opinions are incredibly valuable to us.

The form will be available until Monday 27 November 2023, but in the meantime, if you have any issues, please do not hesitate to contact - 

Epa La Bella at elabella AT evidenceaid.org.

As always, we value your insight and opinions, all of which are essential to the functioning of Evidence Aid.

Claire Allen, Operations Manager Evidence Aid: Championing evidence-based humanitarian action. Please note that my regular working days are Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Please do not expect a response outside of those days.

Support our activities by donating here.

Email: callen AT evidenceaid.org | Skype: claireallencochrane | Website: www.evidenceaid.org | Twitter: @EvidenceAid

Our evidence collections can be found here: https://www.evidenceaid.org/evidence/

HIFA profile (and my source): Claire Allen is Operations Manager at Evidence Aid, UK. Professional interests: Evidence Aid (www.evidenceaid.org) provides evidence for people in disaster preparedness and response to make better decisions. Areas of interest = humanitarian crises, natural disasters and major healthcare emergencies (disaster = when a country is unable to cope with the disaster/crisis or emergency). She is a member of the HIFA Working Group on Access to Health Research. http://www.hifa.org/working-groups/access-health-research Email: callen AT evidenceaid.org

'The Body Politic' c/o Dennett

 "Evolution embodies information in every part of every organism. A whale's baleen embodies information about the food it eats, and the liquid medium in which it finds its food. A bird's wing embodies information about the medium in which it does its work. A  chameleon's skin, more dramatically, carries information about its current environment. An animal's viscera and hormonal systems embody a great deal of information about the world in which its ancestors have lived. This information doesn't have to be copied in the brain at all. It doesn't have to be 'represented' in 'data structures' in the nervous system. . . . 

By using the old bodily systems as a sort of sounding board, or reactive audience", or critic, the central nervous system can be guided - sometimes nudged, sometimes slammed - into wise policies. Put it to the vote of the body, in effect." p.79.

INDIVIDUAL
|

 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

MIND CONSCIOUSNESS COGNITION	ANATOMY - PHYSIOLOGY EVOLUTION BODY
	POLITIC

Dennett, D.C.  (1996) Chapter 3. The Body and its Minds. In. Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness. Basic Books.

My Body, My Decision: Accountability for Bodily Autonomy and Self-Care in a Rapidly Changing World

 Dec 6, 2022 08:00 AM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Bodily autonomy and decision-making are critical for the realization of everyone’s sexual and reproductive health and rights and are the cornerstone of self-care. Join the SCTG Country Advocacy Working Group (CAWG) for an in-depth discussion on mechanisms and strategies to promote accountability for bodily autonomy, agency, and self-care. What have been opportunities and challenges for the Generation Equality Forum to mobilize action in these areas and how can we strengthen accountability for local impact? What are examples of successful advocacy and accountability efforts to enhance bodily autonomy and self-care at the country level?

Find the answers to these questions and more at this virtual, SCTG CAWG event organized by White Ribbon Alliance, CEHURD, Fòs Feminista, and Global Fund for Women.

Live simultaneous interpretation in French and Spanish will be available

Topics & Speakers

• Co-designing a feminist accountability initiative to hold governments to account for Generation Equality Commitments
  Emilia Blancarte Jaber, Global Fund for Women
• Advocacy milestones for institutionalization of self-care and Generation Equality Commitments. A case study from Uganda

Annah Kukundakwe, CEHURD, Uganda

• Implementing innovative models of self-managed abortion and responding to the needs of the most marginalized: Lessons from Latin America

Nina Zamberlin, Fòs Feminista, Argentina

Register to Attend

About the Self-Care CAWG

The Self-Care CAWG is a dynamic forum for sharing effective approaches, promising practices, and lessons learned on policy and advocacy efforts to advance self-care at the country level. CAWG is housed under the Self-Care Trailblazer Group (SCTG) and is chaired by SCTG member White Ribbon Alliance. Each quarter, the CAWG meets to explore a theme of wide relevance to self-care advocates, including building off topics covered in the 2021 Self-Care Learning and Discovery Series. ...

My source: IBP Network Global

Tweetchat - "Inter-Field Learning" 3rd November 2022

"There are four fields of nursing:

1. adult nursing
2. children’s nursing
3. learning disabilities nursing
4. mental health nursing"
   
   

NMC - Standards for competence for registered nurses

Share your experiences and innovative ways of implementing our @nmcnews standards of proficiency for registered nurses across the four fields of nursing. @JulieDi26744550 @paulajaneholt https://t.co/b9l6rUvQsX

— Susan Lynn West (@SusanwestSusan) October 27, 2022

Includes the questions:
How do you develop curricula to embrace holistic care? What examples of best practice can you share?

[ Competencies ( All nurses (field of registration) ) ]

 INDIVIDUAL

|

 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

professional values communication and...	decision making
...interpersonal skills nursing practice team working socialisation (professional values, identity...)	professional values leadership management

No endorsement of Hodges' model to be implied or intended.

Call for Papers - Basic Needs: Normative Perspectives

Call for papers*

for a special issue on

Basic Needs: Normative Perspectives

(Editors: Lukas Meyer – Daniel Petz – Alessandro Pinzani)

Lessico di Etica Pubblica

http://www.eticapubblica.it/

 

In recent years the debate on basic needs and their place in normative theories of ethics and politics has been rekindled. This controversial concept has finally been openly adopted by authors who adopt different approaches to discuss issues of social justice. There are good reasons for this.

As a currency of justice, needs have several advantages. First, in contrast to preferences, desires, and some other currencies, basic needs are fully objective, i.e., whether a person has a basic need for a certain thing is independent of her own or anybody else’s mental attitudes towards that thing. A second important reason for preferring basic needs as the currency of justice is that they are also universal, although their definition might be culturally influenced. Thirdly, basic needs are intrinsically morally demanding: that P has a basic need for O by itself entails that P ought to be able to have, be, realize, etc. O. Finally, basic needs also have an important advantage in the particular context of sufficientarianism. One of the main objections against sufficientarianism is that it is unable to provide a plausible substantive specification of its threshold of sufficiency. The concept of basic needs, in contrast, essentially entails the idea of a qualitative difference. Being able to fulfill such needs takes precedence over being able to fulfill non-basic needs and desires. Moreover, it distinguishes a life that has a certain minimum quality from a life that lacks this quality.

We invite authors to explore these and other aspects of the concept of basic needs and its use for normative theories of social justice, including intergenerational justice.

Contributions can be in English, Italian, German, and French. The deadline is September 30, 2022

For inquiries please contact: Alessandro Pinzani <alepinzani AT gmail.com>

 

*currently.

COVID: Logic is the patient - again...

Hodges' model is evidence seeking, what logic might apply? 

 

Logic was once the 'patient':

“Yet, by 1530, formal logic was a dying branch of studies, and by the seventeenth century it had been completely forgotten. Why? No one to my knowledge has provided a satisfactory answer. Prantl, one of the earliest scholars to take notice of medieval logic, merely relied on the prejudice of four hundred years in depicting the universities as nursing; the sick but obstinate patient (dialectics), until 'the healthy spirit of antiquity conquered the scholastic pedantry'. Bochenski is not concerned with the mechanics of historical change. Ong gives the cause of death as an inherent weakness in medieval logic itself: 'Scholastic logic was dying of the frustration attendant upon its failure to develop a symbolic system adequate to its ambition and the promise of its initial development.' Even if medieval logic could not overcome this weakness, it had nevertheless hobbled along for three hundred fifty years with the malady! Even if the universities artificially prolonged its life, how exactly did the 'healthy spirit of antiquity' do away with the old warrior?” (Heath, 1971, p.47).

 

Individual
|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ------------------------------------------ mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

Group

logic	LOGIC
logic	logic

Heath, Terrence. “Logical Grammar, Grammatical Logic, and Humanism in Three German Universities.” Studies in the Renaissance 18 (1971): 9–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/2857078.

Review: iii Fundamentals of Person-Centred Healthcare Practice

 

Previously, I recognised the many links throughout the book and on p.54 there are five relating to professional standards. These reflect the book's international scope and multidisciplinary relevance. Those on page 54 do work and support the text. One of them I was presented not with the expected page and missed the outcome of the 'click'. I wasn't going to re-type but found the page through the site's menu. Some links are long, as I found, whether permalinks [usually shorter] or fallback search text might improve link-longevity I'm not sure.

As a reassurance the contrast issue black-text-on-dark-green is limited to one figure.

The book is well referenced with an additional reading list. I've been made aware through plagiarism detectors (one paper) which - it appears - have 'read' an introductory section to Hodges' model as self-plagiarism. I wondered if in comprising a community of practice the references here maybe somewhat insular. I've no analysis to support this and the same no doubt may apply to other to emergent ideas, including threshold concepts. You have to start somewhere. At fear of contradiction there are many theories called upon and referenced.

Students may find the more attention to the position and specificity of references useful p.75 "we cannot not communicate." How times, chapters (8 - Communicating and Relating Effectively), theory, practice and management are challenged. The art of  'sympathetic presencing' working on the phone triaging acute community mental health referrals, 'Being kind and warm'.

For a text on person-centredness the book is imho mental illness-health light, but then as noted what is the book about? Am I suggesting that such books should attend to disciplinary equality? That said if there is a test for parity of esteem here, what do you conclude from one dedicated chapter? I was surprised, but is there a dilemma here? Beside 'Trust in self and others' I made a note, 'intuition'. Is person-centredness and being person-centred taken for granted within mental health practice? Research suggests not. 

Reading the table of contents you will find:

Chapter 18: Being person-centred in the acute hospital setting
Chapter 19: Person-Centred Rehabilitation
Chapter 20: Being person-centred in community and ambulatory services
Chapter 21: Experiencing person-centredness in long-term care
Chapter 22: Being person-centred in mental health services
Chapter 23: Person-centred support for people with learning disabilities
Chapter 24: Being Person-centred in Maternity Services
Chapter 25: Being person-centred in children’s services
Chapter 26: Being person-centred when working with people living with long-term conditions
Chapter 27: Palliative and end of life care services

I had a sense that the chapters were not sufficiently differentiated despite the titles. This may say more about my reading and the (editor's achieved) coherence of the book overall. Perhaps also for me, person-centredness is realised in-situ with personalised details. Not just vignettes (which are used) but the detailed intra- interpersonal, social, physical, political and spiritual choreography that is person-centred care: whether or not there is engagement (a dance).

Dementia is represented but the context appears to be residential care. You will find challenging / courageous conversations, but not challenging behaviour in situations that test interpersonal skills and person-centredness especially for staff, students, carers and families (dementia in general hospitals - despite numerous initiatives). Trauma has its place in the mental health chapter (and in current literature), but again the challenge of psychoses, anorexia are missed opportunities to reveal the potential and delivery of the Person-Centered Practice Framework.

Since the book's publication with its stress on the welfare and well-being of staff and educators too, the need to make explicit the politics in health is even more extreme. The need to protect the title of 'nurse'; mis-information generally and relating to COVID. Person-centred decision making and shared decision making are described as systems. Perhaps this misses the nuances of a health care professional, the team and family working with a person were they are making an unwise decision (pp.83-92). Another chapter indicates the need and utility of disciplinary bridges:

Chapter 17: Socio-political context in Person-centred Practice

 

individual - PERSON - patient
|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

family - group - population

MIND :: Parity -	- of esteem :: BODY
Culture Child - Parent - Guardian FAMILY SOCIO -	Refugees Homeless title of 'nurse'* mis-information Organisational culture? - POLITICAL

One more to follow with many thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

Review i

Review ii

Review iv

Fundamentals of Person-Centred Healthcare Practice,  McCormack, B., McCance, T., Bulley, C., Brown, D., McMillan, A, Martin,S. (Eds.). ISBN: 978-1-119-53308-5 February 2021 Wiley-Blackwell.

* https://twitter.com/hashtag/ProtectNurse?src=hashtag_click

 

Book: Noise

individual
| 

 INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

noise?
noise?	noise?

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein, Noise: Exclusive Edition (Hardback), HarperCollins Publishers.

[c/o HIFA] Lancet Planetary Health: An argument for the naturalistic study of collective intelligence

Citation, extracts and a comment from me below. Full text here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00077-2/

CITATION: An argument for the naturalistic study of collective intelligence Jonathan Nattel, David Akullian
Comment| volume 5, issue 5, e247-e248, may 01, 2021
Published:May, 2021 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00077-2 

SELECTED EXTRACTS 

Over the past decade, corporate-owned digital media—minimally regulated, geared towards profit, and willing to engage a broad range of psychological techniques to command an expansive swath of human attention5—have increasingly caused information to flow around, rather than through, the structures of professional journalism as it makes its way from politicians to the public at large.

The circumvention of professional journalism as a means for filtering, organising, and distributing information has led to multiple distortions of collective perception, including the decontextualisation of information, propagation of false information, and the manipulation of public opinion by agents with a broad variety of interests. 

 the overall result has been an increase in polarisation, fragmented collective perceptions of reality, and the ensuing failures of collective discourse and decision making. All in all, ideal conditions for the emergence of populist, fascist, or dictatorial leadership. 

A study of how information is channelled within a society to support collective wellbeing and decision making might allow us to ask crucial questions, such as when a new technology for communication arrives, in what way is it healthy? In what way is it unhealthy? And in what ways must it be contained?... Given the critical juncture at which humanity currently finds itself, the timing of such a project could hardly be more crucial.

 --

Comment (NPW): 'The circumvention of professional journalism... has led to multiple distortions'. The same could be said for the circumvention of processes required for reliable and actionalble healthcare information to be made available to end users (whether the public, health workers, or policymakers). 

Neil Pakenham-Walsh, 

HIFA Coordinator, neil AT hifa.org www.hifa.org

HIFA: Healthcare Information For All: www.hifa.org 

I  have related concepts from this short work to Hodges' model, followed by a reference that reflects the naturalistic scale of the study suggested here:

individual
|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

[ Multi- ] Context - Situated [ model ] HEALTH WORKERS individual perception & intelligence - literacy Individual values Individual sense making	WELL-BEING of NATURAL WORLD HEALTH WORKERS Physical PROCESSES: Time [Is there an 'Over-arching theory of health communication'?] Channels of information - tech / forms
WELL-BEING of SOCIETY Intergenerational coherence (*amid change*) PUBLIC Social processes: Diffusion, Sharing SOCIO-tech? societies: channels of information? collective perception & intelligence (wisdom of crowds?)	Channels of information - control Journalism Populist, fascist, or dictatorial leadership POLICYMAKERS Digital & other divides? Political processes Electoral Politics

 

 

Jones, P. (1996) An overarching theory of health communication? Health Informatics Journal,2,1,28-34.

Metacognition: new developments and challenges - Conference / Symposium

Date
24 June 2021 - 25 June 2021
Institute
Institute of Philosophy
Type
Conference / Symposium
Venue
Woburn Suite G22/26

*The event will be hybrid in-person - online, further details will be announced soon*

* For further information and the Call for Papers click here*

Selected speakers:

Ophelia Deroy
LMU Munich
School of Advanced Study, University of London

Steve Fleming
UCL

Louise Goupil
École Normale Supérieure

John Morrison
Barnard College

Josef Perner
University of Salzburg

Joëlle Proust
Institut Jean Nicod

Alex Rosati

University of Michigan

In recent years the scope of metacognition has expanded. Metacognitive processes seem to be involved in practically all cognitive faculties: perception, action, memory, learning, decision making, and conceptual thought are some examples. It encompasses many cases where metacognition operates without the person engaging in deliberate monitoring or control. Evidence for metacognition also extends to pre-verbal infants and non-human animals. But are there fundamentally different types of metacognition involved in different cases? And how should we capture the distinction: procedural vs. analytic, experience-based vs. information-based, implicit vs. explicit, core vs. late-developing, or some other way?

To book click here

For enquires about the conference please get in touch with Eloise Rowley, eloise.rowley AT sas.ac.uk

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement No. 681422. For further information about the ‘Metacognition of Concepts’ project, see the project’s website: http://www.nicholasshea.co.uk/ 

My source:

Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ 
Recent posts can also be read in a Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/PhilosL/ 
Follow the list on Twitter @PhilosL. Follow the Department of Philosophy @LiverpoolPhilos

IFORS Developing Countries Online Resources

New documents joined - further ones are welcome

IFORS Developing Countries Online Resources 

The aim of the IFORS Developing Countries Online Resources page is to offer the OR worker all publicly-available materials on the topic of OR for Development. It also aims to provide a venue for people who are working in the area to share their completed or in-process work, learn from others, and stimulate comments and discussions on the work. Regarding IFORS Developing Countries OR resources website, its regular updates - and your possible submission of "free" (not copyright protected) material, you might occasionally visit

http://ifors.org/developing_countries/index.php?title=Main_Page

With this open resources page we aim to make research and application results better accessible to the many friends in the Developing Countries. We would be glad about interest. Contributions from the science, communication and education sectors are warmly welcome by our community which has very little access to emerging documents on arts and science, research and technology. "Operational Research" (OR) is the discipline of applying advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions. By using techniques such as problem structuring methods and mathematical modelling to analyze complex situations, Operational Research gives executives the power to make more effective decisions and build more productive systems. 

The International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS; http://ifors.org/) is an almost 60-year old organization which is currently composed of 51 national societies. 

Regional Groups of IFORS are: ALIO (The Latin American Ibero Association on Operations Research), APORS (The Association of Asian-Pacific Operational Research Societies), EURO (The Association of European Operational Research Societies), NORAM (The Association of North American Operations Research Societies). 

IFORS conferences are taking place every three years. On IFORS 2021, Seoul, South Korea, August 22-27, 2021, please refer to http://www.ifors2020.kr/

Thank you very much for your attention. 

With kind regards, best wishes,

Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber 

PS: Feedback is welcome via gerhard.weber AT put.poznan.pl

My source:

www.jiscmail.ac.uk/AI-SGES 

 

Call for Papers: Ethics, Health Data, and Bio-Citizenship

CFP: PhilosophicalNews, vol. 22, 2021

Ethics, Health Data, and Bio-Citizenship

http://www.moralphilosophy.eu/cfp/cfp-no-22/

Submission Deadline

Full paper: January 1st, 2021

Aims and Background

Adriana Petryna first introduced the term “biological citizenship” in her ethnography of the aftermath of the Chernobyl post-disaster emergency, Life Exposed [Petryna A. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.]. As stated by Rose and Novas, biological citizenship can be defined as an active form of citizenship that produces new forms of belonging, claims to acknowledgement of experiences, and access to resources revolving around biological and medical claims. Within this frame, the “emergency” refers to those “emerging forms of life” and introduces a new element into the philosophical, ethical, and sociological reflection: something which arises from the intertwining of modes of theoretical thinking and moral agency pertinent to different areas – medical, legal, economic, political, moral – and is not directly postulated by any of them; something whose characteristics can be identifiable, but whose result cannot be predicted. Several factors have contributed to defining the concept of biological citizenship. These include:

1.         A gnoseological expansion leading to a proliferation of disease categories in the biomedical field;

2.          New forms of bio-sociality emerging in connection with the increase in rare diseases;

3.         The consolidation of new biopolitical systems and new forms of governance;

4.          The rise of new political and moral economies of hope;

5.          An increased relevance of patient associations in decision making.

However, biological citizenship should not be constructed merely as a resurgence of the medicalization of life (Foucault), or a form of liberalization and privatization of eugenics (Habermas). In this context, this special issue aims at investigating the multidisciplinary background of the expanding moral claim to bio-sociality and bio-citizenship. As a matter of fact, being a bio-citizen carries an underlying demand for more suitable public policies and socio-economic rights to shape the universalization of fragility and vulnerability as human conditions in contemporary society. On the one hand, bio-citizenship may therefore be viewed as a proactive proposition for patient-centred healthcare within an enlarged framework of cultural and political meanings: the patient is no longer a subject, who happens to suffer from a specific impairment at a specific moment in time; rather, being a patient is a universal condition, shared by all human beings. The idea is to move from a generally negative perception of the term “patient” to a neutral or positive perception of the same concept. On the other hand, however, biological citizenship also implies an underlying and constant connection between the patient status and the involvement of health data in order for patient-centred technologies to run efficiently. This entails new (cyber) risks and vulnerabilities that might not only impoverish the empathic and emotional quality of the care relationship, but also favour a concept of democratic citizenship based on Big-data-oriented sovereignty, thus paving the way from bio-citizenship to bio-data-citizenship. This idiosyncrasy is very evident in the ongoing global experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are learning how contingent the necessity is to rethink the link between ethics, Big data, patient empowerment, and healthcare technology.

Original contributions discussing issues such as gender, big data, biocitizenship, or any other relevant topic will be considered, subject to approval by the Editorial Board.

Submission Details

•             8000 words (spaces included)

•             Each text has to include an abstract written in English, 300 words max.

•             All material should be submitted via e-mail to the special issue’s editors Antonio Carnevale (a.carnevale AT cyberethicslab.com) and Emanuela Tangari (e.tangari AT cyberethicslab.com).

The volume will be published in June 2021.

For further information as well as the submission of the paper, please refer to the guidelines or visit http://www.moralphilosophy.eu/cfp/cfp-no-22/

Call for papers - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio - Rhetoric and Health

Call for papers - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio www.rifl.unical.it

Vol. 15, N. 1/2021 Rhetoric and health

Edited by Maria Grazia Rossi

Deadline: 20.01.2021

Words can act as a pharmakon, becoming a remedy or a poison. Considering both theoretical tenets and empirical findings, we have convincing evidence on the power of language and words in changing minds and fostering behavioural change.

In the context of health, it has been underlined how the quality of communication affect (clinical) outcomes, at the individual level (on patients) and the collective or societal level (on citizens). During the current COVID-19 pandemic, it has become even more clear that such communication effect is indirect and mediated by factors such as understanding, motivation, social assistance, trust in the system, etc. Words that are well-spoken but also, obviously, well understood can have a strong impact on the quality of our lives, concerning the clinical, emotional and social spheres. This is why the proper and effective use of words should be considered as a common ethical responsibility: it is an ethical responsibility for healthcare providers that directly take care of patients, but it is also a responsibility of public and private institutions working to promote behaviours favouring the adoption of a healthier life and the building of healthier societies, respectful of other people and more environmentally friendly. What happened from a communicative point of view to justify the need to activate a state of emergency and maintain lockdown restrictions is exemplary in this respect, also to discuss the conflict between values that is pervasive in our complex and interconnected societies. Even beyond the pandemic, many examples can be mentioned to discuss the importance of both the effectiveness and quality of communication. Take as examples social campaigns and/or advertisements on health issues related to cases such as the public debate on vaccination or antibiotic resistance, the social campaigns to combat pollution or against smoking in public spaces.

However, it is not obvious to find a consensual framework to define what counts as communication of quality, even if rhetoricians investigated heavily on this issue. Not necessarily a successful communication is also desirable from an ethical perspective. Obtaining persuasion – to be able to change attitudes and/or behaviours, it is not necessarily equivalent to do it in an ethically way. For example, implicit persuasion strategies often (but not always) can be described in terms of manipulation tools attempting to manipulate people and to change their habits. Again, this applies at the individual level within the interactions between patients and healthcare providers, with therapeutic recommendations described as genuine persuasive acts. At the collective level, it also applies to public communication, including the communication made on social networks, where fake news and misinformation spread even more quickly.

The links between rhetoric and health can be therefore analysed from two different points of view. From a linguistic point of view, the main problem is to figure out which communicative strategies are effective to persuade patients (and citizens) in changing a given behaviour and/or accepting the treatment more appropriate to a specific medical condition. From an ethical point of view, the main problem is to figure out which effective communicative strategies are legitimate, meaning they respect values defining both the patient (citizen) agenda and the doctor (political/health system) agenda. The discussions concerning the frameworks of value-based medicine and patient-centered medicine fit in this context, as well as fall in this debate the current attention given to the frameworks of narrative medicine and persuasive technology (applied to telemedicine, mobile apps, social networks, etc.).

Vol. 15, N. 1/2021 of RIFL expects to explore the links between rhetoric and health, accepting papers aim at considering the role of communication in the context of health, and papers considering persuasion from an ethical point of view – at the individual level (between patients and providers) and the collective/societal one (between institutions and citizens, between media and citizens).

Papers should be theoretical or empirical. All fields will be considered (Philosophy of Language, Classic studies, Literary studies, Linguistics, Psychology, etc.) if they are relevant to discuss the persuasive and/or the ethical dimension of communication in the context of health. Papers exploring the following areas are very welcome:

• Words and language as pharmakon
• Communicating science, communicating the COVID-19 pandemic
• Doctor-patient communication
• Persuasion, argumentation and manipulation in the context of health
• Ethic of the medical discourse and ethics for health
• Ethical relevance and effectiveness of narrative medicine
• Shared decision-making between patients and providers
• Social campaigns and advertisement for health
• Persuasive technology and health
• Social networks and seeking information on the web
• Value-based medicine
• Patient-based medicine
• Public opinion and health
• Visual persuasion and the role of images in the context of health
• Linguistic strategies developed for healthcare providers
• Emotions and interpersonal relations in the context of health
• Language and placebo effect

We call for articles in Italian, English and Portuguese. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English.

The manuscript must be prepared using the journal template Download template. All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to segreteria.rifl AT gmail.com.

Instructions for authors:

Maximum contribution length:

40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including bibliography and endnotes).

Deadline 20.01.2021

Publication: June 2021

CFP Full text: http://rifl.unical.it/index.php/rifl/announcement/view/23

My source:

Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html. Recent posts can also be read in a Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/PhilosL/ Follow the list on Twitter @PhilosL. Follow the Department of Philosophy @LiverpoolPhilos

Collective Intelligence in Hodges' model: c/o Röling (2009)

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group - population

Intelligence Quotient Emotional Intelligence Spiritual Intelligence ... Individual beliefs Individual motivation "Can individuals really be rational and modify behaviours accordingly?"

Ozone layer Troposphere Biosphere  HUMANS are a FORCE of NATURE Deepest Ocean bed "Anthropogenics would also be a praxiology - a science that informs decisions and action." p.40.

The 'Enlightment' tradition: Science, Knowledge, Human ideals distilled in history and future history.

"Can we adapt tools forged to create wealth and use them for sustainable development? Is ever-increasing wealth the only viable measure of progress?" "A close understanding of how institutions determine individual behaviour might even curb the enthusiasm for "methodological individualism", the tendency to explain collective things such as the marketplace as a necessary outcome of individual choices." p.41.

[Context: How can agriculture feed the world ..? ]

"One of the things this exercise brought home to me was how poorly we understand humans as agents of planetary change, how little of what we do know is widely shared, and that this knowledge is scattered across disciplines that appear distant to governance. I began to ask if we needed a new discipline, one that could beyond the work of thousands of ecologists, climatologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, neuroscientists and the like. I decided to appropriate the name "anthropogenics" for my dream discipline. p.40.

My source:
Röling, N. (2009) Profile. A proper study of mankind, New Scientist, 17 January, 201, 2691. pp.40-41.

as CLEAR as Hodges' model?

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group - population

ASK  about underlying social problems	TREAT  the immediate health problem ...
REFER to local social support resources	ADVOCATE for

McGill University - CLEAR Collaboration


My source:
Davidson, K.W., McGinn, T. (2019) Screening for Social Determinants of Health: The Known and Unknown. JAMA.Published online August 29, 2019.

Individual & Group process - Collective Intelligence [CI] c/o Radcliffe, et al. (2019)

No explanation is needed as to why this paper caught my attention in a tweet that featured the figure [2] below? The context is medical, not nursing and the extended multidisciplinary team, but as per the threshold concepts post the focus is decision making.

From a nursing perspective and using Hodges' model the 'individual processes' would include data gathering, patient assessment, liaison with relatives and colleagues and reflection to integrate information. Evidence-based sources will also be involved depending on the reason for referral, the patients (relatives) account, and the status of the diagnosis. Information technology input will be through the electronic health record that should also provide a history of previous episodes of care and the conclusions reached.

Within Hodges' model below I have added socio-technical and governance. Perhaps, as a systematic scoping review and applied to a specific healthcare profession there is less emphasis on the 'political' dimensions of decision making (management, policy, rules, reporting, targets). Equally from a nursing perspective there is the 'data cleaning' within the research process but then also nurses, and students in particular not being negatively impacted by comments about a forthcoming clinical placement, or a patient / client who has been referred (or referred) to the service / team.

individual - self

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group- population

individual as subject of mental health Dx Individual knowledge and experience Reflection Learning and decision-making styles and bias (positive and negative?) Feedback from Collective Intelligence?	individual as subject of physical Dx Analysis Individual Input Group Input Synthesis Information Technology
Collaborative working Clinical Teams Level of SOCIO-technical integration	outcomes Studies were:  individual or group process several a combination. governance

My source:

TIL about collective intelligence in medical decision-making: Radcliffe, @UrmimalaSarkar &co found 15 studies thereof. Interesting! There are tech-supported forms now, but no strong evidence about their effects on patient care. https://t.co/TdQwwRQ4tg pic.twitter.com/odtjjv5hUg

— Hilda Bastian (@hildabast) August 13, 2019

Radcliffe, K., Lyson, H. C., Barr-Walker, J., & Sarkar, U. (2019). Collective intelligence in medical decision-making: A systematic scoping review. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 19(1), 158. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-019-0882-0

Threshold Concepts: Reflection on chaos, complexity and AI

Here are the reflections on the photograph posted in June following the Conference on Threshold Concepts:

Chaos can occur in any one ... or all of the four domains of Hodges' model. The same applies to order.

http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kjerland/Lorenz/lorenz_attractor.html

This is a characteristic of chaos and chaotic systems.

Chaos can arise at any time: in the here and now, being sown now for the future (climate change?), or springing from the past, as in pleasurable, or traumatic memories.

While the Lorenz attractor and other graphical examples are grounded in mathematics and science, in #h2cm we need to imagine the butterfly diagram extended across and simultaneously at work across the models four domains.

individual - self

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group- population

Even in instances of riot and anarchy there will be pockets of 'order', but would you would want to take your chance of finding one? Amid talk of being in the wrong place, at wrong time; to what extent is this dependent upon who we associate with socially? Or, what we believe is the political course we might, should, will, must follow?

The context of Prof. Land's slide is learning and decision making. As a 'political' matter when chaos occurs, how is it manifested in disintegration? Can we hear the 'gears grind'? What exactly goes awry? Is it the processes as in the timing, leadership and with it responsibility?

The slide is powerful in giving support, to clinical decision-making as a context in which complex decision making is very common and simultaneously encompasses political, rationale and judgemental (ethical) forms of decision making.

Hodges' model can also facilitate recognition of differentiation between relational chaos and the explicit state of decision-making. For example, a healthcare practitioner and client/patient/carer may have achieved empathy and rapport, but the complex demands of the clinical decision still presents a great deal of uncertainty. Alternately in instances when the relationship is being forged then the communications: verbal and non-verbal (and a function of the clinical team) can be a confounding factor if not negotiated professionally (and in socially acceptable terms by members of the public). Another useful perspective is Personal and Public Involvement (PPI) at what point is this achieved? What are the thresholds in the public's learning, as they engage and are engaged if they are not to label the initiative as a checkbox exercise? Again Hodges' model can help us to reflect upon the scope and complexity of such situations.


AI, artificial intelligence was mentioned (I'm sure?) in the presentation and the benefits of AI in healthcare are already being realised. This is tempered with the requirement for AI systems to be able to explain their 'reasoning', rather than this be taken at face value. As AI takes on tasks that include initial automated screening of job applications that include videos then another dimension of learning is presented to students.

Health and justice is by default complex. Consider, the task of being seen by society that justice is duly served and doing so with a duty of care and welfare of the prisoners. To this, we can add the aspiration of custody being rehabilitative. For a prisoner, even on remand, there will be times when health needs and patiency must be recognised. When a long-term prisoner becomes chronically ill, this can present a major challenge to law-makers, prisoners, their families, the healthcare team and society.

individual - self

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group- population

Identity (use of name, touch ...) (My) PURPOSE Beliefs, Personal values  Safety (personal) Thresholds Trigger warning Critical - critique  not taking it personally	PROCESS [Space] - physical & degrees of freedom in decision making constraints Rationale* Evidence Theory Quantitative Research
Qualitative Research Patient : Healthcare practitioner decision making  PRACTICE Critical - agreeing to disagree Schism - 'distance'	Consensus (bridge building)  Autonomy (in decision making) Administration / Bureaucracy Professionalism Anti- 'X' movements Riot and anarchy safety (POLICY) Critical - political

*While placed within the sciences domain, 'rationale' can be evidenced physically, psychologically,  politically and socially.  It is this that forces us to acknowledge the several edges of chaos.

See also:
Inaugural Scottish Threshold Concepts Conference: TCs in Action [i]

Inaugural Scottish Threshold Concepts Conference: TCs in Action [ii]

Inaugural Scottish Threshold Concepts Conference: TCs in Action [iii]

Images:
http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kjerland/Lorenz/lorenz_attractor.html

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3774260/comments
(Original image)