Nov 19, 2017 05:59 PM
What do face transplants say about identity & wellbeing?
https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-face-tran...-wellbeing
EXCERPT: The delay was caused not by medical or technical challenges, but by bioethical and perceptual ones: bioethicists were concerned that the risks of the surgery and the dangers posed by the immunosuppressant medication needed to prevent rejection of the transplanted face would outweigh the benefits. Doctors were concerned about the public reaction to the manipulation of something held to be fundamental to individual identity.
The doctors were right. Public outcry was intense, heated, and – initially – strangely unfocused. [...] Face transplants reveal our deepest-held notions of the relationship between face and identity, and fundamentally challenge them. That’s hard to explain, or even to identify as a concern. Which is to say: the objections to the surgery were rooted in feelings, not in facts, though facts were to follow, providing a comfortable place for the discomfort.
[...] The growing acceptance of the surgery is due in part to the passage of time. People have had face transplants, and the world didn’t end. Recipients (as they are careful to emphasise in their post-operation interviews) still feel very much like themselves. And, despite their post-transplant faces being a blend of their original features and those of their donors, some even feel that they look very much like themselves: certainly more like themselves than they did with no face. [...] The post-apocalyptic sci-fi future foreshadowed in the many films and novels featuring face transplants hasn’t come to bear. The face transplant is no longer a dangerous and weird mechanism to upset the order of identity. [...] In another possible world, face transplants could have shown the way forward to a new and radical understanding of the limitations of using the face as the representation of identity. They haven’t....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-face-tran...-wellbeing
Folk Concepts
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/16/folk-concepts/
EXCERPT: “Folk concept.” You may have never heard the phrase defined, or even used, but you probably already know what it means. Consider this list:
luck
Bayes’ rule
ghosts
vitamin C
Which two are folk concepts?
If you were able to instantly see that luck and ghosts are folk concepts, then you are already in possession of the folk concept of the folk concept. The descriptor “folk” invites the hearer to a conversation about less sophisticated people, behind their back. [...]
Many disciplines use the concept of the folk concept, including anthropology, sociology, botany, and psychology (not to mention folklore and history of science). Each discipline likely has its own special meaning for the term that, if not explicitly defined, is encoded in usage. The term “folk concept” is rarely defined, even by scientists studying folk concepts. This is not necessarily a fault; definitions may not get us any further than example usage and hermeneutics. [...]
Folk concepts are often imprecise and vague (healing energy, true love). If the phrase “folk concept” is also imprecise and vague, if its referents shift over time and context, if it presents a hand-wave-y spectrum rather than a hard category, then it shares the nature of the things it describes.
[...] So far, folk concepts seem to vastly outnumber things that aren’t folk concepts. Only a tiny minority of concepts have a claim to formal, scientific status, and that claim is often short-lived. Folk concepts are the ordinary background reality, and formal scientific concepts are the rare exception. Almost everything that is interesting, important, or deeply meaningful to human beings is a folk concept – including interestingness, importance, and meaning itself.
There have been a few approaches toward folk concepts in the scientific literature. One approach is dismissive of folk concepts as inherently unscientific, to be eradicated and replaced with formal precision. For example, Cunningham (1961) says:
Over the years the sociologist has learned to be properly skeptical of “folk” definitions of social phenomena. For example, concepts such as “crime” and “insanity” have proven useless in most types of scientific analysis of deviant behavior. “Leisure,” it may be argued, is also just such a folk concept. We have an intuitive feeling of what is subsumed under this rubric but find the concept a virtual Pandora’s box when it comes to formal definition of the phenomenon...
MORE: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/16/folk-concepts/
https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-face-tran...-wellbeing
EXCERPT: The delay was caused not by medical or technical challenges, but by bioethical and perceptual ones: bioethicists were concerned that the risks of the surgery and the dangers posed by the immunosuppressant medication needed to prevent rejection of the transplanted face would outweigh the benefits. Doctors were concerned about the public reaction to the manipulation of something held to be fundamental to individual identity.
The doctors were right. Public outcry was intense, heated, and – initially – strangely unfocused. [...] Face transplants reveal our deepest-held notions of the relationship between face and identity, and fundamentally challenge them. That’s hard to explain, or even to identify as a concern. Which is to say: the objections to the surgery were rooted in feelings, not in facts, though facts were to follow, providing a comfortable place for the discomfort.
[...] The growing acceptance of the surgery is due in part to the passage of time. People have had face transplants, and the world didn’t end. Recipients (as they are careful to emphasise in their post-operation interviews) still feel very much like themselves. And, despite their post-transplant faces being a blend of their original features and those of their donors, some even feel that they look very much like themselves: certainly more like themselves than they did with no face. [...] The post-apocalyptic sci-fi future foreshadowed in the many films and novels featuring face transplants hasn’t come to bear. The face transplant is no longer a dangerous and weird mechanism to upset the order of identity. [...] In another possible world, face transplants could have shown the way forward to a new and radical understanding of the limitations of using the face as the representation of identity. They haven’t....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-face-tran...-wellbeing
Folk Concepts
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/16/folk-concepts/
EXCERPT: “Folk concept.” You may have never heard the phrase defined, or even used, but you probably already know what it means. Consider this list:
luck
Bayes’ rule
ghosts
vitamin C
Which two are folk concepts?
If you were able to instantly see that luck and ghosts are folk concepts, then you are already in possession of the folk concept of the folk concept. The descriptor “folk” invites the hearer to a conversation about less sophisticated people, behind their back. [...]
Many disciplines use the concept of the folk concept, including anthropology, sociology, botany, and psychology (not to mention folklore and history of science). Each discipline likely has its own special meaning for the term that, if not explicitly defined, is encoded in usage. The term “folk concept” is rarely defined, even by scientists studying folk concepts. This is not necessarily a fault; definitions may not get us any further than example usage and hermeneutics. [...]
Folk concepts are often imprecise and vague (healing energy, true love). If the phrase “folk concept” is also imprecise and vague, if its referents shift over time and context, if it presents a hand-wave-y spectrum rather than a hard category, then it shares the nature of the things it describes.
[...] So far, folk concepts seem to vastly outnumber things that aren’t folk concepts. Only a tiny minority of concepts have a claim to formal, scientific status, and that claim is often short-lived. Folk concepts are the ordinary background reality, and formal scientific concepts are the rare exception. Almost everything that is interesting, important, or deeply meaningful to human beings is a folk concept – including interestingness, importance, and meaning itself.
There have been a few approaches toward folk concepts in the scientific literature. One approach is dismissive of folk concepts as inherently unscientific, to be eradicated and replaced with formal precision. For example, Cunningham (1961) says:
Over the years the sociologist has learned to be properly skeptical of “folk” definitions of social phenomena. For example, concepts such as “crime” and “insanity” have proven useless in most types of scientific analysis of deviant behavior. “Leisure,” it may be argued, is also just such a folk concept. We have an intuitive feeling of what is subsumed under this rubric but find the concept a virtual Pandora’s box when it comes to formal definition of the phenomenon...
MORE: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/16/folk-concepts/
