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Virtues and vices in a non-ideal world

Virtues and vices in a non-ideal world

Humans are prone to bias, irrationality, and various forms of prejudice. From an evolutionary perspective, this is no accident. Biases can be viewed as adaptive responses to an environment that often rewards “thinking fast” over “thinking slow.” Irrationality can also be adaptive, especially in contexts that incentivize group cohesion over accuracy. Prejudices and stereotypes are, arguably, integral features of human cognition, though the prejudices and stereotypes that are prevalent in a society tell us a lot about that society—its history, its hangups, its structure.

Does this mean that humans are bad thinkers, perhaps even vicious thinkers? This would be too quick. Biases are adaptive because—provided certain conditions are met—they help us better understand the world. Biases can lead us astray—by leading us to adopt inaccurate pictures of the world—but, when they do so, this need not reveal anything resembling a vice. Our thinking sometimes goes wrong due to bad luck. Even systematic errors can have innocent explanations.

More importantly, the idea that biases are inimical to good thinking only makes sense on an idealized way of understanding what it is to think well, or to think badly. Humans are far from perfect thinkers. If we take an ideal thinker as the model that human thinkers must emulate, it is no surprise that we fall short. The question though is whether we should take ideal thinkers as the model in the first place.

In my new book, Non-Ideal Epistemology, I identify two key characteristics of the idealized picture of good (and bad) thinking. The first is that it judges the quality of actual human thinking in terms of how well it approximates ideal thinking. If humans tend to think in ways that systematically violate the laws of logic or probability theory, this is evidence that humans think badly because ideal thinkers would obey these laws. If we tend to exaggerate the import of evidence that supports our political or scientific views, this is evidence that we are deeply biased, perhaps viciously so, because ideal thinkers would assign just as much weight to evidence as that evidence merits.

The second key characteristic of the idealized picture is a tendency to understand good or bad thinking in an acontextual, ahistorical way. There is a set of character traits the possession of which makes one a good thinker irrespective of the context or situation. There is another set of traits the possession of which makes one a bad thinker irrespective of the context.

For example, you might think that a tendency to engage with salient alternatives to your own views is a central part of virtuous thinking. It demonstrates open-mindedness. On the other hand, you might think that a tendency to ignore salient alternatives is a central part of vicious thinking. It demonstrates closed-mindedness, dogmatism, and perhaps even arrogance.

The idealized picture runs into trouble because of these two characteristics. It is often a mistake to judge human performance against an ideal standard because we don’t think like an ideal thinker would. Good human performance is often very different from an ideal version thereof. Good human strategies for arriving at a reasonably accurate understanding of the world can’t ignore our obvious limitations, cognitive or otherwise. If we are bad at following the laws of logic or probability theory, that’s likely because we haven’t used these tools to solve the practical problems that have occupied us as a species. If we are bad at “thinking on our own,” that’s likely because we are social animals, and have evolved strategies for solving problems together rather than by ourselves.

Moreover, it is often a mistake to ignore social context and environment. Whether it is a good thing to engage with salient alternatives depends in part on what will happen when you engage. Will you be taken seriously? Will your perspective be listened to? It isn’t closed-minded or dogmatic to refuse to listen to people who won’t listen to you. A willingness to listen and engage may manifest your genuine open-mindedness. But it might just reflect the fact that you expect (and like!) to be taken seriously.

If we can’t understand good thinking in terms of fit with an ideal standard, how can we understand it? One alternative—the alternative I pursue in my book—would be to start with examples of successful thinking—not just isolated cases where someone has “thought well,” but the social institutions and structures that represent our best attempt to make sense of the world. The result would be an empirically-driven understanding of what it is to think well—what I call a non-ideal epistemology.

The various sciences have produced vast amounts of knowledge about the world around us. We can study—scientifically!—how it is that they have done this. The result may well be an understanding of good thinking that differs radically from the idealized picture. For example, a degree of closed-mindedness and dogmatism, not to mention arrogance, may be essential to scientific progress. Ultimately, it may well turn out that humans succeed by harnessing the biases, prejudices, and forms of irrationality to which we are prone.

Featured image by Jr Korpa on Unsplash (public domain)

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In praise of sloth

In praise of sloth

Exotic words like bamboozle and wayzgoose are the bread of popular books on etymology, but as regards origins, the toughest words are usually not so conspicuous and not so funny, and those who follow this blog may remember that my recent posts have been devoted to seemingly insignificant nouns and verbs. The same is true of today’s blog post, whose “hero” is the adjective slow. No words look less inspiring, but few are more opaque. This adjective is not an orphan: it existed in Old English and had relatives all over Germanic, except Gothic, but in Old English, it occurred rarely and, when it did, meant “torpid; dull,” rather than “lacking speed” or “lasting a long time.” Even in the Revised Version of the Bible, the word usually has metaphorical senses, as in “slow of heart,” though slow had acquired all its familiar modern senses long before the seventeenth century.

When speakers of Old English wanted to say “lasting long,” they used the adjective longsome(e) (now dead or regional; almost the same form occurs in Beowulf), an exact cognate of Modern German langsam “slow.” Surprisingly, today, English slow “not fast” has no stylistically neutral synonyms. If someone speaks, walks, or drives slowly, there is no way of describing the action differently, except for substituting not quickly or not fast for slowly. The most resourceful thesauruses/thesauri suggest only “gradual, protracted, lingering, lengthened, spun-out,” and the like as synonyms. It is remarkable how a word with a limited sphere of application managed to rise to such prominence.

This is a slowworm. It is not slow: slow- in its name is the product of folk etymology.
Image via pxhere, public domain

The absence of cognates in Gothic may be due to the fact that slow has always been limited to the north: Low German, Dutch, Frisian, and Scandinavian. All the recorded forms sound alike: Old English slā, Old High German slēu (unlike English slāw, German slēu has survived only in dialects), and so forth. In Old Icelandic, three forms turned up: slær, sljár, and sljór (all vowels in them were long). I would like to refer to The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (ODEE; 1966), which, though I am aware of its deficiencies, I use every day and have loved to death (tattered and torn, it occupies a place of honor on my shelf). It says: “Common Germanic (except Gothic) *slæwaz; Indo-European *slēwos, of unknown origin.”

The OED online has come a long way from this formulation, but I still find it useful to mention my rather pedantic objections to the old and trusty ODEE. The absence of a Gothic cognate of slow may of course be due to chance, because the fourth-century Gothic Bible has come down to us only in part. Yet not improbably, the Goths did not know such a word.  As mentioned above, the cognates of slow were current in northern dialects. It is therefore better not to refer to the Common Germanic form. The cognates cited above seem to have proliferated by “budding” (one form from another: see the picture in the heading), so that there is no certainty that the sought-after “proto” root existed. But the most curious part of the statement about the root is: “of unknown origin.” Since my main area of research in the history of words is precisely such outcasts of English and Germanic etymology, I wonder what that formulation means. Most probably, the editor wanted to refer to one of the ancient reconstructed roots, as they have been codified in the standard books on Indo-European. 

A slowcoach is not the same as a slow coach.
Left: by Ketut Subiyanto. Centre: by Magda Ehlers. Right: via getarchive.net – all public domain.

Those who have access to some of the editions of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language will find, appended to the main text, a long list of such reconstructed roots. Walter W. Skeat also listed them, though he referred to a much older manual, and his forms differed somewhat from those cited in The Heritage Dictionary. His verdict was the same: “Root unknown.” But let us suppose that *slēwoz, the evasive remote ancestor, really existed. What “known” origin can we be looking for?  The clue is probably supposed to come from some cognates that would have clarified the initial meaning of our adjective. However, that cognate would, most likely, have meant “slow, sluggish, inactive”!  Skeat suggested “blunt, weak, slow.” Our readers may have read an old tale in which two “protopeople” (a man and his wife) were thinking of a good name for the yet unnamed animal, now known as cat. They tried all possible words and came to the conclusion that the best name for the cat would be cat. We may agree that that couple was slow in coming to the point but wise.

Our oldest and even later etymologists walked around a well-delimited bit of ground and compared slow with Gothic slawan “to be silent,” English slack, slap, sloven, sloe, slough, slumber, and so forth. Outside Germanic, Russian slabyi “weak” and Latin laevus ~ Greek laiós ~ Russian levyi, all meaning “left (= weak) hand,” have been tried as related to the Germanic adjective. The latter series presupposes that the initial s in slow is the so-called s-mobile, a volatile prefix, whose appearance is not governed by any rules. And of course, a host of Germanic look-alikes turns up in this merry-go-round. They too are usually of unknown or dubious etymology and can therefore provide little help. More than a hundred years ago, Charles Scott, the editor of The Century Dictionary wrote: “There is a vague resemblance and common suggestion in the series slip, slide, slouch, slug, etc., to which slow may be added.” In the 1986 update of the great Gothic etymological dictionary, we read under slawan “to be silent” (see it above): “Etymology unclear….  Probably expanded on onomatopoetic basis.”

Here is a sloth. Do you rhyme sloth with both or cloth?
By Thowra_uk, via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This seems to be a promising approach, but an approach, rather than a solution, because what is so onomatopoeic (sound-imitative) about the sl-group? Sound-symbolic perhaps? In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned the fact that sl– is a most “emotional” group: sleezy, slack, slovenly, slattern, slut, slobber, slime, slum, and slippery tend to evoke negative feelings. And those are only some of the most typical examples. However, they provide no immediate clue to the etymology of slang, sleeve, slave, and slay, to mention a few. We may perhaps suggest that slow, when it was coined by Germanic speakers in the north, meant “stupid” and had “off-putting” connotations (mere guesswork), but it would be good to discover what is “wrong” with the combination sl-. This is a task for psycholinguists, and I doubt that they are equal to it.

By contrast, sound-imitative groups are usually transparent (as in thrash, tread, crash, grumble, trample, and their likes). The initial group fl– (as in flutter, flicker, flow, and so forth) seems to suggest a certain type of unsteady movement, but slow remains a riddle, even if its initial sense was “silly, foolish, obtuse.” It should be added that sound-symbolic words tend to influence one another, and that is what I meant by budding. Once a language has a sizable number of words beginning with, for instance, fl– or sl-, and referring to the same semantic field, a certain association between sound and sense emerges, and even if the word initially had a different meaning, it gets “infected” by its neighbors and acquires a new sense. Slow will remain a word of “unclear origin,” but it seems more profitable not to search for its root in the protolanguage and accept its symbolic coloring. The rest is bound to remain a riddle.

Featured image by Kevin Harber, via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Supporting the future of peer review [podcast]

Supporting the future of peer review [podcast]

Every year, Peer Review Week honors the contributions of scientists, academics, and researchers in all fields for the hours of work they put into peer reviewing manuscripts to ensure quality work is published. This year, the theme of Peer Review Week is “The Future of Peer Review.”

But what actually is peer review?

According to Oxford Languages, peer review is “the evaluation of scientific, academic, or professional work by others working in the same field.” In practice, this means manuscripts submitted to academic journals must go through a strict review from peers in the field to check the validity and novelty of the research. Additionally, this process aids the editor of the journal in determining if the manuscript is fit to publish in the journal with little or no revisions, or if it requires major edits. 

Peer review goes back to the beginning of research sharing, with the concept of peer review evident in ancient Greece. Modern peer review as we know it today is thought to have originated in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries with the introduction of the first academic journals, though it has transformed massively with the increase in scientific papers published and the advent of the internet.  

Historically, editors would invite close colleagues to review, which limited inclusivity in the process. Additionally, familiarity with the authors of manuscripts could sway peer reviewers to review in a favorable or unfavorable light due to unconscious bias.

On today’s episode, we are excited to welcome three of our colleagues at Oxford University Press to discuss current changes they see in the field, and what they will mean for the future of publishing.  

First, we welcomed Laura Jose, a Publisher in the Owned and Product Tower at OUP, to share how peer review reduces bias. We then interviewed Dr Amanda Boehm, scientific managing editor for JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute and JNCI Cancer Spectrum, about diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives in peer review. Lastly, we spoke with James Phillpotts, the Director of Content Transformation & Standards, who serves as an OUP representative for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). We discussed NISO’s recently released document on Standard Terminology for Peer Review.

Check out Episode 87 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Oxford Academic (OUP) · Supporting the Future of Peer Review – Episode 87 – The Oxford CommentRecommended reading

This article from the December 2002 Cardiovascular Research, “The significance of the peer review process against the background of bias: priority ratings of reviewers and editors and the prediction of citation, the role of geographical bias” by Tobias Opthof, Ruben Coronel, and Michiel J. Janse offers a look at peer review from the not so distant past.

A more recent scholarly look at peer review, “Can transparency undermine peer review? A simulation model of scientist behavior under open peer review” by Federico Bianchi and Flaminio Squazzoni could be found in the October 2022 Science and Public Policy (Open Access)

From the blog, we have this collection by R. Michael Alvarez of evergreen editor tips on how to be a good peer reviewer.

We’ve also collected external documents that were mentioned or referenced by our guests:

“AI can crack double blind peer review – should we still use it?” by Leonard Bauersfeld, Angel Romero, Manasi Muglikar, and Davide Scaramuzza on the LSE Impact Blog“Double-anonymous peer review reduces reviewer bias, finds three-year trial” from the British Ecological Society “Nobel and novice: Author prominence affects peer review” by Jürgen Huber, Sabiou Inoua, Rudolf Kerschbamer, Christian König-Kersting, Stefan Palan, and Vernon L. Smith in PNAS (Open Access)“Which peer reviewers voluntarily reveal their identity to authors? Insights into the consequences of open-identities peer review” by Charles W. Fox in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological SciencesCommittee on Public Ethics (COPE) Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, March 2013As mentioned by James Phillpotts, NISO’s recent guidelines on Standard Terminology for Peer Review, published July 2023  Transcript

The-Oxford-Comment-Episode-87-transcript

Featured image: CC0 via Unsplash

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A free market? The French East India Company and modern capitalism

A free market? The French East India Company and modern capitalism

“Paris is the place to make money, & England is the country to enjoy it.”

With what we think we know about capitalism in England and France circa 1790—a year into the tumult of the French Revolution and as the territorial expanse of the gargantuan British East India Company continued to wax in Asia—it is hard to fathom how exactly, a banker based in London (albeit one of French ancestry) could have come to this conclusion as he wrote to a friend, one of the directors of the much smaller French East India Company, or Compagnie des Indes. 

Our twenty-first-century business history textbooks and op-eds tell a different story: that we should think of the British East India Company as the first modern multinational corporation, an ancestor of Amazon or Google. Like the corporate giants of the present, scholars often identify the British and Dutch East India Companies as architects of Western political and economic dominance, having built the modern world through their imperial exploits, conquests, market power, and exploitation of labor. Uncomfortably straddling the boundaries between the political and the financial, these “company-states” were both self-governing, profit-driven enterprises, but also political bodies that built and governed territorial empires of their own.

“These ‘company-states’ were self-governing, profit-driven enterprises, that built and governed territorial empires of their own.”

But neither journalists nor scholars pay much attention to one crucial element of the story: that the British and Dutch companies inspired a long suite of both imitators and competitors across a European continent thirsty for the exploitation of colonial trade. In the Atlantic world, settlement and slave trading companies populated the Americas with migrants both free and enslaved. In the Indian Ocean, European states competed against one another for access to lucrative markets for spices, Indian cotton goods, and Chinese silks and porcelain. Among the corporate entrants to this competition in the long eighteenth-century numbered Prussian, Austrian, Swedish, and Danish East India companies, among many more—companies that were often financially precarious, short-lived, and whose politics and operations remain largely unknown and unstudied.

This characterization curiously applies to the early modern trading companies of what was ultimately one of the most significant European global empires: France. In its three successive incarnations, the French East India Company earned a not entirely undeserved reputation for scandal, financial crisis, and institutional turmoil. Modern historians must reckon with the fruits of that turmoil: unlike its British and Dutch counterparts, whose archives are largely consolidated in major collections in London and the Hague, the papers of the three French companies are fragmented and scattered across different repositories throughout the country. The fact that royal ministers meddled so deliberately and repeatedly in the politics of the Compagnies des Indes hardly makes them desirable forebears for modern corporations beholden to the whims of their shareholders.

Yet the French East India Companies were major imperial and capitalist actors in their time. It was, after all, direct rivalry and competition between the British and French East India Companies that drove the establishment of British dominion in India in the decades after the global Seven Years’ War (1754–1763). This military consolidation came at a tremendous cost to the British company, whose repeated bouts of financial insolvency became a critical subject of parliamentary scrutiny in the decades to follow. At the same time, the defeated French had to invent new ways to secure access to coveted Indian goods and markets now controlled by the British, while still maintaining fragile diplomatic ties with independent South Asian powers who remained key geopolitical allies against a common enemy.

“Companies made poor sovereigns and states had to take responsibility for what their company-states had wrought.”

The final iteration of the French East India Company—lasting only from 1785 to 1793—emerged from this moment of mutual crisis between these rival imperial powers that drove a rethinking of the relationship between empire and business. By the late eighteenth-century, the “company-state” system was breaking down: exploitative and extractive as empire was, the costs of policing and governing territories were enormous, and private companies were proving ill-adapted to govern and trade simultaneously. In 1773, Voltaire called the defeated and bankrupt French company “a two-headed cadaver that conducted war & commerce equally badly”—a sentiment matched by the opprobrium towards its British counterpart articulated by Adam Smith in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations. Companies made poor sovereigns, and states had to take responsibility, one way or another, for what their company-states had wrought.

One solution was to put the company under an elaborate regulatory framework, and in the decades after the Seven Years’ War, this is exactly what happened with the British East India Company, which progressively became a centralized state bureaucracy of its own, to the chagrin of its capitalist investors.By contrast, the French government—both under the Bourbon monarchy and during the early years of the Revolution—pursued a deregulation of their new company.  As the cost of empire in South Asia led French officials to scale back their military presence, they envisioned an informal empire for France instead, where a “purely commercial” company would maintain trading relationships with both Britain and key Indian states, like the kingdom of Mysore.

This vision of informal, commercial power progressively led French company shareholders to fight for their own rights as investors and to demand even greater independence from the state. Their corporate activism unfolded amid some of the greatest economic and political turmoil in French history, with the coming of the French Revolution—and yet, offered a decidedly alluring alternative to the rigid, parliamentary framework being imposed on the reluctant shareholders of their British counterpart. The reimagined French East India Company, though short-lived, offered a model of what a private company free from the regulations of royal or parliamentary charters might look like. Despite what we think we know about the British East India Company and the making of modern capitalism, there was money to be made in Paris, too. 

Sign in via your institution and start reading Company Politics on Oxford Academic today.

Featured image: “Hindoustan” by Pierre-Antoine Mongin (1807), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

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Advancing open access in the UK

Advancing open access in the UK

Oxford University Press and Jisc, the education and research not-for-profit, have held a successful and productive Read & Publish (R&P) agreement since 2021. The agreement provides UK universities access to OUP’s prestigious journal collection and allows researchers to publish their research open access (OA) in OUP’s journals.

By publishing OA, researchers can achieve greater visibility and impact for their research findings and be part of a movement seeking to improve scholarly communication, increase trust in research literature, and accelerate progress towards new outcomes.

R&P agreements between academic institutions and publishers, sometimes known as Transformative Agreements, are an important facilitator in the transition to a more open research cycle. OUP’s R&P agreements provide the academic community with transparent, flexible, and inclusive options for OA publishing. Our agreements cover more than 900 institutions in different markets across the world.

This blog post showcases a selection of the achievements of UK researchers who have published their work OA in an OUP journal via our agreement with Jisc.

Showcasing the achievements of UK researchersx300

The number of open access articles published by UK researchers in our agreement with Jisc was 300 x higher in 2022 compared to 2020. Across our global publishing today, 45% of the research articles we have published are OA (as of July 2023).

%↑

The biggest increase in OA publishing since the deal began was achieved by researchers in the life sciences, followed by medicine, and the social sciences. Our R&P agreements are inclusive of all research disciplines and provide opportunities for researchers who don’t have access to specific OA funding or those working in fields that haven’t previously been able to realise the benefits of OA publishing.

8.8 million downloads

Open access articles published in OUP journals get 100% more downloads than non-OA articles. For researchers in the UK who published an article through the Jisc agreement in 2021 and 2022, this means 8,854,419 views of their work.

Our most-read articles include:

Victoria E Kettle and others, “Cross-sectional associations between domain-specific sitting time and other lifestyle health behaviours: the Stormont study”, Journal of Public Health David Hope, Julian Limberg, “The economic consequences of major tax cuts for the rich”, Socio-Economic ReviewMadeleine Tremblett and others, “What advice do general practitioners give to people living with obesity to lose weight? A qualitative content analysis of recorded interactions”, Family PracticeAlberto Giubilini and others, ”The ‘Ethical’ COVID-19 Vaccine is the One that Preserves Lives: Religious and Moral Beliefs on the COVID-19 Vaccine”, Public Health EthicsGemma C Sharp and others, “The COVID-19 pandemic and the menstrual cycle: research gaps and opportunities”, International Journal of Epidemiology Spotlight on the most-read article: Victoria Kettle et al. in Journal of Public Health Background

Kettle et al report a dearth of literature on how different domains of sitting time relate to other health behaviours. Their study aimed to explore these associations in a sample of office workers.

Methods

7170 civil servants completed were surveyed about their time spent sitting, on both workdays and non-workdays, in 5 different domains (travel, work, TV, computer-use, leisure-time), as well as other health behaviours including physical activity, fruit and vegetable intake, alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking. 

Results & Conclusion

Those who spent 7 hours sitting at work and a further 2 hours sitting to watch TV were twice as likely to report 3 or more unhealthy behaviours. People who spent 3 or more hours sitting to watch TV on a non-workday were nearly 3 times as likely to partake in unhealthy behaviours. 

Kettle and team conclude that health interventions need to focus on work settings and TV viewing behaviours, and suggest that public health policy should consider sitting time as an important health behaviour.

Read the full article on Oxford Academic

20,000 citations

OUP’s open access articles have the second highest mean lifetime citation rate of all major academic publishers, demonstrating the quality and impact of our publishing (source: Dimensions). Open access articles by authors at Jisc institutions published in 2021 and 2022 have achieved 19,827 citations of their work, as of July 2023.

The top cited articles include:

COVIDSurg Collaborative, GlobalSurg Collaborative, “SARS-CoV-2 vaccination modelling for safe surgery to save lives: data from an international prospective cohort study”, British Journal of SurgeryEugene Vasiliev, Holger Baumgardt, “Gaia EDR3 view on galactic globular clusters”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical SocietyIsabella A T M Ferreira and others, “SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617 Mutations L452R and E484Q Are Not Synergistic for Antibody Evasion”, The Journal of Infectious DiseasesGeriatric Medicine Research Collaborative and others, “Age and frailty are independently associated with increased COVID-19 mortality and increased care needs in survivors: results of an international multi-centre study”, Age and AgeingMandy O J Grootaert, Martin R Bennett, “Vascular smooth muscle cells in atherosclerosis: time for a re-assessment”, Cardiovascular Research

Unsurprisingly the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is clear in our top read and top cited publications. This demonstrates both the need for reliable and trustworthy peer-reviewed research during a global crisis as well as the value of scholarly literature for helping society progress towards more positive health outcomes for people across the globe.

Spotlight on the Geriatric Medicine Research Collaborative’s article in Age and Ageing Background

Increased mortality in older adults was demonstrated early on in the pandemic, but the effect of frailty was less clear.

Study Methods

This multi-centre cohort study involved patients aged 18 years and older hospitalised with COVID-19. The team used Cox regression analysis to assess the impact of age, frailty, and delirium on the risk of inpatient mortality, adjusting for sex, illness severity, inflammation, and co-morbidities. 

Results & Conclusion

Data from 5,711 patients from 55 hospitals in 12 countries were included. The risk of death increased independently with increasing age, frailty, inflammation, renal disease, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, but not delirium. Age, frailty, delirium, dementia, and mental health diagnoses were all associated with increased risk of higher care needs on discharge.

Read the full article on Oxford Academic

Featured image by Nickbeer, via Canva

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How to succeed as a newly qualified doctor

How to succeed as a newly qualified doctor

Becoming a doctor requires years of study and clinical placements, so what happens when a newly qualified doctor finally starts their first job? How can they prepare? What do they really need to know?  What might be their best experience? In this blog post, two doctors present essential advice on how to make the most of being a newly qualified doctor.

David Fisher and Liora Wittner are the authors of Oxford Clinical Guidelines: Newly Qualified Doctor. David Fisher worked as an FY1 doctor in Hinchingbrooke hospital, Huntingdon in 2015 and Liora Wittner worked as an FY1 doctor at Lister hospital, Stevenage in 2017.

What can I do to prepare for my first rotation?

David: Personally, after cramming for medical finals I arrived at my first FY1 post (part respiratory and part ITU) feeling as though the knowledge I crammed for finals had leaked out of my ears until there was nothing left! If you are like me, I would recommend reading up on the most common diagnoses that you will be experiencing on your first rotation. I am not suggesting that you become an expert in the specialty because nobody is expecting a new consultant to walk through the door on your first day, but enough that you will understand the plans that you are writing.

In terms of on-call shifts, I would similarly refresh your knowledge of managing key emergencies that you might experience on on-call shifts. If you start feeling sweaty and have palpitations as you imagine yourself responding to an emergency, remember that you will not be alone and help will be at hand. By the time you have assessed an unwell patient someone else will probably have arrived to help!

“Being a newly qualified doctor involves a lot of learning on the job, and that’s OK.”

Liora: I think no matter how well you’ve done in your exams, or how much you’ve practiced your clinical skills, or how much reading you’ve done, you will never go in feeling prepared enough! So first of all, accept that you won’t feel ready no matter what. But in reality, you are much more ready than you think! Being newly qualified involves a lot of learning on the job, and that’s OK. No one is expecting you to come in knowing everything, just to be ready to learn. If you can, try to chat to FY2s who did the job last year, it’s a great opportunity to get insider tips.

What can I do if I get a shock or have a bad experience?

David: There is no denying that the job is tough. At its most basic, medicine is a battle between health and disease and a bad experience may occur when disease prevails earlier than we expected. There are of course other bad experiences: mistakes, difficult inter-personal team relationships, and the sheer bodily demand from working long and sometimes antisocial hours are all hard to negotiate. It is important to talk through bad experiences with colleagues and other people who form your emotional support network, whether that is family or friends. Everyone experiences bad experiences sometimes and in medicine it is practically unavoidable. It is important to keep things in perspective and to make sure that you have a way of unwinding from the stresses of the job. Whether that involves exercise, food, socialising, or any other hobby, make time for it because these things will help you to process bad experiences and even be strengthened by them.

“It is important to talk through bad experience with colleagues and people in your emotional support network.”

Liora: Talk to someone. Whether that’s your direct supervisor, your FY1 peers or other doctors on the team, make sure you get a chance to debrief with someone you trust. Chances are one of them will have experienced something similar before and will have some good advice. Remember that you’re not alone. Of course, you can also talk to family and non-medic friends (patient confidentiality permitting!)—sometimes it’s helpful to have an outside perspective. And try to take the time outside of work to relax and refresh yourself, with some great TV, good food, or whatever works for you.

What was your best experience in your first year as a newly qualified doctor?

David: It’s hard to pinpoint my best experience in my first year of working. It felt like living in a whirlwind as there was so much to learn but I couldn’t believe how much more competent I felt by the end of the year. I clearly remember all of the small achievements (which didn’t feel small at the time) such as putting a cannula in independently on the first attempt. At the start of the year I had so many questions and frequently bleeped the registrar during on-call shifts even for relatively minor things, but at the start of the year nothing felt minor. By the end of the year I started to stand on my own feet and I needed less support than I did and that felt great because I felt more useful. I also enjoyed the team mentality that all the FY1s had; we were all in it together, whether we were struggling or celebrating, we grew together and forged friendships.

“As an FY1 who is always on the ward, you have an amazing opportunity to build relationships with patients.”

Liora: Feeling that I had gained the trust of a patient. Unfortunately, some patients spend much longer than they might have hoped in hospital, but as an FY1 who is always on the ward, you often represent continuity of care for the patient. You might be the doctor that they see the most over a period of weeks or months. This means that you have an amazing opportunity to build relationships with the longer-stay patients, to really get to know them and their families. Having the chance to really engage with the patient and gain their trust is a great feeling, and then seeing them finally being happily discharged home is incredibly satisfying.

What do I do if I make a mistake?

David: Everyone makes mistakes and anyone who denies ever making a mistake in medicine is probably lying. Mistakes range from the most minor with no adverse effects to the most serious, which in medicine can result in patient harm. Debrief and identify the contributing factors to the mistake: which of those factors were unavoidable and which can be modified in the future? Mistakes happen, and the question is, “how will you respond?” A positive response is one where lessons are learned and most crucially, when subsequently placed in an almost identical situation, the outcome is different. It is natural to feel low after making a mistake, it shows you care. At the same time, do not eat yourself up but rather pick yourself up and move forward and become a better doctor because of it.

Liora: Don’t stress! Everyone makes mistakes. Things like prescription errors are very common and often picked up by the nurses or ward pharmacist so that you can correct them. Make sure you learn from it for next time. If it’s a bigger mistake, make sure that you have the support of your supervisor to help you fix and apologise for it.

“You are part of a team and all of your seniors are there to support you.”

What would you have told yourself as a new FY1 on your first day?

David: That feeling of being completely overwhelmed will pass and after one year you will feel much more competent. To help along the way, bring a pillow and blanket for your on-calls. You may not use them much but the downtime that you have will be more comfortable.

When you get given a bleep, work out how to check the volume and if it is set to “obnoxiously loud” turn it down because nobody wants a doctor in the middle of night who is experiencing chest pain from being awoken by a loud bleep. At the same time, don’t turn the volume down so much that you don’t hear it; nobody wants a doctor in the middle of the night who doesn’t turn up because they slept through the bleep.

Liora: Don’t panic! You have worked hard to get where you are and you deserve to be there. You are there as part of a team and all of your seniors are there to support you. And most importantly, make a note of every door and cupboard code you get given—you’ll be grateful for it when you suddenly find yourself locked out of a ward or looking for equipment in the middle of the night!

Featured image via Pixabay, public domain

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Translating Proust again

Translating Proust again

There is no ideal, ultimate translation of a given original. Classic texts in particular, from Homer onwards, are susceptible of multiple readings and retranslations over time. Retranslation of classic works, and the ability to compare different versions of a given text, afford an opportunity to celebrate not only the expressive capacities of the English language and the creativity of the translator’s art, but also the inexhaustible richness of the translated text.   

For half a century, the translation of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu by Scott Moncrieff, published between 1922 and 1932, was the only one available to English-speaking readers unable to read Proust in the original French. This translation was monumental in its scale and in many ways admirable in its realization. Moncrieff had a fine ear for the cadences of Proust’s prose, and a considerable talent for elegant phrasing. But his language dated over time, especially in dialogue, and from the beginning he was prone to tamper with the text, through embellishment or the heightening of language. The reservation most commonly voiced about his translation, indeed, is that it changed Proust’s tone. He tended to make Proust sound precious and flowery, whereas Proust’s style is not in the least affected or ornate. His prose is precise, rigorous, exact. Grand rhythm and maxim-like concentration often work together. Proust’s sentences, though elaborately constructed, have a beautiful balance, a musicality that becomes particularly apparent when the text is read aloud. 

Terence Kilmartin, in his 1981 revision of Moncrieff, made numerous small changes, making his predecessor’s prose a little plainer, though his edition (itself revised by D.J. Enright in 1992) remains essentially Moncrieff’s. As John Sturrock observed, Moncrieff’s choice of title, the Shakespearean Remembrance of Things Past, hardly reflects the plainness (or the thematic implications) of A la recherche du temps perdu. The choice is symptomatic, Sturrock noted, of “the unhappy way in which Scott Moncrieff contrived to play down the stringent intelligence of his author by conveying it in an English prose that is constantly looking to prettify. It’s as if the translator had been taken aback by how acrid and how ruthless Proust can be in his exposure of the deep falsities of the inhabitants of the Parisian beau monde, and was determined to muffle its cruelty by the gentility of his English.”

New translations of classic authors are produced to some extent in the shadow of their predecessors, of which they offer, implicitly or not, a kind of critique. This is very much the case with Lydia Davis, who translated the first volume of the novel, Du côté de chez Swann (as The Way by Swann’s), for the 2002 Penguin edition of the Recherche. Her translation is marked by a determination to stay close to Proust’s original in every way, including the retention of the precise order of elements in a sentence. In stark contrast to Davis is James Grieve’s 1982 translation (republished in 2023 by New York Review Books). This translation is very free. Grieve is more than ready to reshape the Proustian sentence, and to use colloquialisms, in pursuit of what he called “real English.”  

“New translations of classic authors are produced to some extent in the shadow of their predecessors, of which they offer, implicitly or not, a kind of critique.”

I think of translation as an art of imitation: a quest to reproduce a text’s “voice.” It is a kind of performance art, combining close reading and creative (re)writing. This involves a multiplicity of exact choices concerning rhythm, register, sound, syntax, tone, texture: all those things that make up style and reflect the marriage between style and meaning. Proust’s style is largely identified with his famous long sentences, with, in Richard Howard’s words, their “coiling elaboration.” As they uncoil, the sentences express the rhythms of a sensibility, the directions and indirections of desire, the conflicts and convolutions of a mind that forms the framework—indeed the subject-matter—of the narrative as it unfolds, via many detours and with a dynamic backward- and forward-looking movement, from childhood beginnings to mature adulthood. The narrative builds multiple perspectives into a symphonic structure, promoting a dramatic narration as the narrator comes slowly to understand the significance of his past life. The Proustian sentence reflects the narrator’s exploration of his experience, presenting things as he sees them and reflects upon them. It is crucial to maintain the overall integrity of Proust’s syntax, in order to maintain the rhythms of the narrator’s representation of his experience.   

Since Moncrieff’s day, literary translation has become a much more self-conscious practice, while recent years have seen the rise of the academic discipline of translation studies. Some academics champion a “foreignizing” approach to translation. This denotes, in its milder form, a determination to stay as close as possible to the original, and, in its most zealous form, a kind of interventionism that heightens one’s awareness of the foreign. The latter approach implies the production of a consciously defamiliarized English by the retention of syntactical or grammatical conventions from the source language: to make the translation “feel French” (or German, etc.) and remind readers that they are reading a translation. Proponents of this approach feel it shows respect for the other and has the merit of sensitizing readers to diversity among cultures. There is of course a foreignness inherent in the text, both for linguistic reasons and because different languages reflect different social and cultural worlds. Who would not wish to respect foreignness in the latter sense—for instance, by keeping culturally specific words and phrases in the original? But foreignize stylistically? Proust sounded strange in French, to his French audience, because of the particularity of his voice, a strikingly original new voice given shape in his native language. It is a verbal strangeness—a stylistic otherness—the translator must aim to reproduce so that the Anglophone reader can experience something equivalent to the experience of the native French reader. But this is not the same as trying to make the translation sound French per se. Successful translation of Proust is achieved (unsurprisingly, one might feel) by making him sound like Proust—by giving him an English voice, a voice that conveys his vision, his sensibility, his unique qualities as a writer. Moreover, as I hope my translation shows, Proust in English can be idiosyncratic while retaining an idiomatic quality. My goal has been to recreate Proust’s voice in such a way that the translation creates the illusion that the reader is reading not a translation but the original.   

Featured image: “Coquelicots (La promenade)” by Claude Monet via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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Etymology as guesswork, being also a study in the history of the word guess

Etymology as guesswork, being also a study in the history of the word guess

It might be a good idea to produce a series of blog posts, demonstrating some non-trivial situations in etymology. There are words whose origin is almost obvious, but we’ll never be sure whether we have discovered it. Take doozy, for example. It is the vowel that provides the fun (an expected result of ooglification). Yet the idea that doozy is a facetious variant of daisy remains a nice fantasy. Also, one can think of words of a known (now known!) but well-hidden origin (a classic example is pedigree). In my opinion, threshold belongs here too (see the post for 11 February 2015, on it), along with slang and conundrum. Conundrum was deciphered long ago, but few sources are aware of this fact. Slang has been treated less harshly by authoritative works. Isn’t that drama?

Enter henchman.
Photo via Pxfuel, public domain

Enter henchman, a word of “disputed origin.” Frank Chance, one of the most active etymologists of the nineteenth century, kept writing about it for years. He tried to make his hypothesis accepted and failed, though perhaps he was close to the truth. His battle with a host of mighty opponents is a thriller, much more absorbing than the books that stay for weeks on bestseller lists. Next to henchmen, we find a crowd of dwarfs (or dwarves, if you prefer). The greatest giants of Germanic linguistics failed to decipher the etymology of the word dwarf. Friedrich Kluge almost guessed the truth but later changed his mind. While looking through the consecutive editions of his etymological dictionary, I stumbled upon his early hypothesis and rejoiced: this is the answer! I exhumed it from a huge common grave by chance. Though I am not aware of universal jubilation following upon my discovery, I believe such stories are true thrillers.

Or take Harlequin. Two scholars discovered its etymology at the same time. One of them worked for years investigating the problem, and when he brought out his book, he discovered that he had been anticipated. What a drama! A less spectacular example is the adverb yet. Dictionaries say next to nothing about its etymology, and the public could not care less about its origin. And yet!The literature on it is huge. Moreover, the riddle was solved long ago. Once again, the answer is hidden in an obscure source. A book titled Tantalizing Etymologies may become a great commercial success, especially because people tend to misuse the word tantalizing (as in: “Visit our restaurant with its tantalizing menu,” which suggests that if you come there, you will be starved to death).

The history of the word guessTry our tantalizing menu.
Photo by Antoni Shkraba via Pexels, public domain

A good deal of our scholarship is guesswork, and today’s story deals with the word guess. It is amazing how much the oldest scholars, not having the benefit of our historical grammars and dictionaries, guessed correctly in this case, because we too remain partly stalled at the end of the search. Guess was first recorded in the fourteenth century, which suggests that it is a Middle English verb without Old English antecedents, or that (unless it was a native neologism) we are dealing with a borrowing. No similar word exists in any Romance language, but Germanic provides a series of obvious cognates. Dutch, for example, has gissen, and Danish has gisse, from gitse. The Old Icelandic verb sounded geta and meant, among many other things, “to guess.” The choices are few: English guess is almost certainly a loan from Dutch or Scandinavian, and its final –ss goes back to –ts. Scandinavian appears to be the ultimate source. Walter W. Skeat reconstructed the initial meaning of guess as “to try to get” or “to be ready to get.”

Seventeenth-century etymologists and even those who worked much later tended to derive English words from Hebrew, Greek, or Latin. It is much to their credit that as regards guess, almost none of them wandered in those quarters even four hundred years ago. The only devious way sometimes took them to German gießen “to pour” (its earlier form had t in the middle, as in Gothic giutan). This verb occupies a place of honor in Germanic etymology, because the word god has often been derived from it (the origin of god remains a puzzle: numerous clever suggestions, but no solution). John Minsheu, the author of the first etymological dictionary of English (1617), must also have thought that guess carries religious connotations, because he cited Hebrew kessem “a divination” (however, one never knows whether he meant an etymon or a synonym). Two more researchers had similar thoughts and cited Irish geas “a charm.” Noah Webster connected guess with an English cognate of giutan (see it above) and believed that guess could be deciphered as “to cast (throw) together circumstances.”

A tragedy: twice deciphered, and both times correctly.
Image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay, public domain

All those stillborn etymologies are mildly interesting only to a historian of English linguistics. Fortunately, a convincing solution has been found—indeed, not a complete solution but its major and most important part. The light comes from Scandinavia, and this fact was clear to James A. H. Murray, the chief editor of the OED. Old Danish gitse and Icelandic gizka (old spelling: z = ts), both of which mean “to guess,” make it clear that the English verb has the root get and some addition (suffix), of which the second s is the only modern remnant. Originally, “to guess” must have meant “to get what you are looking for.” The oldest form, quite appropriately, remains a matter of speculation (something like getisson or getsjan?). Icelandic gizka ~ giska looks like a cognate of get, followed by the reflexive suffix –sk (that is, guess emerges as meaning “to get something for oneself,” but this a later transformation). In our gallery of tantalizing etymologies, guess will be known as a word of an almost obvious but partly hidden origin.

In the past, the verb to guess meant simply “to suppose; to believe,” “to get it.” This sense is extremely common in American English: “Do you know their new address?” “I guess so.” This is the way they still spoke in the days of Sheridan. By contrast, to guess a riddle seems to be dead: it has been supplanted by solve a riddle. As far as the spelling is concerned, English words beginning with gi– and ge– are a nightmare: compare get and gesture, gift and gibbet. Hence the spelling guess, going back to the sixteenth century.

Guess, as we have seen, has nothing to do with divination, but, surprisingly, the verb returns us to the history of religion. The great Scandinavian god Óðinn (pronounced as Othin, with th as in the) had countless names. Why he needed so many of them is anybody’s guess, but one of them was Gizzur, that is, Gitsur. He did like to ask insoluble riddles, but whether such is the origin of this name remains a mystery. In any case, it does not supply additional proof to the old idea that the word guess has something to do with divination. And indeed, it has none.

Is all etymology guesswork? No! But intelligent guessing plays an important role in it, because etymology is a study in reconstruction, and reconstruction is all about hypotheses and conjectures.  

Featured image: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney Productions 1937, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

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Antonina: a sixth-century military wife

Antonina: a sixth-century military wife

In our modern world, the spouses of major political figures may sometimes themselves spend quite a bit of time in the limelight, and be significant assets to the careers of their politician partners. In the sixth century, the wife of the most famous and successful Roman general of the day became nearly as powerful and famous as he was. Belisarius was the preferred general of Emperor Justinian (r. 527-565), and served his emperor by leading his armies to defeat the Persians, and to recover North Africa from the Vandals and Italy from the Ostrogoths. Antonina, his wife, was more than a smiling face dragged along for the ride. She was a serious political operative in her own right, and her partnership with Belisarius enabled both of them to reach astounding heights of power in the middle of the century.

Belisarius and Antonina worked together to secure most of their greatest achievements. Antonina was famous in her own day for accompanying Belisarius on his military campaigns. The historian Procopius of Caesarea exclaimed, “she made a point of accompanying him to the ends of the earth!” Antonina traveled with Belisarius to Italy in 535 and was at his side when the general and his army triumphantly (and peacefully) entered Rome on 9 December 536. It had been 60 years since the Eternal City was ruled by a Roman Emperor. 

“Antonina was a serious political operative in her own right and, with Belisarius, reached astounding heights of power.”

The restoration of Roman authority did not come without some growing pains, however. Within a few months, Belisarius and Antonina began to suspect that Pope Silverius, resident within the city, secretly favored the recently departed Ostrogoths. This was not an unreasonable suspicion, as Silverius owed his papacy to an irregular appointment by the Ostrogothic King Theodahad. So, late in March 537, Antonina and Belisarius together schemed to depose the pope and replace him with someone more loyal to the Roman cause. The anonymously authored Liber Pontificalis provides a vivid depiction of the deposition, suggesting that the couple received the pope in audience while Antonina was reclining on a couch and Belisarius was sitting at her feet. It was Antonina who then spoke, saying, “Tell us, lord Pope Silverius, what have we done to you and the Romans to make you want to betray us into the hands of the Goths?” The pope was then stripped of his vestments and hurried out of the room. A short time later, Belisarius and Antonina appointed Vigilius to be pope.

This is a remarkable story that shows the power of Belisarius and Antonina when they worked together. More than this, the deposition of a pope by these two figures is essentially unprecedented. Before this moment, the last time a pope had been deposed and replaced was in 355, when Emperor Constantius II (r. 337-361) deposed Pope Liberius. A pope would not be deposed again until Emperor Constans II (r. 641-668) deposed Pope Martin I in 654. The deposition of a pope was perhaps a once-in-a-century event, and the other successful depositions were made possible only via the extraordinary pressure of the emperor. That Belisarius and Antonina could together depose Silverius, seemingly without much resistance, speaks to their authority and power.

Beyond the restoration of Rome and deposition of Pope Silverius, Antonina was with Belisarius for most of his other signature victories. In 533, Belisarius led a Roman army from Constantinople to North Africa. The Romans romped through what is today Tunisia, defeating the Vandal army twice and securing control of the entire Vandal kingdom and its capital, the ancient city of Carthage. Antonina traveled with Belisarius and his army every step of the way. In 540, Belisarius and the Roman army victoriously entered Ravenna, the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, after accepting the submission of the Ostrogothic King Vittigis. Antonina was right there as well.

“It is just as significant that Antonina was not with Belisarius for his greatest failures.”

While Antonina was present for most of Belisarius’ greatest victories, it is perhaps just as significant that she seems not to have been with him for his greatest failures. On 19 April 531, Belisarius suffered a serious setback to his military career by losing to the Persians at the Battle of Callinicum. According to Procopius, the officers of the Roman army had pressured the general into offering battle when he thought it was not propitious. Antonina was not present with Belisarius for this campaign or battle, and one wonders whether she might have steeled him to resist the pressure from his subordinates. Similarly, in Summer 542, Belisarius made a serious political faux pas by speculating on who should take the throne next if Justinian, at that time lying sick with the plague, should die. The report of Belisarius’ musing was forwarded to the emperor, who recalled and disgraced his general. Once again, it seems that Antonina was not present at the time. With her political acumen, she might have helped Belisarius to manage the rumor mill and avoid this precipitous fall from favor.

Antonina was the wife of a famous Roman general but stopping the description of her with that sells her short. She was a seasoned traveler and a wily political operative in her own right. It was the partnership of Antonina and Belisarius and their shared experiences that helped to propel them to the heights of success and power in the sixth century.

Featured image: Basilica of San Vitale, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Making psychology a reflexive human science

Making psychology a reflexive human science

As the thousand flowers of psychological research bloom in the fields of popular understanding, we ought to reflect upon the nature of the explanations our field proffers. 

The model of the rational computable subject leaves out much that makes us human. For one it does not adequately convey the relation between culture and biology. It is time we admit the insufficiency of the positivist project; we should not tie our hopes of explanation too tightly to the experimental paradigms we develop to operationalize prevalent metaphors of mind (Koch, 1999; Danziger, 2008). 

Joseph Henrich’s reflections on the cultural context of empirical research further suggest that the majority of our findings reflect a very small WEIRD sample of the human population. Lack of context obscures the significance and meaning of research results. Empirical psychology ought to foreground historical and cultural context so that in addition to deriving descriptive principles of mechanism, psychologists can discursively approach the phenomena as part of our broader cultural projects. 

Drawing from historical and anthropological forms of analysis will allow psychology to better encapsulate how the mind emerges from and reflects back onto its particular cultural context. 

History and context can expand empirical psychology

An interdisciplinary psychology must posit explanation at multiple levels, from description of the mechanics of receptor function to the discursive space of identity. Mixing these distinct layers of explanation would allow the mind sciences to express the phenomenological reality of the contextual setting of individual minds. Anthropology is designed to secure such stories and will help us describe what epistemic use psychology fulfills in a given locale. For example, psychology is used in the West to assess pathology and provide therapeutic interventions for mental suffering. 

“It is time we admit the insufficiency of the positivist project.”

If tradition is the self-encounter of the human mind, horizon is the vantage point of knowing the relative significance of a finite position. History then allows for a broader understanding of the reflexive links between knowledge and practice. As Gadamer (2004) surmised, we understand the horizon of the questions we ask by regaining concepts from the past in a way that includes our own comprehension of them. Deployment of psychology in concordance with an historical anthropology enriches our understanding of the symbolic sphere we inhabit. According to Roger Smith (2019: 17), “Historical knowledge contributes narrative, and the understanding of narrative is fundamental to the notion of being human; human self-knowledge and action are mutually constitutive, or, belief changes a person and what a person does changes belief.” 

We also know from history that many causes are best characterized as chaotic or through complexity theory due uncertainty, the interdependency of variables, and the contingent nature of agency (Gaddis, 2002). The historical method of developing narratives seems to be crucial to our imaginative appraisals of truth and knowledge and should be considered in its own regard as a shaping influence upon the nature of belief and explanation in psychology. Observation, imaginative sense-making, and perspective-taking are themselves sources of knowledge rather than artifacts in the scientific process (Osbeck, 2019).

Models should allow for variability, design limitations, and failure rates. Heuristics should be understood as pragmatic applications that we substitute for deductive knowledge (Wimsatt, 1976). Our theories should be so robust and valid that failure of replication does not threaten the foundation of the field. To counteract these crises, psychologists can develop familiarity with levels of analysis above and below the brain and the person. In this way, we can develop generative models which are open to inter-field integration. 

“Making psychology a more reflexive human science would bestow a sense of scope and context.”

It is time empirical psychology adds historical and anthropological methodology so that in addition to descriptive principles of mechanism and verificationism a new generation of psychologists will approach the mind with a view to more discursive, contextualized, and empathetic explanation. Some community psychology is already moving in this direction, but we also need laboratory and theoretical research to adopt this approach. Making psychology a more reflexive human science would bestow a sense of scope and context and allow for more effective communication with humanists and natural scientists. 

Exciting frontier work that integrates types of explanation are being undertaken in the study of affect, pain management, and the gut-brain axis. Such work expands and investigates the embeddedness and multilevel integration of mind and body. Focusing on such phenomena has the potential to unify subjective/mental and objective/material aspects of mind because it concerns the precise relations between bodily mechanisms and enculturated conscious experience. Using anthropology, we can see healing as the pragmatic goal of such work in the historical context of a shift from dualism to monism. Through a more thorough understanding of our mythological frames, we can better understand the motivations of the unique form of shared understanding that is psychological explanation.

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