Oxford University Press's Blog, page 843

How we all kill whales

By Michael Moore

My first job after veterinary school in 1983 was for the International Whaling Commission examining the efficacy of explosive harpoons for killing fin whales on an Icelandic whaling vessel. Later, I encountered a very different way of killing whales. A North Atlantic right whale was first sighted entangled in fishing gear in May of 1999. Five months later it was dead off Cape May, New Jersey. The entangling rope and gillnet, bound around both armpits, and tightly stretched over its back, had dissected off the blubber leaving a massive wound (below) while it was still alive.

North Atlantic right whale 5 months after first seen entangled in 1999. The wound in the blubber coat dissected off by the rope and gillnet stretched over the dorsum between the two flippers is clearly visible. The skin has been lost through decomposition exposing white blubber. Photo courtesy Lisa Conger, New England Aquarium.

These two very contrasting scenarios of how humans kill whales have preoccupied me ever since. The whalers were intent on killing for profit, and did so with remarkable efficiency. My concerns centred on whether the hunt was sustainable. In contrast, the entangled animal was killed without intent, but I was extremely concerned about the animal’s welfare while it was taking five months to die. Some anti-whaling advocates criticise commercial whaling, while ignoring the unintentional killing of whales in many countries. The idea that individuals should judge another nation’s motivations and methods of killing whales, struck and strikes me as being far from clear ethically.

There are a number of conservation and welfare factors at work in these two ways that man kills whales today, whether by intent or not. Here I focus primarily on commercial whaling and entanglement, but there are other topics that could be included, such as scientific and aboriginal whaling, euthanasia of living stranded whales, lethal and sublethal vessel strikes, effects of ocean noise and contaminants on whales, and premature death of larger odontocetes in captive display. ‘Whaling’ is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the action, practice, or business of catching whales”. Whenever fixed fishing gear is set in areas that are known to be frequented by large whales, there is a probability (that is gear and species dependent) that whales will be captured by the gear and that these encounters will affect the whale’s welfare and sometimes be lethal. Many of these animals if large enough to break out are subsequently ‘released’ as they swim off with the entangling gear, however, as with other catch and release fisheries and commercial fishery bycatch release, animals often die. Likewise, some whales species are caught on the bulbous bows of large ships and brought to port dead.

Whaling by Design

Killing whales with harpoons and associated tools has been commercially profitable for at least 1000 years, since King Sancho (the Wise) of Navarre levied a tax on baleen plates in 1150. Open boat whaling evolved from shore based whaling to European and American whaling from larger mother vessels offshore. These fisheries relied primarily on handheld harpoons, using drag to tire a whale to enable delivery of lances to vital organs in the chest. The explosive harpoon and faster vessels later enabled wholesale, sequential devastation of balaenopterid and sperm whale stocks around the world. Most of the concern at that time was with loss of stocks, many of which have yet to recover significantly. It was only in recent decades that the nature of the death caused by an explosive harpoon became a central theme of some anti-whaling protests. The message was mixed: hunting whales is cruel; there are not enough of them. Explosive harpoons can be comparable to other hunting methods. The bigger issues are: sufficiency of animals to sustain a given mortality, not knowing population sizes at all well; and our ongoing abject failure to manage whale stocks, indeed any high seas fishery, sustainably. We should not be killing whales by design.

Whaling by default

Humans also kill whales unintentionally: vessel strike, fishery bycatch, marine debris, food chain effects, and oil and chemical spills. Pinniped and cetacean mortalities from acute fishing gear bycatch entanglement have been estimated to be hundreds of thousands of individuals per year. Large whales are often powerful enough to break free from the anchored fishing gear and swim off, with residual gear around their appendages. This gear adds substantial drag, depleting energy reserves, and ultimately the animal dies. Such mortalities are certainly underestimated, as some large whale species are negatively buoyant and sink on death especially if they are lipid depleted. On the eastern North American Continental shelf death by entanglement in fishing gear is on aggregate the most common diagnosed cause of death among 323 individuals from eight large whale species: 18% entangled, 10% vessel struck, 14% non-human related, and 57% undiagnosed in a sample of 323 animals. In contrast to commercial and aboriginal whaling, and vessel strike, the time to death for whales that do not drown acutely can be extremely prolonged. Fatally entangled right whales can take an average of six months to die. Entanglement scars also give evidence of persistent sub-lethal fishing gear interactions in North Atlantic right whales. For the period 1980-2009 in a sample of 626 whales, 83% had been entangled at least once, 59% more than once, with 26% acquiring new scars every year, with no obvious trend in terms of incidence. Another way to think about this is that the majority of North Atlantic right whales are repeatedly more restrained than any animal in a zoo. We tend to talk about the ocean as wilderness yet, in this area and others, it is far from that, being the workplace of industries that kill whales by design and default.

Entanglement Solutions

Palliative measures have included removal of entangling fishing gear by trained disentanglement teams (IWC, 2010), with recent international training. However prevention of entanglement is the only lasting solution, given the difficulty of disentanglement. Prevention measures have largely hinged on gear modification, such as sinking ground lines and breakaway links. There needs to be a fundamental shift in terms of fishery management for mitigating whale entanglement not only using tested, practical, safe and effective gear modification, but also by focusing on keeping the gear and the whales separate in time and space. Such a proposal may seem radical and unacceptable from a fishing industry perspective, however it would create Marine Protected Areas that could serve fishery as well as marine mammal conservation agendas.

Michael Moore has a veterinary degree from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)/ Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program in Biological Oceanography. He is the Director of the WHOI Marine Mammal Center and provides veterinary support for management of marine mammal strandings on Cape Cod, MA, USA by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. He is the author of the paper ‘How we all kill whales‘, published in ICES Journal of Marine Science.

The ICES Journal of Marine Science publishes articles, short communications, and critical reviews that contribute to our scientific understanding of marine systems and the impact of human activities. The Journal serves as a foundation for scientific advice across the broad spectrum of management and conservation issues related to the marine environment.

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Who shapes the history of the British Isles?

From politicians to psychiatrists, novelists to biologists, and actors to entrepreneurs, the January 2014 update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography adds a further 219 biographies of men and women who’ve made their mark on British history. When were they born? Where did they start out? To what work did they dedicate their lives? How was this recognized? To get a taste for these notable lives and how they made a mark on the nation, explore the infographic below.

How and where did Alexander McQueen start out in the world of fashion design? Who exactly is the ventriloquist noted above? Visit the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s January update feature page to find out more. You can also download a jpg or pdf of the infographic.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,800 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 190 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @ODNB on Twitter for people in the news.

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                Related StoriesOsagie K. Obasogie speaks with Skip Gates about colorblindness and raceA virtual journey in the footsteps of Zebulon PikeUK National Libraries Day 2014: “Why we love libraries” 

Madness, rationality, and epistemic innocence

By Lisa Bortolotti

Madness and irrationality may seem inextricably related. “You are crazy!” we say, when someone tells us about their risk-taking behaviour or their self-defeating actions. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) describe people with depression, autism, schizophrenia, dementia, and personality disorders as people who infringe norms of rationality. But not all people diagnosed with a mental disorder behave irrationally, and not all people who behave irrationally are diagnosed with a mental disorder.

There is evidence that people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, depression, or autism are, in some contexts, more epistemically rational, that is, more responsive to evidence and more likely to form true beliefs, than people without any psychiatric diagnosis. People make more accurate predictions when they are depressed, because the statistically normal way to make predictions is characterized by excessive optimism. People with autism score higher in social interaction games (such as Prisoner’s Dilemma) and are more logically consistent than control participants when making decisions involving possible financial gain, by not responding to emotional contextual cues in the same way as controls (see Tateno 2013 and De Martino et al. 2008). People with schizophrenia are also less vulnerable to a statistically normal but irrational tendency to gamble when faced with a certain loss (Brown et al. 2013).

It is interesting to consider the possibility that even delusions, a paradigmatic example of irrational beliefs, and a symptom of mental disorders such as schizophrenia and dementia, serve to restore epistemic functionality that was previously compromised. That is, they may temporarily allow an agent to acquire, retain and use appropriately true beliefs of importance to her.

First consider a young man who finds himself in hospital with both his legs paralysed as a result of an accident. He is in a state of despair; his negative emotions are overwhelming (McKay and Dennett 2009) and compromise his capacity to relate to his physical and social environment. Coming to believe that his legs cannot move due to arthritis, as opposed to a permanent paralysis, may help him overcome that moment of despair.

Now consider a woman who is subject to a distressing anomalous experience. Almost everything seems to have a special meaning, the doorbell ringing at 12 o’clock, the radio playing that Elton John song, her son’s teacher wearing a red blouse, but the special meaning of these facts remains mysterious. Mishara and Corlett suggest that the delusion puts an end to an often long period of great anxiety during which the agent is constantly expecting something important to happen. The doorbell ringing, the song, the red blouse are all messages by the secret services, communicating to the woman that her husband is having an affair. Now there is an explanation and the sense of unpredictability and expectation stops. Attention can be deviated from the stimuli previously experienced as salient and distressing. Due to the adoption of a delusional hypothesis, automated processes of learning can resume and the capacity to respond to cues in the environment is enhanced.

Obviously, delusions are not a good thing. The young man with anosognosia overcomes despair by adopting a very implausible belief that is not supported by the evidence available to him. The woman experiencing random events as salient is finding everywhere confirmation for a belief that is completely unjustified. Epistemic faults are so central to our understanding of delusions that they appear prominently in the definition of delusions: for instance, in the DSM-5, delusions are “fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in the light of conflicting evidence”. Believing something false, often absurd, such as the content of a delusion (“I am dead”, “My wife has been replaced by an impostor”, “The queen wants me dead”, “President Obama is secretly in love with me”), can cause internal conflict and create a gap between the agent and the people around her. The agent may be challenged about her delusion at first, then viewed as unreliable and untrustworthy when she does not respond to evidence and argument, and finally laughed at or ignored. The ensuing social isolation then contributes to the rigidity of the delusion: the agent no longer feels like she can talk about her delusion, and receives no further challenges, and the delusion “sticks”.

It seems important to start thinking about the evaluation of “imperfect cognitions” in a way that reflects the standard limitations of human agents and the circumstances in which they find themselves due to anomalous experience, biased reasoning, impaired memory, dysregulated mood or emotions. When no useful interaction can be had with the social and physical environment, a false and irrational belief that helps overcome the crisis remains false and irrational, but I call it epistemically innocent.

Lisa Bortolotti is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry Series Editor. She is author of Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs, has written for The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience, amongst others.

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Osagie K. Obasogie speaks with Skip Gates about colorblindness and race

Osagie K. Obasogie, J.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings with a joint appointment at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. His first book, Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind, was recently published by Stanford University Press and his second book on the past, present, and future of bioethics is under contract with the University of California Press. Professor Obasogie discussed his surprising findings about the relationships between race, sight, and bioethics with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: The subject matter of Blinded by Sight is such a fascinating topic, so I have to start with the obvious question: how and why did you get involved in this field of study?

Osagie K. Obasogie: Innocently enough, this project started back in 2005 while watching the movie Ray, which portrays the life of the legendary musician Ray Charles. While viewing the movie, I became mesmerized by the central role that race played in Mr. Charles’s life, both in terms of his personal identity and the community that he felt connected to. Since race is largely thought to be a visual experience in the sighted community, I was struck by the way in which Mr. Charles’s lack of vision did not seem to diminish his racial sensibilities.

I wanted to learn more about the way race “works” in the blind community. At the time, I assumed that this was a lively conversation across various disciplines, so I began looking at the published literature so that I could learn more about this area of research. Surprisingly, no one had done research on race and blindness. The question simply had not been asked, which speaks to the strength of the assumption that race isn’t all that important to blind people. Given this gap in the literature, I decided to do the research myself.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Your research has revealed some of the ways in which blind white people and blind black people first learn how to “see” race conceptually. What were some of the major differences you found in how these two groups experienced race?

Osagie K. Obasogie: The differences track rather closely to the different way that race is experienced by sighted whites and blacks. For example, both sighted and blind White respondents tend to see race as something that other people have, i.e. race is something that minorities experience while being White is thought to be “raceless” and remains the default norm. On the other hand, sighted and blind minorities tend to have a much deeper personal connection to issues of race.

One thing of interest that came out of the interviews is that several blind White people that I spoke with used their physical disability to analogize to the social disabilities associated with being a racial minority. These respondents would describe experiences in which other people discriminated against them because of their blindness and then assert that these experiences gave them insight into what it is like to be Black or any other minority. It’s interesting how some blind White respondents were able to see connections between their discriminatory experiences and other marginalized groups to create a sense of solidarity in how society can develop stereotypes and treat people unfairly. But it’s also interesting to note that none of the blind respondents of color analogized between race and disability in this manner; they viewed their discriminatory experiences connected to race and disability as being largely distinct. So, this perception that being blind provides insight to what it’s like to be Black may very well be a unique way in which Whiteness plays out in the White blind community.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Not only do you address the way blind people view race, but you also discuss the way sighted people view the blind. Specifically, you mention the tendency to believe that blind people live in a “racial utopia” in which ethnic differences are irrelevant. Were there any experiences that you had with blind people, prior to conducting this research, that you had to reevaluate in light of your findings?

Osagie K. Obasogie: I did not have any contact with the blind community prior to these interviews and didn’t think much about how blind people experience race until seeing the movie Ray. That being said, at some level I probably assumed, like most people, that blind people had a diminished understanding of race and that it could not be as salient to them as it is to sighted people. This research certainly gave me a new appreciation of the extent to which understanding and “seeing” race has very little to do with vision. That is the gist of the book, i.e. the social and institutional practices that we’re constantly engaged in shape the way we look at people and the way that we live our lives—even for people who are blind.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: You have made it clear that the goal of your research is to question the idea of political and legal colorblindness, so prevalent since the election of Barack Obama. Why do you think that this notion has become so idealized in our academic discourse and in the media? Is it a distortion based on ignorance and idealism, or is there perhaps a more concrete agenda to it?

Osagie K. Obasogie: In the abstract, there is something noble about the idea and metaphor of colorblindness. I think we all wish that we lived in a world where race did not matter when it came to life opportunities and life outcomes. However, I also think we all wish that money could grow on trees and that there is a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. That, in short, is the problem with colorblindness: it is entirely divorced from reality. It asks us to substitute how we think the world ought to be for how it is, which obscures the day-to-day struggles that racial discrimination places on people’s lives. This leads colorblindness to function as a form of racial subordination itself; turning a blind eye to race is to ignore the experiences of racial minorities, which in effect maintains status quo racial hierarchies.

While there is certainly an unfortunate political dynamic behind colorblindness that promotes this ideal to maintain racial inequalities, one thing that I touch upon in my book is the way that metaphors such as “our constitution is colorblind” grease the wheels, so to speak, of these politics by making certain social and political ideas seem more persuasive than they ought to be. An increasing amount of social science and neuroscience research is showing how metaphors play upon the cognitive structure of our brains to allow certain political preferences to seem more palatable. For example, colorblindness is premised upon how we think blind people experience race, i.e. that it is irrelevant to them, that they live in a racial utopia, and that the sighted community can mimic this experience through laws and policies that promote a similar inattention to race. On a surface level, this seems appealing. Some of the sighted people that I spoke with as part of the interviews voiced a certain amount of envy of Blind people, as if they were fortunate to not have to deal with race. But, the interviews offered in my book provides examples of how race affects everyone—even blind people—in a manner that debunks the assumptions that we have about race and blindness. Using blind people’s experiences with race to debunk the intuitions embedded in the colorblind metaphor creates an important space to raise deeper question about the politics of colorblindness.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: How has this research, along with your critique of the idea of colorblindness, influenced your forthcoming book, Beyond Bioethics: Towards a New Biopolitics.

Osagie K. Obasogie: Where Blinded By Sight takes a serious look at race in law and public policy, Beyond Bioethics provides a similar critical insight into the fields of medicine and biomedical research. Like law, medicine often works from a series of presumptions that the differences that we see in health outcomes are a function of nature. For example, health disparities research that attempts to understand why racial minorities are often sicker than Whites often seeks biological or genetic reasons for this difference. And, increasingly, new biomedical innovations premised upon natural differences in racial groups are being offered as solutions to resolving health disparities. One of the issues discussed in Beyond Bioethics is the need to move away from interventions that treat health disparities as natural and that take seriously the social determinants (such as racial inequality) of these disparate outcomes. Beyond Bioethics attempts to get us to think about the political nature of how we understand group difference and remedy group disparities, and encourages greater regulatory oversight to ensure that categories of difference (such as race) are used in medicine in ways that attend to these social and political dynamics.

This interview originally appeared on the Oxford African American Studies Center.

Osagie K. Obasogie, J.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings with a joint appointment at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Genetics and Society. Obasogie’s scholarly interests include Constitutional law, bioethics, sociology of law, and reproductive and genetic technologies. His writings have spanned both academic and public audiences, with journal articles in venues such as the Law & Society Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, Stanford Technology Law Review, and the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics along with commentaries in outlets including the New York Times, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and New Scientist. His first book, Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind, was published by Stanford University Press and his second book on the past, present, and future of bioethics is under contract with the University of California Press. Obasogie received his B.A. with distinction from Yale University, his J.D. from Columbia Law School where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley where he was a fellow with the National Science Foundation.

The Oxford African American Studies Center combines the authority of carefully edited reference works with sophisticated technology to create the most comprehensive collection of scholarship available online to focus on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture. The Oxford African American Studies Center is free for Black History Month. Simply use Username: blackhistorymonth and Password: onlineaccess to log in.

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Image courtesy of Osagie K. Obasogie.

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                Related StoriesA journey through 500 years of African American historyPete Seeger: the power of singing to promote social justiceSoldiers’ experiences of World War I in photographs 

Pete Seeger: the power of singing to promote social justice

By Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel

“That song really sticks with you!”

The speaker was the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1957, on his way to a speaking engagement in Kentucky. The song was “We Shall Overcome.” He had heard it the day before from Pete Seeger at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. There Seeger had, a decade before, learned the song — most likely derived from an old gospel song that became a labor union song by the early 1900s.

Thanks mainly to Pete Seeger, who recently died at the age of 94, “We Shall Overcome” eventually “went viral” – long before we had a phrase to describe that phenomenon. The Civil Rights Movement adopted the song as its anthem. And, in 1965, a US President from the Deep South exclaimed before a joint session of Congress on voting legislation: “We shall overcome!”

Folk singer Pete Seeger entertaining at the opening of the Washington labor canteen in 1944. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt pictured in center. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Songs have the power to move people, more than words alone. Teaching people songs – and singing them together – can move people emotionally, socially, and politically. Seeger knew the power of singing to move people to help bring about progressive social change.

For almost seven decades he did just that. He sang – and had people sing along with him – to rally support for labor unions, for the Civil Rights Movement, for ending the Vietnam War, for eliminating nuclear weapons, and for addressing environmental hazards.

Many of the songs that he sang were derived from the Bible, traditional rural American folk music, or the musical culture of other peoples and countries. He used singing to teach, to inspire, and to build community. And he used singing to help build social movements. Asked how he would like to be remembered, he replied: “He made up songs to try and persuade people to do something.” Indeed he did, and very effectively.

Seeger optimistically saw that small actions can contribute to a large social movement. In an interview in 2004 on the radio program “Democracy Now!” with Amy Goodman, he paraphrased a parable from the New Testament: “The sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don’t grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don’t grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousandfold. Who knows where some good little thing that you’ve done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of.”

Pete Seeger in 2008. Photo by Dan Tappan 2008. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Seeger realized that having audiences – often made up of students or young children – join him in singing had the potential to make members of those audiences commit, or affirm commitment, to social causes: “In each of my concerts there are some old songs which you and I have sung together many times before, but which can always stand another singing. Like another sunrise, or another kiss, this also is an act of reaffirmation.”

And finally, Seeger saw singing as a unifying force that can remind us of our shared humanity. “Our songs are, like you and me, the product of a long, long human chain, and even the strangest ones are distantly related to each other, as we all are. Each of us can be proud to be a link in this chain.”

He elaborated on this concept in a recent PBS movie about his life, entitled Pete Seeger: The Power of Song:

“Once upon a time, wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise, and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes, or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.”

Barry S. Levy, M.D., M.P.H., and Victor W. Sidel, M.D., are co-editors of the recently published second edition of Social Injustice and Public Health as well as two editions each of the books War and Public Health and Terrorism and Public Health. They are both past presidents of the American Public Health Association. Dr. Levy is an Adjunct Professor of Public Health at Tufts University School of Medicine. Dr. Sidel is Distinguished University Professor of Social Medicine Emeritus at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein Medical College and an Adjunct Professor of Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College. Read their previous OUPblog articles.

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Why nobody dreams of being a professor

By Arturo Hernandez

By now the reactions to Nicholas Kristoff’s piece at the New York Times are circulating the Internet. There are good arguments in favor and against blaming professors or the public or both. Rather than take one side or the other I thought it would make sense to give a couple of anecdotes that provide insight into this issue.

I am a full professor of psychology at the University of Houston interested in the brain bases of bilingualism. The divide between my interests and the public’s interest became very apparent to me when I sought to publish a book on the bilingual brain. At first, I thought I could become the next Steve Pinker or Dan Gilbert writing to the masses about the intricacies of the bilingual brain to an ever attentive audience. My dreams crashed into reality quite quickly. Agent after agent took the time to read my early proposals, but eventually turned me down. One even made it clear to me that I was “small potatoes” and that most publishers were looking for a Sarah Palin who had a name that would sell books. So I was nothing compared to Sarah Palin, at least in the book-selling world.

Eventually, I found Oxford University Press, which published an academic-trade book that could sell to both the professional and lay audience. The struggle was real as I wrote this book. It was hard to wring the academic out of me. Communicating complex ideas in more palatable ways was a difficult lesson to learn. Having taught undergraduate classes helped me to write better and vice-versa. But at most large recent research universities communicating to undergraduates is not the primary goal. Evaluations of our progress are based to a much greater extent on publications in academically reputable journals and on the research dollars we might obtain to do so. So teaching the public even the one we see on a daily basis can often take a back seat to the many other tasks that we have to complete in order to be successful.

More recently, I was reminded of the complexity of communicating what it means to be a professor to a very different audience. The Televisa Foundation asked me to present at an event at Burbank Middle School which is part of the Houston Independent School District. The foundation has established a new initiative to improve the academic success of English language learners. One of these initiatives is to have Live The Dream events at various schools in which public leaders come out and give motivational speeches to children who come from Spanish-speaking homes. I arrived early one morning on the assigned day. There I met the Mayor Pro-Tem of Houston, Ed Gonzalez, the principal of the school, Rosa E. Hernandez, and Dulce Maria, a Mexican actress and singer.

It is fair to say that Dulce Maria stole the show. The children lined up to take pictures with her and listened carefully as she talked about achieving her dream. She talked about how she always wanted to sing and that how her role model was Alejandra Guzman, another Mexican singer. The funny thing is that everyone else there had a clear sense that they had found their life’s purpose in childhood. The mayor pro-tem talked about how he always wanted to make people’s lives better. The principal talked about how she used to play school when she was young.

What did I say? Well, in fact, I never dreamed of being a professor. When I was a little boy my biggest dream was to be an astronaut and my biggest concern was to look at my mom and ask, “Mom, can astronaut’s moms go up in the rocket ship with them when they go to the moon.”

Today, I am a professor, and I love what I do. But telling the narrative that brought me from a child interested in the stars to an adult interested in language in the brain is not straightforward. Most professors hope to inspire undergraduates and work regularly to inspire our graduate students to join academia. Maybe more of us should try to find a way to inspire children as well.

Arturo Hernandez is currently Professor of Psychology and Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience graduate program at the University of Houston. He is the author of The Bilingual Brain. His major research interest is in the neural underpinnings of bilingual language processing and second language acquisition in children and adults. He has used a variety of neuroimaging methods as well as behavioral techniques to investigate these phenomena which have been published in a number of peer reviewed journal articles. His research is currently funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development. Follow him on Twitter @DrAEHernandez.

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Image credit: Group of students in class paying attention to the teacher. © andresrimaging via iStockphoto.

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Five facts you need to know in 2014

At the end of each year, people around the world look back on what’s passed and what they’ve accomplished — including the books they’ve read and the knowledge they’ve learned. And then in January, the rest of us try to catch up and figure out what we need to know in the new year. Several Oxford University Press titles landed on prestigious Book of the Year lists in 2013, covering everything from the history of strategy, the dissection of austerity policies, to the ascendance of China in the global political arena. So we pulled together a quick list of illuminating facts to give you a jump start on 2014.

“Washington must see the security of its allies in Asia as being as vital as America itself. The challenge for the US government is whether America can convince China that it will accept a nuclear strike on Los Angeles rather than allow Beijing to take Taiwan. The answer is: probably not.”


        — The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power by Hugh White 


              (The Economist’s Book of the Year list for 2013)

“Since the 2008 crisis, banks that file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission have awarded themselves $2.2 trillion in compensation.”


        — Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth


              (Financial Times’ Book of the Year list for 2013)

“China’s aggregate economy is due to surpass the United States’ by 2025.”


        — China Goes Global: The Partial Power by David Shambaugh


              (The Economist’s Book of the Year list for 2013)

“Britain’s Fifth Battle Squadron was composed of battleships equipped with eight 15-inch guns that could fire a 1,920-pound shell accurately up to about 24,000 yards.”


        — The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War by Peter Hart


              (The Economist’s Book of the Year list for 2013)

“The word ‘strategy’ only came into general use at the start of the nineteenth century, though its origins predate Napoleon. It became a reflection of the Age of Enlightenment’s growing confidence in empirical science and the application of reason.”


        — Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman


              (Financial Time’s Book of the Year list for 2013)

A selection of Oxford University Press titles made the ‘Best of 2013′ lists from the Guardian, New Scientist, Times Literary Supplement, History Today, Financial Times, New Statesman, the Spectator, and Bloomberg.

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Enhancing transparency at ICSID

By Antonio R. Parra

Among arbitral institutions, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) has long been a leader in promoting the transparency of its operation.

Through its case registers, ICSID has always published information on the institution, conduct, and disposition of proceedings administered by the Centre. Article 48(5) of ICSID’s constituent Convention requires the consent of both parties for any publication by ICSID of the award rendered in their case. Under the regulations of ICSID, this requirement also applies to the publication by the Centre of other documents generated in the proceedings. Over the years, ICSID has consistently, and usually successfully, sought the consent of the parties for its publication of awards; and it has lately redoubled its efforts to obtain consents missing for the publication of some older awards and decisions. Amendments of the Centre’s arbitration rules have mandated it to publish excerpts of the legal reasoning of awards even in the absence of such consents. The website that ICSID maintains has become the main vehicle for its publication of awards (full texts or excerpts) and information from the case registers. Public participation in and access to ICSID arbitration proceedings have been fostered by further amendments of the rules confirming the authority of the arbitral tribunals to accept and consider amicus curiae briefs and to allow third parties to attend or observe hearings if neither disputing party objects.

The World Bank in Washington, D.C. Photo by Shiny Things. CC-BY-NC-2.0 via Shiny Things Flickr.

But with enormous increases in the number of investment treaty arbitration cases submitted to ICSID, many of them raising issues of public concern, the Centre is subject to growing pressure for even greater and more complete transparency. Rising expectations in this regard are reflected in the Rules on Transparency in Treaty-based Investor-State Arbitration recently adopted by the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). Whereas ICSID still may not publish the full texts of awards or other documents from its cases without the consent of both parties, or have hearings open to the public over the objection of a party, the UNCITRAL Rules on Transparency do not set similar restrictions on publication of documents and public access to hearings in treaty-based cases brought under the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules.

The time may thus be coming for ICSID to try to reverse its general rules on these points. More particularly, it might aim to amend its regulations and rules to provide for publication of all the main documents generated in proceedings, unless or except to the extent decided otherwise by the arbitrators, and for tribunals to have full authority to allow third parties to attend or observe hearings. Such amendments would involve renewing a suggestion made by the ICSID Secretariat a decade ago regarding attendance at hearings. The suggestion surely would now garner more support. Any obstacle to the amendments posed by the requirement in Article 48(5) of the ICSID Convention, for consent of the parties for publication by the Centre of the awards, might be surmounted by the consent being incorporated in amended arbitration rules, applicable under subsequently formed ICSID arbitration consent agreements.

Antonio R. Parra is the author of The History of ICSID. He served as the first Deputy Secretary-General of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) from 1999 to 2005 and was Legal Adviser at ICSID from 1990 to 1999. His earlier positions include Senior Counsel, ICSID; Counsel, Office of the Senior Vice President and General Counsel, World Bank; Counsel, Policy and General Affairs, World Bank; Assistant Legal Counsel, OPEC Fund for International Development; and Research Staffer, OPEC Secretariat. At the World Bank’s Legal Vice Presidency and ICSID, Mr Parra worked on the establishment of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency and the preparation of the World Bank Guidelines on the Treatment of Foreign Direct Investment.

The History of ICSID has been added to Investment Claims, a specialist service providing researchers with access to a fully integrated and updated suite of arbitration awards and decisions, bilateral investment treaties, multilateral treaties, journal articles, monographs, and arbitration laws. There are now 13 titles from Oxford University Press on the site, including a wealth of other content such as case reports, treaty sets, and journal articles.

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                Related StoriesImportance of venue selection in international arbitrationUS Supreme Court weighs in on BG Group v. ArgentinaHow the Humanities changed the world 

How the Humanities changed the world

By Rens Bod

Have insights from the humanities ever led to breakthroughs, or is any interpretation of a text, painting, musical piece, or historical event as good as any other? I have long been fascinated with this question. To be sure, insights from the humanities have had an impact on society. Yet even this observation may come as a surprise, since humanities disciplines like philology, art history, musicology, literary studies, and theatre studies are usually seen as a luxury pastime which is of little use to society and even less to the economy. Arguments in favour of the humanities usually emphasize their importance for critical thinking, historical consciousness and for creating competent democratic citizens. While these arguments may all be true, a quick glance at the history of the humanities shows a rather different picture. In all periods, humanists have made discoveries that literally changed our world, for better and worse. As if humanities scholars have no clue of their own history, these discoveries have even been attributed to the sciences.

In the fifteenth century, when the humanities were called studia humanitatis, the Italian philologist Lorenzo Valla showed by meticulous lexical and stylistic analysis that the document known as the “Donation of Constantine” was a mediaeval fake. In this document it was stated that the Roman emperor Constantine the Great had donated the Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I out of gratitude for Constantine’s miraculous recovery from leprosy. But when Valla showed that the document could impossibly have been written in the time of Constantine, the papal claim to worldly power appeared suddenly to be based on fiction, a result which was vehemently taken up by the church reformer Martin Luther. Thanks to Valla’s philological innovation, one individual could now wipe the floor with a document that had been deemed unimpeachable for centuries.

In the early seventeenth century the historian Joseph Scaliger tried to reconcile the divergent chronological systems of different peoples. When he arrived at Egyptian history, Scaliger was able to date the beginning of the first Egyptian dynasty to 5285 BCE. To his dismay this date was nearly 1,300 years before the generally accepted date of Creation, which according to biblical chronology had to be around 4000 BCE.  Although Scaliger tried to save the Bible by placing the early pharaohs into a hypothetical period which he called ‘proleptic time’, his result led to fierce biblical criticism that ushered in the early Enlightenment with Spinoza among its most famous exponents.

The Donation of Constantine (Unknown Painter)

A more recent humanistic breakthrough is the discovery that virtually all languages in Europe and Asia are related via precise sound shift rules that govern phonological changes over time. The linguist August Schleicher argued that this result pointed at a large language family that had evolved from an original proto-language called proto-Indo-European. This triggered the hypothesis of the existence of a ‘pure’ Aryan race, a view which was eagerly adopted and abused by the National Socialists. Thus the impact of the humanities, like that of the sciences, is not necessarily positive. The claim that the humanities are important for democracy and for developing critical citizens, as put forward by Martha Nussbaum, thus deserves a more nuanced discussion.

Humanistic insights and discoveries have also led to scientific and even technological breakthroughs. When Leon Battista Alberti gave the first description of linear perspective in 15th century Florentine painting, it not only (literally) changed our view of the world but it also led to revolutionary architectural design techniques. And when the 19th-century scholar Karl Lachmann used the model of a tree of texts with a common root for his textual reconstructions, he also gave biologists a powerful method for describing zoological phylogenies.

Perhaps the insight from the humanities with the most impressive impact on science and technology occurred in the study of language. When in the late 1950s linguists like Noam Chomsky developed a notation for defining grammars, it was immediately taken up by computer scientists such as John Backus who applied this notation to designing programming languages. Chomsky’s syntactic definition of a language served as the pattern for the structure of the whole compiler for ALGOL — the first higher programming language. Thus the development of modern programming languages was initiated through linguistic work. This unexpected application of the study of language is rarely if ever mentioned in the historiography of linguistics while it is widely acknowledged in (the history of) computer science.

The disregard of these kinds of utilizations of humanistic insights is symptomatic for the humanities. While applications of humanistic methods in other fields may not be the core business of the humanities, the underlying insights that led to these applications are. In their critical investigations of texts, languages, art and music, humanists have revealed patterns and theories that led to new and unforeseen utilizations. A profound awareness of the general history of the humanities can guard us against the misconception that the humanities only deal with attributing ‘value’, developing a critical and aesthetical mind, or creating historical consciousness.

Sadly modern humanists often believe that they are moving towards science when they use an empirical approach in studying texts, art, music, or the past. They are mistaken. Scholars using empirical methods are returning to their roots in the 15th-century studia humanitatis when the empirical approach was invented — and not since disappeared.

Rens Bod is a professor of humanities at the University of Amsterdam. His latest book is A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present.

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Image credit: The Donation of Constantine. By Unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Thinking about the mind: an anti-linguistic turn

By Bence Nanay

Contemporary philosophy of mind is an offshoot of philosophy of language. Most formative figures of modern philosophy of mind started out as philosophers of language. This is hardly surprising – almost everyone in that generation started out as a philosopher of language. But this focus on language left its mark on the way we now think about the mind – and this is not necessarily a good thing.

Sentences represent the world. As do some of our mental states: thoughts, beliefs, desires. And we understand pretty well how sentences represent the world. So a tempting way of thinking about the mind is that its building blocks are very much like the building blocks of language: that mental states represent the world the way sentences do.

Sentences express propositions. So, again, it is tempting to think of mental states as representing propositions: as propositional attitudes. And, unsurprisingly, this is the standard way of thinking about the mind: that its basic building blocks are propositional attitudes: beliefs, desires, thoughts. The belief that Paris is the capital of France is an attitude to the proposition that Paris is the capital of France. The general suggestion then is that we can capture the functioning of the mind by appealing to this economy of propositions.

It is easy to see that this way of thinking about the mind is based on mirroring language. But are we justified to do so? Language is an important feature of some select subset of minds (adult human minds), but there are non-linguistic minds: animal minds and infant minds. And they can do amazing things. While no-one denies that they lack language, they are still described by (most) philosophers (and even cognitive scientists) as having beliefs and desires – propositional attitudes.

It would be extremely surprising if the way the mind is shaped had anything to do with language as language is such a late addition to our mental life. A much more natural suggestion is that it has a lot to do with the actions the organism performs. We are evolved creatures and what matters in evolution is really whether one performs actions successfully (and not what one thinks). The mind is shaped in a way that would help us to perform actions. What we should expect then is that the structure of the mind is geared towards facilitating actions and not towards representing propositions. Of course, some select minds can also do that – and, may even use propositional thoughts to perfect one’s performance of actions. But it would be a methodological mistake to start with propositions. We should start with actions.

What would then be those representations that have direct impact on the success of our actions? Representations that attribute properties that are directly relevant for the performance of an action. I call these properties action-properties and the representations that attribute them pragmatic representations. Without pragmatic representations, we would be pretty bad at performing actions. And those of our ancestors whose pragmatic representations failed to get things right had very little chance to survive. Correct pragmatic representations have huge evolutionary benefits and incorrect ones make quick extinction very likely.

But what are these pragmatic representations and why do we not have a widespread label for them, like the ones we have for beliefs and thoughts? Suppose that you are trying to drink a sip of water from the cup in front of you. In order to do so, you need to represent the spatial location of the cup. If you didn’t, you would have no idea which direction to reach out towards. You also need to represent the size of the cup, otherwise you would have no information about what grip size you need to approach it with. And you need to represent its weight, otherwise you would have no idea how much force to exert when lifting it. These are some of the action-properties that your pragmatic representation attributes to the cup. But it happens only very rarely that your pragmatic representation attributes action-properties consciously. Most of our pragmatic representations are unconscious mental states, which of course doesn’t make them any less real. But it would explain why they are missing from the conceptual arsenal we use for describing our minds.

How should we resist the mirroring of language when talking about the mind? We should try to identify mental representations that we have independent, language-free reasons to attribute to agents. If we want to avoid falling back on talking about beliefs, desires and other propositional attitudes, we need some genuine alternatives. Pragmatic representations are mental states of this kind and it would be a good idea to take them seriously not only when talking about animal minds and the minds of small children, but also when talking about the linguistically competent adult human mind.

We, adult humans clearly have propositional attitudes — some of us make a living out of them. Nonetheless, our pragmatic representations still play a much more important role in our mental life: they guide and monitor all our actions (including the ones that have to do with propositional attitudes), they determine the way we see the world and shape the way we interact with others and they may even account for our engagement with fictional narratives. Taking them more seriously would amount to an anti-linguistic turn in philosophy of mind.

This doesn’t mean that we should no longer talk about beliefs and thoughts — these are clearly important constituents of the human mind. So the anti-linguistic turn I am proposing is more like an anti-linguistic half-turn. But linguistically structured representations are late, last minute additions to our mental life — in the same way as humans are last minute additions to our planet. And while humans radically transformed the way the Earth looks, it would be a mistake to try to understand the planet merely focusing on human-made features. Similarly, while language and propositional attitudes radically transformed the way our mind works, even for appreciating just how radical this transformation was, we need to be able to understand the pre-linguistic mind.

Bence Nanay is Professor of Philosophy and BOF Research Professor at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University. He received his PhD at University of California, Berkeley in 2006. He is the Editor of Perceiving the World. He published more than seventy articles on philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and aesthetics.

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