Pär Segerdahl

Incidental Findings: The Time Is not yet Ripe for a Policy for Biobanks

Incidental findings (IFs) are acknowledged to be among the most important ethical issues to consider in biobank research. Genome-wide association studies and disease-specific genetic research might reveal information about individual participants that are not related to the research purpose, but may be relevant to those participants’ future health. In this article, we provide a synopsis of arguments for and against the disclosure of IFs in biobank research. We argue that arguments that do not distinguish between communications about pathogenic conditions and complex genetic risk for diseases fail, as preferences and decisions may be far more complex in the latter case. The principle of beneficence, for example, often supports the communication of incidentally discovered diseases, but if communication of risk is different, the beneficence of such communication is not equally evident. By conflating the latter form of communication with the former, the application of ethical principles to IFs in biobank research sometimes becomes too easy and frictionless. Current empirical surveys of people’s desire to be informed about IFs do not provide sufficient guidance because they rely on the same notion of risk communication as a form of communication about actual health and disease. Differently designed empirical research and more reflection on biobank research and genetic risk information is required before ethical principles can be applied to support the adoption of a reasonable and comprehensive policy for handling IFs.

Can an Ape Become Your Co-author? Reflections on Becoming as a Presupposition of Teaching

Wittgenstein’s remarks on teaching highlight how teaching is an interactive, bidirectional process: through her responses, the learner contributes to the teaching process. However, not every potential learner exhibits such responses. A one-year-old child is typically too young to respond in ways that sustain interactive processes of “learning how to multiply.” But we have the attitude that she will become teachable, when she gets a little older. Teaching can be said to presuppose a dimension of becoming . Our familiarity with this dimension comes to expression in how we imagine the learner in Wittgenstein’s examples . We do not assume that the pupil in the mathematical rule-following discussion is a one-year-old child, for example, or an ape. By discussing ape language research, this chapter investigates becoming as a presupposition of teaching . Ape language research is interesting because we generally do not expect that an ape can become someone whose spontaneous responses sustain language learning . Using as my point of departure an article by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and three language-competent bonobos, I show how different our attitudes to ape and human learnability are. We patiently await learnability in human children , but assume that apes must be specifically trained, if they are to learn at all. By revealing our attitudes to apes as not living in a dimension of becoming (as being at most susceptible to disciplining), and by demonstrating the challenges these presumptions mean for ape language research, the chapter emphasizes the didactic significance of attitudes to learnability , and of becoming as a presupposition of teaching .

Kanzi Acquires Language in a Forest in Georgia

This book develops an idea originating in Japanese primatology and currently increasingly prominent in Western biology: the idea of culture in animals. Culture is often considered what distinguishes humans from animals. While we regard humans as living meaningfully in shared cultures developed and maintained in collaboration, animals are often conceived of as moving instinctively and alone in barren nature, according to innate genetic programs, even when they live in social groups. For instance, in an ambitious attempt to explore how human consciousness evolved, Merlin Donald writes that ‘our exceptional powers as a species derive from the curious fact that we have broken out of one of the most critical limitations of traditional nervous systems — their loneliness, or solipsism’ (Donald 2001: xiii). Although the author’s exposition of culture as a powerful dimension of human life is similar to the notion of culture developed in this book, we do not see culture as a uniquely human possession. Contemporary biologists studying animal behaviour are slowly transforming this black-and-white picture of what it is like to be an animal, as opposed to a human being. Researchers follow in the footsteps of Japanese primatologists by naming the individual animals under study and employing methods that probably would have created a scandal in Western science half a century ago.

What Does It Mean to Study Language

The rapid development of the biological sciences during the past decades is to a large extent due to new forms of specialized research work. Molecular biology and genetics would disintegrate without the continually updated technologies, skills and forms of knowledge that biologists in various fields develop and share with colleagues and students, but not with the rest of us speaking humans.

Design Features of Language

If man is shaped by the same evolutionary mechanisms as the other animal species, then we can reasonably expect to find precursors of human language in the other primates. Detecting these precursors in apes’ interactions has proved to be a difficult task. In an important anthology on primate behaviour, Tree of Origin (2001), edited by Frans de Waal, the psychologist Charles Snowdon discusses language as a problem for evolutionary biology: Of all the topics in this book, the origin of language is one of the most difficult to imagine emerging from our nonhuman primate ancestors. Evidence of cooperative hunting, of the cultural transmission of tool use, of empathy and reconciliation, of manipulating the behavior of social companions is clear in great apes and occasionally in some monkeys. In these areas it is easy to see much of our own behavior reflected in the behavior of apes and monkeys, and vice versa.

Ambiguous Human Culture

Deeply unexpected discoveries often reveal an equally unexpected ignorance. We may not know what we ourselves have discovered, especially not in our professional capacity for the new experiences can take us beyond our scientific training and how we commonly conceptualize results in relevant fields of inquiry These unexpected discoveries are often the most exciting ones, but they tend to make scientific work almost indistinguishable, at least for a period of time, from philosophical thinking. The revealed lack of clarity about the concepts that normally are used to make sense of the data often awakens the philosopher inside the professional scientist. This awakened philosopher is not an expert thinker, but a dazed human being, who faces the challenging fact that she cannot always trust her professional skill. She has the desire to think through, in her own self-made way, what she has experienced, for the manual has become untrustworthy. Philosophical thinking tends to be homespun. It arises when the more elaborate guidelines fail and we trust nothing except what we can achieve by thinking of our own accord. To the extent that professional philosophy exists, philosophy in its most original form arises when the professional doubts the veracity of her reasoning habits, the concepts she uses as if they were self-evident, her almost automatic way of writing articles, her habitual way of teaching and arguing, perhaps even her way of greeting colleagues: everything belonging to the academic culture to which she has adapted herself.

Summary: The Catalogue of Design Features

Comparative studies of cognition in human and nonhuman primates should in the future be complemented by cultural approaches where humans and animals are allowed to affect each other. Such work would help us see the overwhelming affinities and similarities that put the differences in their proper perspective: Biology that lacks an intuitive knowledge of resemblances can provide only an impoverished, mechanistic view of the living world. We may say that the rationalization of this intuitive understanding of similarity is the essence of the new science of living things. (Imanishi 2002: 7)

Wittgenstein, Meursault and the Difficulty of Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein is generally considered to be an exceptionally difficult philosopher. But in what way is he difficult? Scarcely in the way that Edmund Husserl, with his extensive technical terminology, is difficult, for there is almost no technical vocabulary in (at least the late) Wittgenstein’s writings. Nor is he difficult in the way that Martin Heidegger, with his lofty linguistic innovations, is difficult, for finding a philosopher whose language is more everyday than Wittgenstein’s would be a difficult task. So why is Wittgenstein not rather one of the easiest philosophers to understand?

The Semantic Reading and the Notion of Indirect Speech

Would every person immediately understand us if we told him that when he requests salt by saying ‘Can you pass the salt?’, he is in fact speaking indirectly? I do not think so. And neither do I think that the meaning of the following claim is clear to everyone: ‘In everyday speech, we often use one sentence to convey the meaning of another’ (Gordon & Lakoff 1975: 83).

The Semantic Reading and Conversational Implicature

The pragmatic notion of conversational implicature is in an important respect similar to the notion of deixis, in the sense that the notion is motivated by features of language use for which the traditional semantic techniques cannot account. The problem is that the uses of linguistic expressions often convey more information than is expressed by their literal meanings. Consider the following sentence: ‘I heard sounds coming from the kitchen.’ When this sentence is used as an answer to the question ‘Where is Sarah?’, its speaker communicates not only that he has heard sounds coming from the kitchen (which is the literal meaning of the sentence), but also that he considers it possible that Sarah is in the kitchen. What is said is just one part of what a speaker communicates. Much, perhaps most, of what is communicated is implied in one way or another. Although this is a kind of commonplace, it had not been incorporated into a theory of meaning until Grice sketched the main types of implication and roughly characterized them in his William James Lectures for 1967, titled ‘Logic and Conversation.’ (Martinich 1990: 103)