Introduction: Enclosures and discontents

Universality and Its Discontents

In framing the concept of rational consensus, decision theorists have tended to defer to an older, established literature on social welfare theory for guidance on how to proceed. But the uncritical adoption of standards meant to regulate the reconciliation of differing interests has unduly burdened the development of rational methods for the synthesis of differing judgments. In particular, the ...

Dysbiosis and Its Discontents

Dysbiosis is a key term in human microbiome research, especially when microbiome patterns are associated with disease states. Although some questions have been raised about how this term is applied, its use continues undiminished in the literature. We investigate the ways in which microbiome researchers discuss dysbiosis and then assess the impact of different concepts of dysbiosis on microbiom...

Anthropomorphism and its Discontents

The usefulness of an approach in science is a difficult beast to capture. Attempts to quantify the fertility of anthropomorphism can quickly degenerate into something akin to a scientific beauty contest (at worst) or a matter of counting publications or citations of protagonists (at best). Blumberg asks “whether individuals who explicitly engage in anthropomorphism have a track record of scient...

Doctors and their discontents.

Griefs and Discontents

Those of us who seek to help the bereaved will welcome this book. Written in language free of Americanese, it describes the mental mechanisms behind the phenomena of grieving. As the author says: 'Often we lose what we most value and as we do not really accept our losses, it is an invariable aspect of the human condition, therefore, to attempt to remove the dilemma. Our greatest achievements fr...