Politics or metaphysics? On attributing psychological properties to animals

Attributing Properties

The paper deals with the semantics and ontology of ordinary discourse about properties. The main focus lies on the following thesis: A simple predication of the form ‘a is F’ is synonymous with the corresponding explicit property-attribution ‘a has F-ness’. An argument against this Synonymy Thesis is put forth which is based on the thesis that simple predications and property-attributions diffe...

Fasting and Experimental Animals, Detrimental or Positive?

While fasting has been practiced for centuries, its beneficial effects was unknown until recently. This review tries to analyze the current literature of how fasting and intermittent fasting (IF) could affect clinical pathological parameters, learning, mood and brain plasticity. The effects of different ways of fasting on metabolism and stress were also explored. Animal experiments have elucida...

Attributing effects to interactions.

A framework is presented that allows an investigator to estimate the portion of the effect of one exposure that is attributable to an interaction with a second exposure. We show that when the 2 exposures are statistically independent in distribution, the total effect of one exposure can be decomposed into a conditional effect of that exposure when the second is absent and also a component due t...

Attributing Illness to Food

Identification and prioritization of effective food safety interventions require an understanding of the relationship between food and pathogen from farm to consumption. Critical to this cause is food attribution, the capacity to attribute cases of foodborne disease to the food vehicle or other source responsible for illness. A wide variety of food attribution approaches and data are used aroun...

Attributing Harm to Racist Speech