Do people believe mental disorders are real and possess underlying essences? The current study found that both novices and practicing clinicians held weaker essentialist beliefs about mental disorders than about medical disorders. They were also unwilling to endorse the idea that mental disorders are real and natural. Furthermore, compared with novices, mental health clinicians were less likely...

Many philosophers have been attracted by the view that colors are mindindependent properties of object surfaces. A leading, and increasingly popular, version of this view that has been defended in recent years is the so-called physicalist position that identifies colors with (classes of) spectral reflectance distributions. This view, has, however, come in for a fair bit of criticism for failing...

Sperm that females receive during mating are stored in special places in the females' reproductive tracts. These storage sites serve to support and retain the sperm, maintaining the sperms' motility and, in mammals, permitting final sperm-maturation. The molecules that attract sperm to these sites and mediate what happens to them there have remained elusive. New research, using elegant genetic ...

This paper compares descriptivist approaches for concept acquisition with essentialist approaches by exploring the conditions under which people use generic sentences (sentences such as ‘Apples are round’ which contrast with sentences about particulars like ‘All/most of the apples are round’). It fleshes out the essentialist approach in terms of the Baptism theory of concept acquisition (Oved, ...

use of herbal extracts and essences as natural antibacterial compounds has become increasingly popular for the control of oral infectious diseases. therefore, finding natural antimicrobial products with the lowest side effects seems necessary. the present study sought to assess the effect of punica granatum l. water extract on five oral bacteria and bacterial biofilm formation on orthodontic wi...

In recent years, there has been a flurry of work on the metaphysics of race. While it is now widely accepted that races do not share robust, biobehavioral essences, opinions differ over what, if anything, race is. Recent work has been divided between three apparently quite different answers. A variety of theorists argue for racial skepticism, the view that races do not exist at all. A second gr...