RE-THINKING RACIALIZATION

This paper seeks to scrutinize the most recent definition of racialization, as proposed by Adam Hochman, and interrogate its utility as a productive analytic for social scientists. Due to theoretical conflations between race and racism, and analytical conflations of groupness and category, racialization functions as a tautological descriptive rather than an agenda-setting theoretical framework for scholars studying race. The most recent definition of the concept cannot, and does not try to, account for a mechanism for the process of racialization. Such an accounting is a necessary component of any conceptualization that aims to help identify the origins of racialization. Second, in the absence of locating an agent or mechanism, the concept is tautologized: racialization, with an inability to locate a mechanism, offers itself up as the mechanism. Third, this tautologizing leads to a profound conflation of racialization offered as both a descriptive and a causal concept. Not only does this conflation halt the analytic capacity of the term as it applies to social scientific uses, but this conflation proves harmful for the anti-realist agenda as proposed by Hochman. By conflating analyses of causality with description, the latest definition of racialization unknowingly countersigns a uniquely American ideological conception of race; that is, the latest definition allows a description of the appearance of race to stand in for an explanation for race.

Conceptual frameworks for programs addressing violence against children: a scoping review

ABSTRACT Objective: Map the conceptual frameworks for programs addressing violence against children developed in primary health care. Method: This is a scoping review that followed the methodological recommendations of the Joanna Briggs Institute. A reference manager and qualitative analysis software were used for data management and analysis. Results: 1,346 studies were pre-selected and analyzed. The final sample consisted of 24 studies, mostly published in the 2000s. Three strategic actions were identified in programs: Home Visitation, Children Exposed to Violence, and Parenting Development, most of them focused on the level of intervention. No study explained the conceptual frameworks guiding the programs. Conclusion: Mapped programs were well structured and essential for addressing domestic violence against children. They mainly adopted the multi-causal concept to understand the health-disease process, which was restricted to overcoming the contradictions of violence.

Rethinking heritability

Two markedly different concepts of heritability co-exist in the social and life sciences. Behavioral genetics has popularized a highly technical, quantitative concept: heritability as the proportion of genetic variance relative to the total phenotypic variance of a trait in a population. At the same time, a more common biological notion simply refers to the transmission of phenotypic traits across generations via the transmission of genes. It is argued here that the behavioral-genetic concept is of little use overall, while the common biological concept is overly narrow and implies a false view of the significance of genes in development. By appropriately expanding heritability into a general causal concept based on its role in evolution, we will arrive at a new view of development, heritability, and evolution that recognizes the importance of non-genetic inheritance and the causal parity of all determinants of phenotypic traits.

Rotten, stale, fresh: three flavors of heritability

The concept of heritability in behavioral genetics is different from the more standard concept used in biology. The former is a statistical measure of the proportion of genetic variance relative to the total phenotypic variance of a trait in a population, the latter refers to the transmission of phenotypic traits across generations via the transmission of an underlying causal substrate (genes). It will be argued that the behavioral-genetic concept is a generally useless quantity, while the standard biological concept is overly narrow and implies a false picture of the significance of genes in development. By suitably expanding standard heritability into a general causal concept based on its role in evolution, we will arrive at a general view of development that recognizes the causal parity of all determinants of phenotypic traits and shows why the behavioral genetic dichotomy of genes vs environment is fundamentally misguided. Some implications for criminology and the social sciences will be addressed.

Probability in Biology

I examine the concept of “fitness” in the philosophy of evolutionary biology to show how discussions of probability in biology can go wrong, and right. Many of the critiques of the propensity interpretation of fitness have focused on the mathematical aspects of fitness; re-focusing on several aspects of the propensity interpretation of probability more generally can help to address these concerns. I conclude with some general lessons for thinking about probability in biology. The propensity interpretation of fitness, properly understood, solves the explanatory circularity problem and the mismatch problem, andalso withstands many other problems. Fitness is the propensity for organisms to survive and reproduce in particular environments and in particular populations. Fitness values can be described in terms of distributions of propensities and can be modeled for any number of generations using computer simulations. Fitness is a causal concept. Relative fitness is what matters for natural selection.

Platitudes and Counterexamples

This article explains the conception of causation as a natural relation in more detail. It outlines some of the features of our use of the causal concept that do not fit with the idea of causation as a natural relation between events. It then outlines the correct explanation of these features, replacing the metaphysical conception of causation with a conception of causation in terms of a contrastive difference-making relation, where the contrasts are determined contextually on the basis of what are often normative considerations.

FACT AND LAW IN THE CAUSAL INQUIRY

This paper takes it as a premise that a distinction between matters of fact and of law is important in the causal inquiry. But it argues that separating factual and legal causation as different elements of liability is not the best way to implement the fact/law distinction. What counts as a cause-in-fact is partly a legal question; and certain liability-limiting doctrines under the umbrella of “legal causation” depend on the application of factual-causal concepts. The contrastive account of factual causation proposed in this paper improves matters. This account more clearly distinguishes matters of fact from matters of law within the cause-in-fact inquiry. It also extends the scope of cause-in-fact to answer some questions currently answered by certain doctrines of legal causation—doctrines that, it is argued, are more naturally seen as applications of our ordinary causal concept than as noncausal liability-limiting devices.

A SEMI-AUTOMATIC APPROACH FOR CONFOUNDING-AWARE SUBGROUP DISCOVERY

This paper presents a semi-automatic approach for confounding-aware subgroup discovery: Confounding essentially disturbs the measured effect of an association between variables due to the influence of other parameters that were not considered. The proposed method is embedded into a general subgroup discovery approach, and provides the means for detecting potentially confounded subgroup patterns, other unconfounded relations, and/or patterns that are affected by effect-modification. Since there is no purely automatic test for confounding, the discovered relations are presented to the user in a semi-automatic approach. Furthermore, we utilize (causal) domain knowledge for improving the results of the algorithm, since confounding is itself a causal concept. The applicability and benefit of the presented technique is illustrated by real-world examples from a case-study in the medical domain.