O-mannosylation in Candida albicans enables development of interkingdom biofilm communities

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Globalization, re-discovery of the Malay ‘local,' and popular TV fiction through audience narratives

The proliferation of TV fiction can be partly explained by TV producers attuning their products to draw audience’s attention. Narratives of love dominate the plots and almost always the good is pitted against the evil, rich against the poor - ultimately the good always wins. The formula may be clichéd, but in places where news of war, terrorism, diseases, violence, and conflicts usually prevail, respite from tumultuous realities of the world can often be found in popular TV fiction. Here, we study three popular Malay TV fiction, Julia, On Dhia, and Adam & Hawa to examine how TV fiction viewers relate to them through personal narratives and focus group interviews. Through their voices, we reveal that despite TV fiction viewers’ constant preoccupation with Western-imposed globalization, the TV fiction set against the backdrop of globalization can encourage the viewers to re-route their ways to re-discover their imaginary ‘good old days’ that are often dismissed, neglected or forgotten

In Defense of Wishful Thinking: James, Quine, Emotions, and the Web of Belief

What is W. V. O. Quine’s relationship to classical pragmatism? Although he resists the comparison to William James in particular, commentators have seen an affinity between his “web of belief” model of theory confirmation and James’s claim that our beliefs form a “stock” that faces new experience as a corporate body. I argue that the similarity is only superficial. James thinks our web of beliefs should be responsive not just to perceptual but also to emotional experiences in some cases; Quine denies this. I motivate James’s controversial view by appealing to an episode in the history of medicine when a researcher self-experimented by swallowing a vial of bacteria that at the time had not been studied in much detail. The researcher’s commitment to his own as-yet untested hypothesis was based in part on emotional considerations. Finally, I argue that Quine’s insistence that emotions can never be relevant to adjusting our web of belief reflects a tacit holdover of one of logical positivism’s crucially anti-pragmatist commitments—that philosophy of science should focus exclusively on the context of justification, not the context of discovery. James’s emphasis on discovery as a (perhaps the) crucial locus for epistemological inquiry is characteristic of pragmatism in general. Since Quinean epistemology is always an epistemology of justification, he is not happily viewed as a member of the pragmatist tradition