Where does tolerance collide?

Willingness to let groups one objects to exercise civil liberties, to speak, assemble, teach, hold office. Stouffer's 1954 national survey fixed the measurement: a battery asking whether members of particular nonconforming groups should be allowed to make a speech or have a book in the public library. Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus objected that this confounds tolerance with which groups are unpopular at the moment, and introduced the least-liked group method: each respondent names the group they most dislike and is then asked the liberties items about that group. Gibson's fifty-year review keeps the core: tolerance requires an objection, so agreeing to rights for a group one likes does not count.[1][2][3]

Unit

A citizen's judgment about a specific out-group

Recovery means

Not applicable, the criterion is forbearance despite objection, measured at one time

Measured by

Civil-liberties batteries about named or respondent-chosen groups; Stouffer items; least-liked group scale

Refraining from interfering with beliefs or practices one finds wrong, when one has the power to interfere, for reasons that outweigh the objection. Locke's Letter argued that the civil magistrate's power extends to civil interests and not to the care of souls, which cannot be coerced. Forst gives the modern analysis three components (an objection, an acceptance that overrides it, and a rejection marking where toleration ends) and distinguishes a permission conception, in which a majority grants toleration from above, from a respect conception among equals. The philosophical question is what justifies the acceptance; the survey question is only whether it is present.[4][5]

Unit

A normative relation between a tolerator and the tolerated

Recovery means

Not applicable, a normative standard, argued rather than regained

Measured by

Not measured, analysed by the structure and justification of the components

The total amount a specific dimension is permitted to vary, the difference between the maximum and minimum limits. ASME Y14.5 defines tolerance in these terms and builds the language of geometric dimensioning and tolerancing on it: tolerances of size, form, orientation, location, and runout, each a zone within which the feature must lie. A tolerance is not a failure of precision; it is a design decision about how much variation the function can absorb, traded against manufacturing cost. The part either conforms or it does not.[6]

Unit

A feature of a part, relative to its nominal

Recovery means

Not applicable, a nonconforming part is reworked or scrapped, not recovered

Measured by

Inspection against limits with gauges and coordinate measuring machines; process capability indices

The capacity of an organism to sustain a stress inside its tissues without injury, as opposed to keeping the stress out. Levitt's scheme made the distinction the organising principle of plant stress physiology: an organism can avoid a stress by excluding it (deep roots, a waxy cuticle) or tolerate it by surviving the strain once it is inside. Grime's triangle placed stress-tolerators, alongside competitors and ruderals, as one of three primary strategies, characterised by slow growth, long-lived tissues, and persistence in chronically unproductive habitats. The organism's response is the object; nobody objects to anything.[7][8]

Unit

A genotype, species, or population under a stressor

Recovery means

Survival and return of function after the stress is removed; distinct from resistance during it

Measured by

Survival and growth across stress gradients; lethal thresholds; physiological markers such as osmotic adjustment

The immune system's active, antigen-specific failure to attack something it could otherwise attack, self tissue, a transplant, a commensal. Billingham, Brent, and Medawar showed that mice exposed to foreign cells in fetal life later accepted skin grafts from the donor strain, proving tolerance is acquired and specific rather than a general weakness. Sakaguchi and colleagues established regulatory T cells as an active mechanism that maintains it in adult life, so that tolerance is something the system does, and its breakdown is autoimmunity. Here tolerance is the healthy state and its loss is the disease.[9][10]

Unit

An immune system relative to a specific antigen

Recovery means

Re-establishing tolerance after autoimmunity or rejection, the goal of tolerogenic therapy

Measured by

Graft survival, absence of antigen-specific responses, regulatory T-cell counts and function

A decrease in the effect of a drug after repeated administration, so that a larger dose is needed for the same effect. Siegel showed in rats that a substantial part of morphine tolerance is learned: cues that reliably precede the drug come to elicit a compensatory response that opposes it, and tolerance fails to appear when the drug is given in a novel setting. This sits beside pharmacokinetic tolerance (faster clearance) and pharmacodynamic tolerance (receptor downregulation) as a third mechanism, and it is why an overdose can follow a familiar dose taken somewhere new. Tolerance is a change in the organism, not a virtue of it.[11]

Unit

An organism's dose–response relation over repeated exposure

Recovery means

Loss of tolerance after abstinence; return of the original sensitivity

Measured by

Rightward shift of the dose–response curve; effect at a fixed dose across sessions; environment-specific tests