The purpose of this paper is to assess Profet’s (1992) and others’ hypothesis that nausea and vomiting in pregnancy (NVP) is adaptive. A number of studies have found an association between NVP and a decreased risk for early fetal loss (<20 weeks). It is assumed that the adaptive benefits of improved survivorship associated with NVP outweigh the minimal nutritional consequences. However, in populations that experience marginal levels of nutrition, NVP may have important nutritional consequences. To test these potential consequences, a (...) study on NVP, nutritional status, and pregnancy outcome was conducted among Turkana pastoralists, who experience seasonal and chronic nutritional stress. Interviews and anthropometric assessments were conducted on 68 pregnant Turkana women of Kenya during a 1993–1994 field season. The results from the case study suggest that women who experience NVP do encounter nutritional consequences in the later stages of pregnancy and are more likely to experience poor pregnancy outcomes. These results suggest that NVP may not be adaptive in all environmental settings, particularly among marginally nourished populations. (shrink)

The ‘traditional’ view among philosophical theologians, that God is eternal not merely in the sense of being everlasting but in the sense of being outside time altogether, has come under sharp criticism in recent years, both from biblical theologians and from philosophers. It is against the latter form of attack, particularly as represented by the detailed criticisms of Professor Nelson Pike, that I wish to try and defend the notion of a divine timelessness.

Many theists of a traditional bent have been bothered by the apparent tension between God's essential omnipotence and his essential moral goodness. Nelson Pike draws attention to the conflict between these two attributes in his article ‘Omnipotence and God's Ability to Sin’, and there have been many attempts to respond to it since that time. Most of these responses argue that the essential omnipotence and essential goodness of God are not logically incompatible, so that the traditional conception of God (...) is not incoherent; I think the arguments have been largely successful. However, some theists have found the typical responses to Pike less than convincing, and are tempted to surrender the claim that God has moral perfection essentially in favour of the more modest claim that God is morally perfect in the actual world though in some possible worlds God is morally defective. I argue in this paper that this fall-back position is incoherent. More accurately, I argue that a necessary being who is essentially omniscient and essentially omnipotent cannot be contingently morally perfect or contingently morally defective. Any such being is either essentially good or essentially evil. Since the latter alternative seems unattractive, I argue that theists should embrace the essential moral perfection of God. (shrink)

For the claim that the satisfaction of certain conditions is sufficient for the application of some concept to serve as part of the (`reductive') analysis of that concept, we require the conditions to be specified without employing that very concept. An account of the application conditions of a concept not meeting this requirement, we call analytically circular. For such a claim to be usable in determining the extension of the concept, however, such circularity may not matter, since if the concept (...) figures in a certain kind of intensional context in the specification of the conditions, the satisfaction of those conditions may not itself depend on the extension of the concept. We put this by saying that although analytically circular, the account may yet not be inferentially circular. (shrink)

This paper considers the question: what becomes of the notion of a logic as a way of codifying valid arguments when the customary assumption is dropped that the premisses and conclusions of these arguments are statements from some single language? An elegant treatment of the notion of a logic, when this assumption is in force, is that provided by Dana Scott's theory of consequence relations; this treatment is appropriately generalized in the present paper to the case where we do not (...) make this assumption of linguistic homogeneity. Several applications of the resulting concept of a heterogeneous logic are suggested, but the main emphasis is on the formal development. One topic touched on is a certain contrast between the boolean and the intensional sentence-connectives in this more general setting. (shrink)

An account of desire as a species of belief may owe its appeal to the details of its proposal as to precisely what sort of beliefs desires are to be identified with, and its downfall may be due to those details it does provide. For example, it may be proposed that the desire that α is in fact the belief that it ought to be that α, or is morally good or desirable that it should be the case that α. (...) Here the appeal might be that of forging a link between the holding of a moral belief and the acknowledgment that one has a reason for acting a certain way; and the shortcoming of the suggestion is its evident implausibility: even if the ‘necessity’ direction could be established, having a desire hardly seems sufficient for the holding of any such belief. Again: it might be proposed, perhaps simply to bring some order into the realm of propositional attitudes by reducing some to others, that the belief with which we should identify a’s desire that α is a’s belief that he will or would be happy if α. This proposed identification can be seen to be incorrect by consideration of examples such as the following, due to J. Gosling. An aging and ailing parent might forego numerous pleasures in order that his children should reap the benefits of his saving and have a good start in life – perhaps by receiving an expensive education – after his impending death. Oearly he may want that they should so benefit even if he does not believe in an after-death existence in which he might come to know of, and so take pleasure in, his children’s subsequent well-being. So his wanting that they should prosper cannot consist in his believing that he will be happy if/when they do, since he has no expectation of even being in existence in that eventuality. As Gosling puts it, there is a clear difference between thinking that something’s coming about will bring one pleasure, on the one hand, and viewing the prospect of its coming about with pleasure, on the other. (shrink)

Several intrinsic/extrinsic distinctions amongst properties, current in the literature, are discussed and contrasted. The proponents of such distinctions tend to present them as competing, but it is suggested here that at least three of the relevant distinctions (including here that between non-relational and relational properties) arise out of separate perfectly legitimate intuitive considerations: though of course different proposed explications of the informal distinctions involved in any one case may well conflict. Special attention is paid to the question of whether a (...) single notion of property is capable of supporting the various distinctions. (shrink)

This paper is about a support information management system for a wind power producer having an energy storage system and participating in a day-ahead electricity market. Energy storage can play not only a leading role in mitigation of the effect of uncertainty faced by a WP producer, but also allow for conversion of wind energy into electric energy to be stored and then released at favourable hours. This storage provides capability for arbitrage, allowing an increase on profit of a WP (...) producer, but must be supported by a convenient problem formulation. The formulation proposed for the support information management system is based on an approach of stochasticity written as a mixed integer linear programming problem. WP and market prices are considered as stochastic processes represented by a set of scenarios. The charging/discharging of the ESS are considered dependent on scenarios of market prices and on scenarios of WP. The effectiveness of the proposed formulation is tested by comparison of case studies using data from the Iberian Electricity Market. The comparison is in favour of the proposed consideration of stochasticity. (shrink)

Tarski 1968 makes a move in the course of providing an account of ?definitionally equivalent? classes of algebras with a businesslike lack of fanfare and commentary, the significance of which may accordingly be lost on the casual reader. In ?1 we present this move as a response to a certain difficulty in the received account of what it is to define a function symbol (or ?operation symbol?). This difficulty, which presents itself as a minor technicality needing to be got around (...) especially for the case of symbols for zero-place functions (for ?distinguished elements?), has repercussions?not widely recognised?for the account of functional completeness in sentential logic. A similarly stark comment in Church 1956 reveals an appreciation of this difficulty, though not every subsequent author on the topic has taken the point. We fill out this side of the picture in ?2. The discussion of functional completeness in ?2 is supplemented by some remarks on what is involved in defining a connective, which have been included in an Appendix. The emphasis throughout is on conceptual clarification rather than on proving theorems, and the main body of the paper may be regarded as an elaboration on the remarks just mentioned by Tarski and Church. The Appendix (?3) is intended to be similarly clarificatory, though this time with some corrective intent, of remarks made in and about Makinson 1973. (shrink)

The adverse reaction to Hempel's 'ravens paradox' embodied in giving it that description is compared with the usual reaction of experimental subjects to the Wason selection task.

We illustrate, with three examples, the interaction between boolean and modal connectives by looking at the role of truth-functional reasoning in the provision of completeness proofs for normal modal logics. The first example (§ 1) is of a logic (more accurately: range of logics) which is incomplete in the sense of being determined by no class of Kripke frames, where the incompleteness is entirely due to the lack of boolean negation amongst the underlying non-modal connectives. The second example (§ 2) (...) focusses on the breakdown, in the absence of boolean disjunction, of the usual canonical model argument for the logic of dense Kripke frames, though a proof of incompleteness with respect to the Kripke semantics is not offered. An alternative semantic account is developed, in terms of which a completeness proof can be given, and this is used (§ 3) in the discussion of the third example, a bimodal logic which is, as with the first example, provably incomplete in terms of the Kripke semantics, the incompleteness being due to the lack of disjunction (as a primitive or defined boolean connective). (shrink)

The sources of the real conflict between science and various kinds of undertakings in occultism pretending to be science date back to the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries, when modern scientific method was barely taking shape. The natural philosophy of the 16th century, which put forth natural magic in place of divine magic, was the ideological antipode of the new science in process of formation. The pantheistic reinterpretation of monotheistic Christian creationism is a characteristic feature (...) of constructs in natural philosophy with their striving toward maximal substantialization of the nonmaterial. Thus, for example, the rationalist mystic of natural philosophy, Girolamo Cardano, returns in his work to the medieval notion of the world soul, but understands by it an entirely material substance which he identifies with light and heat. (shrink)