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)

Hegel was one of the philosophers, who seemingly paid only little attention to the conceptual problems of aetiology. The paper deals especially with those parts of his work, in which Hegel sheds light particularly on these problems. It examines a evaluates Hegel's conception of interconnection between entities such as reality, essence, necessity, appearance and causality . A special attention is paid to the question of "causa sui" as inherently related to the problem of mutual causation. The paper shows many methodological (...) dangers as well as the lessons, we can still draw from Hegel's aetiological reflections. (shrink)

We consider the modal logic of non-contingency in a general setting, without making special assumptions about the accessibility relation. The basic logic in this setting is axiomatized, and some of its extensions are discussed, with special attention to the expressive weakness of the language whose sole modal primitive is non-contingency , by comparison with the usual language based on necessity.

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)

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)

A.N. Prior once showed that on certain apparently reasonable assumptions, a thesis sometimes associated with the name of Hume to the effect that no set of factual statements can ever entail an evaluative statement, is quite untenable. We assume only that there is at least one statement of each kind, and that the negation of a factual statement is factual — a principle we may call ‘N'. Now consider the disjunction F V E of some factual with some evaluative statement. (...) Since the disjunction is entailed by F, a factual statement, it must, if principle H is correct, be classified as factual. But by N, ∽ F is also factual, and this together with F V E entails E, thus violating H since E was exhypothesi an evaluative statement. (shrink)

SummaryIf you know you can recognise positive instances of a property, can you use this knowledge so as to be able to recognise also its negative instances? This is the question to be adressed.

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.

A purported axiomatization, by P. Gärdenfors, of intuitionistic propositional logic is shown to be incomplete, and that the mistaken claim to completeness is seen to result from carelessness in the choice of primitive logical vocabulary. This leads to a consideration of various ways of conceiving the distinction between primitive and defined vocabularies, along with the bearing of these differences on such matters as are discussed in connection with Gärdenfors.

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)