Base of the pyramid ventures seek to create “mutual value” for themselves and poor communities, but often use business models unadapted for the BoP context, and have been less successful than hoped. Sustainable business models’ multi-stakeholder lens offers a promising alternative path to mutual value, but BoP-based SBM studies are scarce. This single case study explores whether and how SBM characteristics manifest in the business model and value outcomes of Habi, a Manila footwear company successfully creating mutual value with BoP (...) suppliers. We find SBM characteristics underpin Habi’s dual-structure business model and success in four ways: viewing profits as a tool for community development resulted in designing both product and business model around community strengths; understanding communities as systems helped Habi address the complexities of poverty; balancing short-term business needs with a long-term, slow-growth approach led to their choice of investors; and implementing community value capture mechanisms ensured enduring community benefit. (shrink)

Our normal discourse is replete with discussion of things which do not exist — the objects of fiction, of illusion and hallucination, of religious worship, of misguided fears and other intentional states. Let us call such discourse empty. How to account for the meaning of empty discourse, and such truth values as its statements have, are perennial and thorny philosophical topics. Many positions are well known; in this book of five chapters Azzouni advocates another. Empty discourse is literally about nothing; (...) nonetheless, one may give an account of how its sentences are both meaningful and have appropriate truth values. In the first three chapters, the ideas are applied to the objects of mathematics, hallucination, and fiction, respectively. Chapter 5 fills out the picture with a discussion of truth-conditional semantics. Chapter 4 broaches the question of how all this is relevant to a broader question: the unity of the sciences.The book is ingenious and clearly argued.1 There are many perceptive discussions — for example, of the way we talk about fictional objects, and about hallucination. And although it is not the main aim of the book, it mounts a number of telling arguments against alternative positions. And even if the book did not persuade at least this reader of its main thesis, it has estabished a genuinely novel and intriguing position …. (shrink)

Truths about non-existent things Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-3 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9583-8 Authors Peter Forrest, Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Ontology without Borders, by AzzouniJody. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xxv + 279.

According to Jody Azzouni’s “deflationary nominalism,” the singular terms of mathematical language applied or unapplied to science refer to nothing at all. What does exist, Azzouni claims, must satisfy the quaternary condition he calls “thick epistemic access” (TEA). In this paper I argue that TEA surreptitiously reifies some mathematical entities. The mathematical entity that I take TEA to reify is the Fourier harmonic, an infinite-duration monochromatic sinusoid applied throughout engineering and physics. I defend the reality of the harmonic, in Azzouni’s (...) account, not by satisfying all four TEA conditions with respect to it, but by showing that the harmonic renders satisfiable the TEA condition called “grounding,” specifically in Azzouni’s (Talking about nothing: numbers, hallucinations, and fictions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) example of a human visually perceiving a vase. The harmonic thereby plays what Azzouni calls an “epistemic role,” and merits inclusion in the deflationary nominalist ontology. Against the “coding” objection of Azzouni and Bueno (Br J Philos Sci 67:781–816, 2016), which would nominalize the harmonic to nonexistent status, I reply that in the context of grounding, the coding objection begs the question. (shrink)

If you travel through airports, you can’t help but notice it. Jodi Picoult’s novels are everywhere. From Charlotte to Kansas City to Los Angeles, airport bookstores are consistently stocked with three or four or more of her most recent heavy volumes of fiction. Read one and you might mutter that it seems designed for a relatively mindless flight from one coast to the other. Read several and you might agree with National Public Radio’s disparaging view that the books are (...) “lurid tales of family strife . . . garnished heavily with medical jargon, legalese, and a punitive finger pointed at a mother.” It’s not hard to find negative comments about Picoult’s novels. Janet Maslin, writing for the New York .. (shrink)

On October 5th, 2017, the New York Times published an article that would establish the #MeToo movement and help millions of women across the globe to raise their voice and share their stories of sexual harassment, aggression and/or violence. If Harvey Weinstein was the main accused, he was, actually, the epitome of a systemic, as well as an endemic, issue that didn’t stop at the studios’ doors and was made possible thanks to a rather surprising and quite unexpected accomplice. (...) In fact, “Hollywood’s open secret” has been well-guarded by, among other things, the contract and its law. In the eyes of a contract law specialist, whether it be a man or a woman, the major highlight of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s article rests in their ability to have brought to light contracts—the, now, infamous and highly criticised “NDAs” (non-disclosure agreements)—that ensured Weinstein the freedom to buy his victims’ silence. The first goal of this essay is trying to understand, on the one hand, how could that be possible and, on the other hand, explain to a larger audience how a tool usually used for economic and commercial purposes could have been diverted from its traditional use. It also aims to present measures that have been adopted in the United States to fight these agreements, and imagine what could they be in a country such as France. Although these types of “NDAs” don’t seem to find their equivalent in the French public sphere, it is still helpful to ponder over remedies offered by the new French law of contract shall these contracts ever come to exist… or arise. (shrink)

The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history…. You watch. The time has come. Women are gonna take charge of society.I think [#MeToo] will have staying power because people, and not only women, men as well as women, realize how wrong the behavior was and how it subordinated women. So we shall see, but my prediction is that it is here to stay.As the story is told, #MeToo arrived in a kairotic moment. Jodi Kantor (...) and Megan Twohey's 5 October 2017 New York Times exposé of the methods Harvey Weinstein used to systematically harass and subsequently silence women in the entertainment industry opened the proverbial floodgates. Ten days later, actor Alyssa... (shrink)

Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia Trans. Jody Gladding European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman New York: Columbia UP, 2003 ISBN 0-231-12514-3.

Tim Crane characterizes the cognitive role of singular thought via singular mental files: the application of such files to more than one object is senseless. As many do, he thus stresses the contrast between ‘singular’ and ‘general’. I give a counterexample, plurally-directed singular thought, and I offer alternative characterizations of singular thought—better described as ‘objects-directed thought’—initially in terms of the defeasibility of the descriptions associated with one's thinking of an object, and then more broadly in terms of whether descriptions of (...) the object or description-independent epistemic routes to the object are primarily operative in an agent's thinking. (shrink)

If we must take mathematical statements to be true, must we also believe in the existence of abstract eternal invisible mathematical objects accessible only by the power of pure thought? Jody Azzouni says no, and he claims that the way to escape such commitments is to accept true statements which are about objects that don't exist in any sense at all. Azzouni illustrates what the metaphysical landscape looks like once we avoid a militant Realism which forces our commitment to anything (...) that our theories quantify. Escaping metaphysical straitjackets, while retaining the insight that some truths are about objects that do exist, Azzouni says that we can sort scientifically-given objects into two categories: ones which exist, and to which we forge instrumental access in order to learn their properties, and ones which do not, that is, which are made up in exactly the same sense that fictional objects are. He offers as a case study a small portion of Newtonian physics, and one result of his classification of its ontological commitments, is that it does not commit us to absolute space and time. (shrink)

Mistaken reasons for thinking diagrammatic proofs aren't rigorous are explored. The main result is that a confusion between the contents of a proof procedure (what's expressed by the referential elements in a proof procedure) and the unarticulated mathematical aspects of a proof procedure (how that proof procedure is enabled) gives the impression that diagrammatic proofs are less rigorous than language proofs. An additional (and independent) factor is treating the impossibility of naturally generalizing a diagrammatic proof procedure as an indication of (...) lack of rigor. (shrink)

Most philosophers of mathematics try to show either that the sort of knowledge mathematicians have is similar to the sort of knowledge specialists in the empirical sciences have or that the kind of knowledge mathematicians have, although apparently about objects such as numbers, sets, and so on, isn't really about those sorts of things as well. Jody Azzouni argues that mathematical knowledge really is a special kind of knowledge with its own special means of gathering evidence. He analyses the linguistic (...) pitfalls and misperceptions philosophers in this field are often prone to, and explores the misapplications of epistemic principles from the empirical sciences to the exact sciences. What emerges is a picture of mathematics both sensitive to mathematical practice, and to the ontological and epistemological issues that concern philosophers. (shrink)

This article examines the potential of Action Research informed by Dewey’s pragmatism as a research methodology in the social sciences. Not only a philosophical orientation, pragmatism is also a powerful mode of inquiry. When combined with the democratic research approach of Action Research, Deweyan pragmatism has great potential to shed light on educational and other social science questions, forward social change, and enact Dewey’s vision of radical social democracy. Although Dewey’s philosophy, one could argue, has never been mainstream in education (...) and in research, the combination of Deweyan philosophy and Action Research has the potential to revive interest in Dewey’s work and serve as an example of Deweyan .. (shrink)

Kant discovered a philosophical problem with mathematical proof. Despite being a priori , its methodology involves more than analytic truth. But what else is involved? This problem is widely taken to have been solved by Frege’s extension of logic beyond its restricted (and largely Aristotelian) form. Nevertheless, a successor problem remains: both traditional and contemporary (classical) mathematical proofs, although conforming to the norms of contemporary (classical) logic, never were, and still aren’t, executed by mathematicians in a way that transparently reveals (...) why these proofs—written in the vernacular to this very day—succeed in conforming to those norms. (shrink)

In recent years, autopoietic enactivism has been used to address persistent conceptual problems in psychiatry, such as the problem of demarcating disorder, that other models thus far have failed to overcome. There appear to be three main enactive accounts of psychopathology with subtle, although not incompatible, differences: Maiesecharacterizes disorder as distinct disruptions in autonomy and agency; Nielsen characterizes disorder as behaviors that relevantly conflict with the functional norms of an individual; De Haan emphasizes patterns of disordered sense-making, that are transformed (...) through the existential dimension. Given that these accounts are intended to provide not only an ontologically richer account of psychopathology but also reduce the stigma experienced by individuals with mental disorders by accounting for lived experience, a critical analysis of these approaches is needed. I will provide a problematization of enactive accounts of mental disorder, showing that this particular framework does not, as it stands, necessarily reduce the harm and suffering experienced by individuals with mental disorder because of its ontological openness; enactivism leaves much to be interpreted and applied by the clinician (or patient) such that practical and ethical problems in its use arise. (shrink)

Philosophers are very fond of making non-factualist claims—claims to the effect that there is no fact of the matter as to whether something is the case. But can these claims be coherently stated in the context of classical logic? Some care is needed here, we argue, otherwise one ends up denying a tautology or embracing a contradiction. In the end, we think there are only two strategies available to someone who wants to be a non-factualist about something, and remain within (...) the province of classical logic. But one of these strategies is rather controversial, and the other requires substantially more work than is often supposed. Being a non-factualist is no easy business, and it may not be the most philosophically perspicuous way to go. (shrink)

The form of nominalism known as 'mathematical fictionalism' is examined and found wanting, mainly on grounds that go back to an early antinominalist work of Rudolf Carnap that has unfortunately not been paid sufficient attention by more recent writers.

Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way, what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized but nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot avoid talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to say things about Pegasus (...) or about hallucinated objects that are true, such as "Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flying horse," or "That elf I'm now hallucinating over there is wearing blue shoes." Standard contemporary metaphysical views and semantic analyses of singular idioms on offer in contemporary philosophy of language have not successfully accommodated these routine practices of saying true and false things about the nonexistent while simultaneously honoring the insight that such things do not exist in any way at all. That is, philosophers often feel driven to claim that such objects do exist, or they claim that all our talk isn't genuine truth-apt talk, but only pretence. This book reconfigures metaphysics in radical ways that allow the accommodation of our ordinary ways of speaking of what does not exist while retaining the absolutely crucial presupposition that such objects exist in no way at all, have no properties, and so are not the truth-makers for the truths and falsities that are about them. (shrink)

Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the cognitive and ethical role of emotion, particularly empathy, in medical practice. The author explains how doctors can use empathy in diagnosing and treating patients without jeopardizing their objectivity or projecting their own values on to patients.

Jody Azzouni argues that we involuntarily experience certain physical items, certain products of human actions, and certain human actions themselves as having meaning-properties. We understand these items as possessing meaning or as having truth values. For example, a sign on a door reading "Drinks Inside" strikes native English speakers as referring to liquids in the room behind the door. The sign has a truth value--if no drinks are found in the room, the sign is misleading. Someone pointing in a direction (...) has the same effect: we experience her gesture as significant. Azzouni does not suggest that we don't recognize the expectations or intentions of speakers ; we do recognize that the person pointing in a certain direction intends for us to understand her gesture's significance. Nevertheless, Azzouni asserts that we experience that gesture as having significance independent of her intentions. The gesture is meaningful on its own. The same is true of language, both spoken and written. We experience the meanings of language artifacts as independent of their makers' intentions in the same way that we experience an object's shape as a property independent of the object's color. There is a distinctive phenomenology to the experience of understanding language, and Semantic Perception shows how this phenomenology can be brought to bear as evidence for and against competing theories of language. (shrink)

When ordinary people - mathematicians among them - take something to follow from something else, they are exposing the backbone of our self-ascribed ability to reason. Jody Azzouni investigates the connection between that ordinary notion of consequence and the formal analogues invented by logicians. One claim of the book is that, despite our apparent intuitive grasp of consequence, we do not introspect rules by which we reason, nor do we grasp the scope and range of the domain, as it were, (...) of our reasoning. This point is illustrated with a close analysis of a paradigmatic case of ordinary reasoning: mathematical proof. (shrink)

_Knowledge and Reference in Empirical Science_ is a fascinating study of the bounds between science and language: in what sense, and of what, does science provide knowledge? Is science an instrument only distantly related to what's real? Can the language of science be used to adequately describe the truth? In this book, Jodi Azziouni investigates the technology of science - the actual forging and exploiting of causal links, between ourselves and what we endeavor to know and understand.