The discipline of nursing has long maintained that is has a unique contribution to make within the health care arena. This assertion of uniqueness lies in great part in the discipline's claim to a distinct body of knowledge. Nursing knowledge is characterized by diverse and multiple forms of knowing and underpins the work of all nurses, regardless of field of practice. Unfortunately, it has been challenging for the discipline to take full ownership of its epistemological diversity, largely due to factors (...) such as competing worldviews, and ideological and binary positioning. A philosophical middle ground stance is proposed as a way for the discipline to contemplate, discuss and develop nursing knowledge; a middle space that provides the freedom to consider competing worldviews while still allowing for the discipline to fully express itself in all of its epistemological diversity. In being able to enact its multiple forms of knowledge in a creative and open space that is open to different ideas and worldviews, not only can nursing take full ownership of its practice and its unique knowledge, it can also demonstrate how best to navigate an increasingly polarized world. In a world that is increasingly fixated on binary solutions and dualistic points of view, it is time for nursing to celebrate its epistemological diversity. (shrink)

A multimodal person representation contains information about what a person looks like and what a person sounds like. However, little is known about how children form these face-voice mappings. Here, we explored the possibility that two cognitive tools that guide word learning, a one-to-one mapping bias and fast mapping, also guide children’s learning about faces and voices. We taught 4- and 5-year-olds mappings between three individual faces and voices, then presented them with new faces and voices. In Experiment 1, we (...) found that children rapidly learned face-voice mappings from just a few exposures, and furthermore spontaneously mapped novel faces to novel voices using a one-to-one mapping bias (that each face can produce only one voice). In Experiment 2, we found that children’s face-voice representations are abstract, generalizing to novel tokens of a person. In Experiment 3, we found that children retained in memory the face-voice mappings that they had generated via inference (i.e., they showed evidence of fast mapping), and used these newly formed representations to generate further mappings between new faces and voices. These findings suggest that preschoolers’ rapid learning about faces and voices may be aided by biases that are similar to those that support word learning. (shrink)

This paper discusses verse 1074 of the Suttanipāta’s Upasīvamāṇavapucchā. While various interpretations of the verse are possible due to a lack of textual sources to draw from for interpretation, I attempt to understand this verse—which describes the state of nibbāna using the metaphor of an extinguished fire—through a philological examination of the text itself and other contemporary ones. Specifically, I focus on whether the verse implies that nibbāna takes place in the present life or at and after the end of (...) life by examining the compound nāmakāya and the phrase atthaṃ paleti that appear in it. Arguing that the former term is a dvandva meaning “name-and-body” and that the latter means “goes down”, I conclude that in this verse the Buddha is discussing nibbāna at and after the end of life. However, I do not deny that different interpretations are possible. When dealing with an ancient verse, the interpretation of one word can affect one’s understanding of the verse itself or the sutta overall, possibly leading to perspectives on early Buddhist thought completely different from the original meaning or original intention of the author of the sutta. Taking this into consideration, this paper adopts a meticulous approach to philologically examining early Pāli texts. (shrink)

Two new modes of thinking have spread through systematics in the twentieth century. Both have deep historical roots, but they have been widely accepted only during this century. Population thinking overtook the field in the early part of the century, culminating in the full development of population systematics in the 1930s and 1940s, and the subsequent growth of the entire field of population biology. Population thinking rejects the idea that each species has a natural type (as the earlier essentialist view (...) had assumed), and instead sees every species as a varying population of interbreeding individuals. Tree thinking has spread through the field since the 1960s with the development of phylogenetic systematics. Tree thinking recognizes that species are not independent replicates within a class (as earlier group thinkers had tended to see them), but are instead interconnected parts of an evolutionary tree. It lays emphasis on the explanation of evolutionary events in the context of a tree, rather than on the states exhibited by collections of species, and it sees evolutionary history as a story of divergence rather than a story of development. Just as population thinking gave rise to the new field of population biology, so tree thinking is giving rise to the new field of phylogenetic biology. (shrink)

‘The Natural System’ is the abstract notion of the order in living diversity. The richness and complexity of this notion is revealed by the diversity of representations of the Natural System drawn by ornithologists in the Nineteenth Century. These representations varied in overall form from stars, to circles, to maps, to evolutionary trees and cross-sections through trees. They differed in their depiction of affinity, analogy, continuity, directionality, symmetry, reticulation and branching, evolution, and morphological convergence and divergence. Some representations were two-dimensional, (...) and some were three-dimensional; n-dimensional representations were discussed but never illustrated. The study of diagrammatic representations of the Natural System is made difficult by the frequent failure of authors to discuss them in their texts, and by the consequent problem of distinguishing features which carried meaning from arbitrary features and printing conventions which did not. Many of the systematics controversies of the last thirty years have their roots in the conceptual problems which surrounded the Natural System in the late 1800s, problems which were left unresolved when interest in higher-level systematics declined at the turn of this century. (shrink)

In recent work MacPherson argues that the standard method of modeling belief logically, as a necessity operator in a modal logic, is doomed to fail. The problem with normal modal logics as logics of belief is that they treat believers as "ideal" in unrealistic ways (i.e., as omnidoxastic); however, similar problems re-emerge for candidate non-normal logics. The authors argue that logics used to model belief in artificial intelligence (AI) are also flawed in this way. But for AI systems, omnidoxasticity is (...) impossible because of their finite nature, and this fact can be exploited to produce operational models of fallible belief. The relevance of this point to various philosophical views about belief is discussed. (shrink)

This book argues that the novelist Joseph Conrad's work speaks directly to us in a way that none of his contemporaries can. Conrad’s scepticism, pessimism, emphasis on the importance and fragility of community, and the difficulties of escaping our history are important tools for understanding the political world in which we live. He is prepared to face a future where progress is not inevitable, where actions have unintended consequences, and where we cannot know the contexts in which we act. _Heart (...) of Darkness_ uncovers the rotten core of the Eurocentric myth of imperialism as a way of bringing enlightenment to 'native peoples’ – lessons which are relevant once more as the Iraq debacle has undermined the claims of liberal democracy to universal significance. The result can hardly be called a political programme, but Conrad’s work is clearly suggestive of a sceptical conservatism of the sort described by the author in his 2005 book _After Blair: Conservatism Beyond Thatcher_. The difficult part of a Conradian philosophy is the profundity of his pessimism – far greater than Oakeshott, with whom Conrad does share some similarities. Conrad’s work poses the question of how far we as a society are prepared to face the consequences of our ignorance. (shrink)

Classifications of animals and plants have long been represented by hierarchical lists of taxa, but occasional authors have drawn diagrammatic versions of their classifications in an attempt to better depict the "natural relationships" of their organisms. Ornithologists in 19th-century Britain produced and pioneered many types of classificatory diagrams, and these fall into three groups: (a) the quinarian systems of Vigors and Swainson (1820s and 1830s); (b) the "maps" of Strickland and Wallace (1840s and 1850s); and (c) the evolutionary diagrams of (...) the post-Darwin authors (1860 on). The quinarians distinguished between affinity and analogy and used both in their classifications, whereas Strickland rejected the quinarians' belief in numerical regularity and their use of analogy. Wallace's "maps" are easily given an evolutionary interpretation, and his approach was taken up and modified by later evolutionary anatomists. Sharpe returned to Strickland's methods and merely appended a superficial evolutionary interpretation. Contrary to common belief systematics has a rich conceptual history, and many of the conceptual developments in 19th-century systematics were made by ornithologists. (shrink)

Discussions of the theory and practice of systematics and evolutionary biology have heretofore revolved around the views of philosophers of science. I reexamine these issues from the different perspective of the philosophy of history. Just as philosophers of history distinguish between chronicle (non-interpretive or non-explanatory writing) and narrative history (interpretive or explanatory writing), I distinguish between evolutionary chronicle (cladograms, broadly construed) and narrative evolutionary history. Systematics is the discipline which estimates the evolutionary chronicle. ¶ Explanations of the events described in (...) the evolutionary chronicle are not of the covering-law type described by philosophers of science, but rather of the how-possibly, continuous series, and integrating types described by philosophers of history. Pre-evolutionary explanations of states (in contrast to chroniclar events) are still widespread in "evolutionary" biology, however, because evolutionary chronicles are in general poorly known. To the extent that chronicles are known, the narrative evolutionary histories based on them are structured like conventional historical narratives, in that they treat their central subjects as ontological individuals. This conventional treatment is incorrect. The central subjects of evolutionary narratives are clades, branched entities which have some of the properties of individuals and some of the properties of classes. Our unconscious treatment of the subjects of evolutionary narratives as individuals has been the cause of erroneous notions of progress in evolution, and of views that taxa "develop" ontogenetically in ways analogous to individual organisms. We must rewrite our narrative evolutionary histories so that they properly represent the branching nature of evolution, and we must reframe our evolutionary philosophies so that they properly reflect the historical nature of our subject. (shrink)

Accounts of the evolutionary past have as much in common with works of narrative history as they do with works of science. Awareness of the narrative character of evolutionary writing leads to the discovery of a host of fascinating and hitherto unrecognized problems in the representation of evolutionary history, problems associated with the writing of narrative. These problems include selective attention, narrative perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, differential resolution, and the establishment of a canon of important events. The narrative aspects of (...) evolutionary writing, however, which promote linearity and cohesiveness in conventional stories, conflict with the underlying chronicle of evolution, which is not linear, but branched, and which does not cohere, but diverges. The impulse to narrate is so great, however, and is so strongly reinforced by traditional schemes of taxonomic attention, that natural historians have more often abandoned the diverging tree than they have abandoned the narrative mode of representation. If we are to understand the true nature of the evolutionary past then we must adopt tree thinking, and develop new and creative ways, both narrative and non-narrative, of telling the history of life. (shrink)

The same attitudes that allowed a significant increase in the anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations that are causing climate change are the same attitudes that are retarding an adequate ethical response to the impact that climate change is having on both human populations and the rest of the planet. The industrialized nations of the West paid little attention during the past three centuries to the impacts that their economies and cultures were having on the environment, both locally and globally. There (...) was an underlying belief that the planet could indefinitely absorb the wastes of manufacturing, and the natural resources that were fuelling industrialization were seemingly endless if not actually .. (shrink)

七代目子孫が初めて語る...江戸時代、600以上の荒廃した農村を復興させた金次郎のとっておきの教え。運命を高める55の金言。.

Stephen Edelston Toulmin has been one of the most wide-ranging scholars of the twentieth century. He has written extensively on the history and philosophy of the physical, biological, and historical sciences, as well as on logic, ethics, and rhetoric. This listing of more than 100 publications by and about Toulmin is intended to encourage those scholars who may have come to Toulmin's work from only one direction to explore the full range of his research and writing across many different disciplines.