A social conception of science -- The pursuit of forms -- Beyond the doctrine of signs -- Structures of mediation -- Signs in action -- Prospects of communication -- From a rhetorical point of view.

The contribution of this work is a classification of corporate social action underlying the Social Ratings Data compiled by Kinder Lydenburg Domini Analytics, Inc. We compare extant typologies of corporate social action to the results of our exploratory factor analysis. Our findings indicate four distinct latent constructs that bear resemblance to concepts discussed in prior literature. Akey finding of our research is that positive and negative social action are both empirically and conceptually distinct constructs and should not be combined in (...) future research. Additionally, we recommend that some prior research results be reconsidered to determine whether these newly derived measures might clarify some previous findings. (shrink)

BackgroundHuman embryonic stem cells as a source for the development of advanced therapy medicinal products are considered for treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Research has shown promising results and opened an avenue of great importance for patients who currently lack a disease modifying therapy. The use of hESC has given rise to moral concerns and been the focus of often heated debates on the moral status of human embryos. Approval for marketing is still pending.ObjectiveTo Investigate the perspectives and concerns of patients (...) with PD, patients being the directly concerned stakeholders in the ethical discussion.MethodsQualitative semi-structured interviews related to this new therapy in seventeen patients from two Swedish cities.ResultsThe participants expressed various interests related to the use of human embryos for development of medicinal therapies; however, overall, they were positive towards the use of hESC for treatment of PD. It was deemed important that the donating woman or couple made the choice to donate embryos voluntarily. Furthermore, there were concerns that the industry does not always prioritise the patient over profit; thus, transparency was seen as important. (shrink)

Two views of scientific theories dominated the philosophy of science during the twentieth century, the syntactic view of the logical empiricists and the semantic view of their successors. I show that neither view is adequate to provide a proper understanding of the connections that exist between theories at different times. I outline a new approach, a hybrid of the two, that provides the right structural connection between earlier and later theories, and that takes due account of the importance of the (...) mathematical models of a theory and of the various distinct formulations that pick out these models. (shrink)

Measures of happiness are increasingly being used throughout the social sciences. While these measures have attracted numerous types of criticisms, a crucial aspect of these measures has been left largely unexplored—their calibration. Using Eran Tal’s recently developed notion of calibration we argue first that the prospect of continued calibration of happiness measures is crucial for the science of happiness, and second, that continued calibration of happiness measures faces a particular problem—The Two Unknowns Problem. The Two Unknowns Problem relies on the (...) claim that individuals are necessarily a part of the measurement apparatus in first person measures of happiness, and the claim that we have no reason to believe that the evaluation standards people employ are invariant across individuals and time. We argue that calibrating happiness measures therefore involves solving an equation with two unknowns—an individual’s degree of happiness, and their evaluation standards—which is, generally, not possible. Third, we consider two possible escape routes from this problem and we suggest that the most promising route requires yet unexplored empirical and theoretical work on linking happiness to behavioral or neural evidence. (shrink)

An ambitious new model of experimentation that will reorient our understanding of the key features of experimental practice. What is experimental knowledge, and how do we get it? While there is general agreement that experiment is a crucial source of scientific knowledge, how experiment generates that knowledge is far more contentious. In this book, philosopher of science James Mattingly explains how experiments function. Specifically, he discusses what it is about experimental practice that transforms observations of what may be very localized, (...) particular, isolated systems into what may be global, general, integrated empirical knowledge. Mattingly argues that the purpose of experimentation is the same as the purpose of any other knowledge-generating enterprise—to change the state of information of the knower. This trivial-seeming point has a non-trivial consequence: to understand a knowledge-generating enterprise, we should follow the flow of information. Therefore, the account of experimental knowledge Mattingly provides is based on understanding how information flows in experiments: what facilitates that flow, what hinders it, and what characteristics allow it to flow from system to system, into the heads of researchers, and finally into our store of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Evolutionary theodicies are attempts to explain how the enormous amounts of suffering, premature death and extinction inherent in the evolutionary process can be reconciled with belief in a loving and almighty God. A common strategy in this area is to argue that certain very valuable creaturely attributes could only be exemplified by creatures that are produced by a partly random and uncontrolled process of evolution. Evolution, in other words, was the only possible way for God to create these kinds of (...) creatures. This article presents and examines two versions of the “only way”-argument. The anthropocentric version tries to justify God’s use of evolution by reference to the value of human freedom, and argues that freedom presupposes that God lets go of full control over the process of creation . The non-anthropocentric version presents a similar argument with respect to more inclusive creaturely properties, such as that of being “truly other” than God, or of being a “creaturely self” with a certain degree of autonomy in relation to God . With the help of a number of thought-experiments of the “Twin-Earth”-type, the author argues that both the anthropocentric and the non-anthropocentric only way-arguments fail. (shrink)

According to the alternative semantics for focus, the semantic reflec of intonational focus is a second semantic value, which in the case of a sentence is a set of propositions. We examine a range of semantic and pragmatic applications of the theory, and extract a unitary principle specifying how the focus semantic value interacts with semantic and pragmatic processes. A strong version of the theory has the effect of making lexical or construction-specific stipulation of a focus-related effect in association-with-focus constructions (...) impossible. Furthermore, while focus has a uniform import, the sources of meaning differences in association with focus are various. (shrink)

SummaryHow can the immense amount of suffering and waste inherent in the evolutionary process be reconciled with the existence of a perfectly good and omnipotent God? A widely embraced proposal in the area of “evolutionary theodicy” is the so-called “Only Way”-argument. This argument contends that certain valuable goods – in particular, creaturely independence and human freedom – can only come about through a genuinely indeterministic and partly uncontrolled process of evolution. In a previous article, I have argued that the “Only (...) Way”-argument can be defeated by a “Twin Earth”-thought experiment: If God is omnipotent, he could have created – directly, without evolution – creatures that are molecule-for-molecule identical to those that he actually created through evolution. If the creatures that he actually created have freedom and independence, there is no valid reason to deny that the non-evolved “twin creatures” would also be free and independent. Recently, Eikrem and Søvik have suggested a way of blocking my Twin Earth-argument by appealing to the distinction between type-values and token-values. While ES admit that the Twin Earth-argument shows the non-necessity of evolution for the existence of certain type-goods, they argue that an evolutionary creation can be justified by appeal to valuable token-goods that could not have existed without evolution. In this article, I respond to ES’s token-goods argument by showing that it is incompatible with a basic presupposition of “Only Way” evolutionary theodicies, namely the claim that the evolutionary process is genuinely indeterministic and partly uncontrolled. (shrink)

We synthesize literature from organization theory and political sociology to develop a conceptual lens from which organizing can be examined as a process whereby institutional structures are changed in ways similar to how social movements change entire societies. Implied is that hegemonic power structures maintain existing institutional structures by either resisting insurgencies or by making them seem senseless in the first place.

Part of the standard protection of decisionally incapacitated research subjects is a prohibition against enrolling them unless surrogate decision makers authorize it. A common view is that surrogates primarily ought to make their decisions based on what the decisionally incapacitated subject would have wanted regarding research participation. However, empirical studies indicate that surrogate predictions about such preferences are not very accurate. The focus of this article is the significance of surrogate accuracy in the context of research that is not expected (...) to benefit the research subject. We identify three morally relevant asymmetries between being enrolled and not being enrolled in such non-beneficial research, and conclude that when there is a non-negligible probability that surrogates’ predictions are wrong, it will generally be better to err on the side of not authorizing enrollment. (shrink)

This article examines the contention that the central concepts of C. S. Peirce’s semeiotic are inherently communicational. It is argued that the Peircean approach avoids the pitfalls of objectivism and constructivism, rendering the sign-user neither a passive recipient nor an omnipotent creator of meaning. Consequently, semeiotic may serve as a useful general framework for studies of learning processes.

Reflexive Methodology established itself as a groundbreaking success, providing researchers with an invaluable guide to a central problem in research methodology – how to put field research and interpretations in perspective, paying attention to the interpretive, political, and rhetorical nature of empirical research. Now thoroughly updated, the Second Edition includes a new chapter on positivism, social constructionism, and critical realism, and offers new conclusions on the applications of methodology. It provides further illustrations and updates that build on the acclaimed and (...) successful First Edition. (shrink)

Decision making for incompetent patients is a much-discussed topic in bioethics. According to one influential decision making standard, the substituted judgment standard, a surrogate decision maker ought to make the decision that the incompetent patient would have made, had he or she been competent. Empirical research has been conducted in order to find out whether surrogate decision makers are sufficiently good at doing their job, as this is defined by the substituted judgment standard. This research investigates to what extent surrogates (...) are able to predict what the patient would have preferred in the relevant circumstances. In this paper we address a methodological shortcoming evident in a significant number of studies. The mistake consists in categorizing responses that only express uncertainty as predictions that the patient would be positive to treatment, on the grounds that the clinical default is to provide treatment unless it is refused. We argue that this practice is based on confusion and that it risks damaging the research on surrogate accuracy. (shrink)

This article analyses the orientation of gaze as a significant communicative resource in televised political interviews. The study explores how interviewees use their gaze, in coordination with talk, in receiving and answering adversarial questions. It is guided by conversation analysis, Goffman’s work on gaze in interaction, and the approach on embodied actions developed primarily by Goodwin. Gaze is described as a flexible recipient and speaker resource available for stance-taking, the downgrading and upgrading of actions, and the claiming of the floor. (...) The study is based on taped and transcribed data from two formats of election campaign interviews on Swedish television, including 350 question and response sequences. (shrink)

Together with large biobanks of human samples, medical registries with aggregated data from many clinical centers are vital parts of an infrastructure for maintaining high standards of quality with regard to medical diagnosis and treatment. The rapid development in personalized medicine and pharmaco-genomics only underscores the future need for these infrastructures. However, registries and biobanks have been criticized as constituting great risks to individual privacy. In this article, I suggest that quality with regard to diagnosis and treatment is an inherent, (...) morally normative requirement of health care, and argue that quality concerns in this sense may be balanced with privacy concerns. (shrink)

Research on incompetent humans raises ethical challenges, especially when there is no direct benefit to these research subjects. Contemporary codes of research ethics typically require that such research must specifically serve to benefit the population to which the research subjects belong. The article critically examines this “same-population condition”, raising issues of both interpretation and moral justification. Of particular concern is the risk that the way in which the condition is articulated and rationalized in effect disguises or downplays the instrumentalization of (...) incompetent individuals. (shrink)

This article discusses the ethics of nuclear waste management in terms of the concept of responsibility for the harmful effects of modern technology. At present, the principle that every country and new generation should assume responsibility for the nuclear waste they produce is challenged by a globalised industry and the repositories of nuclear waste that have accumulated over the past fifty years and been left for future generations to manage. The basic premise of the article is that modern technology, particularly (...) nuclear power, calls for a new kind of responsibility that extends to future generations as well. This new concept of responsibility and the principles of long-term management of nuclear waste are set out and discussed in detail, with reference to Kant, Jaspers, Jonas, Peter Kemp and others. (shrink)

This reissued volume by Isaiah Berlin, originally published in 1996, comprises primarily essays from the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s concerning political themes such as government repress...

In Peirce’s Account of Purposefulness, Gabriele Gava tackles one of the thorniest questions in Peirce research, namely the problem of Peirce’s relationship to Kantian philosophy. The leading argument of the book amounts to what may be the most sustained defence of a transcendental reading of Peirce’s thought since Karl-Otto Apel’s pioneering efforts. In pursuing this path, Gava is not exactly moving through uncharted terrain; but nor has he chosen the road most travelled in recent times. For...

Epigrams of Lingayat saints of the 16th century espousing the Advaita school in Hindu philosophy; transcribed from a palm-leaf manuscript preserved in the Karnatak University.

This chapter takes a look at the argument that is directly against a characterization of will as a “moment of choice”. This argument treats willing as a processual development. The chapter shows that willing can be viewed as a gradual change of orientation from one attentional target to another. In this chapter, thinking of will is a morally loaded process that is achieved through emotion work, thought, conversation, and a variety of other experiences. The chapter also briefly refers to recent (...) anthropological considerations of emotion, agency, and intention. (shrink)

For ages, medicine has had poor access to the fetus inside the mother's womb. But in relatively recent years, the human body has become transparent. The latest breakthroughs of technology have made it possible, from the very beginning of pregnancy, to consider the fetus as an individual who can be examined and sampled. His or her physician may now establish a diagnosis and prognosis and prescribe a treatment in the same way as in traditional medicine.