Analytical categories of scientific cultures have typically been used both exclusively and universally. For instance, when styles of scientific research are employed in attempts to understand and narrate science, styles alone are usually employed. This article is a thought experiment in interweaving categories. What would happen if rather than employ a single category, we instead investigated several categories simultaneously? What would we learn about the practices and theories, the agents and materials, and the political-technological impact of science if we analyzed (...) and applied styles, paradigms, and models simultaneously? I address these questions in general and for a specific case study: a brief history of systematics. (shrink)

This is the first book-length project to examine the relationship between blackness, queerness, and hip hop. Using aesthetics as its organizing lens, Hip Hop Heresies attends to the ways that hip hop cultural production in New York City from the 1970s through the first fifteen years of the 21st century produced hip hop cultural products (film, visual art, and music) that offer "queer articulations" of race, gender, and sexuality that are contrary to hegemonic ideas and representations of those categories in (...) hip hop production, as well as in writing about hip hop culture. (shrink)

Since van Fraassen first put forward the suggestive idea that many philosophical positions should be construed as ‘stances’ rather than factual beliefs, there have been various attempts to spell out precisely what a philosophical stance might be, and on what basis one should be adopted. In this paper I defend a particular account of stances, the view that they are pragmatically justified perspectives or ways of seeing the world, and compare it to some other accounts that have been offered. In (...) Sect. 2 I consider van Fraassen’s argument for construing empiricism as a stance, and look at some responses to it. In Sect. 3 I outline my conception of stances as perspectives or ways of seeing, and explain how stances so understood may be justified. I illustrate this conception by way of a discussion of the model pluralist position with respect to the units of selection debate in biology, and suggest that on the model pluralist view different perspectives on the units of selection, such as the gene’s eye view, are in fact van Fraassian stances. In Sect. 4 I discuss the view put forward by Teller and Chakravartty among others that stances should be understood as epistemic policies, and argue that it is consistent with the conception of stances as perspectives. In the final section I criticise Rowbottom’s attempt to assimilate stances to Kuhnian paradigms. I argue that he has overlooked some important disanalogies between stances and paradigms, so that the comparison obscures more than it reveals. (shrink)

Contemporary studies in unconscious cognition are essentially founded on dissociation, i.e., on how it dissociates with respect to conscious mental processes and representations. This is claimed to be in so many and diverse ways that one is often lost in dissociation. In order to reduce this state of confusion we here carry out two major tasks: based on the central distinction between cognitive processes and representations, we identify and isolate the main dissociation paradigms; we then critically analyze their key (...) tenets and reported findings. (shrink)

In view of the fact that culture-inclusive psychology has been eluded or relatively ignored by mainstream psychology, the movement of indigenous psychology is destined to develop a new model of man that incorporates both causal psychology and intentional psychology as suggested by Vygotsky . Following the principle of cultural psychology: “one mind, many mentalities” , the Mandala Model of Self and Face and Favor Model were constructed to represent the universal mechanisms of self and social interaction that can be applied (...) to any culture; both models can be used as conceptual frameworks for analyzing mentalities of people in any given culture. Taking research works from Foundations of Chinese Psychology: Confucian Social Relation as exemplars , this article illustrates how to construct culture-inclusive theories of Confucianism by multiple philosophical paradigms. The mechanism of culture-inclusive theory can be applied to explain qualitative research findings on lifeworld events of people in a particular society. It can also be utilized to predict results of quantitative research conducted to verify theoretical propositions in the scientific microworld by empirical methods. (shrink)

The Organ Donation Act 2019 has introduced an opt-out organ donor register in England, meaning that consent to the donation of organs upon death is presumed unless an objection during life was actively expressed. By assessing the rights of the dead over their organs, the sick to those same organs, and the role of consent in their requisition, this paper interrogates whether such paradigms for deceased organ donation are ethically justifiable. Where legal considerations are applicable, I focus on the (...) recent changes in England as a case in point; however, this paper ultimately challenges the justifiability of opt-out systems in any form, concluding that ethical solutions to organ shortage do not lie in opt-out systems of deceased organ procurement. (shrink)

Although the word 'sustainability' is used broadly, scientific approaches to sustainability fall into one of two competing paradigms. Following the influential Brundtland report of 1987. some theorists identify sustainability with some form of resource availability, and develop indicators for sustainability that stress capital depletion. This approach has spawned debates about the intersubstitutivity of capitals, with many environmental theorists arguing that at some point, depletion of natural capital cannot be offset by increases in human or social capital. The alternative approach (...) is grounded in stock and flow systems systems modeling, and defines sustainability through indicators that determine whether the system structure is robust (e.g. resists perturbation), resilient (recovers after disruption) and adaptive (capable of change in response to external conditions). Both paradigms have applications in economics and ecology. (shrink)

From the mid-1960s until the late 1980s, the well-known general philosophies of science of the time were applied to economics. The result was disappointing: none seemed to fit. This paper argues that this is due to a special feature of economics: it possesses ‘orientational paradigms’ in high number. Orientational paradigms are similar to Kuhn’s paradigms in that they are shared across scientific communities, but dissimilar to Kuhn’s paradigms in that they are not generally accepted as valid (...) guidelines for further research. As will be shown by several examples, orientational paradigms provide economics with common points of reference that support its epistemic coherence and make scientific discourse more easily possible across school boundaries. With the help of systematicity theory, a newer general philosophy of science, one can further elucidate the role of orientational paradigms with regard to scientific progress. (shrink)

In describing the flawless regularity of developmental processes and the correlation between changes at certain genetic loci and changes in morphology, biologists frequently employ two metaphors: that genes ‘control’ development, and that genomes embody ‘programs’ for development. Although these metaphors have an admirable sharpness and punch, they lead, when taken literally, to highly distorted pictures of developmental processes. A more balanced, and useful, view of the role of genes in development is that they act as suppliers of the material needs (...) of development and, in some instances, as context‐dependent catalysts of cellular changes, rather than as ‘controllers’ of developmental progress and direction. The consequences of adopting this alternative view of development are discussed. (shrink)

Starting from the hypothesis that the predominant church, religion and belief in Romania (i.e. the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Orthodox religion and the Orthodox belief) are paradigms that help understand politics, we will highlight in the present article three major aspects of the political phenomenon in post-communist Romania: de-symbolizing the democratic function, institutionalizing “democratism” and manifesting integralism in the public space. Our analysis is based on a communicational approach which postulates the conceptual oppositions as a fundament of understanding. The (...) interpretation of these oppositions has lead us to discovering a series of coherent actions, behaviors, facts, etc., but also a series of incoherent, at some point irrational situations in the relation between the religious and the political spheres. The importance of this article lies in the fact that, once highlighted, these structures allow us to take into consideration the possibility of analyzing the meaning of the relation between the religious and the political spheres. (shrink)

This paper evaluates the validity of three theoretical paradigms in corporate governance: shareholder theory, stakeholder theory and stewardship theory. It assesses the philosophical basis of each using elements of engineering control theory, cybernetics and the political science literature. I conclude that neither shareholder nor stakeholder theory offers an effective basis for corporate governance, but that stewardship is the direction in which corporate governance practice should evolve, if organisations are to deliver benefits to both their owners and other beneficiaries whilst (...) not significantly harming the interests of other groups. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag liefere ich eine Interpretation und Verteidigung der These Thomas Kuhns von der Priorität von Paradigmen. Ich behaupte, daß Kuhns Argument für diese These wichtiger, als gewöhnlich angenommen wird, ist, und zwar sowohl für die Klärung seiner Ideen als auch für die Wissenschaftstheorie im allgemeinen. Anerkennt man seine Kritik an der üblichen Auffassung, daß Regeln den Paradigmen vorausgehen, so erscheint vieles von dem, was er über andere Gegenstände sagt, in einem neuen Licht, und viele Schwierigkeiten, die Philosophen bei (...) ihren Versuchen zur Erklärung des Wissenschaftswandels angetroffen haben, erweisen sich als unbegründet. (shrink)

This chapter evaluates the defective verbal paradigms in the Hungarian language. The first section of the chapter provides an overview of the defectiveness in Hungarian, with emphasis on the systematic, phonotactically motivated defectiveness of the paradigms of some verbal stems. The aim of this section is to be as theoretically neutral and descriptive as possible to facilitate a good comparison with other types of defectiveness in other languages. The second section of the chapter discusses the results of the (...) experiments which are conducted in order to determine the various aspects of the defectiveness in the verbal paradigm. Some of the aspects tested include: the gap locations such as the occurrence and variation of forms in other designated cells of the verbal paradigm, and the correlations between the occurrence of forms in some designated cells; and the gap properties such as the differences in the classification of some verb stems into various stem-classes, and the range of variation exhibited by the forms that native Hungarian speakers accept as fill-ins for the gaps that are present in the paradigms of the defective verbs. (shrink)

This paper proposes an exploration of relationships and exchanges between the philosophies of Cavell and Kuhn by the study of aspects of the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Although the notions of language games and family resemblances used by Kuhn in "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" have been elaborated by Wittgenstein, Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein inspired that of Kuhn. I will attempt to show that against this background, Cavell’s conception of the relations of arts, works of arts, and artists, can be relevantly compared (...) to Kuhn’s conception of the relations of sciences, scientific successes, and scientific practitioners. (shrink)

This synthesis of 5 prominent conflict management paradigms uses power differential as the single most contributing variable to their process and outcome of conflict. Efforts of scholars to integrate or synthesize conflict paradigms have been unsuccessful or clumsy by the scholars’ own assessments. The 5 selected paradigms represent an interdisciplinary set of normative and descriptive paradigms from different social contexts and intellectual frameworks. The 5 share the common traits of rival goals, three levels of socially constructed (...) power differential, and outcomes relative to the total value of the rival goal. An inverse relationship between power differential and the total value of conflict outcomes is supported by all 5 paradigms and empirical data. Explanatory metatheory is the methodology used for synthesis. An increase in power differential results in a decrease in total value of the rival goal. Power differential is constructed using Max Weber’s ideal-type method. The power differentials are abstracted from the paradigms themselves. Empirical work form secondary sources and case studies complete the analysis. (shrink)

History, as a science, has been developing in the context of a concrete epoch of scientific paradigms and types of scientific rationality. The period of constitutionalization of social and humanitarian knowledge and history refers to the middle of the 20th century, to the epoch of a triumphal approach of positivism. The formation of a ‘classical‘ historical science was connected with the fact, that history was not considered to be an art any more. It was proclaimed, that history should be (...) based on natural sciences, dealing with real facts. The review of a ‘classical‘ scientific paradigm of history was stated in the 19th-20th centuries and it was connected with the confirmation of a principal difference between social, humanitarian and scientific knowledge. The discussion of the method and the language of science took the central place. Nonclassical paradigm of social and humanitarian science began to form. At this period, it develops the concept of ‘humanitarian story‘. At the end of the 20th century, the historical science entered postclassical period. This circumstance was accompanied by new methodological approaches with the basis on social and philosophical discourse. Integrative paradigm in history, which is based on the principle of additionality, has been forming. Within this paradigm, history becomes stereoscopic acquiring the character of ‘social and humanitarian‘ history. (shrink)

This book is a study of comparative philosophy and theology. The themes are the critical issues arising from the modern interpretation of Confucian doctrine as they confront the Christian beliefs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Gender patterns in speech styles provide us with models of both the dominant confrontational style (male) and the affiliative nurturant style (female). In this paper, I argue that dominant confrontational styles are seriously problematic, in speech as well as in behaviour generally, whereas affiliative nurturant styles offer us a model which can be generalized without contradiction. I distinguish confrontation from competition and address briefly how our classrooms might be used to teach affiliative nurturant styles of talking and living.

We develop and apply a multi-dimensional account of explanatory depth towards a comparative analysis of inflationary and bouncing paradigms in primordial cosmology. Our analysis builds on earlier work due to Azhar and Loeb (2021) that establishes initial conditions fine-tuning as a dimension of explanatory depth relevant to debates in contemporary cosmology. We propose dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy as two further dimensions of depth in the context of problems with instability and trans-Planckian modes that afflict bouncing and inflationary approaches respectively. (...) In the context of the latter issue, we argue that the recently formulated trans-Planckian censorship conjecture leads to a trade-off for inflationary models between dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy. We conclude with the suggestion that explanatory preference with regard to the different dimensions of depth is best understood in terms of differing attitudes towards heuristics for future model building. (shrink)

"The book provides an excellent historical summary of the debates over continental drift theory in this century." —Contemporary Sociology "This is a useful discussion of the way that science works. The book will be of value to philosophers of science... " —Choice "... will find an important place in university and department libraries, and will interest afficionados of the factual and intellectual history of the earth sciences." —Terra Nova "... an excellent core analysis... " —The Times Higher Education Supplement "... (...) an ambitious and important contribution to the new sociology of science." —American Journal of Sociology "... Stewart's book is a noble effort, an interesting and readable discussion, and another higher notch on the scoreboard of critical scholarship that deserves wide examination and close attention." —Geophysics This fascinating book describes the rise and fall and rebirth of continental drift theory in this century. It uses the recent revolution in geoscientinsts' beliefs about the earth to examine questions such as, How does scientific knowledge develop and change? The book also explores how well different perspectives help us to understand revolutionary change in science. (shrink)

Owing to the growing academic and practitioner’s interest in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility, there is a need to do a comprehensive assessment and synthesis of research activities. This article addresses this need and examines the academic literature on Corporate Social Responsibility and Performance using a paradigmatic and methodological lens. The objective of this article is fourfold. First, it examines the status of CSR research from its beginning especially after 1970 to year 2008 in leading academic journals and reports (...) to assess the focus areas of research on CSR so far. Second, it analyzes the research paradigms adopted in these research articles using the Operations Research Paradigm framework. Third, it compares and contrasts various kinds of research articles, methodologies, and research designs used in various researches in literature. Finally, it uncovers the implications of this study and directions for future research. (shrink)

Van Belle traces the history of psychology from its roots in Greek philosophy and includes a description of the later influence of the Hebraic-Christian mindset on that history. Subsequently, he follows the journey of psychology through the Middle Ages and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Next, he describes the birth and trajectory of psychology proper during the nineteenth century and closes with a description of a number of the more contemporary schools of psychological thought. The underlying thesis of (...) the text is that the history of psychology gives evidence of both continuity and discontinuity in interaction with one another. Thus, to do justice to the actual history of psychology one must take note of both persisting themata and changing paradigms. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThirty years ago, the subfields of emotion and cognition operated relatively independently and the associated science reflected the tacit view that they were distinct constructs. Today, questions about the integration of cognition and emotion are among the most interesting questions in the field. I offer a personal view of the key changes that fuelled this shift over time and describe research from my group that unfolded in parallel and led to the identification of the positivity effect.

The article describes the course of the Soviet-Vatican negotiations, analyzes from the point of view of the differences of value orientations of its subjects.

Current education paradigms were informed by the classical Newtonian worldview of brain functioning in which the mind is simply the physical activity of the brain, and our thoughts cannot have any effect upon the physical world. However, researchers in the field of quantum mechanics found that the outcomes of certain subatomic experiments are determined by the consciousness of the observer, leading philosophers to propose that the observed and the observer are linked. Quantum mechanics also demonstrates that distant minds may (...) behave in simultaneous correlational ways, in the absence of being linked through any known energetic signal. Further, researchers in this field propose that an external memory space is operating in the human brain, suggesting that this proposed external memory space may be a quantum field surrounding the brain and interacting with other fields, generating a global mental field of information flow. This article proposes that current education paradigms, which have been informed by a classical Newtonian physics worldview may need to be expanded to include a quantum mechanics worldview. The author seeks to understand if, and how, quantum mechanics could inform education practices, theories and paradigms and invites discussion, debate and speculation on the implications this would have for education systems. (shrink)

One', Aristotle says, can be said in many ways and each being is one. Through a comprehensive analysis of the passages in which Aristotle makes sense of these claims, the book provides a detailed account of how the different ways of being one permeate the domain of being and explores Aristotle's approach to the notion of unity from the ontological, cosmological and dialectical point of view. In rejecting what he regards as an 'archaic' conception of being, Aristotle rejects a corresponding (...) 'archaic' conception of the one and shows how, within the framework of his philosophy of being and substance, different problems and different paradigmatic forms of unity coexist and make of unity a privileged ground for the exercise of philosophical thought. (shrink)

Paradigms that combine synthetic (one-word) and periphrastic forms in complementary distribution have loomed large in discussions of morphological blocking (McCloskey and Hale 1983, Poser 1986, Andrews 1990). Such composite paradigms potentially challenge the lexicalist claim that words and sentences are organized by distinct subsystems of grammar. They are of course grist for the mill of Distributed Morphology, a theory which revels in every kind of interpenetration of morphology and syntax. But they have prompted even Paradigm Function Morphologists to (...) introduce syntactic constructions into their morphology. I shall argue, instead, for a lexicalist treatment, which is based on the idea that blocking is a filtering device that applies to the output of the generative system, rather than operating directly on its derivations (Wunderlich 1996). I present this approach to blocking in section 1, and show in section 2 how it deals with the intricate composite verb paradigm of Latin, where the periphrastic perfect passive supplies the missing pieces of an otherwise synthetic inflectional system. This part of Latin verb morphology has recently been treated from the perspective of Distributed Morphology and Paradigm Function Morphology. I compare my solution to these treatments and argue that it is superior in two respects: it predicts the complementarity of the synthetic and periphrastic formations and yet allows their respective morphological and syntactic properties to be captured, and it readily covers some basic data that the other analyses get wrong. (shrink)

There is increasing evidence for the wide‐spread existence of functionally redundant genetic pathways in developmental processes. However, both their significance and manner of evolution are still matters of debate. I will argue here that redundancy of gene actions may, in fact, be a necessary requirement for the development and evolution of complex life forms. One can view development as a process that transmits information from the egg to the adult organism. Transmission of information is, however, always an error‐prone process, which (...) can only be safeguarded by including redundancies in the message. Molecular examples for well analysed redundant processes indicate that redundancies may best be understood within a conceptual framework of overlaps between different gene functions. (shrink)

Morphogen gradient theories have enjoyed considerable popularity since the beginning of this century, but conclusive evidence for a role of morphogens in controlling multicellular development has been elusive. Recently, work on three secreted signalling proteins, Activin in Xenopus, and Wingless and Dpp in Drosophila, has stongly suggested that these proteins function as morphogens. In order to define a factor as a morphogen, it is necessary to show firstly, that it has a direct effect on target cells and secondly, that it (...) affects the development of target cells in a concentration‐dependent manner. With these criteria in mind, the evidence available for a variety of proposed morphogens is discussed. While the evidence is not conclusive in most of the cases considered, there is a strong case in favour of the three proteins mentioned above, which suggests that morphogens are potentially of general importance in controlling the development of multicellular organisms. (shrink)

This research examines the methodologies employed by cognitive psychologists to study “false memory,” and assesses if these methodologies are likely to facilitate scientific progress or perhaps constrain the conclusions reached. A PsycINFO search of the empirical publications in cognitive psychology was conducted through January, 2004, using the subject heading, “false memory.” The search produced 198 articles. Although there is an apparent false memory research bandwagon in cognitive psychology, with increasing numbers of studies published on this topic over the past decade, (...) few researchers have studied false memory as the term was originally intended—to specifically refer to planting memory for an entirely new event that was never experienced in an individual’s lifetime. Cognitive psychologists interested in conducting research relevant to assessing the authenticity of memories for child sexual abuse should consider the generalizability of their research to the planting of entirely new events in memory. (shrink)

Eyal Benvenisti has sought to provide an optimistic account of international law through reconceptualizing the idea of sovereignty as a kind of trusteeship for humanity. He thus sketches a welcome antidote to trends in recent work in public law including public international law that claim that international law is no more than a cloak for economic and political interests, so that all that matters is which powerful actor gets to decide. In this Article, I approach his position through a discussion (...) of the debate in Weimar about sovereignty between Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller. I try to show that Heller’s almost unknown legal theory might be helpful to Benvenisti’s position. Heller shared with Schmitt the idea that sovereignty had to have a central role in legal theory and that its role includes a place for a final legal decision. Indeed, much more than Schmitt, Heller regarded all accounts of sovereignty as inherently political. However, in a manner closer to the spirit of Kelsen’s enterprise than to Schmitt’s, he wished to emphasize that the ultimate decider - the sovereign decision unit of the political order of liberal democracy - is entirely legally constituted. Moreover, Heller argued that fundamental principles of legality condition the exercise of a sovereign power in a way that explains the specific legitimacy of legality and which might supply the link between sovereignty and ideas such as trusteeship and humanity. (shrink)

This introductory article provides a contextual and theoretical overview to this special issue of Body & Society. The special issue presents five selected case studies – focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer – to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions. The first of these is the entanglement of biomedical governance – political/economic as well as self-disciplinary – with the nexus of estrangement, which can denote both the distancing (...) of otherness and self-division. Second is the realm of feeling, of phantasmatic projection and of the ways in which the biopolitical becomes reciprocally, discursively, enmeshed in a wider cultural imaginary. Third is the shifting terrain of gender and feminist politics, a key dimension of which is the necessary reworking of feminist thought in the wake of a radically altered biomedical and biotechnological landscape. Under the rubric of Estranged Bodies, the collection considers themes of dissolution and the fragility of the body/subject read through bodily catastrophe, radical body modification and extreme medical intervention. Also considered is the notion of assemblage – the provisional coming together of disparate parts – which encourages a rethinking of questions of reconstituted, displaced and re-placed bodies. (shrink)