More and more people would like to migrate, but find that every state places barriers in their way. At the same time, most governments not only permit but court foreign investment. Can this difference between the treatment of people and the treatment of money be justified? This book asks this question from the point of view of five different ethical perspectives: liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, Marxism, natural law and political realism. -- FROM BOOK JACKET.

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) theory of dialogue production cannot completely explain recent data showing that when interactants in referential communication tasks have different views of a physical space, they accommodate their language to their partner's view rather than mimicking their partner's expressions. Instead, these data are consistent with the hypothesis that interactants are taking the perspective of their conversational partners.

It has been demonstrated that death certificates do not accurately record the actual cause of death in up to one-fourth of cases, as determined from subsequent autopsy findings. The purpose of this study was to explore the use of natural language autopsy data bases as an automated quality assurance mechanism. We translated the account of the major process leading to death, or the primary diagnosis, from all 45,564 narrative autopsy reports obtained at The Johns Hopkins Hospital between May 28, 1889, (...) and June 30, 1987, into the hierarchical system of Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) titles. We obtained a total of 125,772 MeSH title translations, 1,563 of them distinct (average 2.8 per case), ranging in frequency from 6,029 occurrences of LUNG to 1 occurrence apiece of 357 MeSH titles. The natural-language-to-MeSH translations showed expected trends over the past century: fewer infectious diseases; more cardiovascular and neoplastic disease among adults; and more respiratory diseases and congenital malformations in the pediatric age group. The greater availability of autopsy documents in electronic form should increase the value of this resource for quality assurance. (shrink)

Six African countries participated in an intercontinental professional development workshop developed by the science and math staff at the University of Iowa and supported by the Africa-America Institute. The 11-day workshop was designed to produce changes in goal setting, assessment practices, instruction, and curriculum structures for high school teachers. The article provides a detailed description of the workshop and discusses evidence of workshop successes. Preworkshop and postworkshop vision statements and curriculum units were used to track the progression of five Kenyan (...) educators as they moved toward constructivist-based practices. Teachers enhanced their views of science and math learning outcomes and learning environment as the workshop progressed. Specifically, teachers moved from emphasizing better grades and exam scores to greater student use of science and math skills. They also shifted from a heavily teacher-centered classroom view to a more student-centered classroom view. (shrink)

A thorough account of Langer's philosophical career.

This book examines the Condorcet Jury Theorem and how its assumptions can be applicable to the real world. It will use the theorem to assess various familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, revealing how best to take advantage of the truth-tracking potential of majoritarian democracy.

At the turn of the century Martin Buber arrived on the philosophic scene... The path to his maturity was one long struggle with the problem of unity- in particular with the problem of the unity of spirit and life; and he saw the problem itself to be rooted in the supposition of the primacy of the subject-object relation, with subjects "over here," objects "over there," and their relation a matter of subjects "taking in" objects or, alternatively, constituting them. But Buber (...) moved into a position which undercuts the subject-object dichotomy and initiates a second "Copernican revolution" in philosophical thought. (shrink)

Robert Abrams argues that new concepts of space and landscape emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, marking a linguistic and interpretative limit to American expansion. Abrams supports the radical elements of antebellum writing, where writers from Hawthorne to Rebecca Harding Davis disputed the naturalizing discourses of mid-nineteenth century society. Whereas previous critics find in antebellum writing a desire to convert chaos into an affirmative, liberal agenda, Abrams contends that authors of the 1840s and 50s deconstructed more than they constructed.

Originally published in 1989 Liberal Neutrality approaches the recommendation of neutrality by confronting the abstract prescription (that we should be neutral) with the implications for particular people and institutions. This not only identifies what neutrality involves logically, but also exposes the practical difficulties that may be encountered in pursuing it. In some cases, such close examination shows that neutrality is not desirable, and in others that it is attainable only within certain limits. Although neutrality has become a fashionable term in (...) political theory, this is the only volume to subject the idea to systematic scrutiny. It will be useful not only to specialists in diverse disciplines - political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, lawyers and educationalists. (shrink)

William Whewell is considered one of the most important nineteenth-century British philosophers of science and a contributor to modern philosophical thought, particularly regarding the problem of induction and the logic of discovery. In this volume, Robert E. Butts offers selections from Whewell's most important writings, and analysis of counter-claims to his philosophy.

Many in science are disposed not to take biosemiotics seriously, dismissing it as too anthropomorphic. Furthermore, biosemiotic apologetics are cast in top-down fashion, thereby adding to widespread skepticism. An effective response might be to approach biosemiotics from the bottom up, but the foundational assumptions that support Enlightenment science make that avenue impossible. Considerations from ecosystem studies reveal, however, that those conventional assumptions, although once possessing great utilitarian value, have come to impede deeper understanding of living systems because they implicitly depict (...) the evolution of the universe backward. Ecological dynamics suggests instead a smaller set of countervailing postulates that allows evolution to play forward and sets the stage for tripartite causalities, signs, and interpreters—the key elements of biosemiosis—to emerge naturally out of the interaction of chance with configurations of autocatalytic processes. Biosemiosis thereby appears as a fully legitimate outgrowth of the new metaphysic and shows promise for becoming the supervenient focus of a deeper perspective on the phenomenon of life. (shrink)

Discusses the justification for a minimal welfare state independent of political rhetoric from the right or the left.

Periodically in the history of psychology the state of the field is examined to determine its progress since the last assessment was made . On occasion, the conclusion is drawn that progress is either minimal or non existent. Such a conclusion usually takes the form of questioning psychology’s success in developing theoretical statements, or indeed statements in any context, that successfully allow for consistent prediction of the phenomenon in question. Just such an assessment has recently been offered by Schlinger in (...) this journal. (shrink)

The notion of the heart is one of the most basic notions in ordinary language. It is central to Heidegger’s notion of thought that he relates to the primordial word Gedanc as underlying attunement that issues forth in emotional phenomena. He plays with all the etymological cognates of that word to zero in on the phenomena involved. The key experience of Erstaunen that grounds the first beginning of philosophy is paralleled by Erschrecken that grounds Heidegger’s “second beginning” and plays counterpoint (...) with the first. Along with Befindlichkeit as one’s basic attunement, these are key phenomena that belong to the heart, not to ‘intellect’ or ‘will.’ Thinking in terms of the intellect is das rechnende Denken¸ thinking in terms of the heart, besinnliche Nachdenken. It is the latter that provides the “poetic-intellectual” experience for both the arts and philosophy in which such “world space” is created that even the ordinary appears extraordinary. (shrink)

This is the second of two chapters on preference democracy. It points out that theories of liberal democracy necessarily require systematic responsiveness to popular wishes, in ways that make them fundamentally ‘preference‐respecting’, but that there are many different kinds of preferences and correspondingly many different ways of respecting them. Different models of democracy are better at providing certain sorts of respect for certain sorts of preferences than others, and which model of democracy liberal democrats want to adopt therefore depends on (...) which sorts of preferences they want to accord which sort of respect. The central claim of this chapter is that the author's preferred model of ‘democratic deliberation within’ is preference‐respecting in the right way, and that it therefore deserves a key role in any larger system of democratic accountability. The different sections of the chapter are: Respecting Preferences, Not Just Recording Them; Permissible Paternalism; Assessing Alternative Models of Preference‐Respecting Democracy; The Virtues of Sporadic Assessments: Preference‐Respecting Arguments for Indirect Democracy; and Combining ‘Democratic Deliberation Within’ and Trustee‐style Representative Democracy. (shrink)

This second companion paper to a logico-mathematic, structural methodology and its findings address theoretical issues underlying sub-literal phenomena. The concept of a “cognitive psycho-dynamics” is introduced. In addition, research on masked priming and automatic activation of “chronic goals and motives” schemata are presented as initial and partial explanatory theoretical bases. Corroborating findings from fMRI and other neurological research suggest that some of the cognitive operations are biologically based. A biological evolutionary framework is then presented to explain the origin and development (...) of SubLit cognition and lexical referents. Implications are discussed throughout. (shrink)

Despite the burgeoning research in recent years on what is called analogical reasoning and transfer, the problem of how similarity or invariant relations are fundamentally accessed is typically either unrecognized, or ignored in componential and computational analyses. The access problematic is not a new one, being outlined by the paradox found in Plato’s Meno. In order to understand the analogical-access problematic, it is suggested that the concepts of analogical relations including the lexical concept metaphor, isomorphic relation in mathematics, homology in (...) biology, stimulus generalization in psychology, transfer of learning in education, and transposition phenomena in perception, be reconceptualized as subsets of a higher-order domain as all share the problem of how invariance relations are generated and accessed. A solution is suggested based on two specific evolutionary and neurological models, coupled with findings regarding the cognitive importance of knowledge-base. The paper constitutes a reciprocal complementarity analysis of a previous paper on metaphor. A higher-order form of analogical reasoning called analogical progression is introduced. Implications for research are discussed that indicate the need for a paradigm shift. The paper concludes with a four-stage model of analogical access. (shrink)

PLATO'S WAS a peculiar genius unmatched by any in the entire history of Western thought. He understood well the central play in human experience between appearance, which, ambiguously poised, is a vehicle of both revelation and concealment, and the reality which appearance both conceals and reveals--or better, which appearance conceals as it reveals. The grounds of this play lie both in the character of human structure and in the character of the whole within which that structure functions. Grounded in the (...) unconscious of physiology, the field of human awareness rises by stages from an immediately given, biologically-based circle of sensory awareness, through a culturally mediated sphere of different modes of situating the sensory surface within the greater whole, to a basic orientation toward that all-encompassing whole, which affords us the distance needed to grasp both the orientation itself as orientation and the stages preceding it. Ordinary life is locked into a struggle between the biologically grounded desires and the peculiarities of cultural mediation that seek to channel those desires. Ordinary life exists in relation to a kind of functional surface of things which it co-constitutes with those things in a sort of "dashboard knowledge," knowing what to push and pull and turn to get the desired responses. Sophists continually arise as masters of appearance, often taking themselves, especially if they think they have the sanction of the gods, as genuine lovers of wisdom. (shrink)

SENSING PRESENTS TO US INDIVIDUALS. But, though directing us practically, the way it presents them misleads us systematically about the nature of the individuals with which we have our practical dealings and poses serious questions about the status of the universals we use to describe them. We are all quite aware of the consequences in the practical order of unsettling the question of universals. The notion of capacity can overcome the problems involved.

The major advantage of STS is the kind of teaching it allows and demands. Twelve middle school teachers who were enthused with STS teaching selected two sections for a research study. One section was the experimental STS section; the other followed the course syllabus and textbook closely. The major findings indicate the advantages for STS as a teaching approach. Students at the STS approach learned as many science concepts as students who were taught such concepts directly. But the students in (...) the STS sections were superior in all other aspects, including understanding and use of 14 process skills, use of creative thinking skills, development of more positive attitudes, better ability to apply and connect ideas and skills to other situations, and developing a better understanding of the nature and history of science. (shrink)