In Overdoing Democracy, Robert B. Talisse turns the popular adage "the cure for democracy's ills is more democracy" on its head. Indeed, he argues, the widely recognized, crisis-level polarization within contemporary democracy stems from the tendency among citizens to overdo democracy. When we make everything--even where we shop, the teams we cheer for, and the coffee we drink--about our politics, we weaken our bonds to one another, and work against the fundamental goals of democracy. Talisse advocates civic friendship built (...) around shared endeavors that we must undertake with fellow citizens who do not necessarily share our political affinities as the best way we can obtain a healthier, more sustainable democracy. (shrink)

Historically, philosophers of biology have tended to sidestep the problem of development by focusing primarily on evolutionary biology and, more recently, on molecular biology and genetics. Quite often too, development has been misunderstood as simply, or even primarily, a matter of gene activation and regulation. Nowadays a growing number of philosophers of science are focusing their analyses on the complexities of development, and in Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution Jason Scott Robert explores the nature of development against current trends in (...) biological theory and practice and looks at the interrelations between development and evolution, an area of resurgent biological interest. Clearly written, this book should be of interest to students and professionals in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

This is a work concerned with justification and freedom and the relationship between these. Its summational aim is to defend a transcendental argument for free will – that we could not be epistemically justified in undermining a strong notion of free will, as a strong notion of free will would be required for any such process of undermining to be itself epistemically justified. The book advances two transcendental arguments – for a deontically internalist conception of epistemic justification and the aforementioned (...) argument for a libertarian conception of free will. In defending each of these arguments, the book both defends and relies upon the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. In articulating the latter transcendental argument – for freedom – heavy reliance is made on the earlier, epistemic, work: especially on the deontological conception of rational justification (on epistemic internalism). (shrink)

When my family discusses how we should spend a summer holiday, we start from certain common understandings about our preferences. We prefer self-catering accommodation to hotels, and hotels to campsites. We prefer walking and looking at scenery and wildlife to big-city sightseeing and shopping. When it comes to walks, we prefer walks of six miles or so to ones which are much shorter or much longer, and prefer well-marked but uncrowded paths to ones which are either more rugged or more (...) popular. And so on. These common understandings greatly simplify the task of choosing between holiday destinations and activities, by allowing us quickly to eliminate many options. But what does it mean to say that we prefer one thing to another? (shrink)

Robert J. Howell offers a new account of the relationship between conscious experience and the physical world, based on a neo-Cartesian notion of the physical and careful consideration of three anti-materialist arguments. His theory of subjective physicalism reconciles the data of consciousness with the advantages of a monistic, physical ontology.

Beliefs have what I will call ‘propositional content’. A belief is always a belief that so-and-so: a belief that grass is green, or a belief that snow is white, or whatever. Other things have propositional content too, such as sentences, judgments and assertions. The Standard View amongst philosophers is that what it is to have a propositional content is to stand in an appropriate relation to a proposition. Moreover, on this view, propositions are objects, i.e. the kind of thing you (...) can refer to with singular terms. For example, on the Standard View, we should parse the sentence ‘Simon believes that Sharon is funny’ as: [Simon] believes [that Sharon is funny]; ‘Simon’ is a term referring to a thinking subject, ‘that Sharon is funny’ is a term referring to a proposition, and ‘x believes y’ is a dyadic predicate expressing the believing relation. In this paper, I argue against the Standard View. This is how I think we should parse ‘Simon believes that Sharon is funny’: [Simon] believes that [Sharon is funny]; here we have a singular term, ‘Simon’, a sentence ‘Sharon is funny’, and a ‘prenective’ joining them together, ‘x believes that p’. On this Prenective View, we do not get at the propositional content of someone’s belief by referring to a reified proposition with a singular term; we simply use the sentence ‘Sharon is funny’ to express that content for ourselves. I argue for the Prenective View in large part by showing that an initially attractive version of the Standard View is actually vulnerable to the same objection that Wittgenstein used against Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgment. (shrink)

The concept of brain death was recently described as being “at once well settled and persistently unresolved.” Every day, in the United States and around the world, physicians diagnose patients as brain dead, and then proceed to transplant organs from these patients into others in need. Yet as well settled as this practice has become, brain death continues to be the focus of controversy, with two journals in bioethics dedicating major sections to the topic within the last two years.By way (...) of background, the Uniform Determination of Death Act states that “[a]n individual who has sustained either: irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.” In other words, death can be defined by either cardiorespiratory or neurological criteria, with “brain death” representing the loss of all brain function. This standard, or closely related variants, has become the accepted approach throughout the United States and in many parts of the world. (shrink)

Jago and Loss have recently used variations on Fitch's paradox to argue that every truth has a truthmaker, and that every fact is grounded. In this paper, I show that Fitch's paradox can also be adapted to prove the exact opposite conclusions: no truth has a truthmaker, and no fact is grounded. All of these arguments are as dialectically effective as each other, and so they are all in bad company.

In this book, Robert Talisse critically examines the moral and political implications of pluralism, the view that our best moral thinking is indeterminate and that moral conflict is an inescapable feature of the human condition. Through a careful engagement with the work of William James, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and their contemporary followers, Talisse distinguishes two broad types of moral pluralism: metaphysical and epistemic. After arguing that metaphysical pluralism does not offer a compelling account of value and thus cannot (...) ground a viable conception of liberal politics, Talisse proposes and defends a distinctive variety of epistemic pluralism. According to this view, certain value conflicts are at present undecidable rather than intrinsic. Consequently, epistemic pluralism countenances the possibility that further argumentation, enhanced reflection, or the acquisition of more information could yield rational resolutions to the kinds of value conflicts that metaphysical pluralists deem irresolvable as such. Talisse’s epistemic pluralism hence prescribes a politics in which deep value conflicts are to be addressed by ongoing argumentation and free engagement among citizens; the epistemic pluralist thus sees liberal democracy is the proper political response to ongoing moral disagreement. (shrink)

According to the Dependency Theory, truth asymmetrically depends on the world, in the following sense: true propositions are true because the world makes them true. The Dependency Theory strikes many philosophers as incontrovertible, but in this paper I reject it. I begin by presenting a problem for the Dependency Theory. I then develop an alternative to the Dependency Theory which avoids that problem. This alternative is an immodest Identity Theory of Truth, and I end the paper by responding to Dodd’s (...) charge that immodest Identity Theories are incoherent. (shrink)

Robert Cummins argues that any causal theory of mental content (CT) founders on an established fact of human psychology: that theory mediates sensory detection. He concludes,.

We recommend the attitude of optimistic agnosticism toward animal mindreading: suspending acceptance until tests succeed in overcoming Povinelli's problem, and being optimistic about the feasibility of such tests. Fletcher and Carruthers argue for sufficient reasons to accept animal mindreading; we find their arguments unconvincing. Points they raise against the behavior-reading theory apply equally to mindreading theory, and their claims of greater parsimony are unfounded. Premature acceptance of mindreading could inhibit the search for innovative ways to overcome longstanding methodological problems. Optimistic (...) agnosticism, in contrast, encourages the pursuit of approaches that can lead to important insights about animal social cognition. (shrink)

While there are good reasons to think that Hegel would not engage with modern scepticism in the Science of Logic, this article argues that he nevertheless does so in a way that informs the text's conception of logic as the latter pertains to metaphysics. Hegel engages with modern scepticism's general concerns that philosophy should begin without unexamined presuppositions and should come to attain not only knowledge of truth, but corresponding second-order knowledge: knowledge of knowing truth. These concerns inform two needs (...) that Hegel formulates for first philosophy, which logic—by unifying with metaphysics, which is traditionally synonymous with first philosophy—is to satisfy. However, logic, for the Logic, is unified with metaphysics as a science of absolute knowing, the form of thinking involved in traditional metaphysics. As such, logic, for the Logic, is neither anti-metaphysical nor reducible to metaphysics, but is rather a science of metaphysical thinking, which, for Hegel, includes metaphysics. The article emphasizes how Hegel's construal of logic as a science of absolute knowing avoids running into the ‘swimming problem’ that Hegel raises against, broadly, epistemological forms of first philosophy. (shrink)

Developments over the past four decades have secured Immanuel Kant’s status as being for contemporary philosophers what the sea was for Swinburne: the great, gray mother of us all. And Kant mattered as much for the classical American pragmatists as he does for us today. But we look back at that sepia-toned age across an extended period during which Anglophone philosophy largely wrote Kant out of its canon. The founding ideology of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, articulating the rationale and (...) fighting faith for the rising tide of analytic philosophy, was forged in a recoil from the perceived defects of a British idealism inspired by Hegel. Mindful of the massive debt evidently and self-avowedly owed by Hegel to Kant, and putting aside neo-Kantian readings of Kant as an empiricist philosopher of science that cast him in a light they would have found more favorable, Russell and Moore diagnosed the idealist rot as having set in already with Kant. For them, and for many of their followers down through the years, the progressive current in philosophy should be seen to have run directly from Locke, Leibniz, and Hume, to Mill and Frege, without any dangerous diversion into the oxbow of German idealism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper compares two alternative answers to the question ?Who is the addressee of welfare economics?? These answers correspond with different understandings of the status of the normative conclusions of welfare economics and have different implications for how welfare economics should be adapted in the light of the findings of behavioural economics. The conventional welfarist answer is that welfare economics is addressed to a ?social planner?, whose objective is to maximize the overall well-being of society; the planner is imagined (...) as a benevolent despot, receptive to the economist's advice. The alternative contractarian answer is that welfare economics is addressed to individuals who are seeking mutually beneficial agreements; a contractarian recommendation has the form ?It is in the interests of each of you separately that all of you together agree to do x?. Each of these answers should be understood as a literary convention that uses a highly simplified model of politics. I defend the contractarian approach and show that it is less supportive of ?soft paternalism? than is the welfarist approach. (shrink)

How can we experience real emotions when viewing a movie or reading a novel or watching a play when we know the characters whose actions have this effect on us do not exist? This is a conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, and in this book Robert Yanal both canvasses previously proposed solutions to it and offers one of his own. First formulated by Samuel Johnson, the paradox received its most famous answer from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (...) who advised his readers to engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief." More recently, philosophers have argued that we are irrational in emoting toward fiction, or that we do not emote toward fiction but rather toward factual counterparts, or that we do not have real but only quasi-emotion toward fiction, generated by our playing games of make-believe. All of these proposed solutions are critically reviewed. Finding these answers unsatisfactory, Yanal offers an alternative, providing a new version of what has been dubbed "thought theory." On this theory, mere thoughts not believed true are seen as the functional equivalent of belief at least insofar as stimulating emotion is concerned. The emoter's disbelief in the actuality of components of the thoughts must be rendered relatively inactive. Such emotion is real and typically has the character of being richly generated yet unconsummated. The book extends this theory also to resolving other paradoxes arising from emotional response to fiction: how we feel suspense over what comes next in a story even when we are re-reading it for a second or third time; and how we take pleasure in narratives, such as tragedy, that excite unpleasant emotions such as fear, pity, or horror. (shrink)

In a recent article, Iris Marion Young raises several challenges to deliberative democracy on behalf of political activists. In this paper, the author defends a version of deliberative democracy against the activist challenges raised by Young and devises challenges to activism on behalf of the deliberative democrat. Key Words: activism • deliberative democracy • Discourse • Ideology • public sphere • I. M. Young.

Impact, Volume 2020, Issue 26, Page 2-41, June 2020.

Alastair S. Gunn has argued that it is in principle possible to restore degraded natural environments and to restore their full value, provided that species distinctive to them are extant. I argue, first, that the proviso is unnecessary. More importantly, I claim that full value cannot be restored because restored environments lack the relational property of being naturally evolved. I delineate and explain the structure and detail of the theoretical bases for this claim and show that Gunn’s reflections do not (...) rule out the view that full value cannot be restored. (shrink)

This article addresses the character and potential of the radical cosmopolitanism that is currently flourishing within the social sciences. I explore how cosmopolitanism is articulated in a number of disciplines–including international law, international relations, sociology and political philosophy–and how it conceives of its own age. I focus first of all on the timeconsciousness that informs the cosmopolitan representation of modernity, in particular its projection of a rupturebetween the old ‘Westphalian’ order of nation states and the advancing cosmopolitan order of the (...) present, and, second, on the nature of cosmopolitan critiques of nationalism, socialism and ‘modernist’ social and political thought in general. Behind this focus lie a question over the extent to which cosmopolitanism replicates in its own normative proposals the defects of that which it criticizes, and another question over the means by which the critical kernel of contemporary cosmopolitanism can be separated from its doctrinal shell. (shrink)

Folk epistemology—the idea that one can't help believing that one's beliefs are true—provides an alternative to political theorists' inadequate defenses of democracy. It implicitly suggests a dialectical, truth-seeking norm for dealing with people who do not share one's own beliefs. Folk epistemology takes us beyond Mill's consequentialist claim for democracy (that the free array of opinions in a deliberative democracy leads us to the truth); instead, the epistemic freedom of the democratic process itself makes citizens confident that evidence for one's (...) beliefs have not been distorted by a corrupt system. Since the starting point of folk epistemology is the meta-conviction that people believe that what they believe is true, it should also serve as a starting point for more rigorous scholarship that seeks to understand why people believe what they believe, instead of dismissing them as “irrational” if one disagrees with their beliefs. (shrink)

This article argues that we could improve the design of research protocols by developing an awareness of and a responsiveness to the social contexts of all the actors in the research enterprise, including subjects, investigators, sponsors, and members of the community in which the research will be conducted. ?Social context? refers to the settings in which the actors are situated, including, but not limited to, their social, economic, political, cultural, and technological features. The utility of thinking about social contexts is (...) introduced and exemplified by the presentation of a hypothetical case in which one central issue is limitation of the probability of injury to subjects by selection of individuals who are not expected to live long enough for the known risks of the study to become manifest as harms. Benefits of such considerations may include enhanced subject satisfaction and cooperation, community acceptance, and improved data quality, among other desirable consequences. (shrink)

Debates over vaccine mandates raise intense emotions, as reflected in the current controversy over whether to mandate the vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV), the virus that can cause cervical cancer. Public health ethics so far has failed to facilitate meaningful dialogue between the opposing sides. When stripped of its emotional charge, the debate can be framed as a contest between competing ethical values. This framework can be conceptualized graphically as a conflict between autonomy on the one hand, which militates (...) against government intrusion, and beneficence, utilitarianism, justice, and nonmaleficence on the other, which may lend support to intervention. When applied to the HPV vaccine, this framework would support a mandate based on utilitarianism, if certain conditions are met and if herd immunity is a realistic objective. (shrink)

On a traditional view of perceptual justification, perceptual experiences always provide prima facie justification for beliefs based on them. Against this view, Matthew McGrath and Susanna Siegel argue that if an experience is formed in an epistemically pernicious way then it is epistemically downgraded. They argue that "wishful seeing"—when a subject sees something because he wants to see it—is psychologically and normatively analogous to wishful thinking. They conclude that perception can lose its traditional justificatory power, and that our epistemic norms (...) should govern how experiences are formed. To make this case, the downgrader must first isolate a feature of wishful thinking that makes it epistemically defective, then show that this feature is present in wishful seeing. I present a dilemma for the downgrader. There are two features of wishful thinking that could plausibly explain why it is irrational: the fact that a desire causes you to form a belief not supported by adequate evidence, or the mere influence that desire holds over belief formation. Each option presents formidable difficulties. Although the first “bad evidence” explanation, which McGrath employs, explains the irrationality of wishful thinking, it does not transfer to wishful seeing, since experiences are not formed in response to evidence. The second “influence of desire” explanation, which Siegel employs, fails to isolate an epistemically defective feature of wishful thinking, and also does not transfer to wishful seeing. I conclude that the downgrader’s argument from wishful seeing fails. (shrink)

Utilizes anthropological theory to relativize and question leading theories in the philosophy of language and epistemology. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact that developments in transhumanist technologies may have upon human cultures (and thus upon the lifeworld), and to do so by exploring a potential debate between Habermas and the transhumanists. Transhumanists, such as Nick Bostrom, typically see the potential in genetic and other technologies for positively expanding and transcending human nature. In contrast, Habermas is a representative of those who are fearful of this technology, suggesting that it will compound the deleterious (...) effects of the colonisation of the lifeworld, further constraining human autonomy and undermining the meaningfulness of the lifeworld by expanding the technological control and manipulation of humanity. It will be argued that these opposed positions are grounded in fundamentally different understandings of the consequences of scientific and technological advance. On one level, the transhumanists remain confident that the lifeworld has within it the resources necessary to find meaning and purpose in a society deeply infused by genetic technology. Habermas disagrees. On another level, the difference is articulated by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, primarily by challenging what may be understood as a Baconian faith in science as a project for the domination of nature (where nature is an infinitely malleable material, to be dominated and shaped, without adverse consequences, purely for the purposes of human survival). While the transhumanists broadly embrace this faith, Habermas returns to something akin to Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic scepticism. (shrink)

For a good part of the 20th century, the classic Pragmatists--Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey--and pragmatism in general were largely ignored by analytic philosophers. They were said to hold such untenable views as whatever best satisfies our needs is true and that the end justifies the means. Despite a recent revival of interest in these figures, spurred largely by the work of Richard Rorty, it is not uncommon to continue to hear claims that pragmatism is a subjectivist, (...) anti-realist position that denies that there is a mind-independent world, and fails to place objective constraints on inquiry. In this book, Robert Schwartz dispels these traditional views by examining the empiricist and constructivist orientation of the classic pragmatists. Based on updated and expanded versions of his influential papers, as well as a number of previously unpublished essays, in this book Schwartz demonstrates the relevance of pragmatic thought to a wide range of issues beyond concerns over truth and realism that currently dominate discussions. The individual essays elaborate and defend pragmatic, instrumentalist, and constructivist conceptions of truth and inquiry, moral discourse and ethical statements, perception, art, and worldmaking. Pragmatic Perspectives will appeal to scholars interested in the history of American philosophy and pragmatic approaches to contemporary issues in analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Robert Talisse | : In the past two decades, democratic political practice has taken a deliberative turn. That is, contemporary democratic politics has become increasingly focused on facilitating citizen participation in the public exchange of reasons. Although the deliberative turn in democratic practice is in several respects welcome, the technological and communicative advances that have facilitated it also make possible new kinds of deliberative democratic pathology. This essay calls attention to and examines new epistemological troubles for public deliberation enacted (...) under contemporary conditions. Drawing from a lesson offered by Lyn Sanders two decades ago, the paper raises the concern that the deliberative turn in democratic practice has counter-democratic effects. | : Au cours des deux décennies passées, la pratique politique démocratique a pris un tournant délibératif. Plus précisément, la politique démocratique contemporaine s’est de plus en plus concentrée sur la manière de faciliter la participation citoyenne dans l’échange public de raisons. Si ce tournant est le bienvenu pour plusieurs raisons, les avancées technologiques et communicationnelles qui l’ont facilité ont également rendu possibles de nouvelles pathologies démocratiques et délibératives. Cet essai examine les nouveaux problèmes épistémologiques pour la délibération publique contemporaine. Tirant la leçon des travaux menés par Lyn Sanders il y a deux décennies, l’article s’interroge sur les effets antidémocratiques du tournant délibératif. (shrink)

In this essay I offer a new interpretation of Kant’s discussion of “the old formula of the schools” in the Critique of Practical Reason – “nihil appetimus, nisi sub ratione boni; nihil aversamur, n...

Historically, the dispute between empiricists and nativists in philosophy and cognitive science has concerned human and animal minds (Margolis and Laurence in Philos Stud: An Int J Philos Anal Tradit 165(2): 693-718, 2013, Ritchie in Synthese 199(Suppl 1): 159–176, 2021, Colombo in Synthese 195: 4817–4838, 2018). But recent progress has highlighted how empiricist and nativist concerns arise in the construction of artificial systems (Buckner in From deep learning to rational machines: What the history of philosophy can teach us about the (...) future of artificial intelligence. Oxford University Press.). This paper uses nativism and empiricism to address questions about the nature of artificial intelligence and its trajectory. It begins by defining the nativism/empiricism debate in terms of the generality of a system. Nativist systems have initial states with domain-specific features; empiricist systems have initial states with only domain-general features. With the debate framed in this way, it then explores a variety of arguments for nativism and empiricism in AI. These arguments revolve around two different questions which must be distinguished: whether nativism the only possible approach to developing human-level AI (HLAI); and whether nativism is the most practical approach to developing HLAI. On the first question, it argues that nativism is quite clearly not the only possible approach to developing HLAI, as is sometimes suggested. It argues that existing arguments for the necessity of nativism are unconvincing, because they analogize from poverty of the stimulus arguments about humans, while AIs often have access to much more data than humans. Then it argues that the case of evolution gives us a compelling argument against nativism. On the second, practical question, the paper argues that there is a tradeoff between the advantages of encoding innate machinery directly, and the advantages of evolving or learning it. However, as the past decade has shown, empiricism is a much more viable path to greater capability levels, given the ‘bitter lesson’ (Sutton in _Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction_. MIT press.) that encoding the ‘correct’ knowledge in AI systems is perennially outperformed by more empiricist methods that leverage large-scale data and computation. (shrink)

In this volume leading international environmental philosophers further the debate about the value of nature, the concept of the environment, and the metaphysical, ethical, social and international implications of these concepts. Philosophers have to some extent neglected the study of nature and the natural environment, and this collection not only provides a long-overdue contribution to that study, but also points to inadequacies of much contemporary ethical and political theory. For environmentalists who are not philosophers, it will stimulate reflection on their (...) own concepts and principles. [Book Synopsis]. (shrink)

A potential explanation of a fact is a hypothesis such that, if it were true, it would explain the fact in question. Let’s suppose that we become aware of a fact and some potential explanations thereof. Let’s also suppose that we would like to believe the truth. Given this aim, we can ask two questions. First, is it likely that one of these hypotheses is true? Second, given an affirmative answer to the first question, which one is it likely to (...) be? Inference to the best explanation (IBE) offers answers to both questions. To the first, it says ‘Yes’—assuming that at least one of the hypotheses would, if true, provide a satisfactory explanation of the fact under consideration. To the second, it says that the hypothesis most likely to be true is the one that scores best on the explanatory virtues: conservatism, modesty, simplicity, generality, and predictive power. Many philosophers have argued against IBE’s answer to the first question. I am interested in an objection to its answer to the second. Many philosophers seem to think that it is unsustainable: they seem to think that even if we assume that one of the competing hypotheses is true, we should not think that IBE will help us to identify it. Or, more carefully, if these philosophers are doing what they appear to be doing—namely, offering critiques of IBE that don’t depend on assumptions about the field of competing hypotheses—then their claim is that IBE will not help us to identify the truth. I believe that this is mistaken: the argument for believing it assumes a model of IBE that we have no reason to accept. (shrink)

"A brilliant young scholar, Robert Neville, an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church teaching philosophy and theology at Fordham University, offers a new challenging theory of creation that defends religion in the Platonic-Augustinian tradition for the contemporary world. In preparing his argument, Neville orients his position with regard to contemporary alternatives--the existential philosophy of Paul Tillich, the neo-classical or process metaphysics of Charles Hartshorne, and the speculative Aristotelian philosophy of Paul Weiss. Neville approaches his theme, the problem of (...) the transcendence and the presence of God, in three ways. On one level the issue is metaphysical, and the author elaborates and argues for an abstract speculative theory of creation based on the dialectic of the one and the many; in doing so, he criticizes the views of Aquinas, Hegel, Royce, Wiess, and others. The issue on another level is epistemological, and the author offers a way of coping with modern criticisms of the metaphysics of creation, arguing that they theory of creation is not only intelligible but is demanded by the very structure of intelligibility. The author then applies the theory of creation to the practice of religion itself, applying abstract theory to creatin fundamental phenomena of religion to give experiential support to the earlier arguments. Speculation so sophisticated and daring will surely invite responses from both philosophers and theologians."-Publisher. (shrink)

Galen of Pergamum developed a new notion of the vegetative soul as seated in the liver, in a synthetic appropriation of Platonic tripartition, Aristotelian hylomorphism, Hippocratic elemental theory and Hellenistic science. The traditional analogy between plant and human being receives a firmer grounding in Galen, making the model of the plant more prominent than ever in the discussion of the vegetative soul. While most of the particular functions of the vegetative soul in human beings are well-defined by Galen, its generative (...) and formative powers remain unexplained, since the stuff to which we attribute these powers seems to lack intelligence. (shrink)

Until recently, economics was generally understood to be a nonexperimental science with a hypothetico‐deductive methodology. This article considers how the methodology of economics has changed with the spread of experimental methods. Initially, most experimental economists saw their work as testing pre‐existing theories. However, a method of systematic inductive enquiry in which theory plays a less central role is now evolving. This method is structured around the discovery and progressive refinement of regularities. “Exhibits”—experimental designs that generate significant regularities—are taking over some (...) of the functions formerly performed by theoretical models. †To contact the author, please write to: School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)