This article studies the formats Do we X, Should/Shall we X, and Let’s X in order to deepen our understanding of face-to-face collaborative interactions at the computer. We use 6 hours of data of university students collaborating in British and American English, and our methodology is Conversation Analysis. We demonstrate that the participants display and orient to the immediacy/remoteness of the task, as well as their entitlement to carry out the proposed task, when they put forward a proposed action. To (...) do so, they use specific formats, specific verbs, and display specific tasks depending on their needs, emerging from the unfolding of the collaboration. We argue that collaboration is not only a matter of organising the accomplishment of a set of tasks, but also of displaying what kind of task is being proposed, and to what extent the speaker is entitled to the proposed task. (shrink)

A translation of Plato's dialogue on the nature of pleasure and its relation to thought and knowledge. It includes a cogent introduction, notes, and comprehensive bibliography.

This paper investigates whether gender affects ethically sensitive decisions of a personal or business nature. Data from 51 practicing accountants from both public accounting and private industry suggest that while differences exist between female and male accountants in responses to specific situations, overall responses are quite similar. Statistically significant differences were found for only five of the sixteen ethically sensitive situations. Further, when personal and business situations of a similar nature were paired together, two of the eight differences between personal (...) and business responses were significantly different between females and males. Taken as a whole, the results refute the suggestion that the ethical decision making of organizations may be enhanced as more women enter the business field. (shrink)

'With admirable clarity, Mrs Peters sums up what determines competence in spelling and the traditional and new approaches to its teaching.' -Times Literary Supplement.

In her 1996 and 2006 essays “Being and Becoming: Rhetorical Ontology in Early Greek Thought” and “The Task of the Bow: Heraclitus’ Rhetorical Critique of Epic Language,” Carol Poster was the first to argue for the historical and theoretical relevance of Heraclitus in the discipline of rhetoric. Despite the admonitions of Edward Schiappa (1999) and Thomas Cole (1991) against applying rhetorical theories that only emerged after the fourth century BCE to pre- or proto-rhetorical texts, Poster argues that Heraclitus merits the (...) attention of rhetorical as well as philosophical scholarship not only because Heraclitus had such a profound influence on the thought and work of thinkers who would later become the ancient .. (shrink)

One way of understanding the reduplicative formula "Christ is, ’qua’ God, omniscient, but ’qua’ man, limited in knowledge" is to take the occurrences of the ‘qua‘ locution as picking out different parts of Christ: a divine part and a human part. But this view of Christ as a composite being runs into paradox when combined with the orthodox understanding of the Incarnation, according to which Christ is identical to the second person of the Trinity. In response, we have to choose (...) between modifying the orthodox understanding, adopting a philosophically and theologically contentious perdurantist account of persistence through time, or rejecting altogether the idea of the composite Christ. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the relationship between vernacular kind terms and specialist scientific vocabularies. Elsewhere I have developed a defence of realism about the chemical elements as natural kinds. This defence depends on identifying the epistemic interests and theoretical conception of the elements that have suffused chemistry since the mid-eighteenth century. Because of this dependence, it is a discipline-specific defence, and would seem to entail important concessions to pluralism about natural kinds. I argue that making this kind of concession (...) does not imply that vernacular kind terms have independent application conditions. Nor does it preclude us saying that chemists, with their particular epistemic interests, have discovered the underlying nature of water, the stuff that is named and thought about in accordance with the practical interests of everyday life. There are limits to pluralism. (shrink)

In this article I argue that structure in chemistry is a creature of abstraction: attending selectively to structural similarities, we neglect differences. There are different ways to abstract, so abstraction is interest dependent. So is structure. First, there are two different and mutually irreducible notions of structure in chemistry: bond structure and geometrical structure. Second, structure is relative to scale : the same substance has different structures at different scales, and relationships of structural sameness and difference vary across the scales. (...) However, these facts have no tendency to undermine structure’s claim to reality, or its metaphysical seriousness. (shrink)

Property is a complex sign in semiotics. It is also the source of tension and conflict in law. This paper examines property in triadic terms consisting of what Charles S. Peirce would identify as the icon (firstness), the index (secondness), and the symbol (thirdness). From this perspective the paper explores the ideas of place, space, and time at the iconic level of the sign of property. Discussion addresses the way in which property serves as a coded system for communicating information (...) about a given community’s values and its cultural-interpretive hierarchy. Much like an aboriginal songline, property functions as a way of imprinting the land with impressions of social ordering related to place, space, and time. In the context of global trade we therefore observe property conflicts which are sometimes not so much about the technical language of property as they are about tensions among the embedded values in competing signs of property. (shrink)

For humans and many other animals, gender is a fact of life. Most individuals are born either male or female and their sex will have an enormous influence on their behaviour, physiology and life history. In this review, I consider the effect gender has on lifespan. In particular, I discuss the role played by behaviour, immunity and oxidative damage in determining sex‐dependent differences in longevity. I consider existing explanations for the effect of gender on lifespan and how these explanations fit (...) together. Finally, I expand on the recent suggestion of a key role for the insulin/IGF‐1 signalling pathway in regulating sex‐dependent differences in lifespan(1) and I highlight a number of areas for future investigation. BioEssays 29:795–802, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In this essay I critically examine the role of entropy of mixing in articulating a macroscopic criterion for the sameness and difference of chemical substances. Consider three cases of mixing in which entropy change occurs: isotopic variants, spin isomers, and populations of atoms in different orthogonal quantum states. Using these cases I argue that entropy of mixing tracks differences between physical states, differences that may or may not correspond to a difference of substance. It does not provide a criterion for (...) the sameness and difference of substance that is appropriate to chemistry. (shrink)

In this paper I defend, against Eric Scerri’s objections, the following theses: that Lavoisier and Mendeleev shared a ‘core conception’ of chemical element, and that this core conception underwrites referential continuity in the names of particular elements.Keywords: Antoine Lavoisier; Dmitri Mendeleev; Chemical elements; Substance; Natural kinds; Reference.

_ Source: _Volume 31, Issue 1, pp 30 - 47 In this article, I show that Hobbes’s account of the generation of the commonwealth in both _The Elements of Law_ and _De Cive_ relies on ideas that he would come to theorise in terms of authorisation and representation in _Leviathan_. In this respect, I argue that the _Leviathan_ account is better understood as filling in gaps and resolving equivocations in Hobbes’s theory, rather than marking a decisive break in his thinking. (...) This argument is developed by substantiating two more specific theses. First, while Hobbes only explicitly distinguishes between the “alienation” and “authorisation” clauses of the covenant in _Leviathan_, the earlier versions of his theory rely on a two-clause account. Second, in the earlier versions of his theory, Hobbes equivocates between suggesting that the relation between the state and sovereign should be understood in terms of representation or identity; an equivocation that he would only resolve in _Leviathan_. (shrink)

Our target article discussed how emerging knowledge of the physiological processes involved in the control of saccadic eye movements provided the basis for a functional framework in which to understand the programming of such movements. The commentators raised many interesting issues in their varied responses that ranged from detailed discussion of the physiological substrate through issues of saccade control in reading. New evidence at the physiological level demonstrates that some elaborations are needed to the framework we proposed. Most clearly, the (...) spatial selection process operates in a manner different from our suggestion of an increase in activity in the salience map. Some commentators make the interesting and welcome proposal that the functional processes we outline may in fact be implemented with an even more unified physiological substrate (continuity between collicular fixation and build-up cells) than we envisaged. Extensions to the framework are discussed involving the planning of sequential saccades, saccades made in crossmodal situations, the influences of learning and memory, and binocular saccades. We consider carefully the commentaries proposing explicit attentional and/or executive processes in the programming of saccades. We integrate the comments of researchers investigating saccade control in neurological and neuropsychiatric patients and finally discuss whether the framework can account for saccades made in the course of reading. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the discussion of the phenomenon sometimes described as “the utility and disutility of chance” both from the descriptive and the prescriptive point of view Emphasis is not on axioms and formal properties but on the psychological content of decision theoretic constructs.

Humans have slowly built more productive societies by slowly acquiring various kinds of capital, and by carefully matching them to each other. Because disruptions can disturb this careful matching, and discourage social coordination, large disruptions can cause a “social collapse,” i.e., a reduction in productivity out of proportion to the disruption. For many types of disasters, severity seems to follow a power law distribution. For some of types, such as wars and earthquakes, most of the expected harm is predicted to (...) occur in extreme events, which kill most people on Earth. So if we are willing to worry about any war or earthquake, we should worry especially about extreme versions. If individuals varied little in their resistance to such disruptions, events a little stronger than extreme ones would eliminate humanity, and our only hope would be to prevent such events. If individuals vary a lot in their resistance, however, then it may pay to increase the variance in such resistance, such as by creating special sanctuaries from which the few remaining humans could rebuild society. (shrink)

The Scottish independence referendum in 2014 saw the breakthrough of online political campaigning in the UK. Despite the outcome, research and media alike concluded that the main pro-independence campaign, Yes Scotland, outdid the main pro-union campaign, Better Together, in the online battle. This article addresses this discrepancy by exploring how YS and BT used social media affordances in order to legitimize their own and de-legitimize their opponents’ positions. The material consists of multimodal tweets published by YS and BT in the (...) run-up to the referendum. The article employs a model for multimodal legitimation that takes into consideration the construction of authority, moral evaluation and the construction and justifications of means and goals. The findings show that both campaigns made extensive use of de-legitimating strategies, although YS was more balanced. The article also shows that the campaigns’ communicative choices had implications for the construction and justification of goals and means, with YS running a more visionary campaign than BT. (shrink)

Arthur Fine and André Kukla have argued that realism and instrumentalism are indifferent with respect to scientific practice. I argue that this claim is ambiguous. One interpretation is that for any practice, the fact that that practice yields predictively successful theories is evidentially indifferent between scientific realism and instrumentalism. On the second construal, the claim is that for any practice, adoption of that practice by a scientist is indifferent between their being a realist or instrumentalist. I argue that there are (...) no good arguments for the indifference claim under the second interpretation, and good reasons to think that it is false. (shrink)

While many of Bernard Mandeville's contemporary critics read him as trying to ridicule and subvert all ideas of morality and virtue, others criticized him for insisting on too demanding a conception of virtue as self-denial. In this article, I take the latter line of criticism as my point of departure and evaluate whether Mandeville's ‘origins of virtue’ thesis can be reconciled with his claims about virtue requiring self-denial. To do so, I trace the changes to Mandeville's account of virtue between (...) the different editions of The Fable of the Bees and An Enquiry Into the Origin of Honour, placing particular emphasis on the conceptual distinctions introduced in the 1723 edition of the Fable. I show that there are important tensions in Mandeville's argument and I evaluate potential ways in which they might be resolved. The most important inconsistency, I argue, is that it is unclear whether Mandeville's speculative historical explanation of the origins of virtue can support the strongest claims he makes about virtue requiring a complete conquest of the passions, even if it can support weaker conceptualizations of virtue as self-denial. (shrink)

Given common priors, no agent can publicly estimate a non-zero sign for the difference between his estimate and another agent’s future estimate. Thus rational agents cannot publicly anticipate the direction in which other agents will disagree with them.  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

In practice, scoring rules elicit good probability estimates from individuals, while betting markets elicit good consensus estimates from groups. Market scoring rules combine these features, eliciting estimates from individuals or groups, with groups costing no more than individuals. Regarding a bet on one event given another event, only logarithmic versions preserve the probability of the given event. Logarithmic versions also preserve the conditional probabilities of other events, and so preserve conditional independence relations. Given logarithmic rules that elicit relative probabilities of (...) base event pairs, it costs no more to elicit estimates on all combinations of these base events. (shrink)

The use of contingent valuation methods for estimating the economic value of environmental improvements and damages has increased significantly. However, doubts exist regarding the validity of the usual willingness to pay CV methods. In this article, we examine the CV approach in light of recent findings from behavioral decision research regarding the constructive nature of human preferences. We argue that a principal source of problems with conventional CV methods is that they impose unrealistic cognitive demands upon respondents. We propose a (...) new CV approach, based on the value-structuring capabilities of multiattribute utility theory and decision analysis, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

Comparative ethics raises theoretical and methodological problems important for all ethical studies. Five essays in this focus section provide introductions to the ethics of specific indigenous cultures and suggest implications for further comparative studies. In this introduction, we review these findings and discuss their relevance to the concept of ethical naturalism which we have previously offered as a basis for comparative work.

Consider two agents who want to be Bayesians with a common prior, but who cannot due to computational limitations. If these agents agree that their estimates are consistent with certain easy-to-compute consistency constraints, then they can agree to disagree about any random variable only if they also agree to disagree, to a similar degree and in a stronger sense, about an average error. Yet average error is a state-independent random variable, and one agent's estimate of it is also agreed to (...) be state-independent. Thus suggests that disagreements are not fundamentally due to differing information about the state of the world. (shrink)

SummaryR. G. Collingwood presented his major work of political philosophy, The New Leviathan, as an updated version of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. However, his reasons for taking Hobbes's great work as his inspiration have puzzled and eluded many Collingwood scholars, while those interested in the reception of Hobbes's ideas have largely neglected the New Leviathan. In this essay I reveal what Collingwood saw in Hobbes's political philosophy and show how his reading of Hobbes both diverges from other prominent interpretations of the (...) time and invites us to reassess Hobbes's complex association with the origins of liberalism. In doing so, I focus on Collingwood's science of mind, his ideas on society and authority, and his dialectical theory of politics, in each case showing how he engaged with Hobbes in order to elucidate his own vision of civilisation. That vision is based on the development of social consciousness, which involves people coming to understand the body politic as a joint enterprise whereby they confer authority upon those who rule. (shrink)

Expected utility theory does not directly deal with the utility of chance. It has been suggested in the literature (Samuelson, 1952, Markowitz, 1959) that this can be remedied by an approach which explicitly models the emotional consequences which give rise to the utility of chance. We refer to this as the elaborated outcomes approach. It is argued that the elaborated outcomes approach destroys the possibility of deriving a representation theorem based on the usual axioms of expected utility theory. This is (...) shown with the help of an example due to Markowitz. It turns out that the space of conceivable lotteries over elaborated outcomes is too narrow to permit the application of the axioms. Moreover it is shown that a representation theorem does not hold for the example. (shrink)

The ciliated protozoan, Paramecium, broadcasts the activity of its individual ion channel classes through its swimming behaviour. This fact has made it possible to isolate mutants with defective ion currents, simply by selecting individuals with abnormal swimming patterns. At least four of Paramecium's ion currents are activated by rising intracellular calcium concentration, including two K+ currents and a Na+ current. A variety of cell lines with defects in these Ca2+‐dependent currents have been isolated: in several cases, the defects have been (...) traced to mutations in the structural gene for calmodulin. Sequence analysis of calmodulins from these and other Ca2+ ‐dependent ion‐current mutants may enable a detailed mapping of putative channel interaction domains on the surface of the calmodulin molecule. (shrink)

The history of science and the philosophy of science have a long and tangled relationship. On the one hand, philosophical reflection on science can be guided, shaped, and challenged by historical scholarship—a process begun by Thomas Kuhn and continued by successive generations of ‘post-positivist’ historians and philosophers of science. On the other hand, the activity of writing the history of science raises methodological questions concerning, for instance, progress in science, realism and antirealism, and the semantics of scientific theories, questions which (...) are the subject of continued debate in philosophy. Clearly the history and the philosophy of science will continue to challenge each other's research agendas and guiding assumptions. (shrink)

Republic is the central work of the Western world's most famous philosopher. Essentially an inquiry into morality, Republic also contains crucial arguments and insights into many other areas of philosophy. It is also a literary masterpiece: the philosophy is presented for the most part for the ordinary reader, who is carried along by the wit and intensity of the dialogue and by Plato's unforgettable images of the human condition. This new, lucid translation by Robin Waterfield is complemented by full (...) explanatory notes and an up-to-date critical introduction. (shrink)

We are unlikely to stop seeking pleasure, as this would prejudice our health and well-being. Yet many psychoactive substances providing pleasure are outlawed as illicit recreational drugs, despite the fact that only some of them are addictive to some people. Efforts to redress their prohibition, or to reform legislation so that penalties are proportionate to harm have largely failed. Yet, if choices over seeking pleasure are ethical insofar as they avoid harm to oneself or others, public health strategies should foster (...) ethical choice by moving beyond current risk management practices embodied in the harm reduction movement. The neuroscience of pleasure has much to offer neuroethics and public health strategies. Distinguishing between ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ fosters new understandings of addiction. These hold promise for directing the search for pharmacotherapies which prevent addiction and relapse or disrupt associated neuromechanisms. They could inform new research into creating lawful psychoactive substances which give us pleasure without provoking addiction. As the health and well being of human and other animals rests upon the experience of pleasure, this would be an ethical objective within public health strategy. Were ethical and neurobiological obstacles to ending addiction to be overcome, problems associated with excessive consumption, the lure of unlawful psychoactive substances and the paucity of lawful means to achieve pleasurable altered states would remain. Non-addictive designer drugs, which reliably provided lawful access to pleasures and altered states, would ameliorate these public health concerns insofar as they fostered citizens’ informed, ethical choices according to a neurobiological taxonomy of pleasures. (shrink)

We develop an analysis of discourse anaphora—the relationship between a pronoun and an antecedent earlier in the discourse —using games of partial information. The analysis is extended to include information from a variety of different sources, including lexical semantics, contrastive stress, grammatical relations, and decision theoretic aspects of the context.

Although much attention has been given to the role of community stakeholders in developing environmental risk- management policies, most local and national initiatives are better known for their failings than their successes. One reason for this continuing difficulty, we contend, is a reluctance to address the many difficult value trade-offs that necessarily arise in the course of creating and evaluating alternative risk- management options. In this paper we discuss six reasons why such trade-offs are difficult and, for each, present helpful (...) techniques from the decision sciences along with case study examples of successful applications. (shrink)

Present regulations and prohibitions relating to psychoactive substances rest upon socio-historically contingent and hence arguably irrational foundations. New evidence bases located in post-genomic genetics and neuroscience hold the potential to disrupt them through demonstrating a lack of congruence between the regulations and prohibitions and the alleged and actual harms. How far might we use such knowledge to drive policy? What limits, if any, should be placed on our choices, and what attempts to influence these may be seen as acceptable? This (...) article seeks to address these questions in relation to criminal justice system and public health governance of psychoactive substance use. It will explore the implications of justifications employed in both areas to restrict free choice on the grounds of harm to the self and to others. The central argument made is that the current categorisation of psychoactive substances as lawful or unlawful is likely to become disrupted as the result of several separate discourses which converge over psychoactive substance use: enhancement, cognitive liberty and the degree to which subjective experiences of pleasure, well being and happiness might enable us to improve and maintain our health as individuals and that of society as a whole. In my view, the strategic deployment of concepts of addiction which has enabled the public health and criminal justice systems to be able to share governance over psychoactive substance use is likely to become destabilised by these discursive developments. In that policy in the United Kingdom and elsewhere now draws upon happiness research, while reformers advocate freedom of choice over means of enhancing our states of being, a new focus upon the rational evaluation of psychoactive substances governance seems plausible. (shrink)

If we are not to conclude that most planets like Earth have evolved life as intelligent as we are, we must presume Earth is not random. This selection effect, however, also implies that the origin of life need not be as easy as the early appearance of life on Earth suggests. If a series of major evolutionary transitions were required to produce intelligent life, selection implies that a subset of these were “critical steps,” with durations that are similarly distributed. The (...) time remaining from now until simple life is no longer possible on Earth must also be similarly distributed. I show how these results provide timing tests to constrain models of critical evolutionary transitions. (shrink)