""This is an excellent source of ideas on using the media to enrich science teaching and engage pupils.

Construed broadly as interpretation theory, hermeneutics could be understood to encompass all modes of interpretation (textual or otherwise), including any kind of literary criticism, from Aristotle's poetics to the New Criticism of the 1950s, as well as the French tradition of structuralism and even perhaps Derridean poststructural thought. Although Gadamer and Ricoeur both recognize the poetic work or, at least, lyric poetry, as belonging to a special class of literature, they do display somewhat different attitudes toward it. For Gadamer, one (...) of the hallmarks of the eminent text is its un‐translatability. That is, all literary works resist translation to one degree or another, but lyric poetry defies it altogether. In Part I of Truth and Method, Gadamer lays out the history of aesthetics and takes issue with the kind of “aesthetic consciousness” that takes the work of art as an object of study. (shrink)

Current models for regulation of parent‐specific gene expression in plants have been based on a small number of imprinted genes in Arabidopsis. These present repression as the default state, with expression requiring targeted activation. In general, repression is associated with maintenance methylation of cytosines, while no role has been found in Arabidopsis imprinting for de novo methylation—unlike the case in mammals. A recent paper1 both reinforces and challenges the model drawn from Arabidopsis. Methylation patterns of two imprinted loci in maize (...) were tracked from gametes to offspring, enabling an exploration of the timing of imprinting. For one gene, fie1, the results were as expected: parent‐specific methylation patterns were inherited from the three types of gamete: egg, central cell and sperm. The behaviour of fie2, however, was a surprise: no alleles were methylated in the gametes, although paternally contributed fie2 is methylated and silent in the endosperm, indicating that, in some cases, plant imprinting requires de novo DNA methylation. This work significantly broadens our understanding of plant imprinting and points to a greater diversity in imprinting mechanisms than has previously been appreciated. BioEssays 28: 1167–1171, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Traces the development of recursive functions from their origins in the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930s, with particular emphasis on the work and influence of Kurt Gödel.

ZusammenfassungKants Anspruch, gestiitzt auf die «Iogisehe Bedeutung» von «Kausalität», die Annahme einer «Kausalität aus Freiheit» mit den Ergebnissen der Erfahrungstheorie in Einklang bringen zu können, wird in Frage gestellt. Darüber hinaus wird bezweifelt, dass jene Annahme dem Zusam‐menhang eines transzendentalphilosophischen Gedankengangs angehört, da sie weder im selben Sinne wie in der Erfahrungstheorie als Bedingung der Möglichkeit des Sittengesetzes noch als ob‐jektiv gültiges Prinzip aufgefasst werden kann. Sie sprengt daher den Rahmen der transzendentalphilosophischen Betrachtungsweise.

In their book, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection, Depew and Weber argued for the need to address the relationship between self-organization and natural selection in evolutionary theory, and focused on seven “visions” for doing so. Recently, Batten et al. in a paper in this journal, entitled “Visions of evolution: self-organization proposes what natural selection disposes,” picked up the issue with the work of Depew and Weber as a starting point. While the efforts of both sets (...) of authors are to be commended, there are substantive errors in both the presentations of my work and of my work with colleagues that undermine theirs. My purpose here is to correct the errors in question, thereby removing the undermining effects and in so doing reassert the position my colleagues and I first advanced more than two decades ago, and that I still stand by and argue for today. The central points are as follows: Self-organization or spontaneous ordering is a process of selection; this selection process is governed by a “physical selection principle”; this principle is the law of maximum entropy production; and natural selection is a special case where the components are replicating. (shrink)

We prove that if an incomplete computably enumerable set has the the universal splitting property then it is low2. This solves a question from Ambos-Spies and Fejer [1] and Downey and Stob [7]. Some technical improvements are discussed.

While there is a considerable body of research on law student identity construction based on interviews and transcripts of classroom talk, there is very little work based on student written texts. In this article two letters of advice written by beginning law students are analysed, using Ivanic and Camps’s framework, as an example of identity formation. Legal identity is argued to be formed by students’ attempts to accommodate a dynamic, partial, practitioner role of provider of advice to the traditional analytic (...) focus of the law student. The process of accommodation is evident in the language of the letters, which show disfluencies resulting from attempts to combine different roles into a coherent legal identity. Comparison with a professionally written letter suggests that, rather than seeking to shape a coherent position, lawyers are able simultaneously to hold incompatible perspectives, concealing the tensions by foregrounding some perspectives and backgrounding others. (shrink)

A step-by-step guide to develop your idea from the first spark to the finished product, with charming illustrations recalling the whimsy and imagination of childhood.

The first edition, published by Acumen in 2000, became a prescribed textbook on modal logic courses. The second edition has been fully revised in response to readers' suggestions, including two new chapters on conditional logic, which was not covered in the first edition. "Modal Logics and Philosophy" is a fully comprehensive introduction to modal logics and their application suitable for course use. Unlike most modal logic textbooks, which are both forbidding mathematically and short on philosophical discussion, "Modal Logics and Philosophy" (...) places its emphasis firmly on showing how useful modal logic can be as a tool for formal philosophical analysis. In part 1 of the book, the reader is introduced to some standard systems of modal logic and encouraged through a series of exercises to become proficient in manipulating these logics. The emphasis is on possible world semantics for modal logics and the semantic emphasis is carried into the formal method, Jeffrey-style truth-trees. Standard truth-trees are extended in a simple and transparent way to take possible worlds into account. Part 2 systematically explores the applications of modal logic to philosophical issues such as truth, time, processes, knowledge and belief, obligation and permission. (shrink)

Explains why the debate initiated by Stephen Lloyd Smith’s plea to jettison the so-called ‘Standard Account of Method’ ––the conventional wisdom of how research philosophy and methodology ought to be taught to management students––is of the utmost importance to the teaching of management studies in British universities. Identifies a fully-developed presentation of the SAM framework in a well-considered and widely-used textbook––‘Research Methods for Managers’ by John Gill and Phil Johnson––and demonstrates that the book’s argument is both logically and scholarly defective. (...) Identifies the SAM as a form of dogmatic rationalism; one that is oblivious to the possibility of applying deductive inference in the service of a critical rationalism. Outlines the logical role of deductive testing in empirical research and demonstrates that there need be no great divide between nomothetic and ideographic research problems once appropriate distinctions are drawn between different forms of explanation. Nonetheless, questions the relevance of these research problems to the concerns of practising managers by highlighting the contrast, as made by philosophers, between social science and social technology. Concludes that the continued presentation and defence of the SAM, as the conventional wisdom of how research philosophy and methodology ought to be taught to management students, is thoroughly lamentable. (shrink)

Generalized Darwinism (GD) claims to be a conceptual and theoretical framework for researching evolutionary change processes in organizations. This paper examines the claims of GD. It finds that in contrast to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection proper, the GD framework is not an explanatory deductive argument form. What it is that GD actually generalizes and intends to explain thereby becomes somewhat moot. It is proposed that the so-called ‘generalization’ that the GD framework supplies might be best understood schematically. (...) Two general schemata that purport to distil commonalities between processes of organizational evolution and biological evolution are thereby identified. But in considering the applicability of the two schemata to organizational evolution, criticism reveals one to be problematic, whereas the other one, to which the GD programme collapses if the problematical schema is dispensed with, has been long associated with another so-called ‘evolutionary approach’ to the understanding of social change: Sir Karl Popper’s ‘evolutionary epistemology’. The paper concludes that if the research problem is to account for the evolutionary character of social and organizational change, then theorists need not commit to the GD framework. They may elect to use Popper’s evolutionary epistemology instead. (shrink)

This paper revisits some recent contributions on ‘Why Management Theory Needs Popper’ to the journal Philosophy of Management. It proposes that those discussions provided an appraisal of the relevance of Popper’s falsification schema to management theory, but that they did not thereby bring to the fore all of the issues pertinent to a balanced and well-rounded understanding of Popper’s philosophy of critical rationalism. It is argued that such an understanding requires a discussion of what Popper himself declared to be the (...) real lynchpin of his thought: fallibilism and a critical approach. It is noted that this represents a rejection of the historical problem situation of philosophy — that knowledge claims need to be positively justified as true. It is argued that this rejection implies an anti-authoritarian, non-justificational philosophy based on the use of critical reason. Its application to several different objects of criticism is demonstrated and its ethical dimensions are explored. The relevance of critical rationalism to management studies and practice is assessed and an inherent limitation on the prospects of its adoption in management practice is identified. … the appeal to authorities is the death of knowledge… the growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement. (shrink)

Uses Sir Karl Popper’s philosophy of critical rationalism to examine the discussion of the UK ‘credit crunch’ as presented by the public record of the UK House of Commons Treasury Select Committee’s investigation. Identifies various philosophical doctrines that acted to shape that investigation and the testimony presented before it. Presents those doctrines as prejudicial to the advancement of knowledge, learning and rationality. Concludes that the philosophy of critical rationalism is relevant to the problems of modern society.

In Plato on the Unity of the Virtues, Rod Jenks argues that while Plato makes several attempts to show how virtue is one, he deliberately fails to secure this because he thinks the way in which the virtues are both one and many is finally ineffable.

The usual treatment of a dinner table utterance of ‘Can you pass the salt?’ is that it involves an indirect request to pass the salt as well as a direct question about the hearer’s ability to do so: an indirect speech act. These are held to involve two illocutionary forces and two illocutionary acts. Rod Bertolet has raised doubts about whether consideration of such examples warrants the postulation of indirect speech acts and illocutionary forces other than the literal ones. In (...) a recent article, Mary Kate McGowan, Shan Shan Tam, and Margaret Hall claim to show that these doubts are unfounded. The purpose of this paper is to show that they have not established this. (shrink)

Ever since Saul Kripke and others developed a semantic interpretation for modal logic, 'possible worlds' has been a much debated issue in contemporary metaphysics. To propose the idea of a possible world that differs in some way from our actual world - for example a world where the grass is red or where no people exist - can help us to analyse and understand a wide range of philosophical concepts, such as counterfactuals, properties, modality, and of course, the notions of (...) possibility and necessity. This book examines the ways in which possible worlds have been used as a framework for considering problems in logic and argument analysis. The book begins with a non-technical introduction to the basic ideas of modal logic in terms of Kripke's possible worlds and then moves on to a discussion of 'possible for' and 'possible that'. The central chapters examine questions of meaning, epistemic possibility, temporal logic, metaphysics, and impossibility. Girle also investigates how the idea of a possible world can be put to use in different areas of philosophy, the problems it may raise, and the benefits that can be gained. (shrink)

In this commentary on Stokoe’s article, ‘Moving forward with membership categorization analysis’, I take up the challenge to apply her keys for MCA to an extract of conversation recorded in a restaurant. The strengths of conversation analysis have not included – and indeed have not attempted to achieve – successful engagement with beyond-the-immediate-talk aspects of culture and the commonsense workings of society. The aim of the article is to explore what MCA might add to an analysis of a stretch of (...) talk using conversation analytic tools. It was found that a systematic application of the keys did indeed provide a richer account of what was going on. Whereas categories alone did not appear to provide more insights than commonsense can tell us, when the broader array of MCA tools and keys were applied, an enhanced analysis of the passage of talk emerged. An exploration of whether this can be extended as a method for a rigorous investigation of culture and society while still being grounded in participants’ mutual, moment-by-moment orientations to categories seems at the very least worth the serious attention of scholars interested in interaction. (shrink)