The species comprising the fungal endophyte genus “Epichloë ”are symbionts of cool season grasses. About half the species in this genus are strictly vertically transmitted, and evolutionary theory suggests that these species must be mutualists. Nevertheless, Faeth and Sullivan (e.g., 2003) have argued that such vertically transmitted endophytes are ’usually parasitic,’ and Müller and Krauss (2005) have argued that such vertically transmitted endophytes fall along a mutualism-parasitism continuum. These papers (and others) have caused confusion in the field. We used a (...) systematic review to show that close to half of the published papers in this field incorrectly categorize the interaction. Here, we develop the argument that advantages and disadvantages are not the same things as mutualism and parasitism and that experimental evidence must be interpreted in the context of theory. We argue that, “contra ”Faeth and Sullivan, it is highly unlikely that such strictly vertically transmitted endophytes can be parasites, and that, “contra ”Müller and Krauss, it is inappropriate to apply the continuum concept to strictly vertically transmitted endophytes. We develop a mathematical model to support and illustrate our arguments. We use the model to clarify that parasitism “requires ”some degree of horizontal transmission, and that while it is appropriate to use the continuum concept when referring to the genus as a whole, or to species that possess horizontal transmission, we argue that it is inappropriate to use the concept when referring to species that are strictly vertically transmitted. (shrink)

The Twentieth Century has seen a dramatic rise in the use of probability and statistics in almost all fields of research. This has stimulated many new philosophical ideas on probability. _Philosophical Theories of Probability_ is the first book to present a clear, comprehensive and systematic account of these various theories and to explain how they relate to one another. Gillies also offers a distinctive version of the propensity theory of probability, and the intersubjective interpretation, which develops the subjective theory.

Why is understanding causation so important in philosophy and the sciences? Should causation be defined in terms of probability? Whilst causation plays a major role in theories and concepts of medicine, little attempt has been made to connect causation and probability with medicine itself. Causality, Probability, and Medicine is one of the first books to apply philosophical reasoning about causality to important topics and debates in medicine. Donald Gillies provides a thorough introduction to and assessment of competing theories of causality (...) in philosophy, including action-related theories, causality and mechanisms, and causality and probability. Throughout the book he applies them to important discoveries and theories within medicine, such as germ theory; tuberculosis and cholera; smoking and heart disease; the first ever randomized controlled trial designed to test the treatment of tuberculosis; the growing area of philosophy of evidence-based medicine; and philosophy of epidemiology. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, as well as those working in medicine, nursing and related health disciplines where a working knowledge of causality and probability is required. (shrink)

Go to John Cantwell’s response to the original paper from here › Go to Grazia Ietto-Gillies’ original paper from here ›.

The last couple of decades has brought a renewed interest in American conservatism among historians. Yet most recent studies have focused on the emergence of neoconservatism after World War II and virtually no recent scholarly work has pursued the history of conservatism before the 1920s. Both Richard Hofstadter and Clinton Rossiter agreed that the late nineteenth century was an important watershed in the evolution of American conservative thought. Hofstadter argued that the new laissez-faire conservatism that became dominant during the Gilded (...) Age was remarkable in that “it lacked many of the signal characteristics of conservatism as it is usually found.” Yet some conservatives refused to accept key features of what Clinton Rossiter once branded this new “contradictory conservatism.” This essay focuses mostly on Protestant clerical intellectuals who dissented from the new orthodoxy and attempted to preserve older conservative principles. Against the laissez-faire conservatives' hyperindividualism, these dissenting conservatives stressed an organic view of the social order and the importance of mediating institutions such as family and church. To the others' secularism, they offered a social theory suffused with evangelical Protestantism. This analysis highlights where these dissidents differed from their fellow conservatives and seeks also to elucidate their alternative conservative vision of the American republic. Such a study serves to clarify just how profound an ideological shift occurred among conservatives during the Gilded Age and illuminates some of the persistent tensions within American conservatism still evident today. (shrink)

The frequent or chronic experience of boredom has been shown to be strongly connected to one’s well-being. Individuals who score high on measures of boredom proneness face several psychological, physical, and even social harms. Although boredom can affect anyone’s well-being, its impact is not uniform across all individuals and social groups. Social identity can alter one’s experience of boredom, and in this chapter, we expand upon the existing literature on the social dimensions of boredom to detail how marginalization on the (...) basis of one’s race can transform one’s relationship to boredom. We argue that, within the context of race, the experience of boredom can cause further significant psychological and social harms for those who belong to racially minoritized or marginalized groups. The experience of this form of boredom – racialized boredom – is based in iniquitous social institutions and structures. As a result, it becomes harder to alleviate it, and solutions to its psychological and social harms are severely restricted. Such a realization underscores boredom’s potential to become a deeply unjust phenomenon: the pervasiveness of racialized boredom further disenfranchises those who are already marginalized and presents additional barriers to their well-being. (shrink)

This paper introduces what is called the intersubjective interpretation of the probability calculus. Intersubjective probabilities are related to subjective probabilities, and the paper begins with a particular formulation of the familiar Dutch Book argument. This argument is then extended, in Section 3, to social groups, and this enables the concept of intersubjective probability to be introduced in Section 4. It is then argued that the intersubjective interpretation is the appropriate one for the probabilities which appear in confirmation theory whether of (...) a Bayesian or a Popperian variety. The final section of the paper states and tries to answer an objection due to Putnam. (shrink)

Outlines the key concepts in the work of Foucault, showing how his concepts of discourse, of power/knowledge, and of governmentality offer a way to understand how ideas of educational leadership and management have emerged, how they serve to establish a discipline, and how they construct individuals in particular ideological ways.

The paper briefly summarises the historical evolution of transnational corporations and their activities. It then introduces the major theories developed to explain the TNC. There is an attempt to place the theories historically, within the context of the socio-economic … More ›.

Epistemic modals are standardly taken to be context-dependent quantifiers over possibilities. Thus sentences containing them get truth-values with respect to both a context and an index. But some insist that this relativization is not relative enough: `might'-claims, they say, only get truth-values with respect to contexts, indices, and—the new wrinkle—points of assessment (hence, CIA). Here we argue against such "relativist" semantics. We begin with a sketch of the motivation for such theories and a generic formulation of them. Then we catalogue (...) central problems that any such theory faces. We end by outlining an alternative story. (shrink)

In the current socioeconomic environment, brands increasingly need to portray societal and ethical commitments at a corporate level, in order to remain competitive and improve their reputation. However, studies that relate business ethics to corporate brands are either purely conceptual or have been empirically conducted in relation to the field of products/goods. This is surprising because corporate brands are even more relevant in the services sector, due to the different nature of services, and the subsequent need to provide a consistent (...) high-quality customer experience across all the brand–customer interactions and touch-points. Thus, the purpose of this article is to study, at a corporate brand level and in the field of services, the effect of customer perceived ethicality of a brand on brand equity. The model is tested by structural equations, using data collected for eight service categories by means of a panel composed of 2179 customers. The test of measurement equivalence between these categories is conducted using generalizability theory. Confirmatory factor analysis marker technique is applied in order to check for common method variance. The results of the hypothesized model indicate that customer perceived ethicality has a positive, indirect impact on brand equity, through the mediators of brand affect and perceived quality. However, there is no empirical evidence for a direct effect of customer perceived ethicality on brand equity. (shrink)

This paper has three main goals. First, to motivate a puzzle about how ignorance-expressing terms like maybe and if interact: they iterate, and when they do they exhibit scopelessness. Second, to argue that there is an ambiguity in our theoretical toolbox, and that exposing that opens the door to a solution to the puzzle. And third, to explore the reach of that solution. Along the way, the paper highlights a number of pleasing properties of two elegant semantic theories, explores some (...) meta-theoretic properties of dynamic notions of meaning, dips its toe into some hazardous waters, and offers characterization theorems for the space of meanings an indicative conditional can have. (shrink)

Teaching students to ask and answer questions is critically important if they are to engage in reasoned argumentation, problem-solving, and learning. This study involved 35 groups of grade 6 children from 18 classrooms in three conditions (cognitive questioning condition, community of inquiry condition, and the comparison condition) who were videotaped as they worked on specific inquiry-based science tasks. The study also involved the teachers in these classrooms who were audio-taped as they interacted with the children during these tasks. The results (...) show that while there were no significant differences in the children's explanatory behaviour across the two time periods, there were significant differences in the total verbal interactions between the children in the cognitive questioning condition and their peers in the community of inquiry and comparison conditions. Furthermore, the children in the cognitive questioning condition obtained higher reasoning and problem-solving scores than peers in the other conditions. Interestingly, while there were no significant differences between the teachers’ basic and extended mediating behaviours in the three conditions at Times 1 and 2, there was a significant difference in extended mediation behaviours with the teachers demonstrating nearly three times more extended mediation to promote students’ learning at Time 2 than they did at Time 1. Teacher intervention in providing guidance in how to interact during cooperative, inquiry-based science appears to be critical to helping students engage in higher-level thinking and learning. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method examines the remarkable advances made in the field of AI over the past twenty years, discussing their profound implications for philosophy. Taking a clear, non-technical approach, Donald Gillies shows how current views on scientific method are challenged by this recent research, and suggests a new framework for the study of logic. Finally, he draws on work by such seminal thinkers as Bacon, Gdel, Popper, Penrose, and Lucas, to address the hotly-contested question of whether computers might (...) become intellectually superior to human beings. (shrink)

The propensity interpretation of probability was introduced by Popper ([1957]), but has subsequently been developed in different ways by quite a number of philosophers of science. This paper does not attempt a complete survey, but discusses a number of different versions of the theory, thereby giving some idea of the varieties of propensity. Propensity theories are classified into (i) long-run and (ii) single-case. The paper argues for a long-run version of the propensity theory, but this is contrasted with two single-case (...) propensity theories, one due to Miller and the later Popper, and the other to Fetzer. The three approaches are compared by examining how they deal with a key problem for the propensity approach, namely the relationship between propensity and causality and Humphreys' paradox. (shrink)

What we want to be true about ordinary indicative conditionals seems to be more than we can possibly get: there just seems to be no good way to assign truth-conditions to ordinary indicative conditionals. Some take this argument as reason to make our wantings more modest. Others take it to show that indicative conditionals don't have truth-conditions in the first place. But we have overlooked two possibilities for assigning truth-conditions to indicatives. What's more, those possibilities deliver what we want and (...) turn out to be equivalent. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us Digg Reddit Technorati What's this? (shrink)

The creation of poetry can be an intensely healing process, as therapeutic as the other arts and talking therapies. This paper examines three areas. First, it sets out some opinions about the specific qualities of poetry that make it particularly valuable as part of a therapeutic process. It goes on to give exemplified information about how poetry is used within healthcare in Britain. Finally, it indicates the current growth of interest in this area, with brief descriptions of pilot research studies (...) where poetry has been offered by a writing therapist, or by nursing or medical practitioners. (shrink)

Part I: Inductivism and its Critics:. 1. Some Historical Background: Inductivism, Russell and the Cambridge School, the Vienna Circle and Popper. 2. Popper’s Critique of Inductivism. 3. Duhem’s Critique of Inductivism. Part II: Conventionalism and the Duhem-Quine Thesis:. 4. Poincare’s Conventionalism of 1902. 5. The Duhem Thesis and the Quine Thesis. Part III: The Nature of Observation:. 6. Observation Statements: the Views of Carnap, Neurath, Popper and Duhem. 7. Observation Statements: Some Psychological Findings. Part IV: The Demarcation between Science and (...) Metaphysics:. 8. Is Metaphysics Meaningless? Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle and Popper’s Critique. 9. Metaphysics in relation to Science: the Views of Popper, Duhem and Quine. 10. Falsification in the light of the Duhem-Quine Thesis. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to consider whether critical rationalism has any ideas which could usefully be applied to the internet. Today we tend to take the internet for granted and it is easy to forget that it was only about two decades ago that it began to be used to any significant extent. Accordingly in section 1 of the paper, there is a brief consideration of the history of the internet. At first sight this makes it looks implausible (...) that any of Popper’s ideas could be applicable to the internet, since Popper died before the internet came into general use. However, section 2 argues that Popper’s theory of World 3 does apply very well to the internet. This application is significant because, as shown in section 3, it leads to the problem of misinformation, which is one of the most significant problems generated by the internet. In section 4 there is an attempt to solve this problem using ideas taken from Popper’s epistemology. It is argued that there should be changes in education designed to prepare students for the internet age. Teaching in the internet age should focus on presenting to the students not just the accepted theories but also the evidence on which they are based. An illustration of how this might be done is given by considering an example from science teaching, namely the teaching of Newtonian mechanics in the last years of school or first years of university. (shrink)

La posmodernidad se caracteriza por la desaparición de la idea de una acionalidad central de la historia, por un rechazo al universalismo moderno, poniéndose de manifiesto en cambio una eclosión de racionalidades ‘locales’ –minorías étnicas, sexuales, religiosas, culturales o estéticas las cuales aparecen como un rechazo a la idea de que sólo existe una forma de humanidad verdaderamente digna de realizarse; a este fenómeno de microgrupos emergiendo en todos los campos se le conoce como neotribalismo. Así pues, la figura que (...) aparece como representativa de la posmodernidad no es la de Apolo (la de un orden universal), sino la de Dionisio (un constante juego ético-estético dado en lo contingente), el cual puede ser afiliado a la imagen del puer aeternus (el joven/niño eterno), contraria a la del adulto serio, racional, productor y reproductor (propia del siglo XIX), que, dejando de lado las calificaciones de tipo moral, normativo y con tan sólo calificar de cool la realidad, anula las pretensiones absolutistas universalistas. (shrink)

Moore's paradox pits our intuitions about semantic oddnessagainst the concept of truth-functional consistency. Most solutions tothe problem proceed by explaining away our intuitions. But``consistency'' is a theory-laden concept, having different contours indifferent semantic theories. Truth-functional consistency is appropriateonly if the semantic theory we are using identifies meaning withtruth-conditions. I argue that such a framework is not appropriate whenit comes to analzying epistemic modality. I show that a theory whichaccounts for a wide variety of semantic data about epistemic modals(Update Semantics) buys (...) us a solution to Moore's paradox as a corollary.It turns out that Moorean propositions, when looked at through the lenseof an appropriate semantic theory, are inconsistent after all. (shrink)

This paper considers whether philosophy of mathematics could benefit by the introduction of some sociology. It begins by considering Lakatos's arguments that philosophy of science should be kept free of any sociology. An attempt is made to criticize these arguments, and then a positive argument is given for introducing a sociological dimension into the philosophy of mathematics. This argument is illustrated by considering Brouwer's account of numbers as mental constructions. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of Azzouni's view that (...) mathematics differs fundamentally from other social practices. (shrink)

The paper begins with an exposition of Aristotle’s own philosophy of mathematics. It is claimed that this is based on two postulates. The first is the embodiment postulate, which states that mathematical objects exist not in a separate world, but embodied in the material world. The second is that infinity is always potential and never actual. It is argued that Aristotle’s philosophy gave an adequate account of ancient Greek mathematics; but that his second postulate does not apply to modern mathematics, (...) which assumes the existence of the actual infinite. However, it is claimed that the embodiment postulate does still hold in contemporary mathematics, and this is argued in detail by considering the natural numbers and the sets of ZFC. (shrink)

This paper suggests a new principle for confirmation theory which is called the principle of explanatory surplus. This principle is shown to be non-Bayesian in character, and to lead to a treatment of simplicity in science. Two cases of the principle of explanatory surplus are considered. The first (number of parameters) is illustrated by curve-fitting examples, while the second (number of theoretical assumptions) is illustrated by the examples of Newton's Laws and Adler's Theory of the Inferiority Complex.

The development of causal modelling since the 1950s has been accompanied by a number of controversies, the most striking of which concerns the Markov condition. Reichenbach's conjunctive forks did satisfy the Markov condition, while Salmon's interactive forks did not. Subsequently some experts in the field have argued that adequate causal models should always satisfy the Markov condition, while others have claimed that non-Markovian causal models are needed in some cases. This paper argues for the second position by considering the multi-causal (...) forks, which are widespread in contemporary medicine (Section 2). A non-Markovian causal model for such forks is introduced and shown to be mathematically tractable (Sections 6, 7, and 8). The paper also gives a general discussion of the controversy about the Markov condition (Section 1), and of the related controversy about probabilistic causality (Sections 3, 4, and 5). (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that the empirical success of Keynesianism shows it to be scientific. Keynesianism here refers not to a specific theory, but to a paradigm. It is argued that Kuhn's notion of paradigm can be applied to economics, but, in contrast to the natural sciences, in economics there are always competing paradigms. The principal ones in contemporary economics are the Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxist. To investigate whether the Keynesian paradigm is scientific we need a criterion (...) for the scientificity of a paradigm. The paper first considers one approach to this problem due to Kant, but this is rejected as incorrect and called 'the Kantian fallacy'. Another approach is then put forward: 'the empirical confirmation principle', and reasons are given for accepting this as correct. Using this principle, it is then argued that that Keynesianism is indeed scientific. (shrink)

Archaeological discoveries, unless of unusual beauty, are generally of less inherent interest than the conclusions to which they point. Not that they are merely evidence in the court-room sense of the word; they certainly spur the imagination, and provide tangible links with those vast, unknown areas of human knowledge which scholarship seeks to restore to us. The public interest in recovered documents of the past, however, seems mainly in the discovery of the objects themselves rather than in the interpretation of (...) those objects. It is as if proving there was a past at a given date is of more interest than the life which made up that past.It is evident, for example, that public interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls is fading, now that publication of some of the new texts contained in them allows a preliminary assessment of their significance. Contact with the minds of men who composed them seems to be of lesser moment to many than the physical existence of manuscripts written and made use of two thousand years ago. (shrink)