This chapter presents detailed empirical work on several aspects of children's linguistic performance, focusing in particular on evidence that even two-year-old children understand that the meanings of determiners are ‘conservative’, that the meaning of natural language disjunction is ‘inclusive–or’, and that the structural notion of ‘c-command’ governs a range of linguistic phenomena. This and other works are used to defend three related versions of the argument from the poverty of the stimulus, each of which strongly supports the existence of an (...) innate language faculty. (shrink)

_In the normal course of events, children manifest linguistic competence equivalent to that of adults in just a few years. Children can produce and understand novel sentences, they can judge that certain strings of words are true or false, and so on. Yet experience appears to dramatically underdetermine the com- petence children so rapidly achieve, even given optimistic assumptions about children’s nonlinguistic capacities to extract information and form generalizations on the basis of statistical regularities in the input. These considerations underlie (...) various (more specific) poverty of stimulus arguments for the innate specification of linguistic principles. But in our view, certain features of nativist arguments have not yet been fully appreciated. We focus here on three (related) kinds of poverty of stimulus argument, each of which has been supported by the findings of psycholinguistic investigations of child language. (shrink)

Dewey's theory of happiness goes against the grain of much contemporary psychologic and popular thought by identifying the highest form of human happiness with moral behavior. Such happiness, according to Dewey, avoids being at the mercy of circumstances because it is independent of the pleasures and successes we take from experience and, instead, is dependent upon the disposition we bring to experience. It accompanies a disposition characterized by an abiding interest in objects in which all can share, one founded (...) upon a dynamic inner harmony and evolving adjustment to the world. The marks of such an expansive disposition are "stability of character, braveness of soul, and equanimity of soul," and the key to the development of these traits is what Dewey calls "ethical love." We conclude with consideration of three potential criticisms of Dewey's view of happiness and possible Deweyan rejoinders. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Metaphysics of Causality and NoveltyStephen BickhamI find myself in agreement with most of the points of Crosby's position that there are new things and new events in the world. Like him, I hold that determinists are mistaken, and I believe that time flows one way only. I appreciate Crosby's amendment of Whitehead's category of the ultimate from creativity to creativity/destructiveness or, translating Spinoza's term, nature naturing. And finally (...) I applaud his clever, and I think successful, argument that the production of novelty, rather than being incompatible with causal action, is, indeed, a requirement for any such process. Most of the meat of philosophy, however, lies not in agreements but in their contraries. While I do have significant disagreements with Crosby, I want to state at the beginning that these deal with issues in Philosophy that I find among the most perplexing, and so I hope I can expound them with at least a modicum of clarity.The major, underlying concern I have with Crosby's argument centers not on the concept of novelty nor on whether such occurs, but on the concept of causality. It is in relation to causality that Crosby attempts to prove his case on the existence of novelty. He maintains that not only is novelty not opposed to causality, but novelty itself is a necessary condition for causality to exist at all. Very importantly, I believe he proves his point. However, if causality is a totally confused notion, then, in my opinion, proving that novelty is necessary for causality to exist proves much less than Crosby intends. If I am correct, Crosby's argument is vitiated to a good extent because of its connection with causality at all.To see how this plays out, we can look at the simplest statement of this principle, "Everything that exists must have a cause." But note that this tries to make causality clear by invoking the frustrating and paradoxical notion of "thing." What is a thing, which is supposed to require a cause for its existence? [End Page 64] I present a piece of sandstone. Is it a thing? Here is a grain of sand on the surface of the piece. Is it a thing? The sandstone was taken from a ledge. Is the ledge a thing? The ledge is part of a deposit. Is the deposit of sandstone a thing? What happens to the causality principle if we try to eliminate (not an easy thing) this suspect category of thing (or something)?Maybe it is every event that must have a cause. But this gets us no closer to freedom from metaphysical quicksand. The first definition in my dictionary of event is, "Something that happens"(emphasis mine). And if we consider the notion of event on its own ground, so to speak, we run up against the following questions, among others: How much time is necessary for an event? Is a hiccup an event? A hiccup in the middle of a concert? Was the Chicago Fire an event? The battle of Antietam? The Civil War? The settling of the West? The Industrial Revolution?I am not concerned here with what is usually regarded as the essential puzzling issue of causality, that is, the nature of the causal relation. I am only struggling, and vainly I fear, with the preliminary issue of what the things are that are said to require causes. And I'm pessimistic that we will get very far in the task of specifying with precision just what these things—or occurrences or processes or fundamental entities or whatever—are.Perhaps another approach, a different angle, might be utilized. Must it not be that there is a fundamental truth or insight, or at least a strong, legitimate motive for holding that every thing (or event, etc.) must have a cause? This is a position held by virtually everyone at the level of common sense, and by the great majority, even, of skeptically minded philosophers. Rather than trying either to stipulate what the entities involved in causality are or wrestle with the issue of what the causal relationship itself is, let's try to understand why... (shrink)

How many kisses will be enough for Catullus? That is the question that opens Poem 7. The answer: as many as are the grains of sand in the Libyan desert, asmany as are the stars in the nightime sky. Yet in this poem sand and stars do notfunction simply as quantitative symbols. Each is in fact described in a mannerthat subtly alludes to the mouth – the organ from which Lesbia's kisses couldcome.

lt is widely held that entertaining a belief or forming a judgement involves the exercise of conceptual capacities; and to this extent the representational content of a belief or judgement is said to be "con— ceptual". According to Gareth Evans (1980), not all psychological states have conceptual content in this sense. In particular, perceptual states have non—conceptual content; it is not until one forms a judgement on the basis of a perceptual experience that one touches the realm of conceptual content.

It has long been known that in the context of axiomatic second-order logic (SOL), Hume’s Principle (HP) is mutually interpretable with “the universe is Dedekind infinite” (DI). In this paper, we offer a more fine-grained analysis of the logical strength of HP, measured by deductive implications rather than interpretability. Our main result is that HP is not deductively conservative over SOL + DI. That is, SOL + HP proves additional theorems in the language of pure second-order logic that are not (...) provable from SOL + DI alone. Arguably, then, HP is not just a pure axiom of infinity, but rather it carries additional logical content. On the other hand, we show that HP is \(\Pi ^1_1\) conservative over SOL + DI, and that HP is conservative over SOL + DI + “the universe is well ordered” (WO). Next, we show that SOL + HP does not prove any of the simplest and most natural versions of the axiom of choice, including WO and weaker principles. Lastly, we discuss other axioms of infinity. We show that HP does not prove the Splitting or Pairing principles (axioms of infinity stronger than DI). (shrink)

Heal (1996a) maintains that evidence of cognitive penetrability doesn't determine whether stimulation theory or theory theory wins. Given the wide variety of mechanisms and processes that get called ‘simulation’, we argue that it's not useful to ask‘who wins?’. The label ‘simulation’picks out no natural or theoretically interesting category. We propose a more fine‐grained taxonomy and argue that some processes that have been labelled ‘simulation’, eg.,‘actual‐situation‐simulation’, clearly do exist, while other processes labelled ‘simulation’, e.g., ‘pretence‐driven‐off‐line‐simulation’are quite controversial. We do concede that (...) evidence of cognitive penetrability isn't decisive evidence against pretence‐driven‐off‐line‐simulation. Nonetheless, advocates of pretence‐driven‐off‐line‐simulation need to provide some explanation of the experimental evidence of penetrability. We argue that Heal's suggestion that simulation is restricted to‘rational’processes is unprincipled, and we offer an alternative proposal for restricted simulation. (shrink)

It has long been known that in the context of axiomatic second-order logic (SOL), Hume’s Principle (HP) is mutually interpretable with “the universe is Dedekind infinite” (DI). In this paper, we offer a more fine-grained analysis of the logical strength of HP, measured by deductive implications rather than interpretability. Our main result is that HP is not deductively conservative over SOL + DI. That is, SOL + HP proves additional theorems in the language of pure second-order logic that are not (...) provable from SOL + DI alone. Arguably, then, HP is not just a pure axiom of infinity, but rather it carries additional logical content. On the other hand, we show that HP is $$\Pi ^1_1$$ conservative over SOL + DI, and that HP is conservative over SOL + DI + “the universe is well ordered” (WO). Next, we show that SOL + HP does not prove any of the simplest and most natural versions of the axiom of choice, including WO and weaker principles. Lastly, we discuss other axioms of infinity. We show that HP does not prove the Splitting or Pairing principles (axioms of infinity stronger than DI). (shrink)

This book accomplishes the nearly miraculous achievement of being both substantive and highly entertaining. According to Barrington, “JOTT,” derived from “Just One of Those Things,” stands for a kind of “spatial discontinuity”—namely, a motley class of events in which objects appear or disappear in mysterious ways. For example, some can be classified as “Walkabouts,” in which “an article disappears from the place where it was known to have been and is found in another place.” Similarly, in “Comebacks,” “a known article (...) disappears from the place where it was known to have been and later is found back in the same place.” And in “Turn-ups,” “a known article from an uncertain location appears in a place where it is known not to have been before it was found there.” The other primary categories in Barrington’s taxonomy are Flyaway, Windfall, and Trade-in (the reader might be able to guess what these are). The central contention of this book is that JOTT phenomena merit the attention of psi researchers and theorists of the paranormal. I’ve often lamented that lab research in parapsychology is premature, because we have no decent idea what kind of organic function scientists are trying to investigate under inevitably straitjacketed laboratory conditions. Not only are we ignorant of psi's finer‑grained features, we don't even know what its natural history might be–for example, whether it has an evolutionary role or primary or overall purpose or function (although there=s no shortage of speculation on these matters). Of course, there=s no reason to think that psychic phenomena occur only for parapsychologists, much less only when those parapsychologists set out to look for them. After all, a major motivation for conducting formal studies is that we have evidence of psi occurring spontaneously in life. Moreover, there are good reasons for thinking that psi might be triggered unconsciously or subconsciously, in which case it might also occur surreptitiously. But since we=re a very long way from understanding the nature and function of everyday psi, we don't know whether psychic functioning is an ability (like musical ability) or whether it=s a brute endowment such as the capacity to see or to move one's limbs. Obviously, then, in the absence of this rudimentary knowledge, we have no idea whether (or to what extent) our experimental procedures are even appropriate to the phenomena. After all, many human capacities or endowments are situation-sensitive and can only be evaluated in real-life contexts. (shrink)

Throughout his metaphysical writings, Sellars maintains that current microtheory, with its particulate paradigm, can never depict adequately---even in principle---a universe populated with sentient beings like us. Why not? Experience for us involves the presence of an occurrent perceptual core of ultimately homogeneous secondary qualities. Sellars’ “Grain Argument” demonstrates that physical objects qua clouds of discrete particles cannot instantiate such qualities and that they cannot be assigned to an intrasentient realm construed as clusters of discrete, particulate neurons. Neither, contends Sellars, (...) can they simply be eliminated from the inventory of any theory claiming to be both empirical and conceptually independent of common sense. And since common sense fails to provide an adequate picture of reality, our only course is to abandon the particulate paradigm of current microtheory in favor of a process paradigm. This paper traces and develops, in dialog form, these arguments. (shrink)

When we mathematically model natural phenomena, there is an assumption concerning how the mathematics relates to the actual phenomenon in question. This assumption is that mathematics represents the world by “mapping on” to it. I argue that this assumption of mapping, or correspondence between mathematics and natural phenomena, breaks down when we ignore the fine grain of our physical concepts. I show that this is a source of trouble for the mapping account of applied mathematics, using the case of (...) Prandtl’s Boundary Layer solution to the Navier-Stokes equations. (shrink)

Philosophers have often claimed that general ideas or representations have their origin in abstraction, but it remains unclear exactly what abstraction as a psychological process consists in. We argue that the Lockean aspiration of using abstraction to explain the origins of all general representations cannot work and that at least some general representations have to be innate. We then offer an explicit framework for understanding abstraction, one that treats abstraction as a computational process that operates over an innate quality space (...) of fine-grained general representations. We argue that this framework has important philosophical implications for the nativism-empiricism dispute, for questions about the acquisition of unstructured representations, and for questions about the relation between human and animal minds. (shrink)

t is often suggested that truth-preservation is insufficient for logical consequence, and that consequence needs to satisfy a further condition of relevance. Premises and conclusion in a valid consequence must be relevant to one another, and truth-preservation is too coarse-grained a notion to guarantee that. Thus logical consequence is the intersection of truth-preservation and relevance. This situation has the absurd consequence that one might concede that the conclusion of an argument was true (since the argument had true premises and was (...) truth-preserving); yet should refuse to infer the conclusion from the premises, in the absence of demonstration of the relevance of the premises to the conclusion. The error lies in giving insufficient attention to the notion of truth-preservation. Relevance is no separable ingredient in the analysis of logical consequence, but a necessary condition of it. What we show is that if an argument really is truth-preserving, then that in itself is enough to show that the premises are (logically) relevant to the conclusion. (shrink)

Classical Indian views of the self and person range from maximal to minimal conceptions, from a view of everyone's true self as the supreme being, infinite, immortal, self‐existent, self‐aware, and intrinsically blissful, to a view of the person as nothing more than the living human body that ceases to be at death. (“Consciousness is an adventitious attribute of the body, like the intoxicating power of fermented grain.”) Every major school and subschool takes a stance on what a self is (...) and how it is known; a rich diversity of opinion and argument marks this area of classical Indian thought. (shrink)

During times of economic uncertainty, such as the current period, all costs of agricultural production become important and worthy of close scrutiny if the threat of farm foreclosures is to be minimized. This concern particularly applies to the cost of plant nutrients, which, under conventional approaches, typically represents 24%–30% (or more) of the total variable costs of production [Lu et al. (2000) Food Reviews International 16(2): 121–157; Bullen and Brown (2001) Economic Evaluation of UNR Cotton, NC State University, Raleigh, North (...) Carolina]. The purpose of this paper is to examine, via a review of the literature, the economics and profitability of various plant nutrient management strategies–both conventional and alternative ones–in an attempt to identify those strategies that can lead to financial resource optimization and, ultimately, maximum profits for farm enterprises. The results of this analysis are as follows: In a meta-analysis of 120 studies, conventional nutrient management systems, using commercial fertilizers, showed higher profit for most grain crops (with the exception of corn and sorghum), than organic nutrient management systems. Both cover crop and animal manure-based systems show considerable promise as alternative nutrient management strategies for increasing farm profitability. A cover crop system produced the highest average corn yield and gross margin per hectare with the smallest coefficient of variation compared to no-tillage conventional, manure-based, or crownvetch systems. Manure-based systems that do not require purchase or transport of the manure (as in combined animal and crop production systems) can be considerably more profitable than conventional systems. Both manure-based and cover crop systems that do not include the use of commercial fertilizers (i.e., organic systems), hold particular promise due to the output price premiums typically garnered by the organic crops grown under such conditions. (shrink)

Pleonastic entities are entities whose existence is secured by something-from-nothing transformations, these being conceptually valid inferences that take one from a statement in which no reference is made to a thing of a certain kind to a statement—often a pleonastic equivalent of the first statement—in which there is a reference to a thing of that kind. The possibility of pleonastic entities is further explained in terms of the notion of one theory being a conservative extension of another. Propositions are pleonastic (...) entities, and the way in which they are individuated shows how pleonastic propositions are both fine-grained and unstructured. (shrink)

In contemporary culture, accountability is usually understood in terms of holding people who have done something wrong accountable for their actions. As such, it is virtually synonymous with punishing someone. Living Accountably argues that accountability should also be understood as a significant, forward-looking virtue, an excellence possessed by those who willingly embrace being accountable to those who have proper standing, when that standing is exercised appropriately. Those who have this virtue are people who strive to live accountably. The book gives (...) a fine-grained description of the virtue and how it is exercised, including an account of the motivational profile of the one who has the virtue. It examines the relation of accountability to other virtues, such as honesty and humility, as well as opposing vices, such as self-deception, arrogance, and servility. Though the virtue of accountability is compatible with individual autonomy, recognizing the importance of the virtue does justice to the social character of human persons. C. Stephen Evans also explores the history of this virtue in other cultures and historical eras, providing evidence that the virtue is widely recognized, even if it is somewhat eclipsed in modern western societies. Accountability is also a virtue that connects ethical life with religious life for many people, since it is common for people to have a sense that they are accountable in a global way for how they live their lives. Living Accountably explores the question as to whether global accountability can be understood in a purely secular way, as accountability to other humans, or whether it must be understood as accountability to God, or some other transcendent reality. (shrink)

We study active set methods for optimization problems in Block Angular Form (BAF). We begin by reviewing some standard basis factorizations, including Saunders' orthogonal factorization and updates for the simplex method that do not impose any restriction on the pivot sequence and maintain the basis factorization structured in BAF throughout the algorithm. We then suggest orthogonal factorization and updating procedures that allow coarse grain parallelization, pivot updates local to the affected blocks, and independent block reinversion. A simple parallel environment (...) appropriate to the description and complexity analysis of test procedures is defined in Section 5. The factorization and updating procedures are presented in Sections 6 and 7. Our update procedure outperforms conventional Updating procedures even in a purely sequential environment. (shrink)

A new biography of one of the founding fathers of the Scientific Revolution, Robert Boyle, is no easy undertaking, but no scholar is better poised to give us a revisionist view of this iconic figure than Michael Hunter. For fourteen years Hunter, together with Edward Davis, supervised the definitive fourteen‐volume edition of Boyle's complete works, published and unpublished. This was the first such undertaking since the 1744 edition compiled by the cleric and antiquary Thomas Birch. Almost no Boyle scholar has (...) been as privileged—or as dogged—in probing every bit of Boyle's legendary scribblings as Hunter. With his new biography, which gestated for decades and reflects the accumulating wisdom gained only with disciplined, persistent, and wide‐ranging reading, Hunter has shed new light on Boyle's life and character. Specialists will delight in having Hunter's path‐breaking articles gathered together in one volume from journals as far ranging as the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and Medical History to the more standard venues of the profession.Which Boyle have historians of early modern science more recently encountered, and how does Hunter's book enhance or change our understanding? Richard S. Westfall and Marie Boas Hall produced portraits of Boyle as a bona fide, uncomplicated mechanist devoted to testing his view of the universe by frequent experimentation. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their Leviathan and the Air‐Pump set the stage for a more complex version of Boyle. They portrayed him as a consummate strategist who craftily used his experimental philosophy to serve his own conservative political and social agendas. Shapin's more recent A Social History of Truth claimed that Boyle relied heavily on his social status to carefully craft his public image as a gentleman in order to gain credibility and trust from his audiences. Lawrence Principe in his Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest has shown us a Boyle who was passionately committed to alchemy and fascinated by, if fearful of, magic. Barbara Kaplan in her Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick emphasized Boyle's long‐standing interests in medical issues and medical practices.What sort of Boyle does Hunter offer his audience, and how has his high place in Boyle scholarship enabled him to present such a novel interpretation? Hunter shows us a Boyle whose fully complex personality directly contributed to, and thwarted, his scientific production as an experimenter. Hunter's analysis is not deeply seated in psychoanalytical theory but, rather, emerges from a fine‐grained analysis of Boyle's intense religious preoccupations. In the case of Boyle, Hunter argues, earlier eighteenth‐century biographers—including Gilbert Burnet, Roger North, Henry Miles, and William Wooton—produced adulation for a figure whose deep religiosity enhanced his scientific endeavors. Rather than casting his lot with contemporaries who sought a conservative solution to church and state relations after 1660, Boyle had troubling religious preoccupations so that things for him were not so simple, as Hunter shows. Indeed, Boyle befriended and associated with men who were openly acknowledged as mystics and enthusiasts and never allied himself exclusively—or even primarily—with Church of England spokesmen or ecclesiastics. Moreover, Hunter argues, Boyle felt more acutely aware of the dangers of excessive rationalism than he did of the claims of direct divine inspiration. Boyle's religious anxieties, far from mere youthful preoccupations, plagued him throughout his lifetime. Hunter reproduces Boyle's notes on two full confessional interviews he had with two prominent churchmen toward the end of his life. The two churchmen, Gilbert Burnet and Edward Stillingfleet, appeared unsympathetic with the great man's scruples over the legitimacy of his ownership of considerable lands once belonging to the Church. But for Boyle this was no trivial matter; throughout his life he was similarly plagued about the moral rectitude of inheritances from his wealthy father, about constant incursions of blasphemous thoughts, and about the moral propriety of taking oaths. Indeed, for Hunter Boyle's obsessive concern in salving his conscience induced his refusal to accept the presidency of the Royal Society in 1680 because of the oath‐taking necessitated by the position. His tortuous, obsessive religious preoccupations, Hunter argues, find their parallels in Boyle's equally exacting procedures related to his punctilious scientific experiments. Thus, while some historians might see the scrupulous religiosity of Boyle as “dysfunctional,” the same instincts and personality features made him a highly “functional” scientist.Hunter's careful probing of Boyle's defensive apologies, frequently found as prefatory material in his published treatises, reveals another side of Boyle, hitherto largely ignored by his biographers. Excessively concerned about his reputation for establishing new empirical findings, Boyle reveals himself to Hunter in several instances as a masterful dissembler or plagiarist, careful in the extreme to conceal his debts to empirics, compilers, and less learned or less socially prominent men, including George Starkey, William Salmon, Johann Glauber, J. J. Becher, and Jean‐Baptiste DuHamel. What emerges from Hunter's depiction is the antithesis of the decisive, manipulative, socially prepossessing Boyle that Shapin has depicted. What Hunter furnishes is a Boyle who is perhaps far more insecure than the one historians have allowed themselves to envision and who struggled to hide his own vulnerability and inadequacy.In a satisfying exploration of Boyle's connections with medical circles, Hunter searches to explain why Boyle, well known among his contemporaries for enjoying a constant state of ill health and for his dissatisfaction with learned Galenic medicine passed down by the esteemed physicians of his day, was, nevertheless, so loath to publish his stinging criticisms of the medical profession. Historians have long recognized that Boyle evinced strong interest in medical matters from the time of his early researches with physicians in the 1650s in Oxford and that he continued to write about medical issues for the next several decades of his life. But Boyle was acutely aware—as his prefaces attest—that he was not a member of the profession and that his access to sick bodies was severely constricted by his status as a gentleman. Hunter suggests that Boyle's reticence in publishing his attacks on the Galenists owed something to his social position—he was, after all, on good social terms with many eminent physicians. His deference, Hunter argues, owed not just to his hesitation to attack a well‐respected profession, but also to his diffidence about proclaiming universal truths on matters as changeable—and ultimately untestable—as sick human bodies. Hunter further probes another paradox of Boyle's life. We know that Boyle freely gave out his medical advice and medicines that were produced in his private laboratory to friends and acquaintances and that, furthermore, he saw this as a moral duty and Christian charity. Yet Boyle, the champion of open communication in matters of natural philosophy, steadfastly refused to publish his medicine recipes . His unpublished drafts reveal a Boyle who was sharply committed to widening the access of his poor countrymen to chemically prepared and effective medicines. But Boyle stopped well short of making these recipes available for wider dissemination through the medium of print. Why? Again Hunter presents no simple answers but suggests a medley of motives. Exquisitely sensitive to his own reputation, Boyle, in part, may have censored himself lest he be seen as the equal of empirics, apothecaries, and quacksalvers, all abundant and thriving in London in the 1670s. Despite his high‐minded sense of philanthropy, Boyle was particularly concerned about his public persona, so much so that his private passions at times took second seat. Hunter suggests a similar explanation for Boyle's refusal to forthrightly publish his investigations of supernatural phenomena, including witchcraft, visions, angelic apparitions, and second sight. In addition to his strong religious scruples that such investigations might be tainted by demonic participation, Boyle censored himself out of his fear of the charge of easy credulity. As popular satires of experimenters were beginning to pour forth from the pens of Thomas Shadwell and Samuel Butler, Boyle must have smarted at the thought of being classified among those indulging in magical pursuits unbecoming to a genteel experimenter. Hunter concludes by revealing a Boyle far from being a confident showman and expositor of the new science. Instead he shows us a conflicted, ambivalent man who suffered from his high social status, even as he manipulated it for his own aggrandizement or for that of the Royal Society and its experimental program.Hunter's depiction of a tortured man—hitherto most often conceived as an iconic devotee of experimental science or as a consummate, self‐fashioning, smooth‐talking gentleman—will not sit well with some historians. Nor will his characterization of Boyle's lifelong religious scruples sit well. Just as Lawrence Principe presented readers with a disturbing vision of a Boyle duped by alchemical operators or conversing with angelic voices, Hunter offers up a tentative, hesitant, and uncertain man who does not seem to fit with earlier portraits. With extremely convincing and documented evidence, Hunter draws a complex, strong personality that left its stamp on his scientific agenda. Hunter's most piercing insight is to see Boyle's deep‐seated diffidence not as an obstacle to his science but as a driving force behind his commitment to experimentalism. In the end Hunter's view will outlast earlier, less complex versions. (shrink)

Interest is growing in the relocalization of staple crops, including wheat, in western Washington (WWA), a nontraditional wheat-growing area. Commercial bakers are potentially important food chain intermediaries in the case of relocalized wheat production. We conducted a mail survey of commercial bakers in WWA to assess their interest in sourcing wheat/flour from WWA, identify the characteristics of bakeries most likely to purchase wheat/flour from WWA, understand the factors important to bakers in purchasing regionally produced wheat/flour, and identify perceived barriers to (...) making such purchases. Sixty-one percent of survey respondents were interested in purchasing WWA wheat/flour. Bakers who used retail strategies to market their products were more likely to be interested in WWA wheat/flour compared to those not using retail methods. Bakers’ current purchases of Washington wheat/flour were not related to their interest in purchasing WWA flour. The most important factors bakers would consider in purchasing regionally produced wheat/flour were consistency of flour quality, quality of flour, and reliability of supply. Cost was the most frequently mentioned barrier to the purchase of regionally produced wheat/flour. Our results are relevant for other areas attempting to reconnect grain producers, commercial bakers, and consumers in mutually beneficial ways. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe paper explores Stephen Yablo's suggestion that ‘If-Thenism’ in the philosophy of mathematics is best formulated as the thesis that the real content of a mathematical claim C is the result of subtracting the potentially problematic metaphysical commitments of mathematics from C [Yablo 2017]. Yablo's proposal assumes that some propositions make others true. The present discussion assumes that propositions are coarse-grained sets of possible worlds and asks what Yablo's proposal looks like on that assumption. The conclusion is that the (...) adequacy of the proposal turns on hard-to-settle questions about the truthmakers for propositions expressed by material conditionals. (shrink)

Ernest Sosa has recently argued that the knowledge we get from instruments and the knowledge we get from testimony is similar in important ways. Most importantly, the justification that supports it is similar in kind – both instrumental justification and justification from testimony is to be understood in terms of reliability. I argue that Sosa’s theory is problematic. Specifically, I argue that we can take certain attitudes towards people that we cannot coherently take towards instruments. This, I argue, grounds a (...) distinction between the kind of justification that testimony can make available and the kind of justification that instruments can make available. The result is that reliability cannot provide a complete explanation of the justification that testimony makes available. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a transition in my scholarly life. Specifically, I shifted from being a postdoctoral fellow in an anthropology department at a traditional university to a tenure track position as an assistant professor at an institute for bioethics and health humanities within an academic health center. This development has been instructive, partly because I have begun learning about how the political economies of academic medicine and the traditional university differ, align, and respectively shape institutional research cultures. My (...) primary research interests are focused on ethical and socio-technical issues in infectious disease research and control, including in initiatives that are... (shrink)

According to the non-identity problem we may sometimes choose to bring a disadvantaged person into the world, or no person at all, so that the disadvantaged person thus has no apparent claim against us. Applied to cases of environmental degradation, posterity apparently has no claim against present polluters if their existence depends on it. I discuss the problem with reference to utilitarianism and the notion of intergenerational continuity.

One often hears the claim that fact-based versions of the correspondence theory of truth face a disruptive dilemma: ‘if all true propositions correspond to the same fact, the notion is useless, and if every [true] proposition corresponds to a distinct fact, then the notion becomes idle’ (Engel 2002, 21). The assumption underlying this claim is that all conceptions of facts can be assigned to either of two categories. The first includes those conceptions according to which facts are so coarse-grained that (...) they collapse into the One Great Fact that is the World itself. The second includes those conceptions that, by failing to individuate facts independently of the entities they are supposed to make true, end by regarding them as so fine-grained that they become identical to (the ‘tautological accusatives’ of) true propositions. The contention that these two alternatives exhaust the options available to the correspondence theorist is not, however, beyond suspicion. In this paper I side with those who are convinced that correspondence theorists can steer clear both of the Scyilla of the One Great Fact and of the Charybdis of the Identity Theory. The third way I shall endeavour to sketch is developed by bringing Stephen Schiffer’s theory of pleonastic entities to bear on the issue of the nature of facts. I shall suggest that by regarding facts as pleonastic entities whose principles of individuation are wholly determined by the hypostatizing practices that are constitutive of the possession of the corresponding concepts, one may hope to frame a (neo-Moorean) version of the correspondence theory that avoids the dilemma. Moreover, I shall argue that the ‘pleonastic’ version of the correspondence theory is in fact but a slightly inflated variant of the ‘conjunctive’ theory of truth defended by John Mackie, William Kneale and Wolfgang Künne – a variant whose main attractive lies in the fact that it is not afflicted by the problems of interpretation raised by the quantificational structure of its ontologically more parsimonious siblings. (shrink)

This book is an ethic of inclusion leading from gender and sexual difference through the social world of race and culture to the natural world.

Reexamines the good, tracing the history of the idea of truth as an ethical movement, and interpreting the good as nature's abundance, giving beauty and truth as gifts.

Patient-centered care is now recognized as a clinical method and ideal model for patient – health professional relationships, and many definitions have influenced its evolution. Overall the patient-centered care literature has provided relatively little to define patient-centered care at the level of the patient-professional relationship. Additionally, patient-centered care lacks grounding in ethical theory. This thesis asserts that theoretical concepts from the ethics of care can provide a stronger conceptual basis for patient-centered care.This thesis begins with a critical interpretive review of (...) the patient-centered care literature, yielding 12 articles that previously introduced new theoretical and definitional work on patient-centered care and patient-centered communication. Six common themes and ideas were discovered, and include Engaging the Patient as a Whole Person, Recognizing and Responding to Emotions, Fostering a Therapeutic Alliance, Promoting an Exchange of Information, Sharing Decision Making, and Enabling Self-Management and Patient Navigation. These elements were then compared to key elements of the ethics of care. This thesis argues that feminists have good reason to consider care as a type of moral duty, and it describes how this duty functions. This thesis also argues that a duty to care is triggered when caregivers are presented with particular substantive forms of vulnerability. Specifically, this thesis argues that vulnerable subjects whose constitutive needs are at risk require particular moral obligations. The links between the ethics of care and patient-centered care are discussed, including how an ethics of care response ought to function in the health care context. Finally, the cases of J.J. and Makayla Sault, two aboriginal girls who refused chemotherapy in favour of traditional aboriginal healing practices, are analyzed. This thesis offers a short scoping review of the bioethics discourse surrounding these cases. A review of this discourse revealed several common themes, which included the peripheral importance of culture and history, the equating of best interests with survival, the supremacy of science-based medicine, and the impartial application of ethical principles. This thesis recommends that health care professionals apply an ethics of care approach to similar ethical dilemmas in the future, which involves shifting one's ethical focus to the central relationships of the case, understanding the unique perspective of the patient's narrative, and promoting a care-based rather than a justice-based approach to problem-solving. (shrink)

The Genre Legong is a secular (balih-balihan) Balinese dance genre (Anon. 1971).[1] Though originally associated with the palace,[2] legong has long been performed in villages, especially at temple ceremonies, as well as at Balinese festivals of the arts. Since the 1920s, abridged versions of legong dances have featured in concerts organized for tourists and in overseas tours by Balinese orchestras. Indeed, the dance has become culturally emblematic, and its image is used to advertise Bali to the world. Traditionally, the dancers (...) are three young girls; the servant (condong), who dances a prelude, and two legong. All wear elaborate costumes of gilded cloth with ornate accessories and frangipani-crowned headdresses.[3] The core repertoire consists of about fifteen dances (some of which are now lost), ranging in their longest versions from thirty to sixty minutes. Some of these are narrative, while others are abstract or general representations of nature, birds, insects, or plants. Those that involve narratives are, nevertheless, highly stylized, and the presentation of the drama is always secondary to the beauty of the dance. The genre is regarded as a treasury of the movements for Balinese women’s dance, and no dancer’s training is complete if she lacks a solid grounding in legong. The dance is accompanied by a gamelan of twenty-five or more players.[4] Though the legong dance remains popular in areas of traditional strength, and despite efforts to revive it, it is generally in decline (Davies 2006). (shrink)

An introduction to the seven principles for practicing critical hope.

1. IntroductionIt is an increasingly accepted protocol to situate oneself discursively in order to approach a set of problems. This protocol, consolidated by Donna Haraway’s famous “situated knowledge,” is also evident in everyday Indigenous Australian practice.1 I begin, therefore, with my long association with the Goolarabooloo community in Broome, North-West Australia, and in particular with Paddy Roe, who started teaching me in the late 1970s. This text attempts to translate his sense of belonging to that territory, an attachment he had (...) to struggle to maintain, both in the face of ongoing destructive colonization and also in the face of other Aboriginal territorial claims. These collective attachments are therefore inflected by history—not just settler history, but Indigenous history that has changed in relation to colonization. These changes are wrought through overwhelmingly rapid material changes, shifting institutional alliances, contested concepts, and new practices. This ethnographic history is an attempt to provide an overview of some of these changes in the North-West corner of Australia over the last forty years. (shrink)

This article argues that the concept of translation is central to the work of Bruno Latour, starting before ANT, with the group working on the sociologie de la traduction at the École des Mines. As one of his translators, I reflect on the extension of his identity via translation, then on the idea of translation as ‘political labour’ across social discontinuities, including those in colonisation contexts where certain languages can become hegemonic. Finally, with Latour’s major project, the Inquiry into Modes (...) of Existence, translation continues its descriptive task, but carries so much weight over the various modes of existence that it qualifies as a key philosophical concept of considerable analytic value. (shrink)