Collapse is a term that has attracted much attention in social science literature in recent years, but there remain substantial areas of disagreement about how it should be understood in historical contexts. More specifically, the use of the term collapse often merely serves to dramatize long-past events, to push human actors into the background, and to mystify the past intellectually. At the same time, since human societies are complex systems, the alternative involves grasping the challenges that a holistic analysis presents, (...) taking account of the many different levels and paces at which societies function, and developing appropriate methods that help to integrate science and history. Often neglected elements in considerations of collapse are the perceptions and beliefs of a historical society and how a given society deals with change; an important facet of this, almost entirely ignored in the discussion, is the understanding of time held by the individuals and social groups affected by change; and from this perspective ‘collapse’ depends very much on perception, including the perceptions of the modern commentator. With this in mind, this article challenges simplistic notions of ‘collapse’ in an effort to encourage a more nuanced understanding of the impact and process of both social and environmental change on past human societies. (shrink)

In interpretations of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" section of the first Critique, there is a widespread tendency to present Kant as establishing that the representation of space is a condition for individuating or distinguishing objects, and to claim that it is on this basis that Kant establishes the apriority of this representation. The aim of this paper is to criticize this way of interpreting the "Aesthetic," and to defend an alternative interpretation. On this alternative, questions about the formation of the representation (...) of space figure more centrally, and the anti-Leibnizian character of Kant 's argument can be properly appreciated. (shrink)

This work opens with a development of the notion of Unfathomed Knowledge, which Bartley makes clear by using it to explain such recent scientific advances as the development of drugs for the treatment of AIDS, and by showing its implications for such far-flung fields as the Marxist theory of alienation, the sociology of knowledge, patent law, and morality.

An influential argument against the possibility of truth by linguistic convention holds that while conventions can determine which proposition a given sentence expresses, they (conventions) are powerless to make propositions true or false. This argument has been offered in the literature by Lewy, Yablo, Boghossian, Sider and others. But despite its influence and prima facie plausibility, the argument: (i) equivocates between different senses of “making true”; (ii) mistakenly assumes hyperintensional contexts are intensional; and (iii) relies upon an implausible vision of (...) the way that language works. (shrink)

Plato claimed that morality exits to control conflict. Business people increasingly are called upon to resolve moral conflicts between various stakeholders who maintain opposing ethical positions or principles. Attempts to resolve these moral conflicts within business discussions may be exacerbated if disputants have different communicative styles. To better understand the communication process involved in attempts to resolve a moral dilemma, we investigate the "discourse ethics" procedure of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas claims that an individual's level of moral reasoning parallels the type (...) of communication which that individual typically uses in attempts to resolve conflict. Our research focuses upon the relationship between the communicative style used by participants attempting to resolve a particular moral dilemma involving workplace safety and the level of moral reasoning possessed by those participants. The results of our study suggest that, contrary to Habermas' views, participants with "higher" levels of moral reasoning do not use "discursive" communicative tactics more frequently than participants that possessed "lower" moral reasoning. (shrink)

’Ethical codes of conduct are superficial and distracting answers to the question of how to promote ethical behaviour in corporate life.’The author is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Business Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The philosopher Rudolf Carnap, although not himself an originator of mathematical advances in logic, was much involved in the development of the subject. He was the most important and deepest philosopher of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, or, to use the label Carnap later preferred, logical empiricists. It was Carnap who gave the most fully developed and sophisticated form to the linguistic doctrine of logical and mathematical truth: the view that the truths of mathematics and logic do not describe (...) some Platonistic realm, but rather are artifacts of the way we establish a language in which to speak of the factual, empirical world, fallouts of the representational capacity of language. Carnap was also the thinker who, after Russell, most emphasized the importance of modern logic, and the distinctive advances it enables in the foundations of mathematics, to contemporary philosophy. It was through Carnap's urgings, abetted by Hans Hahn, once Carnap arrived in Vienna as Privatdozent in philosophy in 1926, that the Vienna Circle began to take logic seriously and that positivist philosophy began to grapple with the question of how an account of mathematics compatible with empiricism can be given.A particular facet of Carnap's influence is not widely appreciated: it was Carnap who introduced Kurt Gödel to logic, in the serious sense. Although Gödel seems to have attended a course of Schlick's on philosophy of mathematics in 1925–26, his second year at the University, he did not at that time pursue logic further, nor did the seminar leave much of a trace on him. In the early summer of 1928, however, Carnap gave two lectures to the Circle which Gödel attended, or so I surmise. At these occasions, Carnap presented material from his manuscript treatise, Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik, that is, “Investigations into general axiomatics”, which dealt with questions of consistency, completeness and categoricity. Carnap later circulated this material to various people including Gödel. (shrink)

Studies of change blindness indicate that more intentional monitoring of changes is necessary to successfully detect changes as scene complexity increases. However, there have been conflicting reports as to whether people are aware of this relation between intention and successful change detection as scene complexity increases. Here we continue our dialogue with [Beck, M. R., Levin, D. T., & Angelone, B. . Change blindness blindness: Beliefs about the roles of intention and scene complexity in change detection. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, (...) 31–51; Beck, M. R., Levin, D. T., & Angelone, B. . Metacognitive errors in change detection: Lab and life converge. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 58–62] by reporting two experiments that show participants do in fact intuit that more intentional monitoring is needed to detect changes as scene complexity increases. We also discuss how this dialogue illustrates the need for psychological studies to be grounded in measurements taken from real world situations rather than laboratory experiments or questionnaires. (shrink)

The system whose only predicate is identity, whose only nonlogical vocabulary is the abstraction operator, and whose axioms are all first-order instances of Frege's Axiom V is shown to be undecidable.

: It has been said that Kant's critical philosophy made it impossible to pursue either the Cartesian rationalist or the Lockean empiricist program of providing a foundation for the sciences (e.g., Guyer 1992). This claim does not hold true for much of nineteenth century French philosophy, especially the eclectic spiritualist tradition that begins with Victor Cousin (1792-1867) and Pierre Maine de Biran (1766-1824) and continues through Paul Janet (1823-99). This tradition assimilated Kant's transcendental apperception of the unity of experience to (...) Descartes's cogito. They then took this to be the method of a philosophical psychology that reveals the active self as substance or cause and thus provides the epistemological grounding for these categories. However, to dismiss these philosophers as simply confused or mistaken would be to overlook the historical role that their interpretations of Kant played in the subsequent development of philosophy and the social sciences in France. Specifically, Émile Durkheim's (1858-1917) sociological theory of the categories was deeply influenced by the eclectic spiritualist tradition and yet at the same time developed in reaction to it, as he thought that its psychological account of the categories failed to bring out their shared or universal character and the extent to which our conceptions of the categories are cultural products. (shrink)

Foss's critique of van Fraassen's constructive empiricism is shown to be completely wide of the mark (Foss 1984, van Fraassen 1980). Foss misunderstands van Fraassen's use of the terms 'observable', 'phenomena', 'empirical adequacy', and 'epistemic community'. He misconstrues constructive empiricism as making knowledge, and perhaps existence, dependent on the observer. On the basis of this error, he attempts to reduce constructive empiricism to skepticism. None of his criticisms are to the point.

In "primitive" cultures, dual symbolic classification systems draw rigid temporal and spatial boundaries between the sacred and the profane. The right and left hands are described as sacred and profane, respectively. Durkheim saw a weakening of these systems as an aspect of modernization. A weakening of such dichotomous reason is shown in two examples. First, Hertz's study of the suppression of the left hand among the Maori links the left hand to the right cerebral hemisphere of the brain. The further (...) inference he might have drawn, but did not, is that the right hemisphere and its pattern thinking might play a significant role in magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. The Maori physical confinement of the left hand is no longer practiced. Second, in the United States, Hugdahl et al. present data from eight one‐decade cohorts showing that the decrease in left‐handedness by age was countered by a corresponding increase in left‐to‐right hand switching. A lower life‐span by left handers might account for some of the change across age cohorts, but at least half of the decrease in manifest left‐handedness was accounted for by a gradual decrease in social pressure not to use the left hand. Implications for the moral solidarity of postmodern society are discussed. (shrink)

Journalists say sometimes that the end does not justify the means, but they can act otherwise. Even if there are only rare instances in which the end can justify the means, some guidelines are needed to determine when those situations exist. I propose six questions for application to this thorny issue and for avoiding extremes of moral laxity and false scrupulosity.

In a paper titled "Dewey between Hegel and Darwin," Richard Rorty argued that while it is appropriate to describe John Dewey as a radical empiricist and panpsychist, it would be better if we allowed those aspects of his thought to atrophy and eventually disappear. This paper challenges that claim, arguing that properly understood, radical empiricism and panpsychism continue to have a role in a world newly fascinated by the way bodies, minds, experience and nature are all interwoven into a complex (...) organic network. (shrink)