Resilience is often promoted as a boundary concept to integrate the social and natural dimensions of sustainability. However, it is a troubled dialogue from which social scientists may feel detached. To explain this, we first scrutinize the meanings, attributes, and uses of resilience in ecology and elsewhere to construct a typology of definitions. Second, we analyze core concepts and principles in resilience theory that cause disciplinary tensions between the social and natural sciences. Third, we provide empirical evidence of the asymmetry (...) in the use of resilience theory in ecology and environmental sciences compared to five relevant social science disciplines. Fourth, we contrast the unification ambition in resilience theory with methodological pluralism. Throughout, we develop the argument that incommensurability and unification constrain the interdisciplinary dialogue, whereas pluralism drawing on core social scientific concepts would better facilitate integrated sustainability research. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage with the question of the normative content of the resilience concept. The issues are approached in two consecutive steps. First, we proceed from a narrow construal of the resilience concept – as the ability of a system to absorb a disturbance – and show that under an analysis of normative concepts as evaluative concepts resilience comes out as descriptive. In the second part of the paper, we argue that (1) for systems of interest (primarily social (...) systems or system with a social component) we seem to have options with respect to how they are described and (2) that this matters for what is to be taken as a sign of resilience as opposed to a sign of the lack of resilience for such systems. We discuss the implications of this for how the concept should be applied in practice and suggest that users of the resilience concept face a choice between versions of the concept that are either ontologically or normatively charged. (shrink)

A large proportion of tumour‐associated antigens seem to be determined by carbohydrate structures. Advances in the study of the antigenicity of cell‐surface carbohydrates have been hampered by the absence of advanced monoclonal hybridoma technology comparable to that available for the study of protein antigens. Monoclonal antibodies have been raised against a carbohydrate epitope (43–9F) that is associated with the proliferative features of squamous lung carcinomas. These were used in turn to generate anti‐idiotype antibodies with homology to 43–9F. The method and (...) its possible applications are described, together with a procedure to detect rare cell membrane variants within large populations. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary research within the field of sustainability studies often faces incompatible ontological assumptions deriving from natural and social sciences. The importance of this fact is often underrated and sometimes leads to the wrong strategies. We distinguish between two broad approaches in interdisciplinarity: unificationism and pluralism. Unificationism seeks unification and perceives disciplinary boundaries as conventional, representing no long-term obstacle to progress, whereas pluralism emphasizes more ephemeral and transient interdisciplinary connections and underscores the autonomy of the disciplines with respect to one another. (...) Both approaches have their merits and pitfalls. Unification runs the risk of scientific imperialism, while pluralism can result in insurmountable barriers between disciplines. We made a comparison of eight distinct interdisciplinary attempts at integration of knowledge across social and natural sciences. The comparison was carried out as four pairwise comparisons: environmental economics versus ecological economics, environmental history versus historical ecology, resilience theory versus political ecology, and socio-biology versus actor-network theory. We conclude by showing that none of these prominent eight interdisciplinary fields in and of itself manages to provide, in a satisfactory way, such an integrated understanding of sustainability. We argue for pluralism and advocate complex ways of articulating divergent ontological assumptions. This is not equivalent to pursuing knowledge unification either through scientific imperialism or by catering to the requirements of narrow practical utility. It means prioritizing interdisciplinary integration by simultaneously acknowledging the role of societal and natural factors in accounting for sustainability issues. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary research within the field of sustainability studies often faces incompatible ontological assumptions deriving from natural and social sciences. The importance of this fact is often underrated and sometimes leads to the wrong strategies. We distinguish between two broad approaches in interdisciplinarity: unificationism and pluralism. Unificationism seeks unification and perceives disciplinary boundaries as conventional, representing no long-term obstacle to progress, whereas pluralism emphasizes more ephemeral and transient interdisciplinary connections and underscores the autonomy of the disciplines with respect to one another. (...) Both approaches have their merits and pitfalls. Unification runs the risk of scientific imperialism, while pluralism can result in insurmountable barriers between disciplines. We made a comparison of eight distinct interdisciplinary attempts at integration of knowledge across social and natural sciences. The comparison was carried out as four pairwise comparisons: environmental economics versus ecological economics, environmental history versus historical ecology, resilience theory versus political ecology, and socio-biology versus actor-network theory. We conclude by showing that none of these prominent eight interdisciplinary fields in and of itself manages to provide, in a satisfactory way, such an integrated understanding of sustainability. We argue for pluralism and advocate complex ways of articulating divergent ontological assumptions. This is not equivalent to pursuing knowledge unification either through scientific imperialism or by catering to the requirements of narrow practical utility. It means prioritizing interdisciplinary integration by simultaneously acknowledging the role of societal and natural factors in accounting for sustainability issues. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary research in the fields of forestry and sustainability studies often encounters seemingly incompatible ontological assumptions deriving from natural and social sciences. The perceived incompatibilities might emerge from the epistemological and ontological claims of the theories or models directly employed in the interdisciplinary collaboration, or they might be created by other epistemological and ontological assumptions that these interdisciplinary researchers find no reason to question. In this paper we discuss the benefits and risks of two possible approaches, Popperian optimism and Kuhnian (...) pessimism, to interdisciplinary knowledge integration where epistemological and ontological differences between the sciences involved can be expected. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary research in the fields of forestry and sustainability studies often encounters seemingly incompatible ontological assumptions deriving from natural and social sciences. The perceived incompatibilities might emerge from the epistemological and ontological claims of the theories or models directly employed in the interdisciplinary collaboration, or they might be created by other epistemological and ontological assumptions that these interdisciplinary researchers find no reason to question. In this paper we discuss the benefits and risks of two possible approaches, Popperian optimism and Kuhnian (...) pessimism, to interdisciplinary knowledge integration where epistemological and ontological differences between the sciences involved can be expected. (shrink)

The calls for evidence-based public policy making have increased dramatically in the last decades, and so has the interest in evidence-based sustainability studies. But questions remain about what “evidence” actually means in different contexts and if the concept travels well between different domains of application. Some of the most relevant questions asked by sustainability studies are not, and in some cases cannot be, directly answered by relying on research evidence of the kinds favored by the evidence-based movement. Therefore, sustainability studies (...) must also harness other forms of knowledge, based on forms of practical experience. How to integrate these two sources of knowledge is one of the most fundamental epistemological and practical problems society is facing. Identifying what kind of practical experience and research evidence we need to integrate is another challenging question. We draw on examples from our research in the Global South and suggest an efficient principle, problem-feeding, for harnessing practical experience within an adapted version of evidence-based sustainability studies. (shrink)

The calls for evidence-based public policy making have increased dramatically in the last decades, and so has the interest in evidence-based sustainability studies. But questions remain about what “evidence” actually means in different contexts and if the concept travels well between different domains of application. Some of the most relevant questions asked by sustainability studies are not, and in some cases cannot be, directly answered by relying on research evidence of the kinds favored by the evidence-based movement. Therefore, sustainability studies (...) must also harness other forms of knowledge, based on forms of practical experience. How to integrate these two sources of knowledge is one of the most fundamental epistemological and practical problems society is facing. Identifying what kind of practical experience and research evidence we need to integrate is another challenging question. We draw on examples from our research in the Global South and suggest an efficient principle, problem-feeding, for harnessing practical experience within an adapted version of evidence-based sustainability studies. (shrink)

With Carl Gegenbaur and Ernst Haeckel, inspiredby Darwin and the cell theory, comparativeanatomy and embryology became established andflourished in Jena. This tradition wascontinued and developed further with new ideasand methods devised by some of Haeckelsstudents. This first period of innovative workin evolutionary morphology was followed byperiods of crisis and even a disintegration ofthe discipline in the early twentieth century.This stagnation was caused by a lack ofinterest among morphologists in Mendeliangenetics, and uncertainty about the mechanismsof evolution. Idealistic morphology was stillinfluental in (...) Germany, which prevented a fullappreciation of the importance of Darwinstheory of natural selection for comparativemorphology. Evolutionary morphology andembryology failed to contribute significantlyto the modern synthesis of evolutionarybiology, thereby probably delaying theintegration of developmental biology intomodern evolutionary biology. However, Haeckelsstudent Oscar Hertwig, as well as Victor Franzand Alexej N. Sewertzoff from a youngergeneration, all tried to forge their ownsynthetic approaches in which (inspired byHaeckels work) embryology played an importantrole. Important for all three researchers wereattempts to refine, and sometimes redefine, thebiogenetic law, and to find new scientificexplanations for it (and for the manyexceptions to it). Their research was latermore or less forgotten, and had littleinfluence on the architects of the modernsynthesis. As the relationship betweenevolutionary and developmental biology is nowagain rising in importance in the form ofEvo-Devo, we would like to draw attention tohow this earlier research tradition grappledwith similar questions to those now on theagenda, albeit from sometimes quite differentperspectives. (shrink)

Ernst Haeckel formulated his biogenetic law, famously stating that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in 1872. The Russian evolutionist Alexei Sewertzoff, and the Swiss-born zoologist Adolf Naef were among those who revised Haeckel’s law, thus changing the course of evolutionary theory and of developmental biology. Although Sewertzoff and Naef approached the problem in a similar way and formulated similar hypotheses at a purely descriptive level, their theoretical viewpoints were crucially different. While Sewertzoff laid the foundations for a Darwinian evolutionary morphology and is (...) regarded as a forerunner of the modern synthesis, Naef was one of the most important figures in “idealistic morphology”, which is usually seen as a type of anti-Darwinism. Both Naef and Sewertzoff aimed to revise Haeckel’s biogenetic law and came to comparable conclusions at the empirical level. This paper is an attempt to explain how their fundamentally different theoretical backgrounds influenced their views on the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. (shrink)

In a seminal book, Alvin I. Goldman outlines a theory for how to evaluate social practices with respect to their “veritistic value”, i.e., their tendency to promote the acquisition of true beliefs in society. In the same work, Goldman raises a number of serious worries for his account. Two of them concern the possibility of determining the veritistic value of a practice in a concrete case because we often don't know what beliefs are actually true, and even if we did, (...) the task of determining the veritistic value would be computationally extremely difficult. Neither problem is specific to Goldman's theory and both can be expected to arise for just about any account of veritistic value. It is argued here that the first problem does not pose a serious threat to large classes of interesting practices. The bulk of the paper is devoted to the computational problem, which, it is submitted, can be addressed in promising terms by means of computer simulation. In an attempt to add vividness to this proposal, an up-and-running simulation environment is presented and put to some preliminary tests. (shrink)

We consider an infinite hierarchy of systems of Alethic Modal Logic with so-called Levels of Perfection, and add to them suitable definitions of such interesting deontic categories as those of supererogation, offence, conditional obligation and conditional permission. We then state three problems concerning the proper characterization of the resulting logic(s) for our defined notions, and discuss two of these problems in some detail.

This book contains scholarly contributions to several current debates in the philosophy of medicine and health care regarding the nature of health and health promotion, concepts and measurements of mental illness, phenomenological conceptions of health and illness, allocation of health care resources, criteria for proper medical science, the clinical meeting, and ethical constraints in such a meeting. With one exception, the authors in this book are or have been teachers or graduate students at the interdisciplinary Department of Health and Society (...) (Tema H) at Linköping University, Sweden. While all the texts have a philosophical focus, many other disciplines have influenced the choice of specific perspectives. The university backgrounds of the authors range from medicine, psychology, sociology, and religion to philosophy. What binds the authors together is their deep interest in the theory of medicine and in the pursuit of a philosophy of humanistic medicine and health care. (shrink)

As a part of a research project on Dignity and Older Europeans Programme) I explore in this paper a set of notions of human dignity. The general concept of dignity is introduced and characterized as a position on a value scale and it is further specified through its relations to the notions of right, respect and self-respect. I present four kinds of dignity and spell out their differences: the dignity of merit, the dignity of moral or existential stature, the dignity (...) of identity and the universal human dignity. Menschenwürde pertains to all human beings to the same extent and cannot be lost as long as the persons exist. The dignity of merit depends on social rank and position. There are many species of this kind of dignity and it is very unevenly distributed among human beings. The dignity of merit exists in degrees and it can come and go. The dignity of moral stature is the result of the moral deeds of the subject; likewise it can be reduced or lost through his or her immoral deeds. This kind of dignity is tied to the idea of a dignified character and of dignity as a virtue. The dignity of moral stature is a dignity of degree and it is also unevenly distributed. The dignity of identity is tied to the integrity of the subject's body and mind, and in many instances, although not always, also dependent on the subject's self-image. This dignity can come and go as a result of the deeds of fellow human beings and also as a result of changes in the subject's body and mind. (shrink)

Book Review of Luc Bovens and Stephan Hartmann *Bayesian Epistemology* by Erik J. Olsson.

Experts have been claimed to perceive risks in a different way than the general public. It is likely that experts often see risks in their own field of expertise as smaller than the public does, but that does not imply that their risk perception is also driven by other factors. Topical experts and general risk assessors are two quite different types of experts. Still, common assertions as to the simple structure of expert risk perception, said to be related only to (...) technical or statistical risk estimates, builds on a meager database consisting of 15 general risk assessors. Results from a study reported here show that the factors explaining experts’ risk perception are similar to those of a comparable group of nontopical experts with a similar level of technological literacy and to the general public, and that the level of explained variance is quite comparable for experts and the general public. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore the ethical foundations for a caring conversation. The analysis is based on the ethics of Paul Ricoeur and deals with questions such as what kind of person the nurse ought to be and how she or he engages in caring conversations with suffering others. According to Ricoeur, ethics (the aim of an accomplished life) has primacy over morality (the articulation of aims in norms). At the ethical level, self-esteem and autonomy were shown (...) to be essential for a person (nurse) to act with respect and responsibility. The ethical relationship of a caring conversation was found to be asymmetrical, because of the passivity inflicted by suffering. This asymmetry was found to be potentially unethical if not balanced with reciprocity. In the ethical context, the caring conversation is one in which the nurse makes room through the ethos of caritas for a suffering person to regain his or her self-esteem, and thus makes a good life possible. (shrink)

In policy-making the consumption of specially labelled products, and its role in improving the welfare of livestock, has attracted considerable attention. There is in many countries a diverse market for animal welfare-friendly products which is potentially confusing and may lack transparency. We ask whether special quality labels that involve medium levels of animal welfare, as compared with labels promoting premium levels of animal welfare, have a role to play in promoting improvements in animal welfare. The Danish pork market is our (...) reference case, but we also widen the context by comparing the markets for pork in three other European countries. Our findings suggest that in order to improve animal welfare through demand for welfare-friendly products it is important to maintain separate the market for products with strong animal welfare profiles from markets for products with medium levels of animal welfare where, often, animal welfare is bundled together with other food quality attributes. We conclude that such quality labels may indeed play an important role in promoting higher animal welfare standards provided that they offer real improvements in animal welfare as compared with standard products. They will be attractive to consumers with a positive, but not especially strong interest in animal welfare as an individual food attribute who would otherwise be inclined to purchase standard products. (shrink)

Emotions are an important clue for the characterisation of individuals in Xenophon’s “Hellenica”. Especially joy and schadenfreude have an important narrative function. Malicious joy and spite point at the flaws of the Spartan hegemony after the Peloponnesian War. However, pleasure at the misfortune of others is not negative in itself. Defeating hubristic enemies is a proper reason to rejoice for Xenophon. Emotions can be vices or virtues, it is the circumstances that define their moral value.

Kierkegaard's view of time and eternity.

The main purpose of this paper is to clarify some senses of dignity that are particularly relevant for the treatment and care of the elderly. I make a distinction between two quite different ideas of dignity, on the one hand the basic kind of dignity possessed by every human being, and on the other hand the dignity which is the result of a person's merits, whether these be inherited or achieved. Common to both these ideas is that having a dignity (...) entails having a set of rights, in the case of basic dignity the set of rights which we call human rights, the rights which the United Nations, among others, has tried to determine. The dignities of merit also provide some rights, although normally rights with limited scope covering, for instance, a professional area. This observation gives my preliminary answer to the fundamental question of what distinguishes dignity from other high values that could be attached to humans. I discuss further a kind of value that might be mistaken for a kind of dignity, viz. what I call public status. This status is to be distinguished from social status (the status of e.g. kings, governors, and officials) that I take to be a proper dignity of merit. The public status is the status gained solely via public perception and not directly via any merits on the part of the dignified. Finally, I turn to the topic of the dignity of the elderly and try to determine whether there is some dignity peculiar to the elderly, and which is over and above the basicMenschenwrde. My two preliminary proposals are the following: the elderly have a dignity of wisdom and they have a highly general dignity of merit, which results from their life-long efforts and achievements, and for this they deserve our gratitude. (shrink)

The traditional Lockean justification of property rights has been argued to be no longer valid in a world in which much wealth does not derive from acquisitions of natural resources, and in which much property, such as money, is intangible. This means that libertarians need to reconsider whether and why property rights are justified for objects that fall outside of the scope of the Lockean justification. This paper gives a justification of property rights in relation to modern money, which uses (...) the self-ownership principle as its central premise. Since modern money is a form of credit, I start with a justification of credit property rights. I then consider both money under gold convertibility and present-day fiat systems, showing that the justification of credit property rights remains valid under these conditions. (shrink)

Rationale: High-frequency oscillations in intracranial EEG are used to delineate the epileptogenic zone during presurgical diagnostic assessment in patients with epilepsy. HFOs are historically divided into ripples, fast ripples, and their co-occurrence. In a previous study, we had validated the rate of FRandRs during deep sleep to predict seizure outcome. Here, we ask whether epileptic FRandRs might be confounded by physiological FRandRs that are unrelated to epilepsy.Methods: We recorded iEEG in the medial temporal lobe MTL in 17 patients while they (...) performed cognitive tasks. The three cognitive tasks addressed verbal working memory, visual working memory, and emotional processing. In our previous studies, these tasks activated the MTL. We re-analyzed the data of these studies with the automated detector that focuses on the co-occurrence of ripples and FRs.Results: For each task, we identified those channels in which the HFO rate was modulated during the task condition compared to the control condition. However, the number of these channels did not exceed the chance level. Interestingly, even during wakefulness, the HFO rate was higher for channels within the seizure onset zone than for channels outside the SOZ.Conclusion: Our prospective definition of an epileptic HFO, the FRandR, is not confounded by physiological HFOs that might be elicited by our cognitive tasks. This is reassuring for the clinical use of FRandR as a biomarker of the EZ. (shrink)

Research programs regularly compete to achieve the same goal, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA or the construction of a TEA laser. The more the competing programs share information, the faster the goal is likely to be reached, to society’s benefit. But the “priority rule”-the scientific norm according to which the first program to reach the goal in question must receive all the credit for the achievement-provides a powerful disincentive for programs to share information. How, then, is (...) the clash between social and individual interest resolved in scientific practice? This chapter investigates what Robert Merton called science’s “communist” norm, which mandates universal sharing of knowledge, and uses mathematical models of discovery to argue that a communist regime may be on the whole advantageous and fair to all parties, and so might be implemented by a social contract that all scientists would be willing to sign. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel proof of the conservativity of the intuitionistic theory of strictly positive fixpoints, $$\widehat{{\textrm{ID}}}{}_{1}^{{\textrm{i}}}{}$$ ID ^ 1 i, over Heyting arithmetic ($${\textrm{HA}}$$ HA ), originally proved in full generality by Arai (Ann Pure Appl Log 162:807–815, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apal.2011.03.002). The proof embeds $$\widehat{{\textrm{ID}}}{}_{1}^{{\textrm{i}}}{}$$ ID ^ 1 i into the corresponding theory over Beeson’s logic of partial terms and then uses two consecutive interpretations, a realizability interpretation of this theory into the subtheory generated by almost negative fixpoints, and (...) a direct interpretation into Heyting arithmetic with partial terms using a hierarchy of satisfaction predicates for almost negative formulae. It concludes by applying van den Berg and van Slooten’s result (Indag Math 29:260–275, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indag.2017.07.009) that Heyting arithmetic with partial terms plus the schema of self realizability for arithmetic formulae is conservative over $${\textrm{HA}}$$ HA. (shrink)

In this paper we examine C. I. Lewis's view on the roleof coherence – what he calls ''congruence'' – in thejustification of beliefs based on memory ortestimony. Lewis has two main theses on the subject. His negativethesis states that coherence of independent items ofevidence has no impact on the probability of a conclusionunless each item has some credibility of its own. Thepositive thesis says, roughly speaking, that coherenceof independently obtained items of evidence – such asconverging memories or testimonies – raises (...) the probabilityof a conclusion to the extent sufficient for epistemicjustification, or, to use Lewis's expression, ''rationaland practical reliance''.It turns out that, while thenegative thesis is essentially correct, astrong positive connection between congruence andprobability – a connection of the kind Lewis ultimatelyneeds in his validation of memory – is contingent on thePrinciple of Indifference. In the final section we assess therepercussions of the latter fact for Lewis's theory in particularand for coherence justification in general. (shrink)

In recent decades, economists have developed methods for measuring the country-wide level of inequality of opportunity. The most popular method, called the ex-ante method, uses data on the distribution of outcomes stratified by groups of individuals with the same circumstances, in order to estimate the part of outcome inequality that is due to these circumstances. I argue that these methods are potentially biased, both upwards and downwards, and that the unknown size of this bias could be large. To argue that (...) the methods are biased, I show that they ought to measure causal or counterfactual quantities, while the methods are only capable of identifying correlational information. To argue that the bias is potentially large, I illustrate how the causal complexity of the real world leads to numerous non-causal correlations between circumstances and outcomes and respond to objections claiming that such correlations are nonetheless indicators of unfair disadvantage, that is, inequality of opportunity. (shrink)