The development of the statistical theory of turbulence mainly take places between 1920 and 1940, in a context where emerging theories in fluid mechanics are striving to provide results closer to experimentation and applicable to practical fluid problems. The secondary literature on the history of fluid mechanics has often emphasized the importance of the contributions of Prandtl, Taylor, and von Kármán to the closure problem of Reynolds equations for a turbulent fluid confined by walls and to the statistical description of (...) an isotropic and homogeneous turbulent flow. During the same period, a new theory of turbulence also surfaces in France. This theory is formulated by a group of researchers led by Philippe Wehrlé (1890–1965), the director of the French National Meteorological Office (Office national météorologique, ONM), and Georges Dedebant (1902–1965), the head of ONM’s Scientific Service. Their objective is to mathematically formalize the turbulence, taking into account the atmospheric turbulence and using a theory of random functions defined from experimental concepts. However, this French theory of turbulence gradually loses international recognition after World War II. After introducing the key figures and the fundamental components of their theory, the article explores various scientific factors why their contribution was increasingly forgotten after the Second World War. (shrink)

Response to commentaries on keynote article.

In this paper we consider an intuitionistic variant of the modal logic S4 (which we call IS4). The novelty of this paper is that we place particular importance on the natural deduction formulation of IS4— our formulation has several important metatheoretic properties. In addition, we study models of IS4— not in the framework of Kirpke semantics, but in the more general framework of category theory. This allows not only a more abstract definition of a whole class of models but also (...) a means of modelling proofs as well as provability. (shrink)

Contemporary Western societies are obsessed with the “obesity epidemic,” dieting, and fitness. Fat people violate the Western conscience by violating a thinness norm. In virtue of violating the thinness norm, fat people suffer many varied consequences. Is their suffering morally permissible, or even obligatory? In this paper, I argue that the answer is no. I examine contemporary philosophical accounts of oppression and draw largely on the work of Sally Haslanger to generate a set of conditions sufficient for some phenomena to (...) count as oppression, and I illustrate the account’s value using the example of gender oppression. I then apply the account to fat people, examine empirical evidence, and argue that the suffering of fat people counts as oppression. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that the latter group [of Non-Humeans] is correct. My argument focuses on practical deliberation and has two parts. I will discuss two different problems that arise for the Humean Theory and suggest that while taken individually each problem appears to have a solution, for each problem the solution Humeans offer precludes solving the other problem. I will suggest that to see these difficulties we must take seriously the thought that we can only understand an (...) agent’s reasons for her action by looking at her actual or possible practical deliberation. (shrink)

In ‘Wittgenstein on Language and Rules’, Professor N. Malcolm took us to task for misinterpreting Wittgenstein's arguments on the relationship between the concept of following a rule and the concept of community agreement on what counts as following a given rule. Not that we denied that there are any grammatical connections between these concepts. On the contrary, we emphasized that a rule and an act in accord with it make contact in language. Moreover we argued that agreement in judgments and (...) in definitions is indeed necessary for a shared language. But we denied that the concept of a language is so tightly interwoven with the concept of a community of speakers as to preclude its applicabilty to someone whose use of signs is not shared by others. Malcolm holds that ‘This is an unwitting reduction of Wittgenstein's originality. That human agreement is necessary for “shared” language is not so striking a thought as that it is essential for language simpliciter.’ Though less striking, we believe that it has the merit of being a true thought. We shall once more try to show both that it is correct, and that it is a correct account of Wittgenstein's arguments. (shrink)

The King Report on Corporate Governance (1994) evoked unprecedented interest in corporate governance in South Africa. This does not mean that corporate governance was not an issue of concern before the release of this historical report. To the contrary, corporate governance in its broader sense has been at stake since the inception of the first publicly owned companies in South Africa. This article intends to give an overview of corporate governance in South Africa. It starts by making a distinction between (...) broad and narrow conceptions of corporate governance. Before applying this distinction to the practice of corporate governance in South Africa, a brief overview of the corporate landscape in South Africa is provided. Then the South African situation with regard to broad and narrow corporate governance respectively is analysed. The article ends with a discussion of the review of corporate governance that currently is in the making in South Africa. Throughout the article both the financial and ethical dimensions of corporate governance is attended to. (shrink)

Dealing with the nature of historical knowledge, this book is concerned with both philosophical and historical questions. It involves considerations as various as statistical hypothesis testing, componential analysis and the problem of the Synoptic Gospels. --.

The purpose of this note is to acknowledge a gap in a previous paper, "The complexity of revision," and to provide a corrected version of the argument.

"This book represents a continuation of the research project in philosophy of language and semantics represented in the journal "Protosociology" at the J. W. ...

The study of continuous group actions is ubiquitous in mathematics, and perhaps the most general kinds of actions for which we can hope to prove theorems in just ZFC are those where a Polish group acts on a Polish space.For this general class we can find works such as [29] that build on ideas from ergodic theory and examine actions of locally compact groups in both the measure theoretic and topological contexts. On the other hand a text in model theory, (...) such as [12], will typically consider issues bearing on the actions by the symmetric group of all permutations of the integers. More generally [1] shows that the orbit equivalence relations induced by closed subgroups of the infinite symmetric group can be reduced to the isomorphism relation on corresponding classes of countable models.This paper considers a third category formed by the continuous actions of separable Banach spaces on Polish spaces. These examples cannot be subsumed under the two earlier headings, and it is known from [10] that theBorel cardinalitiesof the quotient spaces that arise from such actions are incomparable with the equivalence relations induced by the symmetric group or any locally compact Polish group action.One of the first things to be addressed concerns the complexity of these equivalence relations. This question forappears in [1]. (shrink)

The King Report on Corporate Governance (1994) evoked unprecedented interest in corporate governance in South Africa. This does not mean that corporate governance was not an issue of concern before the release of this historical report. To the contrary, corporate governance in its broader sense has been at stake since the inception of the first publicly owned companies in South Africa. This article intends to give an overview of corporate governance in South Africa. It starts by making a distinction between (...) broad and narrow conceptions of corporate governance. Before applying this distinction to the practice of corporate governance in South Africa, a brief overview of the corporate landscape in South Africa is provided. Then the South African situation with regard to broad and narrow corporate governance respectively is analysed. The article ends with a discussion of the review of corporate governance that currently is in the making in South Africa. Throughout the article both the financial and ethical dimensions of corporate governance is attended to. (shrink)

Classical temples in ancient Greece show two deterministic illusionistic principles of architecture, which govern their functional design: geometric proportionalism and a set of illusion-strengthening rules in the proportionalism's stochastic margin. Animal morphology, in its mechanistic-deductive revival, applies just one architectural principle, which is not always satisfactory. Whether a Greek Classical situation occurs in the architecture of living structure is to be investigated by extreme testing with deductive methods.Three deductive methods for explanation of living structure in animal morphology are proposed: the (...) parts, the compromise, and the transformation deduction. The methods are based upon the systems concept for an organism, the flow chart for a functionalistic picture, and the network chart for a structuralistic picture, whereas the optimal design serves as the architectural principle for living structure. These methods show clearly the high explanatory power of deductive methods in morphology, but they also make one open end most explicit: neutral issues do exist. (shrink)

It has become a truism that we live in so‐called information societies where new information technologies have made information abundant. At the same time, information science has made us aware of many phenomena tied to the way we process information. This article explores a series of socio‐epistemic information phenomena resulting from processes that track truth imperfectly: pluralistic ignorance, informational cascades, and belief polarization. It then couples these phenomena with the hypothesis that modern information technologies may lead to their amplification so (...) as to give rise to what are called “infostorms.” This points to the need for studying further the exact relations between information technologies and such infostorms, as well as the ways we may design technologies to avoid being misled away from what we have good reasons to believe. (shrink)