The exhibition Off Beat: Jeff Nuttall and the International Underground showcases the archive of Jeff Nuttall, a painter, poet, editor, actor and novelist. As the exhibition illustrates, Nuttall was a central figure in the International Underground during the 1960s through to the early 1970s. During this time he collaborated with a vast network of avant-garde writers from across the globe, as well as editing the influential publication My Own Mag between 1963 and 1967.

Many are calling for concrete mechanisms of oversight for health research involving artificial intelligence (AI). In response, institutional review boards (IRBs) are being turned to as a familiar model of governance. Here, we examine the IRB model as a form of ethics oversight for health research that uses AI. We consider the model's origins, analyze the challenges IRBs are facing in the contexts of both industry and academia, and offer concrete recommendations for how these committees might be adapted in order (...) to provide an effective mechanism of oversight for health‐related AI research. (shrink)

In order to improve our understanding of the components that reflect functionally important processes during reward anticipation and consumption, we used principle components analyses (PCA) to separate and quantify averaged ERP data obtained from each stage of a modified monetary incentive delay (MID) task. Although a small number of recent ERP studies have reported that reward and loss cues potentiate ERPs during anticipation, action preparation, and consummatory stages of reward processing, these findings are inconsistent due to temporal and spatial overlap (...) between the relevant electrophysiological components. Our results show three components following cue presentation are sensitive to incentive cues (N1, P3a, P3b). In contrast to previous research, reward‐related enhancement occurred only in the P3b, with earlier components more sensitive to break‐even and loss cues. During feedback anticipation, we observed a lateralized centroparietal negativity that was sensitive to response hand but not cue type. We also show that use of PCA on ERPs reflecting reward consumption successfully separates the reward positivity from the independently modulated feedback‐P3. Last, we observe for the first time a new reward consumption component: a late negativity distributed over the left frontal pole. This component appears to be sensitive to response hand, especially in the context of monetary gain. These results illustrate that the time course and sensitivities of electrophysiological activity that follows incentive cues do not follow a simple heuristic in which reward incentive cues produce enhanced activity at all stages and substages. (shrink)

All of inquiry is a mental process from the known to the unknown within the realm of possibility. This process uses the three faculties of perception, conception, and abstraction, all fueled by information. These faculties have corollaries in Science and Philosophy of Religion. It is the thesis of this book that if these faculties are intelligible and reliability in Science, there is no reason to reject them when used in other fields of inquiry.

Umberto Eco’s notion of an “open work” embraces a Peircean pragmatism in order to avoid the extremes of both a bounded authorial intent and an unbounded post-structuralism, but this brand of pragmatism does not succeed in providing objective constraints on interpretation due to an unnecessary commitment to a Saussurrean net of meaning signification. Eco’s arguments for this commitment fail upon simple phenomenological reflection, and the whole commitment proves to be unnecessary for Eco’s fruitful insights of the open work. Successful interpretation (...) of an open work requires both intersubjectivity and actual presence. (shrink)

How do we go about understanding the "classic texts" of sociological theory? This paper begins by reviewing the historicist position of Jones, with its foundations in the work of Quentin Skinner and other historians of political theory. This position then is criticized from the standpoint of the neo-Deweyan pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Specifically, Rorty's pragmatism encourages us to revise Skinner's and Jones's historicism on three specific points: the acceptance of treatments of classical texts that are undeniably anachronistic but (...) nonetheless unobjectionable; the restriction of Skinner's notion of an agent's "privileged access" to his or her intentions; and the adoption of a view of the history of sociological theory as a succession of vocabularies-a view that encourages a new kind of dialogue between historians of sociological theory and theorists themselves. The last point is articulated in a concrete example of the interpretation of one of Durkheim's most characteristic arguments. The conclusion again stresses the benefits to be derived from viewing sociological theory-both past and present-from this pragmatist perspective. (shrink)

The four coauthors describe the twenty-five-year history of efforts of the Council of Learned Societies in Education (CLSE) to represent the interests of the social foundations of education in the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), including the evolution of CLSE into the Council for the Social Foundations of Education and its recent departure from NCATE after a quarter century of successful involvement. The coauthors, each personally supportive of foundational involvement in national accreditation, delineate advantages gained by both (...) CLSE and NCATE during the quarter century of involvement, while also describing concerns and arguments that have led to the current disassociation of the Council for Social Foundations of Education (CSFE) fromNCATE. The article concludes with suggestions for the future and the coauthors' hope that this history and chronicle will provide incentive for reinvolvement of the foundations in national accreditation circles. (shrink)

Distributional models of semantics learn word meanings from contextual co‐occurrence patterns across a large sample of natural language. Early models, such as LSA and HAL (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lund & Burgess, 1996), counted co‐occurrence events; later models, such as BEAGLE (Jones & Mewhort, 2007), replaced counting co‐occurrences with vector accumulation. All of these models learned from positive information only: Words that occur together within a context become related to each other. A recent class of distributional models, referred to (...) as neural embedding models, are based on a prediction process embedded in the functioning of a neural network: Such models predict words that should surround a target word in a given context (e.g., word2vec; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013). An error signal derived from the prediction is used to update each word's representation via backpropagation. However, another key difference in predictive models is their use of negative information in addition to positive information to develop a semantic representation. The models use negative examples to predict words that should not surround a word in a given context. As before, an error signal derived from the prediction prompts an update of the word's representation, a procedure referred to as negative sampling. Standard uses of word2vec recommend a greater or equal ratio of negative to positive sampling. The use of negative information in developing a representation of semantic information is often thought to be intimately associated with word2vec's prediction process. We assess the role of negative information in developing a semantic representation and show that its power does not reflect the use of a prediction mechanism. Finally, we show how negative information can be efficiently integrated into classic count‐based semantic models using parameter‐free analytical transformations. (shrink)

Western philosophy’s relationship with prisons stretches from Plato’s own incarceration to the modern era of mass incarceration. Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration draws together a broad range of philosophical thinkers, from both inside and outside prison walls, in the United States and beyond, who draw on a variety of critical perspectives (including phenomenology, deconstruction, and feminist theory) and historical and contemporary figures in philosophy (including Kant, Hegel, Foucault, and Angela Davis) to think about (...) prisons in this new historical era. All of these contributors have experiences within prison walls: some are or have been incarcerated, some have taught or are teaching in prisons, and all have been students of both philosophy and the carceral system. The powerful testimonials and theoretical arguments are appropriate reading not only for philosophers and prison theorists generally, but also for prison reformers and abolitionists. (shrink)

In the wake of the Stoneman Douglas School shooting, Republican and Democratic leaders—like the American electorate they represent—remain sharply divided in their responses to gun violence. They are united in their condemnation of these mass shootings, but they disagree about whether stricter or looser gun control laws are the answer. Those on the right side of the political aisle suggest that the issue is one of mental illness rather than gun control. Conversely, those who are more liberal or progressive (...) in their political learnings are quick to condemn attempts to reframe the issue of mass shootings as a mental health problem. Both sides are wrong. Mass shootings are indeed partially a mental health problem, albeit one poorly addressed by our current laws and policies. But the solution to mass shootings also needs to consider strategies that may reduce gun violence in general. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between organizational ethical culture in two large international CPA firms, auditors'' personal values and the ethical orientation that those values dictate, and judgments in ethical dilemmas typical of those that accountants face. Using an experimental task consisting of multiple judgments designed to vary in "moral intensity" (Jones, 1991), and unique as well as tried-and-true approaches to variable measurements, this study examined the judgments of more than three hundred participants in our study. ANCOVA and path (...) analysis results indicate that: (1) Ethical judgments in situations of high moral intensity are affected by personal values and by environmental variables, such as the professional code of conduct (direct and indirect effects) and previous ethics instruction (direct effect only). (2) Corporate ethical culture, and a relatively strong firm rules-orientation, affect auditors'' idealism but not relativism, and therefore indirectly affect ethical judgments. Jones'' (1991) moral intensity argument is supported: differences in the characteristics of specific judgment tasks apparently result in different decision processes. (shrink)

Investigating the concepts and material realities of energy coursing through the arts: a foundational text. This book investigates energies—in the plural, the energies embedded and embodied in everything under the sun— as they are expressed in the arts. With contributions from scholars and critics from the visual arts, art history, anthropology, music, literature, and the history of science, it offers the first multidisciplinary investigation of the concepts and material realities of energy coursing through the arts. Just as Douglas Kahn's (...) earlier books helped introduce sound as a category for study in the arts, this new volume will be a foundational volume for future explorers in a largely uncharted domain. The modern concept of energy is only two hundred years old—an abstraction grounded in extraction—but this book takes a more expansive view. It opens with a clap: the sonic energies in a ceremony of the indigenous Goolarabooloo people of Australia. Other chapters explore the energies of photography; responses of artists in the early twentieth century—including Marcel Duchamp—to scientific discoveries in electricity and electromagnetism; the aestheticization of entropy in works by Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson; free-jazz musician Milford Graves's cross-cultural engagement with music, science, and spiritualism; energy field performance; and the self-generating energy of rumor and gossip as artwork. Contributors include such leading scholars as Linda Dalrymple Henderson, John Tresch, and Caroline A. Jones. Practicing artists and students of art history will find Energies in the Arts an essential work. Contributors Susan Ballard, Jennifer Biddle, Marcus Boon, Joan Brassil, Steven Connor, Milford Graves, Daniel Hackbarth, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Caroline A. Jones, Douglas Kahn, David Mather, Stephen Muecke, James Nisbet, Daniela Silvestrin, Michael Taussig, John Tresch, Melissa Warak. (shrink)

Various philosophical accounts of function attributions have taken the following form:fis a function of a structureXin a systemSif and only ifXdoesfinSandfcausally contributes toG. While sharing this form, these accounts disagree over how “G” is to be specified. Specifications of “G” range from the fairly determinate to the less determinate. Although much of the debate over functions has been concerned with the proper characterization of “G”, it has become apparent that theories which fit this schema are subject to now-standard counterexamples in (...) whichfdoes in fact causally contribute to the realization ofG, butffails to be a function ofXin thatf's contribution is accidental in nature. Consider, for example, goal-state theory according to whichfis a function ofXinSjust in casefcontributes to the realization of some goal ofS. Imagine that Jones has a silver dollar in his shirt pocket which deflects a bullet meant for his chest. Assuming that the coin is in Jones's pocket for reasons unrelated to his goal of continued existence, although the coin contributes to this goal, it does not have the function of “bullet deflector” since its contribution is merely accidental. We can easily generate similar counter-examples for other theories which fit this schema but differ in how “G” is specified. I will call this the problem of “accidentalG-generating effects”. Counterexamples of this type have put pressure on theorists to modify this schema or at least to add additional conditions in order to rule out “accidental functions”. In this paper I will first examine various modifications which have been suggested for avoiding this type of counterexample, and then develop a new approach to the question of “accidental functions”. (shrink)

Did people in early modern Europe have a concept of an inner self? Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor have brought together an outstanding group of literary, cultural, and history scholars to answer this intriguing question. Through a synthesis of historicism and psychoanalytic criticism, the contributors explore the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising union of history and subjectivity in Europe centuries before psychoanalytic theory. Addressing such topics as "fetishes and Renaissances," "the cartographic unconscious," and "the topographic imaginary," these essays move (...) beyond the strict boundaries of historicism and psychoanalysis to carve out new histories of interiority in early modern Europe. Contributors: Ann Rosalind Jones, Peter Stallybrass, James R. Siemon, John Guillory, Eric Wilson, Karen Newman, Tom Conley, Jeffrey Masten, Carla Mazzio, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Jonathan Goldberg, Douglas Trevor, Kathryn Schwarz, David Hillman, Marjorie Garber. (shrink)

πέπλους τε νῆσαι λινογενεῖς τ’ ἐπενδύταςτε νῆσαιCanter: τε νίσαιPoll.A: τάνυσαιPoll.FSnêsaimantles and outer garments born of flaxGreek has three verbs νέω: ‘swim’, ‘spin’ and ‘heap up, pile’. The aorist infinitive of both and is νῆσαι. LSJ takes Sophocles, fr. 439 R. to be an instance of νέω. Pearson comments: ‘νῆσαι is loosely used for ὑϕαίνειν. The process of spinning, being preparatory to that of weaving, was apt to be regarded as part of the same operation rather than as a distinct art (...) … Soph. probably had in mind η 96 πέπλοι | λεπτοὶ ἐΰννητοι βεβλήατο, ἔργα γυναικῶν’. Lloyd-Jones accordingly translates the fragment ‘to weave robes and tunics made of linen’. (shrink)

This article examines a number of key terms in Pollux’ discussion of the anatomy of the human spine as a way of assessing both his reliability in regard to technical language of all sorts and the relative strengths and weaknesses of two major representatives of the modern philological and lexicographic tradition, the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek-English Lexicon and the new Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek.

This experiment examined the effects of three elements comprising Jones' (1991) moral intensity construct, (social consensus, personal proximity, and magnitude of consequences) in a cross-cultural comparison of ethical decision making within a human resource management (HRM) context. Results indicated social consensus had the most potent effect on judgments of moral concern and judgments of immorality. An analysis of American, Eastern European, and Indonesian responses also indicted socio-cultural differences were moderated by the type of HRM ethical issue. In addition, individual (...) differences in personal ethical ideology (relativism and idealism) varied reliably with moral judgments after controlling for issue characteristics and socio-cultural background. (shrink)

Vol. presents a method for critically evaluating relevance in arguments based on case studies & a new relevance theory incorporating techniques of argumentation theory, logic & artificiaI intelligence. For scholars/students in argumentation & rhetoric.

Media argumentation is a powerful force in our lives. From political speeches to television commercials to war propaganda, it can effectively mobilize political action, influence the public, and market products. This book presents a new and systematic way of thinking about the influence of mass media in our lives, showing the intersection of media sources with argumentation theory, informal logic, computational theory, and theories of persuasion. Using a variety of case studies that represent arguments that typically occur in the mass (...) media, Douglas Walton demonstrates how tools recently developed in argumentation theory can be usefully applied to the identification, analysis, and evaluation of media arguments. (shrink)

A "slippery slope argument" is a type of argument in which a first step is taken and a series of inextricable consequences follow, ultimately leading to a disastrous outcome. Many textbooks on informal logic and critical thinking treat the slippery slope argument as a fallacy. Walton argues that used correctly in some cases, they can be a reasonable type of argument to shift a burden of proof in a critical discussion, while in other cases they are used incorrectly. Walton identifies (...) and analyzes four types of slippery slope argument. Walton presents guidelines that show how each type of slippery slope argument can be used correctly or incorrectly, using over fifty case studies of argumentation on controversial issues. These include abortion, medical research on human embryos, euthanasia, the decriminalization of marijuana, pornography, and censorship, and banning of American flag burning. (shrink)

Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation presents the basic tools for the identification, analysis, and evaluation of common arguments for beginners. The book teaches by using examples of arguments in dialogues, both in the text itself and in the exercises. Examples of controversial legal, political, and ethical arguments are analyzed. Illustrating the most common kinds of arguments, the book also explains how to evaluate each kind by critical questioning. Douglas Walton shows how arguments can be reasonable under the right dialogue conditions (...) by using critical questions to evaluate them. The book teaches by example, both in the text itself and in exercises, but it is based on methods that have been developed through the author's thirty years of research in argumentation studies. (shrink)

Second edition of the introductory guidebook to the basic principles of constructing sound arguments and criticising bad ones. Non-technical in approach, it is based on 186 examples, which Douglas Walton, a leading authority in the field of informal logic, discusses and evaluates in clear, illustrative detail. Walton explains how errors, fallacies, and other key failures of argument occur. He shows how correct uses of argument are based on sound strategies for reasoned persuasion and critical responses. This edition takes into (...) account many developments in the field of argumentation study that have occurred since 1989, many created by the author. Drawing on these developments, Walton includes and analyzes 36 new topical examples and also brings in work on argumentation schemes. Ideally suited for use in courses in informal logic and introduction to philosophy, this book will also be valuable to students of pragmatics, rhetoric, and speech communication. (shrink)

Argumentation, which can be abstractly defined as the interaction of different arguments for and against some conclusion, is an important skill to learn for everyday life, law, science, politics and business. The best way to learn it is to try it out on real instances of arguments found in everyday conversational exchanges and legal argumentation. The introductory chapter of this book gives a clear general idea of what the methods of argumentation are and how they work as tools that can (...) be used to analyze arguments. Each subsequent chapter then applies these methods to a leading problem of argumentation. Today the field of computing has embraced argumentation as a paradigm for research in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Another purpose of this book is to present and refine tools and techniques from computing as components of the methods that can be handily used by scholars in other fields. (shrink)

Recent work in artificial intelligence has increasingly turned to argumentation as a rich, interdisciplinary area of research that can provide new methods related to evidence and reasoning in the area of law. Douglas Walton provides an introduction to basic concepts, tools and methods in argumentation theory and artificial intelligence as applied to the analysis and evaluation of witness testimony. He shows how witness testimony is by its nature inherently fallible and sometimes subject to disastrous failures. At the same time (...) such testimony can provide evidence that is not only necessary but inherently reasonable for logically guiding legal experts to accept or reject a claim. Walton shows how to overcome the traditional disdain for witness testimony as a type of evidence shown by logical positivists, and the views of trial sceptics who doubt that trial rules deal with witness testimony in a way that yields a rational decision-making process. (shrink)

In this volume, Douglas Yoder uses the tools of modern and postmodern philosophy and biblical criticism to elucidate the epistemology of the Tanakh, the collection of writings that comprise the Hebrew Bible. Despite the conceptual sophistication of the Tanakh, its epistemology has been overlooked in both religious and secular hermeneutics. The concept of revelation, the genre of apocalypse, and critiques of ideology and theory are all found within or derive from epistemic texts of the Tanakh. Yoder examines how philosophers (...) such as Spinoza, Hume, and Kant interacted with such matters. He also explores how the motifs of writing, reading, interpretation, image, and animals, topics that figure prominently in the work of Derrida, Foucault, and Nietzsche, appear also in the Tanakh. An understanding of Tanakh epistemology, he concludes, can lead to new appraisals of religious and secular life throughout the modern world. (shrink)

On September 1, 2023, Texas made important revisions to it its decades‐old statute granting legal safe harbor immunity to physicians who withhold or withdraw life‐sustaining treatment over the objection of critically ill patients’ surrogate decision‐makers. However, lawmakers left untouched glaring flaws in a key safeguard for patients—the transfer option. The transfer option is ethically important because, when no hospital is willing to accept the patient in transfer, that fact is taken as strong evidence that the surrogates’ treatment requests fall outside (...) accepted medical practice. But there are serious shortcomings in how the transfer option is carried out in Texas and many other states, which undermines the ethical usefulness of the process. We identify these shortcomings and recommend revisions to state statutes and professional guidelines to overcome them. (shrink)

Wigmore thought that there was a science of proof underlying legal reasoning that could be displayed in any given case as a graphic sequence of argumentation from the evidence in the case leading to the ultimate probandum. Argumentation technology has now vindicated this approach by providing useful qualitative methods that can be applied to identifying, analyzing, and evaluating the pro and con arguments put forward by both sides in a trial. In this chapter, it is shown how to apply argumentation (...) schemes, such as argument from witness testimony, using argument diagrams applied to typical sequences of evidence-based legal reasoning in which there is a successive refinement of arguments displayed as the evidence comes into a case. It is shown how argument from applying rules to cases, teleological, argument from expert witness testimony, and abductive reasoning are centrally important for this purpose. (shrink)

Scientists have used models for hundreds of years as a means of describing phenomena and as a basis for further analogy. In Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science, Daniela Bailer-Jones assembles an original and comprehensive philosophical analysis of how models have been used and interpreted in both historical and contemporary contexts. Bailer-Jones delineates the many forms models can take (ranging from equations to animals; from physical objects to theoretical constructs), and how they are put to use. She examines (...) early mechanical models employed by nineteenth-century physicists such as Kelvin and Maxwell, describes their roots in the mathematical principles of Newton and others, and compares them to contemporary mechanistic approaches. Bailer-Jones then views the use of analogy in the late nineteenth century as a means of understanding models and to link different branches of science. She reveals how analogies can also be models themselves, or can help to create them. The first half of the twentieth century saw little mention of models in the literature of logical empiricism. Focusing primarily on theory, logical empiricists believed that models were of temporary importance, flawed, and awaiting correction. The later contesting of logical empiricism, particularly the hypothetico-deductive account of theories, by philosophers such as Mary Hesse, sparked a renewed interest in the importance of models during the 1950s that continues to this day. Bailer-Jones analyzes subsequent propositions of: models as metaphors; Kuhn's concept of a paradigm; the Semantic View of theories; and the case study approaches of Cartwright and Morrison, among others. She then engages current debates on topics such as phenomena versus data, the distinctions between models and theories, the concepts of representation and realism, and the discerning of falsities in models. (shrink)

Develops a logical analysis of dialogue in which two or more parties attempt to advance their own interests. It includes a classification of the major types of dialogues and a discussion of several important informal fallacies.

This book provides a systematic analysis of many common argumentation schemes and a compendium of 96 schemes. The study of these schemes, or forms of argument that capture stereotypical patterns of human reasoning, is at the core of argumentation research. Surveying all aspects of argumentation schemes from the ground up, the book takes the reader from the elementary exposition in the first chapter to the latest state of the art in the research efforts to formalize and classify the schemes, outlined (...) in the last chapter. It provides a systematic and comprehensive account, with notation suitable for computational applications that increasingly make use of argumentation schemes. (shrink)

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject (...) to ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation. (shrink)

This book identifies 25 argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning and matches a set of critical questions to each.

Although fallacies have been common since Aristotle, until recently little attention has been devoted to identifying and defining them. Furthermore, the concept of fallacy itself has lacked a sufficiently clear meaning to make it a useful tool for evaluating arguments. Douglas Walton takes a new analytical look at the concept of fallacy and presents an up-to-date analysis of its usefulness for argumentation studies. Walton uses case studies illustrating familiar arguments and tricky deceptions in everyday conversation where the charge of (...) fallaciousness is at issue. The numerous case studies show in concrete terms many practical aspects of how to use textual evidence to identify and analyze fallacies and to evaluate arguments as fallacious. Walton looks at how an argument is used in the context of conversation. He defines a fallacy as a conversational move, or sequence of moves, that is supposed to be an argument that contributes to the purpose of the conversation but in reality interferes with it. The view is a pragmatic one, based on the assumption that when people argue, they do so in a context of dialogue, a conventionalized normative framework that is goal-directed. Such a contextual framework is shown to be crucial in determining whether an argument has been used correctly. Walton also shows how examples of fallacies given in the logic textbooks characteristically turn out to be variants of reasonable, even if defeasible or questionable arguments, based on presumptive reasoning. This is the essence of the evaluation problem. A key thesis of the book, which must not be taken for granted as previous textbooks have so often done, is that you can spot a fallacy from how it was used in a context of dialogue. This is an innovative and even, as Walton notes, "a radical and controversial" theory of fallacy. (shrink)

Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand Irigaray's original contribution to philosophical and feminist thought.

Properties and objects are everywhere, but remain a philosophical mystery. Douglas Ehring argues that the idea of tropes--properties and relations understood as particulars--provides the best foundation for a metaphysical account of properties and objects. He develops and defends a new theory of trope nominalism.

Natural and supernatural explanations are used to interpret the same events in a number of predictable and universal ways. Yet little is known about how variation in diverse cultural ecologies influences how people integrate natural and supernatural explanations. Here, we examine explanatory coexistence in three existentially arousing domains of human thought: illness, death, and human origins using qualitative data from interviews conducted in Tanna, Vanuatu. Vanuatu, a Melanesian archipelago, provides a cultural context ideal for examining variation in explanatory coexistence due (...) to the lack of industrialization and the relatively recent introduction of Christianity and Western education. We argue for the integration of interdisciplinary methodologies from cognitive science and anthropology to inform research on explanatory coexistence. (shrink)

A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables.The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published (...) research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated. (shrink)

What is truth? What role does truth play in the connections between language and the world? What is the relationship between truth and being? Douglas Edwards tackles these questions and develops a distinctive metaphysical worldview. He argues that in some domains language responds to the world, whereas in others language generates the world.