At the centenary of Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, we explore the continuing relevance of Knightian uncertainty to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship. There are three challenges facing such assessment. First, RUP is complex and difficult to interpret. The key but neglected element of RUP is that Knight’s account is not solely about risk and uncertainty as states of nature, but about how an agent’s beliefs about uncertain outcomes and confidence in those beliefs guide their choices. Second, (...) RUP is Knight’s only effort in this area. His subsequent career led elsewhere, so he did not engage with subsequent interpretations of this work. Third, much of the current literature emphasizes that decisions must be different under the two states of nature with a consequent misunderstanding of entrepreneurial agency. This paper addresses each challenge in sequence. First, we explicate Knight’s approach and explain why that approach is murky. Second, as a complement to Knight’s interpretation, we examine Frank P. Ramsey’s approach to subjective probabilities to help clarify Knight’s murky approach. What links Knight and Ramsey is a shared pragmatism about entrepreneurial agency under uncertainty that depends upon the beliefs about, and confidence in, their judgments of possible outcomes. This Knight-Ramsey approach does not require actor’s behaviors to be determined by the class of uncertain environment they face. We focus on the response by the entrepreneur to the existence of uncertainty in all its forms. We argue that this reductive account provides a foundation to examine common problems in management, including managerial hubris, the interaction between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and the need for experimentation in advance of new product and venture launches. Third, we critique current literature that favors epistemic purism about the ontology of risk and uncertainty and ignores Knight-Ramsey pragmatism in meeting uncertainty, such as using formal and informal institutions for uncertainty mitigation. Our account locates Frank Knight’s subtleties in entrepreneurial behavior firmly in the literature on entrepreneurial agency a century later. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

Let us begin with a piece of intellectual history. The story begins in a period encapsulating the second world war – say the ‘40’s, give and take a bit. Around then, it began to be argued with force that an expression – e.g., an English one – while it well might mean something, does not say anything, and notably no one thing in particular. The principal behind the argument was surely J.L. Austin, though, I would claim, the same point was (...) argued in a somewhat different way by Wittgenstein. The intended point was not merely a grammatical one: we say of an expression that it means such and such, but not that it says such and such. Be that as it may, the main point was quite substantive: typically, an English expression is such that, with its meaning fixed, there are a variety of distinct things to be said in using it on some production of it or other. (shrink)

This unique textbook utilizes an integrated, case-based approach to explore how the domains of bioethics, public health and the social sciences impact individual patients and populations. It provides a structured framework suitable for both educators (including course directors and others engaged in curricular design) and for medical and health professions students to use in classroom settings across a range of clinical areas and allied health professions and for independent study. The textbook opens with an introduction, describing the intersection of ethics (...) and public health in clinical practice and the six key themes that inform the book's core learning objectives, followed by a guide to using the book. It then presents 22 case studies that address a broad spectrum of patient populations, clinical settings, and disease pathologies. Each pair of cases shares a core concept in bioethics or public health, from community perspectives and end-of-life care to medical mistakes and stigma and marginalization. They engage learners in rigorous clinical and ethical reasoning by prompting readers to make choices based on available information and then providing additional information to challenge assumptions, simulating clinical decision-making. In addition to providing a unique, detailed clinical scenario, each case is presented in a consistent format, which includes learning objectives, questions and responses for self-directed learning, questions and responses for group discussion, references, and suggested further reading. All cases integrate the six themes of patient- and family-centered care; evidence-based practice; structural competency; biases in decision-making; cultural humility and awareness of the culture of medicine; and justice, social responsibility and advocacy. The final section discusses some challenges to evaluating courses and learning encounters that adopt the cases and includes a model framework for learner assessment. (shrink)

Bundel essays over aspecten van het denken van de Duitse filosoof Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

Philosophers have had an interest in language from the earliest times but the twentieth century, with its so-called 'linguistic turn' in philosophy, has seen a huge expansion of work focused specifically on language and its foundations. No branch of philosophy has been unaffected by this shift of emphasis. It is timely at the end of the century to review and assess the vast range of issues that have been developed and debated in this central area. The distinguished international contributors present (...) a clear, accessible guide to the fundamental questions raised by the philosophers about language. Contributions include Graeme Forbes on necessity, Susan Haack on deviant logics, Paul Horwich on truth, Charles Travis on Wittgenstein, L.J. Cohen on linguistic philosophy, Ruth Kempson on semantics and syntax and Christopher Hookway on ontology, to name but a few. A wide range of topics are covered from the metaphysics and ontology of language, language and mind, truth and meaning, to theories or reference, speech act theory, philosophy of logic and formal semantics. There are also articles on key figures from the twentieth century and earlier. Based on the foundation provided by the award-winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics this single volume provides a collection of articles that will be an invaluable reference tool for all those interested in the area of philosophy of language, and also to those in cognitive science and psychology. All the articles have been thoroughly revised and updated. This volume gives a unique survey of topics that are at the very core of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Highlights the central issues currently being debated within cultural anthropology, and documents the most original theoretical trends now affecting the field ...

Few years pass without an attempt to interpret Theocritus, Idyll 7. The poem's narrative and descriptive skill, dramatic subtlety and felicity of language are mercifully more than adequate to survive these scholarly onslaughts, so I have less hesitation in offering my own interpretation. The poem's chief problems seem to me to arise from uncertainty as to: Who is the narrator, and why are we kept waiting until line 21 before we are told that he is called Simichidas? Who, or what (...) sort of man, is the goatherd Lycidas, whom he encounters on his way from town to the harvest festival? Answers to these questions fundamentally affect our interpretation of their exchange of songs, which occupies almost half the idyll, and of Lycidas' gift of his stick to Simichidas; and these interpretations will go far towards interpreting the poem as a whole. (shrink)

post hos elefantorum fulgentium formidandam speciem et truculentos hiatus uix mentes pauidae perferebant; ad quorum stridorem odoremque et insuetum aspectum magis equi terrebantur. COKNELISSEN, Mnemosyne, xiv , 280, comments: ‘Non intellego fulgentium. Minime audiendus est Wagnerus, qui fulgentes elephantes dictos esse contendit ob cutem glabram. Corrigendum puto ingentium. Porro non satis intellego quomodo hiatus elefantorum militibus pauorem incutere potuerit. Wagnerus, qui omnia con-coquere solet, interpretatur proboscidas. Nescio an scripserit A. barritus.’.