One major success of studying neural cell development in tissue culture has been the discovery of the O‐2A cell. This bipotential cell generates oligodendrocytes or, under certain conditions, a type of astrocyte. This essay considers the evidence that the characteristic properties demonstrated by the O‐2A cells in vitro are an accurate reflection of oligodendrocyte development in vivo.

Economists have always recognised that human endeavours are constrained by our limited and uncertain knowledge, but only recently has an accepted theory of uncertainty and information evolved. This theory has turned out to have surprisingly practical applications: for example in analysing stock market returns, in evaluating accident prevention measures, and in assessing patent and copyright laws. This book presents these intellectual advances in readable form for the first time. It unifies many important but partial results into a satisfying single picture, (...) making it clear how the economics of uncertainty and information generalises and extends standard economic analysis. Part One of the volume covers the economics of uncertainty: how each person adapts to a given fixed state of knowledge by making an optimal choice among the immediate 'terminal' actions available. These choices in turn determine the overall market equilibrium reflecting the social distribution of risk bearing. In Part Two, covering the economics of information, the state of knowledge is no longer held fixed. Instead, individuals can to a greater or lesser extent overcome their ignorance by 'informational' actions. The text also addresses at appropriate points many specific topics such as insurance, the Capital Asset Pricing model, auctions, deterrence of entry, and research and invention. (shrink)

Preface Once when Joseph Priestley was contemplating the political developments of his time, he told his friend Theophilus Lindsey that they motivated him ...

In the past generation, various philosophers have been concerned with the so-called “placement problem” for naturalism. The problem has taken on the shorthand alliteration of the 4Ms, since Mind/Mentality, Meaning, Morality, and Modality/Mathematics are four important phenomena that are difficult to place within orthodox construals of naturalism, typified by physicalism and a methodological preference for ways of knowing associated with the natural sciences. In this paper I highlight the importance of temporality to this ostensibly forced choice between naturalism and the (...) 4Ms, and then reframe the problem by advocating a temporal naturalism rather than the atemporal versions that remain the orthodoxy. In short, I argue in Section 1 that scientific naturalism is standardly atemporal in outlook and in philosophical presuppositions, in Section 2 that temporality is a fundamental condition for each of the 4Ms (drawing on insights from classical phenomenology), and hence the intransigence of the dilemma. Instead of accepting this construal, in Section 3 I outline a temporal naturalism that owes more to biology than to physics (and hence more to Peter Godfrey-Smith than Huw Price), where we also see temporally dependent “points of view” in incipient biological forms, and where the norms surrounding explanation are less nomological and reductive in orientation. (shrink)

Last year marked the 20th anniversary of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977. The FCPA is the first and only statute prohibiting bribery and other corrupt business practices by U.S. citizens and companies conducting business overseas. This paper provides an overview of the FCPA during the two decades of its existence. More specifically, the objectives of this paper are four-fold. First, the paper provides background information about the FCPA of 1977 and subsequent amendments in 1988. Second, the paper (...) discusses the enforcement of the FCPA since its passage by examining the number of cases prosecuted under the FCPA and the respective penalties imposed. Third, the paper discusses the economic impact of the FCPA by addressing whether the FCPA places U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage. Fourth, the paper provides public policy recommendations to expand the reach and scope of the FCPA. It covers efforts to criminalize bribery through multilateral organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization of American States (OAS). It also covers bilateral arrangements and efforts by non-governmental organizations such as Transparency International. (shrink)

DNA databases have significant commercial value. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies have built databanks using samples and information voluntarily provided by customers. As the price of genetic analysis falls, there is growing interest in building such databases by paying individuals for their DNA and personal data. This paper maps the ethical issues associated with private companies paying for DNA. We outline the benefits of building better genomic databases and describe possible concerns about crowding out, undue inducement, exploitation, and commodification. While (...) certain objections deserve more empirical and philosophical investigation, we argue that none currently provide decisive reasons against using financial incentives to secure DNA samples. (shrink)

This thought-provoking book discusses the concept of progress in economics and investigates whether any advance has been made in its different spheres of research. The authors look back at the history, successes and failures of their respective fields and thoroughly examine the notion of progress from an epistemological and methodological perspective. The idea of progress is particularly significant as the authors regard it as an essentially contested concept which can be defined in many ways – theoretically or empirically; locally or (...) globally; or as encouraging or impeding the existence of other research traditions. The authors discuss the idea that for progress to make any sense there must be an accumulation of knowledge built up over time rather than the replacement of ideas by each successive generation. Accordingly, they are not concerned with estimating the price of progress, reminiscing in the past, or assessing what has been lost. Instead they apply the complex mechanisms and machinery of the discipline to sub-fields such as normative economics, monetary economics, trade and location theory, Austrian economics and classical economics to critically assess whether progress has been made in these areas of research. -/- Bringing together authoritative and wide-ranging contributions by leading scholars, this book will challenge and engage those interested in philosophy, economic methodology and the history of economic thought. It will also appeal to economists in general who are interested in the advancement of their profession. (shrink)

Philosophical arguments usually are and nearly always should be abductive. Across many areas, philosophers are starting to recognize that often the best we can do in theorizing some phenomena is put forward our best overall account of it, warts and all. This is especially true in esoteric areas like logic, aesthetics, mathematics, and morality where the data to be explained is often based in our stubborn intuitions. -/- While this methodological shift is welcome, it's not without problems. Abductive arguments involve (...) significant theoretical resources which themselves can be part of what's being disputed. This means that we will sometimes find otherwise good arguments which suggest their own grounds are problematic. In particular, sometimes revising our beliefs on the basis of such an argument can undermine the very justification we used in that argument. -/- This feature, which I'll call self-effacingness, occurs most dramatically in arguments against our standing views on the esoteric subject matters mentioned above: logic, mathematics, aesthetics, and morality. This is because these subject matters all play a role in how we reason abductively. This isn't an idle fact; we can resist some challenges to our standing beliefs about these subject matters exactly because the challenges are self-effacing. The self-effacing character of certain arguments is thus both a benefit and limitation of the abductive turn and deserves serious attention. I aim to give it the attention it deserves. (shrink)

Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) are at last coming to be recognised as serious global public health problems. Nevertheless, many women with personal histories of DVA decline to disclose them to healthcare practitioners. In the health sciences, recent empirical work has identified many factors that impede DVA disclosure, known as barriers to disclosure. Drawing on recent work in social epistemology on testimonial silencing, we might wonder why so many people withhold their testimony and whether there is some kind of epistemic (...) injustice afoot here. In this paper, I offer some philosophical reflections on DVA disclosure in clinical contexts and the associated barriers to disclosure. I argue that women with personal histories of DVA are vulnerable to a certain form of testimonial injustice in clinical contexts, namely, testimonial smothering, and that this may help to explain why they withhold that testimony. It is my contention that this can help explain the low rates of DVA disclosure by patients to healthcare practitioners. (shrink)

In this chapter, I revisit the question of the philosophical significance of the Great War upon the trajectory of philosophy in the twentieth century. While accounts of this are very rare in philosophy, and this is itself symptomatic, those that are given are also strangely implausible. They usually assert one of two things: that the War had little or no philosophical significance because most of the major developments had already begun, or—at the opposite extreme—they maintain that nothing was ever the (...) same in philosophy (as elsewhere). On the latter view, the creation of the so-called analytic-continental ‘divide’ is but one notable philosophical consequence of the Great War. I want here to steer a middle-way between these positions, both having a grain of truth but over-playing their respective hands. (shrink)

Presupposing no familiarity with the technical concepts of either philosophy or computing, this clear introduction reviews the progress made in AI since the inception of the field in 1956. Copeland goes on to analyze what those working in AI must achieve before they can claim to have built a thinking machine and appraises their prospects of succeeding. There are clear introductions to connectionism and to the language of thought hypothesis which weave together material from philosophy, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. John (...) Searle's attacks on AI and cognitive science are countered and close attention is given to foundational issues, including the nature of computation, Turing Machines, the Church-Turing Thesis and the difference between classical symbol processing and parallel distributed processing. The book also explores the possibility of machines having free will and consciousness and concludes with a discussion of in what sense the human brain may be a computer. (shrink)

The thesis presented here focuses on the concept of totality in the work of the contemporary cultural critic Fredric Jameson (1934–). By totality, we mean how the human heart enables the human body, but without the body, the heart has no part concerning the whole; they are mutually dependent. This work shall argue that totality is the allegorical figuration framing Jameson’s political critiques of modernity in The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism (1991). The postmodern world today as an absent totality (...) represents the contradiction in Jameson: We live in a complex world despite its unrepresentability. Whilst studies of early Jameson have interpreted his works through postmodernity and cognitive mapping, their unsubstantiation of Jameson’s later totality has resulted in not being able to explicate Jameson’s view of the a-historicity of postmodernity. Part One shall examine Jameson’s readings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, demonstrating that Hegel’s critique of Kant concerning the boundary of knowledge includes its overcoming and that Hegelian totality is not closed, permitting Jameson to represent the world as an open totality. Part Two shall argue that Jameson’s reading of the works of Karl Marx and the Marxist tradition of Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin reinforces totality in their writing styles, which allows Jameson to glimpse totality through writing. Part Three shall argue that totality in Jameson’s interpretation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) is at work and that Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799) elucidates a counterpoint to totality which can be used to understand non-dialectical thinkers which Jameson examines such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Part Four shall argue that Jameson’s reading of these thinkers is justified in critiquing their productive misreadings of totality as closed, informing their political quietism, thereby re-politicising totality as an allegory. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that hope is polysemous in that it sometimes refers to hoping and other times to being hopeful. That it has these two distinct senses is reflected in the observation that a person can hope for an outcome without being hopeful that it will occur. Below, I offer a new argument for this distinction. My strategy is to show that accepting this distinction yields a rich account of two distinct ways in which hope can be lost, (...) ways that map onto the two senses of hope: A person can lose hope either by ceasing to hope for an outcome (hopelessness) or by ceasing to be hopeful that it will obtain (despair). Thinking about these negative attitudes in these two ways, I contend, is explanatorily rich and fruitfully reveals how they differ in phenomenology, behavioral differences, and the ways in which a person can escape them. (shrink)

In Pascal’s famous wager, he claims that the seeking non-believer can induce genuine religious belief in herself by joining a religious community and taking part in its rituals. This form of belief regulation is epistemologically puzzling: can we form beliefs in this way, and could such beliefs be rationally held? In the first half of the paper, we explain how the regimen could allow the seeking non-believer to regulate her religious beliefs by intervening on her evidence and epistemic standards. In (...) the second half of the paper, we argue that regulated religious beliefs can be rationally held. (shrink)

This paper challenges T. S. Gendler's notion of aliefs, a novel kind of mental state which she introduces to explain a wide variety of belief-discordant behaviors. In particular, I argue that many of the cases which she uses to motivate such a mental state can be fully explained by accounts that make use only of commonplace attitudes such as beliefs and desires.

Introspective evidence is still treated with great suspicion in cognitive science. This work is designed to encourage cognitive scientists to take more account of the subject's unique perspective.

A short discussion piece arguing that the neuropsychological phenomenon of double dissociations is most revealing of underlying cognitive architecture because of the capacities that are spared, more than the capacities that are lost.

This book offers solutions to two persistent and I believe closely related problems in epistemology. The first problem is that of drawing a principled distinction between perception and inference: what is the difference between seeing that something is the case and merely believing it on the basis of what we do see? The second problem is that of specifying which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., directly, or noninferentially, justified) and which are not. I argue that what makes a belief a (...) perceptual belief, or a basic belief, is not any introspectible feature of the belief but rather the nature of the cognitive system, or "module", that is causally responsible for the belief. Thus, even zombies, who in the philosophical literature lack conscious experiences altogether, can have basic, justified, perceptual beliefs. -/- The theories of perceptual and basic beliefs developed in the monograph are embedded in a larger reliabilist epistemology. I use this theory of basic beliefs to develop a detailed reliabilist theory: Inferentialist Reliabilism, which offers a reliabilist theory of inferential justification and which solves some longstanding problems for other reliabilist views by demanding inferential support for some—but not all—beliefs. The book is an instance of a thoroughgoingly naturalistic approach to epistemology. Many of my arguments have an empirical basis, and the view that I endorse reserves a central role for the cognitive sciences—in particular, cognitive neuroscience—in filling in the details of an applied epistemological theory. (shrink)

Many contemporary Anglo-American philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. But what do they mean by that term? Popular naturalist slogans like, "there is no first philosophy" or "philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences" are far from illuminating. "Understanding Naturalism" provides a clear and readable survey of the main strands in recent naturalist thought. The origin and development of naturalist ideas in epistemology, metaphysics and semantics is explained through the works of Quine, Goldman, Kuhn, Chalmers, Papineau, Millikan and others. The most (...) common objections to the naturalist project - that it involves a change of subject and fails to engage with "real" philosophical problems, that it is self-refuting, and that naturalism cannot deal with normative notions like truth, justification and meaning - are all discussed. "Understanding Naturalism" distinguishes two strands of naturalist thinking - the constructive and the deflationary - and explains how this distinction can invigorate naturalism and the future of philosophical research. (shrink)

Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure takes sociology in a new direction. It examines key aspects of social structure by using a fresh understanding of emotions categories. Through that synthesis emerge new perspectives on rationality, class structure, social action, conformity, basic rights, and social change. As well as giving an innovative view of social processes, J. M. Barbalet's study also reveals unappreciated aspects of emotions by considering fear, resentment, vengefulness, shame, and confidence in the context of social structure. While much (...) has been written on the social consequences of excessive or pathological emotions, this book demonstrates the centrality of emotions to routine operations of social interaction. Dr Barbalet also re-evaluates the nature of social theory, for once the importance of emotions to social processes becomes clear, the intellectual constitution of sociology, and therefore its history, must be rethought. (shrink)

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart explore the ability of complicated rules to generate simple behaviour in nature through 'the collapse of chaos'.

In order to better understand the topic of hope, this paper argues that two separate theories are needed: One for hoping, and the other for hopefulness. This bifurcated approach is warranted by the observation that the word ‘hope’ is polysemous: It is sometimes used to refer to hoping and sometimes, to feeling or being hopeful. Moreover, these two senses of 'hope' are distinct, as a person can hope for some outcome yet not simultaneously feel hopeful about it. I argue that (...) this distinction between hoping and hopefulness is not always observed or fully appreciated in the literature and has consequently caused much confusion. This paper then sketches what theorizing about hope looks like in light of this clarification and discusses some of its implications. (shrink)

According to the standard account, to hope for an outcome is to desire it and to believe that its realization is possible, though not inevitable. This account, however, faces certain difficulties: It cannot explain how people can display differing strengths in hope; it cannot distinguish hope from despair; and it cannot explain substantial hopes. This paper proposes an account of hope that can meet these deficiencies. Briefly, it argues that in addition to possessing the relevant belief–desire structure as allowed in (...) the standard account, a hopeful person must also be able to see a way in which the desired outcome can come about and to see such a way to the outcome as a genuine possibility. (shrink)

What is the phenomenology of hope? A common view is that hope has a generally positive and pleasant affective tone. This rosy depiction, however, has recently been challenged. Certain hopes, it has been objected, are such that they are either entirely negative in valence or neutral in tone. In this paper, I argue that this challenge has only limited success. In particular, I show that it only applies to one sense of hope but leaves another sense—one that is implicitly but (...) widely employed in the hope literature—untouched. Moreover, I argue that hope construed in this latter sense is inherently positively valenced. The paper concludes by discussing some of the implications of this defense of hope's positive phenomenology, including the ontological question of whether hope is an emotion. (shrink)

A natural suggestion and increasingly popular account of how to revise our logical beliefs treats revision of logic analogously to the revision of scientific theories. I investigate this approach and argue that simple applications of abductive methodology to logic result in revision-cycles, developing a detailed case study of an actual dispute with this property. This is problematic if we take abductive methodology to provide justification for revising our logical framework. I then generalize the case study, pointing to similarities with more (...) recent and popular heterodox logics such as naïve logics of truth. I use this discussion to motivate a constraint—logical partisanhood—on the uses of such methodology: roughly: both the proposed alternative and our actual background logic must be able to agree that moving to the alternative logic is no worse than staying put. (shrink)

Open-mindedness is generally regarded as an intellectual virtue because its exercise reliably leads to truth. However, some theorists have argued that open-mindedness’s truth-conduciveness is highly contingent, pointing out that it is either not truth-conducive at all under certain scenarios or no better than dogmatism or credulity in others. Given such shaky ties to truth, it would appear that the status of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue is in jeopardy. In this paper, I propose to defend open-mindedness against these challenges. In (...) particular, I show that the challenges are ill-founded because they misconstrue the nature of open-mindedness and fail to consider the requisite conditions of its application. With a proper understanding of open-mindedness and of its requirements, it is clear that recourse to it is indeed truth-conducive. (shrink)