Aldo Leopold’s land ethic calls for an extension of ethical consideration to nonhuman components of the complex system he called “the land.” Although the basis for this extension was holistic, interpretations of Leopold’s holism leave one baffled at how he could see his land ethic as an extension of a system which recognizes individual human rights. Leopold’s critics and exponents alike have focused on the holism expressed in his definition of right and wrong. Both regard it as a working criterion (...) of morality to be applied directly to conduct, act by act. Both are mistaken. Leopold was an indirect holist, not a direct one. That is, he applied his holistic definition of right and wrong not as a role for judging conduct directly, case by case, but as a principle for judging conduct only indirectly by judging the roles, tastes, predilections, practices, and attitudes which influence it. (shrink)

We show that several theorems on ordinal bounds in different parts of logic are simple consequences of a basic result in the theory of global inductive definitions.

The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

Between 1993 and 2002, 39 clinical trial staff were investigated for scientific misconduct by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Analysis of ORI case records reveals practices regarding workload, training and supervision that enable misconduct. Considering the potential effects on human subjects protection, quality and reliability of data, and the trustworthiness of the clinical research enterprise, regulations or guidance on use of clinical trial staff ought to be available. Current ORI regulations do not hold investigators or institutions responsible for supervision (...) and training of clinical trial staff. Given the important issues at stake, the definition of research misconduct should encompass the intentional or negligent mismanagement of scientific projects. Individual institutions and professional associations not only can but should adopt stricter standards of conduct than those reflected in federal regulations. (shrink)

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

Résumé Cette recherche porte sur le rôle joué par les différents éléments d’une image dans l’interprétation de cette image et dans les émotions qu’elle induit. A partir de l’approche structurale de la théorie des représentations sociales on suppose que certains des éléments d’une image seraient centraux tandis que d’autres seraient périphériques. Pour explorer cette piste on a retouché trois photographies originales afin de supprimer certains des éléments qu’elles montraient. Les photographies originales et les photographies retouchées ont été présentées à trois (...) groupes de participants qui devaient, pour chaque photographie, produire trois associations verbales puis évaluer le niveau d’activation des émotions ressenties. Les résultats montrent que certains des éléments d’une image en déterminent à la fois le sens et les émotions qu’elle induit, d’autres n’en déterminent que les émotions, d’autres enfin ne déterminent ni la signification, ni les émotions induites. Ces résultats suggèrent que dans le cadre de la théorie des représentations sociales, l’analyse des images en termes d’éléments centraux et périphériques pourrait être très utile pour mieux comprendre comment fonctionnent ces images en tant que systèmes sémiotiques. (shrink)

In this paper I explore informationalism, a pragmatic theory of modality that seems to solve some serious problems in the familiar possible worlds accounts of modality. I view the theory as an elaboration of Stalnaker's moderate modal realism, though it also derives from Dretske's semantic theory of information. Informationalism is presented in Section 2 after the prerequisite stage setting in Section 1. Some applications are sketched in Section 3. Finally, a mathematical model of the theory is developed in Section 4.How (...) many times have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? (Arthur Conan Doyle)You've put me in an impossible situation. (Anonymous)[N]othing we imagine is absolutely impossible. (David Hume). (shrink)

Dans un monde qui a commencé à prendre feu, la stratégie à adopter se pose à présent comme une question vitale. Il n'y a plus le droit à l'erreur, chaque échec stratégique peut coûter extrêmement cher. En nous rappelant de grandes victoires de l'histoire des luttes non-violentes, mais aussi des campagnes plus récentes comme celles des 'Décrocheurs de portraits' ou des 'grèves scolaires pour le climat,' l'auteur nous invite à cesser d'être spectateur et à devenir acteur de l'histoire. Comment agir (...) face à l'urgence climatique et à l'inaction de nos dirigeants? Avec quelles méthodes? Comment lutter efficacement contre le capitalisme et provoquer des changements culturels de grande ampleur? Comment résister à la répression? La Bataille du siècle--véritable manuel d'action civique et politique--propose des stratégies d'action concrètes pour faire émerger un mouvement citoyen de masse: désobéissance civile, non-violence radicale, convergence des luttes climatiques et sociales, complémentarité des alternatives et des résistances, réconciliation du local et du global... Jon Palais nous appelle à transformer la sidération en espérance, car, il en est convaincu, un autre monde est possible.."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Borges on Language and TranslationJon StewartAlthough Jorge Luis Borges had years of philosophical training and expressed a number of philosophical theories in his literary works, he never published a philosophy treatise. The result is that his oeuvre has often been viewed as purely literary and been largely neglected by trained philosophers. However, by ignoring the philosophical aspects of Borges’s thought, criticism has neglected a vast dimension of his work (...) and has thus frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted many aspects of it. As I have tried to demonstrate in an earlier article, 1 there are important philosophical themes in the short stories of Borges, which have yet to be considered. In the present essay, I take up one of these heretofore neglected themes.We can find perhaps no better example of the literary exposition of Borges’s philosophical ideas than in his short story or cuento, “Averroes’ Search.” 2 There Borges reconstructs for us a culture and an age radically different and temporally distant from our own. He recounts the story of Averroes, the Arab philosopher living in Spain in the second half of the twelfth century. The history of philosophy knows Averroes as one of the great medieval commentators on the works of Aristotle. Borges recreates the historical moment and the passion of Averroes in his task of translating and providing a commentary for the texts of the great Greek philosopher who remains forever distant from him. The story takes as its point of departure Renan’s observation about a curious misinterpretation of Aristotle found in Averroes: “S’imaginant que la tragédie n’est autre chose que l’art de louer...”(p. 180). Borges poses [End Page 320] the question of why Averroes, who had dedicated his life to understanding the work of Aristotle, had so badly misunderstood the concept of tragedy treated by the Greek philosopher. To answer this question, Borges brilliantly employs the faculty of historical imagination in order to think himself back into Averroes’s particular time period and cultural context. The short story presents us with a thesis about the intimate connection between culture and language and the ultimate futility of translation and crosscultural knowledge and comprehension. In the present essay, I wish to argue that the point of Borges’s story about the fate of Averroes is (1) to refute the common view which sees language as an entity neutral with respect to culture and history, and (2) to bring to light the comprehensive nature and scope of particular culturally and historically determined ways of thinking and perceiving the world. These philosophical elements have been neglected by the various literary scholars who have treated the works of Borges. 3 Moreover, Borges anticipates many of the most celebrated epistemological and hermeneutical theories of our day from philosophers such as Gadamer, Davidson and Quine, and presents them in literary form.IThere is a common view according to which the manifold languages of the various peoples and cultures of the world are more or less interchangeable. According to this linguistics of common sense, language is something secondary and accidental which is only an inessential corollary to our basic understanding and perception of the world. Human perception and cognition are thought of as constants for all humans everywhere. A dog will be perceived as a dog regardless of time period, place or culture, and the words we create to represent “dog” in the medium of language are secondary and even arbitrary. As a result, individual words in one language correspond to individual words in another. Dog in English corresponds straightforwardly to Hund in German or perro in Spanish, and nothing could be more simple. The gifted translator is merely someone with a great capacity to memorize words and to effect rapid replacement changes, and translation is regarded as a more or less mechanical process with little room for creativity. The diversity of languages is neither epistemologically necessary nor important, but rather explained as an historical accident as in the etiological tale of the Tower of Babel. Language has no necessary connection to the time period in which it is spoken or to the culture of [End Page 321] the people who speak it. That we... (shrink)

First published: Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005.

1, . . . , n | ≈ ψ ? Here 1, . . . , n, ψ are premisses of some formal language, such as a propositional language or a predicate language. | ≈ is an entailment relation: the entailment holds if all models of the premisses also satisfy the conclusion, where the logic provides some suitable notion of ‘model’ and ‘satisfy’. Proof theory is normally invoked to answer a question of this form: one tries to prove the conclusion (...) from the premisses in a finite sequence of steps, where at each step one invokes an axiom or applies a rule of inference. (shrink)

O'Regan & Noë (O&N) fail to address adequately the two most historically important reasons for seeking to explain visual experience in terms of internal representations. They are silent about the apparently inferential nature of perception, and mistaken about the significance of the phenomenology accompanying dreams, hallucinations, and mental imagery.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Hume's Skepticism about Inductive Inference N. SCOTT ARNOLD IT HAS BEEN A COMMONPLACE among commentators on Hume's philosophy that he was a radical skeptic about inductive inference. In addition, he is alleged to have been the first philosopher to pose the so-called problem of induction. Until recently, however, Hume's argument in this connection has not been subject to very close scrutiny. As attention has become focused on this (...) argument, a debate has been shaping up concerning just what Hume intended to establish here. The principal purpose of this article is to settle this interpretive issue as decisively as the texts permit. I should also like to locate Hume's main argument about induction in the larger context of his discussion of skepti- cism in book 1 of the Treatise. I shall suggest that arguments for the radical skepticism commonly attributed to Hume can be found only very late in book 1 of the Treatise and that the most famous argument about inductive inference establishes and is intended to establish only a relatively modest form of skepticism. The argument under consideration can found in book l, part 3, section 6 of the Treatise. It can also be found in essays 4 and 5 of the Enquiries and in the abstract of the Treatise published anonymously by Hume. I shall concen- trate on the Treatise version since it is the first and perhaps most explicit formulation of the argument and because part of my purpose is to place this argument in the larger context of book 1 of the Treatise. The received opinion concerning Hume's argument has it that Hume was highly skeptical about the mind's claims to knowledge about the future (or, more generally, about the unobserved). All beliefs arrived at via inductive I should like to thank M. G. Anderson, John Bahde, Jon Nordy, and Robert Paul Wolff, as well as David Fate Norton and a referee for the Journal of the History of Philosophy, for helpful comments on earlier drafts on this article. 32 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY inferences are unreasonable or unjustified. The alternative interpretation, to be defended below, is that Hume held that no such belief is or can be rendered certain relative to past experience and that such beliefs are not, upon that account, unreasonable or unjustified. Something like this inter- pretation has been defended by Tom L. Beauchamp, Thomas Mappes, and Alexander Rosenberg. ~ My view differs from theirs in that I shall argue that Hume did offer arguments for the more radical skepticism commonly attri- buted to him (though it is unclear whether he regarded them as decisive). These arguments, however, come at the end of book ~ of the Treatise and are independent of the more famous argument to be discussed below. Defenders of the received view are both numerous and distinguished. Versions of this interpretation of the main argument can be found in the writings of Karl Popper, Wesley Salmon, F. L. Will, and Norman Kemp Smith; most recently a variation on the standard interpretation has been defended by Barry Stroud. The fullest and most elaborate defense of the standard interpretation can be found in a monograph by D. C. Stove. '~ Stove's discussion is perhaps the most impressive because of his painstaking efforts to lay bare the structure of Hume's reasoning and to give a line-by- line analysis of the argument. This has the effect of bringing more clearly into focus the main grounds for the standard view. If this standard interpre- tation is correct, then Hume's position is that scientific method is epistemically no better than "superstition" and "enthusiasm." And, Hume would be among those for whom this claim, if true, would be very bad news, because one of his primary purposes in the Treatise is to construct a science of man. Thus, this argument is of considerable internal significance because, if my opponents are correct, Hume appears to have cut the ground out from under what he took to be one of his most important projects -- the construc- tion of a science of man. The other feature of this argument that makes it worthy of serious con- sideration is that it is philosophically... (shrink)

The maximum entropy principle is widely used to determine non-committal probabilities on a finite domain, subject to a set of constraints, but its application to continuous domains is notoriously problematic. This paper concerns an intermediate case, where the domain is a first-order predicate language. Two strategies have been put forward for applying the maximum entropy principle on such a domain: applying it to finite sublanguages and taking the pointwise limit of the resulting probabilities as the size n of the sublanguage (...) increases; selecting a probability function on the language as a whole whose entropy on finite sublanguages of size n is not dominated by that of any other probability function for sufficiently large n. The entropy-limit conjecture says that, where these two approaches yield determinate probabilities, the two methods yield the same probabilities. If this conjecture is found to be true, it would provide a boost to the project of seeking a single canonical inductive logic—a project which faltered when Carnap's attempts in this direction succeeded only in determining a continuum of inductive methods. The truth of the conjecture would also boost the project of providing a canonical characterisation of normal or default models of first-order theories. Hitherto, the entropy-limit conjecture has been verified for languages which contain only unary predicate symbols and also for the case in which the constraints can be captured by a categorical statement of quantifier complexity. This paper shows that the entropy-limit conjecture also holds for categorical statements of complexity, for various non-categorical constraints, and in certain other general situations. (shrink)