In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 177-188 [Access article in PDF] Chaïm Perelman's "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy":Commentary and Translation David A. Frank Michelle K. Bolduc Chaïm Perelman's 1949 article, "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy," has remained unavailable to readers unable to read French. Our commentary and translation is intended to provide English readers access to the context, influences, and themes that make the article an extraordinarily important (...) work in the history of twentieth-century rhetoric. In this article, Perelman offers a powerful critique of first philosophies and anticipates the problems of radical postmodernity. "First Philosophies" remains a strikingly elegant attempt to foil what Foucault (1984, 41-42) has called the "Enlightenment blackmail of reason," the assumption held by logical positivists and radical skeptics that if reason does not yield absolute and eternal Enlightenment knowledge, there can be no knowledge.Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric project avoids Enlightenment blackmail by charting a third way between logical positivism and radical relativism, and "First Philosophies" sets forth the project's philosophical blueprint. Commencing in 1947 and culminating in 1958 with the publication of Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca sought, discovered, and developed a philosophical system designed as a rapprochement between dialectic (reason and logic) and rhetoric (the art of adapting arguments to audiences). Historians of rhetoric judge the work a "grand revolution" (Meyer 1999, 259), believing it marks a rhetorical renaissance in Europe, and suggest nothing like it will appear for another 100 years after its publication (Johnstone 1971). The New Rhetoric project influenced Gadamer and a host of post-war European and American thinkers (Mootz 1998). Michael Leff calls the 1970 English translation of Traité a "bombshell" (1994, 510). Beyond its historical importance, Crosswhite suggests that the New Rhetoric project is "the single most important event in contemporary rhetorical theory" (1996, 35)and "First Philosophies" marks Perelman's turn from logical [End Page 177] positivism to rhetoric, offering prescient answers to the post-World War II crises of reason, and the ideas in the article provide the Traité'sphilosophical glue (see in particular the English translation, 62).Perelman joined many post-war theorists, including Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), in the resistance to the reign of a disembodied Enlightenment rationality. However, Perelman identified what Habermas (1987, 119) would later call the "performative contradiction" in the conclusion that radical skepticism was the only alternative to Enlightenment rationality. In "First Philosophies," Perelman responds directly to Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness (198; see translation below) by exposing the failure of radical skeptics to see that they had been held hostage by Enlightenment blackmail in accepting the Enlightenment criterion for truth, rejecting it, and then making skepticism an absolute. Indeed, "First Philosophies" navigates from this performative contradiction to chart a third way between Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism with an approach that he labels regressive philosophy. Regressive philosophy, Perelman argues, provides the human community with a mode of philosophical reasoning located between the extremes of Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism. In this space between extremes, Perelman identifies contingent truths and values dependent on a rhetorical mode of reasoning, one making moral judgments possible.To best understand "First Philosophies," we recognize the importance of historical context in the development of social theories of knowledge (see Delacampagne 1999; Kennedy 1999). The intellectual networks in which philosophers operate also influence the development of philosophical systems, as Randall Collins has aptly documented. In addition to historical context and intellectual networks, Frederick Beiser has recently noted: "[t] he best introduction to any philosophy is the biography of the person who created it" (1999, 5). He argues that textual analysis alone cannot illuminate the motivation or meaning of a philosophy. A sense of Perelman's biography and the cultural influences that gave rise to "First Philosophies" are necessary for a proper understanding of its themes. For Perelman, the primary intellectual exigencies of the post-war period were the interrelated crises of justice, philosophical reasoning, and responsibility to which "First Philosophies" is a... (shrink)

The chapters in this volume deal with timely issues regarding democracy in theory and in practice in today's globalized world. Authored by leading political philosophers of our time, they appear here for the first time. The essays challenge and defend assumptions about the role of democracy as a viable political and legal institution in response to globalization, keeping in focus the role of rights at the normative foundations of democracy in a pluralistic world.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Bibliography of the New Rhetoric ProjectDavid A. Frank and William DriscollScholars do not have access to a complete bibliography of the new rhetoric project. We have redressed this problem by compiling what we believe is the most comprehensive bibliography to date of the works of Chaïm Perelman and of those he coauthored with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The bibliography includes all the English and French titles, as well as (...) titles that saw first publication in other languages. Translations we believe Perelman may have authorized or endorsed are included.With this bibliography, scholars can now better understand how the new rhetoric project was conceived and how it unfolded. Within the larger constellation of the project, Perelman's bibliography is the most extensive, numbering almost three hundred entries. The trajectory of Perelman's scholarship reveals the origins of the new rhetoric project and how it evolved between the time of his announcement in 1949 that he and Olbrechts-Tyteca had embarked on a program designed to rehabilitate reason and the period of his final articles in the 1980s. A review of the articles and books that came out of the Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca collaboration reveals both a phase of conceptualization and development of the project and a phase of culmination. In the first phase, commencing with Rhétorique et philosophie, the authors established the need for a rhetorically grounded philosophy. As they built toward the publication of the Traité, [End Page 449] the culmination of their ten-year effort, they wrote articles elaborating on "notions" in argumentation (1955) and on the tenets of the "new rhetoric" (1956). In 1958, the year the Traité appeared, they published articles on classical and romantic loci in argumentation and on time in argumentation. With the exception of a 1983 tribute to the theorist Pareto, they did not write together after 1958 but instead pursued separate lines of research out of their collaboration. A significant number of theses entries rehearse and embellish notions introduced between 1947 and 1958, the years of the genesis, development, and culmination of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's new rhetoric project.AbbreviationsChALe champ de l'argumentationDMPDroit, morale, et philosophieEDEthique et droitIJPAThe Idea of Justice and the Problem of ArgumentJLAJustice, Law, and Argument: Essays on Moral and Legal ReasoningNRHThe New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays on Rhetoric and Its ApplicationsJJusticeJRJustice et raisonRPRhétorique et philosophie pour une théorie de l'argumentation en philosophieBibliography1931 "Esquisse d'une logistique des valeurs." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 36 (3–4): 486–96. Google Scholar1932 "A propos de la philosophie de M. Dupréel." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 37 (3): 385–99. Google Scholar1933 "De l'arbitraire dans la connaissance." Archives de la Société belge de philosophie 5 (3): 5–44. Google Scholar"Le statut social des jugements de vérité." Revue de l'Institut de sociologie 13 (1): 17–23. Google Scholar1935 "Réflexions sur l'assimilation." La tribune Juive 12:51–52. [End Page 450]Google Scholar1936 "L'antinomie de M. Gödel." Bulletins de l'Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique 22 (6): 730–36. Google Scholar"Les paradoxes de la logique." Mind 45 (178): 204–8. Google Scholar1937 "L'équivalence, la définition et la solution du paradoxe de Russell." L'enseignement mathématique 36 (5–6): 350–56. Google Scholar"Metafizyka fregego." Kwartalnik filozoficzny 12 (2): 121–42. Google Scholar"Réponse à MM. Grelling et Beth." Mind 46 (182): 278–79. Google Scholar"Une solution des paradoxes de la logique et ses conséquences pour la conception de l'infini." In Congrès Descartes: IXe Congrès international de philosophie, 6:206–10. Paris: Hermann. Google Scholar1938 "Etude sur Frege." PhD diss., Université Libre de Bruxelles.1939 "Etude sur Gottlob Frege." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 44 (2): 224–27. Google Scholar"De logica en het vrije onderzoek." Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 44 (2): 209–19. Google Scholar"La morale des forts et la morale... (shrink)

"The last third of the twentieth century," Gerard Hauser writes, was marked by "a flurry of intellectual work aimed at theorizing rhetoric in new terms" (2001, 1). The year 1958 was key in this flurry, with five major works appearing on a rhetorically inflected philosophy and theory of argumentation: Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (on the relationship between the vita contemplativa and vita activa); Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (on the role of tacit knowledge, emotion, and commitment in science); Stephen Toulmin's (...) Uses of Argument (on the use of argument in nonformal contexts); Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (on the history of the .. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay tells the story of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's “dissociation of concepts,” which they introduced in 1958 and is in use as a tool of criticism by many rhetorical critics. The story begins in England with John Locke's development of associative reasoning in 1770 and then moves to France, with Remy de Gourmont extending associative reasoning with the concept of dissociation in 1899. Gourmont's dissociation crosses the Atlantic and is then developed by Kenneth Burke in 1931. In turn, Perelman (...) and Olbrechts-Tyteca absorbed and expanded Locke, Gourmont, and Burke's theories of association and dissociation in 1958. They crafted a tool, the dissociation of concepts, that equips rhetorical reasoning with the capacity to navigate between the promise and perils of fission and fusion. Since 1958, many scholars have made productive use of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's innovation. The essay concludes with some possible futures for their dissociation of concepts. (shrink)

Chaïm Perelman, alone, and in collaboration with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, developed the New Rhetoric Project, which is in use throughout the world. This book offers the first deep contextualization of the project’s origins and original translations of their work from French into English.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 189-206 [Access article in PDF] First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy Chaïm Perelman "As a crystal reconstitutes itself from one of its particles, all philosophy creates itself from the idea of an open dialectic, and carries, in itself, the same dialectical character." —Ferdinand Gonseth A number of metaphysicians, including Bergson and Heidegger, consider metaphysics the only knowledge of consequence and use the word to refer (...) to their own philosophies. But a large number of eminent metaphysicians, among them Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte and Hegel had only disdain for metaphysics and used the word to discredit the philosophy of their adversaries. D'Alembert (602-604) once noted that those referred to as metaphysicians had little regard for one another. "I have no doubt," he added, "that this title will soon be an insult to our great minds, just as the name sophist which, although it meant wise, was debased in Greece by those who bore it and rejected by the true philosophers."The preceding remarks should, I think, convince the few who would still doubt it that declaring oneself an adversary of metaphysics does not mean that one does not do metaphysics. On the contrary, the very fact of opposing a certain conception of metaphysics presupposes that one advocates another conception of metaphysics; this needs to be made explicit, if it is only implicit. In a very interesting study, Mr. Everett W. Hall has recently analyzed the metaphysical assumptions of four types of positivism (Mach, Comte, Watson, Carnap). Even without this analysis the conclusion is predictable; he who is opposed to a certain manner of treating a problem remains himself within the same problematic. Indeed, such oppositions produce a continuous expansion and dialogue about the meaning of the word "metaphysics." This happens not through an automatic and necessary dialectic, but through the dialectic directed by the philosopher's concerns.The first metaphysicians set forth a particular philosophy of being [être]; those opposed advocated a different philosophy of being. By expanding its meaning, Aristotle gave metaphysics its first dialectical movement and identified it as the study of being as being and ontology. Kantian criticism treats dogmatic metaphysics with disdain, and shows that all theories [End Page 189] of being must be preceded by a theory of knowledge: the first principles of philosophy would be those of epistemology and not those of ontology. Since Kant, and for more than a century, metaphysical debates would be about the primacy of ontology or epistemology, and the opposition to their variants, realism and idealism. Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, the debate broadened. Under the influence of pragmatism, the philosophy of values, and Bergsonism, a strong current of philosophical thinking developed, which integrated the theory of knowledge into a general theory of action. It proclaimed the primacy of a philosophy of action, philosophy of life, and philosophy of values. It is within a metaphysics broadened by these various developments that different conceptions of metaphysics will struggle to establish the primacy of their principles. But, despite their differences, all of these metaphysics can be considered first philosophies.Aristotle wrote a treatise on first philosophy, the first to be called metaphysics. First philosophies refer to any metaphysics that purports to determine first principles such as the fundamentals of being (ontology), of knowledge (epistemology), or of action (axiology). First philosophies position first principles as absolute and that they underlie all philosophical questions. The word "first" informs the argumentation used to establish the primacy of first philosophies. A principle is first when it comes before all others in a temporal, logical, epistemological or ontological order; the insistence on this point serves to emphasize its primacy or axiologic pre-eminence. That which is first or basic, that which precedes or presupposes all the rest, is also first in order of importance.As systematic metaphysics, first philosophies establish an interdependence among ontology, epistemology, and axiology. The course taken by first philosophies is determined by a starting point constituted by a necessary reality, a self-evident concept, or an absolute value before which one can... (shrink)

The philosophy of mind and cognition has been transformed by recent advances in what is loosely called cognitive science. This book is a thoroughly up-to-date introduction to and account of that transformation, in which the many strands in contemporary cognitive science are brought together into a coherent philosophical picture of the mind. The book begins with discussions of the pre-history of contemporary philosophy of mind - dualism, behaviourism, and early versions of the identity theory of mind - and moves through (...) discussions of functionalism in autonomy of psychology, to topics such as eliminative materialism, individualism and the problems of content and representation. The synoptic nature of the discussion makes it ideal as the foundation of an undergraduate course in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This paper offers a probabilistic treatment of the conditions for argument cogency as endorsed in informal logic: acceptability, relevance, and sufficiency. Treating a natural language argument as a reason-claim-complex, our analysis identifies content features of defeasible argument on which the RSA conditions depend, namely: change in the commitment to the reason, the reason’s sensitivity and selectivity to the claim, one’s prior commitment to the claim, and the contextually determined thresholds of acceptability for reasons and for claims. Results contrast with, and (...) may indeed serve to correct, the informal understanding and applications of the RSA criteria concerning their conceptual dependence, their function as update-thresholds, and their status as obligatory rather than permissive norms, but also show how these formal and informal normative approachs can in fact align. (shrink)

David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson’s popular introduction to philosophy of mind and cognition is now available in a fully revised and updated edition. Ensures that the most recent developments in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science are brought together into a coherent, accessible whole. Revisions respond to feedback from students and teachers and make the volume even more useful for courses. New material includes: a section on Descartes’ famous objection to materialism; extended treatment of connectionism; coverage of (...) the view that psychology is autonomous; fuller discussion of recent debates over phenomenal experience; and much more. (shrink)

The psycholinguistic literature has identified two syntactic adaptation effects in language production: rapidly decaying short-term priming and long-lasting adaptation. To explain both effects, we present an ACT-R model of syntactic priming based on a wide-coverage, lexicalized syntactic theory that explains priming as facilitation of lexical access. In this model, two well-established ACT-R mechanisms, base-level learning and spreading activation, account for long-term adaptation and short-term priming, respectively. Our model simulates incremental language production and in a series of modeling studies, we show (...) that it accounts for (a) the inverse frequency interaction; (b) the absence of a decay in long-term priming; and (c) the cumulativity of long-term adaptation. The model also explains the lexical boost effect and the fact that it only applies to short-term priming. We also present corpus data that verify a prediction of the model, that is, that the lexical boost affects all lexical material, rather than just heads. (shrink)

David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson’s popular introduction to philosophy of mind and cognition is now available in a fully revised and updated edition. Ensures that the most recent developments in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science are brought together into a coherent, accessible whole. Revisions respond to feedback from students and teachers and make the volume even more useful for courses. New material includes: a section on Descartes’ famous objection to materialism; extended treatment of connectionism; coverage of (...) the view that psychology is autonomous; fuller discussion of recent debates over phenomenal experience; and much more. (shrink)

An $\omega$-categorical supersimple group is finite-by-abelian-by-finite, and has finite SU-rank. Every definable subgroup is commensurable with an acl-definable subgroup. Every finitely based regular type in a CM-trivial $\omega$-categorical simple theory is non-orthogonal to a type of SU-rank 1. In particular, a supersimple $\omega$-categorical CM-trivial theory has finite SU-rank.

We report on the small-scale (0.5 13 h - 1M, a large-scale bias of ~2.0 and a satellite fraction of 12 ± 2 per cent. Thus, these galaxies occupy haloes with average masses in between those of the higher redshift BOSS CMASS sample and the original SDSS I/II luminous red galaxy sample © 2012 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society © doi:10.1093/mnras/sts314.

We examine the applicability of the concept of Social Licence to Operate (SLO) for international humanitarian and development cooperation organizations. We review the relevant literature on SLO and derive criteria that can be applicable to the work of development agencies. We also examine the case of the international NGO, Mercy Corps, in the region of Samtskhe-Javakheti, Georgia, specifically its Market Alliances against Poverty project. Using focus groups and key informant interviews, we sought to understand what would constitute an SLO for (...) the local community in the context of a development intervention. Themes that emerged included: transparency and accountability; access to information; the potential benefits and dangers of innovations; the inspirational effect of the presence of an external organization; risks associated with loans and grants; and the reliability of intermediaries. Our results can be utilized by development practitioners and humanitarian organizations as well as academics who want t.. (shrink)

Computational models of memory presented in this issue reflect varied empirical data and levels of representation. From mathematical models to neural and cognitive architectures, all aim to converge on a unified theory of the mind.

Background Various authorities recommend the participation of patients in promoting patient safety, but little is known about health care professionals' (HCPs') attitudes towards patients' involvement in safety-related behaviours. Objective To investigate how HCPs evaluate patients' behaviours and HCP responses to patient involvement in the behaviour, relative to different aspects of the patient, the involved HCP and the potential error. Design Cross-sectional fractional factorial survey with seven factors embedded in two error scenarios (missed hand hygiene, medication error). Each survey included two (...) randomized vignettes that described the potential error, a patient's reaction to that error and the HCP response to the patient. Setting Twelve hospitals in Switzerland. Participants A total of 1141 HCPs (response rate 45%). Measurements Approval of patients' behaviour, HCP response to the patient, anticipated effects on the patient–HCP relationship, HCPs' support for being asked the question, affective response to the vignettes. Outcomes were measured on 7-point scales. Results Approval of patients' safety-related interventions was generally high and largely affected by patients' behaviour and correct identification of error. Anticipated effects on the patient–HCP relationship were much less positive, little correlated with approval of patients' behaviour and were mainly determined by the HCP response to intervening patients. HCPs expressed more favourable attitudes towards patients intervening about a medication error than about hand sanitation. Conclusions This study provides the first insights into predictors of HCPs' attitudes towards patient engagement in safety. Future research is however required to assess the generalizability of the findings into practice before training can be designed to address critical issues. (shrink)

We present a computational evaluation of three hypotheses about sources of deficit in sentence comprehension in aphasia: slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction. The ACT-R based Lewis and Vasishth model is used to implement these three proposals. Slowed processing is implemented as slowed execution time of parse steps; intermittent deficiency as increased random noise in activation of elements in memory; and resource reduction as reduced spreading activation. As data, we considered subject vs. object relative sentences, presented in a self-paced (...) listening modality to 56 individuals with aphasia and 46 matched controls. The participants heard the sentences and carried out a picture verification task to decide on an interpretation of the sentence. These response accuracies are used to identify the best parameters that correspond to the three hypotheses mentioned above. We show that controls have more tightly clustered parameter values than IWA; specifically, compared to controls, among IWA there are more individuals with slow parsing times, high noise, and low spreading activation. We find that individual IWA show differential amounts of deficit along the three dimensions of slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction, overall, there is evidence for all three sources of deficit playing a role, and IWA have a more variable range of parameter values than controls. An important implication is that it may be meaningless to talk about sources of deficit with respect to an abstract verage IWA; the focus should be on the individual's differential degrees of deficit along different dimensions, and on understanding the causes of variability in deficit between participants. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 177-188 [Access article in PDF] Chaïm Perelman's "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy":Commentary and Translation David A. Frank Michelle K. Bolduc Chaïm Perelman's 1949 article, "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy," has remained unavailable to readers unable to read French. Our commentary and translation is intended to provide English readers access to the context, influences, and themes that make the article an extraordinarily important (...) work in the history of twentieth-century rhetoric. In this article, Perelman offers a powerful critique of first philosophies and anticipates the problems of radical postmodernity. "First Philosophies" remains a strikingly elegant attempt to foil what Foucault (1984, 41-42) has called the "Enlightenment blackmail of reason," the assumption held by logical positivists and radical skeptics that if reason does not yield absolute and eternal Enlightenment knowledge, there can be no knowledge.Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric project avoids Enlightenment blackmail by charting a third way between logical positivism and radical relativism, and "First Philosophies" sets forth the project's philosophical blueprint. Commencing in 1947 and culminating in 1958 with the publication of Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca sought, discovered, and developed a philosophical system designed as a rapprochement between dialectic (reason and logic) and rhetoric (the art of adapting arguments to audiences). Historians of rhetoric judge the work a "grand revolution" (Meyer 1999, 259), believing it marks a rhetorical renaissance in Europe, and suggest nothing like it will appear for another 100 years after its publication (Johnstone 1971). The New Rhetoric project influenced Gadamer and a host of post-war European and American thinkers (Mootz 1998). Michael Leff calls the 1970 English translation of Traité a "bombshell" (1994, 510). Beyond its historical importance, Crosswhite suggests that the New Rhetoric project is "the single most important event in contemporary rhetorical theory" (1996, 35)and "First Philosophies" marks Perelman's turn from logical [End Page 177] positivism to rhetoric, offering prescient answers to the post-World War II crises of reason, and the ideas in the article provide the Traité'sphilosophical glue (see in particular the English translation, 62).Perelman joined many post-war theorists, including Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), in the resistance to the reign of a disembodied Enlightenment rationality. However, Perelman identified what Habermas (1987, 119) would later call the "performative contradiction" in the conclusion that radical skepticism was the only alternative to Enlightenment rationality. In "First Philosophies," Perelman responds directly to Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness (198; see translation below) by exposing the failure of radical skeptics to see that they had been held hostage by Enlightenment blackmail in accepting the Enlightenment criterion for truth, rejecting it, and then making skepticism an absolute. Indeed, "First Philosophies" navigates from this performative contradiction to chart a third way between Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism with an approach that he labels regressive philosophy. Regressive philosophy, Perelman argues, provides the human community with a mode of philosophical reasoning located between the extremes of Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism. In this space between extremes, Perelman identifies contingent truths and values dependent on a rhetorical mode of reasoning, one making moral judgments possible.To best understand "First Philosophies," we recognize the importance of historical context in the development of social theories of knowledge (see Delacampagne 1999; Kennedy 1999). The intellectual networks in which philosophers operate also influence the development of philosophical systems, as Randall Collins has aptly documented. In addition to historical context and intellectual networks, Frederick Beiser has recently noted: "[t] he best introduction to any philosophy is the biography of the person who created it" (1999, 5). He argues that textual analysis alone cannot illuminate the motivation or meaning of a philosophy. A sense of Perelman's biography and the cultural influences that gave rise to "First Philosophies" are necessary for a proper understanding of its themes. For Perelman, the primary intellectual exigencies of the post-war period were the interrelated crises of justice, philosophical reasoning, and responsibility to which "First Philosophies" is a... (shrink)

In order to design and implement electronic institutions that incorporate norms governing the behavior of the participants of those institutions, some crucial steps should be taken. The first problem is that human norms are (on purpose) specified on an abstract level. This ensures applicability of the norms over long periods of time in many different circumstances. However, for an electronic institution to function according to those norms, they should be concrete enough to be able to check them run time. A (...) second problem is that norms describe which behavior is desirable and permitted, but not how this is achieved in an institution. In the “real world" regulations often indicate procedures for implementing and enforcing the law. Likewise we should devise means to annotate the norms with practical aspects such as enforcement mechanisms, sanctions, etc. in order to get requirements for an institution that will enforce norms (by either constraining behavior within the norms or reacting to violation of the norms). The choice of which kind of mechanism is chosen is not a normative one, but usually based on criteria of efficiency and/or feasibility of the mechanism. In this paper we present our view on how to approach these problems and other related issues to be solved in order to develop e-institutions capable to operate in complex, highly regulated scenarios. (shrink)

In the absence of access to formal credit, informal contracts with independent investors give the small ranchers of the Lower Amazon an acceptable means through which to surmount the high investment hurdle of starting a cattle herd. These contracts – called sociedades – allow small ranchers to raise an outside investor's cattle in return for a portion of the offspring and are commonplace in the cattle production systems of the Amazon. But, notwithstanding a vast literature on cattle production in the (...) Amazon, informal contracts have been largely overlooked. This paper presents the results of a field survey and financial analysis for informal contracts on small ranches in the Lower Amazon. In the results, we suggest that informal contracts are an important means of cattle herd start-up and herd production for small ranchers. Internal rates of returns in cattle production under these contracts are in the range of –7 to –12% for the small rancher and 12% for the investor. The net present value of the contract to the small rancher ranges from –R$1219 to –R$8599 and from R$1681 to R$8845 for the investor, for a 10-year period, depending on herd size. Financial returns contracts are sensitive to the contract design – e.g., to who pays health costs – and to beef prices. The small ranchers have a negative IRR, lose money, and bear all the risk of loss, yet persist in using this form of herd development. We surmise that this is due to the non-financial benefits of cattle ownership and the lack of access to formal credit structures. In conclusion, although outside the formal economy and apparently financially unrewarding, these contracts are an important mechanism by which the small ranchers on the Amazon Floodplains create cattle herds. (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Is conceptual analysis required for reductive explanation? If there is no a priori entailment from microphysical truths to phenomenal truths, does reductive explanation of the phenomenal fail? We say yes . Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker say no.

In this paper we 1. provide a natural deduction system for full first-order linear logic, 2. introduce Curry-Howard-style terms for this version of linear logic, 3. extend the notion of substitution of Curry-Howard terms for term variables, 4. define the reduction rules for the Curry-Howard terms and 5. outline a proof of the strong normalization for the full system of linear logic using a development of Girard's candidates for reducibility, thereby providing an alternative to Girard's proof using proof-nets.

Moral puzzles about actions which bring about very small or what are said to be imperceptible harms or benefits for each of a large number of people are well known. Less well known is an argument by Warren Quinn that standard theories of rationality can lead an agent to end up torturing himself or herself in a completely foreseeable way, and that this shows that standard theories of rationality need to be revised. We show where Quinn's argument goes wrong, and (...) apply this to the moral puzzles. (shrink)

"The book as a whole seeks to reinvigorate an academic discipline (philosophy of religion) which has fallen on hard times, and to do so by building a bridge between philosophy and empirical-historical studies of religion. The topic is both significant and timely. Too long the empiricists have been inadequately sophisticated philosophically and too long the philosophers have ignored historical data both in its breadth and depth. In not only calling for bridges between these disciplines, but actually building some, the work (...) makes a significant contribution to both." -- Alan Miller "This book is useful because it provides some insights both into the ways scholars think about various aspects of religious behavior, and also information about important features of such behavior. Both myth and philosophy are topics of great significance, and have been discussed by many philosophers and historians of religions and some anthropologists. An interesting set of questions about the nature of religion, and nature of philosophy and their relationships (and also about the nature of myth and its relationship to philosophy) is emerging at the forefront of academic discussions in departments of religion, departments of philosophy, and departments of anthropology. It contains some well-written and conceptually interesting essays." -- E. Thomas Lawson. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 177-188 [Access article in PDF] Chaïm Perelman's "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy":Commentary and Translation David A. Frank Michelle K. Bolduc Chaïm Perelman's 1949 article, "First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy," has remained unavailable to readers unable to read French. Our commentary and translation is intended to provide English readers access to the context, influences, and themes that make the article an extraordinarily important (...) work in the history of twentieth-century rhetoric. In this article, Perelman offers a powerful critique of first philosophies and anticipates the problems of radical postmodernity. "First Philosophies" remains a strikingly elegant attempt to foil what Foucault (1984, 41-42) has called the "Enlightenment blackmail of reason," the assumption held by logical positivists and radical skeptics that if reason does not yield absolute and eternal Enlightenment knowledge, there can be no knowledge.Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric project avoids Enlightenment blackmail by charting a third way between logical positivism and radical relativism, and "First Philosophies" sets forth the project's philosophical blueprint. Commencing in 1947 and culminating in 1958 with the publication of Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca sought, discovered, and developed a philosophical system designed as a rapprochement between dialectic (reason and logic) and rhetoric (the art of adapting arguments to audiences). Historians of rhetoric judge the work a "grand revolution" (Meyer 1999, 259), believing it marks a rhetorical renaissance in Europe, and suggest nothing like it will appear for another 100 years after its publication (Johnstone 1971). The New Rhetoric project influenced Gadamer and a host of post-war European and American thinkers (Mootz 1998). Michael Leff calls the 1970 English translation of Traité a "bombshell" (1994, 510). Beyond its historical importance, Crosswhite suggests that the New Rhetoric project is "the single most important event in contemporary rhetorical theory" (1996, 35)and "First Philosophies" marks Perelman's turn from logical [End Page 177] positivism to rhetoric, offering prescient answers to the post-World War II crises of reason, and the ideas in the article provide the Traité'sphilosophical glue (see in particular the English translation, 62).Perelman joined many post-war theorists, including Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), in the resistance to the reign of a disembodied Enlightenment rationality. However, Perelman identified what Habermas (1987, 119) would later call the "performative contradiction" in the conclusion that radical skepticism was the only alternative to Enlightenment rationality. In "First Philosophies," Perelman responds directly to Sartre's 1943 Being and Nothingness (198; see translation below) by exposing the failure of radical skeptics to see that they had been held hostage by Enlightenment blackmail in accepting the Enlightenment criterion for truth, rejecting it, and then making skepticism an absolute. Indeed, "First Philosophies" navigates from this performative contradiction to chart a third way between Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism with an approach that he labels regressive philosophy. Regressive philosophy, Perelman argues, provides the human community with a mode of philosophical reasoning located between the extremes of Enlightenment rationality and radical skepticism. In this space between extremes, Perelman identifies contingent truths and values dependent on a rhetorical mode of reasoning, one making moral judgments possible.To best understand "First Philosophies," we recognize the importance of historical context in the development of social theories of knowledge (see Delacampagne 1999; Kennedy 1999). The intellectual networks in which philosophers operate also influence the development of philosophical systems, as Randall Collins has aptly documented. In addition to historical context and intellectual networks, Frederick Beiser has recently noted: "[t] he best introduction to any philosophy is the biography of the person who created it" (1999, 5). He argues that textual analysis alone cannot illuminate the motivation or meaning of a philosophy. A sense of Perelman's biography and the cultural influences that gave rise to "First Philosophies" are necessary for a proper understanding of its themes. For Perelman, the primary intellectual exigencies of the post-war period were the interrelated crises of justice, philosophical reasoning, and responsibility to which "First Philosophies" is a... (shrink)

We solve a major open problem concerning algorithmic properties of products of ‘transitive’ modal logics by showing that products and commutators of such standard logics as K4, S4, S4.1, K4.3, GL, or Grz are undecidable and do not have the finite model property. More generally, we prove that no Kripke complete extension of the commutator [K4,K4] with product frames of arbitrary finite or infinite depth (with respect to both accessibility relations) can be decidable. In particular, if.

Environmental health research produces scientific knowledge about environmental hazards crucial for public health and environmental justice movements that seek to prevent or reduce exposure to these hazards. The environment in environmental health research is conceptualized as the range of possible social, biological, chemical, and/or physical hazards or risks to human health, some of which merit study due to factors such as their probability and severity, the feasibility of their remediation, and injustice in their distribution. This paper explores the ethics of (...) identifying the relevant environment for environmental health research, as judgments involved in defining an environmental hazard or risk, judgments of that hazard or risk's probability, severity, and/ or injustice, as well as the feasibility of its remediation, all ought to appeal to non-epistemic as well as epistemic values. I illustrate by discussing the case of environmental lead, a housing-related hazard that remains unjustly distributed by race and class and is particularly dangerous to children. Examining a controversy in environmental health research ethics where researchers tested multiple levels of lead abatement in lead-contaminated households, I argue that the broader perspective on the ethics of environmental health research provided in the first part of this paper may have helped prevent this controversy. (shrink)

The two envelope paradox can be dissolved by looking closely at the connection between conditional and unconditional expectation and by being careful when summing an infinite series of positive and negative terms. The two envelope paradox is not another St. Petersburg paradox and that one does not need to ban talk of infinite expectation values in order to dissolve it. The article ends by posing a new puzzle to do with infinite expectations.

This critical note responds to Guiaşu and Tindale’s “Logical fallacies and invasion biology,” from our perspective as ecologists and philosophers of science engaged in debates about invasion biology and invasive species. We agree that “the level of charges and dismissals” surrounding these debates might be “unhealthy” and that “it will be very difficult for dialogues to move forward unless genuine attempts are made to understand the positions being held and to clarify the terms involved.” Although they raise several important scientific, (...) conceptual, and ethical issues at the foundations of invasion biology, we believe Guiaşu and Tindale’s attempts to clarify the debate were unsuccessful. Like some other critics of the field, they tend to misrepresent invasion biology by cherry-picking and constructing “straw people,” inaccurately portraying invasion biology, and thus failing to elevate the dialogue. In this critique, we clarify areas in the invasion biology literature misrepresented by Guiaşu and Tindale. We attempt to provide a more balanced view of areas of reasonable debate within invasion biology, including disputes about empirical evidence, diverse risk attitudes, and other diverse ethical commitments. (shrink)

Aim of the present paper is to provide a formal characterization of various different notions of responsibility within groups of agents (Who did that? Who gets the blame? Who is accountable for that? etc.). To pursue this aim, the papers proposes an organic analysis of organized collective agency by tackling the issues of organizational structure, role enactment, organizational activities, task-division and task-allocation. The result consists in a semantic framework based on dynamic logic in which all these concepts can be represented (...) and in which various notions of responsibility find a formalization. The background motivation of the work consists in those responsibility-related issues which are of particular interest for the theory and development of multi-agent systems. (shrink)

Social Ontology encompasses a wide variety of inquiries into the nature, structure and perhaps essence of social phenomena, and their role and place in our world. Topics of research in Social Ontology range from small-scale interactions to large-scale institutions, from spontaneous teamwork to the functioning of formal organizations, and from unintended consequences to institutional design. Social Ontology brings together theoretical work from a large number of disciplines. This rapidly evolving field of research has attracted increasing attention over the last couple (...) of decades, and the conceptual tools recent research in Social Ontology has provided have proved to be useful in a large number of domains, such as the study of the evolution of communication, the structure of social norms, social structure, and social change, the nature of collective responsibility, and the status of corporate agents. The Journal of Social Ontology aims to further this research. It provides a forum of exchange between scholars of diverse disciplinary, scholarly, and methodological backgrounds, and invites submissions from all branches of Social Ontology. The Journal of Social Ontology adopts strict standards of selection and relies heavily on its carefully selected referees. In a world in which publication strategies and outlets are changing at a tremendous pace, it is difficult to say what the future of scholarly publication will look like. With a generous grant from the University of Vienna for the start-up phase, the Journal of Social Ontology now appears as an Open Access Journal with De Gruyter, thus combining professional support by an established publisher with unlimited accessibility. In addition, the Journal of Social Ontology has been founded together with the International Social Ontology Society (ISOS) that supports the work of this journal. We wish to express our thanks to our supporters, contributors, and referees; we hope that our joint effort will grant the work published in this journal the impact it deserves. (shrink)

This article presents results from a multidisciplinary research project on the integration and transfer of language knowledge into robots as an empirical paradigm for the study of language development in both humans and humanoid robots. Within the framework of human linguistic and cognitive development, we focus on how three central types of learning interact and co-develop: individual learning about one's own embodiment and the environment, social learning (learning from others), and learning of linguistic capability. Our primary concern is how these (...) capabilities can scaffold each other's development in a continuous feedback cycle as their interactions yield increasingly sophisticated competencies in the agent's capacity to interact with others and manipulate its world. Experimental results are summarized in relation to milestones in human linguistic and cognitive development and show that the mutual scaffolding of social learning, individual learning, and linguistic capabilities creates the context, conditions, and requisites for learning in each domain. Challenges and insights identified as a result of this research program are discussed with regard to possible and actual contributions to cognitive science and language ontogeny. In conclusion, directions for future work are suggested that continue to develop this approach toward an integrated framework for understanding these mutually scaffolding processes as a basis for language development in humans and robots. (shrink)

Training under high interference conditions through interleaved practice results in performance suppression during training but enhances long-term performance relative to repetitive practice involving low interference. Previous neuroimaging work addressing this contextual interference effect of motor learning has relied heavily on the blood-oxygen-level-dependent response using functional magnetic resonance imaging methodology resulting in mixed reports of prefrontal cortex recruitment under IP and RP conditions. We sought to clarify these equivocal findings by imaging bilateral PFC recruitment using functional near-infrared spectroscopy while discrete key (...) pressing sequences were trained under IP and RP schedules and subsequently tested following a 24-h delay. An advantage of fNIRS over the fMRI BOLD response is that the former measures oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin changes independently allowing for assessment of cortical hemodynamics even when there is neurovascular decoupling. Despite slower sequence performance durations under IP, bilateral PFC oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin values did not differ between practice conditions. During test, however, slower performance from those previously trained under RP coincided with hemispheric asymmetry in PFC recruitment. Specifically, following RP, test deoxygenated hemoglobin values were significantly lower in the right PFC. The present findings contrast with previous behavioral demonstrations of increased cognitive demand under IP to illustrate a more complex involvement of the PFC in the contextual interference effect. IP and RP incur similar levels of bilateral PFC recruitment, but the processes underlying the recruitment are dissimilar. PFC recruitment during IP supports action reconstruction and memory elaboration while RP relies on PFC recruitment to maintain task variation information in working memory from trial to trial. While PFC recruitment under RP serves to enhance immediate performance, it does not support long-term performance. (shrink)

This book contains programmatic essays that focus on broad-ranging proposals for re-envisioning a discipline of comparative philosophy of religions. It also contains a number of case studies focussing on the interpretation of particular religio-historical data from comparatively oriented philosophical perspectives.

After decades of single issue movements and identity politics on the U.S. left, the series of large demonstrations beginning in 1999 in Seattle have led many to wonder if activist politics can now come together around a common theme of global justice. This book pursues the prospects for progressive political movements in the 21st century with case studies of ten representative movements, including the anti-globalization forces, environmental interest groups, and new takes on the peace movement.

We show that—unlike products of ‘transitive’ modal logics which are usually undecidable—their ‘expanding domain’ relativisations can be decidable, though not in primitive recursive time. In particular, we prove the decidability and the finite expanding product model property of bimodal logics interpreted in two-dimensional structures where one component—call it the ‘flow of time’—is • a finite linear order or a finite transitive tree and the other is composed of structures like • transitive trees/partial orders/quasi-orders/linear orders or only finite such structures expanding (...) over time. The decidability proof is based on Kruskal’s tree theorem, and the proof of non-primitive recursiveness is by reduction of the reachability problem for lossy channel systems. The result is used to show that the dynamic topological logic interpreted in topological spaces with continuous functions is decidable if the number of function iterations is assumed to be finite. (shrink)

: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that HIV testing be routinely offered to certain patients in hospitals with a high prevalence of HIV infection and on all pregnant women. The CDC does not, however, offer implementation level guidelines for obtaining informed consent. We provide a moral justification for requiring informed consent for HIV testing and propose guidelines for securing such consent. In particular we argue that genuine informed consent can be secured without elaborate counseling, such (...) as that currently used at Counseling and Testing Sites, provided that sufficient written notice is given to the patients before testing and that they are specifically asked for permission. (shrink)