By demonstrating the uniformity and universality of the principles of valid interpretation of verbal texts of any sort, this closely reasoned examination provides a theoretical foundation for a discipline that is fundamental to virtually all humanistic studies. It defines the grounds on which textual interpretation can claim to establish objective knowledge, defends that claim against such skeptical attitudes as historicism and psychologism, and shows that many confusions can be avoided if the distinctions between meaning and significance, interpretation and criticism are (...) correctly understood. It provides perhaps the first genuinely comprehensive account of hermeneutic theory to appear in English and the first systematic presentation of the principles of valid interpretation in any language. Mr. Hirsch, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of _Wordsworth and Schelling _and _Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake._ “Here is a book that brings logic to the most unruly of disciplines, literary interpretation. Viewing this subject within the tradition of hermeneutics, Mr. Hirsch is able to trace its origins and development with brilliant insight. The result is a lucidly systemic and authoritative account of the premises and procedures applicable to the interpretation of a literary text. Mr. Hirsch has performed a monumental service thereby that of reinstating the credentials of objectivism and defining the limits of the aesthetics of truth. This study is a necessary took for anyone who wants to talk sense about literature.”—_Virginia Quarterly Review_ “Professor Hirsch demonstrates convincingly that objectivity is attainable in humane studies, and that it is not identified with the subject but with the evidence. A valid interpretation is not necessarily a correct one, but one which is more probably than any other on the basis of existing evidence. He makes a subtle and important distinction between a text’s ‘meaning’ and its ‘significance’, and brilliantly relates meaning to understanding and interpretation to explanation…” In short, this is a work which future students of literary theory cannot afford to neglect.”—_Notes and Queries_ E.D. Hirsch, Jr., is professor of English at the University of Virginia. (shrink)

Hirsch shows why American students perform less well than students in other industrialized countries. Drawing on classroom observation, the history of ideas, and current scientific understanding of the patterns of intellectual growth, he builds the case that our schools have indeed made progress in teaching the mechanics of reading, but do not convey the more complex and essential content needed for reading comprehension. Hirsch reasons that literacy depends less on formal reading 'skills' and more on exposure to rich (...) knowledge. His argument gives parents specific tools for enhancing their child's ability to read with comprehension; shows how No-Child-Left-Behind tests and SATs are measuring a kind of knowledge that is not being taught in our schools; and maps out how American schools can become a strong antidote to poverty and to the race-based achievement gap, and thus fulfill our democratic ideal for our children.--From publisher description. (shrink)

In _Why Knowledge Matters_, influential scholar E. D. Hirsch, Jr., addresses critical issues in contemporary education reform and shows how cherished truisms about education and child development have led to unintended and negative consequences. Hirsch, author of _The Knowledge Deficit_, draws on recent findings in neuroscience and data from France to provide new evidence for the argument that a carefully planned, knowledge-based elementary curriculum is essential to providing the foundations for children’s life success and ensuring equal opportunity for (...) students of all backgrounds. In the absence of a clear, common curriculum, Hirsch contends that tests are reduced to measuring skills rather than content, and that students from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot develop the knowledge base to support high achievement. Hirsch advocates for updated policies based on a set of ideas that are consistent with current cognitive science, developmental psychology, and social science. The book focuses on six persistent problems of recent US education: the over-testing of students; the scapegoating of teachers; the fadeout of preschool gains; the narrowing of the curriculum; the continued achievement gap between demographic groups; and the reliance on standards that are not linked to a rigorous curriculum. Hirsch examines evidence from the United States and other nations that a coherent, knowledge-based approach to schooling has improved both achievement and equity wherever it has been instituted, supporting the argument that the most significant education reform and force for equality of opportunity and greater social cohesion is the reform of fundamental educational ideas. _Why Knowledge Matters _introduces a new generation of American educators to Hirsch’s astute and passionate analysis. (shrink)

Gadamer's book extends and codifies the main hermeneutical concepts of Bultmann, Heidegger, and their adherents, and can be considered a summa of what Robinson calls "The New Hermeneutic." By Robinson and other theologians, and by Continental literary critics, Wahrheit und Methode has been welcomed as a philosophical justification for "vital and relevant" interpretations that are unencumbered by a concern for the author's original intention. On this point "The New Hermeneutic" reveals its affinities with "The New Criticism" and the newer "Myth (...) Criticism." All three have impugned the author's prerogative to be the determiner of textual meaning. Gadamer, however, grounds his anti-intentionalism only partially in aesthetics and not at all in the collective unconscious but primarily in the radical historicism of Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

In this series of lectures, a distinguished group of international contributors from a variety of disciplines debate the current position of the recent achievements in engineering and computer science. (Technology & Industrial).

A framework is designed to aid the marketing decision maker in choosing between deontological and utilitarian reasoning when attempting to solve ethical problems. the framework uses miller's theory of living systems to develop a hierarchy of exchanges as a basis for analysis. then the historical appeal of deontology and utilitarianism are analyzed with respect to the hierarchy.

Melanesian ethnography has been a substantial and enduring presence in Strathern’s comparative project of anthropology. The cornerstone of this project was The Gender of the Gift, where a model was established for demonstrating the analogies between Melanesian societies based on a system of common differences. The comparisons created in this work were centred on a real and radical divide between Melanesia and the West. Strathern’s subsequent comparative work has examined the debates surrounding new social and technological forms in the West (...) (e.g. new genetic and reproductive technologies) through drawing analogies with Melanesian social forms; she has simultaneously highlighted the limits of these comparisons. Her intention in this comparative project has been to expand the range of concepts and language used to understand western social and technological innovations that potentially affect the world at large, so that debate is not simply circumscribed by western preoccupations and concerns. As mediated through the analysis of Strathern and the other Melanesian anthropologists she draws on, the voices and interests of non-westerners can potentially inform and even reform the grounds of such deliberations. (shrink)

This study reports on the development of scale items derived from the pluralistic moral philosophy literature. In addition, the manner in which individuals combine aspects of the different philosophies in making ethical evaluations was explored.

The conceptual model presented in this article argues that corporations exhibit specific behaviors that signal their true level of moral development. Accordingly, the authors identify five levels of moral development and discuss the dynamics that move corporations from one level to another. Examples of corporate behavior which are indicative of specific stages of moral development are offered.

The combination of genuine ethical concerns and fear of learning to use germ-line therapy for human disease must now be confronted. Until now, no established techniques were available to perform this treatment on a human. Through an integration of several fields of science and medicine, we have developed a nine step protocol at the germ-line level for the curative treatment of a genetic disease. Our purpose in this paper is to provide the first method to apply germ-line therapy to treat (...) those not yet born, who are destined to have a life threatening, or a severely debilitating genetic disease. We hope this proposal will initiate the process of a thorough analysis from both the scientific and ethical communities. As such, this proposal can be useful for official groups studying the advantages and disadvantages of germ-line therapy. (shrink)

This work collects together the most influential of Gell's writings with a new introductory chapter written by Gell. The essays vividly demonstrate Gell's theoretical and empirical interests and his distinctive contribution to several key areas of current anthropological enquiry. A central theme of the essays is Gel's highly original exploration of diagrammatic imagery as the site where social relations and cognitive processes converge and crystallise. Gell tracks this imagery across studies of tribal market transactions, dance forms, the iconicity of language (...) and his most recent and groundbreaking analyses of artworks. (shrink)

In this series of lectures, a distinguished group of international contributors from a variety of disciplines debate the current position of the recent achievements in engineering and computer science. (Technology & Industrial).

This article examines strands of an intellectual history in Media and Cultural Studies and Science and Technology Studies in both of which researchers were prompted to take up ethnography. Three historical phases of this process are identified. The move between phases was the result of particular displacements and contestations of perspective in the research procedures within each discipline. Thus concerns about appropriate contextualization led to the eventual embrace of anthropological ethnographic methods. The article traces the subsequent emergence of a ‘crisis (...) of context’ in the deployment of ethnography within these disciplines. The analysis of these historical changes is informed by a particular depiction of Euro-American knowledge conventions. The article suggests that the limits currently perceived for ethnography are a specific instance of the more general limits now recognized for these knowledge conventions. (shrink)

This comment is offered in response to Hansen's A Multidimensional Scale for Measuring Business Ethics: A Purification and Refinement. Five issues arising from Hansen's purification and refinement efforts are addressed. These include the issues of parsimony, predictive validity, collinearity, reliability, and what we see as a confusion between normative and positive theory.

This comment is offered in response to Hansen's "A Multidimensional Scale for Measuring Business Ethics: A Purification and Refinement". Five issues arising from Hansen's purification and refinement efforts are addressed. These include the issues of parsimony, predictive validity, collinearity, reliability, and what we see as a confusion between normative and positive theory.

This article discusses the major criticisms posed in On Measuring Ethical Judgments concerning our ethics scale development work. We agree that the authors of the criticism do engage in what they accurately refer to as armchair theorizing. We point out the errors in their comments.

We propose a domain-level ontology of plays for the facilitation of play-based collaborative autonomy among unmanned and manned-unmanned aircraft teams in the Army’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) mission domain. We define a play as a type of plan that prescribes some pattern of intentional acts that are intended to reliably result in some goal in some competitive context, and which specifies one or more roles that are realized by those prescribed intentional acts. The ontology is well suited to be extended (...) to other types of military and nonmilitary unmanned vehicle operations. (shrink)

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

This article uses Arndt's depiction of marketing epistemology to suggest a possible explanation for the lack of emphasis on marketing ethics within the marketing literature. While a growing number of writers are turning their attention to the area, marketing's heavy reliance on logical empiricism has contributed to a disinclination in the development of this area. Only through recent and numerous revelations of misconduct has the discipline of marketing responded to its ethical dimensions.

Developing countries face numerous barriers to conducting effective and efficient ethics reviews of international collaborative research. In addition to potentially overlooking important scientific and ethical considerations, inadequate or insufficiently trained ethics committees may insist on unwarranted changes to protocols that can impair a study's scientific or ethical validity. Moreover, poorly functioning review systems can impose substantial delays on the commencement of research, which needlessly undermine the development of new interventions for urgent medical needs. In response to these concerns, the Drugs (...) for Neglected Diseases Initiative, an independent nonprofit organization founded by a coalition of public sector and international organizations, developed a mechanism to facilitate more effective and efficient host country ethics review for a study of the use of fexinidazole for the treatment of late stage African Trypanosomiasis. The project involved the implementation of a novel ‘pre-review’ process of ethical oversight, conducted by an ad hoc committee of ethics committee representatives from African and European countries, in collaboration with internationally recognized scientific experts. This article examines the process and outcomes of this collaborative process. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

This research examines, in a general manner, the degree and character of perceptual congruity between salespeople and managers on ethical issues. Salespeople and managers from a diversity of organizations were presented with three scenarios having varying degrees of ethical content and were asked to evaluate the action of the individual in each scenario. Findings indicate that, in every instance, the participating managers tended (1) to be more critical of the action displayed in the scenarios, (2) to view the action as (...) violating a sense of contract or promise, and (3) to view the action as less culturally acceptable than did the salespeople. (shrink)

This book updates and adds to the classic Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, showing how social movement theory has grown and changed.

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscience aims to map mental processes onto brain function, which begs the question of what “mental processes” exist and how they relate to the tasks that are used to manipulate and measure them. This topic has been addressed informally in prior work, but we propose that cumulative progress in cognitive neuroscience requires a more systematic approach to representing the mental entities that are being mapped to brain function and the tasks used to manipulate and measure mental processes. We describe (...) a new open collaborative project that aims to provide a knowledge base for cognitive neuroscience, called the Cognitive Atlas, and outline how this project has the potential to drive novel discoveries about both mind and brain. (shrink)

Indigenous Zuni farming, including cultural values, ecological and biological diversity, and land distribution and tenure, appears to have been quite productive and sustainable for at least 2000 before United States influence began in the later half of the 18th century. United States Government Indian agriculture policy has been based on assimilation of Indians and taking of their resources, and continues in more subtle ways today. At Zuni this policy has resulted in the degradation and loss of natural resources for farming, (...) reduction in the number of Zuni farmers and their control over farming resources, individualization of rights in farmland, consolidation of farm fields, and declining biological diversity in agriculture. The Zuni Sustainable Agriculture Project with the Zuni Irrigation Association and the Zuni community, are now working to revitalize sustainable Zuni farming, based on traditional values, knowledge, and technology, combined with modern knowledge and technology where appropriate. The United States government can support these efforts through appreciation of the need for Zuni control and the potential value of cultural and biological diversity. (shrink)

After hearing Donald Trump's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention held in Cleveland, Ohio, Newt Gingrich was interviewed live on CNN about the menacing tone of the address. Gingrich not only defended Trump's nearly apocalyptic vision of America if he was not elected, the former Speaker of the House swiped aside the clear data that indicated that the criminalized landscapes portrayed in Trump's speech might just be the work of a frenzied and fearful imagination rather than based in (...) fact. "'People feel more threatened,'" Gingrich insisted. "'As a political candidate, I'll go with what people feel '". Commenting in Forbes shortly thereafter, Ethan Siegel, a scientist and science... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Hermeneutical Turn in American Critical Theory, 1830–1860M. D. WalhoutLong considered an obscure province of biblical studies, hermeneutics is now familiar territory to American literary critics, along with phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and the other European theories that have redrawn the map of American criticism in the past twenty-five years. The gradual transformation of hermeneutics into a theory of criticism, and ultimately into a comprehensive theory of the human sciences, (...) was the work of a series of great German thinkers, including Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. These figures were introduced (or reintroduced) to American critics by E. D. Hirsch, whose Validity in Interpretation (1967) “shattered,” in the words of Richard E. Palmer, “the splendid isolation of American literary criticism from hermeneutics.” Hailing Schleiermacher and Dilthey as the forefathers of “objective interpretation,” Hirsch dismissed Heidegger and Gadamer as prophets of subjectivism. For his part, Palmer strove to vindicate Heidegger and Gadamer as the true heirs of the hermeneutical tradition. Noting the difference between Hirsch’s understanding of hermeneutics and theirs, Palmer concluded,So the hermeneutical debate goes on. On the one side are the defenders of objectivity and validation, who look to hermeneutics as the theoretical source for norms of validation; on the other side are the phenomenologists of the event of understanding, who stress the historical character of this “event,” and consequently the limitations of all claims to “objective knowledge” and “validity.” 1Twenty-five years later this hermeneutical debate is still going on. [End Page 683]What Hirsch and Palmer did not realize is that they were reviving a debate over the nature of interpretation that dated from the late nineteenth century, when American literary criticism was undergoing professionalization. 2 As early as 1885, in the programmatic introduction to his book on Shakespeare as a dramatic artist, Richard G. Moulton had declared, “In the treatment of literature the proposition which seems to stand most in need of assertion at the present moment is, that there is an inductive science of literary criticism.” Moulton proceeded to lay down “a foundation axiom of inductive literary criticism: Interpretation in literature is of the nature of a scientific hypothesis, the truth of which is tested by the degree of completeness with which it explains the details of the literary work as they actually stand.” 3 Thirty years later Moulton repeated this axiom, insisting that “such inductive treatment constitutes the very alphabet of science.” 4 But Moulton’s determination to apply the logic of the natural sciences to the interpretation of literature was not without its critics. In 1900 the German-born philologist Julius Goebel began a valiant, if futile, effort to introduce the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey to his American colleagues. 5 Years later, in an article published in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Goebel drew on Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutik und Kritik (1838) to show “the possibility of attaining exact knowledge in the mental sciences without the aid of the scientific or laboratory methods.” 6 Later still, in an article on Dilthey published in the same journal, Goebel recalled how he had argued in an address to the Modern Language Association that criticism “had lost touch with the contemporary movements emphasizing the independence and importance of the mental sciences. What seemed to me needed above all was a reform of the method of interpretation for which Dilthey had set the example both in principle and practice.” 7 It was not until the late 1960s that Goebel’s project was finally revived.While Goebel may have been the first American literary scholar to use the word “hermeneutics,” the concept of interpretation had long been a part of American critical theory. In fact, what might be called the “hermeneutical turn” in American critical theory occurred well before the era of professionalization. [End Page 684] In order to trace this turn, we must recover the work of the amateur critical theorists of the antebellum era, including such forgotten figures as George Allen and Edwin Percy Whipple. Disciples of the Schlegels and Coleridge, these amateur theorists established the basic premises of the hermeneutical turn: that criticism is a science; that the critic must “reproduce” the author’s creative process; that... (shrink)

The normative dimension of language and thought has been cited recently in arguments against naturalist reductions of the intentional--of meaning, belief, and desire. These arguments have been met with much scepticism, primarily because their proponents say little about the kind of 'normativity' on which they depend. There is, however, a rich tradition in ethics of thinking about the nature of the normative, and why it might pose a problem for naturalist reduction. ;In this dissertation, I bring the discussions in language (...) and ethics together, arguing that doing so lends clarity and plausibility to the objections to naturalist reduction in both fields. In Part I, I draw from ethics to characterize normativity, and to explain how it provides a barrier to naturalistic reduction. In doing so, I respond to two common criticisms of irreducibility arguments in ethics: that they only show the irreducibility of our concepts of the ethical, not of ethical properties; and that they depend on outdated views of conceptual analysis. I argue that both objections misfire, though for interesting reasons, and that the anti-reduction argument succeeds. ;In Part II I use the characterization of normativity to shed light on recent arguments against reducing the intentional. I examine two prominent authors who have advanced such arguments, Saul Kripke and Donald Davidson. In addition to fleshing out and defending each of their arguments, I develop a general challenge to any reductive approach. The proposal is that intentional items have an essential capacity to define a context of reasons, something to which no naturalist reduction can do justice. ;In Part III I consider a new trend toward non-reductive forms of naturalism. I argue that most current non-reductive accounts also fail to accommodate the requisite normativity. But if the non-reductive, naturalist approach is developed in a certain direction, one which depends on the idea of response-dependency, it can capture just the kind of normativity that is needed. In closing, I briefly defend such an approach to both intentionality and value. (shrink)

Originating as a proponent of U.S. exceptionalism during the Cold War, American Studies has now reinvented itself, vigorously critiquing various kinds of critical hegemony and launching innovative interdisciplinary endeavors. _The Futures of American Studies_ considers the field today and provides important deliberations on what it might yet become. Essays by both prominent and emerging scholars provide theoretically engaging analyses of the postnational impulse of current scholarship, the field's historical relationship to social movements, the status of theory, the state of higher (...) education in the United States, and the impact of ethnic and gender studies on area studies. They also investigate the influence of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies on U.S. nationalist—and antinationalist—discourses. No single overriding paradigm dominates the anthology. Instead, the articles enter into a lively and challenging dialogue with one another. A major assessment of the state of the field, _The Futures of American Studies_ is necessary reading for American Studies scholars. _Contributors._ Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Günter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, José Estaban Muñoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos. (shrink)

Claire Katz & Lara Trout, Emmanuel Levinas. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers ; Thomas Bedorf, Andreas Cremonini, Verfehlte Begegnung. Levinas und Sartre als philosophische Zeitgenossen ; Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics ; Pascal Delhom & Alfred Hirsch, Im Angesicht der Anderen. Levinas’ Philosophie des Politischen ; Sharon Todd, Learning from the other: Levinas, psychoanalysis and ethical possibilities in education ; Michel Henry, Le bonheur de Spinoza, suivi de: Etude sur le spinozisme de (...) Michel Henry, par Jean-Michel Longneaux ; Jean-François Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie. Des Recherches logiques aux Ideen: la genèse de l’idéalisme transcendantal phénoménologique ; Denis Seron, Objet et signification ; Dan Zahavi, Sara Heinämaa and Hans Ruin, Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation. Phenomenology in The Nordic Countries ; Dimitri Ginev, Entre anthropologie et herméneutique ; Magdalena Mărculescu-Cojocea, Critica metafizicii la Kant şi Heidegger. Problema subiectivităţii: raţiunea între autonomie şi deconstrucţie. (shrink)