Coastal ecosystems are increasingly dominated by humans. Consequently, the human dimensions of sustainability science have become an integral part of emerging coastal governance and management practices. But if we are to avoid the harsh lessons of land management, coastal decision makers must recognize that humans are one of the more coastally dependent species in the biosphere. Management responses must therefore confront both the temporal urgency and the very real compromises and sacrifices that will be necessary to achieve a sustainable coastal (...) ecosystem, one that is economically feasible, socially just, and ecologically sound. (shrink)

The use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in environmental decision-making and the contingent valuation (CV) technique as input into traditional CBA to elicit environmental values in monetary terms has stimulated an extensive debate. Critics have questioned the appropriateness of both the method and the technique. Some alternative suggestions for the elicitation of environmental values are based on a social process of deliberation. However, just like traditional economic theory, these alternative approaches may be questioned on their implicit value judgements regarding the legitimacy (...) of the social-political organisation of the process of value elicitation. Instead of making assumptions a priori, research efforts should be focused on the processes by which actual public attitudes and preferences towards the environment can best be elicited and fed into environmental or other public policy decision-making. In the study presented in this paper, support was found for both the individual WTP based approach and a participatory social deliberation approach to inform the environmental decision-making process, suggesting that a combination of both approaches is most appropriate. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Behavior, language, development, identity, and science—all of these phenomena are commonly characterized as 'social' in nature. But what does it mean to be 'social'? Is there any intrinsic 'mark' of the social shared by these phenomena? In the first book to shed light on this foundational question, twelve distinguished philosophers and social scientists from several disciplines debate the mark of the social. Their varied answers will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, and anyone interested in the theoretical foundations (...) of the social sciences. (shrink)

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom: A New Translation, Redaction History, and Interpretation of “Dignitatis humanae.” by David L. Schindler and Jr. Nicholas J. HealyBarrett H. TurnerFreedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom: A New Translation, Redaction History, and Interpretation of “Dignitatis humanae.” By David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. Grand Rapids, Mich.: (...) Eerdmans, 2015. Pp. xiv + 477. $45.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-7155-8.“I fear that you are going to give the inaccurate impression that this document was exclusively the work of the Americans at the Council, or nearly so,” wrote Ernest Primeau, an American bishop who helped revise Dignitatis humanae (DH) at Vatican II, to a priest-journalist. “The truth is... that many others from other nations played an important role in the writing and passage of the declaration.” Despite Primeau’s warning, popular and scholarly interpretations of DH have often hewed closely to John Courtney Murray’s juridical approach, usually in contrast to the integralism of Cardinal Alfredo [End Page 309] Ottaviani and the Spanish episcopate. Yet “many others” did not fit into those two groups, for a large contingent of bishops favorable to religious liberty nonetheless sought to undergird the juridical reasoning for the right with an ontological foundation.David L. Schindler and Nicholas Healy promote these other voices in Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity. Indeed, they argue that the other voices—the “French” or “ontological” school comprised of bishops such as Alfred Ancel and Karol Wojtyła—provide the true key to DH’s meaning and significance. The book thus responds from the perspective of Communio theology to Murray-ite political theologies that are critical of John Paul II’s emphasis on truth as the basis for freedom. Accompanying Schindler’s and Healy’s essays are conciliar texts charting the origin and influence of this ontological school: the six conciliar drafts, the oral and written interventions of Wojtyła, and an oral intervention of Ancel. These texts, transcribed from the Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II (AS), have been translated by Patrick T. Brannon, S.J., and Michael Camacho. Also included is a side-by-side comparison of the third and sixth drafts that displays the changes made to the juridical position in response to the ontological school.Schindler’s 170-page essay, “Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: An Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae on the Right to Religious Freedom,” is the heart of the work. Schindler recapitulates in a fresh way themes from his prior analyses of liberalism and Murray. In section 1, he summarizes how Wojtyła’s interventions influenced the evolution of DH such that Murray’s juridical approach became subordinated to an emphasis on truth as the foundation and telos of freedom. He conveys Wojtyła’s concern that DH not divide reason and revelation, but that reason be presented as capable of knowing that religion is “nature’s crown and summit” (50). Section 2 outlines Murray’s postconciliar objections to DH’s final version, namely, that it assumes that the American juridical approach leads to relativism and that its insistence on truth as religious liberty’s foundation undermines the universality of the right by degrading the liberty of those in error. To the first, Schindler replies (in section 3) that Murray’s juridical approach necessarily entails what Servais Pinckaers, O.P., called the “freedom of indifference,” Murray’s denials of relativism notwithstanding. The juridical approach leads to the conception of civil space as something neutral to truth-claims about God, but finally results in a state-enforced indifferentism that limits the religious liberty of those who hold that all of existence, prior to human freedom, is intrinsically ordered to God. “The human act, considered from the perspective of the juridical order, is first empty; and truth thus becomes, from that same juridical perspective, adventitious, something that, as such, cannot but logically burden the free-intelligent human act by arbitrarily limiting and closing what is considered by government, for legal purposes, to be simply open, or abstracted from all (metaphysical-religious) content... (shrink)

Environmental ethics has traditionally focused on a defense of the intrinsic value of animals and wild habitats. However, this ethical project needs to be supplemented by a consideration of the kind of culture that can take such an ethical point of view seriously. This essay argues that one component of an environmentally responsible culture is its domesticated environment. How we construct the domesticated environment has an impact on our perception of our own identities and our relations to wild nature. If (...) we care about wild nature, we must also care about the domesticated environment in which we live our lives. This essay contributes to an ethical reflection on the need to overcome the traditional dualism between domesticated and wild, built and natural that permeates environmental ethical thinking. (shrink)

Dmitri Mendeleev, while not creatively a philosopher of science, nor a student of systematic philosophy, was eminently a philosophical scientist. Concern about the nature and foundations of his science is evident throughout the text and footnotes of the Principles of Chemistry. One has to presume that his conclusions provided him with some direction for “the study of his great generalizations” in chemistry, especially for the greatest fruit of his efforts, the Periodic System of the Elements. At least it is apparent (...) that somehow he acquired a much greater confidence in the feasibility of systemizing extant chemical knowledge than almost any of his contemporaries. (shrink)