While logical principles seem timeless, placeless, and eternal, their discovery is a story of personal accidents, political tragedies, and broad social change. If A, Then B begins with logic's emergence twenty-three centuries ago and tracks its expansion as a discipline ever since. -/- The book treats logic as more than a tale of individual abstraction; it sees logic as also being a result of politics, economics, technology, and geography, because all these factors helped to generate an audience for the discipline (...) from the start. The book thus relates developments in logical theory to the social history of different historical periods. -/- The book defends a number of controversial philosophical theses: (1) that rationally persuasive arguments must always proceed from premises that are initially more convincing than the conclusions to be proved (a position derived from Aristotle), (2) that intuitive logical judgments, though sometimes mistaken, can also count as certain knowledge, independent of the techniques used to construct formal logical systems, (3) that Wittgenstein was mistaken in thinking that philosophy was riddled with unintelligible language and that the real problems, instead, have been ambiguity and pretentious diction, and (4) that Nelson Goodman's argument to the effect that deductive logic can be "virtuously circular" is founded on a non sequitur. -/- . (shrink)

We are grateful for Roy T. Cook's attention to our work in his recent review of our book If A, Then B: How the World Discovered Logic. But Professor Cook leaves two misimpressions that we should like to correct. First, we have never maintained (as he phrases it) that "one's premises must be more certain than the conclusions that follow from them, ignoring the obvious logical fact that, if B logically follows from A, then B is provably at least as (...) probable as A." Instead, we assert that one must be *initially* more certain of one's premises than the conclusions that follow from them; otherwise, we contend, no argument that relies on those premises to prove such a conclusion can be rationally persuasive. On this view, one might still be equally certain of both the premises and the conclusion after being persuaded by the argument, especially in cases where the premises entail the conclusion. By analogy, Aristotle asserts in the Posterior Analytics that the premises of demonstration must be "better known" than the conclusion—meaning, in part, that the premises must be initially more convincing. But this hardly shows that Aristotle thinks that, if A is invoked to demonstrate B, then A and B can never be regarded as equally probable…. (shrink)

Professor Girle suggests that the ancient Athenian interest in Aristotle’s syllogistic flowed from a preoccupation with debate in the form of a dialogue game. But other cultures, especially in India, also had a preoccupation with debate that could be characterized in the same way. This kind of explanation seems to us to ignore the elephant in the room: the fact that, in ancient Athens, dialogue and debate were not merely a game. They were the life and death of the state. (...) Many Athenians felt that foolish policies had cost the state dearly, especially during the Peloponnesian War, and many of them blamed those policies on shoddy political reasoning in the Assembly. (Plato hammers at this theme relentlessly.) And tellingly, it is only in the wake of such tragedies that Aristotle’s syllogistic finally emerged. We think that any credible explanation of the ancient Greek interest in formal logic needs to include this grim political reality. (shrink)

Why do logical truths exist at all, and how can our belief in them be justified? In an earlier article we contended that at least some aspects of logic must always be assumed, without argument, and that ‘logic is a horizon beyond which none of our earnest and self-reflecting arguments can help us see’. We also contended that logical truths are independent of physical facts, of social rules, and of the anatomical features of our brains. Nevertheless, in a further article (...) in this volume, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin and Jose Emmanuel Agregado have challenged our view. We respond to their criticisms.Export citation. (shrink)

Passive frame theory is compatible with modern complexity theory and the idea that conflict drives the emergence of a novel structural organization. After describing new developmental data, we suggest that this conflict needs to be expanded to include not only conflict between action options, but also between action and perception.

I adopt a situated approach to the question of what would constitute responsible trust and/or distrust in climate change science, and I identify some of the major challenges for laypersons in their attempts to know well by placing their trust in climate change experts. I examine evidence that white males, as a group of relative privilege, are more likely to distrust the institutions of climate change science than are other demographic groups, and use this example to consider specific challenges (...) facing those who occupy positions of privilege and who seek to place their epistemic trust wisely. I argue that the insights of feminist standpoint theory and epistemologies of ignorance concerning the role of positionality in knowledge production and the need for critical reflexivity can be applied to cases of epistemic trust as well; in some contexts, such as climate change science, considerations of how those differently situated from oneself place their trust will be valuable contributions to responsible assignments of trust. (shrink)

The concept of Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) emphasises the comprehensive person-centred experience as essential to promoting living environments. SHAFE takes an interdisciplinary approach, conceptualising complete and multidisciplinary solutions for an inclusive society. From this approach, we promote participation, health, and well-being experiences by finding the best possible combinations of social, physical, and digital solutions in the community. This initiative emerged bottom-up in Europe from the dream and conviction that innovation can improve health equity, foster caring communities, and sustainable development. (...) Smart, adaptable, and inclusive solutions can promote and support independence and autonomy throughout the lifespan, regardless of age, gender, disabilities, cultural differences, and personal choices, as well as promote happier and fairer living places. The New European Bauhaus initiative gathers “beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive projects and ideas” to inspire a positive transformation around us. The New European Bauhaus 2024 Festival took place between 9-13 April. “Designing the perfect New European Bauhaus neighbourhood: New European Bauhaus meets SHAFE” was a Satellite Event of the Festival, held as an online workshop, organised by the SHAFE Foundation on April 9th, 2024. At the event, a group of 50 participants with a multidisciplinary background discussed how to meet the challenges of the European Garcia family to enable them to live in a perfect neighbourhood. The White Paper presents the findings of the participants with the New European Bauhaus inspiring projects and ideas to house the European Garcia family in their neighbourhood. The White Paper recommends developers, designers, planners, and policymakers to include person-centred design of social and physical environments and technologies. Although awareness of person-centred design is growing, many initiatives still hamper the inclusion of citizens or end-users throughout the development of products and services. (shrink)

This article considers how race and gender shape latina and Latino paths to school success in college. A purposive sample of successful high school and college students was selected. Through interviews, fieldwork, and school records, the researchers find that Latinas navigate successfully through negative stereotypes by maintaining positive definitions of themselves and by emphasizing their group membership as Latina. Young Latino men also see themselves as part of a larger cultural group but tend to have less positive racial and ethnic (...) identities than women do. Typically, they are supported by mentors, such as white athletic coaches, and tend to draw from the meritocratic ethos of sports, regarding their success in individualistic terms. While successful Latinas do not assimilate in the ways predicted by the literature, the young men in this study accept the individualistic and meritocratic ethos of the dominant culture, but with a psychological price. (shrink)

In ‘What on Earth is Logic?’, Michael Shenefelt and Heidi White offer this observation about the nature of logic: ‘If one tries to justify logic logically, one ends up arguing in a circle’. From this, they conclude that ‘logic is a horizon beyond which none of our earnest self-reflecting arguments can help us see’. While there is much to appreciate in how they developed this idea, there are several worrying points that could still be raised against their view. (...) In this article, we outline such problems.Export citation. (shrink)

A fluent and accurate new translation of the dialogue that, all of Plato's works, has seemed to speak most directly to the interests of contemporary analytical philosophers. White's extensive introduction explores the dialogue's center themes, its connection with related discussions in other dialogues, and its implication for the interpretation of Plato's metaphysics.

The problems of racism and racially motivated violence in predominantly African American communities in the United States are complex, multifactorial, and historically rooted. While these problems are also deeply morally troubling, bioethicists have not contributed substantially to addressing them. Concern for justice has been one of the core commitments of bioethics. For this and other reasons, bioethicists should contribute to addressing these problems. We consider how bioethicists can offer meaningful contributions to the public discourse, research, teaching, training, policy development, and (...) academic scholarship in response to the alarming and persistent patterns of racism and implicit biases associated with it. To make any useful contribution, bioethicists will require preparation and should expect to play a significant role through collaborative action with others. (shrink)

White's dense article on narrative discusses the ways that different groups of 20th century historians, particularly historical theorists (see pp.8-9), have constructed and deconstructed narrative as a means of communicating history. White himself acknowledges that narrativity challenges the scientific of history, but suggests that narrativity is not only unavoidable, but also offers a form of literary or allegorical truth.\n\nWhite first discusses the critiques of narrative as a means of communication--it focuses too heavily on political players, it is "unscientific," (...) it is inherently limited because narrative itself cannot be objective (although it's authors sometimes claim it to be).\n\nHe then moves on to discuss other, heavily theoretical, takes on why narrative is still useful as a means of historical communication: that narrative works because it performs as a trope which readers can easily recognize from myth and fiction, or, that narrative works because it allows us to transform events from the present to a synthesized past.\n\nWhite's article is difficult to read, but important background for anyone who wants to see what people have said about narrative in the past 100 years--and why it is still important. (shrink)

Objective Futile treatment, which by definition cannot benefit a patient, is undesirable. This research investigated why doctors believe that treatment that they consider to be futile is sometimes provided at the end of a patient9s life. Design Semistructured in-depth interviews. Setting Three large tertiary public hospitals in Brisbane, Australia. Participants 96 doctors from emergency, intensive care, palliative care, oncology, renal medicine, internal medicine, respiratory medicine, surgery, cardiology, geriatric medicine and medical administration departments. Participants were recruited using purposive maximum variation sampling. (...) Results Doctors attributed the provision of futile treatment to a wide range of inter-related factors. One was the characteristics of treating doctors, including their orientation towards curative treatment, discomfort or inexperience with death and dying, concerns about legal risk and poor communication skills. Second, the attributes of the patient and family, including their requests or demands for further treatment, prognostic uncertainty and lack of information about patient wishes. Third, there were hospital factors including a high degree of specialisation, the availability of routine tests and interventions, and organisational barriers to diverting a patient from a curative to a palliative pathway. Doctors nominated family or patient request and doctors being locked into a curative role as the _main_ reasons for futile care. Conclusions Doctors believe that a range of factors contribute to the provision of futile treatment. A combination of strategies is necessary to reduce futile treatment, including better training for doctors who treat patients at the end of life, educating the community about the limits of medicine and the need to plan for death and dying, and structural reform at the hospital level. (shrink)

Managerial effort has been moving from maintaining a “steady state” to wrestling with the challenge of continuing change and the ethical dilemmas which this can present. Is it possible to formulate an “ethics of change” to guide individuals in such circumstances? The author is a senior lecturer at Cranfield University, Bedford MK43 OAL, UK, and a visiting research associate at the London School of Economics. His principal interests concern the management of organisational change in settings where technology is either the (...) key driver of change, or is the key enabler of some aspect of organisational or process redesign. (shrink)

ABSTRACT By means of the high ratings that they awarded to subprime mortgage‐backed bonds, the three major rating agencies—Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch—played a central role in the current financial crisis. Without these ratings, it is doubtful that subprime mortgages would have been issued in such huge amounts, since a major reason for the subprime lending boom was investor demand for high‐rated bonds—much of it generated by regulations that made such bonds mandatory for large institutional investors. And it is (...) even less likely that such bonds would have become concentrated on the balance sheets of the banks, for which they were rewarded by capital regulations that tilted toward high‐rated securities. Why, then, were the agencies excessively optimistic in their ratings of subprime mortgage‐backed securities? A combination of their fee structure, the complexity of the bonds that they were rating, insufficient historical data, some carelessness, and market pressures proved to be a potent brew. This combination was enabled, however, by seven decades of financial regulation that, beginning in the 1930s, had conferred the force of law upon these agencies' judgments about the creditworthiness of bonds and that, since 1975, had protected the three agencies from competition. (shrink)

It is widely thought that genetic counselors should work with parents “nondirectively”: they should keep parents informed and support their decisions. But this view misconceives human decisionmaking by failing to recognize that value choices are constructed within and constrained by a community. Acknowledging that decisions involve interaction with and responsibility toward others leads to a “dialogical” model of counseling, in which genetic counselors may question and guide parents’ decisions.

This is a part of an in-depth study of a set of the manuscripts related to the Jayadrathayāmala. Taking JY.3.9 as a test-chapter, a comparative paleography analysis of the 11 manuscripts was made within READ software framework. The workflow within READ minimized the effort to make a few important discoveries (manuscripts containing more than one script, identification of the manuscripts potentially written by the same person) as well as to create an overview of the shift from Nāgarī to Newārī and, (...) finally, to Devanāgarī scripts within the history of manuscript transmission of a single chapter. Exploratory statistical analysis in R of the syllable frequency in each manuscript, based on the paleography analysis export from READ, helped to establish that there are potentially two lines of manuscript transmission of the JY.3.9. (shrink)

In the specialized area of pediatric endocrinology, the use of human growth hormone (hGH) both for children who have a growth hormone abnormality and for the treatment of non-hGH-deficient children who are short is a current clinical reality that raises important ethical questions. Generally speaking, the use of hGH for those children who are clearly lacking it is an efficacious intervention based upon established clinical criteria. The use of hGH for children who are short, but have no growth hormone abnormality (...) is ethically and clinically more controversial. The moral conundrum of how to gain knowledge about new medical treatments that may be beneficial to children while, at the same time, ethically enrolling them in clinical trials with placebo arms in order to gain such knowledge will continue to be a contentious issue in the conduct of research and in the delivery of health care. In addition, there are questions about what ought to be studied and whether a physical characteristic such as short stature ought to be viewed as a circumstance of less than optimal health. (shrink)

When people make judgments about the effects of a perturbation on populations of species in a food web, their judgments exhibit the dissipation effect: a tendency to judge that effects of the perturbation weaken or dissipate as they spread out through the food web from the locus of the perturbation. In the present research evidence for two more phenomena is reported. Terminal locations are points in the food web with just a single connection to the rest of the web. Judged (...) changes tended to be higher for species at terminal locations than for species the same distance from the perturbation but at nonterminal locations. Branches are points in the web where a route splits into two or more routes. Judged changes tended to be lower for species following branching points than for species the same distance from the perturbation but not following branching points. It is proposed that the findings can be explained as effects of a mental model employing concepts of influence and resistance. Under this model a perturbation is a change in energy level at a point in the system that acts as an influence affecting the rest of the system. The basic concepts in this model are domain‐general and on that basis it is predicted that the dissipation effect should be found in judgments of any physical system to which notions of influence and resistance can be applied. (shrink)

A simple experimental paradigm creates the powerful illusion that one is touching one’s own hand even when the two hands are separated by 15 cm. The participant uses her right hand to administer stimulation to a prosthetic hand while the Examiner provides identical stimulation to the participant’s receptive left hand. Change in felt position of the receptive hand toward the prosthetic hand has previously led to the interpretation that the participant experiences self-touch at the location of the prosthetic hand, and (...) experiences a sense of ownership of the prosthetic hand. Our results argue against this interpretation. We assessed change in felt position of the participant’s receptive hand but we also assessed change in felt position of the participant’s administering hand. Change in felt position of the administering hand was significantly greater than change in felt position of the receptive hand. Implications for theories of ownership are discussed. (shrink)

In the field of medically assisted reproduction (MAR), there is a growing emphasis on the importance of introducing new assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) only after thorough preclinical safety research, including the use of animal models. At the same time, there is international support for the three R’s (replace, reduce, refine), and the European Union even aims at the full replacement of animals for research. The apparent tension between these two trends underlines the urgency of an explicit justification of the use (...) of animals for the development and preclinical testing of new ARTs. Considering that the use of animals remains necessary for specific forms of ART research and taking account of different views on the moral importance of helping people to have a genetically related child, we argue that, in principle, the importance of safety research as part of responsible innovation outweighs the limited infringement of animal wellbeing involved in ART research. (shrink)

Managerial effort has been moving from maintaining a “steady state” to wrestling with the challenge of continuing change and the ethical dilemmas which this can present. Is it possible to formulate an “ethics of change” to guide individuals in such circumstances? The author is a senior lecturer at Cranfield University, Bedford MK43 OAL, UK, and a visiting research associate at the London School of Economics. His principal interests concern the management of organisational change in settings where technology is either the (...) key driver of change, or is the key enabler of some aspect of organisational or process redesign. (shrink)

“Men can never be free, because they’re weak, corrupt, worthless and restless. The people believe in authority; they’ve grown tired of waiting for miracle or mystery. Science is their religion; no greater explanation exists for them.” (Cigarette Smoking Man, "Talitha Cumi" The X-Files 3X24).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward an East–West Ultramontane Polyphony:On Dogma, Ecclesial Unity, and the FilioqueThomas Joseph White O.P.The book that the contributors to this symposium have commented upon with graciousness and remarkable intellectual acuity is a work consisting of four parts. There are four main claims to the book associated with these four parts, each of which is divided into sub-themes. Thus, one can denote a number of inevitably controversial ideas advanced (...) by the book. In clarifying the nature of these claims, I can initially respond to some of the main points advanced by various of the helpful review essays in this symposium.Framing the Argument of the BookThe first part of the work posits that there is a fundamental developmental continuity between Old and New Testament revelation, wherein God is revealed first to Israel as the one Creator, and subsequently in Jesus Christ as three distinct persons, the eternal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.1 This revelation is in turn received in the pre-Nicene era of the early Church, principally under a twofold conceptual format, according firstly to a model of God as a single transcendent subject of wisdom who sends his Word into the world in human nature, and inspires the prophets by his Spirit (the apologists' monotheistic model, exemplified by Justin Martyr) and, secondly, to [End Page 569] a model of economic Trinitarian activity, of the Father, Son and Spirit, who are each divine and one in being, active in sacred history (Irenaeus).2 Nicene Trinitarian authors sought in various ways to find a deeper concordance of the two approaches, one of which emphasized more the immanent unity of God (potentially tending toward a danger of Sabellianism) and the other of which emphasized real distinction of persons active in the economy (potentially tending toward the danger of subordinationism).3 Pro-Nicene figures like Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Augustine, among others, paved the way for a mature doctrine of immanent Trinitarian life, in which God was understood to be characterized, mysteriously, by eternal processions of the Word and the Spirit who originate from the Father, and receive from him the plenitude of their deity or divine nature, and thus are equally and identically the one God.4 God is mysteriously three persons who are truly one both in essence and being.The second part of the book is concerned with the theological exploration of what it means to speak of God as one, and of the divine nature of God. This determination of Christian theological wisdom stems from a threefold exigency: first, to uncover the inner unity of revelation itself, as indeed the Israelite revelation of the divine unity and the oneness of God the transcendent Creator is thematic to both Testaments;5 second, to consider the preconditions of Nicene orthodoxy, as indeed the claim that the three persons in God are one in essence or nature presupposes that there is a nature of God that is one common to the three persons;6 third, to consider what must be said about the inner life of God as truth and love, as a precondition for thinking about the processional life of the Word and Spirit, who are immanent distinct persons in God who receive and possess this fullness of life but who do not divide this one eternal life in God or cause it to evolve due to their relational proceeding.7I argue that a consideration of God's nature as simple, perfect, good, eternal, immutable, and so forth is essential to any theology that takes the biblical revelation of the unity and transcendence of God seriously, and therefore confesses the revelation of the Trinity integrally.8 Furthermore, regarding [End Page 570] the apophatic contours of this form of reflection, I hold that it is precisely in order to guarantee the kind of circumspect avoidance of "non-biblical speculation" about positive knowledge of God outside of Christ that it is necessary to qualify rightly how God is not identifiable with creation and thus remains unknown in his inner divine nature and eternal life apart from and outside of his divine self-disclosure in the revelation of the Old and New Testaments. Philosophical... (shrink)