This study aims at investigating vagueness in Security Council Resolutions by focussing on a selection of nouns and phrases used as the main casus belli for the Second Gulf War. Analysing a corpus of Security Council Resolutions relating to the conflict, the study leads a qualitative and quantitative analysis drawing upon Mellinkoff’s theories on “weasel words”, which are “words and expressions with a very flexible meaning, strictly dependent on context and interpretation”. Special attention is devoted to the historical/political consequences (...) of such vague and indeterminate expressions. The findings indicate that excessive vagueness might have led to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of the Resolutions, triggering the Iraqi conflict instead of a diplomatic solution. The analysis of the “weasel words” used in the Resolutions suggests the double-faced strength of such expressions: though they can guaranteed a wide degree of applicability of the Resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation and elusiveness, with the overall legislative intent of using intentional vagueness as a political strategy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Spirituality":"Weasel-Word" or Gateway to New Understanding?Peter Gilbert (bio)Keywordsspirituality, faith communities, NIMHEVisiting the Samuel Palmer Exhibition at the British Museum, I was struck, not only by the spiritual power of the paintings, especially in the late Shoreham period such as, my favorite: The Magic Apple Tree (circa 1830)—but how Palmer appeared to bring both Christian and Pantheistic themes into his work. The museum's exhibition collator remarks that Palmer saw (...) the fruitfulness of the earth as an intimation of Divine creativity. The artist sought to capture "The essential vivifying spirit, vital spark" (Palmer's words) of the physical world in which we live.I was reminded as I moved from The Magic Apple Tree, to In a Shoreham Garden, and The Golden Valley, how these paintings had been used by a record company when they had issued all of Ralph Vaughan Williams' orchestral and choral works in the 1970s, to mark his anniversary. Vaughan Williams was not a signed up Christian, but many of his choral works express a strong yearning for the transcendent using Christian imagery. The day before I visited the Palmer exhibition, I listened to Professor Robert Winston on Start the Week (28th November, 2005), in which he spoke of his BBC series The Story of God (Winston, 2005). As a scientist, Winston is intrigued as to why humans seek the transcendent. He continually refers to this desired other as "God," although I think it would be more accurate to call it a search for the transcendent. Winston puzzles over why there appears to be "a God-shaped hole" within humanity (Start the Week, November, 28, 2005), and again, as a scientist, postulates that: "the more we understand about science, the less we understand about the Universe."In the light of the most popular films and books at present, the search for something beyond ourselves appears to be very much at the center, rather than at the periphery of humanity's consciousness at the present time. Reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and reading his various essays, we are struck by his articulation of the human search:We need a story, a myth that does what the traditional religious stories did. It must explain. It must satisfy our hunger for a Why... There are two kinds of Why, and our story must deal with both. There's the one that asks What brought us here? and the other that asks What are we here for?(Pullman, 2001)The author's article is very helpful in its practical approach to psychotherapy and spirituality. I particularly liked her reference to the work of Charles Corr (1991) and his work with people [End Page 197] who are dying and considering the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of the last days. The spiritual aspects being around identifying, developing, or reaffirming spiritual sources of energy and hope. This is the kind of approach that the National Institute for Mental Health in England (NIMHE) national Project on Spirituality and Mental Health has been engaged in since 2001, the approach being to stress the spiritual dimension as an integral part of a whole person and whole systems approach to mental health; work with mental health services and their partners to engage with this agenda; and work toward a better understanding between faith communities and mental health services (see Gilbert and Nicholls, 2003). Service users and their carers are increasingly stating strongly to services that they wish to have their spiritual dimension and spiritual needs addressed properly—and certainly not in a "tick-box" method! The author quotes Samson and Zerter (2003) as saying that the person's spiritual dimension "draws a thread of identity, relationship, meaning and purpose, which weave through each of these aspects" (i.e. the life events and other aspects of their being).I welcome the author's stress on a "relational approach," and her breadth of reference, for example, the diary of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and philosopher, but I had some concerns about her use of the term personal theology, and talk of the personal aspect of religion and "the Divine," in that I think that this could... (shrink)

What is the role of chance in scientific discovery? And, more to the point, if chance plays a key role in scientific discovery, what room is left for reason? These are grounding questions in the debates, for instance, over whether there is a distinction to be made between discovery and justification in science, and whether innate genius must play a role in discovery or if there exists some method that can be taught to anyone. While the role of chance has (...) been discussed throughout the history of science, it has resurfaced in recent debates over how science should be funded, and particularly in the field of biomedical research. The word serendipity, for example, has become increasingly... (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called 'euphemism'. Euphemisms create emotional distance and thus provide a level of comfort and ease when discussing a topic that is sensitive, difficult, or disturbing. In some instances, euphemisms are intentionally used to sway people's opinions or emotions to a particular side, as in the example of politicians' referring to the anti‐abortion position as “pro‐life”, torture techniques as “enhanced interrogation”, or the non‐combatants civilians who die during armed conflict (...) as “collateral damage”. Euphemisms are fallacious because they are intentionally used to conceal the truth and obscure any real meaning; they are soft language used to mask or downplay warranted emotional force. Being ambiguous or vague in meaning brands euphemisms as a type of weasel word. Using honest, direct language and making sure the neutrality deployed is accurate is the best way to avoid euphemisms and weasel wording. (shrink)

Evolution can be a “weasel word” unless circumscribed to mean only a morphological change over time. When this is done, the fact of what can be distinguished from the faith of how. I believe that evolution is purely a natural process, but recognizing that everyone creates his or her own God, I feel justified in giving the name God to that mysterious presence in every interaction that causes transformation, since this is what gives the universe its dynamism. I relate (...) how this God concept informs my religious and ethical life and gives my life meaning and purpose. (shrink)

In his review of Chris Daly’s book Philosophical Methods, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa debates with Daly over the value of using the word “tension,” which Daly describes as a weasel word. Ichikawa disagrees. I raise a worry that Ichikawa’s response will not convince Daly and try to help Ichikawa out. Then I outline a traditional empiricist objection to Daly.

This stuff is everywhere -- The damage that it does -- On weasel words -- Building your own bullshitometer -- Noble monkeys: where we all came from -- The wonderful power of woo -- Bugs, bodies: mysteries of medicine -- Implacable foes of reason: the antivaxers -- No hoax: the truth about climate change -- That isn't exactly how it went: faking history -- Coprolite claims: faking archaeology -- All the news that's fit to fake.

In this article, I maintain that (1) Sartre's views on violence are ambivalent and (2) Sartre sometimes justifies violence. More specifically, I attempt to establish the misreadings by Michael Fleming and Marguerite LaCaze (on whom Fleming relies) of both my writing and Sartre's in these regards. Each, by arguing that, for Sartre, violence is “sometimes acceptable” or “functionally necessary” or “understandable,” but not morally justifiable, is ignoring Sartre's tendency at times to skirt the issue of justifiability by employing “weasel (...) words” that amount to justification. Both critics seem to forget that Sartre says that, on occasion, violence “could be called just” ( qu'on pourrait appeler juste ), especially in conditions of last resort defense against oppression, in which case violence, according to Sartre, can restore and regenerate the oppressed. Further, although I acknowledge Fleming's noteworthy emphasis on “structural violence,” I offer considerable counterevidence against his (and LaCaze's) claim that I ignore or slight Sartre's concern for it. I argue, on Sartrean grounds, against his (and Zizek's) claim that structural violence can be purely objective. Finally, I contend that in arguing that Sartre's views are not strictly ambivalent, Fleming, following LaCaze, makes the error of equating “consistency” with not being ambivalent. (shrink)

What is ‘humpty-dumptying’? Do ‘arguments from analogy’ ever stand up? How do I know when someone is using ‘weasel words’? What’s the difference between a ‘red herring’ and a ‘straw man’? This superb book, now in its third edition, will help anyone who wants to argue well and think critically. Using witty and topical examples, this fully-updated edition includes many new entries and updates the whole text. New entries include: Principle of Charity Lawyer’s Answer Least Worst Option Poisoning the (...) Well Sentimentality Sunk Cost Fallacy Weasel Words ‘You would say that wouldn’t you’. _Thinking from A to Z_ may not help you win every argument, but it will definitely give you the power to tell a good one from a bad one. (shrink)

What is ‘humpty-dumptying’? Do ‘arguments from analogy’ ever stand up? How do I know when someone is using ‘weasel words’? What’s the difference between a ‘red herring’ and a ‘straw man’? This superb book, now in its third edition, will help anyone who wants to argue well and think critically. Using witty and topical examples, this fully-updated edition includes many new entries and updates the whole text. New entries include: Principle of Charity Lawyer’s Answer Least Worst Option Poisoning the (...) Well Sentimentality Sunk Cost Fallacy Weasel Words ‘You would say that wouldn’t you’. _Thinking from A to Z_ may not help you win every argument, but it will definitely give you the power to tell a good one from a bad one. (shrink)

Over the last few years the diplomatic language of UN resolutions has repeatedly been questioned for the excessive presence of vagueness. The use of vague terms could be connected to the genre of diplomatic texts, as resolutions should be applicable to every international contingency and used to mitigate tensions between different legal cultures. However, excessive vagueness could also lead to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of resolutions, undermining their legal impact and triggering conflicts instead of diplomatic solutions. This study aims (...) at investigating intentional vagueness in Security Council resolutions, by focussing on the analysis of the resolutions relating to the second Gulf war. Using the qualitative Discourse-Historical approach (Wodak in Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism, Taylor & Francis Ltd., London [2000]) and quantitative analysis tools (Antconc and Sketch Engine), special attention is given to the historical/political consequences of the vagueness and indeterminacy used in that framework and to the study of vague ‘weasel words’ (Mellinkoff in The language of the law, Little, Brown & Company, Boston [1963]), modals, and adjectives contained in the corpus. The hypothesis of intentional vagueness is further reinforced through an analysis of the US legislation related to the outbreak of the war, to reveal how the US has legally interpreted UN legislation and to understand the purposes and consequences of vague language contained in it. The findings indicate that vagueness in resolutions has triggered the Iraqi conflict instead of diplomatic solutions with the overall legislative intent of using intentional vagueness as a political strategy. (shrink)

Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu, “. . .Your words ... are too big and useless, and so everyone alike spurns them!”Chuang Tzu said, “Maybe you’ve never seen a wildcat or a weasel. It crouches down and hides, watching for something to come along. It leaps and races east and west, not hesitating to go high or low—until it falls into the trap and dies in the net. Then again there’s the yak, big as a cloud covering the sky. (...) It certainly knows how to be big, though it doesn’t know how to catch rats.” 1 One could perhaps understand, if not empathize with, Hui Tzu’s impatience in the dialogue above. Hui Tzu, after all, is not alone in finding Chuang Tzu’s philosophy, which would be the thinking of the Way .. (shrink)

I frequently have trouble with words that other people use with what seems to be blithe understanding (friends tell me that the problem is that I think too much about words, but I find that not thinking doesn't really seem to help). In the case of `tolerance', though, I have no trouble at all - it's a wishy-washy weasel, a mealy-mouthed mink of a word. I suppose I don't want to claim that it has no decent place in the (...) language at all. I'm not particularly worried, for example, about our tolerating bad dramatic or musical performances by friends, close relatives, or children, nor about our tolerating the short tempers of those under great stress, and so on. What concerns me is the notion of tolerance that is so often to be found floating in the nebulous rhetoric of morality, both public and private. (shrink)

Winner of the National Business Book Award From the New York Times bestselling author of The Organized Mind and This Is Your Brain on Music, a primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than ever We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process—especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written (...) reports, revealing the ways lying weasels can use them. It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, and distortions from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical information and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren't. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. Readers learn to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. Levitin's charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren't so. And catch some weasels in their tracks! (shrink)

Despite the development of a vast body of literature pertaining to feminism and science, examples of how feminist phifosophies might be applied to scientific theories and practice have been limited. Moreover, most scientists remain unfamiliar with how feminism pertains to their work. Using the example of the immune system, this paper applies three feminist epistemologies feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernismtoassess competingchims of immune function within a feminist context.

This paper investigates the mutual embeddedness of “nature” and “culture,” as well as the intersections between race, gender, and sexuality, in the story of the HeLa cell line as viewed by a practicing feminist scientist. It provides a feminist analysis of the scientific discourse surrounding the HeLa cell line, and explores how feminist theories of science can provide a constructive and critical lens through which laboratory scientists can view their work.

: This paper investigates the mutual embeddedness of "nature" and "culture," as well as the intersections between race, gender, and sexuality, in the story of the HeLa cell line as viewed by a practicing feminist scientist. It provides a feminist analysis of the scientific discourse surrounding the HeLa cell line, and explores how feminist theories of science can provide a constructive and critical lens through which laboratory scientists can view their work.

: Despite the development of a vast body of literature pertaining to feminism and science, examples of how feminist philosophies might be applied to scientific theories and practice have been limited. Moreover, most scientists remain unfamiliar with how feminism pertains to their work. Using the example of the immune system, this paper applies three feminist epistemologies--feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism--to assess competing claims of immune function within a feminist context.

This essential text contains contributions from a wide range of fields and provides role models for feminist scientists. Including chapters from scientists and feminist scholars, the book presents a wide range of feminist science studies scholarship-from autobiographical narratives and experimental and theoretical projects, to teaching tools and courses and community-based projects.

is an extension of public announcement logic. It is based on a modal operator that expresses what is true after any arbitrary announcement. An incorrect Truth Lemma has been stated and ‘demonstrated’ in Balbiani et al. . In this paper, we put right the wording and the proof of the Truth Lemma for.

In Mind and World and related works, John McDowell attempts to offer us an understanding of the relation between our experience of the world and our wording of it. In arguing for this understanding, McDowell sees himself as engaged in a Wittgensteinian exorcism of a philosophical puzzlement; and his aim is to recover for us a truly satisfying way of conceiving of the relation between our words and our world. Taking my bearing from Stanley Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein, in (...) which, as I argue, the notion of 'the point of an utterance' plays a central role, I develop a criticism of McDowell on two levels. First, I try to show that McDowell fails to lead his words - 'experience', 'seeing', 'judging', 'claiming', and others - back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. His use of these words is still controlled by a particular picture of our relation to the world, rather than by our everyday criteria. Second, I argue that the picture controlling McDowell's account of our wording of our world is one in which the question concerning the point of putting something into words is being repressed. McDowell proposes that our experience 'contains claims', in the sense that it provides us with the very same content that a claim, or a judgment, might have. I argue that, given the philosophical work that McDowell intends such formulations to perform, the 'innocent' understanding that he aims to recover for us betokens a failure to attend to the conditions that allow our words to express, or otherwise carry, any determinate content.Not: 'How can I describe what I see?' but 'What does one call "description of what is seen"'? (Wittgenstein). Wittgenstein (1980a), remark 981. (shrink)

BackgroundSurveys on attitudes towards assisted dying play an important role in informing public debate, policy and legislation. Unfortunately, surveys are often designed with insufficient attention to framing effects; that is, effects on the respondents’ stated attitudes caused by question wording and context. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate and measure such framing effects. MethodsSurvey experiment in which an eight-question survey on attitudes towards assisted dying was distributed to Norwegian citizens through a web-based panel. Two variations of question (...) wording as well as two variations of question order were employed. Respondents were randomized to receive one of four questionnaire versions. ResultsThree thousand and fifty responses were received. There were moderate to large question wording and question order effects. A majority of Norwegian citizens favour the legalization of assisted dying for patients with terminal or chronic disease. ConclusionsStakeholders in the assisted dying debate need to acknowledge potential framing effects, and accordingly should interpret survey results with caution. The same holds for researchers who conduct attitude surveys in the field of bioethics. (shrink)

Uvodjenje veronauke i 'gradjanskog vaspitanja' u prve razrede osnovnih i srednjih skola u Srbiji 2001. godine izazvalo je brojne kontroverze u javnosti. Ova odluka drzavnih vlasti sprovedena je uprkos argumentovanom protivljenju strucne javnosti i dosta podeljenim stavovima u javnom mnjenju. U tekstu su prikazani rezultati jednog istrazivanja javnog mnjenja koji ukazuju na ambivalentne stavove o ovom pitanju.

Heraclitus B 126 D.-K. occurs in a scholion on Tzetzes' commentary on the Iliad. According to the first edition by G. Hermann on which all editors of Heraclitus have based their text, it reads as follows: τ ψυχρ θρεται, θερμν ψχεται, γρν αανεται, καραλον νοτζεται.

CO. Brink's discussion of these lines takes five pages in the body of his commentary, and is continued in an appendix of nine pages at the end. But the passage has for so long caused such sore vexation that his treatment of it seems actually compendious rather than long, and deserves our gratitude. With the main part of his solution, which is to understand communia as ‘generalities to which individual features must be given’, I fully agree.

According to the indispensability argument, the fact that we quantify over numbers, sets and functions in our best scientific theories gives us reason for believing that such objects exist. I examine a strategy to dispense with such quantification by simply replacing any given platonistic theory by the set of sentences in the nominalist vocabulary it logically entails. I argue that, as a strategy, this response fails: for there is no guarantee that the nominalist world that go beyond the set of (...) sentences in the nominalist language such theories entail. However, I argue that what such theories show is that mathematics can enable us to express possibilities about the concrete world that may not be expressible in nominalistically acceptable language. While I grant that this may make quantification over abstracta indispensable, I deny that such indispensability is a reason for accepting them into our ontology. I urge that the nominalist should be allowed to quantify over abstracta whilst denying their existence and I explain how this apparently contradictory practice (a practice I call 'weaseling') is in fact coherent, unproblematic and rational. Finally, I examine the view that platonistic theories are simpler or more attractive than their nominalistic reformulations, and thus that abstract ought to be accepted into our ontology for the same sorts of reasons as other theoretical objects. I argue that, at least in the case of numbers, functions and sets, such arguments misunderstand the kind of simplicity and attractiveness we seek. (shrink)