This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the ...

Presents a guide to the basics of quantum mechanics and measurement.

Once upon a time, the twentieth-century investigations of the behaviors of sub-atomic particles were thought to have established that there can be no such thing as an objective, observer-independent, scientifically realist, empirically adequate picture of the physical world.

Albert approaches critical rationalism as an alternative to other philosophical standpoints dominant in Germany: the conceptions of the Frankfurt School, hermeneutical thinking as represented by Gadamer, analytic philosophy, and logical empiricism. The author's purpose is to find a way out of the foundationalism of classical philosophy without falling back on the skeptical views so prevalent in today's philosophical thinking. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from (...) the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

From the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience, a hugely influential book that challenged key assertions by Niels Bohr and other founders of quantum mechanics, A Guess at the Riddle provides a major metaphysical overhaul of one of physics' most intractable problems-the quest to bridge quantum and classical physics in order to understand the nature of reality.

_Time_'s 'Man of the Century', Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His theory of relativity is the most important scientific idea of the modern era. In this short book Einstein explains, using the minimum of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of the theory which has shaped the world we live in today. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

_Time_'s 'Man of the Century', Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His theory of relativity is the most important scientific idea of the modern era. In this short book Einstein explains, using the minimum of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of the theory which has shaped the world we live in today. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

Relativity is the most important scientific idea of the twentieth century. Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His Special and General theories of Relativity introduced the idea to the world. In this classic short book he explains clearly, using the minimum amount of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of his theory of Relativity. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on Relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

In this eloquent guide to the meanings of the postmodern era, Albert Borgmann charts the options before us as we seek alternatives to the joyless and artificial culture of consumption. Borgmann connects the fundamental ideas driving his understanding of society's ills to every sphere of contemporary social life, and goes beyond the language of postmodern discourse to offer a powerfully articulated vision of what this new era, at its best, has in store. "[This] thoughtful book is the first remotely (...) realistic map out of the post modern labyrinth."—Joseph Coates, _The Chicago Tribune_ "Rather astoundingly large-minded vision of the nature of humanity, civilization and science."—_Kirkus Reviews_. (shrink)

It is argued that certain recent advances in the construction of a theory of the collapses of Quantum Mechanical wave functions suggest the possibility of new and improved foundations for statistical mechanics, foundations in which epistemic considerations play no role.

The literature on ethical decision-making is rooted in a cognitive perspective that emphasizes the role of moral judgment. Recent research in interpersonal dynamics, however, has suggested that ethics revolves around an individual’s perceptions and views of others. We draw from both literatures to propose and empirically examine a contingent model. We theorize that whether the individual relies on cognitions about the ethical issue or perceptions of others depends on the level of social consensus surrounding the issue. We test our hypotheses (...) in three studies. Results suggest that not only does social consensus determine whether an individual relies on ethical cognitions about the issue or perceptions of others, but also that an individual’s view of self is an important moderator in these relationships. We conclude by considering implications of this research for theory and practice. (shrink)

Albert and De Ruiter provide an introduction to the Conversation Analytic approach to ‘repair’: the ways in which people detect and deal with troubles in speaking, hearing and understanding in conversation. They explain the basic turn‐taking structures involved, provide examples, explain recent developments in the field and highlight some important points of contact and contrast with work in the Cognitive Sciences.

Human self-consciousness operates at different levels of complexity and at least comprises five different levels of representational processes. These five levels are nonconceptual representation, conceptual representation, sentential representation, meta-representation, and iterative meta-representation. These different levels of representation can be operationalized by taking a first-person-perspective that is involved in representational processes on different levels of complexity. We refer to experiments that operationalize a first-person-perspective on the level of conceptual and meta-representational self-consciousness. Interestingly, these experiments show converging evidence for a recruitment of (...) medial cortical and parietal regions during taking a first-person-perspective, even when operating on different degrees of complexity. These data lend support for the speculative hypothesis, that there exist a neural signature for human self-consciousness that is recruited independent from the degree of representational complexity to be performed. (shrink)

We develop an exact truthmaker semantics for permission and obligation. The idea is that with every singular act, we associate a sphere of permissions and a sphere of requirements: the acts that are rendered permissible and the acts that are rendered required by the act. We propose the following clauses for permissions and obligations: -/- - a singular act is an exact truthmaker of Pφ iff every exact truthmaker of φ is in the sphere of permissibility of the act, and (...) -/- - a singular act is an exact truthmaker of Oφ iff some exact truthmaker of φ is in the sphere of requirements of the act. -/- We show that this semantics is hyperintensional, and that it can deal with some of the so-called paradoxes of deontic logic in a natural way. Finally, we give a sound and complete axiomatization of the semantics. (shrink)

What exactly do we do when we try to make sense of other people e.g. by ascribing mental states like beliefs and desires to them? After a short criticism of Theory-Theory, Interaction Theory and the Narrative Theory of understanding others as well as an extended criticism of the Simulation Theory in Goldman's recent version (2006), we suggest an alternative approach: the Person Model Theory . Person models are the basis for our ability to register and evaluate persons having mental as (...) well as physical properties. We argue that there are two kinds of person models, nonconceptual person schemata and conceptual person images , and both types of models can be developed for individuals as well as for groups. (shrink)

A many-worlds interpretation is of quantum mechanics tells us that the linear equations of motion are the true and complete laws for the time-evolution of every physical system and that the usual quantum-mechanical states provide complete descriptions of all possible physical situations. Such an interpretation, however, denies the standard way of understanding quantum-mechanical states. When the pointer on a measuring device is in a superposition of pointing many different directions, for example, we are to understand this as many pointers, each (...) in a differentworld, each pointing in a different determinate direction. We ask here whether such talk makes any genuinely intelligible sense of the term world. We conclude that it does not. (shrink)

A Quantum-Mechanical automation, equipped with mechanisms for the measurement and the recording and the prediction of certain physical properties of the world, is described. It is inquired what sort of empirical description such an automation would produce of itself. It turns out that this description would be a very novel one, one such as was never imagined in the conventional discussions of measurement.

The concept of community of persons, which focuses on both persons and the whole, helps understand solidarity. The latter is based on the social nature of persons. Community of persons and solidarity seems to be able to move away from the individualist perspective or the individualism-collectivism dichotomy. Using autopraxeography in a pragmatic constructivism epistemological paradigm, this article aims to explore how organizations can develop solidarity in a workplace. The experience presented takes place in a bank. It shows that communities of (...) persons with employees and customers are both ethical and financially efficient. These communities build a dialogue between persons and organizations. Nevertheless, it is impossible to force solidarity because it could generate derision that is contrary to the wished goal. Finally, while this model is based on solidarity, it focuses solely on internal solidarity. (shrink)

This paper compares the ethical standards reported by consumers and managers with different attachment styles (secure, preoccupied, fearful, or dismissing). We conducted two studies of consumer ethical beliefs and a third managerial survey. In Study 1, we used a questionnaire that we constructed, and in Study 2, we used the Muncy–Vitell Consumer Ethics Scale. The results in both the studies were consistent and showed that men reported a greater indifference to ethical transgressions than women. Based on the two studies, the (...) results indicate that␣among male consumers, the dismissing participants reported the greatest overall indifference to ethical transgressions and the secure participants expressed the most ethical beliefs. The two intermediate groups did not differ significantly from each other. In Study 1, none of the women consumers reported a dismissing attachment style. Women with a secure style reported more ethical beliefs than those in the other two groups. However, the sample in Study 2 included dismissing women. The dismissing women reported the greatest overall indifference to ethical transgressions and the secure women expressed the most ethical beliefs. The illegal profit subscale described the most severe ethical transgressions, and for both men and women, the secure participants were less apt than the other participants to report a willingness to transgress. In Study 3, the Newstrom and Ruch (1975, MSU Business Topics, Winter, 31) Questionnaire was administered to 227 managers. All four attachment patterns were represented among the participants of both genders. In all cases, the participants with a dismissing attachment style showed the greatest readiness to transgress. (shrink)

In this paper we describe a framework for the construction of entities that can serve as interpretations of arbitrary contiguous chunks of text. An important part of the paper is devoted to describing stacking cells, or the proposed meanings for bracket-structures.

Hans Albert is the leading critical rationalist in the German-speaking world and the main critic of the hermeneutic tradition. He is well-known for applying the idea of critical reason to various kinds of human practice, including economics, politics, and law. But he has also improved on Popper's methodology by introducing the idea of rational heuristics. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on epistemology, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of law. Most (...) of Albert's works have not been available in English. It is enormously useful to have these articles collected in a single volume. (shrink)

In this article the advent of Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology is described as a reaction against the predominantly phenomenological bias of French philosophy in the post-war years as well as against the old humanism of existentialism which seemed parochial both in its confinement to a specific tradition of western philosophy and in its lack of interest in scientific approach. Nevertheless, the paradigm of structural anthropology cannot be equated with the field of structuralism, which became a very contestable form of intellectual fashion. (...) The reception of Lévi-Strauss's theory in the English-speaking world carried on both the same enthusiasm and the same distortions and simplifications, to the extent that in the course of anti-structural criticism, the main thrust of the epistemological approach of Lévi-Strauss seems to have been lost, to the collective detriment of social sciences and anthropology. (shrink)

As one of the world's most eminent living philosophers, John Perry has covered a remarkable breadth of subjects in his published work, including semantics, indexicality, self-knowledge, personal identity, and consciousness. Looking particularly at the way in which he deals with issues of self, communication, and reality, this volume is organized in seven chapters that highlight a different aspect of Perry's work on the intersection of these subjects. A fundamental work for students and scholars, Identity, Language, and Mind explores questions that (...) are not only essential in understanding Perry's writings, but also contemporary philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss whether intuitive moral judgements have epistemic value. Are they mere expressions of irrational feelings that should be disregarded or should they be taken seriously? In section 2, I discuss the view of some social psychologists that moral intuitions are, like other social intuitions, under certain conditions more reliable than conscious deliberative judgements. In sections 3 and 4, I examine whether intuitive moral judgements can be said not to need inferential justification. I outline a concept of (...) moral intuition as a seeming whose seemingness resides in special, phenomenological features such as a felt veridicality, appropriateness, familiarity, or confidence, and whose justificatory force is influenced by the reliability of the belief-producing procedures and by a subject's competence in applying moral concepts. I argue that subjects can come to realise that the beliefs expressed in their intuitive judgements evoke a sense of non-inferential credibility. In section 5, I first discuss the contribution of moral expertise to the non-inferential credibility of a person's intuitions. Subsequently, I discuss whether Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is right in saying that we can never claim non-inferential justification for our intuitions because they are subject to all kinds of distorting influences. (shrink)

My paper aims to outline the concept of the pathic foundation of political institutions. I depart from the observation of a lack of clarity concerning the resources of institutional stability in the work of Chantal Mouffe and the proponents of agonistic democracy. Drawing from the ideas of Claude Lefort and Carl von Clausewitz, I sketch the idea that the experience of confict itself generates the moral and epistemic groundings that legitimize and stabilize its institutional regulations. It is within the pathic (...) experience of exhaustion in the face of the results of escalating confict that a common ground of legitimacy is reached. The bulk of my paper is dedicated to the phenomenological analysis of the foundational pathic experience, of the pathic disposition of political subjectivity resulting from it, and of its institutional manifestations. (shrink)

We define a rich model to be one which contains a proper elementary substructure isomorphic to itself. Existence, nonstructure, and categoricity theorems for rich models are proved. A theory T which has fewer than $\min(2^\lambda,\beth_2)$ rich models of cardinality $\lambda(\lambda > |T|)$ is totally transcendental. We show that a countable theory with a unique rich model in some uncountable cardinal is categorical in ℵ 1 and also has a unique countable rich model. We also consider a stronger notion of richness, (...) and use it to characterize superstable theories. (shrink)

Hermann Grassmann's Ausdehnungslehre of 1844 and his Lehrbuch der Arithmetik of 1861 are landmark works in mathematics; the former not only developed new mathematical fields but also both contributed to the setting of modern standards of rigor. Their very modernity, however, may obscure features of Grassmann's view of the foundations of mathematics that were not adopted since. Grassmann gave a key role to the learning of mathematics that affected his method of presentation, including his emphasis on making initial assumptions explicit. (...) In order to better understand this less well-known aspect of his work it will help to examine why some commentators have overlooked his theme of unifying logic, pedagogy and foundations, while others have recognised it. (shrink)

In a discussion of Schroedinger’s views on quantum theory John Bell says that Schroedinger did not see how “to account for particle tracks in track chambers…and more generally for the definiteness, the particularity, of experience, as compared with the indefiniteness, the waviness, of the wave function. It is the problem he had had with his cat. He thought it could not be both dead and alive. But the wave function showed no such commitment, superposing the possibilities. Either the wave function (...) as given by the Schroedinger equation is not everything or it is not right” (Bell 1987). At a recent conference Bell sermonized against the employment of “for all practical purpose” reasoning- he called it FAP reasoning-to solve this problem (Bell 1989). He argued that we should not be satisfied with any alleged solution which works “for all practical purposes” only while leaving conceptual puzzles unresolved. (shrink)

Human linguistic phenomenon is at one and the same time an individual, social, and political fact. As such, its study should bear in mind these complex interrelations, which are produced inside the framework of the sociocultural and historical ecosystem of each human community. Understanding this phenomenon is often no easy task, due to the range of elements involved and their interrelations. The absence of valid, clearly developed paradigms adds to the problem and means that the theoretical conclusions that emerge may (...) be unclear on certain points. It is true that in the last fifty years sociolinguistic studies have advanced considerably, and today we have access to an impressive set of data and a wide variety of theoretical reflections. But as a discipline sociolinguistics does not yet have unified, powerful theoretical models able to account rigorously and clearly for the phenomena it studies. Sociolinguistic studies are today a diverse set of contributions in which certain and theoretical schools and lines of research emerged; but as is to be expected in a relatively new field, there is not enough communication between the various schools and they cannot yet be said to be integrated in terms of their conceptual and theoretical postulates. Against this background, our work aims to contribute to the overall, integrated understanding of the processes of language contact. Via an interdisciplinary, eclectic approach, it also aims to aid the theoretical grounding and integration of a unified, common sociolinguistic paradigm. Our strategy will not be merely to combine the contributions from ongoing research lines, but to address the question from a more global viewpoint which, together with the more innovative contemporary scientific disciplines, permits a harmonious integration of the various sociolinguistic perspectives in a broad, deep and unitary approach to the reality. The materials used to construct this unified approach are taken from many sources: Theoretical physics, ecology, the philosophy of science and mind, anthropology, phenomenological and process sociology, cognitive sciences, political science, pragmatics, history, systems theory, approaches to complexity and obviously sociolinguistics, are all involved in a dialogue in this desire for integration. (shrink)

This book aims to contribute to the overall, integrated understanding of the processes of language contact and their evolution, be they the result of political or economic (dis)integrations or migrations or for technological reasons. Via an interdisciplinary, holistic approach, it also aims to aid the theoretical grounding of a unified, common sociolinguistic paradigm, based on an ecological and complexical perspective. This perspective is based on the fact that linguistic structures do not live in isolation from their social functions and must (...) be situated in relation to the sub- and supra-systems that determine their existence if we are to understand their fortunes. It is a contribution in understanding and promoting the processes of linguistic revitalization in the world, combining at the same time the maintenance and development of diversity while ensuring the intercommunication of human species. (shrink)

Medium-sized language communities face competition between local and global languages such as Spanish, Russian, French and, above all, English. The various regions of Spain where Catalan is spoken, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania show how their medium-sized languages (a term used to distinguish them as much from minority codes as from more widely-spoken codes) coexist alongside or struggle with their big brothers in multilingual families. This comparative analysis offers unique insight into language contact in present-day Europe.

In recent years the term ‘family language policy’ has begun to circulate in the international sociolinguistics literature (cf. Spolsky 2004, 2007, 2012, King et al. 2008; Caldas 2012; Schwartz & Verschik 2013)1. From a conceptual standpoint, however, the creation and/or use of this syntagma, applied directly to the language decisions taken by family members to speak to one another, can raise questions about whether one should apply what appears rather to be a framework that pertains to actions arising out of (...) institutionalisation, public debate, and formal decisions to a phenomenon produced ‘spontaneously’. ‘Language policy’, which is also commonly associated with the term ‘planning’, has traditionally evoked the study of actions taken by public authorities at the level of the institutional and social use of languages and of their process of decision-making, implementation and any effects on social language behaviours that may ensue. The expansion of this concept to the level of interpersonal uses in families, which corresponds to another sphere involving elements that are distinct from those of the political level or of a formally constituted organisation, can be misleading and conceal phenomena specific to this level of social reality. (shrink)