Analysis of the mechanisms underlying sex determination and sex differentiation in Drosophila has provided evidence for a complex but comprehensible regulatory hierarchy governing these developmental decisions. It is suggested here that the pattern of sexual differentiation and dosage compensation characteristic of the male is a default regulatory state. Recent results have provided, in addition, some surprising and intriguing conclusions: (1) that several of the critical controlling genes produce more transcripts than was predicted from the genetic analyses; (2) that setting of (...) the alternative sex‐specific states of the doublesex (dsx) locus involves differential transcript processing; and (3) that some aspects of sexual differentation require the prolonged action of certain elements of the regulatory hierarchy. These findings are discussed in connection with the current model of sex determination in Drosophila. (shrink)

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

As reports of genocide, terrorism, and political violence fill today’s newscasts, more attention has been given to issues of human rights—but all too often the sound bites seem overly simplistic. Many Westerners presume that non-Western peoples yearn for democratic rights, while liberal values of toleration give way to xenophobia. This book shows that the identification of rights with contemporary liberal democracy is inaccurate and questions the assumptions of many politicians and scholars that rights are self-evident in all circumstances and will (...) overcome any conflicts of thought or interest. _Rethinking Rights_ offers a radical reconsideration of the origins, nature, and role of rights in public life, interweaving perspectives of leading scholars in history, political science, philosophy, and law to emphasize rights as a natural outgrowth of a social understanding of human nature and dignity. The authors argue that every person comes to consciousness in a historical and cultural milieu that must be taken into account in understanding human rights, and they describe the omnipresence of concrete, practical rights in their historical, political, and philosophical contexts. By rooting our understanding of rights in both history and the order of existence, they show that it is possible to understand rights as essential to our lives as social beings but also open to refinement within communities. An initial group of essays retraces the origins and historical development of rights in the West, assessing the influence of such thinkers as Locke, Burke, and the authors of the Declaration of Independence to clarify the experience of rights within the Western tradition. A second group addresses the need to rethink our understanding of the nature of existence if we are to understand rights and their place in any decent life, examining the ontological basis of rights, the influence of custom on rights, the social nature of the human person, and the importance of institutional rights. Steering a middle course between radical individualist and extreme egalitarian views, _Rethinking Rights_ proposes a new philosophy of rights appropriate to today’s world, showing that rights need to be rethought in a manner that brings them back into accord with human nature and experience so that they may again truly serve the human good. By engaging both the history of rights in the West and the multicultural challenge of rights in an international context, _Rethinking Rights_ offers a provocative and coherent new argument to advance the field of rights studies. (shrink)

This volume contains ten new essays on a priori knowledge by authors from Canada, the United States, Australia, & Europe Topics addressed include the nature, explanation, & indispensability of a priori knowledge, its connection with analytic truth, its place in mathematics, in logic, & in empirical theory, & the contribution of Kant & Quine to these topics. The focus is on twentieth-century contributions to these issues, but most essays also address earlier discussions at some length, & the essays that focus (...) on Kant also relate his views to more recent discussions. Contents: Introduction. A Rationalist Manifesto. Analyticity, Undeniability, & Truth. Analyticity & the A Priori. The Doubtful A Priori. Some Remarks on Indiscernibility. The Constitutive A Priori. Kant's A Priori Methods for Recognising Necessary Truths. EPR as A Priori Science. Gaps, Gluts, & Paradox. An Essay on Material Necessity. (shrink)

People use commonsense science knowledge to flexibly explain, predict, and manipulate the world around them, yet we lack computational models of how this commonsense science knowledge is represented, acquired, utilized, and revised. This is an important challenge for cognitive science: Building higher order computational models in this area will help characterize one of the hallmarks of human reasoning, and it will allow us to build more robust reasoning systems. This paper presents a novel assembled coherence theory of human conceptual change, (...) whereby people revise beliefs and mental models by constructing and evaluating explanations using fragmentary, globally inconsistent knowledge. We implement AC theory with Timber, a computational model of conceptual change that revises its beliefs and generates human-like explanations in commonsense science. Timber represents domain knowledge using predicate calculus and qualitative model fragments, and uses an abductive model formulation algorithm to construct competing explanations for phenomena. Timber then scores competing explanations with respect to previously accepted beliefs, using a cost function based on simplicity and credibility, identifies a low-cost, preferred explanation and accepts its constituent beliefs, and then greedily alters previous explanation preferences to reduce global cost and thereby revise beliefs. Consistency is a soft constraint in Timber; it is biased to select explanations that share consistent beliefs, assumptions, and causal structure with its other, preferred explanations. In this paper, we use Timber to simulate the belief changes of students during clinical interviews about how the seasons change. We show that Timber produces and revises a sequence of explanations similar to those of the students, which supports the psychological plausibility of AC theory. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of the important role which an obligation to provide reasons can play in avoiding some of the systematic difficulties encountered in the theory of rational social choice. The paper builds on some of the insights offered by theories of structure-induced equilibrium. It argues that the obligation to provide reasons for certain choices, reasons which must be articulated and structured around a set of generally shared and publicly comprehensible categories of thought, can serve to make the (...) space of possible choices "concept-sensitive" in a very useful way. Concept-sensitivity has the effect of restricting certain movements within the choice space so that some of the difficulties for achieving an equilibrium in social choice, difficulties which arise out of an excess of rational doing, are avoided. The resulting equilibrium is path dependent, of course, but because it is dependent on a choice path which "makes sense" (or is ordered by thought precisely because it is concept-sensitive), it is not the sort of arbitrary path dependent social choice which was of such concern to Kenneth Arrow in his original Nobel prize winning work. The paper illustrates its points with examples taken from the law. The law is a method of making social choices which emphasizes (in a very self-conscious way, and one which has no parallel either in politics or the market) the justificatory significance of the obligation to give publicly accountable reasons which attend to those issues arising in an ordered way out of a highly structured adjudicative process. Thus, the paper has as one of its ambitions the bringing together of two accounts of rational decision-making which, to this point at least, have not had much contact, namely, the theory of rational social choice and the theory of legal reasoning. (shrink)

Legal decision-making emphasizes, in a very self-conscious way, the justificatory significance of reasons. This paper argues that the obligation to provide reasons for choices, which must be articulated and structured around a set of generally shared and publicly comprehensible categories of thought, can serve to make the space of possible choices ‘concept sensitive’ in a very useful way. In particular, concept sensitivity has the effect of restricting certain movements within the choice space so that some of the systematic difficulties in (...) achieving an equilibrium in social choice which arise out of an excess of rational doing are avoided. The resulting equilibrium is path dependent. But because it is dependent on a choice path which ‘makes sense’ (or is ordered by thought precisely because it is concept sensitive), it is not the sort of arbitary path-dependent social choice which originally concerned Kenneth Arrow. This paper illustrates these points with examples from criminal law procedure, contract law and constitutional law. (shrink)

As readers of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics undoubtedly know, edited books can be highly uneven in their quality, with some chapters excelling in content, depth, and readability while others languish in mediocrity. Volumes in an annually issued series run an even greater risk of suffering the plague of inferiority, especially after many years of fame and success. End-of-Life Ethics: A Case Study Approach clearly overcomes these maladies and provides readers with an excellent collection of well-written, thought-provoking essays.The Hospice Foundation of (...) America launched its annual bereavement teleconference two decades ago, publishing a book each year to accompany that educational event. Dubbed the “Living with Grief” series, every volume includes chapters written by a diversity of clinicians and scholars in the care of the dying and bereaved. The series has been unique in its approach to bridge scholarly understandings with practical clinical application.This volume takes a unique .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the PublicPaul StobIn Deliberation Day, Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin argue for the creation of a national holiday, "Deliberation Day," in which citizens come together over a two-day period in their local schools and community centers to deliberate over the merits of presidential candidates and their platforms (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004). While Ackerman and Fishkin propose that the government (...) pay each citizen a $150 stipend for voluntary participation, the purpose is not so much to monetarily to reward citizens for "showing up" as it is to foster an enriched civic culture that would send shockwaves through America's political infrastructure: "If Deliberation Day succeeded, everything else would change: the candidates, the media, the activists, the interest groups, the spin doctors, the advertisers, the pollsters, the fund raisers, the lobbyists, the political parties. All would have no choice but to adapt to a more attentive and informed public" (3). The task of Deliberation Day would be to create a new social context in which citizens could become enlightened through public participation. As the authors conclude the book, "We can, through an act of political imagination, create new institutions for redeeming the ancient promise of democratic citizenship. Ordinary men and women need not be the hapless playthings of the powerful. They can and must find new ways to hold their leaders to account, and redeem their dignity as human beings by responsibly shaping their collective destiny" (219).Ackerman and Fishkin's proposal is indeed filled with political imagination. I bring their proposal to light not to critique the possibilities and limitations of Deliberation Day, but to understand the way in which the authors understand "the public." At the bottom, what the polity needs, Ackerman and Fishkin believe, is a public space dedicated to the reinvigoration [End Page 226] of political culture. It is not that the citizenry is incapable of hammering out intelligent political solutions, but that it needs access to social contexts that facilitate deliberation and the emergence of a common good. To foster a culture of political intelligence, the public needs only the chance to enter the forums that will facilitate thorough, cooperative political decision-making.Ackerman and Fishkin are not alone in calling for access to or creation of these types of forums. Habermas's bourgeois public sphere—a public space in which citizens could come together and rationally debate the activities of the state—essentially represents the evolution of a context, a social space, a public arena (Habermas 1989). The bourgeois public sphere is meant to be egalitarian, providing citizens a forum in which to debate openly and foster a common political consciousness.1 But this sphere has proved problematic for a number of scholars. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993), for example, propose a proletarian public sphere to counter capitalism's socioeconomic domination over public resources. Joan Landes (1988) argues that the bourgeois public sphere entails male domination in public life, to the exclusion of women. Nancy Fraser (1992) builds on the feminist critique by adopting the term "counterpublics," collectives of citizens—women, peasants, the working class, and other groups demarcated by issues of race, gender, and ethnicity—that arise in reaction to the dominant public sphere.2In the introduction to Counterpublics and the State (2001), Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer argue that critiques of the bourgeois public sphere specifically and public sphere theory generally amount to three "reconfigurations" in the way in which scholars think of the public. First, scholars have come to recognize the existence and interaction of multiple public spheres. Second, they have come to acknowledge permeable boundaries of access to the multiple public spheres. Third, scholars have come to recognize the dynamic role of the state in shaping public discourse. One considerable result of these three reconfigurations is an increasing recognition of the political divisions that permeate society (Asen and Brouwer 2001, 17-25).If Asen and Brouwer are right, and I think they are, these three reconfigurations represent the general thrust of contemporary public sphere scholarship, including as it is understood among communication scholars.3 And however diverse such scholarship may be, a few common themes seem to recur across... (shrink)

La noción de interpretación desarrollada en el racionalismo crítico de Karl R. Popper muestra atributos específicos que la distinguen de modo sustancial de la interpretación constitutiva de la experiencia que tanto N. R. Hanson como Th. Kuhn defienden en sus respectivas propuestas. Se muestra que la interpretación del modelo popperiano queda atrapada en una epistemología de corte empirista que la separa de modo radical de toda hermenéutica filosófica. The notion of interpretation developed in the critical rationalism of Karl R. (...) Popper displays specific attributes that substantially distinguish it from the constituent interpretation of experience defended in both N. R. Hanson and T. Kuhn proposals. The article shows that the interpretation of Popper's model is trapped in an empiricist epistemology that radically separates it from all hermeneutic philosophy. (shrink)

Since the introduction of mathematical population genetics, its machinery has shaped our fundamental understanding of natural selection. Selection is taken to occur when differential fitnesses produce differential rates of reproductive success, where fitnesses are understood as parameters in a population genetics model. To understand selection is to understand what these parameter values measure and how differences in them lead to frequency changes. I argue that this traditional view is mistaken. The descriptions of natural selection rendered by population genetics models are (...) in general neither predictive nor explanatory and introduce avoidable conceptual confusions. I conclude that a correct understanding of natural selection requires explicitly causal models of reproductive success. *Received May 2006; revised December 2006. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Kansas State University, 201 Dickens Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506; e‐mail: [email protected] . (shrink)

It is widely agreed among broadly Anselmian theists that God is in some sense the 'delimiter of possibilities.' In other words, the scope of possibility is explained by the manner in which the universe emanates from God. However, existing accounts of God's role here—in terms of freedom, choice, or power—face serious difficulties. The present paper provides a new account of God's role as the delimiter of possibilities in terms of the different manner in which the non-actuality of non-actual states of (...) affairs is explained. Intuitively and metaphorically, we can think of the menu of states of affairs being 'whittled down' in successive stages of a process of divine decision-making, with the different species of impossibility corresponding to when and how the states of affairs are ruled out. I argue that this approach provides genuine contingency while also preserving the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (shrink)

Physicians generally recommend that patients resuscitated with naloxone after opioid overdose stay in the emergency department for a period of observation in order to prevent harm from delayed sequelae of opioid toxicity. Patients frequently refuse this period of observation despiteenefit to risk. Healthcare providers are thus confronted with the challenge of how best to protect the patient’s interests while also respecting autonomy, including assessing whether the patient is making an autonomous choice to refuse care. Previous studies have shown that physicians (...) have widely divergent approaches to navigating these conflicts. This paper reviews what is known about the effects of opioid use disorder on decision-making, and argues that some subset of these refusals are non-autonomous choices, even when patients appear to have decision making capacity. This conclusion has several implications for how physicians assess and respond to patients refusing medical recommendations after naloxone resuscitation. (shrink)

The Halpern–Läuchli theorem, a combinatorial result about trees, admits an elegant proof due to Harrington using ideas from forcing. In an attempt to distill the combinatorial essence of this proof, we isolate various partition principles about products of perfect Polish spaces. These principles yield straightforward proofs of the Halpern–Läuchli theorem, and the same forcing from Harrington’s proof can force their consistency. We also show that these principles are not ZFC theorems by showing that they put lower bounds on the size (...) of the continuum. (shrink)

Offers a compelling vision of how to achieve and conduct a liberal but democratic society through the ideal of Neutrality--between people and ideas of the good--and using the tool of Neutral dialogue.

The most successful theory in all of science--and the basis of one third of our economy--says the strangest things about the world and about us. Can you believe that physical reality is created by our observation of it? Physicists were forced to this conclusion, the quantum enigma, by what they observed in their laboratories. Trying to understand the atom, physicists built quantum mechanics and found, to their embarrassment, that their theory intimately connects consciousness with the physical world. Quantum Enigma explores (...) what that implies and why some founders of the theory became the foremost objectors to it. Schrodinger showed that it "absurdly" allowed a cat to be in a "superposition" simultaneously dead and alive. Einstein derided the theory's "spooky interactions." With Bell's Theorem, we now know Schrodinger's superpositions and Einstein's spooky interactions indeed exist. Authors Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain all of this in non-technical terms with help from some fanciful stories and bits about the theory's developers. They present the quantum mystery honestly, with an emphasis on what is and what is not speculation. Physics' encounter with consciousness is its skeleton in the closet. Because the authors open the closet and examine the skeleton, theirs is a controversial book. Quantum Enigma's description of the experimental quantum facts, and the quantum theory explaining them, is undisputed. Interpreting what it all means, however, is controversial. Every interpretation of quantum physics encounters consciousness. Rosenblum and Kuttner therefore turn to exploring consciousness itself--and encounter quantum physics. Free will and anthropic principles become crucial issues, and the connection of consciousness with the cosmos suggested by some leading quantum cosmologists is mind-blowing. Readers are brought to a boundary where the particular expertise of physicists is no longer a sure guide. They will find, instead, the facts and hints provided by quantum mechanics and the ability to speculate for themselves. (shrink)

Generic language (e.g., “tigers have stripes”) leads children to assume that the referenced category (e.g., tigers) is inductively informative and provides a causal explanation for the behavior of individual members. In two preregistered studies with 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 497), we considered the mechanisms underlying these effects by testing how correcting generics might affect the development of these beliefs about novel social and animal kinds (Study 1) and about gender (Study 2). Correcting generics by narrowing their scope to (...) a single individual limited beliefs that the referenced categories could explain what their members would be like while broadening the scope to a superordinate category (Study 2) uniquely limited endorsement of gender norms. Across both studies, correcting generics did not alter beliefs about feature heritability and had mixed effects on inductive inferences, suggesting that additional mechanisms (e.g., causal reasoning about shared features) contribute to the development of full-blown essentialist beliefs. These results help illuminate the mechanisms by which generics lead children to view categories as having rich inductive and causal potential; in particular, they suggest that children interpret generics as signals that speakers in their community view the referenced categories as meaningful kinds that support generalization. The findings also point the way to concrete suggestions for how adults can effectively correct problematic generics (e.g., gender stereotypes) that children may hear in daily life. (shrink)

We have been discussing some of the fundamental features of the classical calculus of probability. The equiprobability of rival events was seen to be a major assumption of the calculus. Moreover, it is an assumption which the pure mathematician need not bother to justify. He need only present his formal system as follows.

The current studies (N = 255, children ages 4–5 and adults) explore patterns of age‐related continuity and change in conceptual representations of social role categories (e.g., “scientist”). In Study 1, young children's judgments of category membership were shaped by both category labels and category‐normative traits, and the two were dissociable, indicating that even young children's conceptual representations for some social categories have a “dual character.” In Study 2, when labels and traits were contrasted, adults and children based their category‐based induction (...) decisions on category‐normative traits rather than labels. Study 3 confirmed that children reason based on category‐normative traits because they view them as an obligatory part of category membership. In contrast, adults in this study viewed the category‐normative traits as informative on their own (not only as a cue to obligations). Implications for continuity and change in representations of social role categories will be discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In 2010,Business Ethics Quarterlypublished ten articles that considered the potential contributions to business ethics research arising from recent scholarship in a variety of philosophical and social scientific fields (strategic management, political philosophy, restorative justice, international business, legal studies, ethical theory, ethical leadership studies, organization theory, marketing, and corporate governance and finance). Here we offer short responses to those articles by members ofBusiness Ethics Quarterly’s editorial board and editorial team.

Argues that the explanation of man's social and cultural differences is best defined by history, not human biology, maintaining that humans shape their social lives by their historical activities.

Motivated by a characterization of weakly compact cardinals due to Todorcevic, we introduce a new cardinal characteristic, the C-sequence number, which can be seen as a measure of the compactness of a regular uncountable cardinal. We prove a number of ZFC and independence results about the C-sequence number and its relationship with large cardinals, stationary reflection, and square principles. We then introduce and study the more general C-sequence spectrum and uncover some tight connections between the C-sequence spectrum and the strong (...) coloring principle U(. . .), introduced in Part I of this series. (shrink)

We investigate questions involving Aronszajn trees, square principles, and stationary reflection. We first consider two strengthenings of introduced by Brodsky and Rinot for the purpose of constructing κ‐Souslin trees. Answering a question of Rinot, we prove that the weaker of these strengthenings is compatible with stationary reflection at κ but the stronger is not. We then prove that, if μ is a singular cardinal, implies the existence of a special ‐tree with a cf(μ)‐ascent path, thus answering a question of Lücke.