After a mild indoctrination into the Christian faith, at the age of 15 I discovered myself to be a non-believer: the idea of an invisible, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God suddenly seemed simply unbelievable. Years later I decided to re-examine the question. Perhaps I had missed something. This in turn led to a fascination with God questions and religious belief, but a re-confirmation of my earlier discovery: the traditional Christian concept of God was not only unbelievable, but incoherent and morally muddled. (...) But further reflection has yielded a qualifying conclusion: God—or rather gods, many gods—do exist but as ideas, tremendously powerful ideas that shape our reality. The crucial concern is that these be good ideas, which has not always been the case. (shrink)

Sponsored by the Argentine Association for the Progress of Sciences, Ciencia e Investigación magazine released its first issue in 1945. In order to circulate the discoveries in the areas of medical and natural sciences, and to instruct on scientific thought, the magazine was introduced as a knowledge disseminating one and attempted to address a general audience. However, during its first publication decade the CEI editors faced two challenges related to scientific communication. On the one hand, they exhibited the conflicts implied (...) in research writing and the typical conditions of the language of science. On the other, they manifested their interest to bestow a discursive style on the magazine which, although simple and oriented to a wide audience, would not corrupt scientific veracity. This paper follows the French approach to discourse analysis, whose purpose is the simultaneous and reciprocal study of the verbal and the socio-institutional dimension of discourses, and analyses the sociolinguistic representations of the language of science and of its dissemination formulated in CEI between 1945-1955, a period - besides - complex for the scientific development in Argentina, characterized by state interventionism in different institutions. To this aim, editorials and articles that address the aforementioned problems have been selected and examined. The results exhibit the discursive complexities of scientific dissemination in an environment unaware of this practice and, consequently, the difficulty of determining a reader profile for the magazine. In general terms, they reveal the importance of the reflection on the language for the development and communication of science. (shrink)

Carl Craver investigates what we are doing when we sue neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain.

Carl F. Craver investigates what we are doing when we use neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain. When does an explanation succeed and when does it fail? Craver offers explicit standards for successful explanation of the workings of the brain, on the basis of a systematic view about what neuroscientific explanations are.

We study decision under uncertainty in an Anscombe–Aumann framework. Two binary relations characterize a decision-maker: one incomplete relation, reflecting her objective rationality, and a second complete relation, reflecting her subjective rationality. We require the latter to be an extension of the former. Our key axiom is a dominance condition. Our main theorem provides a representation of the two relations. The objectively rational relation has a Bewley-style multiple prior representation. Using this set of priors, we fully characterize the subjectively rational relation (...) in terms of the most optimistic and most pessimistic expected utilities. (shrink)

One of the most significant political philosophers of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt is a deeply controversial figure who has been labeled both Nazi sympathizer and modern-day Thomas Hobbes. First published in 1938, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes used the Enlightenment philosopher’s enduring symbol of the protective Leviathan to address the nature of modern statehood. A work that predicted the demise of the Third Reich and that still holds relevance in today’s security-obsessed society, this volume (...) will be essential reading for students and scholars of political science. “Carl Schmitt is surely the most controversial German political and legal philosopher of this century. . . . We deal with Schmitt, against all odds, because history stubbornly persists in proving many of his tenets right.”— Perspectives on Political Science “[A] significant contribution. . . . The relation between Hobbes and Schmitt is one of the most important questions surrounding Schmitt: it includes a distinct, though occasionally vacillating, personal identification as well as an association of ideas.”— Telos. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against one variety of contextualism about aesthetic predicates such as “beautiful.” Contextualist analyses of these and other predicates have been subject to several challenges surrounding disagreement. Focusing on one kind of contextualism— individualized indexical contextualism —I unpack these various challenges and consider the responses available to the contextualist. The three responses I consider are as follows: giving an alternative analysis of the concept of disagreement ; claiming that speakers suffer from semantic blindness; and claiming that (...) attributions of beauty carry presuppositions of commonality. I will argue that none of the available strategies gives a response which both satisfactorily explains all of the disagreement -data and is plausible independent of significant evidence in favor of contextualism. I conclude that individualized indexical contextualism about the aesthetic is untenable, although this does not rule out alternative contextualist approaches to the aesthetic. (shrink)

Traces the development of the integral and the differential calculus and related theories since ancient times.

This paper studies an economy whose agents perceive their consumption possibilities subjectively, and whose preferences are defined on what they subjectively experience, rather than on those alternatives that are objectively present. The model of agents' perceptions is based on intuitionistic logic. Roughly, this means that agents reason constructively: a solution to a problem exists only if there is a construction by which the problem can be solved. The theorems that can be proved determine how an agent perceives a set of (...) alternatives. A dual model relates perceived alternatives to a shared language, which the agents use in trading. So perceptions relate objective alternatives to an agent's subjective view of them, and reporting dually relates an agent's subjective world to a shared language. It turns out that an appropriately modified notion of competitive equilibrium always exists. However, in contrast with standard results in economic theory, competitive equilibrium need not be efficient. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación de corte cualitativo realizada los años 2007 y 2008 en Santiago de Chile, la que tuvo como uno de sus objetivos el describir y comprender las condiciones y la experiencia de trabajo de un grupo de hombres y mujeres de bajo nivel ocupacional empleados en la sala de venta de una gran cadena nacional de supermercados. A partir de la presentación y discusión de estos hallazgos se busca contribuir a una mejor comprensión (...) de los profundos procesos de flexibilización y modernización experimentados por el sector del retail en Chile en las últimas décadas, especialmente en lo que respecta al impacto de los mismos en la experiencia de trabajo de los sujetos empleados en dicho sector. Se espera de este modo arrojar luces desde una perspectiva psicosocial sobre los aspectos laborales de los cambios en el mundo del retail, los que han tendido a quedar invisibilizados ante los enfoques que han enfatizado las dimensiones económicas, o culturales y de consumo, de dichas transformaciones. (shrink)

This collection of articles and associated discussion papers focuses on a problem that has attracted increasing attention from linguists and psychologists throughout the world during the past several years. Reduced to essentials, the problem is that of discovering the character of the mental capacities that make it possible for human beings to attain knowledge of their language on the basis of fragmentary and haphazard early linguistic experience. A fundamental assumption running through all of these contributions is that people possess strong (...) innate predispositions that are critical for success in this task. (shrink)

Under what conditions are people responsible for their choices and the outcomes of those choices? How could such conditions be fostered by liberal societies? Should what people are due as a matter of justice depend on what they are responsible for? For example, how far should healthcare provision depend on patients' past choices? What values would be realized and which hampered by making justice sensitive to responsibility? Would it give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equality? The (...) explosion of philosophical interest in such questions has been fuelled by increased focus on individual responsibility in political debates. Political philosophers, especially egalitarians, have responded to such developments by attempting to map out the proper place for responsibility in theories of justice. This book both reflects on these recent developments in normative political theory and moves the debate forwards. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza la novela Jardín, de la escritora cubana Dulce María Loynaz, deteniéndose en las estrategias que despliega para subvertir distintos modelos de feminidad. La novela sostiene un diálogo productivo con distintas corrientes estéticas, cuyas formas de expresión asume y a la vez critica por las limitaciones que le imponen al desarrollo de la subjetividad femenina. A través del recorrido que realiza en Jardín por distintas propuestas estéticas e ideológicas que han contribuido a la configuración del sujeto moderno, Loynaz (...) despliega una crítica a las formas en que estas construyen el sujeto femenino y su posición en el orden de género sexual. Este recorrido se realiza desde dentro de estas estéticas, desde su apropiación productiva en la textualidad de la novela, la que transita por el lenguaje del romanticismo, del simbolismo, del modernismo y de las vanguardias. En Jardín se muestra cómo estos movimientos abren, pero también cierran, posibilidades de expresión y desarrollo para las mujeres. (shrink)

According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...) explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena. (shrink)

Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks (...) at the book’s continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment. “Will remain a classic—a beautifully finished literary product.”—Charles A. Beard, _American Historical Review_ “_The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers _remains_ _one of the most distinctive American contributions to the historical literature on the Enlightenment.... [It] is likely to beguile and provoke readers for a long time to come.”—Johnson Kent Wright, from the foreword. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of how democratic governance is possible. It analyses democracy as a laminated system consisting of three interdependent levels – the political/institutional, the socia...

We argue that intelligible appeals to interlevel causes (top-down and bottom-up) can be understood, without remainder, as appeals to mechanistically mediated effects. Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of causal and constitutive relations, where the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. The idea of causation would have to stretch to the breaking point to accommodate interlevel causes. The notion of a mechanistically mediated effect is preferable because it can do all of the required work without appealing to mysterious interlevel causes. When interlevel (...) causes can be translated into mechanistically mediated effects, the posited relationship is intelligible and should raise no special philosophical objections. When they cannot, they are suspect. (shrink)

Not all models are explanatory. Some models are data summaries. Some models sketch explanations but leave crucial details unspecified or hidden behind filler terms. Some models are used to conjecture a how-possibly explanation without regard to whether it is a how-actually explanation. I use the Hodgkin and Huxley model of the action potential to illustrate these ways that models can be useful without explaining. I then use the subsequent development of the explanation of the action potential to show what is (...) required of an adequate mechanistic model. Mechanistic models are explanatory. (shrink)

Some philosophers writing on the possibility of faultless disagreement have argued that the only way to account for the intuition that there could be disagreements which are faultless in every sense is to accept a relativistic semantics. In this article we demonstrate that this view is mistaken by constructing an absolutist semantics for a particular domain – aesthetic discourse – which allows for the possibility of genuinely faultless disagreements. We argue that this position is an improvement over previous absolutist responses (...) to the relativist's challenge and that it presents an independently plausible account of the semantics of aesthetic discourse. (shrink)

Many areas of science develop by discovering mechanisms and role functions. Cummins' (1975) analysis of role functions-according to which an item's role function is a capacity of that item that appears in an analytic explanation of the capacity of some containing system-captures one important sense of "function" in the biological sciences and elsewhere. Here I synthesize Cummins' account with recent work on mechanisms and causal/mechanical explanation. The synthesis produces an analysis of specifically mechanistic role functions, one that uses the characteristic (...) active, spatial, temporal, and hierarchical organization of mechanisms to add precision and content to Cummins' original suggestion. This synthesis also shows why the discovery of role functions is a scientific achievement. Discovering a role function (i) contributes to the interlevel integration of multilevel mechanisms, and (ii) provides a unique, contextual variety of causal/mechanical explanation. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of why democracy is desirable in terms of a relational theory of democracy. The theory draws on concepts from Aristotelian, critical realist, and psychoanalytic th...

It is common to defend the Homeostatic Property Cluster ( HPC ) view as a third way between conventionalism and essentialism about natural kinds ( Boyd , 1989, 1991, 1997, 1999; Griffiths , 1997, 1999; Keil , 2003; Kornblith , 1993; Wilson , 1999, 2005; Wilson , Barker , & Brigandt , forthcoming ). According to the HPC view, property clusters are not merely conventionally clustered together; the co-occurrence of properties in the cluster is sustained by a similarity generating ( (...) or homeostatic ) mechanism . I argue that conventional elements are involved partly but ineliminably in deciding which mechanisms define kinds , for deciding when two mechanisms are mechanisms of the same type, and for deciding where one particular mechanism ends and another begins. This intrusion of conventional perspective into the idea of a mechanism raises doubts as to whether the HPC view is sufficiently free of conventional elements to serve as an objective arbiter in scientific disputes about what the kinds of the special sciences should be. (shrink)

This paper discusses the characteristic properties of List PR systems and FPTP systems, as given in Hout 2005 and Hout et al. 2006. While many of the properties we consider are common to both systems, it turns out (see Hout 2005) that the British system distinguishes itself by satisfying the district cancellation property, while the Dutch system distinguishes itself by satisfying consistency and anonymity. For scoring rules, topsonlyness is equivalent to being party fragmentation-proof (see Hout 2005; Hout et al. 2006). (...) One might present this as an argument in favour of requiring topsonlyness. However, we will also give counter-arguments against insisting upon the property of being party fragmentation-proof. (shrink)

La región de Pulmarí, en el Departamento Aluminé, en el sur de la Argentina (Provincia de Neuquén) se caracteriza por una destacada presencia del pueblo indígena Mapuche, que ha protagonizado intensas movilizaciones desde la década de 1990 por su territorio ancestral y frente al avance de diferentes agentes estatales y privados. En contraste con la tendencia que afecta a otras poblaciones, en la región se vienen dando procesos de “territorialización” de estas familias indígenas y desaceleración de las históricas migraciones rural (...) – urbanas, lo que conlleva profundas redefiniciones y reconfiguraciones de estos ámbitos rurales -tendencias explicables a partir de la aplicación de diferentes políticas y planes sociales-. El objetivo principal es analizar la dinámica de las fuentes de ingresos de estos pequeños productores rurales Mapuche, atendiendo a estas particularidades y vinculándolas con el contexto de conflictividad y disputas entre los diferentes sectores que caracteriza a la región desde hace años. (shrink)

This paper discusses the characteristic properties of List PR systems and FPTP systems, as given in Hout 2005 and Hout et al. 2006. While many of the properties we consider are common to both systems, it turns out (see Hout 2005) that the British system distinguishes itself by satisfying the district cancellation property, while the Dutch system distinguishes itself by satisfying consistency and anonymity. For scoring rules, topsonlyness is equivalent to being party fragmentation-proof (see Hout 2005; Hout et al. 2006). (...) One might present this as an argument in favour of requiring topsonlyness. However, we will also give counter-arguments against insisting upon the property of being party fragmentation-proof. (shrink)

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ Uber Den Psychologischen Ursprung Der Raumvorstellung Carl Stumpf S. Hirzel, 1873 Space perception. (shrink)

Arguments from disagreement often take centre stage in debates between competing semantic theories. This paper explores the theoretical basis for arguments from disagreement and, in so doing, proposes methodological principles which allow us to distinguish between legitimate arguments from disagreement and dialectically ineffective arguments from disagreement. In the light of these principles, I evaluate Cappelen and Hawthorne's [2009] argument from disagreement against relativism, and show that it fails to undermine relativism since it is dialectically ineffective. Nevertheless, I argue that an (...) alternative challenge to relativism based on disagreement is available. More generally, I argue that semantic theory is not answerable to data stemming from ‘loaded’ philosophical principles regarding the nature of disagreement. Rather, semantic theorists will exhaust their dialectical responsibilities regarding disagreement if they can demonstrate consistency with a minimal account of the concept. (shrink)

The fundamental tenet of modern empiricism is the view that all non-analytic knowledge is based on experience. Let us call this thesis the principle of empiricism. [1] Contemporary logical empiricism has added [2] to it the maxim that a sentence makes a cognitively meaningful assertion, and thus can be said to be either true or false, only if it is either (1) analytic or self-contradictory or (2) capable, at least in principle, of experiential test. According to this so-called empiricist criterion (...) of cognitive meaning, or of cognitive significance, many of the formulations of traditional metaphysics and large parts of epistemology are devoid of cognitive significance--however rich some of them may be in non-cognitive import by virtue of their emotive appeal or the moral inspiration they offer. Similarly certain doctrines which have been, at one time or another, formulated within empirical science or its border disciplines are so contrived as to be incapable of test by any conceivable evidence; they are therefore qualified as pseudo- [p. 42:] hypotheses, which assert nothing, and which therefore have no explanatory or predictive force whatever. This verdict applies, for example, to the neo-vitalist speculations about entelechies or vital forces, and to the "telefinalist hypothesis" propounded by Lecomte du Noüy. (shrink)

A world awash in little understood chemicals tragically harms adults and children alike. Laws keep health agencies in the dark about toxicants, slow, well motivated research hampers protections, and strenuous vested opposition exacerbates the harm. How science is used in the tort law can facilitate or frustrate redress of harm. This book recommends better approaches.

Scientific indigenous psychologies have been developed mostly in non‐western countries. Indigenous psychologies, seeing mainstream psychology as too western in its cultural foundation, are based on the culture of the society being investigated. In this article I critique the concept of culture used by representative researchers of indigenous psychologies in the English‐language literature and contrast it to current concepts of culture in the social sciences. Furthermore, I argue that the concept of culture used in this literature has implications for the cultural (...) contents that are identified as the culture of a specific society. I also suggest that the political dimensions of what contents of culture are associated with a specific society are not given sufficient attention in this literature. Finally, alternative approaches to culture for the indigenous psychologies are discussed. (shrink)