The standard philosophical project of analysing the concept of knowledge has radical defects in its arbitrary restriction of the subject matter, and its risky theoretical presuppositions. Edward Craig suggests a more illuminating approach, akin to the `state of nature' method found in political theory, which builds up the concept from a hypothesis about the social function of knowledge and the needs it fulfils. Light is thrown on much that philosophers have written about knowledge, about its analysis and the obstacles (...) to its analysis, and on the debate over scepticism. It becomes apparent why many languages not only have such constructions as `knows whether' and `knows that', but also have equivalents of `knows how to' and `know' followed by a direct object. Thus the inquiry is both broadened in scope and made theoretically less fragile. (shrink)

Edward Erwin's clear analysis addresses some of the fundamental questions on behavior therapy that remained in 1978, when this book was first published.

In the months preceding the writing of this review, bioethics has been in the news a great deal. In congressional and public policy debates surrounding stem cell research, human cloning, and the Human Genome Project, bioethics and bioethicists have gained national attention and been subject to public scrutiny. Commentators have asked who these self-appointed moral experts are to tell us what is right and wrong.

Practically every contemporary mainstream scientist presumes that all aspects of mind are generated by brain activity. We demonstrate the inadequacy of this picture by assembling evidence for a variety of empirical phenomena which it cannot explain. We further show that an alternative picture developed by F. W. H. Myers and William James successfully accommodates these phenomena, ratifies the common sense view of ourselves as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with contemporary physics and neuroscience.

At this point I should say something about one of the frequent criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of Europe’s inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method, and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the matters I’ve been discussing so far, and while (...) I have no desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the topic at hand.What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an adversarial critique not only of the field’s perspective and political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable. Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity, institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with considerable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “An Ideology of Difference”. (shrink)

This paper identifies three positions on the relationship between language and experience, the third of which I was not acquainted with before from my reading. It seems absurd.

By formalizing recent syntactic theories for natural languages Stabler shows how their complexity can be handled without guesswork or oversimplification. By formalizing recent syntactic theories for natural languages in the tradition of Chomsky's Barriers, Stabler shows how their complexity can be handled without guesswork or oversimplification. He introduces logical representations of these theories together with special deductive techniques for exploring their consequences that will provide linguists with a valuable tool for deriving and testing theoretical predictions and for experimenting with alternative (...) formulations of grammatical principles. Stabler's novel approach allows results to be deduced with straightforward calculations and provides a systematic framework for tackling the problem of how speakers can infer the properties of an utterance from principles of the grammar. The special treatment of equality, induction principles, and inclusion of a general method for collecting structures from proofs means that sophisticated linguistic arguments can be carried out in detail, giving a rich perspective to issues in linguistic theory and parsing. (shrink)

Derrida and Foucault are opposed to each other on a number of grounds, and perhaps the one specially singled out in Foucault's attack on Derrida—that Derrida is concerned only with "reading" a text and that a text is nothing more than the "traces" found there by the reader—would be the appropriate one to begin with here.1 According to Foucault, if the text is important for Derrida because its real situation is literally an abysmally textual element, l'écriture en abîme with which (...) criticism so far has been unable really to deal,2 then for Foucault the text is important because it inhabits an element of power with a decisive claim on actuality, even though that power is invisible or implied. Derrida's criticism therefore moves us into the text, Foucault's in and out of it. · 1. Michel Foucault's attack on Derrida is to be found in an appendix to the later version of Folie et déraison: Historie de la folie à l'âge classique , pp. 583-602; the earlier edition has been translated into English: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard .· 2. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination , p. 297. Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is the author of Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, along with numerous publications on literature, politics, and culture; his Beginnings: Intention and Method received the first annual Lionel Trilling Memorial Award. "The Problem of Textuality" will appear in a slightly different form in his Criticism between Culture and System. (shrink)

The problem of the one and the many is central to ancient Greek philosophy, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to Aristotle's treatment of it in the Metaphysics. The Central Books of the Metaphysics are widely recognised as the most difficult portion of a most difficult work. This title aims to examine the Central Books.

In support of the thesis that virtue ethics allows for a more comprehensive and consistent interpretation of the Analects than other possible models, the author uses a structural outline of a virtue ethic (derived from Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the Aristotlelian tradition) to organize a discussion of the text. The resulting interpretation focuses attention on the religious aspects of Confucianism and accounts for aspects of the text that are otherwise difficult to explain. In addition, the author argues that the structural (...) similarities between the Aristotelian and Confucian conceptions of self‐cultivation indicate a dimension of commensurability between the two traditions, despite very real variations in specific content. Finally, the author suggests how crosscultural commensurability, in general, can be understood on a theoretical level. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of the phenomenon that has come to be known as ‘moral luck’ have either dismissed it as illusory or touted it as the evidence for doubting the probative value of our commitment to certain widely avowed views concerning interpersonal assessments of responsibility. In this discussion, we present a third, distinctive interpretation of the moral luck phenomenon. Drawing upon empirically robust results from psychological studies of judgment bias, we argue that the phenomenon of moral luck is demonstrably not illusory. (...) What we suggest, however, is that the phenomenon ought not to be taken to countenance doubts about the standards generally taken to be regulative of assessments of interpersonal responsibility. Rather, its significance lies in foregrounding certain generally unacknowledged obstacles we face in the process of conclusively applying general valid moral standards in making specific judgments of responsibility and desert.1. (shrink)

Global climate change raises profound questions for social and political theorists. The human impacts of climate change are sufficiently broad, and generally adverse, to threaten the rights and freedoms of existing and future members of all countries. These impacts will also exacerbate inequalities between rich and poor countries despite the limited role of the latter in their origins. Responding to these impacts will require the implementation of environmental and social policies that are both environmentally effective and consistent with the equality (...) and liberty of populations to which they are applied. This article considers whether global emissions trading, namely, the creation of a global market for tradable allowances conferring the right to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gas over a specified time period, is normatively defensible from a liberal egalitarian perspective. After a brief review of the theory and practice of emissions trading, a number of normative objections to the international trade in emissions allowances are analysed. These objections appeal to one, or a combination, of two claims. First, emissions trading schemes are likely to produce undesirable outcomes, such as environmental neglect, in the further future. I call these ‘instrumental objections’. Second, emissions trading schemes violate non‐consequential norms of justice and fairness. I call these ‘intrinsic objections’. It is argued that, when combined, instrumental and intrinsic objections indicate that instituting a global network of emissions trading schemes, as envisioned by a number of parties to the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord, would be illegitimate in absence of significant procedural and consequential safeguards. (shrink)

In this paper, the author considers an argument against the thesis that humans are irrational in the sense that we reason according to principles that differ from those we ought to follow. The argument begins by noting that if humans are irrational, we should not trust the results of our reasoning processes. If we are justified in believing that humans are irrational, then, since this belief results from a reasoning process, we should not accept this belief. The claim that humans (...) are irrational is, thus, self-undermining. The author shows that this argument---and others like it---fails for several interesting reasons. In fact, there is nothing self-undermining about the claim that humans are irrational; empirical research to establish this claim does not face the sorts of a priori problems that some philosophers and psychologists have claimed it does. (shrink)

We consider the logical form of a natural language sentence to be a formal object which determines both the logical properties of the sentence and, more generally, the ways the sentence is logically related to other sentences. Thus if some NL sentence logically entails another, this fact must follow, given the logical forms of the two sentences. The power of a theory of logical forms of natural language then lies first in what logical properties and relations it can define, and (...) second, in which NL sentences it can show to be logically related to which others. (shrink)

Business scholars pay increasing attention to the expanded influence of stakeholders on firm strategies, legitimacy, and competitiveness. At the same time, analysts have noted that the transformed regulatory and legislative environments of recent decades have encouraged firms to become much more politically active. Surprisingly, relatively little research has tied together these two trends. The present study integrates perspectives on stakeholder management with research on corporate political activity to develop an understanding of the structural sources of stakeholder mobilization in professional grassroots (...) lobbying campaigns. This study employs a unique, original data source to consider how the adoption of grassroots lobbying by a firm relates to its industry, degree of inside lobbying, partisan PAC contributions, and more. This research shows that corporate grassroots lobbying is shaped most significantly by a firm’s degree of inside lobbying, as highly active firms take a diversified strategy for gaining influence. Firms in industries with a heavy public presence as well as those concerned with taxation, government appropriations, and economic development also adopt these strategies readily. PAC contributions to Republican, but not Democratic, candidates also heighten firms’ propensity to lobby the public. (shrink)

Global climate change raises profound questions for social and political theorists. The human impacts of climate change are sufficiently broad, and generally adverse, to threaten the rights and freedoms of existing and future members of all countries. These impacts will also exacerbate inequalities between rich and poor countries despite the limited role of the latter in their origins. Responding to these impacts will require the implementation of environmental and social policies that are both environmentally effective and consistent with the equality (...) and liberty of populations to which they are applied. This article considers whether global emissions trading, namely, the creation of a global market for tradable allowances conferring the right to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gas over a specified time period, is normatively defensible from a liberal egalitarian perspective. After a brief review of the theory and practice of emissions trading, a number of normative objections to the international trade in emissions allowances are analysed. These objections appeal to one, or a combination, of two claims. First, emissions trading schemes are likely to produce undesirable outcomes, such as environmental neglect, in the further future. I call these ‘instrumental objections’. Second, emissions trading schemes violate non‐consequential norms of justice and fairness. I call these ‘intrinsic objections’. It is argued that, when combined, instrumental and intrinsic objections indicate that instituting a global network of emissions trading schemes, as envisioned by a number of parties to the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord, would be illegitimate in absence of significant procedural and consequential safeguards. (shrink)

avant propos This paper is basically Keenan (1992) augmented by some new types of properly polyadic quantification in natural language drawn from Moltmann (1992), Nam (1991) and Srivastav (1990). In addition I would draw the reader's attention to recent mathematical studies of polyadic quantiicationz Ben-Shalom (1992), Spaan (1992) and Westerstahl (1992). The first and third of these extend and generalize (in some cases considerably) the techniques and results in Keenan (1992). Finally I would like to acknowledge the stimulating and constructive (...) discussions ofthe earlier paper with many scholars, notably Dorit Ben-Shalom, Jaap van der Does, Hans Kamp, Uwe Mormich, Arnim von Stechow, Mats Rooth, and Ede Zimmermann. And I repeat here the acknowledgment in the earlier paper to Jim Lambek, Ed Stabler and two anonymous referees for Linguistics and Philosophy (the latter responsible for substantial improvements in the proofs - see footnote 10). (shrink)

Issues of academic authorship pose few problems for philosophers or those in the humanities, yet raise a host of issues for medical researchers, engineers and scientists, where multiple authors is the norm and journal articles sometimes list hundreds of authors. At issue here are abstract questions about desert, as well as practical problems regarding the distribution of goods attached to authorship—tenure, prestige, research grants, etc. This paper defends a version of the author/contributor model, where the specific contributions of authors are (...) described in a footnote, against other models of authorial attribution. Such a model offers the best guarantee that authors will get their due, as well as providing the most reliable protection against misconduct and fraud. The paper also arguesthat it is important for this model to be institutionalized across disciplinary boundaries as the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research will inevitably bring discipline-specific authorial norms into conflict. (shrink)