This essay explores the role of music composition within the curriculum of a typical small liberal arts college and the faculty composer's role(s) in facilitating the study of composition. The relationship between composition and campus performance is discussed, particularly in light of the increased emphasis on performance in formerly all-male colleges (Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, and so on) after the advent of coeducation in the 1970s. Other topics include teaching strategies for introducing non-major students to composition, the rise of interest (...) in non-Western music (with resulting influence on student composers), and the utilization of visiting performers/composers. (shrink)

In the conclusion to this multi-part article I first review the discussions carried out around the six essential questions in psychiatric diagnosis – the position taken by Allen Frances on each question, the commentaries on the respective question along with Frances’ responses to the commentaries, and my own view of the multiple discussions. In this review I emphasize that the core question is the first – what is the nature of psychiatric illness – and that in some manner all further (...) questions follow from the first. Following this review I attempt to move the discussion forward, addressing the first question from the perspectives of natural kind analysis and complexity analysis. This reflection leads toward a view of psychiatric disorders – and future nosologies – as far more complex and uncertain than we have imagined. (shrink)

In face of the multiple controversies surrounding the DSM process in general and the development of DSM-5 in particular, we have organized a discussion around what we consider six essential questions in further work on the DSM. The six questions involve: 1) the nature of a mental disorder; 2) the definition of mental disorder; 3) the issue of whether, in the current state of psychiatric science, DSM-5 should assume a cautious, conservative posture or an assertive, transformative posture; 4) the role (...) of pragmatic considerations in the construction of DSM-5; 5) the issue of utility of the DSM – whether DSM-III and IV have been designed more for clinicians or researchers, and how this conflict should be dealt with in the new manual; and 6) the possibility and advisability, given all the problems with DSM-III and IV, of designing a different diagnostic system. Part 1 of this article took up the first two questions. Part 2 took up the second two questions. Part 3 now deals with Questions 5 & 6. Question 5 confronts the issue of utility, whether the manual design of DSM-III and IV favors clinicians or researchers, and what that means for DSM-5. Our final question, Question 6, takes up a concluding issue, whether the acknowledged problems with the earlier DSMs warrants a significant overhaul of DSM-5 and future manuals. As in Parts 1 & 2 of this article, the general introduction, as well as the introductions and conclusions for the specific questions, are written by James Phillips, and the responses to commentaries are written by Allen Frances. (shrink)

In face of the multiple controversies surrounding the DSM process in general and the development of DSM-5 in particular, we have organized a discussion around what we consider six essential questions in further work on the DSM. The six questions involve: 1) the nature of a mental disorder; 2) the definition of mental disorder; 3) the issue of whether, in the current state of psychiatric science, DSM-5 should assume a cautious, conservative posture or an assertive, transformative posture; 4) the role (...) of pragmatic considerations in the construction of DSM-5; 5) the issue of utility of the DSM - whether DSM-III and IV have been designed more for clinicians or researchers, and how this conflict should be dealt with in the new manual; and 6) the possibility and advisability, given all the problems with DSM-III and IV, of designing a different diagnostic system. Part I of this article will take up the first two questions. With the first question, invited commentators express a range of opinion regarding the nature of psychiatric disorders, loosely divided into a realist position that the diagnostic categories represent real diseases that we can accurately name and know with our perceptual abilities, a middle, nominalist position that psychiatric disorders do exist in the real world but that our diagnostic categories are constructs that may or may not accurately represent the disorders out there, and finally a purely constructivist position that the diagnostic categories are simply constructs with no evidence of psychiatric disorders in the real world. The second question again offers a range of opinion as to how we should define a mental or psychiatric disorder, including the possibility that we should not try to formulate a definition. The general introduction, as well as the introductions and conclusions for the specific questions, are written by James Phillips, and the responses to commentaries are written by Allen Frances. (shrink)

In face of the multiple controversies surrounding the DSM process in general and the development of DSM-5 in particular, we have organized a discussion around what we consider six essential questions in further work on the DSM. The six questions involve: 1) the nature of a mental disorder; 2) the definition of mental disorder; 3) the issue of whether, in the current state of psychiatric science, DSM-5 should assume a cautious, conservative posture or an assertive, transformative posture; 4) the role (...) of pragmatic considerations in the construction of DSM-5; 5) the issue of utility of the DSM - whether DSM-III and IV have been designed more for clinicians or researchers, and how this conflict should be dealt with in the new manual; and 6) the possibility and advisability, given all the problems with DSM-III and IV, of designing a different diagnostic system. Part I of this article took up the first two questions. Part II will take up the second two questions. Question 3 deals with the question as to whether DSM-V should assume a conservative or assertive posture in making changes from DSM-IV. That question in turn breaks down into discussion of diagnoses that depend on, and aim toward, empirical, scientific validation, and diagnoses that are more value-laden and less amenable to scientific validation. Question 4 takes up the role of pragmatic consideration in a psychiatric nosology, whether the purely empirical considerations need to be tempered by considerations of practical consequence. As in Part 1 of this article, the general introduction, as well as the introductions and conclusions for the specific questions, are written by James Phillips, and the responses to commentaries are written by Allen Frances. (shrink)

Attempts to show that the simplicity of a hypothesis can be measured by attending to how well it answers certain kinds of questions.

Attempts to show that the simplicity of a hypothesis can be measured by attending to how well it answers certain kinds of questions.

Robert C. Neville, Dean of Theology and Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, in his comments on Chuang-Tzu for Spiritual Transformation for the State University of New York press: ‘The present outstanding volume by Robert Allinson ... initiates a new direction ... His new direction for understanding Chuang-Tzu is his comprehensive and detailed argument that Chuang Tzu was advocating an ideal of sageliness. Whereas many interpreters have claimed that Chuang Tzu used his metaphorical language to defend a relativism, Allinson shows with (...) convincing mastery that Chuang Tzu had a position, namely, the importance of achieving the ideal of sageliness ... he brings the discussion of Chuang Tzu into the heart of contemporary Western philosophy. Professor Allinson’s book, like his many articles, contributes to the growing body of literature that is creating an effective dialogue between Chinese and Western philosophy. The sophistication of this book demonstrates that the dialogue has worked and that we are in a new era of substantive comparative philosophy ... he also makes a substantial contribution to the philosophy of religion. Currently in its 8th impression, "Chuang-Tzu for Spiritual Transformation: An Analysis of the Inner Chapters" has been translated into Chinese and Korean. This book offers a fundamentally new interpretation of the philosophy of the Chuang-Tzu. It is the first full-length work of its kind which argues that a deep level cognitive structure exists beneath an otherwise random collection of literary anecdotes, cryptic sayings, and dark allusions. The author carefully analyzes myths, legends, monstrous characters, paradoxes, parables and linguistic puzzles as strategically placed techniques for systematically tapping and channeling the spiritual dimensions of the mind. Allinson takes issue with commentators who have treated the Chuang-Tzu as a minor foray into relativism. Chapter titles are re-translated, textual fragments are relocated, and inauthentic, outer miscellaneous chapters are carefully separated from the transformatory message of the authentic, inner chapters. Each of the inner chapters is shown to be a building block to the next so that they can only be understood as forming a developmental sequence. In the end, the reader is presented with a clear, consistent and coherent view of the Chuang-Tzu that is more in accord with its stature as a major philosophical work. (shrink)

In 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', Quine attacks the analytic/synthetic distinction and defends a doctrine that I call epistemological holism. Now, almost fifty years after the article's appearance, what are we to make of these ideas? I suggest that the philosophical naturalism that Quine did so much to promote should lead us to reject Quine's brief against the analytic/synthetic distinction; I also argue that Quine misunderstood Carnap's views on analyticity. As for epistemological holism, I claim that this thesis does not follow (...) from the logical point that Duhem and Quine made about the role of auxiliary assumptions in hypothesis testing, and that the thesis should be rejected. \\\ [Peter Hylton] Section I of this essay discusses Quine's views about reference, contrasting them with those of Russell. For the latter, our language and thought succeed in being about the world because of our acquaintance with objects; the relation of reference-roughly, the relation between a name and its bearer-is thus fundamental. For Quine, by contrast, the fundamental relation by which our language comes to be about the world, and to have empirical content, is that between a sentence and stimulations of our sensory surfaces; reference, while important, is a derivative notion. Section II shows how this view of reference as derivative makes possible the notorious Quinean doctrine of ontological relativity. Section III raises the issue of realism. It argues that somewhat different notions of realism are in play for Quine and for Russell-for Russell, objects, and our knowledge of objects, play the fundamental role, while for quine objectivity and truth are fundamental, with ontology being derivative. (shrink)

This book examines the political and moral challenges that face the vast majority of human beings who consider themselves to be members of a nation. It explores nationality through the difficulties and conflicts that have arisen throughout history, and discusses nations and nationalism from social, philosophical, and anthropological perspectives. In this fascinating Very Short Introduction, Steven Grosby looks at the nation in history, the territorial element in nationality, and the complex ways nationality has co-existed with religion, and shows the close (...) link between being human and the concept of nationalism. (shrink)

Motivation ist in der Welt der Wirtschaft ein unschatzbarer Wert. Auch im personlichen Bereich gilt die Fahigkeit, sich selbst zu motivieren, als ein Schlussel zu einem gelungenen Leben. Die Frage, was Motivation ausmacht, wird nicht zuletzt in der praktischen Philosophie, der Ethik und Handlungstheorie diskutiert. Der Band geht zunachst der Frage nach, woher die Motive unseres Handelns stammen, ob es etwa die Vernunft ist, die motivierende Kraft hat, ob es Gefuhle sind oder aussere Faktoren. Es wird erortert, wie moralische Motivation (...) durch Werte philosophisch zu begreifen ist, und auf Fragestellungen der praktischen Anwendung eingegangen: Wo liegen Moglichkeiten und Grenzen der Motivation von Menschen in den gesellschaftlichen Bereichen der Okologie, der Medizin und der Teilhabe an demokratischen Prozessen? Aber auch in der theoretischen Philosophie werden begriffliche und weltanschauliche Probleme behandelt, die die empirischen Motivationstheorien aufwerfen. Das fuhrt schliesslich zu metaphysischen Fragen nach der Willensfreiheit des Menschen und der Kreativitat der Natur. (shrink)

In 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', Quine attacks the analytic/synthetic distinction and defends a doctrine that I call epistemological holism. Now, almost fifty years after the article's appearance, what are we to make of these ideas? I suggest that the philosophical naturalism that Quine did so much to promote should lead us to reject Quine's brief against the analytic/synthetic distinction; I also argue that Quine misunderstood Carnap's views on analyticity. As for epistemological holism, I claim that this thesis does not follow (...) from the logical point that Duhem and Quine made about the role of auxiliary assumptions in hypothesis testing, and that the thesis should be rejected. \\\ [Peter Hylton] Section I of this essay discusses Quine's views about reference, contrasting them with those of Russell. For the latter, our language and thought succeed in being about the world because of our acquaintance with objects; the relation of reference-roughly, the relation between a name and its bearer-is thus fundamental. For Quine, by contrast, the fundamental relation by which our language comes to be about the world, and to have empirical content, is that between a sentence and stimulations of our sensory surfaces; reference, while important, is a derivative notion. Section II shows how this view of reference as derivative makes possible the notorious Quinean doctrine of ontological relativity. Section III raises the issue of realism. It argues that somewhat different notions of realism are in play for Quine and for Russell-for Russell, objects, and our knowledge of objects, play the fundamental role, while for quine objectivity and truth are fundamental, with ontology being derivative. (shrink)

I discuss two subjects in Samir Okasha’s excellent book, Evolution and the Levels of Selection. In consonance with Okasha’s critique of the conventionalist view of the units of selection problem, I argue that conventionalists have not attended to what realists mean by group, individual, and genic selection. In connection with Okasha’s discussion of the Price equation and contextual analysis, I discuss whether the existence of these two quantitative frameworks is a challenge to realism.

This paper is a sympathetic critique of the argument that Reichenbach develops in Chap. 2 of Experience and Prediction for the thesis that sense experience justifies belief in the existence of an external world. After discussing his attack on the positivist theory of meaning, I describe the probability ideas that Reichenbach presents. I argue that Reichenbach begins with an argument grounded in the Law of Likelihood but that he then endorses a different argument that involves prior probabilities. I try to (...) show how this second step in Reichenbach’s approach can be strengthened by using ideas that have been developed recently for understanding causation in terms of the idea of intervention. (shrink)

This paper is a sympathetic critique of the argument that Reichenbach develops in Chap. 2 of Experience and Prediction for the thesis that sense experience justifies belief in the existence of an external world. After discussing his attack on the positivist theory of meaning, I describe the probability ideas that Reichenbach presents. I argue that Reichenbach begins with an argument grounded in the Law of Likelihood but that he then endorses a different argument that involves prior probabilities. I try to (...) show how this second step in Reichenbach's approach can be strengthened by using ideas that have been developed recently for understanding causation in terms of the idea of intervention. (shrink)

The positivists suggest that some truths may be immune from empirical refutation and yet lacking in rational justification. Quine holds that every proposition is in principle empirically refutable so there are no a priori truths. I’ll provide a working characterization of the idea of “rational revisability” and argue it’s impossible for us to take a chain of rational revision and end up revising everything which we now believe. Quine's position on revisability is also in tension with certain theses about epistemic (...) holism. Finally, I discuss a more general context in which rational argument is viewed as one mechanism among many for reliably modifying beliefs. This more biological perspective allows us to formulate Quine's claims about revisability in a new way and to raise some interesting questions about the potential impact of natural selection on our cognitive capacities. (shrink)

Here I reply to Jean Gayon's, Tim Lewens's, and Samir Okasha's comments on Did Darwin write the Origin backwards? The topics addressed include: Darwin's thinking that common ancestry is "evidentially prior" to natural selection; how Darwin uses phylogenetic trees to test hypotheses concerning natural selection; how group and indivdiual selection should be defined, and how each is related to the concept of adaptation.

Although the justification for using cladistic parsimony to infer phylogenetic trees has been extensively discussed, much less attention has been paid to the use of cladistic parsimony to reconstruct the character states of the ancestral species postulated by an inferred phylogenetic tree. These two problems differ in terms of both their inputs and their outputs, as shown in the following table. In the former, one begins with data on the character states of extant species and tries to find the best (...) supported phylogenetic tree. In the latter, one begins with the tree that is most firmly supported by characteristics C1, C2,... Cn-1; one then takes some new characteristic Cn and records the character states of Cn that attach to the tree’s interior nodes, which represent common ancestors. In both cases, cladistic parsimony solves the problem by finding the hypothesis that requires the fewest changes in character state that are needed to explain the observations. (shrink)

This article explores the accounts of Canadian-trained health professionals working in humanitarian and development organizations who considered not treating a patient or group of patients because of resource limitations. In the narratives, not treating the patient(s) was sometimes understood as the right thing to do, and sometimes as wrong. In analyzing participants’ narratives we draw attention to how medications and equipment are represented. In one type of narrative, medications and equipment are represented primarily as scarce resources; in another, they are (...) represented as patient care. In the contexts respondents were working, medications and equipment were often both patient care interventions and scarce resources. The analytic point is that health professionals tend to emphasize one conceptualization over the other in coming to assert that not treating is right, or wrong. Rendering tacit ethical frameworks more explicit makes them available for reflection and debate. (shrink)

We begin by considering two principles, each having the form causal completeness ergo screening-off. The first concerns a common cause of two or more effects; the second describes an intermediate link in a causal chain. They are logically independent of each other, each is independent of Reichenbach's principle of the common cause, and each is a consequence of the causal Markov condition. Simple examples show that causal incompleteness means that screening-off may fail to obtain. We derive a stronger result: in (...) a rather general setting, if the composite cause C1 & C2 & … & Cn screens-off one event from another, then each of the n component causes C1, C2, …, Cn must fail to screen-off. The idea that a cause may be ordinally invariant in its impact on different effects is defined; it plays an important role in establishing this no-go theorem. Along the way, we describe how composite and component causes can all screen-off when ordinal invariance fails. We argue that this theorem is relevant to assessing the plausibility of the two screening-off principles. The discovery of incomplete causes that screen-off is not evidence that causal completeness must engender screening-off. Formal and epistemic analogies between screening-off and determinism are discussed. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to synthesize four major elements of aesthetic experience that have previously appeared isolated whenever an attempt at conceptualization is made. These four elements are: Immanuel Kant’s disinterested pleasure, Robin G. Collingwood’s emotional expressionism, the present writer’s redemptive emotional experience, and, lastly, Plato’s concept of Beauty. By taking these four abstracted elements as the bedrock for genuine aesthetic experience, this article aims to clarify the proper role of art as distinct from philosophy and intellectualization. Rather (...) than a medium conducive to intellectual understanding, it is argued that the sphere these four elements of aesthetic experience demarcate is one in which art leads to an emotional understanding that transforms the human condition and it imbues it with new meaning only to be found in a moment of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Rosenberg (1983), in his comments on our article (Sober and Lewontin 1982) concerning the units of selection controversy, has matters precisely backwards. We suggest Rosenberg alludes to a quite different view of the units of selection controversy, one that he never shows to have mattered to any biologists engaged in the dispute. We also reject Rosenberg's remark that the hypothesis of genic selection is currently predictively vacuous.

The two demonstrate a profound shared passion, a way of literally being one with a medium and speaking about it with a dazzling lyricism interspersed with dryly ironic remarks, fueled by a conviction that inspires them to traverse history. Their point of intersection is obvious. Duras, a writer, is also a filmmaker, and Godard, a filmmaker, has maintained a distinctive relationship with literature, writing and speech."--Cyril Béghin, back cover.

The substance of the commentaries, however, reveals considerable disagreement about how UO conceptualizes the idea of group selection. Dennett describes the issues as “mind-twistingly elusive and slippery” and hints that it is mere hype to say that group selection has been revived. Barrett and Godfrey-Smith discuss the problem of multiple perspectives at length and claim that we are too liberal in our definition of groups. We believe that these criticisms obscure the simplicity of the basic question that group selection theory (...) is designed to answer and the historical continuity of that theory, from Darwin to the present. (shrink)

In this brief space I want to describe how Chomsky's analysis of "psychological reality" departs from what I think is a fairly standard construal of the idea. This familiar formulation arises from distinguishing between someone's following a rule and someone's acting in conformity with a rule. The former idea, but not the latter, involves the idea that the person has some mental representation of the rule that plays a certain causal role in determining behavior. Although there may be many grammatical (...) rules to which a person's verbal behavior (ignoring slips of the tongue and other performance interferences) conforms, only some of those rules have psychological reality; these are the ones that are internalized in thought and play some appropriate causal role. (shrink)

Fodor argues that naturalistic psychology is defective as a research program because it requires psychology to wait until the rest of science is complete before psychological questions can be addressed. The reason given for thinking that naturalistic psychology requires that all the facts be in, unless I'm mistaken, is that naturalistic psychology requires that the organism's relation to its environment figure in a description of the organism's psychological state, and we don't know what the environment is like until the results (...) of biology, chemistry, and physics are available. If Fodor's claim about naturalistic psychology were correct, one would also expect that a "naturalistic biology" that violates methodological solipsism is likewise impossible. (shrink)

Smith et al. demonstrate the viability of animal metacognition research. We commend their effort and suggest three avenues of research. The first concerns whether animals are explicitly aware of their metacognitive processes. The second asks whether animals have metaknowledge of their own uncertain responses. The third issue concerns the monitoring/control distinction. We suggest some ways in which these issues elucidate metacognitive processes in nonhuman animals.