Based on the existence of polysemy (e.g., lunch can refer to both food and events), it is argued that central tenets of externalist semantics and Fodorian concept atomism, an externalist theory on which words lack semantic structure, are unsound. We evaluate the premise that these arguments rely on—that polysemous words have separate, finer‐grained senses. We survey the evidence across psychology and linguistics and argue that it shows that polysemy does not exist, at least not in this “sense”. The upshot is (...) that if polysemy does not exist, it cannot pose a problem for atomism or externalism. (shrink)

Bioethics' interdisciplinary base -- Patient-centered care -- Evidence-based medicine and pay-for-performance -- Community dialogue -- Overview : bioethics, power, and learning to see -- Cross-cultural concerns -- Race and health disparities -- Disabilities -- Environmental and global issues -- New technologies -- Conclusion.

Restraint as an intervention in the management of acute mental distress has a long history that predates the existence of psychiatry. However, it remains a source of controversy with an ongoing debate as to its role. This article critically explores what to date has seemingly been only implicit in the debate surrounding the role of restraint: how should the concept of validity be interpreted when applied to restraint as an intervention? The practice of restraint in mental health is critically examined (...) using two post-positivist constructions of validity, the pragmatic and the psychopolitical, by means of a critical examination of the literature. The current literature provides only weak support for the pragmatic validity of restraint as an intervention and no support to date for its psychopolitical validity. Judgements regarding the validity of any intervention that is coercive must include reference to the psychopolitical dimensions of both practice and policy. (shrink)

In this short study, I attempt to reconstruct the main conceptual components of Edmund Husserl’s concept of death following the leading clue of his late transcendental phenomenological methodology. First, I summarise his thoughts on death, from the point of view of “the natural attitude”, as an event in the world. Then, I try and explore the manifold senses of the limit phenomenon of death as a multidimensional transcendental phenomenological problem in all of its intersubjective-world constitutive, personal-primordial, and metaphysical-constructive layers of (...) meanings, respectively. By doing so, I also hope that the path we travel can serve the reader as an opportunity for a personal and reflective confrontation with death. (shrink)

How did one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the 20th century grapple with the founding of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—one of the most significant political conflicts of his time? Samuel Hayim Brody traces the development of Martin Buber's thinking and its implications for the Jewish religion, for the problems posed by Zionism, and for the Zionist-Arab conflict. Beginning in turbulent Weimar Germany, Brody shows how Buber's debates about Biblical meanings had concrete political consequences for anarchists, socialists, Zionists, Nazis, (...) British, and Palestinians alike. Brody further reveals how Buber's passionate commitment to the rule of God absent an intermediary came into conflict in the face of a Zionist movement in danger of repeating ancient mistakes. Brody argues that Buber's support for Israel stemmed from a radically rich and complex understanding of the nature of the Jewish mission on earth that arose from an anarchist reading of the Bible. (shrink)

We explain the general significance of integer-based descriptors for natural shapes and show that the evolution of two such descriptors, called mechanical descriptors (the number _N_(_t_) of static balance points and the Morse–Smale graph associated with the scalar distance function measured from the center of mass) appear to capture (unlike classical geophysical shape descriptors) one of our most fundamental intuitions about natural abrasion: shapes get monotonically _simplified_ in this process. Thus mechanical descriptors help to establish a correlation between subjective and (...) objective descriptors of perceived objects. (shrink)

Plato claimed that the regular solids are the building blocks of all matter. His views, commonly referred to as the geometric atomistic model, had enormous impact on human thought despite the fact that four of the five Platonic solids can not fill space without gaps. In this paper we quantify these gaps, showing that the errors in Plato’s estimates were quite small. We also develop a mean field approximation to convex honeycombs using a generalized version of Plato’s idea. This approximation (...) not only admits to view convex mosaics in$$d=3$$d=3dimensions as a continuum but we also find that it is quite accurate, showing that Plato’s geometric intuition may have been remarkable. (shrink)

Play is not only a kind of activity, but also a set of attitudes. We may join a card game in a casino without assuming a play attitude; conversely we may transform a seemingly tedious action, such as a walk to the store, into a pleasant experience of spontaneous movements by adopting an attitude of play. Attitudes of Play is a comprehensive study of the persistent human tendency to bring a cheerful and good-humoured outlook to any kind of situation, including (...) the serious and the mundane. Gabor Csepregi offers a phenomenological description of forms of playfulness, showing how, time and again, our attitudes of play redefine and shape diverse activities and experiences – from teaching, healing, or worshipping to political conflict or walking down the street. With play attitudes, we exercise our freedom to colour these scenes or give them an altogether new form, evoking in us more refined sentiments and more acute perceptions. This book seeks to distinguish play activities from attitudes of play, showing that the latter hold value not merely for their educational or other instrumental benefits but also, and perhaps most importantly, for the overall fulfillment and well-being they offer in all stages of human existence. (shrink)

2020 Gradiva Award Nominee, Best Edited Book Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership considers how these factors can be understood, nurtured, or thwarted and the subsequent impact on women's identity, authority and satisfaction. Psychoanalysis has long struggled with its ideas about women, about who they are, how to work with them, and how to respect and encourage what women want. This book argues that psychoanalytic theory and practice must evolve to maintain its relevance in (...) a volatile landscape. Each section of the book begins with a chapter that reviews contemporary ideas regarding women, as well as psychoanalytic history, gender bias, and societal norms and deficits. Three composite clinical stories allow our distinguished contributors to discuss the contexts within which individual experience can be affected, and the role that clinical work may have to mobilize and advance passion and vitality. In their discussions, the interplay of clinical psychoanalysis, sociopolitical context, and understanding of gender, combine to offer a unique perspective, built on decades of scholarship, personal experience, and clinical expertise. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership will serve as a reference for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as gender studies scholars interested in the progress of psychoanalytic theory regarding women in the 21st century. Contributors to this book include: Rosemary Balsam, Brenda Bauer, Andrea Celenza, Diane Elise, Adrienne Harris, Dorothy Holmes, Nancy Kulish, Vivian Pendar, Dionne Powell, and Arlene Richards. (shrink)

Which works and tenets of early modern natural law reached East-Central Europe, and how? How was it received, what influence did it have? And how did theorists and users of natural law in East- Central Europe enrich the pan-European discourse? This volume is pioneering in two ways; it draws the east of the Empire and its borderlands into the study of natural law, and it adds natural law to the practical discourse of this region. Drawing on a large amount of (...) previously neglected printed or handwritten sources, the authors highlight the impact that Grotius, Pufendorf, Heineccius and others exerted on the teaching of politics and moral philosophy as well as on policies regarding public law, codification praxis, or religious toleration. Contributors are: Péter Balázs, Ivo Cerman, Karin Friedrich, Gábor Gángó, Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Knud Haakonssen, Steffen Huber, Borbála Lovas, Martin P. Schennach, and József Simon. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is the syntax of inverse scope in Hungarian, a language that largely disambiguates quantifier scope at spell-out. Inverse scope is attributed to alternate orderings of potentially large chunks of structure, but with appeal to base-generation, as opposed to nonfeature-driven movement as in Kayne 1998. The proposal is developed within mirror theory and conforms to the assumption that structures are antisymmetrical. The paper also develops a matching notion of scope in terms of featural domination, as opposed (...) to c-command, and applies it to otherwise problematic cases of pied piping. Finally, the interaction of different quantifier types is examined and the patterns are explained invoking morphological considerations on one hand and A-bar reconstruction on the other. (shrink)

The new star of 1572 and the comet of 1577 had a major impact on the ways in which astronomical research developed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Behind this gradual but significant change there was an extended epistemological reform which placed increasing emphasis on reason and experience and strove to exclude arguments from Scripture and authority from scientific debate. This paper argues that the humanist debate on astrology after 1577, which was initiated by highly prestigious members of (...) a supraconfessional Republic of Letters, can be seen as an element of this process. Unlike earlier detractors of astrology, these new critics chiefly employed philosophical and scientific arguments concerning the legitimation of the entire art. By analysing a variety of accounts, this paper will reveal how great and complex the stakes in the debate over astrology were. They concerned not only the crucial problem of predestination and God’s interventionalism (hence also the possibility of miracles), but also the idea of science, the concept of the human mind, and ultimately the humanist ideal of the virtuous, rational, and responsible citizen. (shrink)

section 1. Medical ethics -- section 2. Technology -- section 3. Social and business issues -- section 4. Ritual -- section 5. Women -- section 6. Israel -- section 7. Kashrut -- section 8. Jewish identity and marriage -- section 9. Shabbat and holiday.

If any nature of science perspective is to be incorporated in science-related curricula, it is hard to imagine a satisfactory didactic toolkit that neglects the social studies of science, the academic field of study of the institutional structures and networks of science. Knowledge production takes place in a world populated by actors, instruments, and ideas, and various epistemic cultures are responsible for providing the concepts, abstractions, and techniques that slowly trickle down the information pathways to become stabilized in university curricula (...) or ossified in high-school science, losing much of the tacit knowledge along the way that enabled the production of knowledge in the first place. The discussion of the sociology of science and the sociology of scientific knowledge is followed by a short overview of recent approaches in science studies and the studies of expertise. (shrink)

Recent work in social and cultural studies of science and technology has shown that the ‘epistemic dependence’ of laypeople on experts is not a relation of blind trust, but typically and necessarily involves critical assessment of expert testimonies. Normative epistemologists have suggested a number of criteria, mostly of contextual nature since expert knowledge means restricted cognitive access to some epistemic domain, according to which non-experts can reliably evaluate expert claims; while science studies scholars have concentrated on how laypeople can come (...) to warranted decisions about technical matters on non-technicalgrounds. Instead of addressing the problem transcendentally (how such decisions are possible) or normatively (how such decisions should be reached), this paper contrasts the recommendations available in the literature with the empirical findings of a rough case study concerning the public reaction to the H1N1 vaccine issue. Awareness of how lay people do come to such decisions may inform and refine normative philosophical investigations. (shrink)

Continuity as appears to us immediately by intuition differs from its current formalization, the arithmetical continuum or equivalently the set of real numbers used in modern mathematical analysis. Motivated by the known mathematical and physical problems arising from this formalization of the continuum, our aim in this paper is twofold. Firstly, by interpreting Chaitin’s variant of Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem as an inherent uncertainty or fuzziness of the arithmetical continuum, a formal set-theoretic entropy is assigned to the arithmetical continuum. Secondly, (...) by analyzing Noether’s theorem on symmetries and conserved quantities, we argue that whenever the four dimensional space-time continuum containing a single, stationary, asymptotically flat black hole is modeled by the arithmetical continuum in the mathematical formulation of general relativity, the hidden set-theoretic entropy of this latter structure reveals itself as the entropy of the black hole, indicating that this apparently physical quantity might have a pure set-theoretic origin, too. (shrink)

Among those who criticize the concept of a common refrain is that we really have no idea what futility means. For example, physicians seem to disagree on whether a treatment being futile means that it has a less than 5% chance of working or a 20% chance of working. If the concept is so unclear, then it seems a thin reed upon which to base a momentous ethical decision—namely, that the physician's judgment should be allowed to override the wishes of (...) the competent patient or the patient's duly appointed surrogate. (shrink)

The human labor and animal inputs required to manufacture meat products are kept physically and symbolically distanced from the consumer. Recently however, meatpacking plants received significant news media attention when they emerged as hotpots for COVID-19 — threatening workers’ health, requiring plants to slow production, and forcing farmers to euthanize livestock. In light of these disruptions, this research asks: how did news media frame the impact of COVID-19 on the meat industry, and to what extent is a process of _defetishization_ (...) observed? Examining a sample of 230 news articles from coverage of US meatpacking plants and COVID-19 in 2020, I find that news media largely attributes the cause for the spread of COVID-19 in meatpacking plants to the history of exploitative working conditions and business practices of the meat industry. By contrast, the solutions offered to address these problems aim at alleviating the immediate obstacles posed by the pandemic and returning to, rather than challenging, the status quo. These short-run solutions for complex issues demonstrate the constraints in imagining alternatives to a problem rooted in capitalism. Furthermore, my analysis shows that animals are only made visible in the production process when their bodies become a waste product. (shrink)

The current confrontation between Russia and Ukraine raises essential problems regarding ethics and laws of war. It also presents an opportunity to compose an ethics case study to analyze the idea of a just war. The present-day war of Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine can hardly be analyzed ethically. We lean back to the seminal ideas of just war theorists to argue that war must be waged in a manner that is consistent with moral and ethical principles, such as proportionality, discrimination, (...) and respect for the rights of non-combatants. This article emphasizes the relationship between war and politics, and the belief that military forces should be used rationally and calculatedly. Wars have influenced the development of the modern world history. The fall of the Soviet Union led to 30 years of peace; however, the ideas of its creators returned to contemporary Russian thinking. We attempt to draw conclusions based on the past to enable conflict to end peacefully and a balance to be restored. (shrink)

the Mona Lisa, the Mondscheinsonate, the Chanson d’automne are works of art, the salt shaker on your table, the car in your garage, or the pijamas on your bed are not. the basic question of the metaphysics of works of art is this: what makes a thing a work of art? that is: what sort of property do works of art have in virtue of which they are works of art? or more simply: what sort of property being a work (...) of art is? In this paper we argue that things are works of art in virtue of what they are like, their intrinsic features, that is, in virtue of the fact that they have the perceptual (auditory, visual, etc.) properties they have. In other words: being a work of art supervenes on perceptual-intrinsic features. Currently, this metaphysical view is extremely unpopular within the philosophy of art. It is unpopular because there allegedly exists a knock-down objection to it, the well-known argument from indiscernible counterparts. our thesis implies, among other things, that every perceptual duplicate of a work of art is also a work of art. according to the argument from indiscernible counterparts, however, there could be (or even: there are) indiscernible counterparts such that one of them is a work of art while the other is not. hence things cannot be works of art solely in virtue of what they are like. Our paper divides into three parts. In the first part we state our views. In the second part we defend it against various versions of the argument from indiscernible counterparts. (In doing so our position will become more plausible, we hope). In the final part we provide some meta-reflections on the matter. (shrink)

Research on ethical issues within food systems is often human-centric. As a consequence, animal-centric policy debates where regulatory decisions about food are being made tend to be overlooked by food scholars and activists. This absence was notable in the recent debates around Australia’s animal live export industry. Using Foucault’s tools, we explore how ‘food security’ is conceptualised and governed within animal cruelty policy debates about the live export trade. The problem of food security produced in these debates shaped Indonesians as (...) ‘victims’ of food insecurity due to the nation’s inability to produce sufficient quantities of protein. This understanding of the problem reproduced the dominant framing of food security as a problem for developing countries addressed by increasing global food production. The underlying premise uncritically accepted in Australia’s debates on live export trade was that intensive animal agriculture, and Australia’s live export trade specifically, were essential to alleviating global food insecurity. Drawing on our findings, we show how dominant representations of ‘food security’, and related regulatory and technological trajectories, flourish where alliances between animal and food activists, scholarship, and movements are weak. Accordingly, we argue for agri-food scholars to take up opportunities to contribute to the policy discussions about the treatment of animals to effectively expand the kinds of problems, solutions, and strategies of resistance produced in the discourses surrounding food system issues. (shrink)

Here we investigate the classes RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ of representable directed cylindric algebras of dimension α introduced by Nemeti[12]. RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ can be seen in two different ways: first, as an algebraic counterpart of higher order logics and second, as a cylindric algebraic analogue of Quasi-Projective Relation Algebras. We will give a new, "purely cylindric algebraic" proof for the following theorems of Nemeti: (i) RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ is a finitely axiomatizable variety whenever α ≥ 3 is finite and (ii) one can obtain (...) a strong representation theorem for RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ if one chooses an appropriate (non-well-founded) set theory as foundation of mathematics. These results provide a purely cylindric algebraic solution for the Finitization Problem (in the sense of [11]) in some non-well-founded set theories. (shrink)

In recent years, bioethics has increasingly become an international area of inquiry with major contributions being made not only in North America but also in Europe and in the Pacific Rim countries. This general observation is particularly true for research ethics. Little attention has been paid, however, to this internationalization of bioethics in general and research ethics in particular, and there are few studies comparing what has emerged in the different countries.

Current philosophical reflections on science have departed from mainstream history of science with respect to both methodology and conclusions. The article investigates how different approaches to reconstructing commitments can explain these differences and facilitate a mutual understanding and communication of these two perspectives on science. Translating the differences into problems pertaining to principles of charity, the paper offers a platform for clarification and resolution of the differences between the two perspectives. The outlined contextual approach occupies a middle ground between mainstream (...) history and sociology of science, bracketing questions of rationality, and individual coherence-maximizing, rationality-centered approaches. It can satisfy those, who believe that science is an epistemically privileged endeavor, and its epistemic content should not be neglected when reconstructing the scientists’ positions. It can also satisfy those who hold that it is naive to believe that the immediate context, e.g. the challenges to a theory, the expectations of the author about his audience, etc., does not affect the position a scientist takes. Its theoretical considerations are exemplified with a close study of the debate following the 1672 publication of Newton's theory of light and colours, also offering a novel reading of the development of his methodological views concerning the demonstrativity of the famous crucial experiment. Although we only show the capacity of the framework to analyze a direct controversy, given that it is hard to think about any scientific text as detached from an argumentative context, this approach has the potential to be a general guide for interpretation. (shrink)

The concept of the “End of History” was originally developed by G. W. F. Hegel in the Phenomenology of the spirit in 1806 (Hegel, 2018). The concept can be closely related to a utopia, the completion of the work of philosophers, and the creation of a perfect framework of the finished system of ideas. Hegel had a lot of influence on Western philosophy with the development of this idea and on Marx, who obviously thought of history in dialectic terms. However, (...) he developed the idea of “communism”, which would have been a state of humankind very similar to the concept of Hegel, with no class differences and no opiates of the people—and no place for further development (Marx & Engels, 2002). The “End of History” is based on this theoretical viewpoint that mankind has reached the final and most advanced form of societal development. However, the theorists and their intellectual followers both have to realize a painful way that the phenomenon can only be attained preliminarily. It proves to be a utopia. (shrink)

En este texto examinaremos la relación problemática entre parrhesía, necropolítica y víctima. Nuestro trabajo estará radicado en una examinación de la necropolítica y su íntima relación con el biopoder foucaultiano, sus resistencias y efectos. Una resistencia particular está contenida en la noción de parrhesía, la cual recibirá su respectiva modificación modal ante los efectos de la necropolítica bajo las circunstancias examinadas. Con lo anterior, nuestra intención sería retratar una teoría de "víctimas y parrhesía" bajo el contexto de lo necropolítico y (...) la no–filosofía. Nos "serviremos" de la manera más ética posible de material visual, entablando unos respectivos límites teóricos. (shrink)

All treatments, even those labeled as supportive, have burdens as well as benefits. Patients and their surrogates have the right to finally decide whether the offered treatment's cost-benefit calculation is acceptable.

We study sincere-strategy preference-based approval voting , a system proposed by Brams and Sanver [1] and here adjusted so as to coerce admissibility of the votes , with respect to procedural control. In such control scenarios, an external agent seeks to change the outcome of an election via actions such as adding/deleting/partitioning either candidates or voters. SP-AV combines the voters' preference rankings with their approvals of candidates, where in elections with at least two candidates the voters' approval strategies are adjusted (...) – if needed – to approve of their most-preferred candidate and to disapprove of their least-preferred candidate. This rule coerces admissibility of the votes even in the presence of control actions, and hybridizes, in effect, approval with pluralitiy voting. We prove that this system is computationally resistant to 19 out of 22 types of constructive and destructive control. Thus, SP-AV has more resistances to control than is currently known for any other natural voting system with a polynomial-time winner problem. In particular, SP-AV is the second natural voting system with an easy winner-determination procedure that is known to have full resistance to constructive control, and unlike Copeland voting it in addition displays broad resistance to destructive control. (shrink)

We study sincere-strategy preference-based approval voting (SP-AV), a system proposed by Brams and Sanver [1] and here adjusted so as to coerce admissibility of the votes (rather than excluding inadmissible votes a priori), with respect to procedural control. In such control scenarios, an external agent seeks to change the outcome of an election via actions such as adding/deleting/partitioning either candidates or voters. SP-AV combines the voters' preference rankings with their approvals of candidates, where in elections with at least two candidates (...) the voters' approval strategies are adjusted – if needed – to approve of their most-preferred candidate and to disapprove of their least-preferred candidate. This rule coerces admissibility of the votes even in the presence of control actions, and hybridizes, in effect, approval with pluralitiy voting. We prove that this system is computationally resistant (i.e., the corresponding control problems are NP-hard) to 19 out of 22 types of constructive and destructive control. Thus, SP-AV has more resistances to control than is currently known for any other natural voting system with a polynomial-time winner problem. In particular, SP-AV is (after Copeland voting, see Faliszewski et al. [2, 3]) the second natural voting system with an easy winner-determination procedure that is known to have full resistance to constructive control, and unlike Copeland voting it in addition displays broad resistance to destructive control (© 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim). (shrink)

SUMMARYThis study is centred on events in 1580 surrounding a scandalous publication of Machiavelli’s The Prince by Pietro Perna in Basel. With the presentation of new documents the paper fully reconstructs the judicial case that followed its publication, raising new questions about the author of the infamous book Vindiciae contra tyrannos. However, this fascinating story will serve only as a starting point for the investigation of Machiavelli's late-sixteenth-century reception, providing insights into not only the political and religious but also the (...) scientific context of its publication. These fields, it will be argued, were thoroughly interrelated, all sharing similar epistemological premises. (shrink)

An individual's health, genetic, or environmental-exposure data, placed in an online repository, creates a valuable shared resource that can accelerate biomedical research and even open opportunities for crowd-sourcing discoveries by members of the public. But these data become “immortalized” in ways that may create lasting risk as well as benefit. Once shared on the Internet, the data are difficult or impossible to redact, and identities may be revealed by a process called data linkage, in which online data sets are matched (...) to each other. Reidentification, the process of associating an individual's name with data that were considered deidentified, poses risks such as insurance or employment discrimination, social stigma, and breach of the promises often made in informed-consent documents. At the same time, re-ID poses risks to researchers and indeed to the future of science, should re-ID end up undermining the trust and participation of potential research participants. The ethical challenges of online data sharing are heightened as so-called big data becomes an increasingly important research tool and driver of new research structures. Big data is shifting research to include large numbers of researchers and institutions as well as large numbers of participants providing diverse types of data, so the participants’ consent relationship is no longer with a person or even a research institution. In addition, consent is further transformed because big data analysis often begins with descriptive inquiry and generation of a hypothesis, and the research questions cannot be clearly defined at the outset and may be unforeseeable over the long term. In this article, we consider how expanded data sharing poses new challenges, illustrated by genomics and the transition to new models of consent. We draw on the experiences of participants in an open data platform—the Personal Genome Project—to allow study participants to contribute their voices to inform ethical consent practices and protocol reviews for big-data research. (shrink)

Deindustrialization is a major burden on workers’ health in many countries, calling for theoretically informed sociological analysis. Here, we present a novel neoclassical sociological synthesis of the lived experience of deindustrialization. We conceptualize industry as a social institution whose disintegration has widespread implications for the social fabric. Combining Durkheimian and Marxian categories, we show that deindustrialization generates ruptures in economic production, which entail job and income loss, increased exploitation, social inequality, and the disruption of services. These ruptures spill over to (...) the field of social reproduction, generating material deprivation, job strain, fatalism, increased domestic workload, anomie, community disintegration, and alienation. These ruptures in social reproduction are sources of psychosocial stress, through which deindustrialization gets embodied as ill health and dysfunctional health behavior. We substantiate this framework through the extensive qualitative thematic analysis of 82 life history interviews in Hungary’s rust belt. (shrink)

The original concept of epistemic dependence suggests uncritical deference to expert opinions for non-experts. In the light of recent work in science studies, however, the actual situation of epistemic dependence is seen to involve the necessary and ubiquitous need for lay evaluations of scientific experts. As expert knowledge means restricted cognitive access to some epistemic domain, lay evaluations of expert knowledge are rational and informed only when the criteria used by non-experts when judging experts are different from the criteria used (...) by experts when making their claims. The distinction between ‘substantial knowledge’ and ‘contextual knowledge’ allows for the laypeople to know with experts without having to know precisely what experts know. Such meta-expert evaluations are not specific to the public sphere outside science, nor are they limited internally to science, but they are present in a wide range of contexts in and around science. The paper legitimizes the concept of contextual knowledge by relating it to the relevant literature, and expounds the idea by identifying some elements of such a knowledge. (shrink)

Let be a countable first order structure and endow the universe of with the discrete topology. Then the automorphism group of becomes a topological group. A tuple of automorphisms is defined to be weakly generic iff its diagonal conjugacy class (in the algebraic sense) is dense (in the topological sense) and the ‐orbit of each is finite. Existence of tuples of weakly generic automorphisms are interesting from the point of view of model theory as well as from the point of (...) view of finite combinatorics.The main results of the present work are as follows. In Theorem 2.6 we characterize the existence of tuples of weakly generic automorphisms with the aid of the profinite topology of free groups. In Corollary 2.12 we will show that if has finite topological rank r (and satisfies a further, mild technical condition) then the existence of a weakly generic tuple in implies the existence of weakly generic tuples in for all natural number. Finally, in Theorem 3.2 we show that if is a countable model of an ℵ0‐categorical, simple theory in which all types over the empty set are stationary and has a pair of weakly generic automorphisms then it has tuples of weakly generic automorphisms of arbitrary finite length.At the technical level we will combine elementary investigations about the profinite topology of free groups with the results of [11] about topological ranks of the automorphism groups of some structures. (shrink)