Mary Hesse's well-known work on models and analogies gives models a creative role to play in science, which rests on developing certain analogical properties considered neutral between the two fields. Case study material from Irving Fisher's work (The Purchasing Power of Money, 1911), in which he used analogies to construct models of monetary relations and the monetary system, highlights certain omissions in Hesse's account. The analysis points to the importance of taking account of the negative properties in the (...) analogies and to certain differences between "ready-made" analogies (models of systems based on existing analogical structures) and "designed" analogies (models built up from separate analogical features). (shrink)

The “embeddedness” of economic life in social relations has become a productive analytical principle and the basis of a penetrating critique of economic orthodoxy. But this critique raises another important, social and historical question, of how the economy became “disembedded” in the first place – how the multitude of transactions designated (somewhat arbitrarily) as economic were abstracted from the rest of social life and reconstituted as an object, the economy, which behaves according to its own logic. This article investigates the (...) social sources of some innovations in economic thought that contributed to the emergence of the economy, particularly statistical indicators and mechanical models. By examining the redefinitions of the object of economic research developed by Irving Fisher and Wesley Mitchell in the 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth century, I argue that the abstraction of the economy from the remainder of social life was a strategy linked to the position of these innovators within the field of economics, conceived as a social structure. Possessing a specialized scientific cultural capital, but lacking upper class background, contacts, and dispositions that characterized the founders of academic economics, Fisher and Mitchell elaborated new definitions of their discipline's object of study, and a new type of economic expertise. (shrink)

We address the most fundamental yet routinely ignored issue in economics today: that of distributive impact of the monetary system on the real economy. By re-examining the logical implications of token re-presentation of value and Irving Fisher’s theory of exchange, we argue that producers of value incur incidental expropriation of wealth associated with the deflationary effect that new value supply has on the purchasing power of money. In order to remedy the alleged inequity we propose a value-added negative (...) tax (VANT) based on net individual contribution to the economic output, which is structured as a negative tax function geared to profits derived from eligible productive activities in consideration of their estimated deflationary impact. We show that an adequately optimised VANT can be non-inflationary and have zero net cost to the public. Furthermore, economic output stands to improve due to direct incentivisation of value creation, making the proposed scheme not only politically feasible but economically desirable. The proposal advances the principle of ‘fair money’, where all forms of economic value are attributed to their rightful owners prior to any positive taxation. (shrink)

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side and Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson on the neo-classical side. The book is now considered to be a classic. This fiftieth anniversary edition comes with a new preface by the author and (...) two new afterwords that reflect on the author's contribution to the field and the significance of the book in the history of economics. Topics covered include the measurement of capital, the revival of interest in Irving Fisher's rate of return on investment, the double-switching debate, Sraffa's prelude to a critique of neoclassical theory, and the 'new' theories of the rate of profits in capitalist society. (shrink)

Many people, such as Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Irving Fisher, and William Sharpe, assume that free markets full of rational people automatically lead to ethical actions and outcomes. After all, at its equilibrium point, a perfectly competitive free market maximizes utility, respects autonomy, and fulfills justice’s dictates. Unfortunately, in some technology markets, there are a significant number of people who have undergone epistemic closure. Epistemic closure entails that all reliable evidence that would challenge deeply held beliefs is dismissed (...) as corrupted, whereas all supporting evidence, no matter how unreliable, is accepted as incontrovertible. Those who have the condition act irrationally within that domain. As a result, business decisions become much more difficult than they would be in a rational market. In this article, epistemic closure’s ethical issues are developed. First, although they are acting irrationally within the closure’s domain, those with epistemic closure can still be held accountable for their actions. Second, to deal ethically with epistemic closure and its consequences, then it is vital to know what it is and its root causes, as well as to have a practical principle that can assist in making pragmatic decisions. Because some new technologies face epistemic closure, then focusing on a particular representative case of it will help to illustrate the issue’s ethical dimensions. (shrink)

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side and Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson on the neo-classical side. The book is now considered to be a classic. This fiftieth anniversary edition comes with a new preface by the author and (...) two new afterwords that reflect on the author's contribution to the field and the significance of the book in the history of economics. Topics covered include the measurement of capital, the revival of interest in Irving Fisher's rate of return on investment, the double-switching debate, Sraffa's prelude to a critique of neoclassical theory, and the 'new' theories of the rate of profits in capitalist society. (shrink)

Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ mental control, (...) people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared to a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient. Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility. (shrink)

David Lewis is typically interpreted as a class nominalist. One consequence of class nominalism, which he embraced, is that the reduction of ordered pairs, triples, etc to unordered sets of sets is conventional. The reaction by his Australian counterparts D.M. Armstrong and Peter Forrest was that Lewis was not being ontologically serious. This chapter evaluates this debate over serious ontology. It is argued that in one sense Lewis is ontologically serious, but that his additional commitment to structuralism about classes should (...) push him to adopt a trope-theoretic account of naturalness, which opens up another way to respond to the charge of not doing serious ontology. This conclusion is supported by certain remarks he makes in his correspondence, thus revealing how his thinking about properties appears to have evolved from property-egalitarianism to a sparse theory of tropes. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in examining the role of religion in business ethics, there is little consensus concerning the basis or standards of “good” or ethical behavior and the reasons behind them. This limits our ability to enhance ethical behavior in the workplace. We address this issue by examining worldviews as it relates to ethics research and practice. Our worldview forms the context within which we organize and build our understanding of reality. Given that much of our academic work as well (...) as business practice operate from a modern worldview, we examine how modernism shapes our beliefs and approaches to ethics in business and academia. We identify important limitations of modernism in addressing moral issues and religion. We then introduce the Christian worldview as an alternative approach to examining ethical issues in business. (shrink)

Reports from integrative researchers who have followed calls for sociotechnical integration emphasize that the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration to inflect the social shaping of technoscience is often constrained by their liminal position. Integrative researchers tend to be positioned as either adversarial outsiders or co-opted insiders. In an attempt to navigate these dynamics, we show that attending to affective disturbances can open up possibilities for productive engagements across disciplinary divides. Drawing on the work of Helen Verran, we analyze “disconcertment” in three (...) sociotechnical integration research studies. We develop a heuristic that weaves together disconcertment, affective labor, and responsivity to analyze the role of the body in interdisciplinary collaborations. We draw out how bodies do affective labor when generating responsivity between collaborators in moments of disconcertment. Responsive bodies can function as sensors, sources, and processors of disconcerting experiences of difference. We further show how attending to disconcertment can stimulate methodological choices to recognize, amplify, or minimize the difference between collaborators. Although these choices are context-dependent, each one examined generates responsivity that supports collaborators to readjust the technical in terms of the social. This analysis contributes to science and technology studies scholarship on the role of affect in successes and failures of interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge And whatever our concepts or meanings may be, there is a truth about them just as absolute and just as definite and certain as in the case of mathematics. In other fields we so seldom try to think in the abstract, or by pure logic, that we do not notice this. But obviously it is just as true. Wherever there is any set of interrelated concepts, there, quite apart from all questions of application (...) or the things we use them of, we have generated a whole complex array of orderly relations or patterns of meaning. And there must be a truth about these - a purely logical truth, in abstracto, and a truth which is certain apart from experience - even though this is only a part of the truth which we want to discover, and the rest of it is of a quite different sort which depends upon experience. Ordinarily we do not separate out this a'priori truth, because ordinarily we do not distinguish the purely logical significance of concepts from the application of words to sensible things. In fact it is only the mathematician who is likely to do this at all. But I should like to indicate that this separation is always possible and that it is important for the understanding of knowledge. To this end, let me use the term 'concept' for this element of purely logical meaning. We can then discriminate the conceptual element in thought as the element which two minds must have in common - not merely may have or do have but absolutely must have in common - when they understand each other. I suppose it is a frequent assumption that we are able to apprehend one another's meanings because our images and sensations are alike. But a little thought will Show that this assumption is very dubious. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This article focuses on documents made by the Soviet military secret service detailing the arrest, interrogation, trial and execution of Sergei Tret’iakov in Moscow in 1937. The original documents were published in Russian in 1997 as part of Return my Freedom, a collection of archival records edited by Vladimir Kolyazin that details the fate of Russian and German cultural figures who fell victim to the Stalinist terror. This record of Tret’iakov’s violent death has received little attention, even in Russia or (...) in Russian studies. The book presents facsimiles of 60 separately numbered and dated sheets containing records of Tret’iakov’s arrest and the search of his home. There are two written confessions; a first short admission of guilt and a second longer account of his supposed crimes that also claims parts of the first to be fictitious. These are followed by a transcript of his interrogation, a very brief account of his trial and the even briefer report of his execution. A historical gap separates these from documents of Tret’iakov’s official rehabilitation in 1954 which his wife, Olga Tret’iakov was instrumental in securing. Return my Freedom also contains the record of her arrest, interrogation and release in 1937. The article presents translated extracts from the official record of Tret’iakov’s interrogation and execution for the first time in English, and it explores these documents in relation to core strategies and critical commitments that shaped Tret’iakov’s influential conception of Factography. (shrink)

A generation before Beardsley, legal scholar John Henry Wigmore invented a scheme for representing arguments in a tree diagram, aimed to help advocates analyze the proof of facts at trial. In this essay, I describe Wigmore's "Chart Method" and trace its origin and influence. Wigmore, I argue, contributes to contemporary theory in two ways. His rhetorical approach to diagramming provides a novel perspective on problems about the theory of reasoning, premise adequacy, and dialectical obligations. Further, he advances a novel solution (...) to the problem of assessing argument quality by representing the strength of argument in meeting objections. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity is explicitly con cerned with the suppression of the voice of the Other by the synoptic totalizations of the voice of western philosophy. Levinas contests this emergence of Being and the systems of totality it indicates with the irruption of the face of the other, which signifies through contact and sensibility the presence of infinity within the human situation. Derrida's reading of this fundamental testing of western ontology rests on the accusation that western philosophy already (...) has a term for this: empiricism. That is, Derrida exposes an alien voice within Levinas's exposure of the voice alienated from ontological formulations. In the later Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence Levinas implic itly recognizes the truth of Derrida's demonstration of a residual con ceptualism, and shifts from the thematization of infinite exteriority given by the Other, alterity and the face-to-face relation, to the search for a signifyingness that will breach the noema's identificational closure, that is, to the direct and exposed gesture of saying. Both the limit terms of Totality and Infinity and the response they produced in Derrida have become the starting-point of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence: the testimony that is irreducible to a thematizing knowledge. What saves this saying from becoming in its turn another theme is that, in addition to its acting in the text, it acts upon and as HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 10 No. 3 © 1997 SAGE Publications [0952-695110:3] the text. The vocabulary, form of composition and mode of address of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence strain against their inherited limits. And the work this obliges the reader to undergo is, of course, an ethical necessity, given the work's message. (shrink)

This chapter advances a contextual view of evidence, through a reconsideration of Hempel's paradox of confirmation. The initial view regarding Hempel's paradox is that a non-black non-raven does confirm ‘All ravens are black’, but only in certain contexts. The chapter begins by reformulating the paradox as a puzzle about how the same entity can have variable evidential values for a given proposition. It then offers a three-stage solution to the reformulated paradox. The situation makes better sense when we reach a (...) deeper propositional understanding of evidence, recognising that each entity can be represented in multiple observational propositions. Some anti-contextualist intuitions can be defused by distinguishing two different senses of the word ‘evidence’, one applying to objects or events and the other applying to propositions; only the latter is relevant to inference. A fuller understanding comes from analysing the constitution and use of evidence in terms of epistemic action. These reflections on the ravens paradox suggest a general philosophical framework more suitable for understanding the function of evidence in scientific and everyday practices. (shrink)

Refugees and asylum seekers may experience challenges related to pre-arrival experiences, structural disadvantage after migration and during resettlement requiring the need for special protection when participating in research. The aim was to review if and how people with refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds have had their need for special protection addressed in national and international research ethics guidelines. A systematic search of grey literature was undertaken. The search yielded 2187 documents of which fourteen met the inclusion criteria. Few guidelines addressed (...) specific ethical considerations for vulnerable groups much less people with refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds. One guideline explicitly addressed vulnerability for refugees and asylums seekers. To ensure members of ethics committees and researchers consider the potential challenges of conducting research with these groups, guidelines may need to be supplemented with a refugee and asylum seeker specific research ethics framework. Such a framework may be necessary to optimally protect people with refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds in research. (shrink)

Le concept [the conception] d’a priori touche deux problèmes persistants en philosophie : celui du rôle joué par l’esprit lui-même dans la connaissance, et celui de la possibilité d’une « vérité nécessaire» ou d’une connaissance « indépendante de l’expérience». Or, les conceptions traditionnelles de l’a priori se sont avérées intenables. Que l’esprit appréhende le flux de l’immédiateté avec quelque prescience divine des principes qui légifèrent sur l’expérience, qu’il y ait la moindre lumière...

“Latin American Positivism: Theory and Practice” is unique in that the work examines this subject from a multi-disciplinary prospect. The philosophy contributors examine the doctrines of Latin American positivism as they evolved during the nineteenth century while the historians study the interplay between the philosophy and the larger society.

Cyclin‐dependent kinases are Ser/Thr protein kinases best known for their cell cycle roles, where CDK1 triggers mitotic onset in all eukaryotes. CDKs are also involved in various other cellular processes, some of which, such as transcription and centrosome duplication, are coupled to cell cycle progression. A new study suggests that the mitotic CDK network is active at low levels in non‐dividing, differentiating precursors of multiciliated cells, and that it drives ciliogenesis. Manipulating the activity of CDK1 or PLK1 altered transitions between (...) the amplification, growth, and disengagement phases, in a manner analogous to the control of passage through different phases of mitosis. How the dynamics of the mitotic kinase network are controlled in these post‐mitotic cells, and whether other cell cycle regulators are also involved, remains unknown. In the present mini‐review we suggest that the redeployment of cell cycle regulators to control steps of differentiation in non‐dividing cells might be a more general, hitherto under‐recognized, feature of cell regulation. (shrink)

The science of mind wandering has rapidly expanded over the past 20 years. During this boom, mind wandering researchers have relied on self-report methods, where participants rate whether their minds were wandering. This is not an historical quirk. Rather, we argue that self-report is indispensable for researchers who study passive phenomena like mind wandering. We consider purportedly “objective” methods that measure mind wandering with eye tracking and machine learning. These measures are validated in terms of how well they predict self-reports, (...) which means that purportedly objective measures of mind wandering retain a subjective core. Mind wandering science cannot break from the cycle of self-report. Skeptics about self-report might conclude that mind wandering science has methodological foundations of sand. We take a rather more optimistic view. We present empirical and philosophical reasons to be confident in self-reports about mind wandering. Empirically, these self-reports are remarkably consistent in their contents and behavioral and neural correlates. Philosophically, self-reports are consistent with our best theories about the function of mind wandering. We argue that this triangulation gives us reason to trust both theory and method. (shrink)

We present a distributed control modeling approach for an automated manufacturing system based on the dynamics of one-dimensional cellular automata. This is inspired by the fact that both cellular automata and manufacturing systems are discrete dynamical systems where local interactions given among their elements can lead to complex dynamics, despite the simple rules governing such interactions. The cellular automaton model developed in this study focuses on two states of the resources of a manufacturing system, namely, busy or idle. However, the (...) interaction among the resources such as whether they are shared at different stages of the manufacturing process determines the global dynamics of the system. A procedure is shown to obtain the local evolution rule of the automaton based on the relationships among the resources and the material flow through the manufacturing process. The resulting distributed control of the manufacturing system appears to be heterarchical, and the evolution of the cellular automaton exhibits a Class II behavior for some given disordered initial conditions. (shrink)