This interview with Jeremy Waldron covers three topics. Firstly, we dealt with the methodology debate, that is, the discussion about how to proceed in analyzing the nature of law. Does the question ‘What is law?’ require a descriptive analysis of the concept of law or, rather, a normative exercise in political philosophy? Secondly, we spoke about the role of law in response to historic injustice, especially in relation to the restitution of property rights. On this topic Waldron vindicates the ‘supersession-thesis’, (...) the idea that, due to changed circumstances and the passage of time, historic injustices become superseded. The third section of the interview is devoted to Waldron’s perspective on the citation of foreign law by national judges. (shrink)

I have two objectives in this article. The first is methodological: I elaborate a minimal phenomenological method and attempt to show its importance in studies of infant behavior. The second objective is substantive: Applying the minimal phenomenological approach, combined with Meltzoff’s “like-me” developmental framework, I propose the hypothesis that infants learn the pointing gesture at least in part through imitation. I explain how developments in sensorimotor ability (posture, arm and hand control and coordination, and locomotion) in the first year of (...) life prepare the infant for acquiring the pointing gesture. The former may directly enable the latter by allowing the infant to experience its own body as being “like those” of others, thus allowing it to imitatively appropriate a broader range of adult behavior. My proposal emphasizes the embodiment of mind in the development of cognition, contrary to latent dualistic tendencies in some developmental literature. (shrink)

In this essay, by example of the physician-patient relationship and drawing on the work of D.W. Winnicott, I explore what may be possible together in relationships, and in the pursuit of health and flourishing, at understanding what we need, and getting ourselves and the other “right”—what we are afraid of and how we get each other wrong, and the distance or gap between “what has been” and “what might be.” In pursuit of these questions, I consider what both physicians and (...) patients might endeavor to do together to address this distance: to recognize and respond to each other, and to identify and address common needs and felt distances. And, how, along the way, we may be able to better identify and understand fundamental challenges to all relationships. Finally, I ask the reader to imagine a physician-patient encounter (and all relationships) as vulnerable possibilities. And I suggest a method for a way forward. While we may not always get what we want in a relationship, perhaps our earnest effort at knowing together will open a potential space for us to get what we need. This is where I imagine that the physician-patient relationship begins: where all relationships begin. (shrink)

What process ought to guide decision making for pediatric patients? The prevailing view is that decision making should be informed and guided by the best interest of the child. A widely discussed structural model proposed by Buchanan and Brock focuses on parents as surrogate decision makers and examines best interests as guiding and/or intervention principles. Working from two recent articles by Ross on “constrained parental autonomy” in pediatric decision making (which is grounded in the Buchanan and Brock model), I discuss (...) (supportively) features of Ross’s effort visa-vis the best interest standard. I argue that any pediatric decision-making model that brackets or formally limits an engagement with the child patient assumes too much. Further, any model that under appreciates the place of parents and their autonomy, and the dynamic parent-child relationship, misses an opportunity to broaden the clinical encounter by considering questions of justice for the child (Rawls) and within a family (Ross). In this context, I focus on the child’s emerging and ongoing emotional and intellectual development and autonomy—their capabilities and identifying primary goods. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one‐shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

This paper asks why information should ever be expressed vaguely, re-assessing some previously proposed answers to this question and suggesting some new ones. Particular attention is paid to the benefits that vague expressions can have in situations where agreement over the meaning of an expression cannot be taken for granted. A distinction between two different versions of the above-mentioned question is advocated. The first asks why human languages contain vague expressions, the second question asks when and why a speaker should (...) choose a vague expression when communicating with a hearer. While the former question is purely theoretical, the latter has practical implications for the computational generation of utterances in Natural Language Generation (NLG). (shrink)

Internet is often said to open up new avenues for a more direct and deliberative democracy. In this article, the notion of ‘deliberation’ will be problematized and a typology of political web sites will be developed. Next, three case studies of Dutch discussion sites are used to test the claim that the organizational structure, aim, control of content and kind of interactivity of political web sites can explain the level and quality of participation. Except for its mostly extreme elitist participation, (...) the research presented here gives a rather ambiguous picture of e-democracy at work. Not only are we confronted with more paradoxes than clear-cut answers, the question is raised whether notions such as the ‘public sphere’ are not more of a hindrance than a help in making sense of politics on the Internet. (shrink)

Media in Question sets the agenda for a revitalized debate on the hybrid communicative practices that constitute the postmodern media landscape: practices that cross the boundaries between fact and fiction, information and entertainment, public knowledge, and popular culture. In this challenging and provocative collection, the individual contributors rethink key issuesùthe meaning of the public interest, the quality of media performance, and deregulation. In the process they raise questions rarely addressed in normative media theories, for example, the ethics of sports reporting, (...) the moral reasoning in popular culture, and the required professional standards for infotainment genres such as reality television and gossip journalism. Accessible and wide-ranging, The Media in Question will be essential reading for students in mass communication and political communication studies. (shrink)

Abstract This essay argues that one way of understanding Gramsci today is as an organic intellectual of a class of managerial cadre which develops in advanced capitalism. With the growth of monopolistic structures and a deepening state role in capitalist society, a separate class of mediating functionaries emerges, entrusted with managerial tasks in running the economy and the state. The problems of conquering power from the perspective of this ?new middle class? that concerned Gramsci, were also those of the neo?Machiavellian (...) thinkers, Mosca, Michels, Pareto and Sorel around the turn of the twentieth century. From opposed political angles, they and Gramsci shared the concern with occupying the centre ground and mediate the extremes in a complex society. Today?s Gramscianism appeals to the same set of concerns. (shrink)

Dans cet article, composé en hommage aux travaux de Peter Sharratt, l’auteur examine l’attitude de Pierre de La Ramée (Ramus) et d’Omer Talon à l’égard de l’Éthique à Nicomaque. En tant qu’humanistes, ces derniers s’occupent intensément des arts du discours. Tout en reconnaissant la nécessité d’un fondement éthique dans tout discours, ils se montrent violemment hostiles au traité aristotélicien. Le traité posthume de théologie composé par Ramus propose le Décalogue comme source exclusive de la morale chrétienne. Ramus et Talon refusent (...) de la sorte de s’engager dans la voie ouverte quelques décennies plus tôt par Ph. Melanchthon, qui avait intégré de manière originale la morale antique, notamment celle d’Aristote, dans la théologie protestante. Toutefois, vers la fin du xvie siècle, le philosophe hollandais Rodolphe Snellius, père adoptif du théologien Arminius, composera un traité de morale dans lequel il tente de concilier la morale aristotélicienne avec la méthode développée par Ramus et son équipe. (shrink)

Recent findings necessitate revision of the traditional view of G protein‐coupled receptor (GPCR) signaling and expand the diversity of mechanisms by which receptor signaling influences cell behavior in general. GPCRs elicit signals at the plasma membrane and are then rapidly removed from the cell surface by endocytosis. Internalization of GPCRs has long been thought to serve as a mechanism to terminate the production of second messengers such as cAMP. However, recent studies show that internalized GPCRs can continue to either stimulate (...) or inhibit cAMP production in a sustained manner. They do so by remaining associated with their cognate G protein subunit and adenylyl cyclase at endosomal compartments. Once internalized, the GPCRs produce cellular responses distinct from those elicited at the cell surface. (shrink)

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

A formula ϕ in the one non-logical symbol ϵ with one free variable x is Russell if the sentence Vχ) is logically valid. This note describes a pattern common to the classical examples of Russell formulas, adds a couple of new ones, and constructs many formulas that are near-Russell.

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

8.6 Issues Raised by the Algorithms Proposed.

This response discusses the experiment reported in Krahmer et al.’s Letter to the Editor of Cognitive Science. We observe that their results do not tell us whether the Incremental Algorithm is better or worse than its competitors, and we speculate about implications for reference in complex domains, and for learning from ‘‘normal” (i.e., non-semantically-balanced) corpora.

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about the subject matter (...) of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete. (shrink)

Something is not working in ethics consultation: in certain situations, relationships within families and with careproviders and surrogates have become so emotionally charged and destabilized that attention is dominated by conflict and misunderstanding, foreshadowing a loss of dignity and hope. In a compelling, urgent article, informed by events in the Schiavo case, with examples from the literature on theory, practice, and outcomes, Caplan and Bergman address this situation: redirecting our attention to what they see as “a lack of effective mechanisms” (...) for dealing with a “painful class of disputes in which families disagree with one another, or with doctors, about the care of those who cannot communicate.”1 It is no small matter that many of these cases are situated in the immediate, intense environment of end-of-life decision making. -/- How might we understand these encounters, and their limits? What can we hope? Following the tack of Caplan and Bergman, I will extend the discussion of the complex relationships between patients, families, surrogates, and physicians, and “hope for consensual resolution,” offering a somewhat different account of what is lacking. While Caplan and Bergman foreground an apparent irreconcilability of appeals to competing biomedical principles as what is lacking, I will suggest that a “salient characteristic” among participants, what Caplan and Bergman identify as a common concern for the patient’s best interests, may be far less stable and more complex, and thereby less directive, than first imagined. When Caplan and Bergman sketch their expectations for mediation and for mediators, they are right in noting that abstract principles “articulated as dispositive by designated ‘experts’ fail to capture, and arguably respect, the unique and complex nature of each such individual decision-making process,” and that “patients and families are at the extreme end of a power imbalance.” It is less clear that their descriptions — or their hope for mediation — capture this enormous challenge. (shrink)