Professionalization of farmers and rural entrepreneurs is identified as a potential resource to advance transition to multifunctional landscapes and territorial development. Drawing on interactive conceptions of knowledge creation and technical change, I argue that collective structures that support pooling of experiential knowledge can complement public and private sector engagement in innovation systems. Through exercise of leadership in advancing integration of farming into regional development and in integrating ecological and social concerns into agriculture, farmers can forge a professional identity and (...) broker a new social contract entitling them to renewal of their political and economic status. (shrink)

Critics of modern agriculture decry the dominance of monocultural landscapes and look to multifunctionality as a desirable alternative that facilitates the production of public goods. In this study, we explored opportunities for multifunctional Midwestern agriculture through participatory research led by farmers, landowners, and other local actors. We suggest that agriculture typically fosters some degree of multifunctionality that arises from the divergent intentions of actors. The result is a scattered arrangement of what we term patchwork multifunctionality, a ubiquitous status quo (...) in which individuals provide public goods without coordination. In contrast, interwoven multifunctionality describes deliberate collaboration to provide public goods, especially those cases where landowners work across fence lines to weave a synergistic landscape. Using examples from two case studies, we demonstrate the spectrum of patchwork and interwoven multifunctionality that currently exists in the Corn Belt, and present underutilized opportunities for public good creation. (shrink)

Solar energy powered autopoietic (self-creating and regenerative) natural and cultural biosphere landscapes fulfill vital multiple functions for the sustainable future of organic life and its biological evolution and for human physical and mental health. At the present crucial Macroshift from the industrial to the post- industrial information age, their future and therefore also that of our Total Human Ecosystem, integrating humans and their total environment, is endangered by the exponential growth and waste products of urban-industrial technosphere landscapes and agro-industrial bio-technosphere (...) landscapes. This danger can be prevented only by the creation of new symbiotic relations between human society and nature with the help of mutual supportive, restorative cultural and economic cross-catalytic networks in our Total human Ecosystem. This should be part of an all - embracing sustainability revolution, driven by human consciousness and its responsibility to act as stewards rather than exploiters of the complex and harmonious web of life on this planet. (shrink)

Multifunctional agricultural systems seek to expand upon production-based benefits to enhance family wellbeing and animal health, reduce inputs, and improve environmental services such as biodiversity and water quality. However, in many countries a landscape-level conversion is uneven at best and stalled at worst. This is particularly true across the eastern rural landscape in the United States. We explore the role of social networks as drivers of system transformation within dairy production in the eastern United States, specifically rotational (...) grazing as an alternative management option. We hypothesize the importance of weak ties within farmer social networks as drivers of change. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New York, we conducted 53 interviews with confinement, low-intensity, and rotational grazing dairy producers as well as 35 interviews with associated network actors. Though confinement and grazier networks had similar proportions of strong and weak ties, confinement producers had more market-based weak ties, while graziers had more weak-ties to government agencies and other graziers in the region. These agency weak ties supported rotational graziers through information exchange and cost sharing, both crucial to farmers’ transitions from confinement-based production to grazing systems. While weak ties were integral to initial innovation, farmers did not maintain these relationships beyond their transition to grazing. Of equal importance, grazier weak-tie networks did not include environmental organizations, suggesting unrealized potential for more diverse networks based on environmental services. By understanding the drivers, we can identify barriers to expanding weak tie networks and emergent properties in order to create institutions and policies necessary for change. (shrink)

Multifunctionality poses significant challenges for human brain mapping. Cathy Price and Karl Friston argue that brain regions perform many functions in one sense and a single function in another. Thus, neuroscientists must revise their “cognitive ontologies” to obtain systematic mappings. Colin Klein draws a different lesson from these findings: neuroscientists should abandon systematic mappings for context-sensitive ones. I claim that neither account succeeds as a general treatment of multifunctionality. I argue that brain areas, like genes or organs, are multifunctional (...) in different ways. I call this the “functional heterogeneity hypothesis.” I contend that different multifunctional parts require different mapping strategies. (shrink)

Innovative forms of green urban architecture aim to combine food, production, and design to produce food on a larger scale in and on buildings in urban areas. It includes rooftop gardens, rooftop greenhouses, indoor farms, and other building-related forms. This study uses the framework of sustainability to understand the role of ZFarming in future urban food production and to review the major benefits and limitations. The results are based on an analysis of 96 documents published in accessible international resources. The (...) analysis shows that ZFarming has multiple functions and produces a range of non-food and non-market goods that may have positive impacts on the urban setting. It promises environmental benefits resulting from the saving and recycling of resources and reduced food miles. Social advantages include improving community food security, the provision of educational facilities, linking consumers to food production, and serving as a design inspiration. In economic terms it provides potential public benefits and commodity outputs. However, managing ZFarming faces several challenges. For some applications, the required technologies are known but have not been used or combined in that way before; others will need entirely new materials or cultivation techniques. Further critical aspects are the problem of high investment costs, exclusionary effects, and a lack of acceptance. In conclusion, ZFarming is seen as an outside-the-box solution which has some potential in generating win–win scenarios in cities. Nevertheless, ZFarming practices are not in and of themselves sustainable and need to be managed properly. (shrink)

Consumers are increasingly aware of the health- and safety-related implications of the food which they can buy in the market. At the same time, households have become more aware of their environmental responsibilities. Regarding the production of food, a crucial and multifunctional role is played by agriculture. The way vegetables, fruits, and other crops are grown and how livestock is raised has an impact on the environment and landscape. Operations performed by farmers, such as water management, can be (...) dangerous for the soil and the whole ecosystem. Consequently, there is a search for natural ways of sustaining the impact of agriculture on the environment. In this context, one of the most popular ideas is organic agriculture. In the literature on the subject, there are many concepts that some authors consider to be synonymous even as others argue that these terms are not interchangeable. There is, for example, "organic agriculture," "alternative agriculture," "sustainable agriculture," "ecological agriculture," "biological agriculture," "niche farming," "community-supported agriculture," and "integrated pest management." Very often, techniques and products related to organic agriculture are described by marketing experts with the use of abbreviations such as "bio" and "eco." Products with such markings and labels are increasingly popular in stores that often give them separate shelves for their sale. Despite the higher price compared to conventional products, they are increasingly sought by consumers. The entry examines the various impacts of organic agriculture with a view to these trends. (shrink)

The soundscape, which is defined as the entire acoustic environment of an area, is a relevant biosemiotic ingredient of environmental complexity. It is composed of geophonies, anthrophonies, and biophonies where, in temperate biomes, birds are the major producers of the latter. The soundscape is heterogeneous in terms of space and time, and is affected by landscape features such as vegetation cover. It also operates as a communication network in which intra- and inter-specific interactions create a complex, eavesdropping-broadcasting network, namely, (...) the soundtope. This acoustic context provides public information for tracking resources like territory, mates, food, safety, and roosting sites and it can be considered a multifunctional eco-field. The Acoustic Complexity Index is a new metric that is used to efficiently process the sound files that, when collected by sampling matrixes, return by interpolation the spatial distribution of a soundscape. High quality soundscapes are sought to guarantee the biosemiotic mechanisms among species, but polluted conditions degrade and mask biophonies, thus reducing communication efficiency, with severe consequences for both individual and collective fitness. Preserving high quality soundscapes is therefore an important conservation issue and a target to aim for if we are to assure animal and human wellbeing. (shrink)

During the last few months, several pioneer genome‐wide transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic studies have revolutionised the understanding of bacterial biological processes, leading to a picture that resembles eukaryotic complexity. Technological advances such as next‐generation high‐throughput sequencing and high‐density oligonucleotide microarrays have allowed the determination, in several bacteria, of the entire boundaries of all expressed transcripts. Consequently, novel RNA‐mediated regulatory mechanisms have been discovered including multifunctional RNAs. Moreover, resolution of bacterial proteome organisation (interactome) and global protein localisation (localizome) have unveiled (...) an unanticipated complexity that highlights the significance of protein multifunctionality and localisation in the cell. Also, analysis of a complete bacterial metabolic network has again revealed a high fraction of multifunctional enzymes and an unexpectedly high level of metabolic responses and adaptation. Altogether, these novel approaches have permitted the deciphering of the entire physiological landscape of one of the smallest bacteria, Mycoplasma pneumoniae. Here, we summarise and discuss recent findings aimed at defining the blueprint of any prokaryote. (shrink)

We introduce multifunction algebras B i τ where τ is a set of 0 or 1-ary terms used to bound recursion lengths. We show that if for all ℓ ∈ τ we have ℓ ∈ O then B i τ = FP Σ i−1 p , those multifunctions computable in polynomial time with at most O )) queries to a Σ i−1 p witness oracle for ℓ ∈ τ and p a polynomial. We use our algebras to obtain independence results (...) in bounded arithmetic. In particular, we show if S 2 i proves Σ j b = PH for some j⩾i then S 2 i ≼ B S 2 . This implies if P NP ≠ P NP then S 2 1 does not prove the polynomial hierarchy collapses. We then consider a subtheory, Z , of the well-studied bounded arithmetic theory S 2 = ∪ i S 2 i . Using our algebras we establish the following properties of this theory: Z cannot prove the polynomial hierarchy collapses. In fact, even Z+ Π ̂ 0 b -consequences of S 2 cannot prove the hierarchy collapses. If Z ⊆ S 2 i for any i then the polynomial hierarchy collapses. If Z proves the polynomial hierarchy is infinite then for all i , S 2 i ⊢ Σ i p ≠ Π i p. (shrink)

There appear to be multifunctional artefacts of a type such that none of their functions can be attributed only to some proper part of the artefact. I use two examples of allegedly multifunctional artefacts of this kind in what follows, one due to Lynne Rudder Baker (aspirin) and another of my own (a spork). The two examples are meant to make the same point. I discuss her aspirin example, since its discussion has entered the literature, but without its (...) being dealt with satisfactorily. My example is, I believe, more intuitive than that of aspirin, which Baker introduced in her response to a challenge to her views, and so I will mostly rely on my example of a spork, especially at the end of the paper, to make my case. -/- I argue that in at least those two cases, if the standard arguments for distinguishing between an object and what constitutes it are sound, an argument showing that what we might have taken to be a single multifunctional object is in fact a case of multiple single-function artefacts which collocate. Or almost. There is one further assumption needed for these cases, beyond what the constitution cases require, and I produce reasons for accepting that assumption. (shrink)

The multistep pathway of eukaryotic gene expression involves a series of highly regulated events in the nucleus and cytoplasm. In the nucleus, genes are transcribed into pre‐messenger RNAs which undergo a series of nuclear processing steps. Mature mRNAs are then transported to the cytoplasm, where they are translated into protein and degraded at a rate dictated by transcript‐ and cell‐type‐specific cues. Until recently, these individual nuclear and cytoplasmic events were thought to be primarily regulated by different RNA‐ and DNA‐binding proteins (...) that are localized either only in the nucleus or only the cytoplasm. Here, we describe multifunctional proteins that control both nuclear and cytoplasmic steps of gene expression. One such class of multifunctional proteins (e.g., Bicoid and Y‐box proteins) regulates both transcription and translation whereas another class (e.g., Sex‐lethal) regulates both nuclear RNA processing and translation. Other events controlled by multifunctional proteins include assembly of spliceosome components, spliceosome recycling, RNA editing, cytoplasmic mRNA localization, and cytoplasmic RNA stability. The existence of multifunctional proteins may explain the paradoxical involvement of the nucleus in an RNA surveillance pathway (nonsense‐mediated decay) that detects cytoplasmic signals (premature termination codons). We speculate that shuttling multifunctional proteins serve to efficiently link RNA metabolism in the cytoplasmic and nuclear compartments. BioEssays 23:775–787, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

It might be conjectured that new models of regional economic development, combined with the emerging understanding of multifunctional agriculture, would suggest a new and perhaps more optimistic perspective on the potential of agriculture as an engine of regional economic growth. My purpose here is begin the process of surveying the relevant literature, unraveling the arguments and gleaning evidence from the published empirical record, and drawing-out some implications that may help focus our deliberations over the next few days.

The pathway leading to the synthesis of purines for ATP, RNA, DNA and other cellular molecules involves the same enzymatic steps for all groups of organisms. However, the organization of the polypeptides catalyzing some of these steps differs strikingly from organism to organism.

All the biological membranes contain oxidoreduction systems actively involved in their bioenergetics. Plasma membrane redox systems seem to be ubiquitous and they have been related to several important functions, including not only their role in cell bioenergetics, but also in cell defense through the generation of reactive oxygen species, in iron uptake, in the control of cell growth and proliferation and in signal transduction. In the last few years, an increasing number of mechanistic and molecular studies have deeply widened our (...) knowledge on the function of these plasma membrane redox systems. The aim of this review is to summarize what is currently known about the components and physiological roles of these systems. (shrink)

The vision of integrating artificial intelligence in education is part of an ongoing push for harnessing digital solutions to improve teaching and learning. Drawing from Jasanoff and Hasse, this paper deliberates on how sociotechnical imaginaries are interrelated to the implications of new technologies, such as AI, in education. Complicating Hasses’s call for the development of Socratic ignorance to consider our predispositions about new technologies and open new prospects of thought, this paper revisits postphenomenology and Feenberg’s critical constructivist theories. While embracing (...) the notion of Socratic ignorance, this paper stresses the importance of developing a nuanced understanding of technology that realizes its lack of neutrality and supports the creation of a deeper understanding of how knowledge is produced, deployed, and interpreted in the digital age. Thus, this paper argues that an amalgam of Hasse’s call for advancing Socratic ignorance combined with postphenomenology and critical constructivism can support students in developing a critical understanding of technology and opening new landscapes of imaginaries. (shrink)

Because of its complexity, contemporary scientific research is almost always tackled by groups of scientists, each of which works in a different part of a given research domain. We believe that understanding scientific progress thus requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. To this end, we present a novel agent-based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to climb uphill in this landscape, where elevation represents the significance (...) of the results discovered by employing a research approach. We consider three different search strategies scientists can adopt for exploring the landscape. In the first, scientists work alone and do not let the discoveries of the community as a whole influence their actions. This is compared with two social research strategies, which we call the follower and maverick strategies. Followers are biased towards what others have already discovered, and we find that pure populations of these scientists do less well than scientists acting independently. However, pure populations of mavericks, who try to avoid research approaches that have already been taken, vastly outperform both of the other strategies. Finally, we show that in mixed populations, mavericks stimulate followers to greater levels of epistemic production, making polymorphic populations of mavericks and followers ideal in many research domains. (shrink)

Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.

This article examines two questions about scientists’ search for knowledge. First, which search strategies generate discoveries effectively? Second, is it advantageous to diversify search strategies? We argue pace Weisberg and Muldoon, “Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor”, that, on the first question, a search strategy that deliberately seeks novel research approaches need not be optimal. On the second question, we argue they have not shown epistemic reasons exist for the division of cognitive labor, identifying the errors that led (...) to their conclusions. Furthermore, we generalize the epistemic landscape model, showing that one should be skeptical about the benefits of social learning in epistemically complex environments. (shrink)

Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts offers probing studies of the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature. Each chapter refines and expands the terms of discussion, and together they enrich the debate with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. To explore the interrelation between our conceptions of nature, beauty and art, the contributors consider the social construction of nature, the determination of our appreciation by artistic media, and the duality of nature's determining in gardening. Showing (...) that natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature, the volume occasions questions of the distinction and relation between art and nature generally, and culminates in a set of philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement and emotion in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. (shrink)

Few metaphors in biology are more enduring than the idea of Adaptive Landscapes, originally proposed by Sewall Wright (1932) as a way to visually present to an audience of typically non- mathematically savvy biologists his ideas about the relative role of natural selection and genetic drift in the course of evolution. The metaphor, how- ever, was born troubled, not the least reason for which is the fact that Wright presented different diagrams in his original paper that simply can- not refer (...) to the same concept and are therefore hard to reconcile with each other (Pigliucci 2008). For instance, in some usages, the landscape’s non- fitness axes represent combinations of individual genotypes (which cannot sensibly be aligned on a linear axis, and accordingly were drawn by Wright as polyhedrons of increasing dimensionality). In other usages, however, the points on the diagram represent allele or genotypic frequencies, and so are actually populations, not individuals (and these can indeed be coherently represented along continuous axes). (shrink)

Recent findings indicate that substantial cross‐talk may exist between transcriptional and post‐transcriptional processes. Firstly, there are suggestions that specific promoters influence the post‐transcriptional fate of transcripts, pointing to communication between protein complexes assembled on DNA and nascent pre‐mRNA. Secondly, an increasing number of proteins appear to be multifunctional, participating in transcriptional and post‐transcriptional events. The classic example is TFIIIA, required for both the transcription of 5S rRNA genes and the packaging of 5S rRNA. TFIIIA is now joined by the (...) Y‐box proteins, which bind DNA (transcription activation and repression) and RNA (mRNA packaging). Furthermore, the tumour suppressor WT1, at first thought to be a typical transcription factor, may also be involved in splicing; conversely, hnRNP K, a bona fide pre‐mRNA‐binding protein, appears to be a transcription factor. Other examples of multifunctional proteins are mentioned: notably PTB, Sxl, La and PU.1. It is now reasonable to assert that some proteins, which were first identified as transcription factors, could just as easily have been identified as splicing factors, hnRNP, mRNP proteins and vice versa. It is no longer appropriate to view gene expression as a series of compartmentalised processes; instead, multifunctional proteins are likely to co‐ordinate different steps of gene expression. (shrink)

We have made huge progress in understanding the biology of mental illnesses, but comparatively little in interpreting them at the psychological level. The eminent philosopher Jonathan Glover believes that there is real hope of progress in the human interpretation of disordered minds. -/- The challenge is that the inner worlds of people with psychiatric disorders can seem strange, like alien landscapes, and this strangeness can deter attempts at understanding. Do people with disorders share enough psychology with other people to make (...) interpretation possible? To explore this question, Glover tackles the hard cases—the inner worlds of hospitalized violent criminals, of people with delusions, and of those diagnosed with autism or schizophrenia. Their first-person accounts offer glimpses of inner worlds behind apparently bizarre psychiatric conditions and allow us to begin to learn the “language” used to express psychiatric disturbance. Art by psychiatric patients, or by such complex figures as van Gogh and William Blake, give insight when interpreted from Glover’s unique perspective. He also draws on dark chapters in psychiatry’s past to show the importance of not medicalizing behavior that merely transgresses social norms. And finally, Glover suggests values, especially those linked with agency and identity, to guide how the boundaries of psychiatry should be drawn. -/- Seamlessly blending philosophy, science, literature, and art, Alien Landscapes? is both a sustained defense of humanistic psychological interpretation and a compelling example of the rich and generous approach to mental life for which it argues. (shrink)

Robert Abrams argues that new concepts of space and landscape emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, marking a linguistic and interpretative limit to American expansion. Abrams supports the radical elements of antebellum writing, where writers from Hawthorne to Rebecca Harding Davis disputed the naturalizing discourses of mid-nineteenth century society. Whereas previous critics find in antebellum writing a desire to convert chaos into an affirmative, liberal agenda, Abrams contends that authors of the 1840s and 50s deconstructed more than they constructed.

Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops this theorizing further by confronting it with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data. Focusing on the themes of "time and memory", "repeating patterns", "identity formation", "morality", "labor", "playfulness and adventure", "power and subversion", "sound", "emotions", "coping with contingency", "home and unhomeliness", as well as "nature and environment", the book engages with a broad (...) range of theoretical concepts and approaches from the interdisciplinary field of landscape theory and the study of religions. It brings this theorizing into dialogue with the rich culture of local storytelling and landscape-related traditional beliefs of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords. In this rural region, landscape-related traditions have been collected since the early nineteenth century and continue to be important to this day. Confronting this rich heritage with the insights of landscape theory both in and beyond the study of religions allows important new contributions to theorizing landscape and religion, especially when it comes to considering the perspectives on landscape held by rural populations rather than the urban upper classes that have stood in the focus of research to date. The example of the Icelandic Westfjords shows the extreme richness of religious and supernatural approaches to the landscape that can be developed in rural communities, and how they are significantly and characteristically different from the urban perspectives of literature and the arts. (shrink)

The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

Echoing a distinction made by David Wiggins in his discussion of the relation of identity, this paper investigates whether aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ are sortal-relative or merely sortal-dependent. The hypothesis guiding the paper is that aesthetic adjectives, though probably sortal-dependent in general, are sortal-relative only when used to characterize multifunctional artefacts. This means that multifunctional artefacts should be unique in allowing the following situation to occur: for some object x there are sortals K and K' such that (...) x is a beautiful K and also a K', but not a beautiful K'. Examples of multifunctional artefacts show that this is indeed a possibility. However, that multifunctional artefacts are unique in this respect will be demonstrated by a more principled argument, taking into account the nature of functions on the one hand, and the nature of artefact-classification on the other hand. (shrink)

Aesthetic appreciation of landscape is by no means limited to the sensuous enjoyment of sights and sounds. It very often has a reflective, cognitive element as well. This sometimes incorporates scientific knowledge, e.g.,geological or ecological; but it can also manifest what this article will call 'metaphysical imagination', which sees or seems to see in a landscape some indication, some disclosure of how the world ultimately is. The article explores and critically appraises this concept of metaphysical imagination, and some (...) of the roles it can play in our aesthetic encounters. (shrink)

Landscape and brandingexplores the way landscape is conceptualised, conceived, represented and designed by professionals in a brand-driven age. Landscape - incorporating tangible physical space as well as intangible concepts, narratives, images, and experiences of place - is constructed by a number of creative industries. This book tests the hypothesis that place branding, a powerful marketing and management practice, increasingly blurs the distinction between the promotionof landscape and its production in design terms. Place branding involves the strategic (...) and systematic composition of single-minded, experiential and market-friendly place identities which are consistently communicated across various media, including physical space. How does this implicate or transform notions of place, nature, landscape experience, and the qualitative value of landscape itself? How does this affect the role of landscape architecture? To answer these questions, place branding theory and practice is critically examined alongside an in depth case study of one specific landscape - the Blue Mountains (Australia). Projects undertaken between 1995 and 2015, including a branding strategy for the region, media campaigns, television, cinema, and several landscape architectural works in the public and private domain are comparatively analysed, focusing on the discourse, conventions and values informing their production, and the landscape narratives they convey. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 164-188, June 2022.

This essay aims to show that the concept of landscape does not indicate something static or well-defined in the physical world but is rather the result of a process deriving from our being embodied in the world. Landscape is embodied cognition produced by our subjectivity, which, in turn, constantly hybridises the relationship between inside and outside. The key point, therefore, is to grasp and problematise the interaction between landscape and mindscape. However, this relationship would not be complete (...) without also taking into account the fact that we are integrated in an environment and analysing the fact that we live in an acted environment: our actions are decisive for understanding the environment beginning from the very perception we have of it. Indeed, this perception it itself a true founding act. The specific nature of the walkscape thus allows us to take this dynamic aspect of our relationship with the environment into account before grasping the last fundamental element for achieving a complete understanding of the problem: the currently ongoing transformation that brings us to be immersed not only in natural environments, but also in new digital environments. Taken together, therefore, the concepts of landscape, mindscape and walkscape allow us to clarify the theoretical implications of our being part of an integrated system together with the environment, be it natural or digital. (shrink)

Both landscape and aesthetics are all too often considered disengaged categories associated with leisure and contemplation. This book establishes landscape as a key concept in contemporary thought and rethinks aesthetics in political and activist terms. In order to do so, it challenges the dualism of "the environment" as the space inhabited by humans and the province of the natural sciences about which philosophy has little to say. (This separation is evident even in the name of the recent field (...) of environmental humanities.) In a holistic view, landscapes are at the intersection of environment and human, place and people, and nature and culture, and aesthetics provide an immersive and engaged approach to them. Landscapes are ways of being in the world and aesthetics practical means of inhabiting them. Utilizing a pragmatist, antiessentialist lens, Alberto L. Siani characterizes landscapes (as opposed to environments and territories) as concrete, experienced habitats, performative ways of making sense of the world, while aesthetics (following Dewey) identify values and ordering criteria that permeate them. He addresses issues such as temporality, environmentalism, justice, education, and interdisciplinarity within this framework and in conversation with scientific positions. A coda gives three phenomenological accounts of intensely experienced and inhabited landscapes. (shrink)

Despite an impressive number of investigations and indirect evidence, the mechanisms that link patterns and processes across the landscape remain a debated point. A new definition of landscape as a semiotic interface between resources and organisms opens up a new perspective to a better understanding of such mechanisms. If the landscape is considered a source of signals converted by animal cognition into signs, it follows that spatial configurations, extension, shape and contagion are not only landscape patterns (...) but categories of identifiable signals. The eco-field hypothesis, by which cognitive templates are used to identify spatial configurations as carriers of meaning according to an active function, are combined with the sign theory to create an eco-semiotic model of landscape representation. Signs from landscape change in efficacy according to mechanisms of degradation, and metric sign categories have to be considered. An interdisciplinary coalescence is expected by using the theoretical approach in different fields of conservation and resource management and planning. (shrink)

Starting with the hypothesis that during this first decade of the 21st century a certain territorial culture has spread that implies greater awareness of landscape on the part of the authorities, the economic and social agents who exercise a degree of leadership in territorial matters and the general public, this article sets out to analyse the possibility that a new ethics of landscape is beginning to take shape. The notion of landscape as proposed by the European Convention (...) in Florence in 2000 looks at the idea of the social construction of landscape. In this new paradigm, landscape is conceived as a social product, the cultural projection of a society in a given space from a material, spiritual and symbolic standpoint. Landscape is understood to be inherently dynamic and changing. When the elements that give a particular landscape its historical and cultural continuity are suddenly removed and its sense of place is lost, we are seeing not evolution in the landscape but its destruction. And the very idea of intervention in these landscapes gives rise to the need for principles and moral values that will provide guidelines that allow landscapes, whether unique or commonplace, to evolve without being destroyed. As I see it, therefore, there is an obvious need for an ethics applicable to regional and landscape planning and management. The new ethics of landscape must be based on the ethics of responsibility, taking into account the dignity of nature, the rights of future generations to enjoy quality landscapes and the rights and duties of today's citizens whose interventions transform landscapes and with them their collective identity, their quality of life, their physical and social welfare and, in short, their happiness. (shrink)

Looking at representations of the Irish landscape in contemporary literature and the arts,this volume discusses the economic, political and environmental issues associated with it, questioning the myths behind Ireland's landscape, from the first Greek descriptions to present day post Celtic-Tiger architecture.

This book tackles how and why 'landscape' (farms, gardens, countryside) set the scene in the first centuries BCE and CE for Romans keen to talk up and about (but also to scrutinize and understand) what it meant to be a citizen. It investigates what 'landscape' means now and reflects upon how contemporary approaches to 'landscape' can enrich our understanding of ancient experience of the interface between natural and artificial space. It encourages examination of 'landscape' from a (...) range of angles, suggesting alternative ways of thinking about what landscape represents. These methodological approaches (presented initially via a set of key terms and definitions and then deployed thematically across four chapters), combined with a detailed interdisciplinary bibliography and a series of case studies of literary texts and material sites, enable readers to use this survey as a starting point for developing their own in-depth study. (shrink)

There is no escaping landscape: it's everywhere and part of everyone's life. Landscapes have received much less attention in aesthetics than those arts we can choose to ignore, such as painting or music – but they can tell us a lot about the ethical and aesthetic values of the societies that produce them. Drawing on examples from a wide range of landscapes from around the world and throughout history, Susan Herrington considers the ways landscapes can affect our emotions, our (...) imaginations, and our understanding of the passage of time._ On Landscapes_ reveals the design work involved in even the most naturalistic of landscapes, and the ways in which contemporary landscapes are turning the challenges of the industrial past into opportunities for the future. Inviting us to thoughtfully see and experience the landscapes that we encounter in our daily lives, _On Landscapes_ demonstrates that art is all around us. (shrink)

We argue that the appraisal of models in social epistemology requires conceiving of them as argumentative devices, taking into account the argumentative context and adopting a family-of-models perspective. We draw up such an account and show how it makes it easier to see the value and limits of the use of models in social epistemology. To illustrate our points, we document and explicate the argumentative role of epistemic landscape models in social epistemology and highlight their limitations. We also claim (...) that our account could be fruitfully used in appraising other models in philosophy and science. (shrink)

As a candidate theory of quantum gravity, the popularity of string theory has waxed and waned over the past four decades. One current source of scepticism is that the theory can be used to derive, depending upon the input geometrical assumptions that one makes, a vast range of different quantum field theories, giving rise to the so-called landscape problem. One apparent way to address the landscape problem is to posit the existence of a multiverse; this, however, has in (...) turn drawn heightened attention to questions regarding the empirical testability and predictivity of string theory. We argue first that the landscape problem relies on dubious assumptions and does not motivate a multiverse hypothesis. Nevertheless, we then show that the multiverse hypothesis is scientifically legitimate and could be coupled to string theory for other empirical reasons. Looking at various cosmological approaches, we offer an empirical criterion to assess the scientific status of multiverse hypotheses. (shrink)

This essay begins with some observations concerning the interaction between nature and art. Relying on these reflections, in the second part experience of landscape will be interpreted as a model for the human stance within the natural as well as the historical world. In the third part some consequences for an ethics and politics of saving the conditions for individual as well as social well-being will be drawn.

This paper aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between Ricoeur’s phenomenological- hermeneutical thought and human geography, in particular with respect to the issue of landscape interpretation. The connection draws on the idea that landscapes and lived spaces can be read as texts, not unfamiliar to human geography and semiotics from 1980s onward. In the first part of the paper I will briefly expound some theories of landscape which make use of the metaphors “landscape as cultural image” and (...) “landscape as text” in human and cultural geography. Then, I will discuss the main contribution of Ricoeur to the issue of space. The philosopher already envisioned a possible application of his “threefold mimesis” of Time and Narrative to architectural spaces. In the conclusion, I will propose to rejuvenate the geographical metaphor of “landscape as text” by introducing a possible application of the Ricoeurian notion of “meaningful action as text” to landscape. (shrink)

There is no escaping landscape: it's everywhere and part of everyone's life. Landscapes have received much less attention in aesthetics than those arts we can choose to ignore, such as painting or music – but they can tell us a lot about the ethical and aesthetic values of the societies that produce them. Drawing on examples from a wide range of landscapes from around the world and throughout history, Susan Herrington considers the ways landscapes can affect our emotions, our (...) imaginations, and our understanding of the passage of time._ On Landscapes_ reveals the design work involved in even the most naturalistic of landscapes, and the ways in which contemporary landscapes are turning the challenges of the industrial past into opportunities for the future. Inviting us to thoughtfully see and experience the landscapes that we encounter in our daily lives, _On Landscapes_ demonstrates that art is all around us. (shrink)

In Landscape, Natural Beauty, and the Arts, a distinguished group of scholars probes the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature. Each of the chapters refines and expands the terms of discussion, and together they enrich the debate with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. To explore the interrelation between our conceptions of nature, beauty and art, the contributors consider the social construction of nature, the determination of our appreciation by artistic media, and the duality of (...) nature's determining in gardening. Showing that natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature, the volume occasions questions of the distinction and relation between art and nature generally, and culminates in a set of philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement, and emotion in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. (shrink)

Weisberg and Muldoon’s epistemic landscape model (ELM) has been one of the most significant contributions to the use of agent-based models in philosophy. The model provides an innovative approach to establishing the optimal distribution of cognitive labor in scientific communities, using an epistemic landscape. In the paper, we provide a critical examination of ELM. First, we show that the computing mechanism for ELM is correct insofar as we are able to replicate the results using another programming language. Second, (...) we show that small changes in the rules that determine the behavior of individual agents can lead to important changes in simulation results. Accordingly, we claim that ELM results are robust with respect to the computing mechanism, but not necessarily across parameter space. We conclude by reflecting on the possible lessons to be gained from ELM as a class of simulations or cluster of models. (shrink)

Two types of formal models - landscape search tasks and two-armed bandit models - are often used to study the effects that various social factors have on epistemic performance. I argue that they can be understood within a single framework. In this unified framework, I develop a model that may be used to understand the effects of functional and demographic diversity and their interaction. Using the unified model, I find that the benefit of demographic diversity is most pronounced in (...) a functionally homogeneous group, and decreases with the increase of functional diversity. (shrink)