Preface This volume represents the proceedings of the First Conference on Situation Theory and Its Applications held by CSLI at Asilomar, California, ...

The word ought is often used to express moral judgments. It is used to express moral laws, as in “We ought to honour our parents”; and it is used to express singular moral judgments, as in “You ought not to have spoken to your mother like that”". Some singular moral judgments are clearly deductions from some moral law, as is “You ought not to have spoken to your mother like that”. Others, however, are not clearly so, e.g. “You ought not (...) to have done that”. Where both the agent and the action are indicated merely by a contextual reference, no underlying moral law is suggested by the words alone. Even when the singular judgment characterizes both the agent and the action, as “You, being a strong man, ought to have gone to his aid”, it may still be quite obscure what, if any, moral law implies this judgment. Clearly there is no moral law that “Every strong man ought always to go to everybody's aid”. (shrink)

Gricean pragmatics seems to pose a dilemma. If semantics is limited to the conventional meanings of types of expressions, then the semantics of an utterance does not determine what is said. If all that figures in the determination of what is said counts as semantics, then pragmatic reasoning about the specific intentions of a speaker intrudes on semantics. The dilemma is false. Key points: Semantics need not determine what is said, and the description, with which the hearer begins, need not (...) provide the hearer with knowledge of what was said, or the ability to express what was said, from the hearer's context. (shrink)

In clinical research – whether pharmaceutical, genetic or biomarker research – it is important to protect research participants’ autonomy and to ensure or strengthen their control over health-related decisions. Empirical–ethical studies have argued that both the ethical concept and the current legalistic practice of informed consent should be adapted to the complexity of the clinical environment. For this, a better understanding of recruitment, for which also the physician–patient relationship plays an important role, is needed. Our aim is to ethically reflect (...) communication processes by identifying patterns used by physicians to motivate patients’ participation in clinical research and to assess whether patients also use these patterns in formulating their own research motivation. We conducted a secondary analysis with empirical data from a research project involving physicians and patients in a clinical research setting of a biomarker study for rectal cancer treatment. Our empirical data included observations of physician–patient consultations and semi-structured interviews with patients. Overall, we collected 93 interviews. We found two dominant communication patterns, which physicians applied for motivating patients to take part in this research study. Some forms of these patterns tend to mislead patients’ understanding, while others could justifiably be applied in this consultation setting without undermining patients’ autonomy. This insight that the physician–patient communication has a strong influence on patients increases the importance to strengthen physicians’ ethically acceptable communication patterns regarding research participation. We further suggest that there is a need for a critical reflection of the ethics committee’s requirements for information regarding research participation. (shrink)

Classical Gricean pragmatics is usually conceived as dealing with far-side pragmatics, aimed at computing implicatures. It involves reasoning about why what was said, was said. Near-side pragmatics, on the other hand, is pragmatics in the service of determining, together with the semantical properties of the words used, what was said. But this raises the specter of ‘the pragmatic circle.’ If Gricean pragmatics seeks explanations for why someone said what they did, how can there be Gricean pragmatics on the near-side? Gricean (...) reasoning seems to require what is said to get started. But then if Gricean reasoning is needed to get to what is said, we have a circle. (shrink)

These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung — although perhaps politically incorrect, are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words ‘yes,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines illustrate, (...) it is possible for different speakers in different circumstances to mean different things using those words. How is this possible? What's the relationship among the meaning of words, what speakers mean when uttering those words, the particular circumstances of their utterance, their intentions, their actions, and what they manage to communicate? These are some of the questions that pragmatics tries to answer; the sort of questions that, roughly speaking, serve.. (shrink)

The following statement is a report of the Committee on Philosophy in Education of the American Philosophical Association and was approved by the Association's Board of Officers in December, 1958. The Committee was composed of the following: C. W. Hendel, Chairman, H. G. Alexander, R. M. Chisholm, Max Fisch, Lucius Garvin, Douglas Morgan, A. E. Murphy, Charner Perry and R. G. Turnbull. Primary responsibility for the preparation of this report belonged to a subcommittee composed of Douglas N. Morgan, Chairman, (...) and Charner Perry. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists have frequently criticized ancient Greek philosophy as anti-environmental for a view of philosophy that is counterproductive to environmental ethics and a view of the world that puts nature at the disposal of people. This provocative collection of original essays reexamines the views of nature and ecology found in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus. Recognizing that these thinkers were not confronted with the environmental degradation that threatens contemporary philosophers, the contributors to this book find that (...) the Greeks nevertheless provide an excellent foundation for a sound theory of environmentalism. (shrink)

We offer a general definition of interpretation based on a naturalized teleology. The definition tests and extends the biosemiotic paradigm by seeking to provide a philosophically robust resource for investigating the possible role of semiosis (processes of representation and interpretation) in biological systems. We show that our definition provides a way of understanding various possible kinds of misinterpretation, illustrate the definition using examples at the cellular and subcellular level, and test the definition by applying it to a potential counterexample. We (...) explain how we propose to use the definition as a way of asking new questions about what distinguishes life from non-life and of formulating testable hypotheses within the field of origin-of-life research. If the definition leads to fruitful new empirical approaches to the scientific problem of the origin of life, it will help to establish biosemiotics as a legitimate philosophical approach in theoretical biology and will thereby support a theological appropriation of the biosemiotic perspective as the basis of a new theology of nature. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to investigate the masculinity politics of the ex-gay movement, a loose-knit network of religious, scientific, and political organizations that advocates change for homosexuals. Guided by Risman's gender structure theory, the authors analyze the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of gender in ex-gay discourses. The authors employ critical discourse analysis of representative ex-gay texts to deconstruct the movement's gender ideology and to discuss the social implications of its masculinity politics. They argue that gender is one (...) of the ex-gay movement's most potent social movement resources, enabling it to consolidate power by enlisting new populations and to globalize by adapting to cultural contexts beyond the United States. The authors conclude that the ex-gay movement is an antigay countermovement and an antifeminist Christian Right men's movement. (shrink)

In recent years innovative approaches have emerged across the United States and Canada to improve access to healthful foods. Mobile markets—traveling food retailers that specifically target food deserts—are one such strategy. Given the recent emergence of mobile markets, and their positioning as a solution to disparities in food access, research is needed to understand potentials and limitations of the model. In this article, we report on findings from a survey of mobile market operators in the United States and Canada. Results (...) identify tensions between the intended goals of mobile markets and constraints of the model itself. Further study, including applied research, is needed to better understand potential opportunities to strengthen mobile markets as an intervention strategy. (shrink)

This article describes a project which involved an attempt to integrate an expert system with a hypertext database of primary and secondary text materials. Our chosen legal domain was that of the Convention on Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters (The Brussels Convention 1968). In this article, we address three dimensions of system design. With regard to the legal dimension, we consider the choice of domain and the representation of both knowledge and data in the (...) system. On the technological dimension, we discuss the selection of software development tools and problems associated with keeping knowledge bases and databases up-to-date. Finally, we pay particular attention to the Cinderella dimension of legal expert system development — the user interface. (shrink)

The book begins with an overview of globalization, showing how wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a transnational elite while ever increasing numbers of people are being marginalised. Institutions such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund are intent upon exercising a new hegemony over individuals as the role of the traditional nation state is transformed. At the centre of this power shift is a group of high-tech robber barons who dominate the Information Age (...) and exploit the technologies of globalization for their own narrow interests. The second part of the book explores the rise of the new grass roots oppositional movements around the world. Manifest in such diverse struggles as the uprising of the Zapatistas in Mexico and the battle of Seattle against the World Trade Organisation, this new postmodern politics is "de-centred" and has little interest in the old ideologies that dominated much of the twentieth century. The final section of the book contextualizes postmodern politics by drawing on contemporary examples. The authors discuss the demise of socialist and proto-socialist experiments in Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua and Cuba and the emergence of postmodern movements in Latin America. The final two chapters take a specific look at the Zapatista movement and its significance for revolutionary struggles around the world. (shrink)

The authors reject arguments by Professor Joseph Fletcher (author of Situation Ethics) that in some circumstances parents may be held responsible for producing genetically defective offspring, but offer arguments of their own for the same conclusion. Their arguments could, they suggest, justify `wrongful life' claims by the genetically defective infant against the mother. While researching this paper both authors were postdoctoral fellows in medical ethics in the Program on Human Values and Ethics at the University of Tennessee Center for the (...) Health Sciences. (shrink)

Kevin McCain’s Evidentialism and Epistemic Justification is the most thorough defense of evidentialism to date. In this work, McCain proposes insightful new theses to fill in underdeveloped parts of evidentialism. One of these new theses is an explanationist account of evidential fit that appeals to dispositional properties. We argue that this explanationist account faces counterexamples, and that, more generally, explanationists should not understand evidential fit in terms of dispositional properties.

In the twenty-first century, 70.6 percent of Americans self-identify as Christians,1 58 percent of them still segregate themselves by race on Sunday mornings, and white Protestants make up the majority of this 58 percent.2 These facts belie the claim, popularized after Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election, that America is living in a postracial society3 And yet, the role played by religion in white people's lived experiences of race, racism, and white class privilege in the United States tends to be neglected (...) by philosophers and religious studies scholars, except perhaps when considering white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.4 Contemporary philosophy is secular in a way that generally excludes and... (shrink)

Behind the economic turbulence and political transformations of recent decades is the transition from the nationstate phase of world capitalism to a new transnational phase. While many detractors of globalization focus on global trade, the process is driven by the transnationalization of capital ownership, which in turn leads to the rise of a transnational bourgeoisie that sits at the apex of the global order. Parallel to the transatlantic and transpacific integration of capital there has been an integration of Southern capitalists (...) into the emergent system of transnational capital. A transnational hegemony is replacing a declining U. S. hegemony, although supra-national structures are still not capable of providing the economic regulation and political conditions for global capitalism to function smoothly. In this period of extraordinary conflict, upheaval, and uncertainty, the role of popular classes will be crucial. But their struggles must take on a transnational perspective and engage in transnational organizing. (shrink)