Contemporary regulation of food safety incorporates principles of quality management and systemic performance objectives that used to characterize private standards. Conversely, private standards are covering ground that used to be the realm of regulation. The nature of the two is becoming increasingly indistinguishable. The case study of the Ugandan fish export industry highlights how management methods borrowed from private standards can be applied to public regulation to achieve seemingly conflicting objectives. In the late 1990s, the EU imposed repeated bans on (...) fish imported from Uganda on the basis of food safety concerns. However, the EU did not provide scientific proof that the fish were actually “unsafe.” Rather, the poor performance of Uganda’s regulatory and monitoring system was used as justification. Only by fixing “the system” and performing the ritual of laboratory testing for all consignments for export to the EU did the Ugandan industry regain its status as a “safe” source of fish. Yet, gaps and inconsistencies abound in the current Ugandan fish safety management system. Some operations are by necessity carried out as “rituals of verification.” Given the importance of microbiological tests and laboratories in the compliance system, “alchemic rituals” provide an appropriate metaphor. These rituals are part and parcel of a model that reassures the EU fish-eating public that all is under control in Uganda from boat to point of export. As a consequence, actual non-compliance from boat to landing site allows the fishery to survive as an artisanal operation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Although the literature on multi-stakeholder initiatives for sustainability has grown in recent years, it is scattered across several academic fields, making it hard to ascertain how individual disciplines, such as business ethics, can further contribute to the debate. Based on an extensive review of the literature on certification and principle-based MSIs for sustainability, we show that the scholarly debate rests on three broad themes : theinputinto creating and governing MSIs; theinstitutionalizationof MSIs; and theimpactthat relevant initiatives create. While our discussion reveals (...) the theoretical underpinnings of the 3Is, it also shows that a number of research challenges related to business ethics remain unaddressed. We unpack these challenges and suggest how scholars can utilize theoretical insights in business ethics to push the boundaries of the field. Finally, we also discuss what business ethics research can gain from theory development in the MSI field. (shrink)

Background: Undergraduate nursing students have been documented to experience ethical distress during their clinical training and felt poorly supported in discussing the ethical issues they encountered. Research aims: This study was aimed at exploring nursing students’ perceived opportunity to discuss ethical issues that emerged during their clinical learning experience and associated factors. Research design: An Italian national cross-sectional study design was performed in 2015–2016. Participants were invited to answer a questionnaire composed of four sections regarding: socio-demographic data, previous clinical learning (...) experiences, current clinical learning experience quality and outcomes, and the opportunity to discuss ethical issues with nurses in the last clinical learning experience. Participants and research context: Participants were 9607 undergraduate nursing students who were attending 95 different three-year Italian baccalaureate nursing programmes, located at 27 universities in 15 Italian regions. Ethical considerations: This study was conducted in accordance with the Human Subject Research Ethics Committee guidelines after the research protocol was approved by an ethics committee. Findings: Overall, 4707 perceived to have discussed ethical issues ‘much’ or ‘very much’; among the remaining, 3683 and 1217 students reported the perception of having discussed, respectively, ‘enough’ or ‘never’ ethical issues emerged in the clinical practice. At the multivariate logistic regression analysis explaining 38.1% of the overall variance, the factors promoting ethical discussion were mainly set at the clinical learning environment levels. In contrast, being male was associated with a perception of less opportunity to discuss ethical issues. Conclusion: Nursing faculties should assess the clinical environment prerequisites of the settings as a context of student experience before deciding on their accreditation. Moreover, the nursing faculty and nurse managers should also enhance competence with regard to discussing ethical issues with students among clinical nurses by identifying factors that hinder this learning opportunity in daily practice. (shrink)

Der bekannte Liturgiewissenschaftler, der nicht nur in der Abtei Grottaferrata, sondern auch als Dozent für Liturgiewissenschaft am Pont. Ateneo «Anselmianum» in Rom tätig und mit dem byzantinischen Ritus und den Handschriften Grottaferratas bestens vertraut ist, hat nun diese schöne Einführung in das Offizium Grottaferratas vorgelegt, die der italienischen Übersetzung vorangestellt wurde.

I argue that some utterances of sentences containing occurrences of indexical expressions should not be evaluated with respect to the context of utterance. I suggest that we distinguish between context of utterance and context of interpret‐ation, and I employ this distinction in the analysis of recorded messages and other interesting linguistic phenomena. I then discuss the implications of my views on contexts with respect to the logic of indexicals. Against the traditional view, I argue that sentences such as ‘I am (...) here now’ or ‘something exists’ should not be treated as logical truths. (shrink)

This paper investigates the effects of Buddhist ethics on consumers’ materialism, that is, the propensity to attach a fundamental role to possessions. The literature shows that religion and religiosity influence various attitudes and behaviors of consumers, including their ethical beliefs and ethical decisions. However, most studies focus on general religiosity rather than on the specific doctrinal ethical tenets of religions. The current research focuses on Buddhism and argues that it can tame materialism directly, similar to other religions, and through the (...) specific Buddhist ethical doctrines of the Four Immeasurables: compassion, loving kindness, empathetic joy, and equanimity. The empirical results show the following: (1) Buddhism reduces materialism directly and through some of the Four Immeasurables, and (2) despite the doctrine of non-existence of the self, positive emotions toward the self are still present, and the self absorbs the effects of Buddhist ethics on materialism. The latter finding suggests a “resistance of the self” that is coherent with the idea of a consumer who leverages the self to go beyond it. (shrink)

This essay aims at neutralizing the contextualist challenge against traditional semantics. According to contextualism, utterances of non-elliptical, non-ambiguous, and non-indexical sentences may be associated with contrasting truth-conditions. In this essay, I grant the contextualist analysis of the sentences in question, and the contextualist assessment of the truth-conditions for the corresponding utterances. I then argue that the resulting situation is by no means incompatible with the traditional approach to semantics, and that the evidence put forth by the contextualists may easily be (...) taken into account by the customary treatment of natural languages. (shrink)

Taking inspiration from Searle’s ‘The Logic of Fictional Discourse’, this essay presents an argument against different versions of the so-called ‘speech act theory of fiction’. In particular, it argues that a Uniformity Argument may be constructed, which is additional to the Determination Argument commonly attributed to Searle, and which does not rely on his presumably controversial Determination Principle. This Uniformity Argument is equally powerful against the ‘Dedicated Speech Act’ theories that Searle originally targeted, and the more recent, Grice-inspired versions of (...) speech-act approaches to fictional discourse. (shrink)

I present a novel explanation of the apparent truth of certain remarks about fiction, such as an utterance of ''Salieri commissioned the Requiem'' during a discussion of the movie Amadeus. I criticize the traditional view, which alleges that the uttered sentence abbreviates the longer sentence ''it is true in the movie Amadeus that Salieri commissioned the Requiem''. I propose a solution which appeals to some independently motivated results concerning the contexts relevant for the semantic evaluation of indexical expressions.

This paper distinguishes three non-equivalent senses of 'monster' in Kaplan's Demonstratives: context-shifters, global-shifters, and character-shifters.

This paper argues in favor of a treatment of discourse about fiction in terms of operators on character, that is, Kaplanesque ‘monsters’. The first three sections criticize the traditional analysis of ‘according to the fiction’ as an intensional operator, and the approach to fictional discourse grounded on the notion of contextual shifts. The final sections explain how an analysis in terms of monsters yields the correct readings for a variety of examples involving modal and temporal indexicals.

In this paper, I defend a view of names from fiction compatible with the Millian theory of proper names. Unlike other attempts at providing a Millian analysis of names from fiction, my approach gives semantic recognition to our pre‐theoretic intuitions without postulating metaphysically dubious entities. The intuitively correct treatment of typical examples, including true negative existential statements, is obtained by appealing only to independently motivated results in the semantics for natural languages.

This essay proposes a novel semantic account of demonstratives, aimed at clarifying the sense in which demonstratives are semantically dependent on demonstrations. Its first two sections summarize the main views currently on the market. Section 3 argues that they are all vitiated by the same shortcomings, and yield incorrect results of ‘truth in virtue of character’ and entailment. Section 4 proposes a different account of the relationships between demonstratives and demonstrations, grounded on the idea of truth-conditionally irrelevant aspects of the (...) meaning of certain expressions. The resulting view of demonstratives is consonant with the so-called ‘bare boned’ account of their truth-conditional role, but is also in the position to recognize that the dependence of a demonstrative on a demonstration is, in some sense of the term, meaning-governed. The final section of this essay discusses the distinction between ‘vacuous’ and ‘incomplete’ uses of demonstratives, and cases involving multiple occurrences of these expressions. (shrink)

This essay is devoted to an analysis of the semantic significance of a fashionable view of proper names, the Predicate Theory of names, typically developed in the direction of the Metalinguistic Theory of names. According to MT, ‘syntactic evidence supports the conclusion that a name such as ‘Kennedy’ is analyzable in terms of the predicate ‘individual named ‘Kennedy’’. This analysis is in turn alleged to support a descriptivist treatment of proper names in designative position, presumably in contrast with theories of (...) names as ‘directly referring rigid designators’. The main aim of this essay is that of questioning the significance of PT and MT as theories of designation: even granting for the argument’s sake that names are analyzable as predicates, their designative occurrences may be interpreted in consonance with the dictates of Direct Reference—indeed, in consonance with the radically anti-descriptivist version of Direct Reference I call Millianism. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have been remaking the landscape in political theory, and in this important book some of the most important feminist political theorists provide reconstructions of those concepts most central to the tradition of political philosophy. The goal is nothing less than the construction of a blueprint for a positive feminist theory.Many of these papers are completely new; others are extensions of important earlier work; two are reprints of classic papers. The result is a progress report on the continuing feminist (...) project to re-envision traditional political theory. As such, it constitutes essential reading not only for feminist thinkers but also for traditional philosophers and political theorists, who will need to come to terms with these contemporary critiques and re-readings. (shrink)

This essay presents an argument against the token-reflexive approach to the semantics for indexical languages. After some preliminary remarks in section one, sections two and three explain why some traditional arguments against token-reflexivity are ultimately ineffective. Section four puts forth a more persuasive argument, to the effect that token-reflexive views overgenerate with respect to results of analyticity. However, as section five explains, defenders of the alternative, type-oriented view have all too often wasted the advantage offered by their approach: the unmotivated, (...) independent restriction of semantic evaluation to so-called ‘proper’ indexes is responsible for undesirable conclusions, similar to those to which token- reflexive theorists are committed. (shrink)

Classical arguments about the legitimate use of force have profoundly shaped the norms and institutions of contemporary international society. But what specific lessons can we learn from the classical European philosophers and jurists when thinking about humanitarian intervention, preventive self-defense or international trusteeship today? The contributors to this volume take seriously the admonition of contextualist scholars not to uproot classical thinkers' arguments from their social, political and intellectual environment. Nevertheless, this collection demonstrates that contemporary students, scholars and policymakers can still (...) learn a great deal from the questions raised by classical European thinkers, the problems they highlighted, and even the problematic character of some of the solutions they offered. The aim of this volume is to open up current assumptions about military intervention, and to explore the possibility of reconceptualizing and reappraising contemporary approaches. (shrink)

This book seeks to rectify misrepresentations of Popperian thought with a historical approach to Popper’s philosophy, an approach which applies his own mature view, that we gain knowledge through conjectures and refutations, to his own development, by portraying him in his intellectual growth as just such a series. Gattei seeks to reconstruct the logic of Popper’s development, in order to show how one problem and its tentative solution led to a new problem.

In this paper, I defend a view of names from fiction compatible with the Millian theory of proper names. Unlike other attempts at providing a Millian analysis of names from fiction, my approach gives semantic recognition to our pre‐theoretic intuitions without postulating metaphysically dubious entities. The intuitively correct treatment of typical examples, including true negative existential statements, is obtained by appealing only to independently motivated results in the semantics for natural languages.

This essay argues that relativist semantics provide fruitful frameworks for the study of the relationships between meaning and truth-conditions, and consequently for the analysis of the logical properties of expressions. After a discussion of the role of intensionality and indexicality within classic double-indexed semantics, I explain that the non-relativistic identification of the parameters needed for the definition of truth and for the interpretation of indexicals is grounded on considerations that are irrelevant for the assessment of the relationships between meaning and (...) truth. (shrink)

Despite his well‐known deductivism, in his early (unpublished) writings, Popper held an inductivist position. Up to 1929 epistemology entered Popper's reflections only as far as the problem was that of the justification of the scientific character of these fields of research. However, in that year, while surveying the history of non‐Euclidean geometries, Popper explicitly discussed the cognitive status of geometry without referring to psycho‐pedagogical aspects, thus turning from cognitive psychology to the logic and methodology of science. As a consequence of (...) his reflections on the problematic relationship between geometrical‐mathematical constructions and physical reality Popper was able to get over a too direct notion of such a relationship, cast doubts on inductive inference and started conceiving in a new (strictly non‐inductivist) manner the relationship between theoretical and observational propositions. (shrink)

This essay proposes a semantic analysis of biscuit-conditionals, such as Austin's classic example "there are biscuits in the cupboard if you want some". The analysis is grounded on the ideas of contextual restrictions, and of non-character encoded aspects of meaning, and provides a rigorous framework for the widespread intuitions that the if-clause in a biscuit-conditional is truth-conditionally idle, but it 'qualifies' the speech-act in question. In the concluding section of this essay, the analysis is also applied to the importantly similar (...) phenomenon of speech-act adverbs. (shrink)

The distinction between a merely ‘rigidifying’ dthat and a directly-referential take on dthat-terms is well known, and is explicitly highlighted by Kaplan in Afterthoughts, his 1989 commentary on Demonstratives. What is not equally widely recognized is that Afterthoughts also oscillates between three different directly referential proposals. This essay discusses the semantic and philosophical implications of these different directly-referential interpretations of ‘dthat’, paying particular attention to the relationships between syntactic and propositional structure, the structure and makeup of contexts in the semantics (...) of indexical languages, the significance of context shifting devices and of so-called operators on character, and the aims and scope of propositional semantics. (shrink)

I present a Russellian analysis of Donnellan’s classic examples involving empty definite descriptions, such as a use of ‘the man with the Martini’ in a scenario in which the intended target is a teetotaler with water in his glass. Unlike the traditional Kripke‐style responses to Donnellan, my analysis grants semantic significance to the intuition that, in appropriate circumstances, such a use picks out the teetotaler. I then argue that the apparatus developed in my discussion of Donnellan’s examples may be successfully (...) applied to the semantic treatment of improper definite descriptions, such as ‘the table’ in Strawson’s ‘the table is covered with books.’. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose an analysis of Quine’s example ’Giorgione was so-called because of his size’, grounded on the idea of an obstinate demonstrative. In the first sections, I discuss the advantages and drawbacks of the demonstrative and logophoric treatments of ‘so called’, I highlight certain parallelisms with Davidson’s paratactic view of quotation, and I introduce independent considerations in favor of the idea of an obstinate demonstrative. In the second half of my essay, I apply this notion to Quine’s (...) example, and I discuss its consequences with respect to the principle of substitutivity of coreferential singular terms. (shrink)

This thesis argues that the concept of contingency plays a central role in Althusser's recasting of Marxist philosophy and in his attempt to free the Marxist conception of history from concepts such as teleology, necessity and origin. It is critically placed both against those readings that see the emergence of the problematic of contingency only in the late Althusserm and to the most recent attempts to establish a straightforward continuity in Althusser's work. Drawing on published and unplublished material and covering (...) the entirety of Althusser's philosophical itinerary, the thesis seeks both to unearth the latent presence of this problematic, and its various implications, at each stage in the development of his work. It seeks to clarify, in a systematic way, the conceptual consequences of Althusser's commitment to contingency to the received understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology and political action. In particular, it argues that the standpoint of contingency allows us to locate in Althusser's 'Structural Marxism' the emergence of a 'logic of irruption' and structurally under-determined development of becoming. By emphasising this logic of contingency, it then seeks to produce a more nuanced assessment of his theory of ideology through the introduction of the concept of 'overinterpellation'. It finally attempts to distinguish two moments in the emergence of a materialism of contingency, first political and then philosophical; the problematic coexistence of these two aspects helps to account for the unstable charactoer of Althusser's late philosophical project. (shrink)

This essay studies the semantic properties of what I call Russell-names. Russell-names bear intimate semantic relations with descriptive conditions, in consonance with the main tenets of descriptivism. Yet, they are endowed with the semantic properties attributed to ordinary proper names by Millianism: they are rigid and non-indexical devices of direct reference. This is not an essay in natural language semantics, and remains deliberately neutral with respect to the question whether any among the expressions we ordinarily classify as proper names behave (...) as Russell-names. Its aim is rather that of casting a new light on the traditional debate about descriptivism on the one hand, and, on the other, what is commonly understood as a radically anti-descriptivist approach. From the viewpoint of descriptivism, the conceivability of Russell-names provides welcome relief from the pressure exerted by considerations at odds with a flaccid and/or indexical treatment of proper names. Conversely, from a Millian standpoint, the conceivability of Russell-names indicates that the Millian stance, far from providing a meagre picture of names as ‘mere tags’, is at least in principle consistent with the recognition of their semantic bonds with richer descriptive material. The Appendix provides a formal treatment of Russell-names within a model theoretic semantics for indexical intensional languages, developed within an original ‘double-context’ framework. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 1 Seiten: 151-178.

William Kneale famously noted that "it is obviously trifling to tell [a man] that Socrates was called Socrates" . Leaving aside some debatable details in Kneale's example, it would indeed seem trivial to tell someone that, say, Socrates bears "Socrates."The reason why this sort of communication strikes us as eminently uninformative has occasionally been treated as the symptom of a semantic phenomenon—more precisely, as evidence in favor of nominal descriptive approaches to the semantic behavior of proper names such as "Socrates." (...) According to these approaches, it is obviously trifling to tell someone that Socrates bears "Socrates" because the descriptive condition of bearing "Socrates" is part of the meaning of "Socrates" in some semantically significant sense of "meaning." The aim of this essay is to present a novel counter-argument against nominal descriptivism, and to defend a nondescriptivist explanation of cases such as . In particular, it is argued that nominal descriptivism is independently untenable, since it yields incorrect logical verdicts, and even disregarding its independent inadequacy, nominal descriptivism does not provide an analysis of the peculiar status of preferable to the treatment proposed in what follows. (shrink)

This article, after tracing a precise classification of the exegetical trend known as iʿjāz ʿilmī, summarizes and discusses the criticism leveled at it and examines how the “scientific interpretation” of the Qur’ān is liable to blend with pseudoscience and conspiracy theories to the detriment of a solid harmonization of science and religion and of a genuine appreciation of natural science. Furthermore, the article offers some practical ideas that can be implemented in order to effectively and fairly address iʿjāz ʿilmī in (...) the Muslim world. (shrink)