Argumentative style is assumed to be instrumental to the implementation of an arguer’s strategic plan to resolve a difference of opinion in his/her favor. One important constitutive element of argumentative style are linguistic choices. It is therefore crucial to pay close and systematic attention to linguistic choices and their argumentative functions in the analysis of argumentative style. In this paper we discuss how a linguistic-stylistic analysis can be conducted systematically by making use of methodological insights from the so-called “linguistic-stylistic approach”, (...) and how such an analysis can be integrated with a pragma-dialectical analysis of argumentative discourse. Our aim is to show how such an integration could be helpful in analysing the presentational aspect of an argumentative style, and how the outcomes of such an analysis could be linked to another aspect of argumentative style, namely the strategic considerations implemented in the argumentative discourse and more particularly the argumentative strategies involved. (shrink)

The extended pragma-dialectical argumentation theory assumes that people engaged in argumentative discourse manoeuvre strategically. In argumentative reality, the strategic manoeuvring is often carried out according to an argumentative strategy. Language users make an effort to present their strategic manoeuvres in a specific way and the analysis of the stylistic choices in actual argumentative discourse is the most important basis for identification and analysis of argumentative strategies. In this article, it is shown what requirements must be satisfied by a systematic stylistic (...) analysis of argumentative discourse, and the results of such an analysis are illustrated by means of a case study. (shrink)

There has been a time in my teaching career that I used to cite in my introductory classes ‘Moral Philosophy’ from Erica Jong's Fear of Flying . The situation leading up to the quote is that the main character, Isadora, is asked a sexual favour by her brother in law, Pierre. Her answer and the subsequent dialogue read then as follows: ‘I can't’ , I said. ‘Come on,’ Pierre said, ‘I'll teach you.’ ‘I didn't mean that … I meant that (...) I can't; morally , I can…’. (shrink)

We elaborate on Israel Scheffler's claim that principles of rationality can be rationally evaluated, focusing on foundational development, by which we mean the evolution of principles which are constitutive of our conceptualization of a certain domain of rationality. How can claims that some such principles are better than prior ones, be justified? We argue that Scheffler's metacriterion of overall systematic credibility is insufficient here. Two very different types of rational development are jointly involved, namely, development of general principles that are (...) strictly constitutive of rationality as such, and development of specific principles determinative of our conceptualization of particular domains. For the first type a transcendental argument applies. As to the second, we show how foundational development is itself a condition of the possibility of its justification. In both cases only principles that are typical of the later stage yield the second order criterion in terms of which the evaluative comparison with former stages can be made and defended. In a discussion of problems involved we indicate to what extent Scheffler's idea of rationally justifiable rational development may be realized here, avoiding pitfalls of both foundationalism and relativism. (shrink)

Sign of Presence, A Catholic Ecclesiology in Ecumenical Perspective is the title of the recent ecclesiology by Ton van Eijk. In seven chapters he discusses the main topics of a Catholic ecclesiology. The chapters deal with the relation of the church to the Reign of God and to the Jewish people, the understanding of the church as sacrament, as koinonia/communio and as Eucharistic communion, and ministry. Van Eijk prefers to think about the church, inspired by modern French sacramental theology , (...) as sign of God’s presence. The perspective of his study is ecumenical. He brings to the fore the points of view of other denominations and tries to transcend them, he compares Roman Catholic authoritative texts to those from the World Council of Churches and he discusses actual ecumenical topics as Eucharistic sharing and Episcopal ministry. (shrink)

It is argued that the major interpretations of tobacco mosaic virus which were suggested in the first half of the 20th century can be ordered into two conflicting approaches. It is shown that explaining the existence of these different approaches as views from different perspectives, is a mistaken metaphor. The different approaches resulted in the "construction" of different research objects as answers to the questions "What is a virus"? Although these different conceptions did exclude each other, they co-existed because of (...) the consensus concerning the existence of tobacco mosaic "disease". (shrink)

There has been a time in my teaching career that I used to cite in my introductory classes ‘Moral Philosophy’ from Erica Jong's Fear of Flying . The situation leading up to the quote is that the main character, Isadora, is asked a sexual favour by her brother in law, Pierre. Her answer and the subsequent dialogue read then as follows: ‘I can't’ , I said. ‘Come on,’ Pierre said, ‘I'll teach you.’ ‘I didn't mean that … I meant that (...) I can't; morally , I can…’. (shrink)

Negative polarity is one of the more elusive aspects of linguistics and a subject which has been gaining in importance in recent years. Written from within the well-defined theoretical framework of Generalized Quantifiers, the three main areas considered in this study are collocations, polarity items and multiple negations. In this mature piece of research, van der Wouden takes into account, not only semantic and syntactic considerations, but also to a large extent, pragmatic ones illustrating a wide array of linguistic approaches.

In this paper a corporate social responsibility audit is developed following the underlying methodology of the quality award/excellence models. Firstly the extent to which the quality awards already incorporate the development of social responsibility is examined by looking at the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the European Quality Award. It will be shown that the quality awards do not yet include ethical aspects in relation to social responsibility. Both a clear definition of social responsibility and an improved audit instrument (...) are required. A definition and an audit instrument are developed which stimulate movement in that direction and help organisations to reflect on their position in relation to social responsibility. (shrink)

Scholars have argued that the beginning of virology can be dated from the end of the 19th century: the discovery that some infectious agents could pass through ultrafilters produced a criterium to distinguish ultrafilterable viruses from infectious agents that are not filterable, e.g. bacteria. A filterable agent, claimed to be the cause of human influenza, was isolated in 1933. It will be argued in this paper, however, that the influence of a bacteriological paradigm on influenza research in the first half (...) of the twentieth century was very powerful. Until the late 1940s influenza viruses were studied as infectious entities which, although filterable, were conceived of as analogous to bacteria. It was assumed that filterable viruses which infected animals were a kind of ultrabacteria. According to the bacteriological paradigm the assumed dependence of the filterable viruses on living cells was easy to account for. The second half of the 1940s saw the 'modern concept of virus' begin to be applied to the influenza viruses. Influenza vaccinations in 1946 did not appear to provide protection, from which it was concluded that the influenza virus is very variable. Furthermore, in 1946 and 1947 experimental studies were published, which indicated that the influenza virus may go through an eclipse during its multiplication: it disappears as an infectious agent. Viewed from this perspective, it was only by the second half of the 1940s that research on the influenza virus became emancipated from the bacteriological paradigm. (shrink)

Contemporary oncological research is predominantly characterised by genetic explanations, a situation which may be briefly denoted as the oncogene paradigm. This essay discusses why the new paradigm was perceived so attractive that it could take over the whole field of oncology within a time-span of less than two decades. It is argued that the revolutionary character of the oncogene paradigm stems from the fact that it transcends a dichotomy which has kept experimental cancer research divided for more than three quarters (...) of a century. This concerns the dichotomy between so-called exogenous and endogenous explanations of cancer causation. This essay mainly focuses on the role of the exogenous/endogenous dichotomy in the reception of research on oncogenic viruses, especially discussing the work of Nobel laureate Peyton Rous on cancer viruses at the Rockefeller Institute. Rous was severely criticised by James Ewing, director of the Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases in New York, who held the idea that the origin of cancer was based in the cell. The twentieth century controversy over oncogenic viruses is placed in the context of the intense discussion over causality in medicine during the first decades of the twentieth century in Germany. It is argued that the oncogene paradigm may be seen as revolutionary because it succeeded in uniting the exogenous and endogenous explanations of cancer in a single paradigm. (shrink)

This paper examines the vital role played by electron microscopy toward the modern definition of viruses, as formulated in the late 1950s. Before the 1930s viruses could neither be visualized by available technologies nor grown in artificial media. As such they were usually identified by their ability to cause diseases in their hosts and defined in such negative terms as “ultramicroscopic” or invisible infectious agents that could not be cultivated outside living cells. The invention of the electron microscope, with magnification (...) and resolution powers several orders of magnitude better than that of optical instruments, opened up possibilities for biological applications. The hitherto invisible viruses lent themselves especially well to investigation with this new instrument. We first offer a historical consideration of the development of the instrument and, more significantly, advances in techniques for preparing and observing specimens that turned the electron microscope into a routine biological tool. We then describe the ways in which the electron microscopic images, or micrographs, functioned as forms of new knowledge about viruses and resulted in a paradigm shift in the very definition of these entities. Micrographs were not mere illustrations since they did the work for the electron microscopists. Drawing extensively on primary publications, we adduce the role of the new instrument in understanding the so-called eclipse phase in virus multiplication and the unexpected spinoffs of data from electron microscopy in naming and classifying viruses. Thus, we show that electron microscopy functioned not only to provide evidence, but also arguments in facilitating a reordering of the world that it brought into the visual realm. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper an argument is developed to the effect that (1) there is no moral ground for individual persons to feel responsible for or guilty about crimes of their group to which they have in no way contributed; and (2) since there is no irreducibly collective responsibility nor guilt at any time, there is no question of them persisting over time. In the second part it is argued that there is nevertheless sufficient reason for innocent (...) individual members of a group (that persists over time) to take on responsibility and guilt for the evil other (earlier) members have committed. The reason depends on the acceptability of a particular psychological theory of personal identity. (shrink)

What I set out to do is to cast some doubt on the thesis that, in Bernard Williams's words, any appeal to God in morality "either adds nothing at all, or it adds the wrong sort of thing". A first conclusion is that a morality of real, inescapable and for the agent costly obligations, while being at home in a theistic metaphysic, does not sit easily with metaphysical, atheistic naturalism. The second conclusion is that Christine Korsgaard's impressive ethical project which (...) is neutral towards theism and atheism fails in giving a satisfying account of such obligations. My final claim is that a theistic account in terms of a strong divine command theory might succeed where non-and atheistic accounts seem to founder. (shrink)

Producers, traders, and consumers oforganic food regularly use the concept of thenatural (naturalness) to characterize organicagriculture and or organic food, in contrast tothe unnaturalness of conventional agriculture.Critics sometimes argue that such use lacks anyrational (scientific) basis and only refers tosentiment. In our project, we made an attemptto clarify the content and the use of theconcepts of nature and naturalness in organicagriculture, to relate this conception todiscussions within bioethical literature, andto draw the implications for agriculturalpractice and policy.Qualitative interviews were executed with (...) arange of people in the field of organicagriculture and with consumers of organicproducts, on the basis of a list of statementsabout the meaning of the concept of naturalnessformulated by the authors. Based on the resultsof the interviews, we distinguished 3 aspectsof the concept of naturalness: natural as theorganic (life processes), natural as theecological, and natural as referring to thecharacteristic nature of an entity. We relatedthese conceptual aspects to three mainapproaches within the field of organicagriculture: the no chemicals approach, theagro-ecological approach, and the integrityapproach. It became clear that these approachescan also be recognized in the change ofattitude of farmers as they convert fromconventional to organic agriculture, and in theattitudes of consumers of organic foodproducts. (shrink)

High-ability pupils in primary schools often do not achieve up to their full potential and teachers seem to face difficulties to motivate these pupils. In this study 891 primary school pupils were asked about their views on desired characteristics of good teachers by means of an open teacher-spider-questionnaire. The characteristics reported, were analysed using the three “basic needs” from the Self-Determination Theory. The answers of high-ability pupils were compared to answers of pupils from regular primary education. For both groups, teaching (...) characteristics fostering relatedness, followed by competence, were mentioned most. It was autonomy which was mentioned less frequently by both groups. The answers of the two groups of pupils mostly corresponded, although some differences emerged in specific subcategories. High-ability pupils more frequently mentioned characteristics attuning to their needs and encouragement, and mentioned “providing choice” less often. There were also some differences found between characteristics mentioned by boys and girls. (shrink)