This article brings to bear findings from the debate on the boundary problem in democratic theory on discussions of workplace democracy to argue that workplace democrats’ focus on workers is unjustified and that more constituencies will have to be included in any prospective scheme of workplace democracy. It thereby provides a valuable and underdiscussed perspective on workplace democracy that goes beyond the debate’s usual focus on the clarification and justification of workplace democrats’ core claim. It also goes beyond (...) approaches like stakeholder theory in law and economics that determine decision-making rights without taking into account genuinely democratic considerations. My discussion proceeds by considering three principles for inclusion from democratic theory for the specific case of the corporation. I submit that two of them, the all-coerced and the all-subjected principle, are not appropriate for this specific case, because they cannot capture the distinguishing features of the corporation. The all-affected principle however is appropriate but has a very wide range. I further argue that this is not as big of a problem as it first might seem and that this principle is still the most appropriate for defining the demos of the democratic corporation. The article closes by pointing out the consequences of this result for the workplace democracy debate and for the legitimacy of the market as a coordination mechanism. (shrink)

In response to the democratic boundary problem, two principles have been seen as competitors: the all-affected interests principle and the all-subjected principle. This article claims that these principles are in fact compatible, being justified vis-à-vis different functions, accommodating different values and drawing on different sources of normativity. I call this a ‘function-sensitive’ view. More specifically, I argue that the boundary problem draws attention to the decision functions of democracy and that two values are indispensable when theorizing (...) how to regulate these functions: procedural fairness and political autonomy. While the value of procedural fairness is best promoted through a version of the all-affected interests principle, applied to decision making generally, it is argued that political autonomy is best promoted through a version of the all-subjected principle, applied to coercive decision making specifically. The article concludes by drawing out some practical implications of the function-sensitive view for the case of immigration and border controls. (shrink)

How should political power and influence be allocated in democratic systems? That is, roughly, the core of the boundary problem in democratic theory. As of late, some authors have begun paying increased attention to the methodological aspects of this dispute. This paper attempts to make a twofold contribution to this ‘methodological turn’. On the one hand, it identifies and analyzes five desiderata of a successful principle of democratic inclusion. Any such principle, I argue, must be grounded in a (...) clearly identifiable set of values, must provide a clear standard of inclusion, must specify the relevant modalities of inclusion, must provide sound bridging principles, and must be extensionally adequate. In the first half of the paper, these desiderata are developed and critically scrutinized. On the other hand, I also extract three lessons from the previous discussion. First, that a unique answer to the boundary problem (i.e. one grounded in one single principle) is unlikely. Second, that a satisfactory answer to the boundary problem need not necessarily appeal, as some have argued, to distinctively democratic values. And third, that intuitions about political exclusion (i.e. those requiring or permitting the exclusion of some individuals) should be treated with special caution. (shrink)

Who should have a right to take part in which decisions in democratic decision making? This “boundary problem” is a central issue for democracy and is of both practical and theoretical import. If nothing else, all different notions of democracy have one thing in common: a reference to a community of individuals, “a people”, who takes decision in a democratic fashion. However, that a decision is made with a democratic decision method by a certain group of people doesn’t (...) suffice for making the decision democratic or satisfactory from a democratic perspective. The group also has to be the right one. But what makes a group the right one? The criteria by which to identify the members of the people entitled to participate in collective decisions have been surprisingly difficult to pin down. In this paper, I shall revisit some of the problems discussed in my 2005 paper in light of some recent criticism and discussion of my position in the literature, and address a number of new issues. (shrink)

Despite widespread and worldwide efforts to eradicate vector-borne diseases such as malaria, these diseases continue to have an enormous negative impact on public health. For this reason, scientists are working on novel control strategies, such as gene drive technologies (GDTs). As GDT research advances, researchers are contemplating the potential next step of conducting field trials. An important point of discussion regarding these field trials relates to who should be informed, consulted, and involved in decision-making about their design and launch. It (...) is generally argued that community members have a particularly strong claim to be engaged, and yet, disagreement and lack of clarity exist about how this “community” should be defined and delineated. In this paper, we shed light on this “boundary problem”: the problem of determining how boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in (GDT) community engagement should be drawn. As our analysis demonstrates, the process of defining and delineating a community is itself normative. First, we explicate why it is important to define and delineate the community. Second, we demonstrate that different definitions of community are used and intermingled in the debate on GDTs, and argue in favor of distinguishing geographical, affected, cultural, and political communities. Finally, we propose initial guidance for deciding who should (not) be engaged in decision-making about GDT field trials, by arguing that the definition and delineation of the community should depend on the rationale for engagement and that the characteristics of the community itself can guide the effective design of community engagement strategies. (shrink)

The democratic boundary problem arises because it appears that the units within which democratic decision procedures will operate cannot themselves be constituted democratically. The study argues that setting the boundaries of democracy involves attending simultaneously to three variables: domain (where and to whom do decisions apply), constituency (who is entitled to be included in the deciding body) and scope (which issues should be on the decision agenda). Most of the existing literature has focussed narrowly on the constituency question, (...) endorsing either the All‐Affected Interests Principle or the All Subjected Principle, but neither is satisfactory as a general solution. In particular, the former fails to explain why having interests at stake in a decision necessarily gives you the right to participate in making it, and the latter, although more plausible on that count, assumes that the domain and scope issues have already been settled. To make progress, we need to bring democratic values to bear on the boundary problem. The units we favour should be those that are likely to promote political equality and solidarity among members of the demos. Although this approach will often justify existing territorial states as sites of democracy, it can also generate arguments for making boundary changes along one or other dimension. (shrink)

:Self-ownership theorists argue that many of our most morally urgent and enforceable rights stem from the fact that we own ourselves. Critics of self-ownership argue that the claim that people own their bodies commits self-ownership theorists to several implausible conclusions because self-ownership theory relies on several vague moral predicates, and any precisification of the required predicates is seemingly too permissive or too restrictive. I argue that this line of criticism does not undermine the case for self-ownership theory because self-ownership theory (...) does not require precisification of each moral concept that it is based on and, even if it did, the theory’s alleged extensional inadequacy does not undermine its justification. (shrink)

A computational theory of consciousness should include a quantitative measure of consciousness, or MoC, that (i) would reveal to what extent a given system is conscious, (ii) would make it possible to compare not only different systems, but also the same system at different times, and (iii) would be graded, because so is consciousness. However, unless its design is properly constrained, such an MoC gives rise to what we call the boundary problem: an MoC that labels a system (...) as conscious will do so for some – perhaps most – of its subsystems, as well as for irrelevantly extended systems (e.g., the original system augmented with physical appendages that contribute nothing to the properties supposedly supporting consciousness), and for aggregates of individually conscious systems (e.g., groups of people). This problem suggests that the properties that are being measured are epiphenomenal to consciousness, or else it implies a bizarre proliferation of minds. We propose that a solution to the boundary problem can be found by identifying properties that are intrinsic or systemic: properties that clearly differentiate between systems whose existence is a matter of fact, as opposed to those whose existence is a matter of interpretation (in the eye of the beholder). We argue that if a putative MoC can be shown to be systemic, this ipso facto resolves any associated boundary issues. As test cases, we analyze two recent theories of consciousness in light of our definitions: the Integrated Information Theory and the Geometric Theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Publicly-funded health systems, including those national health services and social or National Health Insurances, are institutionalized solidarity in health. In Europe, solidarity originated from the legacies of labor movements, the Judeo-Christian traditions, and nationalist sentiments in the re-construction Era after the WWII. In middle-to-high income East Asian countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the health systems were built on different grounds and do not have such ethical origins of solidarity. As health systems in Europe and East Asia are both facing (...) sustainability crises due to aging population, stagnant economy, changing boundaries, and advancing medical technologies, how those systems with the European solidaristic ethical traditions can be revived and how those without the European traditions could survive become a matter of theoretical interests and an urgent policy problem to be addressed. Drawing on contemporary theories of solidarity, this essay analyzes the boundary problem and its impact on the sustainability of the health system in Taiwan. It then considers two plausible origins of solidarity in Taiwan. One is the re-emerged civic nationalism, and the other is an ethos of common life. It is argued that after years of implementation, the National Health Insurance in Taiwan might have shaped the social values and people’s habits and formed an ethos of common life. Such ethos could be an ethical origin of solidarity in non-western societies and help the health systems endure the prolonged sustainability crises. (shrink)

Theories of political authority divide naturally into those that locate the source of states' authority in the history of states' interactions with their subjects and those that locate it in structural (or functional) features of states (such as the justice of their basic institutions). This paper argues that purely structuralist theories of political authority (such as those defended by Kant, Rawls, and contemporary “democratic Kantians”) must fail because of their inability to solve the boundary problem—namely, the problem (...) of locating the boundaries between different states' domains of authority in the natural or intuitive places. (shrink)

How to demarcate the political units within which democracy will be practiced? Although recent years have witnessed a steadily increasing academic interest in this question concerning the boundary problem in democratic theory, social contract theory’s potential for solving it has largely been ignored. In fact, contract views are premised on the assumption of a given people and so presuppose what requires legitimization: the existence of a demarcated group of individuals materializing, as it were, from nowhere and whose members (...) agree among themselves to establish a political order. In order to fill this gap in social contract theory, a distinction is made between three kinds of contract views: Lockean political voluntarism, contractarianism, and contractualism. Each of these views can be interpreted in such a way that it offers a democratic solution to the boundary problem. Ultimately, however, a Rawlsian interpretation of the contractualist solution is defended. (shrink)

Where is the justificatory boundary between a true belief's not being knowledge and its being knowledge? Even if we put to one side the Gettier problem, this remains a fundamental epistemological question, concerning as it does the matter of whether we can provide some significant defence of the usual epistemological assumption that a belief is knowledge only if it is well justified. But can that question be answered non-arbitrarily? BonJour believes that it cannot be -- and that epistemology (...) should therefore abandon the concept of knowledge. More optimistically, this paper does attempt to answer that question, by applying -- and thereby refining -- a non-absolutist theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Cultural-nationalist and democratic theory both seek to legitimize political power via collective self-rule: their principle of legitimacy refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is exercised. But such self-referential theories are incapable of jointly solving the distinct problems of legitimacy and boundaries, which they necessarily combine, once it is assumed that the self-ruling collectivity must be a pre-political, in-principle bounded, ground of legitimacy. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the nation’s (...) pre-political culture, but it cannot fix cultural-national boundaries pre-politically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. Traditional democratic theory claims that political power is legitimized pre-politically, but cannot itself legitimize the boundaries of the people. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only once we recognize that the demos is in principle unbounded, and abandon the quest for a pre-political ground of legitimacy, can democratic theory fully avoid this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos. But such a theory departs radically from traditional theory. (shrink)

This essay considers the role of the ‘all affected interests’ principle in democratic theory, focusing on debates concerning its form, substance and relationship to the resolution of the democratic boundary problem. It begins by defending an ‘all actually affected’ formulation of the principle against Goodin’s ‘incoherence argument’ critique of this formulation, before addressing issues concerning how to specify the choice set appropriate to the principle. Turning to the substance of the principle, the argument rejects Nozick’s dismissal of its (...) intuitive appeal and considers the two arguments advanced in favour of the principle as a criterion of democratic inclusion: the interlinked interests argument and the tracking power argument. It is shown that neither of these arguments can substantiate a view of the principle as a criterion of democratic inclusion, although both ground a constitutional understanding of the principle as specifying the scope of a duty of justification. It is then proposed that the principle can play an important role in a two-stage resolution of the democratic boundary problem in which it addresses the question of who is entitled to inclusion in the ‘pre-political’ demos that determines whether to constitute a polity. The second stage of this resolution requires an answer to the question of who should constitute the ‘political demos’, that is, the demos of a constituted polity and it is argued that a version of the ‘‘all subjected persons’’ principle can appropriately play this role.Keywords: all affected interests; all subjected persons; democracy; boundary problem; demos problem. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 646-663, September 2021.

Donald T. Campbell argued that the organization of university departments shaped the boundaries among specialties. This article extends his argument in two ways. First, specialties are also shaped by other institutions, such as sponsors and learned societies. Second, the intersection among specialties is shaped by the complexity of the problems that research addresses. Specialization of research is a way to deal with the complexity of nature. One way of doing this is to erect specialties that focus on different aspects of (...) nature, and which do not overlap in subject matter. This view is the basis of Campbell’s “fish-scale” model of relations among specialties, and assumes that nature is descriptively complex in the sense of William C. Wimsatt . But specialties often overlap and are thus interactively complex as well. Here I argue that a kind of interactive complexity—collaborative complexity—arises when research on a problem must take the not-yet-established contents of multiple specialties into account. Such compound problems are exemplified by attempts to explain historical particulars, such as particular adaptations in single species, e.g., masculinization in Spotted Hyenas. (shrink)

This article outlines a new approach to answering the foundational question in democratic theory of how the boundaries of democratic political units should be delineated. Whereas democratic theorists have mostly focused on identifying the appropriate population-group – or demos – for democratic decisionmaking, it is argued here that we should also take account of considerations relating to the appropriate scope of a democratic unit’s institutionalized governance capabilities – or public power. These matter because democratically legitimate governance is produced not only (...) through the decision-making agency of a demos, but also through the institutionally distinct sources of political agency that shape the governance capabilities of public power. To develop this argument, the article traces a new theoretical account of the normative and institutional sources of collective agency, political legitimacy, and democratic boundaries, and illustrates it through a democratic reconstruction of the classical body politic metaphor. It further shows how this theoretical account lends strong prescriptive support to pluralist institutional boundaries within democratic global governance. (shrink)

This article outlines a new approach to answering the foundational question in democratic theory of how the boundaries of democratic political units should be delineated. Whereas democratic theorists have mostly focused on identifying the appropriate population-group – or demos – for democratic decisionmaking, it is argued here that we should also take account of considerations relating to the appropriate scope of a democratic unit’s institutionalized governance capabilities – or public power. These matter because democratically legitimate governance is produced not only (...) through the decision-making agency of a demos, but also through the institutionally distinct sources of political agency that shape the governance capabilities of public power. To develop this argument, the article traces a new theoretical account of the normative and institutional sources of collective agency, political legitimacy, and democratic boundaries, and illustrates it through a democratic reconstruction of the classical body politic metaphor. It further shows how this theoretical account lends strong prescriptive support to pluralist institutional boundaries within democratic global governance. (shrink)

A proposta deste texto é oferecer alguns aportes acerca da investigação dos problemas ético-estéticos por meio de uma análise teórico-conceitual que privilegia as interseções entre a Filosofia e a Literatura. O objetivo central é o de trabalhar a partir de autores filiados ao movimento romântico-idealista alemão destacando, em suas produções, a presença, direta ou inspirada, dos filósofos antigos, especialmente aqueles filiados à corrente estoica. Isto nos permite ampliar a discussão acerca das valorações morais por meio do resgate do conceito de (...) “representação” a fim de propô-lo como um operador conceitual chave para as respostas acerca dos problemas éticos e estéticos contemporâneos. Para tanto, acredito ser possível uma investigação que aborde sempre uma dupla leitura, tematicamente bem recortada, mas que partirá de um referencial teórico-conceitual filosófico e uma obra literária afim, no intuito de mostrar como um estudo cuidadoso dessas “fronteiras” entre o discurso filosófico e o literário pode oferecer um mapeamento dos problemas relacionados ao debate Ética-Estética. O ponto de apoio fundamental desta proposta é o resgate da concepção “unicista” greco-romana entre as questões estéticas e as filosófico-morais com vistas à pergunta acerca de como seres humanos deveriam viver, o que nos leva a demonstrar como a compatibilização entre os campos de investigação ético e estético oferecem uma visão de mundo mais esclarecedora e ampliada da realidade. (shrink)

A proposta deste texto é oferecer alguns aportes acerca da investigação dos problemas ético-estéticos por meio de uma análise teórico-conceitual que privilegia as interseções entre a Filosofia e a Literatura. O objetivo central é o de trabalhar a partir de autores filiados ao movimento romântico-idealista alemão destacando, em suas produções, a presença, direta ou inspirada, dos filósofos antigos, especialmente aqueles filiados à corrente estoica. Isto nos permite ampliar a discussão acerca das valorações morais por meio do resgate do conceito de (...) “representação” a fim de propô-lo como um operador conceitual chave para as respostas acerca dos problemas éticos e estéticos contemporâneos. Para tanto, acredito ser possível uma investigação que aborde sempre uma dupla leitura, tematicamente bem recortada, mas que partirá de um referencial teórico-conceitual filosófico e uma obra literária afim, no intuito de mostrar como um estudo cuidadoso dessas “fronteiras” entre o discurso filosófico e o literário pode oferecer um mapeamento dos problemas relacionados ao debate Ética-Estética. O ponto de apoio fundamental desta proposta é o resgate da concepção “unicista” greco-romana entre as questões estéticas e as filosófico-morais com vistas à pergunta acerca de como seres humanos deveriam viver, o que nos leva a demonstrar como a compatibilização entre os campos de investigação ético e estético oferecem uma visão de mundo mais esclarecedora e ampliada da realidade.: this paper aims at pointing out some issues concerning the dialogical approach between ethics and esthetics by means of a reflection on the theoretical-critical problems purported by Philosophy and Literature. The main objective is to introduce a proposal of analysis that is centered on the authors of the German Romanticism-Idealism emphasizing the intercourse between their philosophy and the Ancients’ presence in them, moreover the Stoicism. Bearing that in mind, the purpose is to widen the scope of our moral evaluations using as a guideline the conception of “representation”. That allows us to investigate our main contemporary ethical-esthetical issues bringing together a theoretical-philosophical conception and an alike literary work. Our goal is to demonstrate that carefully analyzing those “frontiers”, the ones that demarcate literature and philosophy, is a fruitful mapping of the Ethics-Esthetics debate. In the end, we tend to opt for a “unifying” assumption of the Greco-Roman point of view on the way human beings should lead their lives in order to fashion themselves according to a good character model based on a moral-esthetical grounding. That could open up a wider perspective of our reading of our own reality. Key words: Stoicism; German Idealism-Romanticism; Philosophy and Literature; Tragic Philosophy; Representation. (shrink)

This book is a collection of eleven essays by one of the most interesting moral philosophers currently writing. It examines challenges to liberal thought posed by the changing circumstances of the modern world such as the conflicting tendencies toward global integration, and greater ethnic and communal identification. The author considers whether liberal principles of justice can accommodate social and global interdependencies while reaffirming the importance of individual responsibility and acknowledging the significance of people's diverse personal and communal allegiances.

The legal protection of well-known trademarks is an exception to the fundamental principles of trademark law, i.e. territorality, registration and „speciality“. The well-known trademark is protected even if it had not been registered according to the national legal regulation of that state, in which protection is sought. The well-known trademark can also be protected even in respect to the goods and (or) services which are not similar to those for which the well-known trademark is used or registered (in case the (...) trademark is registered). (shrink)

This book provides a general theory of democratic inclusion for the present world. It presents an original contribution to our understanding of the democratic ideal by explaining how democratic inclusion can apply to individuals in a variety of contexts: the workplace, social clubs, religious institutions, the family and, of course, the state. The book explores the problem of democratic inclusion, what it means to be subject to de facto authority, how this conception translates into legal systems and the relationship (...) between territorial claims by the state, and law's claim to legitimate authority. The volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of politics, especially political theory and democracy. (shrink)

Physics says that it cannot deal with the mind-brain problem, because it does not deal in subjectivities, and mind is subjective. However, biologists still claim to seek a material basis for subjective mental processes, which would thereby render them objective. Something is clearly wrong here. I claim that what is wrong is the adoption of too narrow a view of what constitutes objectivity, especially in identifying it with what a machine can do. I approach the problem in the (...) light of two cognate circumstances: the measurement problem in quantum physics, and the objectivity of standard mathematics, even though most of it is beyond the reach of machines. I argue that the only resolution to such problems is in the recognition that closed loops of causation are objective; i.e. legitimate objects of scientific scrutiny. These are explicitly forbidden in any machine or mechanism. A material system which contains such loops is called complex. Such complex systems thus must possess nonsimulable models; i.e. models which contain impredicativities or self-references which cannot be removed, or faithfully mapped into a single coherent syntactic time-frame. I consider a few of the consequences of the above, in the context of thus redrawing the boundary between subject and object. (shrink)

This paper is to investigate the existence and uniqueness of solutions for an integral boundary value problem of new fractional differential equations with a sign-changed parameter in Banach spaces. The main used approach is a recent fixed point theorem of increasing Ψ − h, r -concave operators defined on ordered sets. In addition, we can present a monotone iterative scheme to approximate the unique solution. In the end, two simple examples are given to illustrate our main results.

According to Interventionism, explanations cite invariant relations which hold among multiple variables. Interventionism incorrectly implies, however, that many common scientific explanations—which cite single‐variable boundary constraints—are not actually explanatory. So I propose a different account of explanation, similar in spirit to Interventionism, which gets those cases of scientific explanation right.

In this article, the main definitions and differentiation concepts of neutrosophic fuzzy environment will be reviewed. This article will introduce an analytical methodology for solving the second-order linear ordinary differential problem with neutrosophic fuzzy boundary values, this analysis will be under generalized Hukuhara differentiability to show the analytical solutions from a different point of view for the uncertain system, some of these solutions may be decreasing in uncertainty or maybe reflecting the behavior of some real-world systems better. Some (...) applications and numeral examples will be solved to show the behavior of the solution. (shrink)

This essay is a historical–geographical account of how scientists and public health officials conceptualized and assessed northern radioactive exposures in the late 1950s and 1960s. The detection of radionuclides in caribou bodies in northern Canada both demonstrated the global reach of nuclear fallout and revealed the unevenness of toxic relations and radioactive exposures. Following the documentation of the lichen–caribou–human pathway of exposure, Canadian public health officials became increasingly concerned about the possibility of heightened radioactive exposures among Indigenous northerners. Between 1963 (...) and 1969, scientists and officials with Canada’s Radiation Protection Division coordinated an interdepartmental monitoring program through which they sought to determine whether the consumption of contaminated caribou meat had caused radioactive exposure levels in northern communities to exceed the officially recognized “safe limits.” In 1969, the northern monitoring program was suspended after officials determined that radionuclide body burdens had not exceeded the threshold for radioactive exposures. While the RPD emphasized its development of a technoscientific approach to measuring radioactive body burdens, the legitimacy of the monitoring program was linked directly to interdepartmental relations within Canada’s colonial northern administration. I situate the northern monitoring program within broader shifts in public health approaches to radiation protection and use Gabrielle Hecht’s concept of nuclearity to demonstrate how RPD officials employed the logic of the threshold in their assessment of radioactive exposures. (shrink)

Sentence boundary detection (SBD) represents an important first step in natural language processing since accurately identifying sentence boundaries significantly impacts downstream applications. Nevertheless, detecting sentence boundaries within legal texts poses a unique and challenging problem due to their distinct structural and linguistic features. Our approach utilizes deep learning models to leverage delimiter and surrounding context information as input, enabling precise detection of sentence boundaries in English legal texts. We evaluate various deep learning models, including domain-specific transformer models like (...) LegalBERT and CaseLawBERT. To assess the efficacy of our deep learning models, we compare them with a state-of-the-art domain-specific statistical conditional random field (CRF) model. After considering model size, F1-score, and inference time, we identify the Convolutional Neural Network Model (CNN) as the top-performing deep learning model. To further enhance performance, we integrate the features of the CNN model into the subsequent CRF model, creating a hybrid architecture that combines the strengths of both models. Our experiments demonstrate that the hybrid model outperforms the baseline model, achieving a 4% improvement in the F1-score. Additional experiments showcase the superiority of the hybrid model over SBD open-source libraries when confronted with an out-of-domain test set. These findings underscore the importance of efficient SBD in legal texts and emphasize the advantages of employing deep learning models and hybrid architectures to achieve optimal performance. (shrink)

Social boundaries separate us fromthem. Explaining the formation, transformation, activation, and suppression of social boundaries presents knotty problems. It helps to distinguish two sets of mechanisms: (1) those that precipitate boundary change and (2) those that constitute boundary change. Properly speaking, only the constitutive mechanisms produce the effects of boundary change as such. Precipitants of boundary change include encounter, imposition, borrowing, conversation, and incentive shift. Constitutive mechanisms include inscription–erasure, activation–deactivation, site transfer, and relocation. Effects of (...) class='Hi'>boundary change include attack–defense sequences. These mechanisms operate over a wide range of social phenomena. Key Words: social boundary • mechanisms. (shrink)

This special issue of Biological Theory is focused on development; it raises the problem of the temporal and spatial boundaries of development. From a temporal point of view, when does development start and stop? From a spatial point of view, what is it exactly that "develops", and is it possible to delineate clearly the developing entity? This issue explores the possible answers to these questions, and thus sheds light on the definition of development itself.

Mereotopology is a theory of connected parts. The existence of boundaries, as parts of everyday objects, is basic to any such theory; but in classical mereotopology, there is a problem: if boundaries exist, then either distinct entities cannot be in contact, or else space is not topologically connected . In this paper we urge that this problem can be met with a paraconsistent mereotopology, and sketch the details of one such approach. The resulting theory focuses attention on the (...) role of empty parts, in delivering a balanced and bounded metaphysics of naive space. (shrink)