In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 440-442 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Lauth. Descartes ' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie. Stuttgart (Bad Cannstatt): Frommann-Holzboog, 1998. Pp. x + 227 pp. Cloth, DM 64.00. Reinhard Lauth's Descartes ' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie is an interesting addition to the literature on Descartes. Written by a renowned scholar of German Idealism, it does not represent an attempt to respond (...) to scholars of Descartes, to take part in the debate regarding aspects of Descartes's philosophy, nor to explain the role of Descartes's thought in the tumultuous seventeenth century, but rather to explain to scholars of German Idealism why Descartes should be considered the first and one of the greatest transcendental philosophers. It is no accident that in the index we find close to 50 references each to Kant and Fichte, while Descartes's important "rationalist" comrades, Spinoza and Leibniz, receive half as much attention; nor is it an accident that the first and last philosopher mentioned in the book is Fichte.Lauth's book is in the tradition of Gueroult's monumental Descartes selon l ' ordre des raisons (Paris, 1968, 2nd edition) and, as the title indicates, the subject of the book is Descartes's philosophy as a system, not as a collection of independent theses about various philosophical problems. However, unlike Gueroult, who concentrated on an [End Page 440] analysis of the Meditations, Lauth draws extensively on the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Discourse on Method, Meditations, and Descartes's correspondence. That Descartes viewed philosophy as ideally constituting a system of human knowledge should not come as news to anyone who recalls Descartes's claim in the Preface to the Principles of Philosophy that all of philosophy is like a tree whose roots are metaphysics, trunk physics, and branches medicine, mechanics, and morals, or his claim in the Preface to the Meditations that there is a clear order of argumentation or reasons and that his goal is to lay bare the foundations of philosophy. How exactly Descartes's philosophy is to constitute a system is the trickier question that is Lauth's concern.According to Lauth, the order of reasons that one finds expressed in Descartes's first philosophy is not simply a series of biographical events, filling a psychological need in Descartes (cf. Alquié, La Découverte métaphysique de l ' homme chez Descartes [Paris, 1966]), but rather the "systematic path of the cogito itself" (X). And Lauth attempts to show that there is something inexorable in the way that conclusions about the world from the point of view of the thinking subject are made and follow from one another. This takes him along the well-known path of the Meditations: from the existence of the self, to the nature of the self, to the existence and nature of God, to the external world, and finally to the relation of mind and body. And here two interesting observations on Lauth's part should be singled out. First, Lauth does an admirable job in intimating the tension regarding the places of the thinking subject and God as the supreme principles in Descartes's system. On the one hand, it would seem that the thinking subject should be the highest principle in Descartes's philosophy insofar as its existence is the first thing known; but, according to Lauth, it cannot be the highest principle because it does not contain the principle of its own existence (76). On the other hand, if we claim that God is the highest principle then we must recognize that a system following from this principle must fail insofar as genuine knowledge of God surpasses the bounds of our finite, human knowledge (99-100). Second, in claiming that Descartes was a "transcendental philosopher," Lauth reminds us of the extent to which Descartes is concerned with the bounds of human knowledge as determinable from the thinking subject itself.While this work contains many useful insights—especially for those scholars of German Idealism who are looking for new ways of reflecting on their subject—it has... (shrink)

In his Between Two Worlds: A Reading of Descartes’s Meditations, John Carriero presents a sustained and sensitive interpretation of this seminal work of modern philosophy. The two worlds of the title are the worlds of Scholastic philosophy on the one side, and of the mechanical philosophy on the other, and it is Carriero’s argument that the Meditations are most helpfully understood against the background of Thomistic Scholasticism. In particular, Carriero shows that there is a deep difference between St. Thomas and (...) Descartes, first, concerning philosophical theology and the nature and possibility of our cognition of the divine essence, and second, concerning the nature of human cognition. What Carriero is ultimately trying to argue against is a picture of Descartes according to which he is fundamentally engaged in an anti-skeptical project and at the same time responsible for a crass and superficial form of dualism.While the book is organized simply, with one chapter devoted to each of the Descartes’s six Meditations, it is philosophically very rich and will reward careful study. Indeed, it is rare for a book to be devoted to such a close reading of a single text at this high level. Certainly, there are many “Introductions” for undergraduates, but few works written for advanced graduate students and professional philosophers cover a text so closely and so subtly. Carriero’s book demonstrates the virtues of this kind of text-immanent. (shrink)

In the main article on Leibniz, it was claimed that Leibniz's philosophy can be seen as a reaction to the Cartesian theory of corporeal substance and the necessitarianism of Spinoza and Hobbes. This entry will address this second aspect of his philosophy. In the course of his writings, Leibniz developed an approach to questions of modality—necessity, possibility, contingency—that not only served an important function within his general metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical theology but also has continuing interest today. Indeed, it (...) has.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Transcendental Proof of RealismBrandon C. LookKenneth R. Westphal. Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 299. Cloth, $80.00.Westphal's book is a rich and exciting contribution to the field of Kant studies. Its claims run counter to much contemporary discussion of Kant's theoretical philosophy and indeed challenge some of Kant's fundamental doctrines, but the arguments are very compelling and therefore likely (...) to force us to rethink both the Critique of Pure Reason [CPR] and Kant's relevance to contemporary epistemology.The central point of this work is that, if we follow Kant's injunction to engage in reflection on our cognitive capacities, then we will be led not to Kantian transcendental idealism but to an unqualified realism about objects and events in space and time. The book's first three chapters are devoted to analyzing Kant's methodology and the much-overlooked idea of transcendental affinity. Westphal focuses on the Kantian duty of engaging in "transcendental reflection," which is "the action through which I make the comparison of representations in general with the cognitive power in which they are situated, and through which I distinguish whether they are to be compared with one another as belonging to pure understanding or to sensible intuition" (CPR, A 261/B 317). And he adds to this the more general methodological obligation of "epistemic reflection," or the duty to determine precisely our cognitive capacities and incapacities. If, then, we reflect on our representations, their origins in sensibility and the understanding, and on our powers to know things of ourselves and the world in general, then certain puzzles arise—puzzles that were confronted by Kant (and Hume and Hegel) but that have not received the attention they have deserved. Chief among these puzzles is our ability to identify single objects and events and track them in space through time. But, as Westphal is keen to point out, identifying any particular over time requires that we be able to re-identify that particular. Now, while this puzzle is addressed by Kant in the Transcendental Deduction and Analogies of Experience, it is important to see that there is a material condition necessary for the possibility of self-conscious experience of the world that is not fleshed out in great detail by Kant and seems to be completely overlooked in the literature on Kant, namely, "the presupposition of diversity in nature" and the homogeneity of its objects among themselves (CPR, A 657/B 685). In other words, the fact that we are able to associate our various sensations with each other at all (and thereby identify and re-identify objects) is due to their "transcendental affinity." And it is Westphal's contention that "on Kant's own principles, the transcendental affinity of the manifold of sensory intuition can only be reconstructed, but not constructed, by intellectual syntheses of the understanding" (91). Therefore, pace Kant, who held that only his transcendental idealism could explain the possibility of experience, Westphal argues that transcendental idealism runs afoul of many of Kant's own arguments and observations in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic and, more important, that transcendental affinity provides grounds for "realism sans phrase" (the author's phrase) about objects and events in space and time, and for the view that our mental states are determined by external objects. As Westphal puts it in his conclusion: "Kant's analysis of transcendental affinity is in fact a transcendental argument for mental content externalism" (266). [End Page 665]The second part of Westphal's argument revolves around a detailed examination of Kant's theses about transeunt causality and the nature of matter as expressed not only in the Critique of Pure Reason, but also in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and the Opus postumum. Roughly the problem is this: in order to have an adequately grounded metaphysics of nature, Kant needs not only the results of the Analogies of Experience, the transcendental causal thesis that every event has a cause, but also the metaphysical causal thesis that every physical event has an external physical cause. But, according to Westphal, in the Metaphysical Foundations... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 (2002) 399-400 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 Jonathan I. Israel. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xx + 810. Cloth, $45.00. Jonathan Israel's goal in this excellent book is to show that we cannot fully understand the high Enlightenment—the age of the philosophes (...) and the French Revolution—without looking at the work and influence of that "most unusual and loneliest thinker" (to borrow a phrase from a later admirer): Spinoza. Israel gives us a detailed and nuanced account of the history of ideas in early modern Europe, focusing especially on the generations before Voltaire and Rousseau. Not only does Israel describe the general struggle between Enlightenment ideas and the status quo ante, he also discusses in depth the tensions between "mainstream" Enlightenment and its "radical" wing. More precisely and importantly, Israel argues that the high Enlightenment ought to be seen as the outcome of "a four-way conflict between Newtonians, neo-Cartesians, Leibnitio-Wolffians, and radicals" (715), a conflict that took place across Europe and whose dust had essentially settled by 1740. Thus, Israel is arguing against the view that the French philosophes were the dominant force in the intellectual world that led to the Revolution, against the view that Newton and Locke played a dominant role throughout Europe, and against the view that there were several distinct enlightenments with different national characters.What is meant by the term "radical Enlightenment"? According to Israel, radical Enlightenment comprises several views and tendencies in the realms of science, theology, and politics: in scientific matters, it embraces naturalism, mechanism, and materialism; in theological matters, it denies a moral order to the universe, a providential god, the Judeo-Christian(-Islamic) account of creation, miracles, and reward and punishment in an afterlife, and is critical of the idea of the divine inspiration of religious texts; in political matters, it unequivocally supports republicanism, even democracy; and, in all matters, it argues for the necessity of toleration and the "freedom to philosophize." For those who know Spinoza's philosophy, this ought to sound familiar.Israel's book is divided into five parts. In the first, he sketches the general intellectual milieu of early seventeenth-century Western Europe. The second part describes Spinoza and his circle and the philosophy of the Ethics and Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In Parts III and IV, Israel discusses the immediate reactions to Spinozism, the varieties of radical Enlightenment made possible by Spinoza, and the "intellectual counter-offensive" to naturalism, materialism, atheism, and republicanism. Part V concerns the "clandestine progress" of Spinozism and radical ideas in different countries after the banning and censorship of so many radical works, and, in a brief epilogue, Israel argues that it is Rousseau who effectively reconciled mainstream Enlightenment thought with its radical relative. This is a lot of territory to cover, and Israel covers it admirably, offering illuminating discussions of other key figures of the time: Leibniz, Malebranche, Bossuet, Locke, Bayle, Wolff, Vico, Diderot, and La Mettrie. Another strength of Israel's book is, however, the extent to which he portrays thinkers (some radicals, some reactionaries) and works that are less familiar to most working in the field today. We learn not only about such figures as Bredenburg, Fontenelle, Le Clerc, Leenhof, and Boulainvilliers, but also, in a charming but unfortunately short chapter, about Spinozistic novels from the eighteenth century.As someone trained in a philosophy department to work on the history of philosophy, I felt uneasy in one respect with this book. While Israel emphasizes the battles between philosophies and ideas, he does not concern himself so much with the process of doing philosophy. That is, if there is a failing in this book, it is that we are presented with descriptions of philosophical views without always being given an adequate account of why such views were held by individual thinkers or how the theses of the radical Enlightenment, say, are related to each... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Transcendental Proof of RealismBrandon C. LookKenneth R. Westphal. Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 299. Cloth, $80.00.Westphal's book is a rich and exciting contribution to the field of Kant studies. Its claims run counter to much contemporary discussion of Kant's theoretical philosophy and indeed challenge some of Kant's fundamental doctrines, but the arguments are very compelling and therefore likely (...) to force us to rethink both the Critique of Pure Reason [CPR] and Kant's relevance to contemporary epistemology.The central point of this work is that, if we follow Kant's injunction to engage in reflection on our cognitive capacities, then we will be led not to Kantian transcendental idealism but to an unqualified realism about objects and events in space and time. The book's first three chapters are devoted to analyzing Kant's methodology and the much-overlooked idea of transcendental affinity. Westphal focuses on the Kantian duty of engaging in "transcendental reflection," which is "the action through which I make the comparison of representations in general with the cognitive power in which they are situated, and through which I distinguish whether they are to be compared with one another as belonging to pure understanding or to sensible intuition" (CPR, A 261/B 317). And he adds to this the more general methodological obligation of "epistemic reflection," or the duty to determine precisely our cognitive capacities and incapacities. If, then, we reflect on our representations, their origins in sensibility and the understanding, and on our powers to know things of ourselves and the world in general, then certain puzzles arise—puzzles that were confronted by Kant (and Hume and Hegel) but that have not received the attention they have deserved. Chief among these puzzles is our ability to identify single objects and events and track them in space through time. But, as Westphal is keen to point out, identifying any particular over time requires that we be able to re-identify that particular. Now, while this puzzle is addressed by Kant in the Transcendental Deduction and Analogies of Experience, it is important to see that there is a material condition necessary for the possibility of self-conscious experience of the world that is not fleshed out in great detail by Kant and seems to be completely overlooked in the literature on Kant, namely, "the presupposition of diversity in nature" and the homogeneity of its objects among themselves (CPR, A 657/B 685). In other words, the fact that we are able to associate our various sensations with each other at all (and thereby identify and re-identify objects) is due to their "transcendental affinity." And it is Westphal's contention that "on Kant's own principles, the transcendental affinity of the manifold of sensory intuition can only be reconstructed, but not constructed, by intellectual syntheses of the understanding" (91). Therefore, pace Kant, who held that only his transcendental idealism could explain the possibility of experience, Westphal argues that transcendental idealism runs afoul of many of Kant's own arguments and observations in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic and, more important, that transcendental affinity provides grounds for "realism sans phrase" (the author's phrase) about objects and events in space and time, and for the view that our mental states are determined by external objects. As Westphal puts it in his conclusion: "Kant's analysis of transcendental affinity is in fact a transcendental argument for mental content externalism" (266). [End Page 665]The second part of Westphal's argument revolves around a detailed examination of Kant's theses about transeunt causality and the nature of matter as expressed not only in the Critique of Pure Reason, but also in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and the Opus postumum. Roughly the problem is this: in order to have an adequately grounded metaphysics of nature, Kant needs not only the results of the Analogies of Experience, the transcendental causal thesis that every event has a cause, but also the metaphysical causal thesis that every physical event has an external physical cause. But, according to Westphal, in the Metaphysical Foundations... (shrink)

It is common in the history of philosophy to view the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence as essentially a debate between Leibniz and Newton. According to this view, Clarke was merely Newton’s mouthpiece, or perhaps his amanuensis taking dictation from the “incomparable Mr. Newton” as Newton sought to demolish the philosophical views of his archenemy, Leibniz. In his new book, however, Ezio Vailati argues that we abandon this simplified view, first, because there is little historical evidence proving Newton’s role in the correspondence, and (...) second, because this common view does Clarke himself, described by Voltaire as “a veritable thinking machine”, a great injustice. Vailati’s approach is, then, to consider “the correspondence essentially as a confrontation between Leibniz and Clarke, the most important exponent of Newtonianism”. (shrink)

We discuss the probabilistic analysis of explanatory power and prove a representation theorem for posterior ratio measures recently advocated by Schupbach and Sprenger. We then prove a representation theorem for an alternative class of measures that rely on the notion of relative probability distance. We end up endorsing the latter, as relative distance measures share the properties of posterior ratio measures that are genuinely appealing, while overcoming a feature that we consider undesirable. They also yield a telling result concerning formal (...) accounts of explanatory power versus inductive confirmation, thereby bridging our discussion to a so-called no-miracle argument. (shrink)

In earlier work, I predicted that we would probably not be able to determine the colors of the dinosaurs. I lost this epistemic bet against science in dramatic fashion when scientists discovered that it is possible to draw inferences about dinosaur coloration based on the microstructure of fossil feathers (Vinther et al., 2008). This paper is an exercise in philosophical error analysis. I examine this episode with two questions in mind. First, does this case lend any support to epistemic optimism (...) about historical science? Second, under what conditions is it rational to make predictions about what questions scientists will or will not be able answer? In reply to the first question, I argue that the recent work on the colors of the dinosaurs matters less to the debate about the epistemology of historical science than it might seem. In reply to the second question, I argue that it is difficult to specify a policy that would rule out the failed bet without also being too conservative. (shrink)

The recent republication of David Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery in a second edition provides an occasion to reappraise the celebrated work which launched the so-called Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge. This work embodies the general outlook and foundational principles in a way that is still characteristic of its descendents. Above all, the recent republication of Bloor's original book is evidence of the continuing interest and importance of the work, but it also provides the clearest evidence (...) of the shortcomings of the enterprise. The arguments presented in the bulk of the book have received relatively little attention by comparison with the principal tenets enunciated in the first few pages. Accordingly, a detailed examination is made of these original arguments which were so influential in establishing the sociology of scientific knowledge. A close analysis reveals their seemingly unnoticed vacuity, as well as a vast discrepancy between the radical tenets of the Strong Programme and the theses that are actually defended in the body of Bloor's text. In this sense, this article serves to complement and reinforce Mario Bunge's recent masterful survey of the field, which he describes as "a grotesque cartoon of scientific research.". (shrink)

The recent republication of David Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery in a second edition provides an occasion to reappraise the celebrated work which launched the so-called Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge. This work embodies the general outlook and foundational principles in a way that is still characteristic of its descendents. Above all, the recent republication of Bloor's original book is evidence of the continuing interest and importance of the work, but it also provides the clearest evidence (...) of the shortcomings of the enterprise. The arguments presented in the bulk of the book have received relatively little attention by comparison with the principal tenets enunciated in the first few pages. Accordingly, a detailed examination is made of these original arguments which were so influential in establishing the sociology of scientific knowledge. A close analysis reveals their seemingly unnoticed vacuity, as well as a vast discrepancy between the radical tenets of the Strong Programme and the theses that are actually defended in the body of Bloor's text. In this sense, this article serves to complement and reinforce Mario Bunge's recent masterful survey of the field, which he describes as "a grotesque cartoon of scientific research.". (shrink)

Recent discussion of the meaning contribution of focus centered around the question of how focus information is integrated into semantic and pragmatic interpretation. One type of theory assumes that certain operators can make direct use of focus information. These theories stipulate that focus-sensitive operators like only or even, quantificational adverbials, and reason clauses have to be associated with a focus in their scope. Such “association with focus” theories have been proposed, for example, by Jackendoff (1972), Jacobs (1983), Rooth (1985), von (...) Stechow (1990) and Krifka (1992). More recently, Rooth (1992) has proposed that focus contributes in a more indirect way to the interpretation of these operators. Rooth argued that the quantificational domain of such operators is fixed by contextual factors, and that these contextual factors in turn are influenced by focus. More specifically, focus is seen as a device that introduces and regulates contextual variables that are then taken up by certain operators. One important argument for the contextual account of focus is that it does not have to stipulate focus in certain cases, namely socalled “second occurrence expressions”, in which there is little, if any, phonological evidence for it. (shrink)

This article is a reconsideration of Tesch's (1977) ethical, educational, and methodological functions for debriefing through a literature review and an Internet survey of authors of articles published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Journal of Traumatic Stress . We advocate for a larger ethical role for debriefing in nondeception research. The educational function of debriefing is examined in light of the continued popularity of undergraduate participant pools. A case is made for the methodological function of debriefing (...) to clarify aspects of research participation. Recommendations are made to improve the conducting and reporting of debriefings. (shrink)

§1. Iterated Gödelian extensions of theories. The idea of iterating ad infinitum the operation of extending a theory T by adding as a new axiom a Gödel sentence for T, or equivalently a formalization of “T is consistent”, thus obtaining an infinite sequence of theories, arose naturally when Godel's incompleteness theorem first appeared, and occurs today to many non-specialists when they ponder the theorem. In the logical literature this idea has been thoroughly explored through two main approaches. One is that (...) initiated by Turing in his “ordinal logics” and taken very much further in Feferman's work on transfinite progressions, which also introduced the more general study of extensions by reflection principles, of which consistency statements are a special case. This approach starts from an assignment of theories to ordinal notations, and extracts sequences of theories through a suitable choice of a path in the set of ordinal notations. The second approach, illustrated in particular by the work of Schmerl and Beklemishev, starts instead from a suitably well-behaved primitive recursive well-ordering, which is used to define a sequence of theories. This second approach has led to precise results about the relative proof-theoretical strength of sequences of theories obtained by iterating different reflection principles. The Turing-Feferman approach, on the other hand, lends itself well to an investigation in qualitative and philosophical terms of the relevance of such iterated reflection extensions to mathematical knowledge, in particular because of two developments associated with this approach. (shrink)

In Globalization and Justice, Kai Nielsen brings his distinctive and passionate voice and considerable philosophical abilities to one of the pressing issues of our time: Is justice possible in our increasingly globalized world? Nielsen argues that it is, though the demands of justice are great, the challenges substantial, and the odds very long. Without a clear philosophical understanding of justice and a firm and focused political will, Nielsen maintains, we are likely to have globalization without justice. This is surely correct.

This chapter explores the possibility of a closer relationship, defending the position that objects of desire are apprehended as good, not just in the sense that it seems so to the subject, but in the much stronger sense that, ceteris paribus. It also explores the fact that a thing is desired may be taken as good reason for counting it as a prima facie good. The chapter argues that passive willing the sort of willing paradigmatically represented by the phenomenon of (...) desire, over which to do not exert immediate control ought to be viewed as a means, perhaps the chief means, by which to apprehend what is good. It involves examining two theses: first is relatively uncontroversial, and the second thesis is much stronger, people might have in mind were to claim that the will, conceived as a faculty of desire, is naturally oriented towards the good. (shrink)

Briefly, I presented two distinct objections against the notion of an existence attribute, or for brevity, e-attribute: first, there is no way of adequately unpacking the analysans of ; but, second, even if there should be an acceptable formulation of, there is no general procedure for deciding which attributes satisfy this definition. Now the second of these objections, I want to say, remains sound for the reasons given in the paper cited above. Unfortunately my attempt to establish the (...) first objection fails and the reason for the failure should not go unnoticed. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Identity of Analytical Philosophy Meta‐ethics Ethical Theory Morality, Politics and Analytical Philosophy.

An investigation into some of the literary features of the book of Malachi reveals that each unit is structured in a twofold way. The macrostructure of the book also shows that the book can be divided into two parts. The results of this investigation strengthens the recent trend in the research of Malachi that it is unlikely that the book underwent an extensive redactional process over a period of time and that it is rather more likely that the book was (...) written in a relatively short period of time. (shrink)

Hospital waiting lists are a feature ofpublicly funded health services that resultswhen demand appears to exceed supply. Whilemuch has been written about hospital waitinglists, little is known about the dynamics ofdiagnostic waiting lists, or more generally whyhospital waiting lists behave in perverse andoften counter-intuitive ways. This paperattempts to address this gap by applying arecent development in critical systems thinkingcalled boundary critique to understand how aparticular ultrasound waiting list was managed.A new waiting list metaphor based on waitinglists as ritual forms is (...) proposed. (shrink)

The deepening U.S. farm crisis has been accompanied by numerous benefit fund raisers, individual donations and volunteer programs—all an expression of cooperation and concern on the part of U.S. citizens, farmer and non-farmer alike. These responses have received wide media attention and much public praise. A sense of patriotism and self-reliance underlies their popularity. Nevertheless, such efforts work to undermine their own ultimate objective—that of improving the economic circumstances of the family farm and farm family.This irony, it is argued, arises (...) from the fact that these charitable responses typically depoliticize the nature of the U.S. farm crisis. First, they deflect public attention away from the larger economic context and the structural inequities within it. Second they revitalize agrarian-based myths which serve to rationalize and to reproduce the ‘independent’ behavior of small, commercial farmers. Finally, it is argued that the depoliticization of the farm crisis is itself a political strategy, one which supports and legitimizes ‘business as usual’ and is compatible with the interests of corporate agriculture. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn's, book The Copernican Revolution deserves to be regarded as the best of that small group of longue duree histories that mark postwar historiography of science. In many respects, it is probably the single most influential one. Tightly written and brilliantly argued, it is responsible, together with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for the continued popularity of the metaphor of revolution in science among scholars and students alike. Yet, surprisingly, while aspects of the story conceived in Kuhn's original account (...) have been debated, researched, and considerably revised, his overall understanding of a scientific revolution initiated by Copernicus has received no detailed scrutiny. The same may be said of the deployment of Copernican episode in Structure. Finally, a critical appreciation is in order not least because Kuhn's story is so compact and his language at times metaphorical. (shrink)

Returning to the text of his phrase-making Rede lecture Sir Charles Snow, surely an experienced explorer of the corridors of power, confesses to the awe of the sorcerer’s apprentice at the flood of comment, hostile and appreciative, near and far in origin, which his unpretentiously original thoughts upon the current rift in cultural communication conjured from the practitioners of literature and science, who broadly divide higher education in England today and whom he addressed at Cambridge in May 1959. The widespread (...) spontaneity of reaction has led him to conclude that his analysis touched a nerve, ‘something which people, all over the world, suspect is relevant to present actions’. His original lecture refused to relate itself to the political waging of ‘the cold war’ as ‘the prime absolute of our age’ and it castigated modernist literature for its neglect of the currently scientific stage of the industrial revolution, which is producing a new egalitarian society in our own time. Now he restates his major theme: the pressing need for a new education to promote common understanding between these two dominant cultures, so that the expanding social force of applied science be directed with the minimum danger and the maximum good for humanity. He does not minimise the danger of leaving a mystic status to the initiates of science. (shrink)

This article reviews empirical and conceptual material from two distinct research traditions: on the science-technology relation and on industrial innovation. It aims both to shed new light on an old debate—the distinction between scientific and technological knowledge—and to refine our conceptualizations of the knowledge used by companies in the course of research and development leading to innovation. On the basis of three empirical studies, a composite categorization of different types of knowledge used in innovation is proposed, as part of a (...) broader framework encompassing two further taxonomic dimensions. It is hoped that this typology and framework might provide useful research tools in furthering our understanding of the knowledge transfers and transformations that occur in the course of innovation. It could also prove useful for organizations and groups facing difficult strategic choices about technology. (shrink)

Cummins (this issue) puts the case for an innate module for deontic reasoning. We argue that this case is not persuasive. First, we claim that Cummins’evolutionary arguments are neutral regarding whether deontic reasoning is learned or innate. Second, we argue that task differences between deontic and indicative reasoning explain many of the phenomena that Cummins takes as evidence for a deontic module. Third, we argue against the suggestion that deontic reasoning is superior to indicative reasoning, either in adults or (...) children. Finally, we re‐evaluate Cummins’interpretation of differences in children's performance on deontic and indicative versions of Wason's selection task. (shrink)

Previous studies have documented the fallibility of attempts by surrogates and physicians to act in a substituted judgment capacity and predict end-of-life treatment decisions on behalf of patients. We previously reported that physicians misperceive their patients' preferences and substitute their own preferences for those of their patients with respect to four treatments: cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the event of cardiac arrest, ventilator for an indefinite period of time, medical nutrition and hydration for an indefinite period of time, and hospitalization in the (...) event of pneumonia. (shrink)

In June 2021, Missouri passed the “Second Amendment Preservation Act” (SAPA). Though SAPA passed easily and had gubernatorial support, many Missouri law enforcement agencies, including the Missouri Sheriff’s Association, oppose it. Missing from this policy conversation, and deserving of analysis, is the voice of Missouri citizens. Using qualitative interview data and survey data, we explored what if anything Missouri gun owners knew about SAPA and what they perceived its effects would be on gun-related murders, suicides, gun thefts, and mass (...) shootings. Most Missouri gun owners had not heard about SAPA and were ambivalent about its potential effect on gun safety outcomes. Our findings also indicate that respondents’ attitudes toward SAPA and the impact of such policy on safety is driven by gun ownership (i.e., primary versus living in a household with firearms), partisan identification, and attitudes toward government firearm regulation. (shrink)