Not all vertebrates share the familiar system of XX:XY sex determination seen in mammals. In the chicken and other birds, sex is determined by a ZZ:ZW sex chromosome system. Gonadal development in the chicken has provided insights into the molecular genetics of vertebrate sex determination and how it has evolved. Such comparative studies show that vertebrate sex‐determining pathways comprise both conserved and divergent elements. The chicken embryo resembles lower vertebrates in that estrogens play a central role in gonadal sex differentiation. (...) However, several genes shown to be critical for mammalian sex determination are also expressed in the chicken, but their expression patterns differ, indicating functional plasticity. While the genetic trigger for sex determination in birds remains unknown, some promising candidate genes have recently emerged. The Z‐linked gene, DMRT1, supports the Z‐dosage model of avian sex determination. Two novel W‐linked genes, ASW and FET1, represent candidate female determinants. BioEssays 26:120–132, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Alex Orenstein: “Inscrutability Scrutinized”: This is a reply to Quine's comments on an earlier paper. In his comments on that earlier paper Quine acknowledged that distinguishing the inscrutability of reference from the indeterminacy of meaning might be preferable to other of his ways of referring to this distinction. He also agreed that inscrutability of reference is a strong claim, a “thesis”, proven as per model theory. His examples of inscrutability are examined and supplemented with other examples. By contrast, indeterminacy of (...) meaning is merely a “conjecture,” a product of Quine's distinctive behaviorist approach. It is made clear that Quine's distinctive ‘stimulus meaning’ is a non‐decomposable idiom. Stimulus meaning is no more a species of meaning than toy horse is a species of horse. I exploit a view he introduced elsewhere when discussing choosing between intuitionist and classical logic. Quine's ersatz conception of meaning and its byproducts should be regarded along similar lines as the intuitionism versus classical logic debate: not as “denying a doctrine but as changing the subject.”. (shrink)

In this book, W. V. Quine’s Immanuel Kant Lectures entitled Science and Sensibilia are published for the first time in English. These lectures represent an important stage in the development of Quine’s later thought, where he is more explicit about the importance of physicalist constraints in his account of the steps from sensory stimulation to scientific theory, and in further using them to assess the extent to which mental vocabulary is defensible. Taken as a unit, these lectures fill an important (...) gap in our understanding of his philosophical development from his 1973 work The Roots of Reference to his later work. The volume further contains an introduction that outlines the content and philosophical significance of the lectures. In addition, several essays written by leading scholars of Quine’s philosophy provide further insight into the important issues raised in the lectures. (shrink)

In comparing his conception of empiricism with that of other like-minded philosophers at the end of his 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism,' W. V. Quine famously emphasized the broader scope of his pragmatist commitment in these terms:Carnap, Lewis, and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism.Such remarks have (...) resulted in Quine's work being associated with the American pragmatist tradition, where he is viewed as either continuing or reviving some of the main themes and issues representative of.. (shrink)

The Actual and the Possible presents new essays by leading specialists on modality and the metaphysics of modality in the history of modern philosophy from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It revisits key moments in the history of modern modal doctrines, and illuminates lesser-knownmoments of that history. The ultimate purpose of this historical approach is to contextualise and even to offer some alternatives to dominant positions within the contemporary philosophy of modality. Hence the volume contains not only new scholarship (...) on the early-modern doctrines of Baruch Spinoza,G. W. F. Leibniz, Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant, but also work relating to less familiar nineteenth-century thinkers such as Alexius Meinong and Jan Lukasiewicz, together with essays on celebrated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger and BertrandRussell, whose modal doctrines have not previously garnered the attention they deserve. The volume thus covers a variety of traditions, and its historical range extends to the end of the twentieth century, addressing the legacy of W. V. Quine's critique of modality within recent analyticphilosophy. (shrink)

This study investigates Félix RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix’s ambiguous relation to F. W. J. Schelling by homing in on the specific relation that holds between habit as a means of demonstrating an underlying identity of mind and world in RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix’s De l’habitude and Schelling’s use of aesthetic intuitionIntuition as a philosophical method in his 1800 System of Transcendental IdealismIdealism (also German Idealism). I argue that what Schelling found in fine art—the work of genius—RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix finds in habit, and from this conclude (...) that RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix offers what we might describe as a romantic conception of habit that brings it into the domain of the pre-rational, pre-reflective spontaneity that Schelling describes in artistic production. (shrink)

These introductory remarks provide an overview of the project Quine develops in his Kant lectures. Much of the lectures are aimed at locating mentalistic discourse within a scientific, physicalist framework, where this forms part of a scientific, if abstract, explanation of how we come to know the external world and other minds without an appeal to mental entities or other sensibilia. I further attempt to illuminate Quine’s physicalist rendering of perception through a comparison with Austin’s ordinary language approach to perception. (...) I conclude with a brief description of the essays found in section II. (shrink)

It has become commonplace to ask, whenever anything has gone wrong, what lessons can be learned from the experience. But the appearance of open‐endedness in that question is misleading: not every answer that we could give to it is acceptable. There are, in the context of such a question, tacit constraints in what counts as a valid lesson to be learned. The article considers what these constraints might be and the different kinds of lessons one might learn from experience, which (...) the common way of taking the question ignores. Initially I attempt to distinguish between lessons that have to do with action and those that have to do with understanding, between lessons that are about the results of our actions and those that are about the meaning of actions and events. On closer examination, however, these distinctions are seen to break down, to represent a difference of degree rather than of kind. In the latter part of the article, therefore, I find the crucial distinction to be between lessons that we can apply, while being ourselves unchanged, and lessons which, by changing the way in which we see and respond to people and events, re‐constitute ourselves and thus express themselves through us willy‐nilly in our subsequent thoughts, words and actions. (shrink)

Proceedings of the II World Congress on Paraconsistency held in Juquey, SP, Brazil, from May 12-19, 2000.

Excerpt from Science and Ethics: Being a Series of Six Lectures Delivered Under the Auspices of the Natural Law Research League And abroad (germany, France, America, but although within the circumscribed limits of these lectures I have not. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst (...) repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In this paper we provide evidence from Japan that bears on a general theory of agenda power in legislatures. By agenda power we mean the power to determine: (a) which bills are considered in the plenary session of the legislature and (b) restrictions on debate and amendment to these bills, when they are considered. While a substantial amount of work has focused on the second category of agenda power, including studies of special rules in the US House (e.g., Sinclair (...) forthcoming), closure in the UK House of Commons (e.g., Cox, 1987; Dion, 1997), and the guillotine in the French National Assembly (e.g., Huber, 1996), there is very little on the first and arguably more fundamental sort of agenda power. This agenda power is our focus here, and henceforth when we refer to we shall mean this narrower conception. (shrink)

This thesis examines necessary truth and defends a normative, or linguistic, account of it. Roughly, it holds that necessary truths state or follow from conceptual norms (i.e., norms that determine patterns of correct concept use). While the thesis touches upon logical and mathematical truth, its primary focus are those necessary truths typically expressed using natural language. The thesis has three parts. In Part I, I criticise metaphysical accounts of necessity and present and defend a normative account of it. At no (...) point do I give a history of normative accounts, but clearly their roots are to be found in the first half of the twentieth century – in the works of Wittgenstein and Carnap, for example. In Part II, I consider whether language can sustain the normative account. Some argue that the account requires language to be regimented in a way that it is not. I show that while it requires a distinction in kind between empirical and conceptual principles, it nevertheless makes room for indeterminacy regarding whether a given statement is an empirical claim or follows from conceptual norms. Finally, in Part III, I consider the relationship between the world and our conceptual scheme. I argue that denying our concepts answer to the world does not mean that they cannot be justified. The normative account does not say that we have no reasons for categorising things in a certain way, but rather that natural facts, in combination with our interests, are fit to provide them. The purpose of the thesis is to show that normative accounts of necessity can be much more robust than they are often given credit for and needn’t have the malign implications often associated with them. (shrink)

Engagement with genomic medicine and research has increased globally during the past few decades, including rapid developments in Sri Lanka. Genomic research is carried out in Sri Lanka on a variety of scales and with different aims and perspectives. However, there are concerns about participants' understanding of genomic research, including the validity of informed consent. This article reports a qualitative study aiming to explore the understanding, knowledge, and attitudes of the Sri Lankan public towards genomic medicine and to inform the (...) development of an effective and appropriate process for informed consent in that setting. Purposive sampling was employed. Participants were recruited from a sub-group of the public in Colombo, Sri Lanka who had either consented or refused to donate genetic material for a biobank. Data were collected using face-to-face semi-structured interviews. Interview data were transcribed verbatim and translated into English. Conventional content analysis was used. The analysis developed three key themes: a) ‘Scientific literacy’ describes an apparent lack of scientific knowledge that seems to affect a participant’s ability to understand the research, b) ‘Motivation’ describes narratives about why participants chose (not) to take part in the research, despite not understanding it, and c) ‘Trust’ describes how trust served to mitigate the apparent ethical deficit created by not being fully informed. In this article, we argue that informed trust is likely an acceptable basis for consent, particularly in settings where scientific literacy might be low. However, researchers must work to be worthy of that trust and ensure that misconceptions are actively addressed. (shrink)

Studie over het werk van de Franse onderwijspionier Célestin Freinet (1896-1966).