Since its publication in 1965, Brian Barry's seminal work has occupied an important role in the revival of Anglo-American political philosophy. A number of ideas and terms in it have become part of the standard vocabulary, such as the distinction between "ideal-regarding" and "want-regarding" principles and the division of principles into aggregative and distributive. The book provided the first precise analysis of the concept of political values having trade-off relations and its analysis of the notion of the public interest has (...) also been significant. (shrink)

It may be as well to begin from the locus classicus , Engels to Mehring, July 14th, 1893: “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process”.

Neo-Darwinian theories of cultural evolution are apt to be criticized on the grounds that they merely borrow from the theory of natural selection concepts that are then metaphorically applied to conventional historical narratives to which they add no more, if anything, than an implicit presupposition of progress from one predetermined stage to the next. Such criticisms, of which a particularly forceful example is a recent article in this journal by Fracchia and Lewontin, can however be shown to be seriously misconceived. (...) The fundamental process of heritable variation and competitive selection of information affecting phenotype underlies both biological and cultural evolution despite the obvious differences between the mechanisms of information transfer by genetic inheritance and by exosomatic imitation and learning. Information transfer is in neither case a metaphor standing for any other thing, and in neither case does change over time proceed in accordance with developmental laws from which the future evolution of either species or cultures could be predicted in advance. For all the unresolved questions that remain, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has demonstrated the mutual compatibility of idiographic and nomothetic explanation in the study of species and of cultures alike. (shrink)

Introduction, W G Runciman Social Evolution in Primates: The Role of Ecological Factors and Male Behaviour, Carel P van Schaik Determinants of Group Size in Primates: A General Model, R I M Dunbar Function and Intention in the Calls of Non-Human Primates, Dorothy L Cheney & Robert M Seyfarth Why Culture is Common, but Cultural Evolution is Rare, Robert Boyd & Peter J Richerson An Evolutionary and Chronological Framework for Human Social Behaviour, Robert A Foley Friendship and the Banker?s (...) Paradox: Other Pathways to the Evolution of Adaptations for Altruism, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides The Early Prehistory of Human Social Behaviour: Issues of Archaeological Inference and Cognitive Evolution, Steven Mithen The Emergence of Biologically Modern Populations in Europe: A Social and Cognitive ?Revolution??, Paul Mellars Responses to Environmental Novelty: Changes in Men?s Marriage Strategies in a Rural Kenyan Community, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder Genetic Language Impairment: Unruly Grammars, M Gopnik, J Dalalakis, S E Fukuda, S Fukuda & E Kehayia The Emergence of Cultures among Wild Chimpanzees, Christophe Boesch Terrestriality, Bipedalism and the Origin of Language, Leslie C Aiello Conclusions, John Maynard Smith. (shrink)

In their response to my article, Fracchia and Lewontin have not refuted any of my three principal objections to theirs; they have ignored altogether my suggestion that evolutionary game theory illustrates particularly clearly the benefits that neo-Darwinian concepts and methods can bring to the human behavioral sciences; and they have attributed to me a version of “methodological individualism” to which I do not subscribe. It is, as is usual at this stage of a Kuhnian paradigm shift, too soon to say (...) how much selectionist theory can contribute to the human behavioral sciences in general and comparative sociology in particular. But selectionism’s critics achieve nothing by alleging that its proponents are committed to propositions to which they do not in fact assent and deny propositions with which they in fact agree. (shrink)

In this lively and provocative book, W. G. Runciman shows where and why they fail, even after due allowance has been made for the different historical contexts in which they wrote.

I was prompted to write a book by re-reading Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto for the first time in half a century and wondering how well they would stand up in the light of what present-day sociologists can fairly claim to know that Plato, Hobbes, and Marx did not. None of them were doing social science as that term is nowadays understood. But all three advance conclusions derived from evidence for how human beings do, or would, or might, behave (...) under different environmental and historical conditions. If these arguments are bad ones, this will presumably undermine the larger purposes which the three texts are intended to serve. Or will it? (shrink)

I was prompted to write a book by re-reading Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto for the first time in half a century and wondering how well they would stand up in the light of what present-day sociologists can fairly claim to know that Plato, Hobbes, and Marx did not. None of them were doing social science as that term is nowadays understood. But all three advance conclusions derived from evidence for how human beings do, or would, or might, behave (...) under different environmental and historical conditions. If these arguments are bad ones, this will presumably undermine the larger purposes which the three texts are intended to serve. Or will it? (shrink)

Guala is right to draw attention to the difficulty of extrapolating from the experimental evidence for weak or strong reciprocity to what is observed in the However, there may be more strong reciprocity in real-world communities than he allows for, as strikingly illustrated in the example of the Mafia.

These papers bring an interdisciplinary approach to bear on what is arguably the central question in the study of human social evolution: how did the simple hunting and foraging bands of the Upper Palaeolithic evolve into the institutionally complex societies of the so-called Neolithic Revolution? The contributors to this volume are leading experts from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and game theory, all of whom share a common evolutionary perspective. The ideas presented here form a major addition to (...) the widespread current interest in evolutionary theory as applied to human behaviour. (shrink)

This article reports on a conversation convened by Quentin Skinner at the invitation of the Editors of The Journal of Political Philosophy and held in Cambridge on 13 February 2001.

Patient safety has only recently been subjected to wide-spread systematic study. Healthcare differs from other high risk industries in being more diverse and multi-contextual, and less certain and regulated. Also many patient safety problems are low-frequency events associated with many, varied contributing factors. The subject of this paper is the epistemology of patient safety (the science of the method of finding out about patient safety). Patient safety research is considered here on the background of a risk management framework which requires (...) researchers to: • Understand the context - as a subset of healthcare quality, services and systems research, with technical and human behavioural (cultural) components and a range of external and internal organisational influences, a wide range of research disciplines is necessary • Identify the risks - identify the things that go wrong and the frequency and nature of different types of incidents from sources such as medical record review, observational studies, audit, incident and medico-legal reports • Analyse the risks - deconstruct the things that go wrong, identifying contributing factors and trying to detect trends and patterns in contributing factors, detection, mitigation factors, ameliorating factors and actions taken to reduce risk • Evaluate the risks - decide on priorities, identifying preventive and corrective strategies and judging the risk- and cost-benefit of potential corrective strategies such as standardisation or simplification of a process or device • Manage the risk - evaluate and scope preventive and/or corrective strategies and then implement these, or place the problem on a risk register pending solution, or accept that what is needed is unaffordable • Communicate and consult - use interactive sessions, audit, on-going feedback, reminders and patient mediated prompts • Monitor and review the state of the problem - get baseline trends and patterns so that changes can be tracked and properly attributed to an intervention A hierarchy of levels of evidence has been proposed for clinical research and we argue that insufficient weighting has been given to lower ranked levels of research and to qualitative research, although critical interpretive synthesis is now gaining acceptance in mainstream thinking (e.g. by the Cochrane Collaboration). Fundamental challenges remain including how to grasp the elusive concept of patient safety, how to quantify, characterise and cost the problems, how to judge the extent to which harm can be attributed to errors, violations or system failures, how to identify contributing factors and the extent to which they can be implicated, how to judge whether incidents or their precursors are preventable, how to generate strong evidence to make healthcare safer and how to translate research into practice. Future directions include addressing the mundane as well as rare, dramatic events, and developing further research in non-hospital settings and in developing countries. In summary, a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, using information from all available data sources and combining retrospective, real time and prospective study designs, is necessary to address some of the more difficult patient safety problems. (shrink)