In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not (...) verificationism; rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science. (shrink)

This article aims to examine journalists' adversarial challenges within the Australian political news interview. Within the Australian context, journalists tend to challenge interviewees: by challenging the content of the prior turn, by `interrupting' the prior turn, and by initially presenting their challenge as a freestanding assertion, not attributed to a third party. As a result, journalists could be interpreted as expressing their own perspective on the topic at hand, rather than maintaining a neutralistic stance. Although the challenging nature of journalistic (...) questions has been previously noted within the Australian context, there have been few analyses of such challenges. Using the framework of conversation analysis, the aim of the following article is to examine adversarial challenges in more detail. In particular, the article will focus on how interviewers and interviewees collaboratively produce the political news interview in such a way as to avoid accusations of bias or non-neutrality. First, the article will focus on the challenging nature of the IR's turn, by examining the various techniques used by journalists to ensure that they maintain a neutralistic stance. Second, it will examine the way in which IEs respond to such adversarial challenges. It will show how although politicians do not overtly accuse IRs of bias or impartiality, they clearly orient to the challenging nature of the journalists' turn. (shrink)

W. B. Gallie's words about Peirce's cosmology—"the black sheep or white elephant of his philosophical progeny" (1952, p. 216)—have often been quoted, usually as a preface to giving a better account of the animal. That he attributed the view to 'contemporary philosophers' and did not assert it himself has usually been ignored. True, Gallie did argue that the "cosmology is a failure, and an inevitable failure" (p. 236), but he also said that Peirce himself "recognized … that his work in (...) this field was imperfect and sketchy" (p. 215), and he concluded the chapter, and his book, with an extremely sympathetic account of all that is nevertheless of enduring value in that failure. After studying Peirce's writings of his.. (shrink)

Socially, people find it difficult to say ‘no’ to requests or invitations. In spoken interaction, we orient to this difficulty through the design of our responses. An agreement response is characteristically said straightaway with minimal gap between request and response. A disagreement response is characteristically delayed through silence and by prefacing the disagreement turn with tokens such as ‘well’, ‘uhm’ and ‘uh’ or with accounts as to why the recipient cannot accept the request or invitation. The question for this article (...) concerns what occurs when requests or invitations are made via texting. The results from 329 texting interactions showed that if responses to a request or invitation were delayed by more than 1 minute, it was much more likely be a ‘no’ rather than a ‘yes’ response. In other words, preferred responses were sent quickly; dispreferred responses were delayed. Understanding texting as social interaction is increasingly important as the range of communicative options continues to widen, Multimedia Messaging Service, Instant Messaging, email). This study shows preference organisation similarities between spoken interaction and texting with texters orienting to social norms concerning delayed responses. Further research is needed to understand in what contexts a person might choose one communicative medium over another. (shrink)

This essay contends that while Nancy and Esposito have strikingly similar concepts of the place of the political in post-metaphysical community, their respective articulations of these concepts noticeably diverge. Because of his commitment to excavating the political project of immunity as central to the Western political tradition in and through the category of the legal person, Esposito announces community as impolitical, as the interruptive spacing, and thus alternating displacement, of the political conceived as the site of emancipatory agency. In contrast, (...) in the work of Agamben and in the recent work of Nancy, an articulation of the person and the political in more agential terms can be found. This divergence presents interpretive difficulties insofar as Esposito's discussion of community as impolitical could be read as advancing ontological neutrality or passivity that threatens to separate political activity from its liberating potential. I argue that such ontological neutrality is a product of Esposito's confrontation with the political as dominated by both the logic of immunity and an engagement with the complex legacy of Heidegger's problematic political trajectory. To this extent it is an open question whether Esposito's project leaves room for a new vision of the political and for political agency. (shrink)

Two aspects of Peirce’s mature philosophy seem to me not to have been sufficiently appreciated. They are its empiricist method and its continuity with his scientific research. The research led to and justified the method.1Ground must be cleared before we can proceed. Simplistic ideas of the empirical must be swept aside and Peirce’s empiricism accurately identified. We must also distinguish two theories of meaning that have been associated with empiricist philosophies and show that Peirce combined them ; this will be (...) essential to Section 6. Only then can we get down to work. Peirce’s experimental and other studies of observation showed that a science of.. (shrink)

The health benefits of male circumcision are wide rangingIn this issue, John Hutson has reiterated the conventional Western medical view that “the surgical argument for circumcision of all neonatal males at present is very weak” and he criticises many of the circumcisions performed in later childhood, without anaesthesia, as “physically cruel and potentially dangerous” [see page 238].1 He is also of the opinion that “the diseases which circumcision is able to prevent are uncommon or even rare”. But therein he errs, (...) and greatly errs.He cites only two publications dealing with the protective effect of male circumcision against HIV infection, and makes no mention of the important recent meta-analysis of Weiss, Quigley, and Hayes2 which shows conclusively from a large number of studies that …. (shrink)

The British government recently announced its willingness to expand the number of state–funded faith schools. It was a decision that aroused considerable controversy, with much of the unease centring around the allegedly divisive nature of such schools. In this article I defend faith schools against the charge that they necessarily undermine social cohesion and show how they can, in fact, legitimately be seen as a force for unity. In addition, I challenge the critics’ key assumption that non–denominational schools are inherently (...) better positioned than their faith–based counterparts to promote a tolerant society. (shrink)

The British government recently announced its willingness to expand the number of state–funded faith schools. It was a decision that aroused considerable controversy, with much of the unease centring around the allegedly divisive nature of such schools. In this article I defend faith schools against the charge that they necessarily undermine social cohesion and show how they can, in fact, legitimately be seen as a force for unity. In addition, I challenge the critics’ key assumption that non–denominational schools are inherently (...) better positioned than their faith–based counterparts to promote a tolerant society. (shrink)

There has recently been a good deal of controversy about Landauer's Principle, which is often stated as follows: The erasure of one bit of information in a computational device is necessarily accompanied by a generation of kT ln 2 heat. This is often generalised to the claim that any logically irreversible operation cannot be implemented in a thermodynamically reversible way. John Norton (2005) and Owen Maroney (2005) both argue that Landauer's Principle has not been shown to hold in general, and (...) Maroney offers a method that he claims instantiates the operation reset in a thermodynamically reversible way. In this paper we defend the qualitative form of Landauer's Principle, and clarify its quantitative consequences (assuming the second law of thermodynamics). We analyse in detail what it means for a physical system to implement a logical transformation L, and we make this precise by defining the notion of an L-machine. Then we show that logical irreversibility of L implies thermodynamic irreversibility of every corresponding L-machine. We do this in two ways. First, by assuming the phenomenological validity of the Kelvin statement of the second law, and second, by using information-theoretic reasoning. We illustrate our results with the example of the logical transformation 'reset', and thereby recover the quantitative form of Landauer's Principle. (shrink)

: This response to my seven critics is organized under five topics: 1. The book's scope and approach; 2. Physicalism, idealism, anthropomorphism; 3. Final causation; 4. Peirce's development; 5. Signs, objects, interpretants. No ground is ceded, but I have found the interchange clarifying and hope that the reader will find it so, too.

In empirical science, hypostatic abstraction posits an entity defined by its assumed physical relation to a known phenomenon. If the assumed relation is real, the posited entity is physically real and is not an ens rationis. The posited entity, being identified indirectly, by its relation to something else, may be the agreed-upon subject of mutually incommensurable theories, and this is a key to understanding the history of science. Natural kinds may be introduced by hypostatic abstraction, and this explains why, contrary (...) to received doctrine, concepts of natural kinds can never be vague in the sense of being fuzzy, though they can be vague in the sense of lacking specificity. Terms defined by hypostatic abstraction are rigid designators in Kripke's sense, but show how rigid designation is consistent with the Fregean theory of reference. (shrink)

Geoffrey Short; Prejudice, Power and Racism: some reflections on the anti-racist critique of multi-cultural education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volum.

Peirce earned his keep making measurements, mainly of gravity but also astronomical, and he made several contributions to the science of measurement. It has been said that his experience measuring had philosophical consequences: his adoption of fallibilism, his argument against necessitarianism, and his conception of inquiry as converging on the truth have all been mentioned. But not much attention has been paid to the curious episode of his making “the study of great men” part of a course in logic: students (...) were asked to rank a long list of men by order of greatness. That was at Johns Hopkins in 1883. I shall argue that that study, together with his reflections on pre-instrumental estimates of stars’ brightness, bears directly on the method of phaneroscopy formulated nearly two decades later. In each case, the problem is to show how objectivity is possible under conditions in which it must seem that objectivity is impossible. (shrink)

Summary In her highly publicised polemic, All Must Have Prizes (1996), Melanie Phillips launches a scathing attack upon the British educational establishment and various facets of policy and practice during the past three decades. She is especially critical of progressivism and approaches to teaching and learning supposedly predicated upon relativist principles (e.g. multicultural education). Our own research on primary?school children's constructions of British identity (Carrington, B. & Short, G. (1995): What makes a person British? Children's conceptions of their national (...) culture and identity, Educational Studies, 21, pp. 217?238) is singled?out for criticism. We begin this paper with a rejoinder to Phillips. Among other things, we take issue with her defence of an assimilationist approach to the curriculum. In the second part of the paper, we present the findings of a recently completed case?study of 12? and 13?year?olds? constructions of their national identity, which replicates the earlier work (criticised by Phillips) with 8? to 11?year?olds. We show that the young adolescents, in common with their counterparts in primary schools, tended to adopt a pluralist viewpoint. Once again, there was an almost complete dearth of comments that were racist or nationalistic. We conclude by briefly exploring the policy implications of the findings. [1] Paper presented to the 1997 Conference of the Association for Moral Education: The Voices of Care and Justice?enhancing dialogue among theorists, researchers and practitioners, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA. (shrink)

This chapter examines the ways in which French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers conceptual resources for an enactive account of language, in particular his extensive consideration of language in The Logic of Sense. Specifically, Deleuze’s distinction between the nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau creations and that of Antonin Artaud’s “transla- tion” of Carroll’s Jabberwocky highlights the need for an enactive, rather than merely embodied, approach to sense-making, particularly with regard to the general category of what Jakobson and Halle (1956) call “sound (...) symbolism”. (shrink)

In this book, T. L. Short places the notorious difficulties of Peirce's important writings in a more productive light, arguing that he wrote philosophy as a scientist, by framing conjectures intended to be refined or superseded in the inquiries they initiate. He argues also that Peirce held that the methods and metaphysics of modern science are amended as inquiry progresses, making metaphysics a branch of empirical knowledge. Additionally, Short shows that Peirce's scientific work expanded empiricism on empirical grounds, (...) grounding his phenomenology and subverting the fact/value dichotomy, and that he understood statistical explanations in nineteenth-century science as reintroducing the idea of final causation, now made empirical. Those innovations underlie Peirce's late ideas of a normative science and of philosophy as a branch of science. Short's rich and original study shows us how to read Peirce's writings and why they are worth reading. (shrink)

Two of the most important topics in the field of medical ethics today are insemination by donor (AID) and in-vitro fertilization. The conclusions of a working party set up by the British Association for the Advancement of Science are embodied in a small book reviewed on pate 108 of this issue, but we feel that more discussion than can be set out in the space allocated to book reviews is justified. Also, this journal in its first number has already devoted (...) a group of papers to the issue of abortion, so the conclusions of the working party and our own comments overlap and we hope illuminate further the problems enunciated. (shrink)

Over many decades, Richard Bernstein has interpreted contemporary philosophy’s three traditions, roughly distinguished as analytic, pragmatic, and Continental, emphasizing their mutual affinities. Despite this reference to the continent of Europe, it would be wrong to identify any of these traditions geographically or linguistically; even to call them ‘traditions’ is stretching a point. Pragmatism originated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it has spread from there, transmogrifying in the process and claiming surprising allies, such as Heidegger; the label ‘pragmatist’ has even been affixed (...) to Hegel! That its day has come is the theme of this, Bernstein’s latest book. Its title is a play on Richard Rorty’s famous.. (shrink)

This book is remarkable for what it does not do. It purports to be about Peirce's opposition to nominalism, but it never states clearly what nominalism is and says little about Peirce's realist alternative. It contains no historical discussion of nominalism and thus does not explain the relation of Peirce's idiosyncratic use of that term to its original meaning. It ignores the secondary literature on that topic and does not even list Rosa Mayorga's highly relevant 2007 book, From Realism to (...) Realicism [sic], in its Bibliography. Nor, despite nominalism's alleged 'threat,' does it make reference to such important recent nominalists as Nelson Goodman or W.V.O. Quine. Indeed, after page one, there is hardly any.. (shrink)

This article revises a paper I read at the SAAP session in honor of my late friend, Richard Robin. The discussion that followed the paper was much better than the paper, and my present effort, I hope, has benefited from that discussion. What I say here is exploratory. I am more confident of my criticisms of other authors than of the alternative I propose. It is the mere sketch of an idea, its many obvious difficulties blithely ignored. I hope in (...) later articles to make up for present deficiencies.I begin by developing a suggestion of Robin's, that Peirce's idea of a normative science grew out of his work on the norms of science, and proceed toward an explanation of the possibility of a normative science, hence of.. (shrink)

Although Newman is often considered a philosopher and theologian, a litterateur and historian, this article shows that his interest in the public affairs of his day and his political views, which were under-girded by his religious convictions, are found in his letters and diaries, in his essays, and even in his sermons.

An accessible and groundbreaking text that takes a fresh view of contemporary geographical issues by looking at the geographies we have lost. Geography means writing about the world. Alternative ways of writing about the world are introduced and critically evaluated. The book discusses medieval cosmologies, Renaissance magic, feng shui, and the knowledge systems of indigenous people. Alternative Geographies provides an alternative way of looking, describing and understanding the world.