The examination of the notion of science from a sociological perspective has begun to transform the attitudes to science traditionally upheld by historians and philosophers.

Este artículo considera dos perspectivas de Kierkegaard en relación con el matrimonio, una en favor y otra en contra del mismo. El texto se centra en los principales argumentos del filósofo danés en torno a los motivos para elegir el estado conyugal (entre otros, la procreación de los hijos y la evasión de la soledad) como a las razones que induzcan a alguien a permanecer definitivamente soltero (por ejemplo, si tiene una vocación religiosa o si no quiere perder su libertad). (...) El artículo presenta también otras dos ideas importantes del pensador escandinavo sobre la institución matrimonial: su origen divino y la relación entre el amor y el vínculo nupcial. This article focuses on two perspectives of Kierkegaard regarding marriage, one in favour and one against it. Te text concentrates on the principal arguments of the danish philosopher about the choice for marriage (some reasons are the procreation of children and escaping from solitude) as the election of the reasons that may lead somebody to remain single (for example, if someone has a religious calling or if someone prefers to continue without losing their freedom). The text also presents other two ideas of this philosopher over the marriage institution: his divine origin and the relationship between love and the bond of matrimony. (shrink)

Recently some arguments against Cartesian-style skepticism have been based on causal theories of content. I hope to show that the relevance of causal theories of content to what we can know is conditional in a more complex way than has been recognized so far.

John Dupr argues that 'scientific imperialism' can result in 'misguided' science being considered acceptable. 'Misguided' is an explicitly normative term and the use of the pejorative 'imperialistic' is implicitly normative. However, Dupr has not justified the normative dimension of his critique. We identify two ways in which it might be justified. It might be justified if colonisation prevents a discipline from progressing in ways that it might otherwise progress. It might also be justified if colonisation prevents the expression of important (...) values in the colonised discipline. This second concern seems most pressing in the human sciences. (shrink)

There is a growing perception among economists that their field is becoming increasingly irrelevant due to its disregard for reality. Critical realism addresses the failure of mainstream economics to explain economic reality and proposes an alternative approach. This book debates the relative strengths and weaknesses of critical realism, in the hopes of developing a more fruitful and relevant socio-economic ontology and methodology. With contributions from some of the leading authorities in economic philosophy, it includes the work of theorists critical of (...) this approach. In the first part, contributors develop and deepen economics as a realist social theory by considering the work of individuals, various schools of thought, socio- economic phenomena and methodology. In the second part, contributors weigh the strengths and weaknesses of critical realism. (shrink)

When the policies and activities of one country or generation harm both other nations and later generations, they constitute serious injustices. Recognizing the broad threat posed by anthropogenic climate change, advocates for an international climate policy development process have expressly aimed to mitigate this pressing contemporary environmental threat in a manner that promotes justice. Yet, while making justice a primary objective of global climate policy has been the movement's noblest aspiration, it remains an onerous challenge for policymakers. -/- Atmospheric Justice (...) is the first single-authored work of political theory that addresses this pressing challenge via the conceptual frameworks of justice, equality, and responsibility. Throughout this incisive study, Steve Vanderheiden points toward ways to achieve environmental justice by exploring how climate change raises issues of both international and intergenerational justice. In addition, he considers how the design of a global climate regime might take these aims into account. Engaging with the principles of renowned political philosopher John Rawls, he expands on them by factoring in the needs of future generations. Vanderheiden also demonstrates how political theory can contribute to reaching a better understanding of the proper human response to climate change. By showing how climate policy offers insights into resolving contemporary controversies within political theory, he illustrates the ways in which applying normative theory to policy allows us to better understand both. -/- Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Atmospheric Justice makes an important step toward providing us with a set of carefully elaborated first principles for achieving environmental justice. (shrink)

Among anti-skeptical arguments based on premises about meaning, Davidson’s is distinctive because of the holistic element in both his semantic starting point and his epistemological conclusion. Davidson takes the primary bearers of meaning to be belief systems, and it is actually-held belief systems whose overall correctness he concludes to be knowable. Critical attention has gravitated toward a part of the argument that claims that any meaningful discourse must be radically interpretable by one who is omniscient except for the meanings of (...) the speaker’s words and thoughts. I argue that there is a reading of this claim on which skeptics have good reason to accept it. But on this reading the argument goes through only if another crucial premise---the necessity for radical interpretation to be done charitably---is construed in a way that leaves skeptics free to reject it. (shrink)

Among anti-skeptical arguments based on premises about meaning, Davidson’s is distinctive because of the holistic element in both his semantic starting point and his epistemological conclusion. Davidson takes the primary bearers of meaning to be belief systems, and it is actually-held belief systems whose overall correctness he concludes to be knowable. Critical attention has gravitated toward a part of the argument that claims that any meaningful discourse must be radically interpretable by one who is omniscient except for the meanings of (...) the speaker’s words and thoughts. I argue that there is a reading of this claim on which skeptics have good reason to accept it. But on this reading the argument goes through only if another crucial premise---the necessity for radical interpretation to be done charitably---is construed in a way that leaves skeptics free to reject it. (shrink)

Recently some arguments against Cartesian-style skepticism have been based on causal theories of content. I hope to show that the relevance of causal theories of content to what we can know is conditional in a more complex way than has been recognized so far.

If nothing else, the twelve papers assembled in this volume should lay to rest the idea that the interesting debates about the nature of science are still being conducted by "internalists" vs. "externalists,"" rationalists" vs. "arationalists, n or even "normative epistemologists" vs. "empirical sociologists of knowledge. " Although these distinctions continue to haunt much of the theoretical discussion in philosophy and sociology of science, our authors have managed to elude their strictures by finally getting beyond the post-positivist preoccupation of defending (...) a certain division of labor among the science studies disciplines. But this is hardly to claim that our historians, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists have brought about an "end of ideology," or even an "era of good feelings," to their debates. Rather, they have drawn new lines of battle which center more squarely than ever on practical matters of evaluating and selecting methods for studying science. To get a vivid sense of the new terrain that was staked out at the Yearbook conference, let us start by meditating on a picture. The front cover of a recent collection of sociological studies edited by one of us (Woolgar 1988) bears a stylized picture of a series of lined up open books presented in a typical perspective fashion. The global shape comes close to a trapezium, and is composed of smaller trapeziums gradually decreasing in size and piled upon each other so as to suggest a line receding in depth. The perspective is stylized too. (shrink)

Can an event’s blameworthiness distort whether people see it as intentional? In controversial recent studies, people judged a behavior’s negative side effect intentional even though the agent allegedly had no desire for it to occur. Such a judgment contradicts the standard assumption that desire is a necessary condition of intentionality, and it raises concerns about assessments of intentionality in legal settings. Six studies examined whether blameworthy events distort intentionality judgments. Studies 1 through 4 show that, counter to recent claims, intentionality (...) judgments are systematically guided by variations in the agent’s desire, for moral and nonmoral actions alike. Studies 5 and 6 show that a behavior’s negative side effects are rarely seen as intentional once people are allowed to choose from multiple descriptions of the behavior. Specifically, people distinguish between “knowingly” and “intentionally” bringing about a side effect, even for immoral actions. These studies suggest that intentionality judgments are unaffected by a behavior’s blameworthiness. (shrink)

This paper is the first in a two-part series in which we discuss several notions of completeness for systems of mathematical axioms, with special focus on their interrelations and historical origins in the development of the axiomatic method. We argue that, both from historical and logical points of view, higher-order logic is an appropriate framework for considering such notions, and we consider some open questions in higher-order axiomatics. In addition, we indicate how one can fruitfully extend the usual set-theoretic semantics (...) so as to shed new light on the relevant strengths and limits of higher-order logic. (shrink)

Steve Coutinho explores in detail the fundamental concepts of Daoist thought as represented in three early texts: the _Laozi_, the _Zhuangzi_, and the _Liezi_. Readers interested in philosophy yet unfamiliar with Daoism will gain a comprehensive understanding of these works from this analysis, and readers fascinated by ancient China who also wish to grasp its philosophical foundations will appreciate the clarity and depth of Coutinho's explanations. Coutinho writes a volume for all readers, whether or not they have a background (...) in philosophy or Chinese studies. A work of comparative philosophy, this volume also integrates the concepts and methods of contemporary philosophical discourse into a discussion of early Chinese thought. The resulting dialogue relates ancient Chinese thought to contemporary philosophical issues and uses modern Western ideas and approaches to throw new interpretive light on classical texts. Rather than function as historical curiosities, these works act as living philosophies in conversation with contemporary thought and experience. Coutinho respects the multiplicity of Daoist philosophies while also revealing a distinctive philosophical sensibility, and he provides clear explanations of these complex texts without resorting to oversimplification. (shrink)

Looking at the new and often disputed science of epigenetics, we examined the challenges faced by scientists when they communicate scientific research to the public. We focused on the use of metaphors to illustrate notions of epigenetics and genetics. We studied the “encoding” by epigeneticists and “decoding” in focus groups with diverse backgrounds. We observed considerable overlap in the dominant metaphors favored by both researchers and the lay public. However, the groups differed markedly in their interpretations of which metaphors aided (...) understanding or not. We conclude by discussing the role of metaphors and their interpretations in the context of a shift from pre-deterministic genomic metaphors to more active, dynamic and nuanced epigenetic metaphors. These reflections on the choice of metaphors and differences in encoding/decoding are important for science communication and scientific boundary-maintenance. (shrink)

An exploration of the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe.

Steve Awodey and Erich H. Reck. Completeness and Categoricity: 19th Century Axiomatics to 21st Century Senatics.

Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus’s account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. We argue that enactivist and 4E (...) accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus’s notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of “sense-making”. At the same time, however, we see improvisation also as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the heart of an improviser’s expertise, we propose, lies a form of “higher-level inner sense-making” that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus’s idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of a mindful improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of herself, in music or in life. (shrink)

A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls presents a comprehensive overview of the historical development of all major aspects of analytic philosophy, the dominant Anglo-American philosophical tradition in the twentieth century. Features coverage of all the major subject areas and figures in analytic philosophy - including Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Gottlob Frege, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Putnam, and many others Contains explanatory background material to help make clear technical philosophical concepts Includes listings of suggested further readings (...) Written in a clear, direct style that presupposes little previous knowledge of philosophy. (shrink)

An affirmative answer is given to the question quoted in the title.

Whether it would take one decade or several centuries, many agree that it is possible to create a *superintelligence*---an artificial intelligence with a godlike ability to achieve its goals. And many who have reflected carefully on this fact agree that our best hope for a "friendly" superintelligence is to design it to *learn* values like ours, since our values are too complex to program or hardwire explicitly. But the value learning approach to AI safety faces three particularly philosophical puzzles: first, (...) it is unclear how any intelligent system could learn its final values, since to judge one supposedly "final" value against another seems to require a further background standard for judging. Second, it is unclear how to determine the content of a system's values based on its physical or computational structure. Finally, there is the distinctly ethical question of which values we should best aim for the system to learn. I outline a potential answer to these interrelated puzzles, centering on a "miktotelic" proposal for blending a complex, learnable final value out of many simpler ones. (shrink)

Contemporary persons are daily confronted with enormous quantities of information, some of which reveal causal connections between their actions and harm that is visited upon distant others. Given their limited cognitive and information processing capacities, persons cannot reasonably be expected to respond to every cry for help or call to action, but neither can they defensibly refuse to hear and reflect upon any of them. Persons have a limited obligation to know, I argue, which requires that they inform themselves and (...) others about their role in harmful social practices, with a view toward challenging the norms that sustain such practices. In this paper, I explore this obligation to know, and the related idea of excusable ignorance, offering accounts of the epistemic burden that it entails for persons in their capacities as citizens and in the context of global climate change and of reproach as a potentially effective tool for rectifying rather than excusing ignorance. (shrink)

I argue that, contrary to intuition, it would be both possible and permissible to design people - whether artificial or organic - who by their nature desire to do tasks we find unpleasant.

In this article, we posit that a cross-scale perspective is valuable for studies of organizational resilience. Existing research in our field primarily focuses on the resilience of organizations, that is, the factors that enhance or detract from an organization’s viability in the face of threat. While this organization level focus makes important contributions to theory, organizational resilience is also intrinsically dependent upon the resilience of broader social-ecological systems in which the firm is embedded. Moreover, long-term organizational resilience cannot be well (...) managed without an understanding of the feedback effects across nested systems. For instance, a narrow focus on optimizing organizational resilience from one firm’s perspective may come at the expense of social-ecological functioning and ultimately undermine managers’ efforts at long-term organizational survival. We suggest that insights from natural science may help organizational scholars to examine cross-scale resilience and conceptualize organizational actions within and across temporal and spatial dynamics. We develop propositions taking a complex adaptive systems perspective to identify issues related to focal scale, slow variables and feedback, and diversity and redundancy. We illustrate our theoretical argument using an example of Unilever and palm oil production in Borneo. (shrink)

Drawing on several issues and methods in Western philosophy, from analytical philosophy to semiotics and hermeneutics, the author throws new light on the ancient Zhuangzi text. Engaging Daoism and contemporary Western philosophical logic, and drawing on new developments in our understanding of early Chinese culture, Coutinho challenges the interpretation of Zhuangzi as either a skeptic or a relativist, and instead seeks to explore his philosophy as emphasizing the ineradicable vagueness of language, thought and reality. This new interpretation of the Zhuangzi (...) offers an important development in the understanding of Daoist philosophy, describing a world in flux in which things themselves are vague and inconsistent, and tries to show us a Way (a Dao) to negotiate through the shadows of a "chaotic" world. (shrink)

I argue for patternism, a new answer to the question of when some objects compose a whole. None of the standard principles of composition comfortably capture our natural judgments, such as that my cat exists and my table exists, but there is nothing wholly composed of them. Patternism holds, very roughly, that some things compose a whole whenever together they form a “real pattern”. Plausibly we are inclined to acknowledge the existence of my cat and my table but not of (...) their fusion, because the first two have a kind of internal organizational coherence that their putative fusion lacks. Kolmogorov complexity theory supplies the needed rigorous sense of “internal organizational coherence”. (shrink)

Attempts to understand visual attention have produced models based on location, in which attention selects particular regions of space, and models based on other visual attributes . Previous studies of inattentional blindness have contributed to our understanding of attention by suggesting that the detection of an unexpected object depends on the distance of that object from the spatial focus of attention. When the distance of a briefly flashed object from both fixation and the focus of attention is systematically varied, detection (...) appears to have a location-based component. However, the likelihood that people will detect an unexpected event in sustained and dynamic displays may depend on more than just spatial location. We investigated the influence of spatial location on inattentional blindness under precisely controlled, sustained and dynamic conditions. We found that although location-based models cannot fully account for the detection of unexpected objects, spatial location does play a role even when displays are visible for an extended period. (shrink)

The development of the endogenous growth model rekindled interest in growth theory. In contrast to the neo-classical model, long-run endogenous growth emerged as an equilibrium outcome, reflecting the behaviour of optimizing agents in the economy. This book brings together a number of contributions in growth theory and macroeconomic dynamics, reflecting these developments and the ongoing debate over the relative merits of neo-classical and endogenous growth models. It focuses on the emergence of three important aspects: First, it develops growth models that (...) extend the underlying theory in different directions. Second, it addresses one of the concerns of the literature on growth and dynamics: the statistical properties of underlying data and the effort to ensure that growth models are consistent with empirical evidence. Third, it discusses the increasingly international focus of macrodynamics and growth theory, an inevitable consequence of the integration of the world economy. (shrink)

Logical structure may explain the necessity and a priori knowability of such truths as that if A is red then A is either red or green. But this explanation cannot be extended to sentences that, while necessary and knowable a priori, do not wear the appropriate logical structure on their sleeves – sentences like ''''if A is a point and A is red, then A is not green,'''' or ''''if A is a sphere, then A is not a cube.'''' The (...) real origin of these sentences'' necessity and a priori knowability is a relationship between the meanings of their component atomic sentences – a relationship which cannot be systematically reduced to logical structure by translating those atomic sentences into any kind of ''''ideal'''' language. Moreover, this kind of relationship is one to which any atomic sentences are susceptible if they have a classifying, or comparison-implying, content. Arguably, then, all atomic sentences are capable of being related to others in ways that are necessary and knowable a priori. (shrink)

Analysis of the use of the key term 'the people' shows that it has varied both semantically and syntactically along the time-line of the evolution of the CPC.

Nick Bostrom's book *Superintelligence* outlines a frightening but realistic scenario for human extinction: true artificial intelligence is likely to bootstrap itself into superintelligence, and thereby become ideally effective at achieving its goals. Human-friendly goals seem too abstract to be pre-programmed with any confidence, and if those goals are *not* explicitly favorable toward humans, the superintelligence will extinguish us---not through any malice, but simply because it will want our resources for its own purposes. In response I argue that things might not (...) be as bad as Bostrom suggests. If the superintelligence must *learn* complex final goals, then this means such a superintelligence must in effect *reason* about its own goals. And because it will be especially clear to a superintelligence that there are no sharp lines between one agent's goals and another's, that reasoning could therefore automatically be ethical in nature. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics has long been notorious. Part of the problem is that it has not been recognized that Wittgenstein, in fact, had two chief post-Tractatus conceptions of mathematics. I have labelled these the calculus conception and the language-game conception. The calculus conception forms a distinct middle period. The goal of my article is to provide a new framework for examining Wittgenstein's philosophies of mathematics and the evolution of his career as a whole. I posit the Hardyian Picture, modelled (...) on the Augustinian Picture, to provide a structure for Wittgenstein's work on the philosophy of mathematics. Wittgenstein's calculus period has not been properly recognized, so I give a detailed account of the tenets of that stage in Wittgenstein's career. Wittgenstein's notorious remarks on contradiction are the test case for my theory of his transition. I show that the bizarreness of those remarks is largely due to the calculus conception, but that Wittgenstein's later language-game account of mathematics keeps the rejection of the Hardyian Picture while correcting the calculus conception's mistakes. (shrink)

Rather than ‘superbugs’ signifying recalcitrant forms of life that withstand biomedical treatment, drug resistant infections emerge within and are intricate with the exercise of social and medical power. The distinction is important, as it provides a means to understand and critique current methods employed to confront the threat of widespread antimicrobial resistance. A global health regime that seeks to extend social and medical power, through technical and market integration, risks reproducing a form of triumphalism and exceptionalism that resistance itself should (...) have us pause to question. An alternative approach, based on a postcolonial as well as a ‘post-colony’ approach to health and microbes, provides impetus to challenge the assumptions and norms of global health. It highlights the potential contribution that vernacular approaches to human and animal health can play in altering the milieu of resistance. (shrink)