The following statement is a report of the Committee on Philosophy in Education of the American Philosophical Association and was approved by the Association's Board of Officers in September, 1959. The Committee was composed of the following: C. W. Hendel, Chairman, H. G. Alexander, R. M. Chisholm, Max Fisch, Lucius Garvin, Douglas Morgan, A. E. Murphy, Charner Perry, and R. G. Turnbull. Primary responsibility for the preparation of this report belonged to a subcommittee composed of Roderick M. Chisholm, Chairman, H. (...) G. Alexander, Lewis Hahn, Paul C. Hayner, and Charles W. Hendel. (shrink)

Contention in the form of protests, riots, and direct action is a central political practice in contemporary democracies. It is also a staple of sociological analysis, after slowly crystallizing as a distinct object of analysis from the 1970s onward. Lately, however, it has become unclear what this distinctiveness consists of and how it may help guide studies of contention: What distinguishes contention from other practices? I argue that contention can be seen as an ontologically distinctive experience. What sets this experience (...) apart is that it expresses a potential for conflict that underlies all social formations. We can take these expressions of conflict as objects of analysis. This means asking how the conflict expressed in contentious practices is ascribed meaning. I develop this perspective theoretically and show how it may facilitate new empirical analyses of contention’s boundaries, its relation to truth, and ethical relations in contention. (shrink)

Johnson and Stricker published an opinion piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics presenting their perspective on the 2008 agreement between the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the Connecticut Attorney General with regard to the 2006 IDSA treatment guideline for Lyme disease. Their writings indicate that these authors hold unconventional views of a relatively common tick-transmitted bacterial infection caused by the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that their opinions would clash with the IDSA's (...) evidence-based guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease. Their allegations of conflict of interest against the IDSA resemble those made against the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2000, which were found to be baseless. It is the responsibility of all physicians and medical scientists to stand up to antiscientific, baseless and unethical attacks on those who support an evidence-based approach to caring for patients. (shrink)

This monograph-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means” reviews and assesses the state of ethnographic and political scholarship concerning how nonstate, tribal societies deal with peacemaking and peacekeeping. A central argument is that the condition among nonstate societies was and is neither one of permanent war nor one of permanent peace but one of permanent peacelessness. Nonstate societies recognize the danger of warfare and take measures to reduce its likelihood, or at least try to mitigate its (...) destructiveness. This article treats the politics, strategies, and practices of peacemaking in tribal societies throughout the world, as well as the full spectrum of attempts at war mitigation. (shrink)

Bijdragen over de actuele betekenis van de filosofie, met name de Reformatorische Wijsbegeerte.

Bayesian models are often criticized for postulating computations that are computationally intractable (e.g., NP-hard) and therefore implausibly performed by our resource-bounded minds/brains. Our letter is motivated by the observation that Bayesian modelers have been claiming that they can counter this charge of “intractability” by proposing that Bayesian computations can be tractably approximated. We would like to make the cognitive science community aware of the problematic nature of such claims. We cite mathematical proofs from the computer science literature that show intractable (...) Bayesian computations, such as postulated in existing Bayesian models, cannot be tractably approximated. This does not mean that human brains do not (or cannot) implement the type of algorithms that Bayesian modelers are advancing, but it does mean that proposing that they do by itself does nothing to parry the charge of intractability, because the postulated algorithms are as intractable (i.e., require exponential time) as the computations they try to approximate. Besides our negative message for the community, our letter also makes a positive contribution by referring to a methodology that Bayesian modelers can use to try and parry the charge of intractability in a mathematically sound way. (shrink)

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists. All rights reserved.Cell walls of grasses, including cereal crops and biofuel grasses, comprise the majority of plant biomass and intimately influence plant growth, development and physiology. However, the functions of many cell wall synthesis genes, and the relationships among and the functions of cell wall components remain obscure. To better understand the patterns of cell wall accumulation and identify genes that act in grass (...) cell wall biosynthesis, we characterized 30 samples from aerial organs of rice at 10 developmental time points, 3-100 d post-germination. Within these samples, we measured 15 cell wall chemical components, enzymatic digestibility and 18 cell wall polysaccharide epitopes/ligands. We also used quantitative reverse transcription-PCR to measure expression of 50 glycosyltransferases, 15 acyltransferases and eight phenylpropanoid genes, many of which had previously been identified as being highly expressed in rice. Most cell wall components vary significantly during development, and correlations among them support current understanding of cell walls. We identified 92 significant correlations between cell wall components and gene expression and establish nine strong hypotheses for genes that synthesize xylans, mixed linkage glucan and pectin components. This work provides an extensive analysis of cell wall composition throughout rice development, identifies genes likely to synthesize grass cell walls, and provides a framework for development of genetically improved grasses for use in lignocellulosic biofuel production and agriculture. (shrink)

In this introduction to the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal's editor questions the assumptions that underwrite standard approaches in the social sciences to the issue of how non-state, tribal societies have dealt with matters of war and peace. He in particular examines and finds wanting the approach that Jared Diamond takes in The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?. Whereas Diamond's theme is that modern states can learn much (...) about many things from traditional hunter-gatherer societies, with respect to peacemaking and peace-keeping he finds traditional societies distinctly inferior, and the arguments by which he reaches this conclusion are tautological and also beg the question. This prefatory essay explains that “Peace by Other Means” will analyze and detail non-Western and premodern European means of keeping peace that modern theorists of conflict resolution are reluctant to credit or incompetent to assess. (shrink)