The nature of the product to be discovered guides the reasoning to discover it. Biologists and medical researchers often search for mechanisms. The "new mechanistic philosophy of science" provides resources about the nature of biological mechanisms that aid the discovery of mechanisms. Here, we apply these resources to the discovery of mechanisms in medicine. A new diagrammatic representation of a disease mechanism chain indicates both what is known and, most significantly, what is not known at a given time, thereby guiding (...) the researcher and collaborators in discovery. Mechanisms of genetic diseases provide the examples. (shrink)

This paper outlines a semantic account of attitude reports and deontic modals based on cognitive and illocutionary products, mental states, and modal products, as opposed to the notion of an abstract proposition or a cognitive act.

As it is broadly accepted, typical uses of demonstratives are accompanied by demonstrations. The concept of demonstration, however, manifests the action–product ambiguity analogous to that visible in the opposition between jumping and the resulting jump, talking and the resulting talk or crying and the resulting cry. It is also a heterogeneous concept that enables demonstrations to vary significantly. The present paper discusses action–product ambiguity as applied to demonstrations as well as the heterogeneity of the latter. An account that acknowledges ambiguity (...) and heterogeneity of demonstrations is sketched in the paper. It is argued that it has a rich explanatory and descriptive potential. (shrink)

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles. _The Field of Cultural Production_ brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study (...) of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power. The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Can we think of a task in a distinctively practical way? Can there be practical concepts? In recent years, epistemologists, philosophers of mind, as well as philosophers of psychology have appealed to practical concepts in characterizing the content of know-how or in explaining certain features of skilled action. However, reasons for positing practical concepts are rarely discussed in a systematic fashion. This paper advances a novel argument for the psychological reality of practical concepts that relies on evidence for a distinctively (...) productive kind of reasoning. (shrink)

This bookis about the roots of managerial rationality. A theoretical base, founded on the concept of 'memetics' is developed in order to explain human thinking and human reason as products of cultural evolution. Cultural change and development are explained by simple, value-driven memetic mechanisms like 'ritualization' and 'extremization'.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, the ways in which knowledge--scientific, social, and cultural--is produced are undergoing fundamental changes. In The New Production of Knowledge, a distinguished group of authors analyze these changes as marking the transition from established institutions, disciplines, practices, and policies to a new mode of knowledge production. Identifying such elements as reflexivity, transdisciplinarity, and heterogeneity within this new mode, the authors consider their impact and interplay with the role of knowledge in (...) social relations. While the knowledge produced by research and development in science and technology is accorded central focus, the authors also outline the changing dimensions of social scientific and humanities knowledge and the relations between the production of knowledge and its dissemination through education. Placing science policy and scientific knowledge within the broader context of contemporary society, this book will be essential reading for all those concerned with the changing nature of knowledge, with the social study of science, with educational systems, and with the correlation between research and development and social, economic, and technological development. "Thought-provoking in its identification of issues that are global in scope; for policy makers in higher education, government, or the commercial sector." --Choice "By their insightful identification of the recent social transformation of knowledge production, the authors have been able to assert new imperatives for policy institutions. The lessons of the book are deep." --Alexis Jacquemin, Universite Catholique de Louvain and Advisor, Foreign Studies Unit, European Commission "Should we celebrate the emergence of a 'post-academic' mode of postmodern knowledge production of the post-industrial society of the 21st Century? Or should we turn away from it with increasing fear and loathing as we also uncover its contradictions. A generation of enthusiasts and/or critics will be indebted to the team of authors for exposing so forcefully the intimate connections between all the cognitive, educational, organizational, and commercial changes that are together revolutionizing the sciences, the technologies, and the humanities. This book will surely spark off a vigorous and fruitful debate about the meaning and purpose of knowledge in our culture." --Professor John Ziman, (Wendy, Janey at Ltd. is going to provide affiliation. Contact if you don't hear from her.) "Jointly authored by a team of distinguished scholars spanning a number of disciplines, The New Production of Knowledge maps the changes in the mode of knowledge production and the global impact of such transformations. . . . The authors succeed . . . at sketching out, in very large strokes, the emerging trends in knowledge production and their implications for future society. The macro focus of the book is a welcome change from the micro obsession of most sociologists of science, who have pretty much deconstructed institutions and even scientific knowledge out of existence." --Contemporary Sociology "This book is a timely contribution to current discussion on the breakdown of and need to renegotiate the social contract between science and society that Vannevar Bush and likeminded architects of science policy constructed immediately after World War II. It goes far beyond the usual scattering of fragmentary insights into changing institutional landscapes, cognitive structures, or quality control mechanisms of present day science, and their linkages with society at large. Tapping a wide variety of sources, the authors provide a coherent picture of important new characteristics that, taken altogether, fundamentally challenge our traditional notions of what academic research is all about. This well-founded analysis of the social redistribution of knowledge and its associated power patterns helps articulate what otherwise tends to remain an--albeit widespread--intuition. Unless they adapt to the new situation, universities in the future will find the centers of gravity of knowledge production moving even further beyond their ken. Knowledge of the social and cognitive dynamics of science in research is much needed as a basis of science and technology policymaking. The New Production of Knowledge does a lot to fill this gap. Another unique feature is its discussion of the humanities, which are usually left out in works coming out of the social studies of science." --Aant Elzinga, University od Goteborg. (shrink)

We often learn the opinions of others without hearing the evidence on which they're based. The orthodox Bayesian response is to treat the reported opinion as evidence itself and update on it by conditionalizing. But sometimes this isn't feasible. In these situations, a simpler way of combining one's existing opinion with opinions reported by others would be useful, especially if it yields the same results as conditionalization. We will show that one method---upco, also known as multiplicative pooling---is specially suited to (...) this role when the opinions you wish to pool concern hypotheses about chances. The result has interesting consequences: it addresses the problem of disagreement between experts; and it sheds light on the social argument for the uniqueness thesis. (shrink)

This work has aimed to investigate the consumers’ green product purchase attitudes and behavioral intention during COVID-19 pandemic. Data was collected through a survey method of 503 consumers in Malaysia. Data were analyzed using the partial least square method. The findings revealed that fear of COVID-19 pandemic has a significant impact on green product behavioral intention. Green product literacy, green product orientation, and social influence have a significant influence on green product purchase attitudes. The results also indicated that consumers’ green (...) product purchase attitudes mediate the effect of green product literacy, green product orientation, and social influence on behavioral intention. The findings of this work will provide strategically relevant references to green marketers and retail managers in the understanding of consumers’ green product purchase attitudes and green product behavioral intention during the ongoing uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Several developments for diverse scientific goals, mostly in physics and physiology, had to take place, which eventually gave us fMRI as one of the central research paradigms of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. This technique stands on solid foundations established by the physics of magnetic resonance and the physiology of hemodynamics and is complimented by computational and statistical techniques. I argue, and support using concrete examples, that these foundations give rise to a productive theory-ladenness in fMRI, which enables researchers to identify and (...) control for the types of methodological and inferential errors. Consequently, this makes it possible for researchers to represent and investigate cognitive phenomena in terms of hemodynamic data and for experimental knowledge to grow independently of large scale theories of cognition. (shrink)

This paper takes the form of a series of sketches of 19th century Austrian political and intellectual history, allied with a number of more general reflections designed to contribute to our understanding of some of the peculiar characteristics of Austrian thought, particularly Austrian philosophy and economics, in the period in question.

Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space and real space. In the course of his (...) exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures. (shrink)

The class Matr(C) of all matrices for a prepositional logic (, C) is investigated. The paper contains general results with no special reference to particular logics. The main theorem (Th. (5.1)) which gives the algebraic characterization of the class Matr(C) states the following. Assume C to be the consequence operation on a prepositional language induced by a class K of matrices. Let m be a regular cardinal not less than the cardinality of C. Then Matr (C) is the least class (...) of matrices containing K and closed under m-reduced products, submatrices, matrix homomorphisms, and matrix homomorphic counter-images. (shrink)

One of the most intuitive views about the metaphysics of laws of nature is Tim Maudlin's idea of a Fundamental Law of Temporal Evolution. So-called FLOTEs are primitive elements of the universe that produce later states from earlier states. While FLOTEs are at home in traditional Newtonian and non-relativistic quantum mechanical theories (not to mention our pre-theoretic conception of the world), I consider here whether they can be made to work with relativity. In particular, shifting to relativistic spacetimes poses two (...) threats to FLOTEs. First, the lack of a privileged spacelike hypersurface in relativistic spacetime makes it unclear how to understand what produces what. A survey of several conceptions of the nomic production relation compatible with relativity reveals all of them to be lacking. Second, relativity motivates a four-dimensional block universe conception of time, according to which all events that will ever occur already exist. On such a view, it's unclear what work there is to be done by FLOTEs. I consider how a proponent of FLOTEs might respond, but conclude that these combined threats seriously undermine the prospects of a productive conception of laws. In short, if spacetime is relativistic, laws are not productive. (shrink)

This paper defends a view of the Gene Ontology (GO) and of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as examples of what the manufacturing industry calls product-service systems. This means that they are products (the ontologies) bundled with a range of ontology services such as updates, training, help desk, and permanent identifiers. The paper argues that GO and BFO are contrasted in this respect with DOLCE, which approximates more closely to a scientific theory or a scientific publication. The paper provides a detailed (...) overview of ontology services and concludes with a discussion of some implications of the product-service system approach for the understanding of the nature of applied ontology. Ontology developer communities are compared in this respect with developers of scientific theories and of standards (such as W3C). For each of these we can ask: what kinds of products do they develop and what kinds of services do they provide for the users of these products? (shrink)

In the past twenty years, the field of science and technology studies (S&TS) has made considerable progress toward illuminating the relationship between scientific knowledge and political power. These insights have not yet been synthesized or presented in a form that systematically highlights the connections between S&TS and other social sciences. This timely collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field attempts to fill that gap. The book develops the theme of "co-production", showing how scientific knowledge (...) both embeds and is embedded in social identities, institutions, representations and discourses. Accordingly, the authors argue, ways of knowing the world are inseparably linked to the ways in which people seek to organize and control it. Through studies of emerging knowledges, research practices and political institutions, the authors demonstrate that the idiom of co-production importantly extends the vocabulary of the traditional social sciences, offering fresh analytic perspectiveson the nexus of science, power and culture. (shrink)

The manufacturing industry is evolving rapidly, becoming more complex, more interconnected, and more geographically distributed. Competitive pressure and diversity of consumer demand are driving manufacturing companies to rely more and more on improved knowledge management practices. As a result, multiple software systems are being created to support the integration of data across the product life cycle. Unfortunately, these systems manifest a low degree of interoperability, and this creates problems, for instance when different enterprises or different branches of an enterprise interact. (...) Common ontologies (consensus-based controlled vocabularies) have proved themselves in various domains as a valuable tool for solving such problems. In this paper, we present a consensus-based Additive Manufacturing Ontology (AMO) and illustrate its application in promoting re-usability in the field of dentistry product manufacturing. (shrink)

This is a continuation of [2]. We study the Tychonoff Compactness Theorem for various definitions of compactness and for various types of spaces . We also study well ordered Tychonoff products and the effect that the multiple choice axiom has on such products.

This paper suggests and discusses an answer to the following question: What distinguishes causal from non-causal or coincidental co-occurrences? The answer derives from Elizabeth Anscombe’s idea that causality is a highly abstract concept whose meaning derives from our understanding of specific causally productive activities, and from her rejection of the assumption that causality can be informatively understood in terms of actual or counterfactual regularities.Keywords: Elizabeth Anscombe; Causality; Explanation; Inhibition.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

We solve a major open problem concerning algorithmic properties of products of ‘transitive’ modal logics by showing that products and commutators of such standard logics as K4, S4, S4.1, K4.3, GL, or Grz are undecidable and do not have the finite model property. More generally, we prove that no Kripke complete extension of the commutator [K4,K4] with product frames of arbitrary finite or infinite depth (with respect to both accessibility relations) can be decidable. In particular, if.

For non-additive set functions, the independent product, in general, is not unique and the Fubini theorem is restricted to slice-comonotonic functions. In this paper, we use the representation theorem of Gilboa and Schmeidler (Math Oper Res 20:197–212, 1995) to extend the Möbius product for non-additive set functions to non-finite spaces. We extend the uniqueness result of Ghirardato (J Econ Theory 73:261–291, 1997) for products of two belief functions and weaken the requirements on the marginals necessary to obtain the Fubini property (...) in the product. More importantly, we show that for the Möbius product one side of the Fubini theorem holds for all integrable functions if one of the marginals either is a probability or a convex combination of a chain of unanimity games, i.e., we relax the requirement of slice-comonotonicity and enrich the set of possible applications. (shrink)

Recent papers by a number of philosophers have been concerned with the question of whether natural selection is a causal process, and if it is, whether the causes of selection are properties of individuals or properties of populations. I shall argue that much confusion in this debate arises because of a failure to distinguish between causal productivity and causal relevance. Causal productivity is a relation that holds between events connected via continuous causal processes, while causal relevance is a relationship that (...) can hold between a variety of different kinds of facts and the events that counterfactually depend upon them. I shall argue that the productive character of natural selection derives from the aggregation of individual processes in which organisms live, reproduce and die. At the same time, a causal explanation of the distribution of traits will necessarily appeal both to causally relevant properties of individuals and to causally relevant properties that exist only at the level of the population. (shrink)

Many consumers implicitly associate sustainability with lower product strength. This so-called ethical = less strong intuition (ELSI) poses a major threat for the success of sustainable products. This article explores this pervasive lay theory and examines whether it is a key barrier for sustainable consumption patterns. Even more importantly, little is known about the underlying mechanisms that might operate differently at the implicit and explicit levels of the consumer’s decision-making. To fill this gap, three studies examine how the implicit judgments (...) that consumers activate automatically shape their consumption behaviors, in concert with their more controlled explicit beliefs about sustainable products. The Main Study investigates the ELSI’s imprint on actual shopping patterns and disentangles the implicit and explicit mechanisms of the lay theory. This paper also asks how this negative influence can be attenuated by examining whether the consumer’s interest in sustainable consumption reduces reliance on the ELSI. Two follow-up studies confirm the robustness from different methodological and practical perspectives. Implications for companies and policy makers are derived. (shrink)

The product market competition has become a global challenge for business organizations in the challenging and competitive market environment in the influx of the COVID-19 outbreak. The influence of products competition on organizational performance in developed economies has gained scholars’ attention, and numerous studies explored its impacts on business profitability. The existing studies designate mixed findings between the linkage of CSR practices and Chinese business firms’ healthier performance in emerging economies; however, the current global crisis due to the coronavirus has (...) made product market completion fierce, which ultimately affects business firms’ performance. This study focuses on this logical global challenge, investigates the rationale, and examines product-market completion impact on firms’ performance operating in the Chinese markets. The study collected data from the annual reports of Chinese business organizations with A-share listing and registered with the database of China Stock Markets and Accounting Research. The study employed a Generalized Method of Moment technique and investigated the connection between product market competition and Chinese firm performance. The empirical analysis of this study highlights the conclusion that market competition positively and significantly affected business firms’ performance. This study specified that product market competition play a dynamic and indispensable role in achieving healthier firm performance in the Chinese markets. This study provides valuable insights on practical implications and future research directions for the scholars to draw interesting results with new study models. (shrink)

Imagination is important for many things in science: solving problems, interpreting data, designing studies, etc. Philosophers of imagination typically account for the productive role played by imagination in science by focusing on how imagination is constrained, e.g., by using self-imposed rules to infer logically, or model events accurately. But the constraints offered by these philosophers either constrain too much, or not enough, and they can never account for uses of imagination that are needed to break today’s constraints in order to (...) make progress tomorrow. Thus, epistemology of imagination needs to make room for an element of epistemological anarchy. (shrink)

Friederike Moltmann has recently proposed an account of truth-bearers that draws on Kazimierz Twardowski’s action/product distinction. Her account is meant to provide a third way between the dominant view of primary truth-bearers as mind-independent entities and the recently revived construal of them as mental or linguistic acts. This paper argues that there is no room for Twardowskian accounts because they are based on a notion of “nonenduring product” that defies comprehension, and no need for them because the linguistic data that (...) Twardowskians take to refute the act-theoretic approach can, in fact, be handled by that approach. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore how nurses are enrolled into and take part in programmes of efficiency and effectiveness. Using the philosophical theorizing about desire as a force or power, I focus specifically on what is understood as relations between desire and productivity in current Westernized health‐care systems. Use is made of the idea from Spinoza that human emotions consist only of pleasure, pain, and desire as these act as a motive force. This is then linked with (...) more contemporary work on the politics and discourses of desire. A report on the implementation of a productivity programme in the United Kingdom, The Productive Ward: Releasing time to care™, is explored for the ways its developers set about motivating nurses to endorse and enact the programme. In exploring the mechanics of desire in these processes, a view of desire as productive is promoted. Looking at desire as assembling actions, and an assemblage, moves the analysis to an interrogation of actions and practices used to enable and bring nurses to the process. Moreover, in working through the various modalities and operations of desire, the potential and limits of such projects are abstracted. Such potentials and limits are necessarily set by the intensification of power and desire in the capitalist economy, saturating areas of nursing, and health‐care provision. (shrink)