Concerns about the welfare of agricultural animals in corporate or “factory farming” systems are growing. Increasingly, it is suggested that modem farm animal production practices are morally objectionable, causing physical and mental suffering to animals. Such criticisms are premised on beliefs about the mental capacities of farm animals that are not wholly supported by scientific evidence, for little is known about farm animal cognition. Some animal scientists, realizing that concerns about the treatment of agricultural animals cannot be addressed in absence (...) of knowledge about farm animal mentality, have begun cognitive studies of farm animals. Subsequently, several ethical problems have emerged. In this paper it is argued that while farm animal cognition studies are needed, scientists must consider the moral problems and implications of the research, and must devise empirically testable hypotheses about those aspects of cognitive behavior that are relevant to discussions about moral treatment of farm animals. (shrink)

The present study examined whether strategy moderated the relationship between visuospatial perspective-taking and empathy. Participants undertook both a perspective-taking task requiring speeded spatial judgements made from the perspective of an observed figure and the Empathy Quotient questionnaire, a measure of trait empathy. Perspective-taking performance was found to be related to empathy in that more empathic individuals showed facilitated performance particularly for figures sharing their own spatial orientation. This relationship was restricted to participants that reported perspective-taking by mentally transforming their spatial (...) orientation to align with that of the figure; it was absent in those adopting an alternative strategy of transposing left and right whenever confronted with a front-view figure. Our finding that strategy moderates the relationship between empathy and visuospatial perspective-taking enables a reconciliation of the apparently inconclusive findings of previous studies and provides evidence for functionally dissociable empathic and non-empathic routes to visuospatial perspective-taking. (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The _Analects_ is a compendium of the sayings of Confucius (551-479 b.c.e.), transcribed and passed down by his disciples. How it came to be transformed by Zhu Xi (1130-1200) into one of the most philosophically significant texts in the Confucian tradition is the subject of this book. Scholarly attention in China had long been devoted to the _Analects._ By the time of Zhu Xi, a rich history of commentary had grown up around it. But Zhu, claiming that the _Analects_ was (...) one of the authoritative texts in the canon and should be read before all others, gave it a still more privileged status in the tradition. He spent decades preparing an extended interlinear commentary on it. Sustained by a newer, more elaborate language of metaphysics, Zhu's commentary on the _Analects_ marked a significant shift in the philosophical orientation of Confucianism--a shift that redefined the Confucian tradition for the next eight centuries, not only in China, but in Japan and Korea well. Gardner's translations and analysis of Zhu Xi's commentary on the _Analects_ show one of China's great thinkers in an interesting and complex act of philosophical negotiation. Through an interlinear, line-by-line "dialogue" with Confucius, Zhu effected a reconciliation of the teachings of the Master, commentary by later exegetes, and contemporary philosophical concerns of Song-dynasty scholars. By comparing Zhu's reading of the _Analects_ with the earlier standard reading by He Yan (190-249), Gardner illuminates what is dramatically new in Zhu Xi's interpretation of the _Analects._ A pioneering study of Zhu Xi's reading of the _Analects,_ this book demonstrates how commentary is both informed by a text and informs future readings, and highlights the importance of interlinear commentary as a genre in Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

In this volume C.A. (Chet) Bowers, whose pioneering work on education and environmental and sustainability issues is widely recognized and respected around the world, brings together a carefully curated selection of his seminal work on the ideological, cultural, and linguistic roots of the ecological crisis; misconceptions underlying modern consciousness; the cultural commons; a critique of technology; and educational reforms to address these pressing concerns. In the World Library of Educationalists, international scholars themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to (...) be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/practical contributions - so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the development of the field itself. Contributors to the series include : Michael Apple, James A. Banks, Joel Spring, William F. Pinar, Stephen J. Ball, Elliot Eisner, Howard Gardner, John Gilbert, Ivor F. Goodson, Peter Jarvis. (shrink)

It is an irony to attack a more sceptical epistemology than one's own in the name of scepticism and defend, instead, an epistemology that is positively illogical. And yet that is what Martin Gardner has done in his “A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper.”.

Principles and the context, by J. C. Bennett.--Love monism, by J. M. Gustafson.--Responsibility in freedom, by E. C. Gardner.--The new morality, by G. Fackre.--When love becomes excarnate, by H. L. Smith.--Situational morality, by R. W. Gleason.--The nature of heresy, by G. Kennedy.--Situation ethics under fire, by J. Fletcher.

Truth diagrams are introduced as a novel graphical representation for propositional logic. To demonstrate their epistemic efficacy a set of 28 concepts are proposed that any comprehensive representation for PL should encompass. TDs address all the criteria whereas seven other existing representations for PL only provide partial coverage. These existing representations are: the linear formula notation, truth tables, a PL specific interpretation of Venn Diagrams, Frege’s conceptual notation, diagrams from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Pierce’s alpha graphs and Gardner’s shuttle diagrams. The (...) comparison of the representations succeeds in distinguishing ideas that are fundamental to PL from features of common PL representations that are somewhat arbitrary. (shrink)

These commemorative papers on different aspects of Dewey's philosophy vary in quality. The essay by Paul Henle on "Dewey's Views on Truth and Verification" is excellent; and Gardner Murphy's reflections on Dewey's psychology are noteworthy. --E. S. C.

Evidence that confirms a scientific hypothesis is said to be ‘novel’ if it is not discovered until after the hypothesis isconstructed. The philosophical issues surrounding novel confirmation have been well summarized by Campbell and Vinci [1983]. They write that philosophers of science generally agree that when observational evidence supports a theory, the confirmation is much stronger when the evidence is ‘novel’... There are, nevertheless, reasons to be skeptical of this tradition... The notion of novel confirmation is beset with a theoretical (...) puzzle about how the degree of confirmation can change without any change in the evidence, hypothesis, or auxiliary assumptions... There have not yet appeared any obviously satisfactory solutions to these problems Much of the literature on novel confirmation relies on the Bayesian analysis of conditional probabilities. Let H represent a hypothesis, E an event that confirms the hypothesis, and B some relevant background information. Denote by Pr the conditional probability of x given y. There are various plausible measures of the degree of support that E lends to H. Among these are: Degree of support = Pr Degree of support = Pr – Pr Degree of support = Pr – Pr Degree of support = Pr – Pt In the work cited, Campbell and Vinci offer a somewhat more involved Bayesian interpretation. Formula is discussed by Gardner [1981] who points out that under this formulation there can be no role for novelty. 'The function Pr contains no third slot in which to insert a temporal relation between the invention of H and the inventor's learning E. Obviously, then, this relation could not possibly affect E's support of H.' Formula, on the other hand, suggests a role for novelty. Bayes's Theorem allows us to rewrite the formula as Degree of support = Pr x [Pr – 1] We can use 1/Pr as a measure of the novelty of E. Then shows that the degree of support increases with novelty of E. In the paper already cited, Campbell and Vinci discuss shortcomings of this analysis. Formula expresses an alternative offered by Howson [1984]. In that formula, Pr represents the probability of H assuming that only B – {E} is known. This allows for the possibility of non-novel facts generating support for hypotheses. Niiniluoto [1984] argues for a variant along the lines of, in which we account for the possibility that the theorist was unaware that his hypothesis entails E. One problem in deciding among these approaches is that the choice of a definition for the degree of support appears arbitrary. What kind of argument could justify the choice of one definition over another? It is our position that there can be no basis for addressing this question in the absence of an explicit model of the process by which hypotheses are generated. Only in the presence of such a model can the various conditional probabilities be given meaningful interpretations. We provide such models in Sections 1, 2 and 4. The simple model of Section 1, incorporating strong assumptions, yields the conclusion that novelty is irrelevant. When these assumptions are relaxed in the later sections, novelty becomes relevant for a variety of reasons. It is at least potentially the case that scientists have more information about their own abilities than is publicly available, and this information might influence their decisions about whether even to attempt novel prediction. If this is so, then it should be incorporated into the model of hypothesis generation. This requires an explicit discussion of how scientists respond to incentives and how the incentives themselves evolve, which in turn takes us into the realm of economic theory. We have addressed these issues in another paper, written for an audience of economists. The results of this research are summarized in Section 3. (shrink)

The philosophical theory of scientific explanation proposed here involves a radically new treatment of causality that accords with the pervasively statistical character of contemporary science. Wesley C. Salmon describes three fundamental conceptions of scientific explanation--the epistemic, modal, and ontic. He argues that the prevailing view is untenable and that the modal conception is scientifically out-dated. Significantly revising aspects of his earlier work, he defends a causal/mechanical theory that is a version of the ontic conception. Professor Salmon's theory furnishes a robust (...) argument for scientific realism akin to the argument that convinced twentieth-century physical scientists of the existence of atoms and molecules. To do justice to such notions as irreducibly statistical laws and statistical explanation, he offers a novel account of physical randomness. The transition from the "reviewed view" of scientific explanation to the causal/mechanical model requires fundamental rethinking of basic explanatory concepts. (shrink)