: This paper seeks to contribute to the development of a sociological understanding of scientific change. It first presents a conceptual framework for defining and understanding the conditions that give rise to episodes of cumulative change (both as the selective reconstruction of events and as the patterned structuring of innovations over time and across different settings). It argues that one of the most powerful structuring mechanisms is the existence of standardized research technologies. Then, the development of electroencephalography (EEG) is presented (...) as an illustrative case study. The EEG supported a dramatic episode of development in brain science, and did so primarily through technological standardization and reliability. The case shows how standard and manipulable technologies provide a framework for orderly change both in retrospective accounts and in specific historical periods of scientific practice. (shrink)

This anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, "Themes from Kaplan," organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.

The principle of double effect is often used in bioethics as a tool to evaluate significant cases in obstetrics and gynecology. In this article the author, a Catholic priest, presents and interprets St. Thomas Aquinas’s delineation of the principle and discusses several classical applications, namely, to hysterectomy during pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, and craniotomy. He explains the medical anatomy and physiology of the conjoined Maltese twins, Jodie and Mary, and then examines the arguments of four moralists on their separation. He concludes (...) by arguing that the principle morally justified the surgical separation of Jodie and Mary. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9.1 : 85–96. (shrink)

In spite of the interference manifested in the double-slit experiment, quantum theory predicts that a measure of interference defined by Sorkin and involving various outcome probabilities from an experiment with three slits, is identically zero. We adapt Sorkin’s measure into a general operational probabilistic framework for physical theories, and then study its relationship to the structure of quantum theory. In particular, we characterize the class of probabilistic theories for which the interference measure is zero as ones in which it is (...) possible to fully determine the state of a system via specific sets of ‘two-slit’ experiments. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in intellectual humility (IH) has attempted to provide deeper understanding of the virtue as personality trait and its impact on an individual's thoughts, beliefs, and actions. A limitations-owning perspective of IH focuses on a proper recognition of the impact of intellectual limitations and a motivation to overcome them, placing it as the mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility. We developed the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale to assess this conception of IH with related personality constructs. In Studies 1 (...) (n= 386) and 2 (n = 296), principal factor and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-factor model – owning one's intellectual limitations, appropriate discomfort with intellectual limitations, and love of learning. Study 3 (n = 322) demonstrated strong test-retest reliability of the measure over 5 months, while Study 4 (n = 612) revealed limitations-owning IH correlated negatively with dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and hubristic pride and positively with openness, assertiveness, authentic pride. It also predicted openness and closed-mindedness over and above education, social desirability, and other measures of IH. The limitations-owning understanding of IH and scale allow for a more nuanced, spectrum interpretation and measurement of the virtue, which directs future study inside and outside of psychology. (shrink)

Respected Catholic ethicists have recently defended the use of salpingostomy and methotrexate in the management of ectopic pregnancies.This article examines the arguments for the revised assessments to determine whether there are sound reasons to believe that these two methods do not constitute the direct and immediate killing of innocent human beings. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.1 (Spring 2011): 65–82.

In Stovall v. Confimed.com, the Kansas Supreme Court held that an out-of-state medical doctor who sold a prescription drug to a Kansas minor over the Internet did not commit an unconscionable act under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act. The Shawnee Country District Court had enjoined the doctor from prescribing or dispensing prescription medicine within the state of Kansas, and the doctor appealed the injunction to the Kansas Supreme Court. The Supreme Court affirmed the district court's decision to grant injunctive relief, (...) but found no unconscionable conduct under the KCPA.The appellee, Washington physician Dr. Howard J. Levine, sold the sexual enhancement drug Viagra over the Internet through his online pharmacy. Neither the physician nor the online pharmacy was licensed to practice in Kansas. The purchasers were two Kansas residents, one of whom was a minor. Both purchased the drugs in a sting operation conducted by the Kansas Attorney General and received the drugs after completing an online application. (shrink)

It was probably Rousseau who first thought of dreams as ennobling experiences. Anyone who has ever read Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire must be struck by the dreamlike quality of Rousseau's meditations. This dreamlike quality is still with us, and those who experience it find themselves ennobled by it. Witness Martin Luther King's famous "1 have a dream. " Dreaming and inspiration raise the artist to the top rung in the ladder ofhuman relations. That is probably the prevailing view among educated (...) people of our time. Rousseau made that view respectable and predominant. Yet in another sense, the problem is much older. It is the problem of political philosophy and poetry, the problem of Socrates and Aristophanes, of Plato and Homer. Yet, while antiquity usually gives the crown to philosophy, since Rous seau, the alternative view tends to prevail. The distinction is not, however, a formal one. Sir Philip Sidney enlisted Plato on the side of poetry. The true distinction is between imagination and reason. If reason is to rule, as Aristotle points out,l the most architectonic of the sciences, that is political science, should rule. It is political philosophy which must determine the nature of the arts which will help or which will hinder the good of the city or the polity. That does not mean that a mere professor should stand in judgment of Shake speare, Bacon, and Rembrandt. It means that ifhe studies these three great artists, he is not over-stepping disciplinary limits. (shrink)

Whether we are morally obligated to obey the law is the central question addressed by Joseph Raz in his most recent work entitled, The Authority of Law. It is a question which divides positivists from natural law adherents. Professor Raz, a self-proclaimed positivist, concludes that “there is no general moral obligation to obey [the law], not even in a good society.” Rather, for Raz he individual must obey the law only if he respects it. “His respect,” says Raz, “is (...) the source of obligation,” leading one to conclude that for Raz the authority of law is the individual. The question of whether we are morally bound to obey the law is not a novel one; foremost among those who have addressed it are Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. Each does so, it is important to note, in terms of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of government, which, in turn, is based upon a correct understanding of the nature of man and human happiness. The law of an illegitimate government, argues St. Thomas, “since it is not in accordance with reason, is not a law absolutely speaking, but rather a perversion of law.”. (shrink)

Comments on the views on free will offered by B. D. Slife , M. Gergen , R. N. Williams , M. S. Richardson , and G. S. Howard in light of the classical definition of FW as being capable of doing otherwise. It is argued that FW interpretations differ markedly depending on whether they are viewed as due to a process or to contents within some process. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Most of our interactions with others occur within the framework of recurring social situations, and the language choices we make are intimately tied to situational features. Although the interdependence between language and social situations has been well recognized at least since G. H. Mead developed his symbolic interactionist theory, psychologists have been reluctant to devote much interest to this domain until recently. Yet it is arguable that a detailed understanding of the subtle links between situational features and language use must (...) lie at the heart of any genuinely social psychology. This volume contains original contributions from psychologists, linguists and philosophers from the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, and Australia who share an interest in the social-psychological aspects of language. Their work represents one of the first concentrated attempts to chart the possibilities of this exciting field. It is perhaps in order to say a few words about the origins of this book. The need for a volume integrating research on language and social situations first emerged during the 2nd International Conference of Language and Social Psychology at Bristol University in 1983, at which I was convening a symposium with a similar title at the request of the organizers, Peter Robinson and Howard Giles. When they first approached me with this idea in 1982, I gladly accepted, since my own research on cognitive representations of social episodes seemed eminently relevant to a symposium on language and social situations. (shrink)

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003), the first American to receive a Ph.D. in history of science, was a Harvard undergraduate ('37) and then a Ph.D. student and protégé of George Sarton, founder of Isis and the History of Science Society. He went on to succeed Sarton as editor of Isis (1952–1958) and, later, president of the Society (1961–1962); he was also a president of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science. Cohen was an internationally recognized Newton scholar; his (...) interests were encyclopedic, ranging from science and public policy to the history of computers, with several decades as a special consultant for history of computing with IBM. Among his hundreds of publications were such major books as Franklin and Newton (1956), The Birth of a New Physics (1959; rpt., 1985), The Newtonian Revolution (1980), Revolution in Science (1985), Science and the Founding Fathers (1995), Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (1999), and his last book, The Triumph of Numbers (2005), not to mention two jointly authored contributions, the variorum edition and new English translation of Newton's Principia, which will surely still be read a century from now. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue not only that there is nothing new in the term “New Philology” , but that the old philology was in fact a new philology with respect to that which had preceded. Use of the labels “new” and “old,” applied to the dialectical development of a discipline, is a gesture sufficiently charged ideologically as to have little meaning in the absolute terms — before and after, bad and good — that it affixes. On the contrary, (...) to the extent that calling oneself “new” is a value-laden gesture which implies that something else is “old” and therefore less worthy, it constitutes a rhetorical strategy of autolegitimation — with little recognition, of course, that the process itself of declaring oneself “new” is indeed very old, or at least as old, where the present case is concerned, as Vico's Nuova Scienza, which some see as the beginning of philological science. The qualifier “new” is by definition a relational term. Vico conceived of his science as new with respect to the philosophy of Descartes; Meyer-Lübke and the Neo-Grammarians, with respect to the Romantics; the Italian New Philologists, with respect primarily to the textual methodology of Joseph Bédier. (shrink)

In this book, Cioran writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream. "A small masterwork... a stringent examination of some persistent and murky notions in human history.... It is best to read Cioran while sitting. The impact upon the intellect can be temporarily stunning, and motor systems may give way under the assault."—Joseph Patrick Kennedy, _Houston Chronicle_ "Cioran has a claim to be regarded as among the handful of original minds... writing today."—_New York Times_ "A sort of (...) final philosopher of the Western world. [Cioran's] statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."—_Washington Post_ E. M. Cioran was born and educated in Romania and lived in Paris from 1937 until his death. He is the author of numerous works, including _On the Heights of Despair_, also available from the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

A response to a commentary by Howard Brody and Luana Colloca about “What's Not Being Shared in Shared Decision‐Making?” from the July‐August 2013.

In The Healer's Power, Howard Brody placed the concept of power at the heart of medicine's moral discourse. Struck by the absence of “power” in the prevailing vocabulary of medical ethics, yet aware of peripheral allusions to power in the writings of some medical ethicists, he intuited the importance of power from the silence surrounding it. He formulated the problem of the healer's power and its responsible use as “the central ethical problem in medicine.” Through the prism of power (...) he refracted a wide range of ethical problems, from informed consent to truth-telling, from confidentiality to futility, from the physician's fantasies to the physician's virtues. At times this prism shed new light on old problems, enabling us to see from an unexpected angle the elements of which the problem was composed. At other times it exposed issues of ethical significance that had been neglected in the bioethics literature. (shrink)

We discuss how academically-based interdisciplinary teams can address the extreme challenges of the world’s poorest by increasing access to the basic necessities of life. The essay’s first part illustrates the evolving commitment of research universities to develop ethical solutions for populations whose survival is at risk and whose quality of life is deeply impaired. The second part proposes a rationale for university responsibility to solve the problems of impoverished populations at a geographical remove. It also presents a framework for integrating (...) science, engineering and ethics in the efforts of multidisciplinary teams dedicated to this task. The essay’s third part illustrates the efforts of Howard University researchers to join forces with African university colleagues in fleshing out a model for sustainable and ethical global development. (shrink)

In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for computers to store, manage, and integrate massive amounts of data has given rise to such new disciplinary fields as biomedical informatics. Applied ontology offers a strategy for the organization of scientific information in computer-tractable form, drawing on concepts not only from computer and information science but also from linguistics, logic, and philosophy. This book provides an introduction to the field of applied ontology that is of (...) particular relevance to biomedicine, covering theoretical components of ontologies, best practices for ontology design, and examples of biomedical ontologies in use. After defining an ontology as a representation of the types of entities in a given domain, the book distinguishes between different kinds of ontologies and taxonomies, and shows how applied ontology draws on more traditional ideas from metaphysics. It presents the core features of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), now used by over one hundred ontology projects around the world, and offers examples of domain ontologies that utilize BFO. The book also describes Web Ontology Language (OWL), a common framework for Semantic Web technologies. Throughout, the book provides concrete recommendations for the design and construction of domain ontologies. (shrink)

An exploration of Immanuel Kant's account of war and the controversies that have arisen from its interpretation. This book brings the ideas of Kant's critical philosophy to bear on one of the leading political and legal questions of our age: under what circumstances, if any, is recourse to war legally and morally justifiable?

Population ethics is widely considered to be exceptionally important and exceptionally difficult. One key source of difficulty is the conflict between certain moral intuitions and analytical results identifying requirements for rational (in the sense of complete and transitive) social choice over possible populations. One prominent such intuition is the Asymmetry, which jointly proposes that the fact that a possible child’s quality of life would be bad is a normative reason not to create the child, but the fact that a child’s (...) quality of life would be good is not a reason to create the child. This paper reports a set of questionnaire experiments about the Asymmetry in the spirit of economists’ empirical social choice. Few survey respondents show support for the Asymmetry; instead respondents report that expectations of a good quality of life are relevant. Each experiment shows evidence (among at least some participants) of dual-process moral reasoning, in which cognitive reflection is statistically associated with reporting expected good quality of life to be normatively relevant. The paper discusses possible implications of these results for the economics of population-sensitive social welfare and for the conflict between moral mathematics and population intuition. (shrink)

This book shows how the traditional concerns of political theory push it increasingly into the study of international relations. This is done, first, by demonstrating how many of the issues usually dealt with by political theory, such as democracy and justice, arise within an increasingly global context and, secondly, by considering how international issues, such as colonialism and war, are best illuminated by building on the work of political theorists. The book suggests that political theory and international relations theory can (...) now both be successfully engaged in as a joint enterprise only. (shrink)

The book is a comparative analysis of all the major social science/political science grand theories. It focuses on developmentalism, dependency theory, the world systems approach, Marxism, institutionalism, rational choice, psychoanalysis, political sociology, sociobiology, environmentalism, neuro-politics, transitions to democracy, and non-Western systems of analysis. To facilitate comparison and analysis, a common framework and outline are employed throughout. An integrating introduction and conclusion help tie the book together.

Little attention has been paid in academic dishonesty literature to empirically testing the effectiveness of different instructor communication strategies to minimize cheating. Using a quasi-experimental design, we compared the effectiveness of instructor fear appeals and moral appeals on student cheating-related attitudes and behavior. Cheating was most strongly associated with neutralizing attitudes in the moral appeal condition. Also, the relationship between observation of others cheating and self-reported cheating behaviors was stronger in both treatment conditions than in the control condition. Although a (...) trend toward less cheating in the treatment conditions was evident, it did not attain statistical significance. (shrink)

The seventh edition of this pragmatic guide to determining right and wrong in the workplace is updated with new case studies and ancillary materials to combine stakeholder perspectives with a deep dive on workplace ethics issues. Using a unique stakeholder-based approach, this book takes business ethics out of the theory realm and provides practical ways to analyze any business decision. Including dozens of cases, Joseph Weiss looks beyond the impacts of ethical lapses on share price and profit to focus (...) on relationships between stakeholders, including individuals, groups, corporations, and governments. The new seventh edition includes seven new cases and ten new Point/Counterpoint exercises, which challenge students to argue both sides of a contemporary issue. It incorporates the latest research as well as updated cases dealing with recent scandals at organizations such as Boeing, Facebook, and Uber. Professors will have access to online support, including teaching notes, PowerPoint slides, and sample tests. The book is equipped with a step-by-step guide to implementing stakeholder analysis, tips to help students apply ethical principles in their personal and professional lives, and comprehensive coverage of employee workplace issues. Addressing relevant topics such as risk management, preferential hiring, and sexual harassment in conjunction with the digital divide, bribery, the environment, and more, Business Ethics, seventh edition explores ethical implications in today's increasingly interconnected global business environment. (shrink)

This book critically assesses arguments for the existence of the God of classical theism, develops an innovative account of objects’ persistence, and defends new arguments against classical theism. The authors engage the following classical theistic proofs: Aquinas’s First Way, Aquinas’s De Ente argument, and Feser’s Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Augustinian, Thomistic, and Rationalist proofs. The authors also provide the first systematic treatment of the ‘existential inertia thesis’. By connecting the thesis to relativity theory and recent developments in the philosophy of physics, and (...) by developing a variety of novel existential-inertia-friendly explanations of persistence, they mount a formidable new case against classical theistic proofs. Finally, they defend new arguments against classical theism based on abstract objects and changing divine knowledge. The text appeals to students, researchers, and others interested in classical theistic proofs, the existence and nature of God, and the ultimate explanations of persistence, change, and contingency. (shrink)

Modes-of-being figure centrally in Heidegger's masterwork Being and Time. Testimony to this is Heidegger's characterisation of two of his most celebrated enquiries—the Existential analytic and the Zeug analysis—as investigations into the respective modes-of-being of the entities concerned. Yet despite the importance of this concept, commentators disagree widely about what a mode-of-being is. In this paper, I systematically outline and defend a novel and exegetically grounded interpretation of this concept. Strongly opposed to Kantian readings, such as those advocated by Taylor Carman (...) and Cristina Lafont, I interpret a mode-of-being as a universal that defines a district —that is, a natural class of entities that ought to be conceptualised in a special way. As such, every mode-of-being plays an important metaphysical and epistemic role: serving both to unify a natural class of a high degree of generality and as the interpretandum of an act yielding the basic-concepts pertaining to the entities therein. In explicating and arguing for this interpretation, I attribute a characteristically Aristotelian philosophical position to the early Heidegger, encompassing both metaphysical and epistemological realism and a conceptualist theory of universals. (shrink)

In challenging the prevailing paradigm for understanding how the human mind works, Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition is certain to stimulate fruitful debate.

The paper takes off from the suggestion of Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen that Kuhn’s account of science may be understood in coherentist terms. There are coherentist themes in Kuhn’s philosophy of science. But one crucial element is lacking. Kuhn does not deny the existence of basic beliefs which have a non-doxastic source of justification. Nor does he assert that epistemic justification only derives from inferential relationships between non-basic beliefs. Despite this, the coherentist interpretation is promising and I develop it further in this (...) paper. I raise the question of whether Kuhn’s account of science can deal with the input objection to coherentism. I argue that the role played by problems in Kuhn’s theory of science ensures that there is input from the external world into scientists’ belief-systems. I follow Hoyningen-Huene in pointing to the causal role played by the external world in determining perceptual states. I next turn to the question of whether Kuhn’s rejection of foundationalism implies coherentism. I argue that Kuhn’s rejection of the one-to-one relation between object and experience is compatible with a foundationalist account of justification. Nor does Kuhn’s rejection of the given entail the same coherentist implications as Sellars’ critique of the myth of the given. (shrink)