This article draws on key models of monitoring and blockholding articulated in the incomplete contracts theory of the firm. Under incomplete contracts theory, different governance systems have incentive structures that entail different tradeoffs—tradeoffs between ownership concentration and liquidity, between monitoring and management initiative, and between private rent-seeking and activity benefiting shareholders as a group. The tradeoffs delimit opportunities for productive cross-reference. More specifically, blockholder systems, such as those in Europe, subsidize monitoring by permitting blockholders to reap private benefits of control (...) through self-dealing and insider trading. Market systems, such as those in the United States and Britain, regulate such private rent-seeking toward the end of maintaining an institutional framework that supports diffuse share ownership and liquid trading markets. It follows that a legal framework conducive to blockholding may be ill-equipped to foster dispersed equity ownership and thick trading markets and that a legal framework conducive to liquid trading markets may have properties that discourage blockholding. This gives rise to questions for law reform agendas on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, proponents ask for deregulation of controls on institutional investors, looking to encourage blockholding and more effective monitoring. In Europe, proponents ask for stronger securities regulation, looking to encourage deeper trading markets. This article suggests that each reform program may lead to disappointing results because neither assures conforming adjustments to the pertinent actors’ incentives. Alternatively, strict reforms that materially change prevailing incentive patterns could perversely destabilize workable arrangements without assuring the appearance of more effective alternatives. (shrink)

Solidarity is a complex theoretical and historical investigation of one of the most dynamic social movements in post-World War II Europe. For some time now, Touraine has attempted to develop a comprehensive theory of social movements. In Solidarity, he and fellow researchers François Dubet, Michel Wieviorka, and Jan Strezelecki, apply the theories of action, movement and sociological intervention elaborated in The Voice and The Eye to the situation in Poland 1980-1. Solidarity is one of many attempts by Touraine to combine (...) a comprehensive theory of social change and action with the history of a contemporary social movement. Here Touraine et al. attempt to explain “the nature, internal workings and the evolution of Solidarity.”. (shrink)

We propose a new definition of actual causes, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. We show that the definition yields a plausible and elegant account of causation that handles well examples which have caused problems for other definitions and resolves major difficulties in the traditional account.

According to the indispensability argument, the fact that we quantify over numbers, sets and functions in our best scientific theories gives us reason for believing that such objects exist. I examine a strategy to dispense with such quantification by simply replacing any given platonistic theory by the set of sentences in the nominalist vocabulary it logically entails. I argue that, as a strategy, this response fails: for there is no guarantee that the nominalist world that go beyond the set of (...) sentences in the nominalist language such theories entail. However, I argue that what such theories show is that mathematics can enable us to express possibilities about the concrete world that may not be expressible in nominalistically acceptable language. While I grant that this may make quantification over abstracta indispensable, I deny that such indispensability is a reason for accepting them into our ontology. I urge that the nominalist should be allowed to quantify over abstracta whilst denying their existence and I explain how this apparently contradictory practice (a practice I call 'weaseling') is in fact coherent, unproblematic and rational. Finally, I examine the view that platonistic theories are simpler or more attractive than their nominalistic reformulations, and thus that abstract ought to be accepted into our ontology for the same sorts of reasons as other theoretical objects. I argue that, at least in the case of numbers, functions and sets, such arguments misunderstand the kind of simplicity and attractiveness we seek. (shrink)

In his recent paper ‘Knowing What Things Look Like’, Matthew McGrath offers a challenge to the idea that knowing an object by seeing it, ‘visual objectual knowledge’ is an instance of immediate knowledge. I offer supporters of the notion of immediate visual objectual knowledge two potential strategies for blocking McGrath’s argument: either by questioning McGrath’s claim about the role that knowing what an object looks like plays in visual objectual knowledge or by denying that any explanation of how knowing what (...) an object looks like plays that role must proceed through an appeal to factual knowledge involving that object’s looks. (shrink)

Model theoretic considerations purportedly show that a certain version of structural realism, one which articulates the nvtion of structure via Ramsey sentences, is in fact trivially true. In this paper we argue that the structural realist is by no means forced to Ramseyfy in the manner assumed in the formal proof. However, the structural realist's reprise is short-lived. For, as we show, there are related versions of the model theoretic argument which cannot be so easily blocked by the structural realist. (...) We examine various ways in which the structural realist may respond, and conclude that the best way of blocking the model theoretic argument involves formulating his Ramseyfied theories using intensional operators. Introduction The model theoretic arguments On Ramseyfying away predicates The model theoretic argument bites back Restricting the second order quantifiers 5.1 Naturalness 5.2 Intrinsic 5.3 Qualitative 5.4 Contingent and causal Intensional operators and relations between properties Conclusion. (shrink)

This exploratory study of ethical decision making by individuals in organizations found moral intensity, as defined by Jones (1991), to significantly influence ethical decision making intentions of managers. Moral intensity explained 37% and 53% of the variance in ethical decision making in two decision-making scenarios. In part, the results of this research support our theoretical understanding of ethical/unethical decision-making and serve as a foundation for future research.

The debate concerning the role of intuitions in philosophy has been characterized by a fundamental disagreement between two main camps. The first, the autonomists, hold that, due to the use in philosophical investigation of appeals to intuition, most of the central questions of philosophy can in principle be answered by philosophical investigation and argument without relying on the sciences. The second, the naturalists, deny the possibility of a priori knowledge and are skeptical of the role of intuition in providing evidence (...) in philosophical inquiry. In spite of the seemingly stark and deep disagreement between the autonomist and the naturalist, in this paper I will attempt to suggest that there is a way to mount a partial defense of intuition-based philosophical practice on naturalist grounds. As will be seen, doing so will require a number of concessions that will satisfy few autonomists while simultaneously disappointing those naturalists who might have thought that all notions of the a priori had been successfully laid to rest. However, I will argue that the account proposed here will preserve those features of traditional philosophical practice that matter most and better explain the history of successes and failures of that practice, thus answering the worries of the autonomist, and that the rejection of the No A Priori Thesis attendant with the account presented here is indeed demanded by the current theories of our best scientific understanding of the mind, thus pacifying the rabid naturalistic critic of any version of apriorism. (shrink)

(1968 [1922]). It amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors. It involves, in other words, a commitment to the primacy of what Talcott Parsons would later call “the action frame of reference” (Parsons 1937: 43-51) in social-scientific explanation. It is also sometimes described as the claim that explanations of “macro” social phenomena must (...) be supplied with “micro” foundations, ones that specify an action-theoretic mechanism (Alexander, 1987). (shrink)

In this paper I claim that Earman and Norton 's hole argument against substantivalist interpretations of General Relativity assumes that the substantivalist must adopt a conception of determinism which I argue is unsatisfactory. Butterfield and others have responded to the hole argument by finding a conception of determinism open to the substantivalist that is not prone to the hole argument. But, unfortunately for the substantivalist, I argue this conception also turns out to be unsatisfactory. Accordingly, I search for a conception (...) of determinism that is both independently plausible and capable of blocking the hole argument. (shrink)

In Natural Goodness Philippa Foot gives an analysis of the concepts we use to describe the characteristics of living things. She suggests that we describe them in functional terms, and this allows us to judge organisms as good or defective depending on how well they perform their distinctive functions. Foot claims that we can judge intentional human actions in the same way: the virtues contribute in obvious ways to good human functioning, and this provides us with grounds for making moral (...) judgements. This paper criticises Foot’s argument by challenging her notion of function. I argue that the type of judgement she makes about living things requires an evolutionary biological account of function. However, such an account would render her meta-ethical claims implausible, since it is unlikely that human beings are adapted to be maximally virtuous. I conclude that Foot is wrong about the logical structure of our judgements of human action. (shrink)

This study surveys the internal audit department of a large financial services organization. Respondents were challenged to recognize and evaluate ethical and unethical situations often encountered in practice. Four key demographic variables were investigated: gender, age, years of employment and peer group influence. For the most part, respondents view themselves as more ethical than their peers. There does appear to be a gender effect suggesting females' ability to identify ethical behavior better than their male counterparts. This study contributes to the (...) extant literature in that it has explored a previously unexplored profession, namely, the internal auditing profession. (shrink)

It is time for a new paper about open questions in the currently very active area of randomness and computability. Ambos-Spies and Kučera presented such a paper in 1999 [1]. All the question in it have been solved, except for one: is KL-randomness different from Martin-Löf randomness? This question is discussed in Section 6.Not all the questions are necessarily hard—some simply have not been tried seriously. When we think a question is a major one, and therefore likely to be hard, (...) we indicate this by the symbol ▶, the criterion being that it is of considerable interest and has been tried by a number of researchers. Some questions are close contenders here; these are marked by ▷. With few exceptions, the questions are precise. They mostly have a yes/no answer. However, there are often more general questions of an intuitive or even philosophical nature behind. We give an outline, indicating the more general questions.All sets will be sets of natural numbers, unless otherwise stated. These sets are identified with infinite strings over {0, 1}. Other terms used in the literature are sequence and real. (shrink)

The authors identify the challenge of holding contemporary business leaders accountable for enhancing the intangible strategic asset of integrity capacity in organizations. After defining integrity capacity and framing it as part of a strategic resource model of sustainable global competitive advantage, the stakeholder costs of integrity capacity neglect are delineated. To address this neglect issue, the authors focus on the cultivation of judgment integrity to handle behavioral, moral and hypothesized economic complexities as key dimensions of integrity capacity. Finally, the authors (...) recommend two leadership practices to build competence in business leaders to enhance integrity capacity as an organizational strategic asset. (shrink)

In this paper I take issue with the doctrine that organisms belong of their very essence to the natural kinds (or biological taxa, if these are not kinds) to which they belong. This view holds that any human essentially belongs to the species Homo sapiens, any feline essentially belongs to the cat family, and so on. I survey the various competing views in biological systematics. These offer different explanations for what it is that makes a member of one species, family, (...) etc. a member of that taxon. Unfortunately, none of them offers an explanation that is compatible with the essentialism in question. (shrink)

Those inclined to believe in the existence of propositions as traditionally conceived might seek to reduce them to some other type of entity. However, parsimonious propositionalists of this type are confronted with a choice of competing candidates – for example, sets of possible worlds, and various neo-Russellian and neo-Fregean constructions. It is argued that this choice is an arbitrary one, and that it closely resembles the type of problematic choice that, as Benacerraf pointed out, bedevils the attempt to reduce numbers (...) to sets – should the number 2 be identified with the set Ø or with the set Ø, Ø? An “argument from arbitrary identification” is formulated with the conclusion that propositions (and perhaps numbers) cannot be reduced away. Various responses to this argument are considered, but ultimately rejected. The paper concludes that the argument is sound: propositions, at least, are sui generis entities. (shrink)

Modernism in the philosophy of science demands a unified story about what makes an inquiry scientific (or a successful science). Fine's "natural ontological attitude" (NOA) is "postmodern" in joining trust in local scientific practice with suspicion toward any global interpretation of science to legitimate or undercut that trust. I consider four readings of this combination of trust and suspicion and their consequences for the autonomy and cultural credibility of the sciences. Three readings take respectively Fine's trusting attitude, his emphasis upon (...) local practice, and his antiessentialism about science as most fundamental to NOA. A fourth, more adequate reading, prompted by recent feminist interpretations of science, offers less restrictive readings of both Fine's trust and his suspicion toward approaching science with "ready-made philosophical engines" (Fine 1986b, 177). (shrink)

LetCbe an axiom system formalized within the first order functional calculus, and letC′ be related toCas the Bernays-Gödel set theory is related to the Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. Ilse Novak [5] and Mostowski [8] have shown that, ifCis consistent, thenC′ is consistent. Mostowski has also proved the stronger result that any theorem ofC′ which can be formalized inCis a theorem ofC.The proofs of Novak and Mostowski do not provide a direct method for obtaining a contradiction inCfrom a contradiction inC′. We could, (...) of course, obtain such a contradiction by proving the theorems ofCone by one; the above result assures us that we must eventually obtain a contradiction. A similar process is necessary to obtain the proof of a theorem inCfrom its proof inC′. The purpose of this paper is to give a new proof of these theorems which provides a direct method of obtaining the desired contradiction or proof.The advantage of the proof may be stated more specifically by arithmetizing the syntax ofCandC′. (shrink)

Most discussions of the epistemology of testimony include personalist requirements. These include either requirements that stipulate certain features that individual testifiers must have in order to count as transmitters of knowledge, or that stipulate certain features that individual recipients of testimony must have in order to count as acquiring knowledge on the basis of that testimony. For example, in the former case, many views require that testifiers be competent and honest, whereas, in the latter case, many views require that recipients (...) of testimony employ faculties for reliably assessing the competence and honesty of testifiers. After presenting and discussing problems for both of these personalist requirements, in this chapter we consider a social epistemology of testimony based on socially distributed cognitive systems, an epistemology of testimony that eschews both forms of personalist requirement. (shrink)

In the course of his researches in electromagnetism and the kinetic theory of gases, James Clerk Maxwell gave some thought to the nature of science itself. His observations in this field are of interest today not only because they are his, but because they are still instructive. Maxwell's views are to be found in the many asides with which he enlivened his scientific papers and treatises and in the various articles and reviews which he prepared for more popular consumption. The (...) topics discussed bear on his own contributions to physics; they include the logic of dynamical explanation, the method of physical analogy, and the perennial question of action at a distance versus contiguity. In the present essay, I wish to discuss Maxwell's views on dynamical explanation. (shrink)

Husserl's (1970) discussion of "Galilean science" is often dismissed as naïvely instrumentalist and hostile to science. He has been explicitly criticized for misunderstanding idealization in science, for treating the lifeworld as a privileged conceptual framework, and for denying that science can in principle completely describe the world (because ordinary prescientific concepts are irreplaceable). I clarify Husserl's position concerning realism, and use this to show that the first two criticisms depend upon misinterpretations. The third criticism is well taken. Nevertheless, this is (...) consistent with Husserl's fundamental claim that the manifestations of things are important to discuss, but are inaccessible to empirical science. (shrink)

Much of the recent discussion of problematic aspects of quantum-mechanical measurement centers around that feature of quantum theory which is called "the projection postulate." This is roughly the claim that a change of a certain sort occurs in the state of a physical system when a measurement is made on the system. In this paper an argument for the projection postulate due to von Neumann is considered. Attention is focused on trying to provide an understanding of the notion of "the (...) state of a physical system" which is compatible with the argument von Neumann offers. An attempt is made to formulate the argument in terms of an objectivistic interpretation of probability concepts. It is seen that such an interpretation does not provide a suitable way of understanding the argument. An attempt is made to illustrate the source of this failure in terms of a non-quantum-mechanical example. (shrink)

This survey of major developments in North American philosophy of science begins with the mid-1960s consolidation of the disciplinary synthesis of internalist history and philosophy of science (HPS) as a response to criticisms of logical empiricism. These developments are grouped for discussion under the following headings: historical metamethodologies, scientific realisms, philosophies of the special sciences, revivals of empiricism, cognitivist naturalisms, social epistemologies, feminist theories of science, studies of experiment and the disunity of science, and studies of science as practice and (...) culture. A unifying theme of the survey is the relation between historical metamethodologists and scientific realists, which dominated philosophical work in the late 1970s. I argue that many of the alternative cognitive naturalisms, social epistemologies, and feminist theories that have been proposed can be understood as analogues to the differences between metamethodological theories of scientific rationality and realist accounts of successful reference to real causal processes. Recent work on experiment, scientific practice, and the culture of science may, however, challenge the underlying conception of the field according to which realism and historical rationalism (or their descendants) are the important alternatives available, and thus may take philosophy of science in new directions. (shrink)

The distinction between explanation and prediction has received much attention in recent literature, but the equally important distinction between explanation and description (or between prediction and description) remains blurred. This latter distinction is particularly important in the social sciences, where probabilistic models (or theories) often play dual roles as explanatory and descriptive devices. The distinction between explanation (or prediction) and description is explicated in the present paper in terms of information theory. The explanatory (or predictive) power of a probabilistic model (...) is identified with information taken from (or transmitted by) the environment (e.g., the independent, experimentally manipulated variables), while the descriptive power of a model reflects additional information taken from (or transmitted by) the data. Although information is usually transmitted by the data in the process of estimating parameters, it turns out that the number of free parameters is not a reliable index of transmitted information. Thus, the common practice of treating parameters as degrees-of-freedom in testing probabilistic models is questionable. Finally, this information-theoretic analysis of explanation, prediction, and description suggests ways of resolving some recent controversies surrounding the pragmatic aspects of explanation and the so-called structural identity thesis. (shrink)

It is argued that current attempts to model human learning behavior commonly fail on one of two counts: either the model assumptions are artificially restricted so as to permit the application of mathematical techniques in deriving their consequences, or else the required complex assumptions are imbedded in computer programs whose technical details obscure the theoretical content of the model. The first failing is characteristic of so-called mathematical models of learning, while the second is characteristic of computer simulation models. An approach (...) to model building which avoids both these failings is presented under the title of a black-box theory of learning. This method permits the statement of assumptions of any desired complexity in a language which clearly exhibits their theoretical content.Section II of the paper is devoted to the problem of testing and comparing alternative learning theories. The policy advocated is to abandon attempts at hypothesis testing. It is argued that, in general, we not only lack sufficient data and sufficiently powerful techniques to test hypotheses, but that the truth of a model is not really the issue of basic interest. A given model may be true in the sense that on the basis of available evidence we cannot statistically reject it, but not interesting in the sense that it provides little information about the processes underlying behavior. Rather, we should accept or reject models on the basis of how much information they provide about the way in which subjects respond to environmental structure. This attitude toward model testing is made precise by introducing a formal measure of the information content of a model. Finally, it is argued that the statistical concept of degrees-of-freedom is misleading when used in the context of model testing and should be replaced by a measure of the information absorbed from the data in estimating parameters. (shrink)

David Gauthier tries to defend morality by showing that rational agents would choose to adopt a fundamental choice disposition that permits them to cooperate in prisoner's dilemmas. In this paper, I argue that Gauthier, rather than trying to work out a prudential justification for his favored choice disposition, should opt for a transcendental justification. I argue that the disposition in question is the product of socialization, not rational choice. However, only agents who are socialized in such a way that they (...) acquire a disposition of this type could acquire the capacity to use language. Given the internal connection between language and thought, this means that no agent endowed with such a disposition could rationally choose to adopt another. Thus rational reflection by moral agents upon their own fundamental choice disposition will have no tendency to destabilize it. (shrink)

The main scientific problems of chemical bonding were solved half a century ago, but adequate philosophical understanding of chemical combination is yet to be achieved. Chemists routinely use important terms ("element," "atom," "molecule," "substance") with more than one meaning. This can lead to misunderstandings. Eliminativists claim that what seems to be a baseball breaking a window is merely the action of "atoms, acting in concert." They argue that statues, baseballs, and similar macroscopic things "do not exist." When macroscopic objects like (...) baseballs move, exceedingly large numbers (1025) of microscopic components coordinate their activities. Understanding how this happens requires attention to the interactions that link parts into larger units. Eliminativists say that everything that truly exists has causal relationships in addition to those of its components—"nonredundant causality." This paper holds that if a number of entities interact in such a way that the effect of that collection on test objects is different than it would have been in the absence of the interaction, then identification of that collection as a single composite agent is warranted, for purposes to which that difference is relevant. Ordinary "chemical substances" (both elementary materials such as dihydrogen and compounds such as water) fulfill this version of the requirement of nonredundant causality. Other sorts of chemical coherences, including chemical dissipative structures (e.g., flames), also fulfill that criterion. All these types of coherences qualify as "substances" (as that term is used in philosophy) even though they are not all "chemical substances.". (shrink)

Kevin Corcoran offers an account of how one can be a physicalist about human persons, deny temporal gaps in the existence of persons, and hold that there is an afterlife. I argue that Corcoran's account both violates the necessity of metaphysical identity and implausibly makes an individual's existence dependent on factors wholly extrinsic to the individual. Corcoran's defence is considered, as well as Stephen Davis's suggestions on how an account like Corcoran's can defend itself against these concerns. It is shown, (...) however, that the difficulties remain in full force and, therefore, that Corcoran's account fails to reconcile physicalism, no gappy existence, and an afterlife. (shrink)

In a number of recent articles, Hartry Field has attempted to reclaim the a priori for his own brand of non‐factualist epistemology by introducing a non‐epistemic notion of the a priori based purely upon the position of individual beliefs within belief systems. In this article we examine (i) whether a robust enough notion of aprioricity is available to Field, and, by extension, to the radical empiricist and (ii) whether it is possible to connect up the non‐epistemic notion of aprioricity with (...) questions about the epistemic status of those beliefs that happen to be a priori in the non‐epistemic sense. (shrink)

Some versions of structuralism consider actors to be necessary for structural analysis; others argue that they are not. All versions of structuralism consider social structure to be analytically independent of actors. I show through examples and subsequently through deduction that this position is wrong. That is, any conceptualization of social structure necessarily involves a conception of its constituent actors. Moreover, I generalize this point to argue that the structure of scientific knowledge follows a multilevel modeling approach: theory at every level (...) of aggregation is based on actor models of appropriate units. Several practical benefits result from using actor models explicitly in structural analysis in particular, and from following the multilevel modeling approach in general. (shrink)