ABSTRACTIf representative democracy is not about elected officials responding directly to voters’ preferences, and if the voters do a poor job of voting their interests in referendums, then what is democracy about? In our view, a satisfactory theory of democracy would focus normatively on the social identities and political interests of citizens rather than on their expressed policy preferences, and empirically on the ability of organized or attentive groups to get those identities and interests effectively recognized and acted on in (...) the governmental process. A group-theoretic version of democratic theory along these lines would dispense with the most important illusions of the conventional “folk theory” of democracy. However, much hard work remains to clarify how actual democracies make policy and to construct a wise normative standard—inspirational but not innocent—against which they can be judged. (shrink)

The Romance of Science pays tribute to the wide-ranging and highly influential work of Trevor Levere, historian of science and author of Poetry Realised in Nature, Transforming Matter, Science and the Canadian Arctic, Affinity and Matter and other significant inquiries in the history of modern science. Expanding on Levere’s many themes and interests, The Romance of Science assembles historians of science -- all influenced by Levere's work -- to explore such matters as the place and space of instruments in science, (...) the role and meaning of science museums, poetry in nature, chemical warfare and warfare in nature, science in Canada and the Arctic, Romanticism, aesthetics and morals in natural philosophy, and the “dismal science” of economics. The Romance of Science explores the interactions between science's romantic, material, institutional and economic engagements with Nature. (shrink)

1. Implicature: some basic oppositions IMPLICATURE is a component of speaker meaning that constitutes an aspect of what is meant in a speaker’s utterance without being part of what is said. What a speaker intends to communicate is characteristically far richer than what she directly expresses; linguistic meaning radically underdetermines the message conveyed and understood. Speaker S tacitly exploits pragmatic principles to bridge this gap and counts on hearer H to invoke the same principles for the purposes of utterance interpretation. (...) The contrast between the said and the meant, and derivatively between the said and the implicated (the meant-but-unsaid), dates back to the fourth century rhetoricians Servius and Donatus, who characterized litotes—the figure of pragmatic understatement—as a figure in which we say less but mean more (“minus dicimus et plus significamus”; see Hoffmann 1987 and Horn 1991a for discussion). In the classical Gricean model, the bridge from what is said (the literal content of the uttered sentence, computed directly from its grammatical structure with the reference of indexicals resolved) to what is communicated is constructed through implicature. As an aspect of speaker meaning, implicatures are by definition distinct from the non-logical inferences that the hearer draws; it is a category mistake to attribute implicatures either to hearers or to sentences (e.g. P and Q) and subsentential expressions (e.g. some). But we can systematically (at least for generalized implicatures; see below) correlate the speaker’s intention to implicate q (in uttering p in context C), the expression p that carries the implicature in C, and the inference of q induced by the speaker’s utterance of p in C. (shrink)

Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

I wish to defend a functionalist approach to the mind-body problem. I use the word ‘functionalist’ with some reluctance, however; for although it has become the conventional label for the sort of approach taken by such philosophers as H. Putnam and D. C. Dennett, I believe it is somewhat misleading. The functionalist, as I understand him, tries to show how there can be machine analogues of mental states and then argues that just as we are not inclined to postulate an (...) ontological dualism between simulated mental states and the machine's physical states, we need not postulate a dualism between mind and body. The functionalist also argues, however, that it is wrong to identify the mental states or simulated mental states with the physical states.Recently functionalism has come under attack, first for not being a coherent alternative, and secondly for not being able to provide an adequate account of sensations. I believe that the first objection is misguided and shall deal with it in section I. However, I agree that functionalists have not provided an adequate account of sensations, but I shall try to help remedy this in section II. (shrink)

This book appears in the Indiana Series in the philosophy of technology, edited by Don Ihde. Hickman emphasizes Dewey as a philosopher of technology and aims to make Dewey's perspective and contributions available to specialists. Still, as claimed on the book jacket, Hickman aims at a "comprehensive yet accessible overview of Dewey's philosophical work." The link between the two projects is the interpretation of Dewey's instrumentalism as a "critique of technology" (p. xi).

This review illustrates the use The Southern Illinois edition of Dewey's writings, on CD ROM, which appeared in the Past Masters Series from IntelLex and edited by Larry Hickman. The exercise investigates the early relation and interactions of John Dewey and George Santayana.

Building on Goldman 2008 and 2009, which argue that objective values would be strange in coming in degrees but in no determinate number of degrees, this paper argues that related properties having to do with degrees of value make a further case against objective values. The properties of giving rise to intransitive orderings and being essentially comparative are explained by Larry Temkin in Rethinking the Good. He shows that “better than” is intransitively ordered. Many subjective states are too. But (...) similar arguments for the intransitive orderings of intrinsic objective properties fail. Furthermore, subjective properties and states can change without these changes being explained by changes in their objects. This is similar to the essentially comparative nature of goodness. Given the analogies to subjective states and lack of analogies to objective properties that the present article points out, it argues that we should infer, as Temkin does not, that values are subjective. (shrink)

Larry Wright is concerned to provide a general account of what it means to ascribe a goal to an action or a function to a thing, an account which will do justice to such distinctions as that between a thing’s function and its accidental effects. His analysis for "S does B for the sake of G" is " B tends to bring about G; B occurs because it tends to bring about G.".

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:194 BOOK REVIEWS detailed discussion. Successive chapters examine Schleiermacher's theory of religious experience, two conceptions of interpretation, the ascription of emotion to oneself and others, mysticism, religious experience as such, and different kinds of explanation of religious experience and the issue of reductionism. The book as a whole seems to me rather an impressive treatment of a very important subject. University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta HUGO A. MAYNELL Intimations (...) of Reality: Critical Realism in Science and Religion. By ARTHUR PEACOCKE. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Pp. 94. $10.95(cl.), $4.95(pa.). In the first of the two lectures printed in this small volume, Peacocke argues for a " critical realist " interpretation of both scientific theories and religious doctrines. Both aim (fallibly but genuinely) to speak of reality, and their methods and tools are similar enough so that if the claims of one deserve to be taken seriously, so do those of the other. Addressing one reality as they do, science and theology cannot proceed in isolation, but must he regarded as "interacting and mutually illumiminating " (51). In the second lecture Peacocke offers suggestions as to how theologians should construe the relation between God and the created world, in view of what scientists are now telling us about the latter. Many of the ideas presented here are familiar from Peacocke's earlier Creation and the World of Science and from writings of Ian Barbour and others. The main novelty lies in his buttressing the case for (and refining the interpretation of) critical realism with arguments drawn from recent work in the philosophy of science. I will start with his discussion of critical realism with respect to science, and then consider his claims for theology, his argument for the mutual relevance of the two, and (briefly) his theological suggestions. · As Peacocke sees the history of the subject, an earller-prevalent "naive realism " about scientific theories and the entities mentioned in them has been undermined chiefly by the work of T. S. Kuhn et al., especially as extended and radicalized by sociologists of science-most pointedly by those pursuing the " strong programme " of explaining scientific theories past and present as social products, without regard to any assessment of their truth value and thus without invoking conformity to reality in explaining a theory's acceptance or success. The recent revival BOOK REVIEWS 195 of realism among philosophers of science he views largely in the aspect of a rebuttal of the sociologists' anti-realist claims. He notes, but sets aside as ancillary to his project, the question what we might learn from the strong-programmers even if we deny their more radical claims. Fair enough. What is more regrettable is that the unwary reader could easily come away with the impression that contemporary philosophers of science are to be found in just two camps on these matters: realists and sociologically-minded anti-realists. In fa.ct, there have been and are quite a few--e.g. Bas van Fraasen and Larry Laudan-who argue against realism on grounds quite independent of sociology : Duhemian grounds, for instance, and considerations drawn from quantum theory. (See van Frassen's The Scientific Image, Laudan's Science and Values, and their respective essay:;; in Scientific Realism, edited by Jarrett Leplin.) So, while there is a revival of realism in philosophy of science, there is hardly a consensus, though it is no doubt also true that most working scientists, unaffected by the philosophers' debate, would adopt some form of critical realism. But how, specifically, does critical realism differ from the naive kind' The difficulty of answering this question is compounded by the great variety of theses held by various authors to be central claims of realism (or anti-realism) simpliciter. This variety is well illustrated in Leplin's collection, and anatomized in his introduction to it. One of the authors on whom Peacocke draws, Ian Ha.eking, distinguishes, in his contribution to the Leplin volume and at greater length in his Representing and Intervening, between realism about entities (theoretical terms, or many of them, do refer; there are such things as electrons) and realism about theories (scientific theories, even large-scale ones like the fundamental... (shrink)

Thirty years after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, sharp disagreement persists concerning the implications of Kuhn’s "historicist" challenge to empiricism. I discuss the historicist movement over the past thirty years, and the extent to which the discourse between two branches of the historical school has been influenced by tacit assumptions shared with Rudolf Carnap’s empiricism. I begin with an examination of Carnap’s logicism --his logic of science-- and his 1960 correspondence with Kuhn. I focus on (...) problems in the analysis applied to the unit of metascientific study or appraisal, arguing for a reassessment of historicist treatment of the internal/external distinction and historiographic meta-methodology. The critique of objectivism and relativism that eventuates from this re-assessment is a double-edged blade, undercutting both objectivist and relativist treatments of cognitive evaluation and scientific change. I use it to cut across an otherwise diverse group of historicist-influenced writers, including Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, H. M. Collins, Stephen Stich. I. Introduction.. (shrink)

Recent summaries of psychologist James H. Leuba's pioneering studies on the religious beliefs of American scientists have misrepresented his findings and ignored important aspects of his analyses, including predictions regarding the future of religion. Much of the recent interest in Leuba was sparked by Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham's commentary in Nature , “Scientists Are Still Keeping the Faith.” Larson and Witham compared the results of their 1996 survey of one thousand randomly selected American scientists regarding their religious (...) beliefs with a similar survey published eighty years earlier by Leuba. Leuba's original studies are themselves problematical. Nonetheless, his notion that different fields of science have different impacts on the religion‐science relationship remains valid. Especially significant is his appreciation of religion as a dynamic, compelling force in human life: any waning of traditional beliefs does not mean a decrease in religious commitment but calls for a new spirituality in harmony with modern scientific teachings. Leuba's studies, placed in proper context, offer a broad historical perspective from which to interpret data about religious beliefs of scientists and the impact of science and scientists on public beliefs, and opportunity to develop new insight into the religion‐science relationship. (shrink)

In "Equality, Priority, and Compassion," Roger Crisp rejects both egalitarianism and prioritarianism. Crisp contends that our concern for those who are badly off is best accounted for by appealing to "a sufficiency principle" based -- indirectly, via the notion of an impartial spectator -- on compassion for those who are badly off" (p. 745). A key example of Crisp's is the Beverly Hills case (discussed below). This example is directed against prioritarianism, but it also threatens egalitarianism. In this article, I (...) respond to the Beverly Hills case. I also challenge the wide person-affecting principle and Crisp's welfarist restriction, which some believe underlie the Levelling Down Objection against egalitarianism. My aim in this article is to defend egalitarianism by illuminating both its nature and appeal. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion argument has rarely been evaluated from an empirical perspective. This is puzzling because its conclusion seems to be making a testable claim about the world: supervenient properties are causally inefficacious. An empirical perspective, however, reveals Kim’s argument to rest on a mistaken conception about how to test whether a property is causally efficacious. Moreover, the empirical perspective makes visible a metaphysical bias that Kim brings to his argument that involves a principle of non-inclusion.

Demystifying Legal Reasoning defends the proposition that there are no special forms of reasoning peculiar to law. Legal decision makers engage in the same modes of reasoning that all actors use in deciding what to do: open-ended moral reasoning, empirical reasoning, and deduction from authoritative rules. This book addresses common law reasoning when prior judicial decisions determine the law, and interpretation of texts. In both areas, the popular view that legal decision makers practise special forms of reasoning is false.

In this article I defend what Mark Greenberg has labeled the standard picture of law against the attack on it by Greenberg and Scott Hershovitz. I point out that law on the standard picture’s conception of it has moral virtues that Greenberg's own moral impact theory and Hershovitz’s similar theory lack. Moreover, it avoids a vicious circularity that bedevils Greenberg’s theory.

This piece is a review essay on Victor Tadros’s The Ends of Harm. Tadros rejects retributive desert but believes punishment can be justified instrumentally without succumbing to the problems of thoroughgoing consequentialism and endorsing using people as means. He believes he can achieve these results through extension of the right of self-defense. I argue that Tadros fails in this endeavor: he has a defective account of the means principle; his rejection of desert leads to gross mismatches of punishment and culpability; (...) and he cannot account for punishment of inchoate crimes. (shrink)