Recent literature describing the process and pathways of the agrarian transition in Southeast Asia suggests that the rise of agricultural intensification and the growth of commodity markets will lead to the demise of swidden agriculture. This paper offers a longitudinal overview of the conditions that drive the agrarian transition amongst indigenous swidden cultivators and migrant paddy farmers in central Palawan Island, the Philippines. In line with regional agrarian change, we describe how a history of conservation policies has criminalized (...) and pressured swidden farmers to adopt more intensive “modern” agricultural practices. We examine how indigenous swidden cultivators adjust their practice in response to recent changes in policies, security of harvests, and socio-cultural values vis-à-vis intensification. Rather than suggest that this transition will lead to the demise of swidden, results reveal that farmers instead negotiate a shifting ground in which they lean on and value swidden as a means of negotiating agrarian change. (shrink)

The island of Palawan stretches northward from Borneo like a bridge to Luzon in the South China Sea. This tropical forest environment, rich in thousands of species of plants and animals, is home to about 50,000 people, known as the Palawan. Besides hunting with blowpipes, traps, spears, and dogs, these people also practice shifting cultivation. Hunting and gathering activities as well as work in the fields follow the alternation of two seasons, the “monsoon” and the “heat,” barat (...) and bulag. As an integral ecosystem, swidden places a high value on mobility rather than on land property. Land tenure, and recourse to physical violence of all kinds are considered unethical behavior. Social life among the Palawan is governed by a bilateral or undifferentiated kinship system, a complex customary law based on rules and values dictated by “the tradition of the Ancestors,” Adat ät Kägunggurangan. (shrink)

I propose to study one problem for epistemic dependence on experts: how to locate experts on what I will call cognitive islands. Cognitive islands are those domains for knowledge in which expertise is required to evaluate other experts. They exist under two conditions: first, that there is no test for expertise available to the inexpert; and second, that the domain is not linked to another domain with such a test. Cognitive islands are the places where we have the fewest resources (...) for evaluating experts, which makes our expert dependences particularly risky. -/- Some have argued that cognitive islands lead to the complete unusability of expert testimony: that anybody who needs expert advice on a cognitive island will be entirely unable to find it. I argue against this radical form of pessimism, but propose a more moderate alternative. I demonstrate that we have some resources for finding experts on cognitive islands, but that cognitive islands leave us vulnerable to an epistemic trap which I will call runaway echo chambers. In a runaway echo chamber, our inexpertise may lead us to pick out bad experts, which will simply reinforce our mistaken beliefs and sensibilities. (shrink)

It follows from Humean principles of plenitude, I argue, that island universes are possible: physical reality might have 'absolutely isolated' parts. This makes trouble for Lewis's modal realism; but the realist has a way out. First, accept absolute actuality, which is defensible, I argue, on independent grounds. Second, revise the standard analysis of modality: modal operators are 'plural', not 'individual', quantifiers over possible worlds. This solves the problem of island universes and confers three additional benefits: an 'unqualified' principle (...) of compossibility can be accepted; the possibility of nothing can be accommodated; and the identity of indiscernible worlds can be decisively refuted. (shrink)

Modifying the descriptive and theoretical generalizations of Relativized Minimality, we argue that a significant subset of weak island violations arise when an extracted phrase should scope over some intervener but is unable to. Harmless interveners seem harmless because they can support an alternative reading. This paper focuses on why certain wh-phrases are poor wide scope takers, and offers an algebraic perspective on scope interaction. Each scopal element SE is associated with certain operations (e.g., not with complements). When a wh-phrase (...) scopes over some SE, the operations associated with that SE are performed in its denotation domain. The requisite operations may or may not be available in a domain, however. We present an empirical analysis of a variety of wh-phrases. It is argued that the wh-phrases that escape all weak islands (i.e., can scope over any intervener) are those that range over individuals, the reason being that all Boolean operations are defined for their domain. Collectives, manners, amounts, numbers, etc. all denote in domains with fewer operations and are thus selectively sensitive to scopal interveners—a “semantic relativized minimality effect”. (shrink)

Here I explore how the island was transformed into the site of the instrumentalization of evil, allowing Kant to expand its conception as a land of truth concerning its default genealogy in the homeland, lending purposiveness to evil to ensure this land of truth is protected from natural illusion. By contrast, Rousseau proposed the opposite course, which surprisingly bears important links to contemporary predicaments, in line with the idea of modern progress premised on a generalizing moral ecology. By the (...) turn of the 20th century, reason usurped a new title claiming this land as a planetary system, touted as the second Copernican revolution. This new revolution overlaps with the geological acknowledgment of the turn to the Anthropocene in the century that follows. The article concludes with an interpretation of the Anthropocene as an anxious competition for misrepresenting the future, borrowing the Deleuzian sense of the desert island and the power of the false, vis-a-vis Derrida’s no-world spatiality, altogether shaped by a new relational ontology in a time of climate change compounded by post-truth challenges to political democracy. (shrink)

A fascinating anthology of texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. "One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian," Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966, belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze's last book, Critique and Clinic. But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of (...) the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. "The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions," he wrote, "come from Sartre." But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze's thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside—but, he cautions, as a philosopher. (shrink)

Insular populations have traditionally drawn a lot of attention from epidemiologists as they provide important insights regarding transmission of infectious diseases and propagation of epidemics. There are numerous historical instances where isolated populations showed high morbidity once a new virus entered the population. Building upon that and recent findings that the activation of the behavioral immune system depends both upon one’s vulnerability and environmental context, we predicted that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, place of residence explains a significant proportion of variance (...) in preferred interpersonal distances, animosity toward strangers, and willingness to punish those who do not adhere to COVID-19 preventive measures. With 48 populated islands, Croatia provides a fruitful testing ground for this prediction. We also opted to explore relations among BIS-related variables and social cognitions in a more natural context than has previously been done. The study was conducted online, on Croatian residents, during April and May 2020. As expected, the BIS variables contributed significantly to preferred interpersonal distances, negative emotions toward strangers, and willingness to punish those who do not adhere to COVID-19 preventive measures. Furthermore, our results showed that geographical location explained a significant amount of variance in preferred social distances and negative emotions toward foreigners. As Croatian islands are extremely frequent travel destinations, these differences between mainlanders and islanders cannot be explained by the lack of exposure to foreigners. Additionally, we found that scores on preferred interpersonal distances, pathogen disgust, and germ aversion were significantly higher compared to those obtained in Croatian samples before the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, men scored higher in perceived infectability than before the COVID-19 pandemic, and women did not, which reflects the objectively higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 for men than for women. Taken together, our results support the notion that BIS is a highly adaptive and context-dependent response system, likely more reactive in more susceptible individuals. (shrink)

It is often proposed that the unacceptability of a semantically interpretable sentence can be rooted in its meaning. Elaborating on Oshima New frontiers in artificial intelligence, Springer, Berlin, 2007), we argue that the meaning-driven unacceptability of factive islands must make reference to felicity conditions, and cannot be reduced to the triviality of propositional content. We also observe, again elaborating on Oshima, that the triviality of factive islands need not be logical, but can be relative to a listener’s background assumptions. These (...) findings call for a revision of a prevalent view about meaning-driven unacceptability, according to which unacceptability results from triviality that is both propositional and logical. (shrink)

This paper adopts a symmetrical approach tocontroversies over R.H. MacArthur and E.O. Wilson'sequilibrium model of island biogeography, in order toshow how different interpretations of the model dependupon different philosophical understandings of theapplication of models and theories. In particular,there are quite distinct domains to which the modelcould apply; in addition, some equivocation amongthese domains is important to the model's success.Therefore, apparently inconsistent interpretations,interpretations that fit into roughly instrumentalist,realist and rationalist conceptions of science, may bemutually supporting in practice. Descriptions ofscientific practice, (...) then, should not adjudicate amongthese interpretations, but should instead recognizeways in which successful models translate amongdomains, and in so doing can become realistic,instrumentally successful, or rationally established.As complex social objects, models can afford complexrepresentational relations. (shrink)

The Island of Rottnest is commonly known to Noongar people as Wadjemup, “place across the river” or from its colonial connections the “Isle of Spirits”. Rottnest is located approximately 18 km off the coast of Western Australia, near Fremantle, and is world-renowned as a tourism precinct. The island’s hidden history of Aboriginal incarceration, dispossession and death within the Panopticon-inspired Quod prison is less well known. Foucault is eminently known for his theories around panopticism, at least by any student (...) of cultural and critical theory in the last few decades. Foucault’s based on the 18th-century social reformer Jeremy Bentham’s idea that prisoners could be controlled and reformed by creating the illusion that they were at all times under surveillance. This paper investigates the Panopticon’s influence on one of the oldest cultures in the world – Australian Aboriginals in the western state of the continent – who were, from 1864, incarcerated in a Panopticon-influenced building referred to as the Quod. The incarceration dehumanized, dispossessed and colonized proud people. (shrink)

An experimental, conceptually driven foray into the Patrician field, Ireland’s ubiquitous national apostle – a former captive – is utilised as a vehicle through which to explore a trinity of salient and interrelated themes within the Catholic and Protestant hinterlands of the Irish imagination: visions of imprisonment; of the island; and of imperialism. The reader is guided through aspects of Patrician literature, visits the island’s hallowed Patrician shrines, and is thus shown Purgatory. Insights into the imaginations exhibited by (...) a range of influential Irish ideologues and intellectuals – Gerry Adams; J.B. Bury; John Hume; Eóin MacNeill; Michael McCarthy; John Mitchel; Peadar O’Donnell; Tomás Ó Fiaich; John Ryan; William Ryan; Ian Paisley; Patrick Pearse; Oscar Wilde – are generated. The cognitive (and conspicuously Platonic) terraforming of the prison-cell into an island, and of the island into a giant prison – of either British or Vatican construction – that recurs in much Irish political thought and reflection, is observed. The concluding section involves historiographical reflection: Bury’s, and by extension St. Patrick’s, influence with regards the development of the discipline of Irish history is highlighted. That the island exhibits a distinctive intellectual micro-climate, one in which visions of Patrick act as a formidable ideological force, is implicit throughout. (shrink)

One of the most startling, and hence theoretically challenging, properties of wh-movement in Sluicing is that it can move wh-phrases out of islands, an important observation which goes back to Ross (1969). Equally challenging is the fact that similar wh-movement out of VP Ellipsis sites remains for the most part illicit. Briefly put, it seems that for a wide range of cases, deletion of an IP containing an island voids the effect of that island for wh-movement, while deletion (...) of a VP containing an island does not. This chapter investigates one aspect of this puzzling dichotomy with respect to island repair, and attempts to show that an interesting and partly novel range of data follow if island deviancies come about due to illicit traces of intermediate movement, working in tandem with a constraint on ellipsis operative in structures that host wh-movement. I will argue that a wide range of islands are indeed active at PF, but not in the way that this claim has usually been understood thus far. Instead of the island node itself being responsible for the degradation in acceptability, I will show that the data support the idea that it is the traces of wh-movement outside the island itself which trigger a PF-crash. I begin with some relevant Background on Sluicing, given in section 6.1, before taking up the Sluicing data in section 6.2 and the VP Ellipsis facts in section 6.3. (shrink)

John Ziman-- the much-missed-- reminds us that 'no man is an island', and takes us to task for working from an individualistic theoretical base. That 'us' includes nearly all social scientists, and most Anglo-American philosophers too. For sure, it includes cognitive scientists, who theorize people in terms of concepts drawn from cybernetics and/or artificial intelligence. (I'll use the term 'computational concepts' broadly, to cover both types.) Indeed, it's a common complaint that cognitive science is overly individualistic.

Through the close analysis of musical performance and tradition, the scholarly contributiors to Island Songs provide a global review of how island songs, their lyrics, and their singers engage with the challenges of modernity, migration, and social change uncovering common patterns despite the diversity and local character of their subjects"--Cover p. [4].

Spoil islands are overlooked places combining dirt with paradise, waste-land with “brave new world,” and wildness with human intervention. Mundane products of dredging, these islands form an uninvestigated archipelago that demonstrates the potential value and contested re-valuation of landscapes of waste. Research navigates the U.S. east coast from New York City to Key West, examines these marginalized topographies to understand emergent concerns of 21st-century placemaking, public space, and infrastructure, and discovers that spoil islands constitute an unprecedented public commons, where human (...) agency and nature are inextricably linked. (shrink)

Recounts the author's experiences on a remote Alaskan island, revealing how his adoption of the Eskimo Koyukon wisdom has positively affected his life.

This paper has two aims. The first concerns the question of whether there is any essential involvement of perspectival thought in intentional agency. I defend the view that the answer is ‘no’ for one kind of perspectival thought, and ‘yes’ for a different kind. Agency does not depend on de se thought, but it does depend on de nunc thought. The second aim of the paper is to defend a claim about the significance of this de se–de nunc contrast as (...) a case study. I argue that the contrast is best explained by a picture on which different kinds of perspectival thought are seen as islands. On this picture, an account of the conceptual role of one kind of perspectival thought won’t settle much about any other kind of perspectival thought. The picture is proposed as a replacement for the standard picture, on which perspectival thought is seen as a natural cognitive kind. (shrink)

Four Island Utopias provides a convenient compilation of four key texts, important for the understanding of utopian thinking in the ancient world and middle ages, along with maps and an extensive introduction to Classical Utopian thought. Ideal for courses in utopian thought.

Climate has a strong influence on urban planning and also plays a fundamental role in soil composition affecting the character of plants and animals. The climate is a combination of different meteorological factors that characterized a specific region over a specific time. The movement of the Sun and Earth inclination toward it is the most important factors which determine the characteristics of the climate. The global movement of the air from equator toward poles and vice versa influences also drastically the (...) climate change. In this section are also included breezes. Also air relative humidity plays an important role shaping the climate. It plays a very important role in cloud formation. The built environment can influence the urban climate of the city through height, form, and applied building materials. Building form and shape, building materials, openings in the façade, and their orientation often are determined by climate parameters. Urban density, directions, and street network and their shape are related to the climate change, apart from topography. Density of urban structures produces important effects on the microclimatic conditions in external spaces. The bioclimatic behavior of each type of outdoor spaces depends on the relationship with its surrounding elements. The city of Tirana is included in Mediterranean climate characterized by hot dry summers and mild cold wet winters with high daily thermal excursions. All of the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea benefit from the Mediterranean climate. Specifically spotted, Tirana is part of Mediterranean coastal zone (<22 °C in temperature) with an annual temperature of 15.3 °C. In the inner city can be found areas with high pollution, which normally contain a high percentage of business and industry, settlements, and traffic, so-called “sealed” areas. They constitute “hyperthermic areas” or “heat islands”. The term “heat island” describes built-up areas which are hotter than nearby rural areas. Heat islands can affect communities by increasing summertime peak energy demand, air-conditioning costs, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, heat-related illness and mortality, and water quality. The aim of the bioclimatic design is also the reduction of the heat-island phenomenon. The use of materials with different energy absorption capabilities and integration of green spaces into urban life is important. The vegetation effects on microclimate and in the built environment are present. Trees are necessary and indispensable to human life. They provide shelter for us, provide food, and their fibers cloth us. Implementation of the green belts in the city is one of the strategies in order to reduce heat-island effect. Vegetation also can provide a deep feeling of attachment to certain places and trees which are part of it. The use of trees avoids monotony and ensures diversification. They play a crucial role creating microclimates which influence the thermal comfort of people reducing heating or cooling loads. Vegetation also creates cooler microclimates around the building through evapotranspiration, reduces wind speed, regulates humidity, and reduces temperature. It is observed that tree species have a greater influence on humidity than on temperature. Trees can also absorb and reduce the reverberation time of the sound, behaving as sound buffers. The benefits of tree plantation in the inner city are enormous and they can’t be neglected. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 26 Heft: 2 Seiten: 361-370.

Business firms play an increasingly influential role in contemporary societies, which has led many scholars to return to the question of the democratisation of corporate governance. However, the possibility of democratic deliberation within firms has received only marginal attention in the current debate. This article fills this gap in the literature by making a normative case for democratic deliberation at the workplace and empirically assessing the deliberative capacity of self-organised teams within business firms. It is based on sixteen in-depth interviews (...) in six German firms which practice various forms of self-organised teamwork. The article argues that self-organised teamwork can create a space for authentic, inclusive, and consequential deliberation by suspending authoritarian control structures within business firms. Finally, the article proposes the consideration of firms not only as necessary parts of a larger deliberative system but also as deliberative systems in themselves. (shrink)

The paper aims at a phenomenological clarification of the “island community” category in the light of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s metaphysics of community. I begin with presenting a brief social history of the Spinalonga leprosarium as a model of an island community; then follows a sketch of some of the main findings made by the German philosopher concerning community per se, and finally an attempt is made to explain the place of island communities in Hildebrand’s hierarchy of communities. (...) I aim to show that an island community should be taken as a special example of what he calls a life circle. It is special because it somehow transcends the “primitiveness” imposed by Hildebrand on Lebenskreise in general, as a result of being rooted in a serious realm of value and meaning. (shrink)

The small nation-state of Singapore has increasingly been referred to in the popular media as the Intelligent Island of the future. With significant state investment in the promotion and dissemination of information-communications technology and attendant social ramifications, this has become an area that can no longer be ignored or taken for granted. This article intends to map the conditions of possibility on which Singapore can be conceived of as an Intelligent Island, in situating the role of information technology (...) and Intelligent Island discourse within the discourses of postcoloniality, technocapitalism, late modernity, and globalization. In particular, this article attempts to show how, in Intelligent Island discourse, the processes of the construction of a Singaporean nation are intricately linked to the shift in political discourse from mobilizing a rhetoric of crisis to one of utopianism. (shrink)

The three texts addressed in this review essay challenge us to question and creatively re-imagine the representation of material spaces at the centre of the colonial project: oceans, islands, ships and archives. Elizabeth McMahon deconstructs the island and its metaphorics, charting the relationship of geography, politics and literature through the changing status of islands, as imagined by colonists, beginning in the Caribbean and ending in Australia. Renisa Mawani destabilises colonial geography by re-animating the ocean and presents, amongst others, the (...) ship and the ocean, as both method and juridical form. Writing against the ‘free sea’, Mawani addresses the imperial reliance on control of the ocean and the intensive juridification of the sea. Stewart Motha re-imagines law’s aggressive acts of adjudication, and challenges its originary fictions by exploring the logic, aesthetics and violence of legal processes that preserve and disavow the past at the same time. Each monograph considers the imaginaries, fictions and material geographies of colonialism, alongside how these imaginaries have been used as sites of counter-claim and resistance by those subjected to their technologies. (shrink)

This paper will investigate how geographic features were recorded on maps in the eighteenth century in order to outline the construction of geographic knowledge by British mapmakers. Due to practical and economic factors, early modern cartography was a conservative practice based on source compilation and comparison. For the Pacific region especially, the paucity of first-hand observations and the conflicting nature of those observations rendered the world's largest ocean difficult to chart and prone to the retention of mythical continents, passages and (...) islands. After a discussion of the practical and economic reasons why geographic features were difficult to revise on maps, the article focuses on a case study to show how geographic enigmas could be placed and persist. It will use Pepys Island to illustrate the ways in which a chimeric feature could become instilled in geographic parlance. (shrink)

The environment and sociopolitical contexts in which we dwell shape our approach to the world. Islands, following Pádraig Ó Tuama, trigger an openness to other persons and sites. They fuel the comity of their inhabitants, motivate their interconnection with others, and thus sharpen their sense of morality. The Caribbean islands, and the Americas writ large, are also sites of both genocide and of a novel way to embrace the world. The peoples of the Caribbean islands have used the predicaments of (...) isolation, displacement, and genocide to initiate a mode of living that is best articulated, in the contemporary period, through the concept of créolization. The authors considered in this essay have expanded our understanding of the créolization. They have made specific the experiential thread of resilience that undergirds the meaning of créolization. In Condé’s work, the resilience is highlighted through the individual writer’s creativity. Sealy, for her part, expands the meaning of créolization to model a prospective inclusionary polity in the form of a créolizing nation. As we know, nations are not isolated entities; they are part of a conglomeration with other nations. Getachew completes the study to show that the cosmopolitan world that we might aspire to reach can benefit from the post-World War II efforts of Caribbean and African postcolonial nations. In truth, we realize with these authors that a moral and equitable international environment has been the articulated goal of Caribbean peoples since arguably the sixteenth century. It is a goal consonant with all of the perennial humanist ideals of modernity. (shrink)

Do all questions have answers? How much can we know about the world? Is there such a thing as an ultimate truth? To be human is to want to know, to understand our origins and the meaning of our lives. In The Island of Knowledge, physicist Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence, the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge. In so doing, he reaches a (...) provocative conclusion: science, the main tool we use to find answers, is fundamentally limited. As science and its philosophical interpretations advance, we are often faced with the unsettling recognition of how much we don't know. Limits to our knowledge of the world arise both from our tools of exploration and from the nature of physical reality: the speed of light, the uncertainty principle, the second law of thermodynamics, the incompleteness theorem, and our own limitations as an intelligent species. Our view of physical reality depends fundamentally on who we are and on how we interact with the cosmos. (shrink)

In this squib, I evaluate the contradiction analysis (Abrusán in Natural Language Semantics 19(3):257–321, 2011, in Weak island semantics, 2014 ) and the necessary infelicity analysis (Oshima in Washio et al. (eds.), New frontiers in artificial intelligence, 2007 ; Schwarz and Simonenko in Natural Language Semantics 26(3–4):253–279, 2018b ) of factive islands in light of a pattern that has not been previously discussed in the literature: questions about propositions. I argue that while the necessary infelicity approach can straightforwardly explain (...) the acceptability of this kind of question, the contradiction account undergenerates, since it wrongly predicts their ungrammaticality. I claim that this prediction follows from the assumption that the domain of quantification contains contraries. Therefore, the main contribution of this squib is the observation that such an assumption cannot play an explanatory role in accounting for factive islands. (shrink)

This work, an initiative of the University of French Polynesia, Tahiti, showcases research collaboration between small island universities in the Pacific. It addresses a number of 'big issues' for Oceania which are also big issues for the world, concerning the biosphere and human society, sustainable development and well-being. The authors seek to create an ecosystem of knowledge through a dialogue, in English and French, between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. The work also brings into perspective (...) academic and traditional knowledge, with a view to enhancing cultural and agricultural practices and the development of public policy. Climate change, environmental degradation and food security are key questions for survival. How can the preservation of cultural heritage, the transmission of native languages and the integration of traditional knowledge into formal education contribute to a harmonious future? How is the phenomenon of violence relevant to an understanding of history, interpersonal relations and social inclusiveness, including for women in the political sphere? The Tongan-Fijian writer Epeli Hau'ofa described Oceania imaginatively as a 'Sea of Islands'. This volume sees Pacific islands as being interconnected in ways beyond imagining, in which nowhere is remote, where the peripheral has become a decentred centre. (shrink)

Before Odysseus and his companions cross over to the land of the Cyclopes, they land on an island, which is described in unusual length and detail . It is inhabited only by wild goats; no hunters disturb them. It possesses neither flocks nor cultivated land, sown or ploughed, since no men live there. The Cyclopes, while nearby, have no ships, nor are there shipwrights who might build ships on which men travel to every city. The island could be (...) made to flourish, for the soil is rich and would bear all things in season. In addition, it contains well-watered meadows, good for vineyards, and a fine protected harbour which requires no mooring. (shrink)

When Kangas suggested in 1986 that wildlife reserve designs could be much smaller than previously thought, community ecologists attacked his views on methodological grounds (island biogeographical theory is beset with uncertainties) and on conservation grounds (Kangas seemed to encourage deforestation and extinction). Kangas' defenders, like Simberloff, argued that in a situation of biological uncertainty (the degree/type of deforestation-induced extinction), scientists ought to follow the epistemologically conservative course and risk type-II error (the risk of not rejecting a null hypothesis that (...) is false), rather than type-I error. (This is the risk of rejecting a null hypothesis that is true). Kangas' opponents, like Noss, argued that, in a situation of scientific uncertainty, scientists ought to risk type-I, rather than type-II, error. This essay argues that there are different types of rationality appropriate to science and applied science and, therefore, in cases of applied science (like conservation biology), the more conservative course of action is for scientists to risk type-I error. The essay argues further that, on grounds of scientific rationality, Kangas, Simberloff, and others were correct in risking type-II error, but that, on grounds of decision-theoretic rationality, Noss, Waide, and others were correct in risking type-I error. (shrink)

Sentences that are ungrammatical and yet intelligible are instances of what I call perfectly thinkable thoughts. I argue that the existence of perfectly thinkable thoughts is revealing in regard to the question of why syntactic islands should exist. If language is an instrument of thought as understood in the biolinguistics tradition, then a uniquely human subset of thoughts is generated in narrow syntax, which suggests that island constraints cannot be rooted in narrow syntax alone and thus must reflect interface (...) conditions imposed on the output of the computational system and its mapping to external systems. (shrink)

This book demonstrates the variety of ways in which the materiality of islands is intertwined in a symbiotic relationship with the capacity of the imagination to make islands the site and embodiment of a host of recurrent human desires, anxieties, and hopes.

Priority monism (hereafter, ‘monism’) is the view that there exists one fundamental entity—the world—and that all other objects that exist (a set of objects typically taken to include tables, chairs, and the whole menagerie of everyday items) are merely derivative. Jonathan Schaffer has defended monism in its current guise, across a range of papers. Each paper looks to add something to the monistic picture of the world. In this paper we argue that monism—as Schaffer describes it—is false. To do so (...) we develop an ‘island universe’ argument against Schaffer's monistic theory. (shrink)

Tamar Gendler takes on “explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant” (56), otherwise known as the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Generally speaking, readers have no trouble believing untrue factual claims such as in Alice in Wonderland or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but we resist claims which advocate praise or approval of immoral acts such as murder. Gendler submits that the implied author aims to persuade the reader to change his or her (...) moral beliefs, thereby causing imaginative resistance. This paper will explain that imaginative resistance is fundamentally an interpersonal moral conflict as experienced in the ethical theory of moral subjectivism, and will suggest ways to manage imaginative resistance by looking at the whole work of fiction. (shrink)